Instinct

45. And Then There Were Two

"Alexei!"

Stephanie looked up to see their mother pushing through the stricken perimeter of people and stumble free of their grasp. The tall, proud woman stopped short. In that moment, Stephanie could see the breath as it was physically forced out of Laura's chest, as if she had been punched in the gut. The bottom of her shirt was torn and the tell-tale swell of bruising was already rising at the corner of her eye. Stephanie saw the moment the blood pooling around her youngest registered. She saw the way Laura clutched at her stomach as if some sort of thread originating there had been cruelly severed.

Through the tears, Stephanie saw all of this, and she knew that everyone around them could see it too. In her arms, on her lap, her sister – her sister's body was cooling. The blood had dried over the knife-thin wound through her throat. Her eyes were still staring sightlessly up at the sky, grotesquely frozen open.

It was nowhere near silent, not with wolves still fighting and windows being shattered and people yelling – but in that moment, Laura's cry of grief sliced through the shock that stilled the air around them. Stephanie flinched and squeezed her eyes shut, fingers curling instinctively tighter around her sister. Once Laura started crying, it seemed she would never stop, and it tore the remnants of Stephanie's heart apart.

Then Laura was on the ground in front of the sisters, completely blind to everything going on around her. She reached with shaking hands toward her only biological daughter, face crumpled in anguish and grief. Stephanie couldn't breathe, couldn't... her mom was still sobbing haltingly, unable to cross the invisible line between them and take her dead daughter into her own arms.

It would make it real.

There was nothing Stephanie could do, nothing anyone could do, to remedy that. Finally, a hand shaking like a leaf came to rest ever so gently on Alexei's milky-white cheek, and the damn broke. Laura caved in on herself and reached to hold her youngest. Stephanie didn't want to let go, didn't know how to, but she managed to uncurl her fingers and surrender her sister's body. The little girl's body was horrifically limp as Laura gathered it to her chest. Her hair was stringy with congealed blood and her limbs dragged along the ground until Laura had her in her lap.

Laura Armstrong smoothed the hair back from her daughter's face and screamed at the unfairness of it all. Stephanie knelt there and felt her head tilt back, hands dropped to the sidewalk, defeated.

What was there in the universe that could justify this?

Nothing. Alexei hadn't had to die. She hadn't deserved it. She hadn't deserved it. Jonathon Seymour hadn't deserved to die. Diana's dad and Caroline's mom and Dave's older sister – none of them had deserved any of it.

"She didn't deserve to die," Stephanie whispered.

Somewhere along the way she'd apparently struggled to her feet. Standing there, swaying, she was speaking to the man with the bloody knife at his feet. His eyes were wide and soft and scared. The malice was gone from his blood – had fled his face with the colour in his cheeks.

"I didn't mean to," he repeated fervently, forlornly. "Oh god, I didn't mean to kill her – I didn't mean–."

He sounded like he wanted to be sick. He stood there, shaking like the blood on his hands was poison to him. Stephanie laughed. She couldn't help it.

"How does it feel to be a killer?" she asked, stepping slowly forward, advancing on him. "How does it feel to know that you took an innocent life?"

The man stepped back unsteadily, stumbling. He raised his blood-speckled hands to his forehead and pressed them there like he could push the thought right out of his mind. But he couldn't, and Stephanie knew that better than anyone.