Seconds ticked by agonizingly slow.  There was a booming in my head.  Not thunder from outside this time though, instead it was all internal.  A dark rumbling of some boiling rage I didn’t normally have access to.  I shouted something, but what I’m not sure.  Tears were welling in my eyes also, my breathing becoming staggered and shallow.  All I could hear was the pounding of adrenaline in my ears.  I must have been crying or something because I couldn’t catch my breath.  Focusing on more than a small space in front of me seemed impossible. 

Next to Aerin’s body I watched white sandals turn and face me, the one closest to the Witch dragging a faint line through an ever increasing pool of blood.  Wrenching my eyes from the crimson stain I met Blondie’s stare.  Her mouth was twisted into a hideous, almost ravenous grin.  I blinked tears away and tried to speak, my voice getting caught in my throat. 

‘Avenge,’ the whisper in my head demanded.

“Ooops,” Blondie shrugged, sounding like a little kid that had spilled her milk, “missed ya.”

‘AVENGE!’

“...fucking... bitch...” the words dropped flatly from my mouth.

“Hmmm... anyway... Your turn, buster” she said before flashing an innocent looking smile.

A scream so primal and deep, so anguished in nature that I still doubt whether it was entirely natural, welled up inside my chest.  No longer was I staring at a deadly trained psychotic killer.  Nothing about the curly haired woman in front of me was intimidating anymore.  Instead I was staring at...

...At a dead woman. 

No more thoughts came, just action.  I charged Blondie with my hands pushing out in front of me, the roar that burst forth jarring her into a startled retreat.

You’re not getting away from me, not this time. 

Whatever madness had built up in that terrible moment as I watched the life drain from Aerin was thrust out of my hands and straight into Blondie.  In an instant I recalled the garage on Fore Street, how it felt like I was able to literally shove her with invisible hands.  I felt a surge of satisfaction watching the terrified expression on her face as she launched backward with a series of splintering crashes through row after row of shelving and books like she’d been tied to a speeding car. 

“Bitch!” I roared as she flopped like a rag doll against a distant back wall. 

Not yet... you’re gonna fucking suffer you goddamned psycho.

My hands were on fire, the arthritic tingling I’d felt back in Portland multiplied tenfold.  But I could feel what I was manipulating.  The air, the particles, the very atoms of existence were clay in the palms of my hands.  Moving my arms, I watched Blondie’s limp form jerk forward and up as if I’d attached gigantic marionette strings to her limbs.  I yelled out again, something indiscernible and probably not even a word, as I twisted my hands up over my shoulders and spun around hurling them down toward the floor with all my might.  Blondie’s form slammed roughly over the shelf closest to me and down into the pile of jagged debris that had originally covered her. 

Fucking whore... fucking bitch...

I struggled to form a lucid thought to articulate my hatred.  But words alone just didn’t capture the insane rage pumping through me.  I stood breathing heavily, watching the pile of rubble for movement, but there was nothing.  My hands clenched involuntarily, the joints painfully stiff, as my vision settled once again on the body of my former lover and companion.

Sirens wailed outside the building.  The upper walls were flashing intermittently with blues and reds.  The rain was still pounding against the skylight and outside windows, oblivious to the horrors that had just taken place in the belly of the old library.  Tears still clouding my vision, my arthritic fists trembling, I stumbled over to Aerin’s body.  I nearly tripped over some smashed metal framing when I got near her, letting my missed step bring me to my knees next to her.  There was blood all over the floor, warm and soaking the knees of my pants.  Her life, her precious crimson life... leaked out onto the ancient wood.

“Oh... god...” I sobbed, “Please...”

I moved in close to her and gently pulled her head onto my lap.  Her eye lids flickered, pale blue orbs underneath with too much pupil showing, all traces of red glow now long gone. 

“Jay,” she coughed, more blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, “you have... you have to find...”

There was more coughing, every spasm of her body piercing me like the squiggly blade that had pinned her.  I was barely able to sob out a reply.

“...What?  Aerin what are you... just hold on.  Help’s here baby... just hold on.”

“Jay!” she grabbed my shoulder with her left hand, iron grip digging into my skin, “Frost.  Find Frost...”

There were banging noises somewhere in the library, and then people shouting.  Narrow beams of white light were probing through the dim orange of the room.  I looked up, then back down as I felt Aerin’s hand slip away and fall limply next to her. 

“Aerin?  Baby... c’mon, they’re here...” 

But there was nothing.  She was gone.  I was alone. 

The only person in the entire world who had known what was happening to me, who would have stood by my side, was gone.  The guardian, the confidant... the one person I would have put my life at risk for, now perished from protecting me.  Fucked up, no job, loser me. 

My mind felt like it clicked off.  Shut down for a reboot or something...  I don’t know.  It simply wasn’t able to handle what had happened.  I started sobbing uncontrollably.  Everything else was a blur.  Multitudes of flashlights in my eyes, guns pointed at me and people shouting instructions.  Then strong hands forcing me up, bouncing me like a pinball between damp shiny leather jackets with brilliant silver badges on them, moving me away from Aerin.  They shouted questions at me, waved the lights in my eyes more.  I just stared at her body, blurry and refracted through tears with a dark circle of red around her still form, a crimson halo of lost life.  It was over.  There was no fight left in me. 

There was more shouting, and then they secured my hands behind my back in cold metal cuffs and led me away through the maze of dark aisles.  As we left the scene I thought I saw Blondie out of the corner of my eye being pulled from the rubble. 

Is she alive? 

I walked like a zombie, eyes focused on the next few feet of floor in front of me.  First wood, then granite steps, then finally wet pavement as we reached the doorway.  The noise outside was overpowering, people yelling and sirens going off in the distance.  The rain was drenching everything in torrents and still demanding attention with a cacophony of sporadic thunder.  And then there was nothing but muffled quiet.  The car door shut, the noise went away, and I was left alone to sit on the uneven vinyl back seat of a Boston Police cruiser. 

Tears still streaming down my face, I tried to get the picture of Aerin lying in a pool of her own blood out of my head, and wondered why I had the incredible misfortune of being the one left alive.

Twenty
Squeaky Eastwood

At first, sitting in the brilliant white sterility of the hospital, I was completely zoned out.  Grief stricken and shell shocked... zombified like my former roommate had been that terrible night on Fore Street, I grimaced in discomfort under the watchful eye of two irritated looking cops.  But while an exhausted looking nurse busied about stitching up the slash in my side, my head cautiously began to entertain the prospect of a reboot.  Slowly it began gathering up the roaming bits of my conscious mind and piece my shattered psyche back together.  The overwhelming grief from Aerin’s murder, my base survival instincts hesitantly reminded me, should be put aside in favor of giving the present situation an immediate evaluation.  The time for mourning would come later.

The first real lucid thought I remember forming was that Blondie probably wasn’t dead.  In my mind the continuous stream of images from the attack started to reel forward a little further each time I reviewed it, and soon I was replaying the sight of a limp form with wildly curling yellow hair being pulled out from the bookshelf rubble.  Looped over and over I started to notice small, almost undetectable tell-tale signs of life... her chest rising and falling ever so slightly, the twitch of an index finger as she was lifted onto the emergency bed.  And slowly the nagging feeling of discomfort lingering deep in the pit of my stomach blossomed into an absolute certainty that my enemy was still alive. 

My mental reboot was interrupted when the two cops escorted me back into the cruiser and drove us a few blocks through the still pounding rainstorm.  I continued to sit silent with a blank expression on my face.  I had no reason to struggle yet, no drive to push beyond where the fates decided to put me.  After being fingerprinted, photographed, catalogued and identified, I was unceremoniously dropped into a small room to sit alone in damp clothes and stare at nothing.  And then, no more than a few seconds after the door to the brightly lit interrogation room had shut me in, I heard a most unexpected sound.

‘Jay...’

I sat bolt upright and swiveled my head around to confirm my isolation.  The small square space didn’t look at all like it belonged in a police station.  The chair I was in sat like something out of an Ikea catalog, all smooth and supportive in the right spots.  Everything around me was all funky curved furniture edges and smooth inviting colors.  Soothing blues and greens, but not institution flavor colors like you see in the movies.  Instead it was brighter and more cheery in an ‘ice cream parlor’ sort of way.  Almost to the point of being so not characteristic of the norm it was disarming.

Weird fucking room, I thought to myself.  But no Aerin...