The Snow White’s name had been Adrianna. She’d looked enough like me that we could have been sisters, because all Snow Whites are sisters, somewhere deep inside the story. They made me recite her history while I was in school, drumming the failure that she represented deep into the marrow of my bones. Never again. Other stories could turn sour, but not mine: never again.
“So our cleanup crews hit every single one of those crime scenes and they stripped them down to fibers and forgetfulness,” said Sloane. “The regular police knew something had happened, but they never got the details, and they never told the FBI to be on the lookout for a serial murderer with a fondness for families and poisoned apples.”
“Great,” I said. “Just great. If it’s not a Cinderella that we’re dealing with here, then what is it?” I felt like a fool as soon as the words were spoken. It was all so obvious …
Sloane fixed me with a cold stare and said, “I thought you were smarter than this, Henry. If we’re not looking for Cindy, then that means we’re looking for her Wicked Stepsister. The one who got away.”
#
We left the cleanup crew to their unenviable task and returned to the office, where we had an unenviable task of our own to undertake: finding a Wicked Stepsister with no active narrative to call her own. Jeff and Andy went for their respective safety nets: the archive for Jeff, and the FBI directory of missing persons for Andy. His logic was good—if the victims of our wayward Wicked Stepsister had never been reported as murdered, he should be able to find them somewhere in the FBI’s files. Someone had to have realized that they were gone.
Demi sat down at her desk with her hands tightly folded in her lap, looking like she had no idea what she could possibly do in this situation. I would normally have tried to come up with some kind of busy work for her, but at the moment I was preoccupied with a more pressing matter: Sloane.
She hadn’t said anything during the ride back from the Marlowe house, and that wasn’t like her. What’s more, she wasn’t going for her computer, either to work or to look at eBay listings. She was just hovering around the edges of the room, expression flickering lightning-fast between rage and despair. It was worrisome to say the least, and terrifying to say a little more.
I took a breath, trying to calm the too-rapid thudding of my heart. The narrative wants me to be flighty; wants me to be the kind of girl who runs at the first signs of danger. I’ve been working for my entire life to train myself out of those urges, and for the most part, under most circumstances, I’ve succeeded. But Wicked Stepsisters are close relatives of Wicked Queens. Under the right circumstances, one can even evolve into the other, shedding the trappings of one story for whatever happens to be available to them. And the Snow White—and the agent—in me knew that we were in danger when there was an active Wicked Stepsister nearby.
Sloane had her own set of narrative impulses to fight with. Going near her when I was showing signs of distress would be like hanging out a big red flag and inviting her to take her shots. She couldn’t help it. I didn’t need to encourage it.
When I was sure that I wasn’t going to have an inconveniently timed panic attack, I walked over to where she was pacing and asked, quietly, “Everything all right with you, Agent Winters?”
“That wasn’t my last name when they found me, any more than ‘Marchen’ was yours,” she replied. “You get to be a fairy tale, I get to be a freeze. Somebody in senior management has a real shitty sense of humor, you know that?”
I paused, briefly stymied. Then I tried again, asking, “But is everything all right?”
Sloane’s laugh was brief and brittle, like ice breaking in an enchanted forest. “All right? Fuck, Henry, you know me better than that. I know me better than that. No, everything is not ‘all right.’ Everything is never going to be all right. Hey!” She whirled, stabbing a finger at Andy. “Look for incidents in places where it gets cold. It won’t matter if she doesn’t have a passport, she’s not moving around legally anyway, and she’s probably capitalizing on looking young and vulnerable. But she’d want to kill somebody where it was snowing.”
“Why?” asked Demi.
Sloane fixed her with a flat stare. “To see if it would feel any different.”
“I’ve got something,” said Andy, saving both Demi and me from needing to formulate a response. “There’s one in St. Paul and one in Chicago. Our Wicked Stepsister has been a busy, busy girl.”
“If she’s working her way into families that have two teenage daughters already, she must be making contact somehow,” I said. “Try looking for new student enrollments at nearby high schools a month or so before those people were reported missing.”
“Why are you assuming subterfuge, and not a blitz attack?” asked Andy.
“Because she’s a teenager herself, based on the first incident, and it would be difficult for her to force her way inside without being seen,” I said. “This way, she gets in, she takes control somehow—”
“She’s probably armed; it wouldn’t be that difficult for her to get a firearm on the black market, and the pause between the deaths and the reported disappearances means that—” Jeff froze with his mouth still open, his eyes widening behind his glasses. “I am an idiot. I don’t deserve to be an archivist. I don’t even deserve to be a shoemaker.”
I frowned at him. “Care to break that down a little bit?”
“She’s using the dead women’s credit cards,” he said. “There’s no reason for her not to. Nobody knows that they’re dead. There’s no one to tell on her, not for several days at least. As long as she abandons the cards before they can give her away—and then she just switches to cash. I’m sure they’ve all been ‘persuaded’ to give her their ATM numbers before she killed them.”
“The Marlowe family was killed a week ago,” I said. “Andy?”
“Already on it,” he said, pulling his keyboard toward himself and beginning to type rapidly.
We’re not hackers. We’re not even computer experts. But it’s amazing what access to government systems and official backdoors can do. If Elise was using her latest victim’s credit cards, we’d find her.
A hand touched my elbow. I turned to find Sloane standing closer than I was entirely comfortable with. The rage had completely faded from her face, replaced by nothing but simple despair. “Can I talk to you while they fuck around with computers and stuff?” she asked. “It’s important.”
“Sure, Sloane.” I looked back over my shoulder. “We’re heading for the conference room. If you get anything, call me. My phone is on.” I faced forward, offering Sloane a thin smile. “I’m all yours.”
“No, you’re not, and you should be really happy about that.” She turned and stalked away, clearly expecting me to follow her. That broken ice terror that I associated with the Snow White side of myself was back, stronger than before. Snow didn’t want me to go anywhere with Sloane, not now, maybe not ever. Snow wanted me to stay right where I was, safe, among friends, where I would be protected.
That, more than anything else, is why I straightened my jacket and followed Sloane Winters down that hall. I’ve never allowed anything to control me, not my story, not the greater narrative that birthed it, and sure as hell not Sloane. I’d be damned if I was going to start now.
Sloane paused outside the conference room door, waiting for me to catch up with her. “I didn’t think you’d actually follow me down this long, dark hall, all by yourself,” she said. Her voice was pitched lower than normal, and it seemed to be full of strange shadows, twisting just outside the edges of her words. “That was a brave, stupid thing to do.”
“I’m your boss,” I said. “Sometimes it’s my job to be brave and stupid. What do you need, Sloane? What can I do to help you?”
She laughed again, that same brittle, breaking laugh. “I don’t think you can help me, just like I don’t think we can help Elise. She’s manifested. Whatever she was before this happened to her, whoever she might have grown up to be, that’s over now. Th
at girl is dead. She’s part of the narrative, and there’s no getting away from that. She’s been written.” The horror and venom that infused her final word was practically visible, dripping from her mouth and running down to the floor like so much poisoned water.
I bit my lower lip for a moment, pondering, before I touched her shoulder and asked, “Are you afraid you’re going to manifest, Sloane? Is that what this is all about? Because we can step up your counseling, we can see about adjusting your medications—”
“I’m not afraid that I’m going to manifest, Henry.” She ducked her head, hiding behind the dyed black curtain of her bangs. It struck me, and not for the first time, just how similar we looked. Her coloring was all pancake makeup and Midnight Whisper #9 applied at the salon, but we still came out looking like sisters, or close enough as to make no difference.
Looking like stepsisters.
I froze, my hand still resting on Sloane’s shoulder. I wanted to pull away. I somehow knew that doing so would be a huge mistake, and so I stayed where I was and asked, in a voice that had no force behind it, “Then what are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid I’ve already manifested,” she said. Sloane raised her head. To my great dismay, I realized that she was crying. Her mascara ran down her cheeks, leaving tarry streaks behind. “Remember the three-ten we had last week? The one I yelled at until it went away?”
I nodded mutely.
“I shouldn’t have had that kind of power over the narrative. No one who isn’t part of the narrative gets to have that kind of power.” Sloane started crying harder. “Can’t you see? It didn’t want a Rapunzel. That’s why it let her go so easily. It never wanted her. It wanted me all along—and I let it in.”
“You haven’t. You wouldn’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “You haven’t done anything—”
“Your coffee yesterday.” She looked away, focusing on the wall, presenting me with her profile. “I didn’t knock it off the desk because I was clumsy, or because I was being a bitch. I knocked it off the desk because I managed to get myself back under control before you drank the poison I’d slipped into your cup.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. And Sloane kept talking.
“The stapler that disappeared. The donuts I threw away and dumped pencil shavings on top of. I’ve nearly killed you eight times in the last week. I was planning to put a poisoned spindle in your desk when the call came in asking me to join you at the scene. I can’t help myself, Henry.” She finally turned back to face me. “It’s like I’m not even there when it’s happening, I’m just watching from a distance, like … like …”
“Like you’re watching a story?” I asked. She nodded mutely. I sighed, and did something I had never believed that I would have a reason to do: I pulled her away from the wall and gathered her into a hug.
Sloane didn’t resist me pulling her toward me, but she didn’t relax at first either. She endured my embrace like it was part of her punishment, the first step in repaying her crimes. Then, bit by bit she softened, until she was limp in my arms, her face pressed into my shoulder, sobbing. I stroked her back with one hand.
“I won’t say it’s okay, Sloane. It’s not okay. But I will say that you’re among …” Calling us her friends seemed to be overstating things a bit. “You’re among teammates, and we don’t give up on our own. We’ll find a way to fix this. I promise.”
My phone chirped. I dug it out of my pocket one-handed and raised it to my ear, not saying anything. A few seconds later, I nodded, lowered the phone, and patted Sloane awkwardly on the shoulder as I tried to extricate myself from her arms. It was surprisingly difficult.
“Come on,” I said. “Andy found proof that Elise Walton bought a gun at a pawnshop downtown last month, and Jeff … well, Jeff thinks he’s found Elise Walton. We need to roll.”
#
According to Andy’s research, a woman named “Christina Marlowe” had checked into a cheap downtown motel two days previous, and hadn’t checked out yet. It made sense. Elise would need time between killings, time to recover and decide where she was headed next. Maybe in the beginning she’d been better about getting out of town fast, but after killing multiple families without a whisper from law enforcement, she’d started to get cocky.
The Bureau had been protecting her all along, even if we didn’t know it. That made me angry—and worse, it scared me. How many killers like Elise were out there, protected by the shadows that they cast and by our mandate to preserve the world’s ignorance of the narrative that moved beneath reality’s skin? How many people had died because we were so good at covering up the tracks that the fairy tales left behind? And was there any possible way for us to change the way that we worked? The ATI Management Bureau is the way it is today because it’s had centuries to grow and evolve, going from a loose alliance of storytellers and archivists to a governmentally funded agency with ties to law enforcement and media censorship agencies. We don’t change quickly.
We’ve never needed to.
Sloane took Andy’s usual place in the front passenger seat for the drive to Elise’s hotel. She buckled her seat belt but only grudgingly, and sat as far forward as it would allow, her fingers tapping against her knees. She looked like a child on Christmas morning. I cast her several uneasy glances before asking, “Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“Don’t treat me with kid gloves, Henry,” she snarled. That was reassuring. If she was snarling at me, she wasn’t trying to poison me. “This is exactly the sort of thing I need.”
“Yes, violence,” muttered Jeff, making no effort to keep himself from being overheard. “That’s the best medicine for what ails anyone.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t help,” I said. “We’re here.”
Elise’s hotel was as rundown and nondescript as its website implied: the perfect place for a fugitive Wicked Stepsister to go to ground for a few days while she regrouped and prepared herself for her next attack. A sign out front advertised free Wi-Fi. That would help her figure out where she was heading. Families that fit her extremely specific profile couldn’t be all that common.
Of course the narrative would be helping her, in its own implacable way. Failed memetic incursions represented a loss of strength, of self—of substance, in a way that our researchers had never quite been able to pin down or define. By sending Elise around the continent mopping up failed Cinderella stories, the narrative could sow chaos and regain strength in the same gesture. I didn’t know how it was directing her movements. I’d never heard of the narrative getting personally involved like that. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
We pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel. The local police had beaten us there. They were using unmarked cars to avoid spooking our suspect, but Officer Troy wasn’t the kind of man who could just disappear into a crowd, even when he was lurking around in front of a nondescript black Lincoln Town Car. That wasn’t going to be a problem; my team was many things, most of them good. We weren’t subtle, though. All five of us got out, gathering together on the sidewalk like a flock of black and white birds. Only Sloane’s non-uniform attire and my too-red lips broke our color scheme.
“Officer,” I said genially, as Troy approached. “I take it dispatch was able to get through to you?”
“What’s this I hear about you preparing to make an arrest?” He didn’t bother with even the pretense of pleasantries, going straight for the implication that we were somehow trespassing on his jurisdiction.
I looked at him coolly. “I wouldn’t call it an arrest, since she’s part of the narrative now. It’s more of an apprehension. But yes, that’s why we’re here.”
“If this is about your ‘narrative,’” I could virtually hear the air quotes around the word, which really wasn’t fair, since he had seen its effects up close and personal more than once, “why are we here at all?”
“Because the bitch probably had a gun when she took out the Marlowes, and there’s no telling what she’ll do when she sees us sta
nding in the hall,” said Sloane. She rocked up onto her toes, and then down again to the flats of her feet. “What are we waiting for, the SWAT team? Let’s get in there and finish this story.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Demi.
“I don’t think anybody has a better one,” said Andy.
“And at this point, I don’t think it matters,” I said. “We’re here. If she’s somehow getting cues from the narrative, it’s going to tell her to move soon. She’ll just get a feeling, and then off she’ll go, and we won’t find her again until she slips up in another city with a field team. Do you really want to be the ones who let her get away?”
“No,” said Andy.
“No,” admitted Demi.
Jeff and Sloane didn’t say anything. They just looked at me, the one resigned and the other eager, still radiating that kid on Christmas excitement. I turned back to Officer Troy.
“My team takes the lead, and you don’t interfere unless you’re asked,” I said. “If there’s an arrest, it’s yours.”
He frowned. “What do you mean, ‘if’ there’s an arrest? She killed people. Either you’re taking her in or I am. There’s no way she’s walking free.”
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him silently until eventually—inevitably—he looked away.
It was time to go in.
#
Officer Troy’s badge got us past the front desk; my badge got us a key to Elise’s room and a promise that no one would be calling up to warn her about our impending arrival. My team and I took the elevator up to the third floor, while Officer Troy and his men took the stairs. It would give us a few minutes where we wouldn’t need to worry about anybody deciding to play cowboy, and between us, we had all the exits covered. She wasn’t getting away.