Aluminum. Cold. Grooved handle.
Excalibur.
My cane must have been kicked here during the earlier chaos. My faithful companion, finding its way back to me one last time.
With the last of my air, I raise the cane up and drive it down.
The handle end impales Brandon’s eyeball with a terrible crunch. The sound of eggshells cracking. His hands go slack around my throat. His body slumps forward, heavy, sudden, and finally,finallystill.
I roll off him and fall to the floor. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering, clicking together in a staccato rhythm I can’t control. My entire body is slick with blood—his and mine, impossible to separate, soaking every inch of me.
I just killed a man.
I just killed a man with my bare hands and my cane and a piece of broken glass.
But there’s only a vast, ringing emptiness where the guilt should be.
This is what Bastian felt on that day I looked down that alley at him. This is how it feels to have blood on your hands.
Who am I now? What have I become?
Slowly, other sounds filter back in. It’s Sage, somewhere across the room, calling my name over and over.
“… Eliana?Eliana!Are you okay? Please, God, please tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” I manage to mumble. “I’m okay, Sage.”
Zeke and Yasmin are ominously quiet. I strain to hear his breathing, movement, anything—but there’s nothing. Only the drip of blood and the rasp of Yasmin’s ruined lungs.
My hands slip in the blood as I crawl toward my best friend. Every movement sends more pain rippling through my battered body, but I keep going, following the sound of her breathing like a lighthouse in the dark. When I find her, she’s curled in a fetal position, arms wrapped tight around her stomach.
“Yas,” I whisper, gathering her close. “Yas, it’s me. He’s gone. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
All she can do is shake. I press my forehead to hers and hold on.
Behind me, I hear the scrape of duct tape being torn away. Mom’s voice, ragged and hoarse: “Eliana? Baby?”
“Here, Mom. I’m here.”
She rushes over. Her hands find my shoulders, my face, touching every bit of me. “Oh, God, oh, God, there’s so much blood?—”
Sage drags himself across the floor. When he reaches us, his hand closes around my ankle as silent reassurance. With his other hand, he pulls out his phone and calls 911. I listen as he speaks. He gives them our address, then the phone falls from his grip.
We all huddle together on the blood-soaked floor, broken and bleeding, waiting for sirens that feel like they’ll never come.
It’s my whole world falling to pieces around me. Well,almostmy whole world. As the sirens grow closer, I think of the one person who isn’t here.
I don’t know where he is right now. The not-knowing is its own kind of torture. A wound that won’t stop crying blood.
But there’s another heartbeat inside me. A tiny, stubborn pulse that survived tonight’s horrors. The one good thing to come from all this darkness. I press my bloody palm against my stomach and feel the baby squirm.
I just killed a man. Reached into some primal part of myself and found teeth I didn’t know I had. Would Bastian be proud? Horrified? Both? In the end, it doesn’t matter. I did what I had to do to protect the people I love.
And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
“Help is coming,” I whisper against Yasmin’s hair, pulling her closer. “We’re going to be okay.”
I have no idea if either of those things is true.
