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My child is burning.
Horror slithers through me, and I don’t think, don’t breathe, before I’ve lifted my child into my arms and am running running running for the house.
“But Mama, I want to play,” Theo says, even as the flames lick through my shirt, burning my skin and sending a jolt of pain through me I can hardly feel, hardly pay attention to when my child is dying.
We reach the threshold, and I practically launch us through the door, throwing my body over Theo’s and rolling us both to smother the flame.
It works; the fire dies down, and when I peek open my eyes to witness the burn marks that have surely singed Theo’s face, it’s not Theo I find.
It’s Ellie.
She’s gasping, crying through her bared teeth, struggling to breathe. At first I think it must be the smoke from the flames, that she’s suffocating, but then…
But then I smell it.
The blood.
My vision goes clear and my attention snaps to her belly, where a sticky red substance soaks through her shirt.
“She stabbed me…” My friend gasps, but I can hardly hear her, not over the ringing in my ears.
“Who stabbed you?” I ask, but my voice is a mumbled whisper, an automated response.
“You.”
The single word draws my gaze away from the blood, but not my attention.
Its scent fills the air, saturating my senses with fresh rainwater and lavender and copper.
I am suddenly very hungry.
“You. You did this to me. It was you.”
Ellie’s perfect features contort in pain, but whether it’s from the wound or my betrayal, I cannot tell.
“It wasn’t me. It was her. It was Cinderella,” I explain, and the words should come out frantic. Because my best friend believes I stabbed her.
But my voice is calm. Low. Like the growl of a lioness in wait.
Ellie’s heart is pounding, her fear palpable as she stares up into my eyes. She scrambles backward on her elbows, but she’s wounded and there’s nowhere for her to go.
“Shh. I’ve got you,” I whisper. The words I might whisper to one of my children during the crackling of a storm.
The tenderness in my voice is absent.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she begs, and something about that feels wrong too, because it is not like the Ellie I know to beg.
But then I realize it’s not Ellie speaking. It’s me. The words fall from my lips.
“Please don’t hurt her,” I’m saying to myself.
Fear grips me, because the desire that cascades through me is so unnatural, so wrong, I cannot bear to feel it.
My ears detect something, the slightest of beats. Ellie’s pulse, rapid and panicked; it sounds like a sultry dance.
It’s slipping away from me, and I have to hear more of it.
“Please. Please don’t do this.”
