he said. “You have my permission to die.”
Not like this. She walked backward, head swiveling, hunting for a way out as the leering security guards moved closer. One slapped a truncheon into the meaty palm of his hand.
Aislin’s words, from the dream they shared in the graveyard, came back to her. “You will have to make a leap of faith.”
She turned and she ran, darting between two of the guards, headlong toward the wall of windows. She hit the glass with her shoulder and burst through. Seelie was weightless for the span of a heartbeat. Then she fell, plummeting down in a rain of razor shards.
73.
Tyler choked on the stench of blood and gun-smoke and he knew where he was even before he opened his eyes. The rough tile floor was sticky under his palms, his body squeezed in a crouch under the mustard-yellow plastic table, and he stared out across a battlefield. The air thick with whimpers, groans, the dead and dying. A body slumped over the lip of a ball pit. Another was facedown a few feet away, sprawled in a puddle of stagnant piss. No dignity in death. Billy Earl Rames made sure of that. Tyler heard him over by the soda dispenser, his giggling lilt drifting across the carnage.
“Eeny, meeny, finey…foe.”
“No no no—” screamed a voice, and then his Desert Eagle roared and added another number to his scoreboard.
Tyler froze. He didn’t look behind him. He couldn’t. June and Megan were behind him. He knew, because this was the same nightmare he’d had a thousand times since the day he lost them. And just like every time before, he knew eventually he would turn around, and he’d see them cold and dead and his failure etched in their glassy eyes.
“Chaaad,” Billy Earl was calling, “Staaacey. C’mon, Chad and Stacey. C’mon out and get what you’ve got comin’ to ya.”
He was hunting. Taking his time. Savoring his moment of power. A bullhorn squawked outside the restaurant, the police demanding he talk to them and negotiate.
The world buckled and warped and he was walking in through the restaurant doors with his family.
Not again please not again.
“French fries!” Megan cheered, racing ahead to the line at the counter. June gave him a look of mock exasperation.
“Tyler, talk to your daughter.”
“Oh. Now she’s my daughter.”
They stood side by side. She held his hand. He realized, looking away from the backlit menu above the counter, that June was staring at him.
“Something on my nose?”
She just smiled.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“Thinking about what?”
Her hand tightened around his, fingers twined.
“Thinking how lucky I am to have the best kid in the world, and a pretty okay husband.”
Please let me stay here, he begged, trapped in his own mind. Please not the next part. Just let me stay here forever.
“Only pretty okay?” he said. “I’ll have you know, ma’am, that my husbanding services are in high demand.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Oh really?”
“Mm-hmm. Just last week, Ms. McGann down the hall asked me to fix her toilet. I hope that doesn’t make you jealous or anything.”
She thumped his shoulder. “Ms. McGann is ninety years old.”
“I’m just saying, you better watch out.”
The walk to the plastic table in the back, still sticky from its last occupant, was the march to the death chamber. He couldn’t control his legs, couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he gently rubbed Megan’s hair, beaming with pride. The nightmare was forcing him to relive every last second of his memories.
It all started with a sip of orange soda.
Click.
The first bullet tears into Megan’s throat and doesn’t leave much behind, just this angelic face barely tethered to a splintered wet stick and she’s still smiling. She’s still smiling, the white-coated man in the morgue later tells him, trying to be kind, because the shot killed her so fast that her brain didn’t register what was happening before the lights flipped off forever.
June’s brain registers it. She registers that her daughter is dead, and a second shot plows into the back wall, spitting plaster and blowing out Tyler’s left eardrum. He still has trouble hearing on his left sometimes. It still aches some mornings when it’s raining and he wakes up in bed alone. June is starting to scream, a keening wail, and the third and fourth bullets find a home in her heart and her lung. Her scream turns into a wet gurgling choke and she falls on him, dead weight but still twitching. He realizes she’s trying to protect