Diana screams. Anders shouts at Sophie. I feign contorting my face in panic, and that relaxes her just enough that she doesn’t notice when I go for my gun. In another blink, it’s pointing at her as she lays one hand over my throat.
“Let her go,” Anders says as he comes around the bed. “Or she will pull that trigger.”
“She will,” Diana says quickly behind him. With shaking hands, she pantomimes shooting a gun.
“Shoot her.”
At the last voice, I give a start. It’s eerily calm, and it comes from over my head. Out of the corner of my eye, April appears. Her expression …
I have never seen this look on her face. Her words are cold and calm and clear, but her face is taut with fear, eyes showing whites all around the blue irises.
When she speaks again, there’s a tremor under that calm. “Shoot her, Casey. Please, just shoot her.” April swallows, the sound as loud as a gunshot. “She has her thumb on your Adam’s apple, and I need you to shoot her now.”
It is indeed on my Adam’s apple. Yes, an open-handed strike at that spot is famous as a killing blow, but Sophie’s thumb just happens to rest there as she presses her hand into my throat.
I lift the gun to Sophie’s face. Then, beside me, Jay gurgles.
“Casey…” Anders says, and I follow his gaze to Sophie’s other hand, wrapped in the tubing again. I glance at Jay. The tubing digs into his throat, blood tricking down.
“Syringe,” I whisper.
Anders shakes his head. “The needle’s snapped. April, can you please draw up—”
“Shoot her, Will, for God’s sake,” April hisses. “She’s going to kill Casey.”
“For once, I’m with April,” Diana says, voice shaky. “Will? Casey’s not going to do this. Can you please—?”
Sophie’s thumb digs in. Then she yanks on the tubing, so hard her face twists with effort, and she smiles. Dear God, she smiles down at me as she yanks and—
I fire, and she twists sideways, my bullet hitting her in the shoulder as another passes through the side of her head. As she topples, I scramble up to wrench the tubing from her hand. Jay’s face hits the floor.
Anders yanks Sophie’s body aside. There’s no help for her. I know that. Grief darts through me, grief for a woman we’d tried so hard to save. Anders had been right shooting to kill, though. He didn’t know whether I would actually pull the trigger, and he couldn’t risk aiming for her shoulder.
With Sophie gone, we both scramble for Jay. He’s facedown on the floor, unmoving. I flip him over. His eyes are closed, and that damned tubing is still embedded in his neck. I go to pull it free, and Anders says “No!” just in time.
“Move!” a voice says. “Both of you. Move, now!”
We part for April as my sister shoulders her way in.
“The tubing—” I begin.
“I see it.”
“He’s not breathing. He’s—”
“Casey.” Her eyes meet mine. “Let me do my job.”
“What do you need?” Anders asks.
April tells him, and we all scramble to obey.
FOURTEEN
Jay is alive. That is all I can say. Alive, for now.
He stopped breathing, and it wasn’t a simple matter of CPR to bring him back. Adrenaline can give ordinary people the strength to overturn cars to free their trapped children. It can also, when fueled by madness and rage, give them the strength to yank plastic tubing through a windpipe. Getting Jay breathing again took all my sister’s emergency-ward experience. Without her, he would have died. Even with her …
Jay did not leap up, gasping, when his heart started again. His brain has been deprived of oxygen for too long. He’s in a coma, and even if he recovers …