I keep pushing, keep trying, but it doesn’t help.
I try attacking Julian, knocking him back before he has a chance to shoot at me, but the bullet just goes wide and ends up hitting Hannah anyway.
I try putting Cody in the front, thinking that Julian won’t shoot if his son is on the line. But Hannah jumps in front of her son, and that makes Julian shoot all the same.
I push Hannah out of the way, knocking her down before the gun goes off, but somehow she still ends up in the way.
Three, four, five, six, seven times. Seven times, I watch my sister bleed out in the alley. Watch her blood pool under her body. Hear that whispered promise we made to each other years and years ago.
“Kill for you, live for you, die for you.”
It’s like the first time each time, only with a new layer of agony, because I don’t understand why this isn’t working.
Why I can’t save her.
Nothing works, and each time I watch her go down, it’s that much harder. I feel frantic, crying uncontrollably now, trying to drag in deep breaths through my mouth, even though it just makes the stabbing pain in my chest hurt even worse.
“Hannah. Please.” I choke the words out, and they come out raspy and broken. They also make no difference.
Her body is cold.
Her spirit is gone.
There’s nothing left of her here.
My eyes pop open, and I glance around the dark room wildly for a second. I’m awake, out of the nightmare…
But that’s not right, is it?
I’m still living the nightmare, because what happened in my dream is true. Hannah is dead, and there’s nothing I can do to bring her back.
I feel so numb. Dead inside.
My heart is still beating, and I’m still breathing in and out, but I may as well have died in that alley with my sister.
I don’t remember lying down to go to sleep, and I’m still in my underwear from when the guys undressed me earlier. Everything after that is kind of a blurry mess, and it makes my head hurt to try to think about it too hard.
So I stop.
Someone shifts in the bed behind me, and I turn over and realize Priest is sleeping with me. His face is unlined and more relaxed than usual in his sleep, and there was a time when I would have reached for him or cuddled up and tried to take comfort in his presence and warmth.
But now I’m barely aware of him. If I hadn’t felt him move, I might not have even realized he was there. The connection between us feels thin and muted, just like everything else.
I just lie there, staring at the ceiling for what could be minutes or hours. Time doesn’t even matter.
Eventually, the numb blankness shifts to a restlessness that I can’t ignore. It feels like something is pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe. It makes me feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin, and the closest thing I can compare it to is the feeling I had after I killed Ivan and the pain didn’t go away.
Lying here in the dark feels wrong somehow.
It feels like I shouldn’t be here.
Like I can’t be here.
I can’t do this.
I know if I try to go back to sleep, I’m just going to see Hannah die all over again, and the thought of that makes bile churn in my stomach. I can’t do that again. I don’t want to.
But I also can’t just lie here. It feels like I’m going to lose my mind if I try to do that. So I get up silently, careful not to wake Priest. He needs the sleep, and I don’t want him to try to stop me.
I go to my dresser and grab the first clothes I find, not even paying attention to what they are at first.
A skirt, a shirt, some shoes.
Anything that covers me enough that I can leave.
It’s late as fuck, but I’m not sure exactly what time it is. The house is quiet and dark, and I guess everyone’s in bed, asleep. Even the dog isn’t stirring as I creep down the stairs and into the living room.
It’s too quiet, too dark, just like my thoughts.
Dog does look up when I pass by where he’s curled up on the couch, a small whine escaping him.
“Hush,” I whisper, shaking my head.
He lies back down, but I can feel his eyes on me as I head for the front door.
I slip outside and start walking down the sidewalk. It feels almost like I’m still in a dream. Like the world around me is hazy and distorted, and none of it is real.
I can’t feel anything.
The trees rustle with a passing breeze, but I don’t feel it on my skin. It lifts my hair a bit, but I don’t feel that either. My feet move down the street, carrying me past the fancy-ass houses in this neighborhood, but I don’t really see them.
For so long, I called myself Ghost, but now I really feel like one. Like I’m drifting between the realms of being alive and being dead, cursed to wander forever because I fucked up the one thing I promised I would do.
I don’t even know where I’m going, and I don’t even really care. I just keep walking, letting my feet carry me out of the guys’ neighborhood and down the road.
The streets are mostly empty at this time of night, and it’s quiet except for the occasional passing car or the rustle of the leaves in the trees.
That starts to change a little when my surroundings do. I walk and walk until I hit a shittier part of town, and it’s much more alive and awake here.
It makes sense that all the respectable people are in bed, while the criminals and thugs and lowlifes are all up and about.
“Hey.”
A rasped voice cuts into the haze of my thoughts, and I turn my head to see a man in torn and dirty clothes coming over to me. I think maybe he has a beard, but I can’t really focus on him at all.
“You got any change, girlie?” he asks me, and I reach into the pocket of my skirt and pull out a couple coins I find there, passing them to him without even really thinking about it at all.
Two women walk down the street in high heels, and one of them laughs at something the other one says.
For some reason, that sparks a memory in my head of the way Hannah used to laugh. She was quieter than me a lot of the time, but her laugh was always loud and bright. I used to think that she laughed with her whole spirit, the joy spilling out of her because it couldn’t be contained.
I think about the way she would carefully dissect her sandwiches and eat them in pieces. Layer by layer, bread, meat, cheese, bread. I used to give her shit for it, teasing her about eating like a fussy old lady, and she’d give me shit right back, calling me an animal for eating all the ingredients at once.
I think about her brushing her hair out, and the way she’d braid it at night, hoping in the morning when she took the braids out there would be luscious waves in her sandy brown hair, like the women we saw on TV. It worked for about an hour, before her terminally straight hair went back to its natural state.