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Thomas asks.
    My blade halfway out of its sheath, I pause, completely off guard.
    “No?”
    Thomas holds up his hand, and over the rustle of snowfall, light breeze, and the clanging of buoys offshore, the sound gets louder. Splashing. Sloshing.
    A groan.
    Oh, you’ve
got
to be kidding
.
    Thomas gallops down the walkway and vaults over the picket fence separating grass from sandy beach. I try to keep up, not wanting to lose sight of him. He’s got my name. Where I was. A vague description of me. Enough for the club to realize someone was at this party who wasn’t meant to be.
    No witnesses.
    Kicking up beach and snow, Thomas jogs to the water’s edge as I’m hastily trying to straddle and jump the picket fence in my khaki pants. I drop Thomas’s jacket on a wooden slat and chase him down the beach. By the time I reach him, he’s kneeling down over a clump of something.
    “What is it?” I ask, my breath heaving from the legitimate chase. I’m not used to running down my prey.
    “Shit, shit, shit…” Thomas mutters. A groan comes from the clump. A clump named Andrew Donahue.
    Shit, indeed.
    Andrew looks up at his brother, glazed eyes peering out of blood and muck. Through a break in the clouds, the beach lights up.
    His face is covered in rusty mud, suit mangled and torn with two rows of neat gashes across his torso. With each breath he takes, blood gurgles from his wounds, soaking through the white button-down shirt. His legs are another matter entirely. Or, more accurately, leg.
    Because one is completely gone―as though he never had one. Not even a stump remains, a paper doll that someone has cleanly freed of an appendage. The other leg is comically normal, though soaked.
    The marks on the torso tell me exactly who my accomplice in the crime was, though. I stare out at the serenely flat water and put a hand on Thomas.
    Push him in. Push him and run. Before it gets you, too.
    Andrew sucks in a breath and Thomas looks up at me.
    “Help me move him? Please.” His voice is pleading, and the disgust of his brother I heard only minutes before is gone. My hand clenches his shoulder.
    Do it. NOW.
    With one fluid motion, my free hand clenches another shoulder―Andrew’s.
    Thomas gets the hint and grabs his brother’s other arm, and we slowly haul the bleeding mess up the beach toward the fence. As we move, I catch the ripple of water on the shore. My partner being robbed of its late-night snack. I know he can move on land, but how fast?
    “Help!” Thomas calls out. “Someone!” He looks down at his brother, who is shuddering violently in the sand, slipping into shock. Andrew’s eyes look up and see me.
    Me, who looks plenty different now, but there’s recognition in his stare. He knows who I am.
    Why didn’t you just kill them both? You had him. You had him…
    “My jacket? Where is it?”
    I grab my own shoulders like it should be there, but I spot it behind the brothers, dangling on a wooden slat. I point.
    Thomas grabs my hand and pulls me down. “Try to keep pressure on… on something.” He dashes away to his jacket and jerks a cell phone out of the pocket.
    I’m leaning over Andrew, my hands pressed tightly on his chest, trying―for some reason―to stop one of his wounds from bleeding so much. Beneath me, his mouth moves and his voice falls silent as he tries to accuse me of doing this to him.
    By the fence, Thomas frantically yells into his phone and he hangs up, coming back to me and his amputee brother.
    “The ambulance is on its way, Andrew, just hold on.”
    Ambulance? Damn. Ambulance means cops. Cops mean questions…
    Even though the police force of Saint Roch City is as clean as the sheets in a rent-by-the-hour motel, there is the off chance I won’t be able to seduce my way out of this.
    Splish.
    Splosh.
    Andrew groans beneath us as Thomas falls silent beside me.
    Splash.
    The placid surface of the cove is broken, turbulent waves moving of their own accord. The water’s edge is forty