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“Bandit, back!” the doctor yelled. She couldn’t help it. She’d lost control, and knew in that moment she’d stupidly revealed she was still alive, and right down the hall from a girl with a gun.
Dumb dog! Dumber doctor!
But she was so dizzy and so unsteady from all the lost blood that she turned and ran after the dog. It was purely instinct. Like a drunken lech, she chased after him, fell toward the walls and caught herself, left then right, and kept lurching forward. She was chasing her dog toward death, and only then did wet, hot tears start to pour down her cheeks. She felt the dried blood lift from her skin in tiny rivers.
This was grief.
Her home, the house, couldn’t protect her the way she’d thought. Strangers, robbers, had broken in: first, they took Steven, then Josh, and now they were trying to take her, too, and Bandit. Noble, courageous, loyal Bandit; the real keeper of the house.
But one more thought occurred to her in the seconds as she lumbered toward the brain-dead kids:
Bandit might go for Lulu’s head.
If she didn’t shoot him first, Bandit would lunge for Lulu’s neck, find her head, and lock-on tight. He might tear her pretty little face from her skull.
It was the doctor’s only hope.
CHAPTER 35
BEFORE SHE COULD even reach the door, two earsplitting short sonic pops exploded over the kitchen table:Pop! Pop!
Bandit cowered and scurried back, only to freeze and stare at the stunned and fish-mouthed girl.
Wide-eyed and frozen, Lulu pointed the gun straight at Nikolai. Straight arm. Straight wrist. Just like she’d learned to do it on YouTube. She looked confused and a smidge regretful there in the dark, with two gaping holes below her neck, to the left, her left, near her heart.
Her eyes seemed to register shock first, then indignation. Then offense.
How dare someone shoot her. And then the light behind her eyes darkened, her face lost expression, her knees buckled. Dark liquid ooze bled through her bra and tank-top. Her long, pretty fingers, witchy and white, nails polished black, released the gun, and it fell to the floor. Then she fell forward, dead, on top of it.
Nikolai looked as surprised as Lulu.
He turned his head and looked past the doorway, at the doctor out in the hall. She lifted her hands and shook her head. She didn’t have a gun. It wasn’t she who had shot the gun.
He lowered his arms and turned around.
In the mudroom doorway, Sophie stood barefoot in a nightshirt. Her long blond hair fell over her shoulders and to her waist, her legs in a triangle stance. She gripped Masha’s gun tight in her hands.
“Oh, my God!” said a voice from across the room. Dr. Parks and Nikolai and Sophie all turned their heads.
No one had noticed Amory standing there, frozen, staring at her best friend on the floor. She hadn’t followed Josh upstairs. She’d doubled back down.
“Oh, my God!” she cried out again, in shock, and looked up at Sophie. Sophie was still pointing the gun, so Amory turned and ran out, squaring her back as a perfect target.
No, the doctor thought, don’t run! Amory, no!
AndPop!again. Another shot rang through the kitchen, straight from the hands of the ghostly Sophie.
Amory seized, arched her back, and belly-flopped straight to the hardwood floor. Her cheekbone landed with a dull flatthwack.
“What happened? What happened?” A panicked Josh yelled from the stairs.
Seconds later, he ran in and froze over Amory’s body. Then he saw Lulu, dead on the floor. He looked confused and suddenly exhausted, like he might fall asleep. Nikolai shook his head and raised his hands in surrender: It wasn’t him. His face swore it. “My mom,” he whispered. Josh spotted Sophie and they squared off, holding each other’s gazes in fright. Masha’s gun rested at her side, out of sight.
Sophie knew the doctor loomed to the left of the boy, at nine o’clock, and she knew in an instant that Josh was her son—the one she had sent away to get clean. Sophie had seen him in photos in frames around the house. How many times had she wiped down the glass protecting his image, dusted his books, and polished his trophies?
She stood and waited.
“Who are you?” Josh cried. He stared again at Amory’s body, then Lulu’s, covered in blood. “What have you done?” His friends had been alive two minutes ago. He was so confused, he started to cry, and his voice choked. “What did you do? Why did you do that? They were my friends!”
