“That’s messed up,” said Andy.
Sloane didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, a
calculating expression in her kohl-rimmed eyes. Finally, after the silence had
stretched out for long enough to become uncomfortable, she said two words:
“Show me.”
Everyone piled into Christina’s bedroom this time: Andy
because he wanted to see the closet, Demi because she didn’t want to be left
alone with the bodies. We hung back, letting Sloane explore the room in her own
way.
She went to the closet first, and just stood there for
several minutes, looking down on the tangled nest of bedding. Finally, she
crouched and flipped over the pillow, studying the floor beneath it. “Two
weeks,” she said. “Maybe three. No longer than that. She’d have been shifting
around in the closet if she’d tried to go longer, and that would have fucked up
the carpet in here.”
None of us asked her how she knew. In cases like this one,
Sloane was our subject matter expert on tales involving wicked relatives. We’d
allow the cleaning team to do a full forensic analysis of the place as soon as
we cleared out, but we knew their findings would confirm Sloane’s deductions.
She was as lost as the rest of us when we were chasing a Little Mermaid or a
Match Girl, but put us in a house with a Cinderella or a Snow White and the
world was hers to unravel.
The narrative never does any of us any favors, even though
it can sometimes seem that way in the short run. But I sometimes feel like Sloane
got even fewer favors than the rest of us. She sees darkness everywhere she
goes. She’s not capable of looking away.
Sloane crossed to the bed, stopping next to it and cocking
her head as she considered the fold of the covers, the position of the pillows.
She pulled down the duvet, peering at the mattress for a moment before she
turned around and said, “We’ve got a problem.”
“The dire pronouncements are getting old,” said Andy.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Someone was sleeping in our Wicked Stepmother’s bed—someone
who wasn’t the stepmother, and wasn’t either of her daughters.” Sloane gestured
toward the bed, continuing, “Someone with red hair. Christina was a blonde, one
of the daughters was brunette, and the other was blonde like her mother.” She narrowed
her eyes at Andy and added, “There are pictures in the hall if you don’t
believe me.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Sloane,” he said
defensively. “This just seems like a pretty big jump to make.”
“Not that big of a jump,” said Jeff. He sounded …
frightened. I turned to look at him, frowning.
“Jeff? You know something that you’d like to share with the
rest of the team?”
“We were never sure that it was really a matter of the
narrative expressing itself, and not just some random human behavior. That’s
why it never made it outside of the Archive.”
“Except for when you consulted with me,” said Sloane. “You
tell them or I will.”
“Jeff?” I repeated.
Our resident archivist sighed, turning to fully face me, and
said, “We had a confirmed five-ten-a in Manhattan about four years ago. The
local field team was dispatched to deal with it, and they got there when the
story should have been fully manifested. What they found was … was a horror
show.”
“Many fairy tales are,” I said. “We’re standing in a dead
woman’s bedroom. What did the field team find, Agent Davis?”
Using Jeff’s title seemed to help him center himself. He
took a deep breath, straightened, and said, “The stepmother was dead, as was
the prospective Cinderella and one of the two stepsisters. The other
stepsister, Elise Walton, was gone. The incident was recorded as a five-ten-a
gone wrong, turned murder-suicide, like some of them do, and it got filed as
part of the overall five-ten-a record.”
“Only about a year later, we got another narrative pop with
the same attributes, or at least really similar ones,” said Sloane, picking up
the story. “There was a potential five-ten-a in Houston that was flagged as
resolved when one of the stepsisters was killed in a car accident. That didn’t
stop the survivors from being poisoned at their dining room table, with cyanide
mixed in applesauce.”
“There have been two more killings that fit this profile
since then,” said Jeff. “They were both in different cities; they both involved
unmanifested five-ten-a narratives.”
“And let me guess,” I said. “The Bureau—and the Bureau
cleanup crew—got involved on every one of those calls, didn’t we?”
Jeff nodded. “It’s standard procedure. We don’t want a
repeat of what happened in seventy-two.”
“Um,” said Demi. “What happened in seventy-two?”
“There was a rash of killings connected to a memetic
incursion gone wrong—a Snow White who didn’t manifest the way that she was
supposed to,” I said. “The media got hold of it before it could be properly
handled. Dubbed them ‘the fairy tale murders.’ We lost half our funding over
that incident, and the Snow White in question wound up getting arrested for her
crimes.”
“Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when you kill people?”
asked Demi.
She sounded so lost that I felt briefly guilty for dragging
her into all of this. I pushed the feeling aside. This was neither the time nor
the place, and Demi’s story had been sealed long before I forced her into
activation. “She killed eight more people while she was in prison, before we
could get someone into her cell and take care of her. It was a mess, in every
sense of the word, and it must never happen again.”
The Snow White’s name had been Adrianna. She’d looked enough
like me that we could have been sisters, because all Snow Whites are sisters, somewhere
deep inside the story. They made me recite her history while I was in school,
drumming the failure that she represented deep into the marrow of my bones.
Never again. Other stories could turn sour, but not mine: never again.
“So our cleanup crews hit every single one of those crime
scenes and they stripped them down to fibers and forgetfulness,” said Sloane.
“The regular police knew something had happened, but they never got the
details, and they never told the FBI to be on the lookout for a serial murderer
with a fondness for families and poisoned apples.”
“Great,” I said. “Just great. If it’s not a Cinderella that
we’re dealing with here, then what is it?” I felt like a fool as soon as the
words were spoken. It was all so
obvious
…
Sloane fixed me with a cold stare and said, “I thought you
were smarter than this, Henry. If we’re not looking for Cindy, then that means
we’re looking for her Wicked Stepsister. The one who got away.”
We left the cleanup crew to their unenviable task and returned
to the office, where we had an unenviable task of our own to undertake: finding
a Wicked Stepsister with no active narrative to call her own. Jeff and Andy
went for their respective safety nets: the archive for Jeff, and the FBI
directory of missing persons for Andy. His logic was good—if the victims of our
wayward Wicked Stepsister had never been reported as murdered, he should be
able to find them somewhere in the FBI’s files.
Someone
had to have
realized that they were gone.
Demi sat down at her desk with her hands tightly folded in
her lap, looking like she had no idea what she could possibly do in this
situation. I would normally have tried to come up with some kind of busy work
for her, but at the moment I was preoccupied with a more pressing matter:
Sloane.
She hadn’t said anything during the ride back from the
Marlowe house, and that wasn’t like her. What’s more, she wasn’t going for her
computer, either to work or to look at eBay listings. She was just hovering
around the edges of the room, expression flickering lightning-fast between rage
and despair. It was worrisome to say the least, and terrifying to say a little
more.
I took a breath, trying to calm the too-rapid thudding of my
heart. The narrative wants me to be flighty; wants me to be the kind of girl
who runs at the first signs of danger. I’ve been working for my entire life to
train myself out of those urges, and for the most part, under most
circumstances, I’ve succeeded. But Wicked Stepsisters are close relatives of
Wicked Queens. Under the right circumstances, one can even evolve into the
other, shedding the trappings of one story for whatever happens to be available
to them. And the Snow White—and the agent—in me knew that we were in danger
when there was an active Wicked Stepsister nearby.
Sloane had her own set of narrative impulses to fight with.
Going near her when I was showing signs of distress would be like hanging out a
big red flag and inviting her to take her shots. She couldn’t help it. I didn’t
need to encourage it.
When I was sure that I wasn’t going to have an
inconveniently timed panic attack, I walked over to where she was pacing and
asked, quietly, “Everything all right with you, Agent Winters?”
“That wasn’t my last name when they found me, any more than
‘Marchen’ was yours,” she replied. “You get to be a fairy tale, I get to be a
freeze. Somebody in senior management has a real shitty sense of humor, you
know that?”
I paused, briefly stymied. Then I tried again, asking, “But
is everything all right?”
Sloane’s laugh was brief and brittle, like ice breaking in
an enchanted forest. “All right? Fuck, Henry, you know me better than that.
I
know me better than that. No, everything is not ‘all right.’ Everything is
never going to be all right. Hey!” She whirled, stabbing a finger at Andy.
“Look for incidents in places where it gets cold. It won’t matter if she
doesn’t have a passport, she’s not moving around legally anyway, and she’s
probably capitalizing on looking young and vulnerable. But she’d want to kill
somebody where it was snowing.”
“Why?” asked Demi.
Sloane fixed her with a flat stare. “To see if it would feel
any different.”
“I’ve got something,” said Andy, saving both Demi and me
from needing to formulate a response. “There’s one in St. Paul
and
one
in Chicago. Our Wicked Stepsister has been a busy, busy girl.”
“If she’s working her way into families that have two
teenage daughters already, she must be making contact somehow,” I said. “Try
looking for new student enrollments at nearby high schools a month or so before
those people were reported missing.”
“Why are you assuming subterfuge, and not a blitz attack?”
asked Andy.
“Because she’s a teenager herself, based on the first
incident, and it would be difficult for her to force her way inside without
being seen,” I said. “This way, she gets in, she takes control somehow—”
“She’s probably armed; it wouldn’t be that difficult for her
to get a firearm on the black market, and the pause between the deaths and the
reported disappearances means that—” Jeff froze with his mouth still open, his
eyes widening behind his glasses. “I am an idiot. I don’t deserve to be an
archivist. I don’t even deserve to be a shoemaker.”
I frowned at him. “Care to break that down a little bit?”
“She’s using the dead women’s
credit cards
,” he said.
“There’s no reason for her not to. Nobody knows that they’re dead. There’s no
one to tell on her, not for several days at least. As long as she abandons the
cards before they can give her away—and then she just switches to cash. I’m
sure they’ve all been ‘persuaded’ to give her their ATM numbers before she
killed them.”
“The Marlowe family was killed a week ago,” I said. “Andy?”
“Already on it,” he said, pulling his keyboard toward
himself and beginning to type rapidly.
We’re not hackers. We’re not even computer experts. But it’s
amazing what access to government systems and official backdoors can do. If
Elise was using her latest victim’s credit cards, we’d find her.
A hand touched my elbow. I turned to find Sloane standing
closer than I was entirely comfortable with. The rage had completely faded from
her face, replaced by nothing but simple despair. “Can I talk to you while they
fuck around with computers and stuff?” she asked. “It’s important.”
“Sure, Sloane.” I looked back over my shoulder. “We’re
heading for the conference room. If you get anything, call me. My phone is on.”
I faced forward, offering Sloane a thin smile. “I’m all yours.”
“No, you’re not, and you should be really happy about that.”
She turned and stalked away, clearly expecting me to follow her. That broken
ice terror that I associated with the Snow White side of myself was back,
stronger than before. Snow didn’t want me to go anywhere with Sloane, not now,
maybe not ever. Snow wanted me to stay right where I was, safe, among friends,
where I would be protected.
That, more than anything else, is why I straightened my
jacket and followed Sloane Winters down that hall. I’ve never allowed anything
to control me, not my story, not the greater narrative that birthed it, and
sure as hell not Sloane. I’d be damned if I was going to start now.
Sloane paused outside the conference room door, waiting for
me to catch up with her. “I didn’t think you’d actually follow me down this
long, dark hall, all by yourself,” she said. Her voice was pitched lower than
normal, and it seemed to be full of strange shadows, twisting just outside the
edges of her words. “That was a brave, stupid thing to do.”
“I’m your boss,” I said. “Sometimes it’s my job to be brave
and stupid. What do you need, Sloane? What can I do to help you?”
She laughed again, that same brittle, breaking laugh. “I
don’t think you can help me, just like I don’t think we can help Elise. She’s
manifested. Whatever she was before this happened to her, whoever she might
have grown up to be, that’s over now. That girl is dead. She’s part of the
narrative, and there’s no getting away from that. She’s been
written
.”
The horror and venom that infused her final word was practically visible,
dripping from her mouth and running down to the floor like so much poisoned
water.