30

I DIDN’T THINK. There wasn’t time to think. Luna had already proven that she was willing to shoot, and behind the trash can I was a fish in a barrel.

I took a breath, which hitched with my aching ribs. Springing up with a yell, I hammer-fisted Luna’s forearm, feeling a dull crack under her skin. She yelped as the gun flew through the air, bouncing in the grass. She sucked in air and grabbed for her arm, but I didn’t give her the chance. Anchoring my back against the wall, I front-kicked the trash can with everything I had, shoving it into Luna, who fell under the force. Empty beer and wine bottles rolled out on top of her.

I sprang out of my corner, leaping over the trash can and landing in a fighting stance, turning left and right, watching for the others, hoping Chris Martinez was near enough to be arriving soon. Dru was still nowhere to be found. Every noise on the night air made me swing toward it, my breath ripping out of me so hard, spit collected on the front of my shirt.

Luna was crying, babbling, rolling around under the spilled trash as she spat out threats. I didn’t have much time to get away, but I was afraid to move. There were so many places for Dru or Vanessa or even Bill to pop out at me. Catch me off guard. Finally, Luna untangled herself and got to her knees, holding her arm to her chest. She slipped, but then found her footing and lurched toward the gun.

“You will regret that, you bitch!” she snarled.

I reached the gun first, scooping it out of the grass and holding it in front of me, but my hands were shaking with so much adrenaline—gold bottle rockets, kapow, kapow, kapow—I couldn’t point it at her. I had been trained to use my body to fight. I had no idea what to do with a gun, other than keep it away from her.

I started to back up toward the fence line. “You don’t want to do this, Luna,” I said. “You’re already hurt. Just let me go before this gets any worse.” The wind shifted and a pool raft rattled across the deck, causing me to flick my eyes worriedly that way. Where the hell was Chris Martinez?

Luna laughed, looking completely unhinged with a twig hanging in her hair and sweeping like a pendulum across her forehead. “Bitch, you’re the one bleeding.”

“Your arm is broken, Luna,” I called. I swallowed, tried to tighten my grip on the gun. “I felt it. Let me go so you can get it fixed. We can be done with this.”

She continued walking toward me, completely unfazed by the gun in my hand. “Oh, we will never be done. Not until you’re permanently gone. Don’t you understand?”

“Dru!” I shouted. I licked my lips, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Luna. “You better come out or I’m going to have to shoot your sister!” One of the dogs I’d dodged earlier began to bark again, setting off a chain of barks throughout the neighborhood.

“Yeah, Dru,” Luna said in that singsongy voice again. “You should come out so you can say your last good-byes to your sweet little Nikki.” She cupped one ear. “What? You don’t care what happens to her? Oh, yeah, that’s right, because you’re in it as deep as the rest of us!”

“Come out, Dru!” I yelled.

“Come out, Dru!” Luna mimicked right after me. She let her hurt arm drop to her side and rolled her eyes. “Okay, this shit’s just getting boring now.” She rushed at me.

I stumbled backward two steps, trying to convince my fingers to pull the trigger. But the gun was so heavy and I was so filled with confused energy, I couldn’t relay the message from brain to hand. Bumpy black and gray swirled in my mind, silver, flashing oranges and yellows and ragemonster red, and mists of green. Fear, mistrust, danger, pain, fury—a palette of awful. I couldn’t concentrate. I’d never done this. I’d never thought I’d have to. And Luna was moving so fast.

She was two steps away, and then one, and I still hadn’t done anything with the gun. I took another step back, my arm cocking backward to do what I did best. I hit Luna across the temple with the butt of the gun, but she was too close for the connection to do any real damage. She let out a squawk, dug her claws into the side of my neck with one hand, and grabbed at the gun with the other. She was moving with too much force, and I was off balance from not being ready. We both went down, Luna on top of me, the back of my hand smacking the ground and the gun flipping away about three feet. My ribs screamed, taking my breath away.

I tried to sit up, to go after the gun before Luna could get it again, but she was tearing at my neck, my arm. She reared back and, with a yell, slammed her forehead into my right eyebrow. I saw a flash of light and felt the neon pain of a new wound opening. My eyes immediately flooded with tears, making it impossible to see. I covered my face with my free hand, but when I felt her rear back again, I grabbed a fistful of hair, just the way Stefan had grabbed mine that night in the hotel. With all my strength, I brought my elbow across her jaw. I heard her teeth click together, hard, and a grunt escaped her. I straightened my arm to roll her off me. Luna screamed and scrambled, flailing, both hands scratching at the hand I had buried in her hair.

“Let me go, you bitch! I will kill you!”

She peeled deep trails through the back of my hand that felt like fire. I had no choice but to let go, but to make up for it, I turned and axe-kicked her to the ribs, just as I had fantasized doing to her on the back of my car that day at school. She bent her legs to deflect most of the impact, though, and rolled away, reaching for the gun.

“No!” I yelled, grunting, trying to get up, to figure out some miracle way of getting to the gun first. But I was too late. She was already there.

I heard footsteps pound across the patio, around the pool, coming toward me. I still couldn’t see because of my watering eyes and the throbbing in my cheek and forehead, but I could make out what looked like Dru, coming toward us fast, his arms outstretched.

This was it. I couldn’t fight them both off. I was too tired, too confused, in too much pain. Whether Peyton and I were real sisters, we were sisters in this. We were sisters in giving ourselves for the secrets and the truth. I supposed, blood or not, that was what made a connection matter, anyway.

Luna staggered to her feet, panting, bleeding, her shirt ripped, her hair wild. She had the gun held in her good hand, low, pointing to the ground. She started to level it at me, still on the ground, too weak and disoriented to stand. I dragged myself on my elbows and feet, trying to get away. If I didn’t get up, I was going to die right here.

“Luna!” Dru yelled, and the footsteps got closer. But instead of coming at me, he got between us and faced Luna, shielding me. I was almost numb with shock. “Run, Nikki! Get out of here!”

I backed into a tree and somehow used it to pull myself to my feet.

“Go, Nikki! Now!”

Luna turned, brought the gun to shoulder level, and fired.

I gasped as I saw Dru drop to the ground, instantly quiet.

He’d been trying to stop her. He’d been trying to save me.

It felt like Luna and I stared at Dru’s limp body for hours, but it was probably only the span of two heartbeats before I felt my feet propelling me forward, my body rigid with red rage. Fire engines. Cherries. Lava. Fast, faster, dead run. Luna only had time to turn her head before I reached her.

You know what to do, Nikki. You’ve done this a million times before in the dojang. You’ve trained for this. Just do what you do.

I stopped, put all my weight on my back foot, turned my whole body, and then brought my leg up, extending my foot. Roundhouse kick. The best I’d ever landed. My foot hit Luna’s head with a hollow thud, and she dropped like a sack of sand. All my colors blinked out at once.

I took a few breaths and then grabbed the gun out of her hand. The barrel was hot. I turned and threw it with a grunt. It skidded across the patio, then plunked into the deep end of the pool and sank to the bottom.

IT WAS ONLY then that I heard the sirens. The lights bounced around the backyard in fits and starts, and for a moment I was unsure if I was the only one seeing the colors. Police cars out front. I staggered in a circle so that I was facing the mansion.

“Back here!” I yelled.

In moments, three cops stormed the yard. I held my hands up in surrender, but the fourth cop to come around to the backyard ran straight to me. It was Detective Chris Martinez.

“You okay? You okay?” he asked, checking me over. “Jesus, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

I nodded. “But Dru . . .”

Martinez hurried over to Dru’s body and knelt beside him, tearing open his shirt and pressing both hands low on his chest. Another officer radioed in for an ambulance. It seemed impossible to me that he could still be alive. There was so much blood. And he was so still.

My foot ached. Hitting the heavy bag was not the same as hitting the back of a human head. But I limped my way over to Dru as well and knelt beside him. He was in bad shape, but he was still conscious. He saw me and tried to sit up, but failed.

“I tried to stop him, Nikki,” he said. “I tried to . . . save her . . . she . . . was right about . . . us. I changed my mind.” A tear slipped from the corner of one eye. His face was so pale it looked waxy. He swallowed, wincing. “I . . . moved her . . . I called the . . .”

“Okay,” I said. I pushed his sweaty hair away from his forehead. The letters on his T-shirt slowly soaked through with red, but I was afraid to look closely enough to tell if it was the red of his blood, or the crimson I’d gotten to know so well. Luna had come to and was instantly making a hell of a fuss. “Help is coming. Just hang on.” He didn’t need to finish. I knew what he was going to say. He’d tried to save Peyton. He was just a little too late.

“I’m so sorry, Nikki,” he said. I noticed blood begin to ring his bottom lip. I still couldn’t bring myself to look at the gunshot, to look at Chris Martinez’s hands as he pressed into the wound to stop the bleeding.

“I knew it!” I heard Luna yell from where the officer had sat her up on the lawn. “I knew you betrayed us! Bastard!”

“That’s enough,” I heard the officer say. I wanted to go over there and yank every hair out of Luna’s head, to tell her to shut the hell up, that this was no longer about them. I wanted to show her the crimson, all the crimson that had now shaded the pool water, unmistakably the synesthesia making its statement about Dru.

But I was too spent, too tired, too focused on keeping my eyes on Dru’s to do anything.

It hadn’t been just a technicality. Dru had been innocent. He’d changed his mind when they met up with her that night. The bruises I’d found on his hands and face and side weren’t from Peyton fighting him off; they were from him fighting Arrigo Basile. Either way, he hadn’t been the one to attack her. He’d tried to stop her attacker. He’d moved her car and taken her to the elementary school and called for an ambulance. He’d tried to do the right thing, and he ended up making himself look really guilty. Luna had seen that and did what Luna did best—take advantage. She’d set him up for the fall, but he didn’t deserve it. Ultimately, he’d sacrificed himself for Peyton. He’d decided that she was more important than all that he had to lose.

All at once I felt vindicated and defeated. Because I knew, before the paramedics stormed in, pushed me away, and started shouting, “coding,” that Dru wasn’t going to make it.

“It’s okay,” I said, stroking his hair again. “She opened her eyes for me. She’s going to be fine.” It was the truth, and it was also a lie. But it was a lie I thought he needed to hear at the time. It was the lie that allowed him to let go.

THE PARAMEDICS WERE a blur of activity, and I was outside of it, my limbs suddenly so weak and tired I couldn’t even stand up, my foot throbbing with my pulse, my ribs aching, my head pounding. I was dimly aware of neon green lighting up my foot with every pulse, of putrid brown filling my heart, but finally I was able to ignore my synesthesia. I scooted on my butt to the pool deck and propped my back against a lawn chair. I hugged my knees to my chest, nestled my face on top of them, and cried.

I felt a shoe scuff on the patio next to me. I didn’t look up.

“Hey.”

I continued crying, letting my tears wet the knees of my jeans, letting my nose run freely.

There was a shifting, a sound of keys and things jingling with the movement. “Hey,” the voice said again, much closer to my ear this time.

I finally turned my head, taking in Chris Martinez’s face through slitted and blurry eyes. He was crouched in front of me.

“We need to get you checked out,” he said softly.

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to turn my face back to the safety of my knees.

“You’ve got a nasty gash on your cheek. You’ve been shot, Nikki. And you’ve got a cut on your head and I can see that you’re in pain. You have to get that taken care of.”

“Why do you even care?” I said angrily, my words muffled by my jeans. “Aren’t you here to tell me you were right about Dru?”

He was silent for so long, I chanced another look at him. “I wasn’t,” he said. “Not entirely. I didn’t start to piece it all together until that night at the hotel.” He turned his face upward. The moon shone on his forehead. “I wouldn’t have figured it out without you, Nikki.”

I made a snorting noise. If he was trying to praise me, it was too little, too late. I didn’t want praise. I wanted to go back in time to before this happened to Peyton. I wanted to warn her not to try to do this on her own. I wanted to save her from herself.

But that could never have happened. Peyton wouldn’t have listened to a girl like me. Not until we were sisters.