Am I supposed to sacrifice myself in trade for Trent?
The memory of her reflection covered in blood ran through her mind. She sipped her beer and cringed, switching hands. Her right shoulder was a hot mess. It was angry at her for ramming it into a wall. It would be barely usable tomorrow.
She scanned through her photos. Images of mirrors, followed by the silly images Simon had taken, most of which were blurry or pointed at the wrong thing. She started to speed up, since the man had managed to take somewhere around a hundred and fifty photos in a ten-minute span of time. Halfway through the stream, she saw something odd. Something that was the wrong color for every other photo around it. Backing up, she groaned.
She leaned back in her chair.
It was certainly the wrong color to belong with the rest. It was also the wrong time period. The image was faded and old, distressed like it was taken a hundred years ago. And picking up the camera, she instantly recognized the man in the image.
Simon. Posing with a young woman with long blonde hair. They weren’t smiling—but she knew it was because the technology at the time took too long to expose the film for the subjects to hold an expression. They were both painfully beautiful and well-dressed. He wore no glasses, and he was missing the manic and terrible grin on his face that he always seemed to wear. It seemed Simon had originally come from money. Photographs were exceedingly rare and expensive at the time. And they were both dressed incredibly well. He was standing behind the woman, who was sitting on a stool in front of him, his hand gently resting on her shoulder.
She picked up her camera and looked down at it. But who was she? They didn’t look related. And why was the Faire showing her this? At least it wasn’t the dead body of her friend or her own self covered in blood. She’d take a weird old vintage photograph.
But why?
The Faire was telling her something about Simon. Was it telling her to go to Simon? But then why show her a vintage photograph of him and some random lady? She clicked through the rest of the images in case there were any others hidden in the pile, but she couldn’t find any. Going back to the one she had found, it took her a second to realize anything had changed.
But when she did, she nearly dropped her camera.
The image had changed.
Simon was once more as she recognized him. Sadistically smiling at the camera, his mismatched glasses on his face. His clothing was the sharply and eccentrically cut pinstripe suit. She knew it was red, even if the image was still a sepia black and white.
But that wasn’t what almost made her drop her camera. Simon had his hand wrapped around the throat of the woman sitting on the stool, pressing her back against his chest.
And the woman sitting on the stool wasn’t a beautiful blonde…it was Cora.
She turned off the camera and shoved it away. She downed the rest of the beer and decided she needed something stronger. “I’m not going back there. I’m not.” He wants to make me into one of his “dolls,” whatever that means. I’m going to just go with the nicest possible option and hope it’s sexual. The other options are worse. “I don’t care.”
But what if it meant that Trent died? She leaned her head on her cabinet doors and let out a long, beleaguered groan. She fixed herself a gin and tonic. She collapsed on her sofa, wincing again at the stabbing pain in her shoulder, and tried to calm her racing heartbeat.
Simon is going to do something terrible to me.
The fucked up, man-eating murder-circus is going to kill my friend.
The Faire never said that it was a trade. I asked it what I should do to save my friend, but it never specifically said that was the deal we were making. This could all just be a trick. She sipped her gin and took a deep breath, held it for a second, and let it out slowly.
Maybe she could convince Trent never to go back to the Faire. But that would go over just about as well as a fart in church. He wasn’t the kind of guy who listened to the advice of others—and telling him not to do something was about as good as a guarantee that he’d just do it out of spite.
If she warned him about Ludwig the Strongman and the rest of the carnival, he’d laugh her off and call her insane. And she probably was. She didn’t have any proof of what had happened to her. None of the photos lasted on her camera. She didn’t even have Simon’s sunglasses anymore.
Where had they gone, anyway?
She sipped the gin and shut her eyes. If the Faire was asking for her life in trade for Trent’s, if that was really the deal on the table? Could she do it? Could she really do it?
Could she lay down her life for her friend?
It was one of those moments where everyone would smile and say they’d do it when asked the proverbial question, because it was only that—proverbial. But this was literal. The Faire wanted her to die—or undergo whatever the hell Simon was going to do to her—in order to allow Trent to live. That was her theory, anyway.
What kind of life did she have, anyway? One of pain, and misery, and working as a teller in a fucking bank because her Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome kept her from pursuing anything else she enjoyed. She wasn’t happy. She was always in agony and finding new ways to hurt. She was just going through her days, watching Netflix and playing videogames, going to the gym enough to make sure her joints popped out less frequently than they would otherwise, and passing the time.
Until what?
She died?
She didn’t even date anymore. Not since the terrible business with Duncan. It’d been five years, but the idea of being intimate with anyone made her sick to her stomach. She just couldn’t sit at a table with someone over dinner and pretend that she wanted to try.
Trent had a life. He had a career. He’d get married someday to some lovely guy and probably buy a small dog and have a beautiful home. He’d wear a sweater around his shoulders, host brunches with mimosas, and be happy and adorable.
None of that was in the cards for her.
Pound for pound, his life had more potential than hers. And she cared about him. He was her best friend—one of the few she still could talk to without having to put up walls or lie about how she felt. About the depression, the pain, any of it. He was the first person she went to after she had thrown Duncan out of their apartment. Trent was the one who had held her while she wept in a puddle on the kitchen floor.
“Nothing beats a good old-fashioned kitchen floor reset. They make for the best sob sessions,” he had told her. And he was right. After she sat there on the kitchen tile and wept, she had felt better. The giant tub of ice cream he had pulled out of his freezer had also helped.
He was always there for her with a joke, with a good story, or wanting to take her out to clubs to cheer her up. Never mind the fact that clubs had the opposite effect on her, he was always trying to find the bright side of things.
But could she really die for him?
She never once thought she was afraid of death, until the possibility became very real. She finished her drink and lay down on the sofa, needing some time to let her thoughts circle the drain before she was tired enough to go to bed.
Apparently, she was more tired than she expected.
Because one second, she was laying on her sofa. And the next, she was dreaming.
And once again, she wasn’t alone.
And once again, it involved a lot of blood.
15