PLAYBACK II

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  “And you just let her go?” Lord Tredici asked, echoing Sebastian’s father.

  His heart was racing.

  His hands were shaking, and the gun was heavy.

  Sebastian’s words had fallen on deaf ears. He was twelve years old, again, and the disappointed confusion in his father’s voice stung in a way he thought only his mother’s could.

  Holidays with their father to the cabin, deep in the wilderness of the estate, began when they were six. At first, framed as vacations, playful hunting trips designed to get them used to being around guns and death, by the time they were eight, their time away with Roderick Hale, had transitioned into an extension of their training. With trips becoming more frequent, they spent less and less time at the actual cabin, and more time learning to survive off the land around it.

  Once the twins turned nine, and the pretense faded, their father stopped accompanying them at all into the wilderness.

  From then on, he would only teach them techniques, instruct them on how to craft and use new tools, or quiz them with questions meant more for provoking thought than actual answering. The moment it was time to apply any of it, they were on their own. Roderick would give them their goal, then retire to his office to pour liquor into himself and pore himself over his tomes.

  That was how, at the age of twelve, tasked with simply killing a deer and bringing back a trophy, the twins ended up in the woods that stuffy midsummer day.

  As was usually the case, Sebastian’s pace was just slow enough to cause him to lag further and further behind. Every so often he would sprint to catch up to his sister, before returning to his normal speed, and the cycle would repeat, again.

  “You are so sloooow,” Tabitha said over her shoulder. “If we’re not back by nighttime, it’s over, Seb—we lose.” She held her right hand out over her left, and pantomimed a bomb dropping into something. Her recreation of the sound it made was an explosion of spit. “Boom! Done for.”

  “Shush—sh-shut up, Tabby,” he said in a whisper. “You’re gonna scare them off!”

  Tabitha turned to walk backwards, so she could look at him. Her face had contorted into sarcastic, scrunched-up worry. Now, she was whispering, too, only in the harsh, loud kind of way.

  “If we don’t find something soon, I’m gonna blame you, Sebeian the Plebeian.”

  “What?” The new nickname caused him to nearly trip in confusion. “Plebby-what?”

  Tabitha spit laughter at him as she spun back around.

  Her pace began to gradually slow to match his, and her voice fell to an actual whisper.

  “Seb the Pleb. Seb the Pleb. Seb the Pleb. Seb the Pleb. Seb the Pleb.”

  “Shh!” It stung each time, and he returned five stinging fingers into her arm as retribution.

  She dramatically played up the pain with a hiss through her teeth. As her own form of reprisal, Tabitha flipped a playful switch. Her face twisting into a scowl, she cocked her arm back to fake a real punch. She pulled the attack an inch from his face, causing the air to hit him in the eye instead.

  He flinched, like he always did.

  And she cackled over it, like she always did.

  It went on like that for hours, the two bickering and joking as quietly as they could, until familiar paths brought them to the dense undergrowth they sought. From that point on, they only used hand gestures and glares to communicate.

  Circling the edges of the vegetation, they followed it to a clearing their father had shown them. They moved quietly, slowly, taking the time to adjust their path according to the direction of the wind.

  The closer they got to the field, the faster Sebastian’s heart raced. He was crouched down, following Tabitha half a step behind. Mirroring her movements through the brush, and taking hand offs of pushed aside branches, he began to feel the weight of the gun slung across his back. It was nearly bigger than he was, a bolt action rifle designed for a grown man. While he struggled with it, he wondered how Tabitha managed.

  Remembering she had grown an inch taller than he had that year, he turned his mind from it.

  To distract himself, Sebastian counted his footsteps. Two, four, six, eight, going up in twos in order to account for his twin. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty.

  It worked so well that he ended up bumping into Tabitha, after she stopped to readjust their approach.

  She turned around, looking like she wanted to yell.

  Instead, she bridled her temper, managing to only glare deafeningly at him.

  After she shook it off and refocused, Tabitha returned to the task at hand by pointing in the direction the deer were in. Her other hand went in the direction they would go, adjacent to the other, so they could remain downwind.

  “If you see it, you shoot it,” she whispered.

  It was a hushed reminder of the rules of their game. And a harsh reminder of what they were there to do. Theirs was a quest to kill, not some mythic adventure for treasure. At the end of the day, in order for them to succeed, something had to die.

  Sebastian continued his counting as they stepped carefully through the thinning trees toward the clearing. Forty, forty-two…sixty, sixty-two, sixty—

  The sound of a stick snapping pulled their eyes in different directions as they both froze.

  Out pacing her brother, Tabitha was steps ahead of him, and heard the crack come from her left as the sound struck a tree and echoed into her ear.

  Positioned in just the right spot, forever a step behind, the sound reached Sebastian straight from its source. His eyes darted to the right, landing perfectly on the flickering white tail of a deer. He traced the outline of it’s light brown form. Its fur camouflaged it well, but movement betrayed it. It was nearly a hundred yards from them, stepping slowly through the trees as it made its way toward the field they were circling.

  Instead of the quiet owl hoot they practiced for those exact situations, it was the automatic gasp that left his lips that drew Tabitha’s attention to it. She followed his eyes to its location, and took a moment to study it.

  “Dang. You win.”

  Sebastian was frozen. What did I win? he wondered, eyes locked on the doe as it innocently meandered by. Their father had warned them that it being early summer, the doe was technically out of season. As the female of the species, some part of the young boy considered it technically always out of season.

  “Hey!” The back of Tabitha’s fingers landed on his arm. It stung just enough to snap him out of his trance. Then she was pulling the strap of his gun from his shoulder. Having to walk him through each step filled her hushed voice with frustration. “Come on, Seb.” She was nearly yelling when the gun was finally in his hands. “Hurry up!”

  Sebastian wanted to argue, but he knew Tabitha would win. He could see the dozens of reasons she could employ, and how he could pointlessly argue against them. And then he flinched at the idea of the fist full of reasons she would employ if he actually pushed the issue.

  Thinking better of it, he raised the rifle to his shoulder.

  While he tried to find the doe in the scope, he hoped it had somehow disappeared.

  “Remember your breath,” his sister whispered.

  Out from behind a tree, the doe stepped back into his line of sight. Through the eyepiece, the animal did not look real. The sunlight cutting through the canopy washed away the details of its fur, making it look almost like plastic to him. Something about the way the light caught in the lens, and curved at the edges, gave the image a hazy, smudged look. Nothing about the scene inside the scope looked real.

  He did not want it to be real. It did not look real. It was not real.

  It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real...

  “On the count of five.”

  But Sebastian was approaching four hundred.

  “Seb, your breath—hey.”

  He could not catch his breath. Sebastian did not need it.

  Because it was not real.

  The trigger was not nearly as heavy as the guilt.

  ~~~

  “Found another,” Tabitha hollered. “Over here, Seb!”

  Unsure if his breath had ever caught up to him, Sebastian was lagging behind, again. His ears still rang from the gunshot. The rifle sat heavy on his shoulder, and the afternoon sun was taking its toll. Struggling over a downed tree, he wished he could go back in time and make the shot count, or not make it at all.

  When he finally caught up to his sister, she made her impatience clear in how she pointed at the blood she had found. Standing with one hand on her hip, her other arm was bent, wrist cocked back, so that her extended hand completed an angry-little-teapot-like gesture. The leaf she was pointing at was surprisingly high, making the drop only visible from below as a silhouette. As he got closer to it, she pulled it down to show him the ruby bead.

  “You must’ve gotten it in the back, or something,” she said, raising an eyebrow at it. “Maybe the shoulder?”

  Sebastian shrugged. Part of him hoped it was nothing more than a graze, and the deer would live. He hoped eventually he would be able to talk her into returning home. Going back empty-handed was a hard sell though.

  “Which way then? Your turn.”

  Taking the lead in their game of leapfrog, he pushed past her, dragging his burden behind him. With every step along the trail of blood, the rifle on his back grew heavier. His sister’s pace made it doubly so. Two thousand and ten, two thousand and twelve…

  He could feel it in his chest. The shortness of breath was more than exertion. Something was wrong. For a moment, he lost track of his count, then could not remember if it was of steps, or beats, or breaths.

  “I dunno,” he said, head swiveling around in search of more tracks. “Let’s go back.”

  She just groaned at him.

  Sebastian knew the direction. Tabitha knew the direction. The path through the undergrowth betrayed his gambit.

  Even when panicked, especially so, animals moved like water along the path of least resistance. In the more dense areas, you could see their trails like dry riverbeds cut through the forest. It was how the twins themselves navigated. Not just by natural landmarks, a tree or rock or clearing, but by memorizing the natural road map used by the animals themselves. With some room for error, the twins knew where they were at all times. It was only beyond the northern boundary of the estate that things became tricky, but even then it was not difficult to find your way back to familiar trees.

  That was how they both knew the trail of blood likely continued north up to the river, before circling back south onto their land. It was exactly that direction they had been heading for half an hour. It was how a guess of Tabitha’s, after not finding the trail, kept them moving, even through Sebastian’s growing doubts.

  “Come on, Tabby,” he whined at her from a distance, “we should go back.”

  Still, she continued on, her fiery ponytail whipping around with all the ire of her pace.

  When she did not even slow down or reply, Sebastian increased his pace.

  After cutting the distance between them in half, he tried, again.

  “We haven’t seen any in like forever, Tabby. We should go back. The sun’s setting, and…my gun’s heavy, Tabby, come on!”

  “We’ve been out at night before,” she called back at him. “Don’t be scared, Sebby!”

  Sebastian could not help his fear. Even when they were prepared for nights out, he struggled with it. He knew every type of animal that lived in their woods, and, still, every night, something about the darkness invented new impossible things to creep and crawl through his imagination. His father’s tomes were full of impossible things that loved the dark, and had a taste for children. All it took was a glance at a page to fill Sebastian’s mind with the same.

  After that, there was no convincing the boy, even in his own well-seated logic, of what was or was not lurking in the shadows of Briarnook Manor and beyond.

  Even as his anxiety grew, he continued following, lagging behind, more and more, as his sister’s pace quickened.

  “Found it!” Tabitha stopped to gleefully point out a leaf with blood on it. “Tooold you, Seb the Pleb.”

  Her being right stung like it always did, practiced as she was at rubbing it in.

  Sebastian caught up with her just in time for her to spin on her heels to keep moving. But the woods had already begun cooling to gold as the sun sank into the horizon. If they continued, it would be well past dark before they made it back with their trophy.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  And that was if they even found it.

  In his attempt to stop her, Sebastian practically jumped to close the distance between them. “Hey! Stop! I wanna go h—”

  Reaching for her shoulder was a mistake.

  As Sebastian tried to pull her to a stop her, his sister spun into it.

  Snatching control of his wrist, Tabitha dragged his arm over her turning shoulder, heaving him over her back, and right into the ground.

  Sebastian landed hard on his rifle, the air leaving his lungs with a sharp whimper.

  He watched through pained tears, writhing on the ground, as a red smudge in his vision took her chance to leave.

  ~~~

  “What did I bring you for, if not for this exactly?” Lord Tredici yelled at him from the driver’s seat of the SUV.

  They were tearing up the driveway toward the broken silhouette of a home.

  But Sebastian was still miles away, years back, walking side by side with a specter.

  “You were supposed to keep an eye on her, Sebastian,” his father told him, as they retraced the twins’ path. “You need to keep her safe from herself. Temper and temperance—that’s you two. Go hand in hand, or not at all.”

  “Huh?”

  Sebastian did not know what to make of it. His father’s tone had an edge to it, like his mother’s always did, though, he never spoke in her pithy, cutting way. The scholar’s habit of alternating between concise statements and enigmatic conceits made communication between the two difficult in a different way. While the words never cut directly, they would twist and curve to circle his brain, to pick at and eat away at him, years later when he least expected it.

  His father’s stern look melted into a warm smile. “You two are so different—opposite sides of a beautiful coin, I swear.” He nodded thoughtfully at something before continuing. “What one of you has, the other will lack. And vice versa. So you must stick together, Sebastian. No matter what the gods or world or whatever powers that be throw at you. You must be there for one another.”

  “Like…Castor and—Castor and Pollock?”

  The question stopped his father in his tracks.

  First raising an eyebrow in confusion, his face suddenly cracked with realization, before breaking with laughter.

  The boy was not sure what he had done. He stood there, staring at his father, as he wondered if he should laugh too.

  “Pollock?”

  Sebastian looked up at the sky. “The Gem—The Gemini? The stars?”

  Still somewhat laughing, his father nodded at him. “The constellation?”

  Before his father could continue correcting him, a gunshot rang out.

  “Seems she found your doe then.”

  From there, it did not take them long to make it back to the clearing where it all began. His father’s haste seemed driven more by nightfall than worry. When they reached the edge of the trees, rather than bother going any further, he stopped to stand there, and holler over at Tabitha.

  “Did you bag your quarry, darling?”

  She was standing in the field, rifle in her hands and pointed at the grass. When she heard their father, she nodded without taking her eyes off of whatever she was looking at. “Yes.”

  Sebastian floated toward her.

  Some part of him needed to see the consequences of his actions.

  “And what exactly is keeping you then? Stumbling home in the dark is not my idea of celebration. I have not yet had enough scotch to transmute it so.”

  “Fawn—,” she said nodding at the ground, “—its fawn, I think. Here.”

  “And?”

  Fawn? A few steps from where she stood, Sebastian froze in confusion. He could see the doe was dead across the field from them.

  Following the barrel of the gun down into the grass, he saw something small hidden there.

  “What will you do?” Their father’s tone emphasized her singular responsibility, before he casually turned around to leave. “Hurry up then! Before the shadows settle!”

  ff>>

  The landing was not the worst punishment of Tabitha’s night, but as she laid there on her back, she thought she might allow herself to drift off into the swelling agony. For a moment, she felt like whatever happened after she blacked out would be justified by the tranquility of nothingness waiting for her there. It was pressing into her vision from all sides, and she wanted to let it take her—

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu—,” the agent groaned as he squirmed on the ground next to her, before a beep undid it, and his crumpling, “—uuuuuuuuuuuuuF!”

  Another jolt of adrenaline allowed Tabitha to lift her head off of the ground. She watched in horror as his body untangled itself in the moonlight. It was accompanied by the sickening unpops and uncracks of his bones and joints.

  Now, she was the one groaning as she tried roll over on her side in a tortuous attempt to get her feet beneath her, before the agent finished rewinding.

  The light on his gun flashed out from under Tabitha while she rolled around. She could feel it writhing beneath her while it tried to return to its owner. Lifting herself up slightly with her elbow, the Glock slid out from under her, and launched back up into the agent’s hand.

  “Oh god…”

  As the rewind finished, Tabitha began trying to push and kick herself away. Every movement was pain, but she tried anything to get distance between her and the agent. Anything that might give her time to fight through the damage, and up to her feet.

  Hitting play on his moment of panic, still thinking Tabitha was about to fall on him, the agent continued fumbling his pistol and camcorder.

  Dropping the gun on the ground, it landed with the flashlight pointing directly at her.

  “Fuckin’ shit! I mean, god—,” following the beam of light coming from the gun, the agent’s eyes found Tabitha. Laughter ripped through him at his realization. “Oh-ho-ho, there ya are!”

  “Stay the fuck back!” Hearing the desperation in her own voice, Tabitha tried rolling over onto her stomach, again, so she could push herself up. As she got on her side, pain ripped through her back.

  She screamed in frustration at her uselessness. She could take the pain, but not the helplessness.

  “Ya know, I didn’t think it was possible…”

  The agent ignored his gun, leaving it to light the yard.

  “…I mean, you think you know a guy…”

  Instead, he walked over to pick something else up off the ground.

  “…think you can trust him not to get himself killed…”

  Something that he dropped in his scramble for camcorder.

  Its silhouette was unmistakable.

  “…and then this thing lands right in front of the advisor. Not even a second before all of the blood.”

  As he stepped into the beam of light, Tabitha could read Louieville Sunder pressed into the side of the baseball bat.

  “I’ve seen that guy turn a lot of shit into mush with this thing,” he continued. “A lot. People, places, things, you name it.” Pointing the bat her, he began yelling. “And then you come along? And what? I mean, that unvarite you had obviously saved your ass, right? But how’d you do it, huh? How’d you get it away from him?”

  Tabitha ignored his flurry of questions, futilely trying to drag herself away at a snail’s pace.

  He closed what little distance she struggled for in an effortless step.

  “I mean, you must’ve fuckin’ nailed him,” he told her, laughing manically.

  Standing over her, he dropped the bat into the tip of his shoe, and tapped the toe to draw attention to it. “Covered my goddamn shoes in him.”

  “Please…,” Tabitha begged. The hit to her pride ached through her entire body.

  “Please,” the agent mocked, lifting the baseball bat over his head. “Did my partner fucking beg?!”

  The bat fell fast, driven as it was by grief. But the agent was not practiced, like his partner.

  “Please!” Tabitha had just enough time to drag her glittering arm up from behind her.

  When the Louieville Sunder connected with the crystals on her forearm, they gave way with a terrible crunch.

  Then, with the boos of a stadium, they shimmered and reformed, growing thicker and deeper into her arm.

  The flash of pain was immediate, but it took looking at her jagged, crooked arm for Tabitha to finally drift away into white hot nothingness.

  “You need to act, not react,” her mother’s voice rang through her mind.

  Somewhere in the bright void, a motel parking lot etched itself into Tabitha’s vision.

  Agent Harris was waiting for her, leaned up against one of the brake lights of the Crown Vic, with its trunk sitting open. He had an unlit cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth.

  “She was right you know,” he said, nodding at something behind her.

  Turning around, she found a memory from her childhood being projected onto the motel.

  “Strike first and end it before it begins,” her mother barked at her. “Once your enemy has shown themselves for what they are, you end it before they even know its begun.”

  A lash of punishment drove the point home. Tabitha turned away from the phantom pain.

  “Not sure I agree with her methods,” he continued, cringing at the show, “but she did prepare you for moments like these.”

  “She’s the reason I’m ever in ‘moments like these.’”

  Agent Harris chuckled. “Y’ain’t wrong, kid.” Reaching into the iridescent trunk, he produced the inconspicuous camcorder. “But if not for moments like these…,” he paused to think about what he was going to say, “…well, I’d probably still be alive, but we wouldn’t have this.” Gesturing dramatically, sarcastically, at the motel phantasm around them, he let out a burst of laughter. “What would either of us do without this, huh?”

  Tabitha smiled. It hurt too much to laugh.

  “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, kid.”

  With a beep, the motel unetched itself from the void, before the bright nothingness rewound from Tabitha’s vision.

  “What the—what the fuck?!” The agent took a step back at the sight of her arm rearranging itself.

  Lightning thundered back through the rewound injury.

  As the pain retreated, the hum of Kirk’s Sublime Ring returned to her with the drone of rewinding. It sang from her hand, down her arm, and up into her bandaged eye, where it clung warmly to her vision.

  Suddenly, Tabitha was being pulled back across the ground by invisible strings.

  Dragged right into the legs of the agent, she could not help but knock them out from under him.

  “Fuckin’—fah—what the shit?!”

  The agent fell over top of her, landing awkwardly on the ground as she continued through her painful unattempts at standing.

  Back where she first landed, Tabitha unspun through the hard landing, and was yanked up into the air. Flipping upside down, she felt the suddenness of hitting the agent ripple through her.

  Once the pain of the elbow drop vanished, and she was rewound into free fall, Tabitha imagined herself hitting PLAY on a VHS player.

  Somewhere behind her bandaged eye, the camcorder beeped.

  Resuming from half the height of her original fall, Tabitha braced for a new landing. She did not have the forward momentum to roll through it, and was forced to absorb the impact with her legs, then wrists.

  Knees driven into her chest, Tabitha sprang up with a groan of pain and exertion. More than one thing felt like it popped, but nothing that kept her from standing. It was not nearly as bad of landing as the first had been.

  A sprain, I think. Maybe a fracture. She would have time for a more thorough assessment on the other side of whatever came next. For now, her body felt better than it had since before she leapt through the window. Time to act, not reac—

  “What the fuck, man?” the agent said bewildered.

  When he was upright, he held the bat out in front of him and inspected it. “So that’s how you did it? You didn’t even need this thing.” His eyes flickered in the light as they danced down to the gun between them. “You know the bulletin put you at a level 4 threat? ‘Null-Class escapee,’ it said.” Shaking his head, he chuckled. “Beneath us, really, but Cobb wanted something simple.” He spit on the ground, then shrugged off a laugh. “Quota’s quota.”

  Tabitha rolled forward on the balls of her feet, preparing to make a break for the Glock. It was closer to her. She could outrun him.

  All she had to do was act.

  Pushing off the grass, she began sprinting for it with every bit of energy she could muster.

  The agent reacted a moment after, eyes widening as he dropped the bat to favor the camcorder.

  He did not hesitate.

  All at once, he was blitzing toward the gun, in a full on sprint, while flipping open the screen on the camcorder to push a button on its side.

  The camcorder beeped.

  Tabitha heard a buzz not unlike the hum of rewinding, but rolling in the opposite direction, enter her ear. The crystals on her arm thrummed in reaction to it, sending goosebumps running along her skin. She could feel as the pace of it quickened.

  She watched as the agent’s speed doubled. His eyes running into the cone of light were ablaze with focus. They darted up and down, inhumanly fast, as he checked her position in comparison to his own, and prepared himself to grab the gun.

  Faster and faster, his footsteps fell, and the hum of fast-forwarding intensified.

  Tabitha was not going to make it in time. He was about to cross the point of being closer to the gun than she was, and his speed was only getting faster.

  Why do I need the gun? The change in plan happened even quicker than the agent was moving. Her mad dash became a running start into a calamitous smash.

  In Tabitha’s left eye, Agent Harris was handing her the baseball bat.

  She took it in her crystalline left hand. Being right-handed meant little when you were trained to be a switch-hitter. And it meant even less when a smear is a smear, no matter what hand paints it.

  The agent was close. Even closer in the next rapid steps.

  He crouched as he moved to scoop the pistol up.

  Tabitha planted her right foot in front of her, lowering herself toward the ground, not to reach for the gun, but to drive power from her back foot into the shoveling uppercut she was swinging.

  The agent would reach the gun first, but his increasing speed would mean he would run right into the home run swing.

  And he realized it.

  With just enough time to abort, his eyes flashed fear. Turning to his left, he just narrowly avoided the punch, and continued behind Tabitha.

  Just over the hum of fast-forwarding, she thought she heard the pop and crack of his body under duress, when he violently buzzed by her.

  But she had committed too much to the strike, and her thrown arm carried her around in a spin.

  Twisting around herself, she tripped over her own legs, and fell onto the ground. Rolling through it, she scrambled up to her feet, before finally getting her eye back on her enemy.

  But the agent had not stopped, instead hitting rewind on the camcorder, to try again.

  Now, he was zipping back toward the gun in reverse. His body unpopped and uncracked with each retread step.

  Jumping for the gun, either a moment too soon or too late, Tabitha was batted away by the cameraman on his return. Rigid from predetermined motion, there was no give to his body as it continued. It felt like being tackled by a statue, leaving her reeling in the grass.

  “Goddammit!” The agent said, when his rewind finished.

  Another beep, and the unwinding hum of fast-forwarding began.

  Get up! This time, she was not fast enough. Her broken body could not react to the adrenaline driven commands. Every movement was addled by knotted or torn muscles. Every nerve fired off in penance. Watching him pick up speed, she felt like she was moving in slow motion.

  One after another, the agent’s footsteps drove into the ground, pushing him toward the light on the gun. His body cried out in strain, clicking, popping, and cracking as his tendons gave in to physics. Crumbling as he was, beneath his own doubled, tripled, quadrupled speed, he would still reach it before her.

  A drop of fear struck Tabitha then, sending a chill up her spine.

  The image of herself dying in every possible way, from every possible angle, beyond that moment shattered across the floor of her mind. She was left with nothing but a sea of reactions to choose from, and none of it would counter the violence of his. No matter how it played out, it always ended with the Glock’s flashlight chasing a bullet into her skull.

  The agent’s silhouette was a blur as he barreled toward it, guided only by the flashlight, like a moth to flame.

  As the light of mortality poured into Tabitha’s imagination, the gleam in her left eye rose to meet her fear. The image of Agent Harris grinding his heel into the tip of the gun flickered through her mind.

  Following her gasp out into the beam, the glinting gleam refracted through the bulb, causing it to burst.

  Darkness collapsed in on them.

  “Fck!” The fast-forwarding agent’s reaction flicked out of him in a rushed gasp.

  While her eye adjusted to the moonlight, Tabitha could only listen to the agent trip over the dark and crumble into the ground.

  In her momentary blindness, his fall was the sound of branches snapping and twigs cracking. Bones failing under the speed of his attempted recovery, she heard him hit the dirt with a nauseating thud. It was punctuated by a sharp, whiny grunt.

  Over in an ever-quickening heartbeat, the agent was left to wail in short, high pitched bursts on the ground.

  With every passing second, his ragged, agonized breathing increased in speed. The fast-forward carried it well past doglike panting into hyperventilating.

  “Pls,” the agent’s voice was strained as he tried to slow his fast-forwarded begging. “Plss. Cam-camr-cammer—plsss.”

  When her vision finished adjusting to the low light, Tabitha’s eye found his pulsing lump of a silhouette. His broken arm was flailing around in front of him.

  He was trying to reach the camcorder he had dropped in his horrific fall.

  The glow of the flip screen illuminated his broken fingers, vibrating through sped up motion just out of reach.

  “Pz,” his attempts to speak were little more than a buzz. When he cried out, it sounded like air leaving a balloon.

  The agent’s body began shaking with breath as his fast-forwarding increased.

  Tabitha struggled to her feet.

  Eye never leaving the agent’s undulating body, she walked over to the camcorder. Taking care to avoid his flickering fingers, she picked it up off the ground.

  In her hand, the object sang to her. It was a song like the hushed anticipation of an audience as the lights wind down in a theater, just before the movie starts.

  On its side, she found the button marked FF.

  When she pressed it, the song in her head vanished.

  The agent’s body returned to its regular pace, and his wailing turned to pained groaning.

  “Oh god—ah fuckin’—,” he wheezed, and coughed up blood, “—fu-fuck—tha-thank you...”

  Standing over him, Tabitha could not stand the sounds he made. She could not stand the pitiful sight of his crumpled form.

  “Please, rewi—hit rewind…”

  His pleas worked against him, only filling her with anger.

  This was the man who was just trying to kill her, not contain her. He was the partner of the agent who had tried and failed. At any point, over the course of the day, they could have hit rewind and simply walked away. How dare he beg for what he refused to offer her.

  Dropping the camcorder just out of reach of him, Tabitha walked over to the gun.

  The moment she bent down for the Glock, the sound of the SUV tearing up the driveway reached her ears. Using the burst of adrenaline, she snatched the gun off the ground, and lifted it.

  She framed the agent’s head in the iron sights, just as the high beams illuminated her intention.

  Tabitha did not hesitate.

  The trigger pull felt lighter than usual.