Page 6
“What a strange place to fall asleep.”
He toed her shoulder with his sneaker, and when she didn’t move, realisation sunk in. She wasn’t sleeping. “Oh, fuck. Are we like, fuckin’ murder magnets or something?”
She wore a store uniform, and as the word murder echoed around us, a pool of glossy, dark red blood creeped out from under her, toward our shoes.
“Wait. We didn’t do this, right?” Zee asked, face stricken.
“No, what? No. Wait, did we?” The bouncing balls couldn’t have murdered someone . . . That wasn’t a thing that happened. “No. This wasn’t us.” We had accidentally murdered a few people lately, but we usually knew about it at the time.
“Good.”
“Although, if we didn’t, someone else did, I guess.”
“Right.” Zee scanned the gloomy shelving units, only half-stocked with what looked like rejects and returns. He scooted me along beside him, and we hurried on, reaching a plastic-plant section.
Zee pinged a trailing ivy, then batted it out of his face when it came back at him. “So . . . imma just put this out there. Are we fucked right now? Like . . . are we trapped in some weird Scandinavian furniture dimension with something that’s slicing up drywall and unaliving the staff? Because that’s what it kinda feels like. But also, this was supposed to be a normal afternoon out with Daddy Fancy Fangs to buy a fuckin’ shelf and some fairy lights for my pole. Yes, that pole—I heard you thinkin’ it.”
“Maybe. Apart from the pole thing.”
“Okay. Fuck. Fine. I knew I shoulda brought Shareen.” He stopped in the middle of an aisle. “Christmas can suck my bouncy balls.”
I scanned the shelves, unsure if we’d passed this way already. “I don’t think aimlessly wandering around is helping.”
“What other options we got, Kitten?”
“We should go back to the bedroom section and hole up there for the night. If there’s something here that wants to eat us, it probably won’t find us there.”
Zee cocked his head. “You mean hide?”
“I mean . . . yeah, I guess. Hiding’s not so bad.”
“Ugh. So which way are the fancy bedrooms?”
“Let’s retrace our steps. We’ll find it . . .”
We turned around and headed back, stepping over the unalived staff member again. Whoever had killed her hadn’t cared about cleanup or getting caught. That wasn’t a good sign. Leaving the body on display meant they were either insane or powerful. Or both.
Passing by shelves of cutlery, Zee picked up a metal spork.
“What’s that for?” I whispered.
He made stabbing motions. “In case we get company,” he whispered back, poking the spork’s prongs to test their sharpness.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him his own claws were longer and more deadly than a spork. “Wouldn’t a knife be—”
He shoved a knife into my hand. I thumbed its edge. “It’s pretty blunt.”
“If we find a sword section, you can switch it out. Until then, you get a table knife.”
It was better than nothing. I dropped it into my pocket alongside the collection of rubber balls.
We pushed on, moving quietly, keeping low. Only the hum of air-conditioning ducts high above our heads accompanied our soft shuffling.
“Do you think Fancy Fangs is okay?” Zee whispered. “Not that I care or anything. I don’t. But he’s looking for us, right?”
“Oh, for sure.”
The bigger question was why hadn’t Victor found us yet?
