In a flurry of actions almost too quick to interpret, Noel signaled to Rodger with a tilt of his head and the boy took his staying hand off the gun in Mrs. White’s shaking hand. A moment later, it was raised, the dark, innocuously small chamber pointed unerringly at my chest.
“I’m truly sorry, love,” she whispered with tears falling into the open wound of her distressed mouth.
I wasn’t.
Not any longer and not for anything.
Before I could even consciously decide, the gun in my hands was raised and the trigger was pressed by the firm clasp on my finger. The gun recoiled in my hand, jerking my shoulder enough to jar me to the side just as Mrs. White’s gun went off.
Her bullet grazed my outer left arm, leaving a trail of fiery agony in its wake.
My bullet found her brain, dead quiet in the wake of its unflinching connection with her skull. A second later, Rodger let her drop to the ground with a wet, punishing thunk.
Over the rushing roar of blood in my ears, I vaguely heard Noel and then Rodger laughing lightly, pleased and shocked at the outcome of our outdated duel. Before I could think about it, before I could even begin to grasp the firestorm of heartbreak and fury raging through me, I whirled toward Noel and brought the butt of the gun down hard across his laughing face.
The crunch reverberated through the dining hall followed by Noel’s grunt of pain as he stumbled back into the table with a crash of plates and cutlery. His arm dislodged one of the candelabras, and the flames spilled to the cloth, lighting the table on fire like a flaming throne below Noel’s prone body.
He screamed.
I turned on my heel and ran, Rodger’s following footsteps already ringing out against the wood behind me. The door at the end of the hall opened before I could even wrap my hand around the handle and Douglas appeared, his face pale but set with determination as fierce as a Celtic warrior. In one hand, he held a massive kitchen knife.
“Go,” he urged, shoving me by. “Get out of here, now.”
I wanted to thank him, cry and hug him for lying in wait for Rodger so I could get gone, to tell him I loved him for putting himself at risk and that I loved him for being my friend when I didn’t have any left.
Instead, I ran.
I ran down the hall, not stopping or even flinching when I heard a crash and scream from behind me where Douglas and Rodger had clashed. I ran through the dark hall harder than I’d even run at The Hunt, so hard my bare feet split against the friction with the glossed floors and my toes threatened to slip in the blood. So hard I went careening into priceless paintings as I turned the corners. So hard my lungs seemed to seize, and I couldn’t really breathe, the tissues clasping around nothing but carbon.
Still, with an inevitably I felt at the back of my crazed mine like a premonition, Rodger caught me.
His hands appeared as if out of thin air, wrapping around my middle and hauling me to the ground from behind. I screamed, flipping as I fell so that I landed hard on my hip, but my legs were twisted briefly out of Rodger’s seeking grip. He looked up at me with seething eyes like a rabid dog.
I reared my leg back and kicked him square in his foaming mouth.
A garbled growl sounded, but I didn’t stop to watch him recover. I scrambled to my feet and searched manically for a weapon, for anything to use against the boy who was close enough to a man in body and corrupt enough mind to do serious damage to my person. There was nothing but a side table decorated with an antique gold phone, paintings on the wall, and… the stuffed and mounted head of a stag.
I jumped up to grasp the antlers in my hands, screaming as Rodger crawled forward and grabbed at one of my ankles, pulling me toward the ground. I leaned down into his momentum even though I knew if I ended up on the ground with him without a weapon, I was dead. His force helped me pull the large head from the wall, and I went tumbling to the ground with it, narrowly missing being impaled by one of the grand points.
Rodger grabbed at my ankle again, tugging me closer as he grunted, “You miserable, filthy whore, I’m going to fuck you with my hands around your pathetic throat until you—”
I reared up, using every ounce of my core strength to bring the mounted head up over my head and down into Rodger’s exposed, arched back.
There was a sickening soft sound like something punching into an old couch cushion and then a thud as the tip of the antler broke through his body and knocked against the floor. Rodger stared up at me in disbelief, his face so young, his eyes wide as they began to tear. His hand spasmed, then loosened around my foot.