For whatever mysterious reason was driving them, she’d probably walked right out of her house and right into hell.
Her hair was short and curly, her eyes wild and panicked. She raised the knife in one hand, beat against her temple with the other. “Get them out of my head!”
“I can help you,” I said, reaching out a hand while I kept my eyes trained on the knife and its wide, flat blade, with a pattern that looked like mokume-gane. If it had been well cared for, it would be sharp and could do some damage.
“You can’t!” She screamed it, putting so much energy into the sound her body bowed with the force of it. “They won’t stop. I will make them stop! I will stop them!”
She held the knife to her throat, and my heart seemed to stop sympathetically.
“Please don’t,” I said, trying to draw her gaze back to me. “I promise I can help you. There’s a place you can go where the voice won’t bother you anymore.”
That place might have involved a cell and a drug-induced coma, but it was all I had to offer at the moment, at least until we learned more.
She paused for a moment, shoulder twitching up toward her ear, and I could see hope spark in her eyes. But it was a small spark, extinguished by whatever delusion ripped through her awareness. She grabbed handfuls of her hair, bent over from the waist like the voice had weight and was pulling her to earth.
She screamed and stomped her feet in obvious frustration, and when she lifted her gaze again, there was a horrible desperation in her eyes. “This won’t end. It doesn’t end. It’s the same thing all day, every day, and there’s nothing you can do about it or that I can do about it. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop!”
She regripped the knife so the blade pointed toward her, a new grim determination in her eyes.
“No!” I said, and ran forward, but I was a moment too late. She plunged the knife into her abdomen, dark blood staining her apron. The fingers still wrapped around the blade turned crimson as she fell to her knees, eyes wide. She looked down, horror filling her eyes, and began to shake.
“Little help here!” I called out, and dodged forward. She pulled one hand away, began to beat back at me. I grabbed her slick wrist, wrapped my free hand around the one still on the knife. There was no telling what she’d punctured, or if pulling out the knife would make the situation worse.
Malik hit his knees beside me. “Do exactly what you’re doing,” he said, and pulled off his jacket. “Keep your hand on the knife. I’m going to apply pressure.”
I just nodded, since I was busy trying to keep the woman’s clawing hand away from me. She was still screaming; her plan to kill the noise by giving herself a brutal amount of pain clearly wasn’t working.
Malik wrapped the coat around the knife below our joined hands, pressed firmly down. The woman screamed with pain, which made more delusional heads turn our way.
A blue ball whizzed by, sparks jettisoning as it passed like an out-of-season sparkler. I looked up, watched it stream toward a young man in his early twenties in athletic shorts and shower shoes shuffling forward, hands gripping his head like he was trying to rip away a vice. He hit the pavement much the way the first one had.
“Merit,” Malik said. I looked back, found him nodding toward my skirt.
“Shit,” I murmured, and slapped at the sparks that were eating their way through the silk. But my hands were very much occupied . . .“I got it,” Amit said, slapping out the sparks with a hand. He blew away the ashes, tamped again just to be sure, and then looked back at the woman bleeding on the ground in front of us. There were streaks of blood on his face.
“Cadogan House has a unique way of partying,” he said.
I looked back at my hands, covered in blood and around an equally bloody knife, hoping to God I wouldn’t lose the woman I hadn’t been able to save.
“Yeah. I’d say that about sums it up.”
• • •
The ambulances arrived first, sirens roaring toward us, lights flashing. Catcher pulled the EMTs to our position, and they worked to stabilize the woman, get her into the ambulance. They must have been experienced with disaster work, as they didn’t flinch at the sight of the chaos, or the humans on the ground.
“Keep her guarded and secured to the bed,” Catcher said of the woman with the knife. “She did this to herself.”
“Suicide?” one of the EMTs asked, crossing himself in the process, two fingers across forehead, breastbone, left, and right.
“Not exactly,” Catcher said. “But we don’t have time to explain right now. The Ombudsman will be in touch.”
They nodded, swept her away and to the hospital with sirens roaring again.
One of the EMTs offered me a bottle of water, and I rinsed the worst of the blood from my hands.
Ethan walked toward me, looked me over, and I did the same to him. Limbs still connected. Filthy and blood smeared, like me, but generally healthy.
“I’m okay,” I said, anticipating the question. “You?”
He nodded, looked down at his now-untucked shirt and ripped pants. “The streets of Chicago are filthy. I don’t recommend rolling around on them.”
I looked down. I’d lost a sleeve, the lace along the bottom of my dress had been shredded, and blood stained the front in ugly vermillion streaks.
“Yeah, my dress is toast.”
He glanced down at it. “You and clothing. At least the wedding was already over.”
I blanched as I realized what would come. I’d have to take the dress back to the House, where Helen would undoubtedly see it. I could all but feel the lecture taking shape, judgment forming like a cloud over us, never mind that I’d paid for the damn thing.
“Helen,” I said, looking up at him, and watched understanding dawn in his eyes.