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Confused, I shook my head.
“Zazie,” his voice was firm now, frightened. He hadn’t seen me shake my head, of course. He probably wondered if I’d passed out. “Zazie, is there anyone else there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hide under the bed until Ryan and I get there. We’re on our way,” he told me, and I blinked and then did what he said, slowly pulling myself away from her lifeless body and under my own bed, where I laid, numb and afraid.
Grandma had always looked like a heart attack waiting to happen, but he still had sounded surprised. He sounded like he was certain that it wasn’t anything natural, that it couldn’t be. That there was something else.
The tone in his voice made me think of fire.
And screaming.
I shook under the bed, in the fetal position, until Zach raced to me and pulled me up until I was sitting. The police were here, their blue and red lights flashing in the night.
“Pack everything. We’re leaving,” Zach ordered me, pulling me to my feet. His boyfriend, Ryan, would wear a serious expression to his own birthday party, so as he began to look through my closet for a suitcase, I felt like I was about to pack for my own funeral.
I was, of course, confused. My grandma was dead in the living room, and now I had to go somewhere? I had things to do? Besides crying? It seemed impossible, and my brain was rejecting this whole event. “What? Where?”
“We’re moving. Now. Move it.” He pointed to random shit in my room.
I looked over at my brother who had, to my incredulity, the look of immediate danger written all over his face.
I didn’t like that expression, and I didn’t like what it meant. Grandma had said that if she told me to go, then I’d have to go fast.
But she wasn’t here anymore. Now it was Zach saying that.
I thought she was just being a crazy woman. Overly cautious. Paranoid.
Yet Zach wasn’t any of those things, and he seemed very adamant that we might be in danger.
I blinked but then moved into action as I sobbed and tried to force back the tears so that I could see what I was even doing. I tried not to think.
“We’re moving somewhere safe,” he told me firmly, and I could hear the resolve in his tone.
Just like that, my world was no longer the same. It was no longer normal.
My time with Murtagh was over. I had to go live with Zach. My whole world had changed overnight. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to. Something inside of my brain—no, my soul—simply told me to listen to Zach and to be quiet about it.
And so that’s what I did.
CHAPTER 5
Four years later
Zazie
“Are you seriously smoking right now?”
I stopped mid-step, my shoe dangling above a cache of unopened mail and dusty, old laminate flooring, crunching my keys into my hands as I paused at the noise.
“No…” I replied to the ghost of my grandmother, and then I grinned when I realized it was only Zach, my older brother, talking to me from the kitchen as he seemed to be cleaning it for me with a face contorted in disgust.
Well, at least if he was cleaning, it must have been a good day. Four months ago, he had been diagnosed with cancer, and it was kicking his ass. He didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, but it seemed like every time I saw him, which was reasonably often, he was skinnier than the last time. Because of his tall frame, he reminded me of a sophisticated caricature of Death, only wearing a sweater vest.
I had a vape pen sticking out of my mouth that I had clenched between my teeth, so I was obviously lying to him. He was raising an eyebrow at me, and so I shrugged and added, “I vape occasionally under stress.”
“You vape more when you’ve been doing jobs you shouldn’t be doing and you feel ashamed,” Zach reminded me. His wisdom was that of a wintered psychologist, despite the fact that he was only thirty-two. “And when you feel guilty for being a lying, thieving bitch who has her nose where it doesn’t belong. But more obviously, because I called on these,” he lifted up a new stack of bills with my new name on it, ‘Zarah McCoy’, “and they were paid.”
