She starts to thrash, a violent, desperate strength fuelled by pure chemical terror. “Get off me! Felix, get off! I’ll be good, I’ll kneel, just don’t touch me with those cold hands! Peter’s coming! He’s going to kill you, he’s going to?—”
She stops. Her whole body goes rigid, her headsnapping toward me. The light from the hallway strobes in her blown-out pupils.
“Peter?” she asks, her voice suddenly tiny. Small. Like the girl I married before the world turned into a meat grinder.
“Yes, baby. It’s me. I’m right here.”
A sob wracks her, but before I can pull her in, her face contorts again. The hallucination shifts, darker this time. She looks at my hands—stained red with Felix’s life—and she begins to hyperventilate, a wet, rattling sound in her lungs.
“No… you’re not him,” she whimpers, backing herself into the corner until her spine hits the cold tile. “You’re the one from the elevator. You’re the one who liked the blood. You’re just another monster. You’re just the one who killed my husband.”
The words are a serrated knife to my gut. She doesn’t even recognise me through the blood. To her, I’m just the next violent man in a long line of them.
“I’m Peter,” I choke out, the tears finally blurring my own vision. “I’m the man who loves you.”
“Peter is dead!” she shrieks, her hands flying to her ears as she begins to rock back and forth. “Felix said he died in the dirt! You’re just a ghost! You’re just the white dust talking to me! Go away! Let me sleep in the dark! Just let me sleep!”
She collapses forward, her forehead hitting my knees, her body vibrating with a chill that no amount of hot water can fix. She’s sobbing into my soaked trousers, begging a ghost to leave her alone, while I sit there holding the woman I burned the world for, realising I might have saved her body, but I’ve lost the girl inside.
The steam-choked air suddenly feels too thin, too hot, like the bathroom is shrinking around us. Wendy’s rocking slows, her spine turning into a rigid iron rod. I reach for her, my fingers brushing her cold, wet shoulder, but she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t even breathe.
“Wendy?” I whisper, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. “Wendy, talk to me.”
Then her head snaps back. Her eyes roll into her skull, leaving nothing but a terrifying, milky white stare. Her jaw clamps shut with a sickening clack of teeth, and the first convulsion hits her like an electric chair.
She thrashes against the porcelain, her limbs flailing with a violent, mechanical strength. I dive forward, catching her head before it can crack against the edge of the tub.
“Hook! Get in here! Now!” I roar, my voice breaking.
She’s shaking so hard the water in the tub is splashing over the sides, mixing with the blood on my clothes. Her skin is turning a ghastly, mottled blue-grey, her lips stained with a foamy, pinkish spit where she’s bitten her tongue. Every muscle in her body is coiled tight, snapping and jerking in a war against her own nervous system.
The cocaine is trying to kill her. It’s the final fuck-you from Felix, a chemical ghost tearing her apart from the inside out.
“Baby, please,” I sob, pinning her hips with my weight, trying to keep her from breaking her own bones against the tile. “Stay with me. Stay with me, Wendy!”
She lets out a sound—a low, gurgling rattle that isn’t human. Her back arches so high I’m terrified her spine will snap, her heels drumming a frantic, hollow beat againstthe tub.
The door bursts open. Hook is there, his shadow long and jagged against the steam. He doesn’t make a joke this time. He sees the blood, the foam, and the way I’m cradling her head like it’s the only thing keeping the world from exploding.
“Hold her side,” Hook snaps, his voice clinical, devoid of its usual silk. “Don’t let her choke. Peter, move her onto her side!”
I shift her, my hands slick with water and sweat, feeling the terrifying heat radiating off her skin. Her heart is a frantic, dying bird beneath her ribs, thudding so fast it’s just a blur of vibration. She’s staring at nothing, her body jerking in rhythmic, brutal spasms that make her look like a marionette with its strings being yanked by a demon.
“Is she dying?” I choke out, looking up at Hook, my vision blurred by hot, stinging tears. “Is she dying, Hook?”
“She’s overdosing on the comedown. Her heart is red-lining,” Hook says, reaching into his tactical vest for a kit.
I look back down at her. This is the girl I loved. This is the girl who used to laugh at the way I made coffee. And now she’s a shivering, blue-lipped ghost, dying in a bathtub because I wasn’t fast enough. Because I let the dark in.
The seizure finally begins to taper off, leaving her limp and blue in my arms. Her breathing is shallow, a wet, rattling hitch in her chest. She looks smaller than she did ten minutesago. Hollow.
“Wendy?” I press my forehead to hers, my tears falling into the foam on her lips. “Please. Don’t leave me with the monster I became to find you. Please.”
Peter
The bathroom floor is cold enough to ache, but I don’t move. I can’t. I’m anchored by the weight of her limp, shivering body. The seizure has passed, leaving her in a state of wreckage that makes my lungs feel like they’re filled with broken glass.
The next seventy-two hours are a descent into a different kind of hell. It isn’t the fast, bloody violence of the elevator; it’s a slow, agonising rot.
