Phantom Prey

at the same time —at exactly the same time— she knew that Loren didn’t exist, that Loren was a flaw in the wetware. The woman, the nightmare, the horror that Davenport called the Fairy —she was the Fairy.
    And the Fairy struggled to come back, did come back, fading in and out, as though Alyssa were getting alternating shots of Xanax and cocaine.
    She sliced across St. Paul on I-94, headed south across the Lafayette Bridge and down Highway 52, then cut east to the South St. Paul municipal airport; all on remote control, as though she were getting directions from a comic book, frame by frame.
    Hunter Austin had a condo-hangar, not yet sold. She used her card-key to get through the gate, wound through the clutter of dark hangars, picked up the garage-door opener off the front seat, punched up the hangar door, and when it had opened, pulled the car inside.
    Her Benz was crouched there, waiting, and she shifted to the bigger car, hurrying, forgot to get the garage-door opener, and after she’d backed out, had to jump out of the car and go back and get it. Hope nobody sees me, hope . . . The hangar area was dark as a coal sack, cold. Not another living thing, only Alyssa, scurrying in and out of her car’s headlights, at Hunter Austin’s hangar.
    From there, it was ten minutes home. Loren’s face blinked in the mirrors and the windows and the glass panels around the house, but she ignored him: programming errors, nothing more. Once she thought she heard him cry out to her; thought she felt him plucking at her jacket. She ignored the cry, the touch, hurried up the stairs to her bedroom, to the bathroom, to soak her face in cold water, to take a shower . . .
    Flicked on the light, and stopped, staring, agog. She was covered with blood. Her face, her chest . . . she touched her blouse, found it sticky, soaked with still-wet blood. “Oh, God . . .”
    She peeled off the clothes, ripping them away from herself, staggered into the shower, turned it on, scrubbed at herself, the stains resisting the body wash, giving way to a loofah. When she got out of the shower, shivering, not with cold, but with fear, and regret, and astonishment . . . she raised a washcloth to her face and saw the black new moons of blood under her fingernails.
    She would have pulled the nails with pliers, if she’d had some pliers; frantic, she dug through her travel kit and came up with some blade-ended tweezers and used a blade to scrape deep under the nails. “Get it out,” she moaned, digging. “Get it out.”
    Finally clean, she picked up her clothes, and saw blood on the floor. Her clothes were soaked in it. She wrapped them in a towel, used another towel to clean up the blood on the floor, carried the bundle down to the laundry, shoved them into the washer, poured in a cup, then another, of Tide.
    Put the bottle down, saw the flecks of blood on her forearms, began to weep, backed away from the washer, ran back up the stairs, to the bathroom, watched her frantic, harried eyes in the mirror as she washed off this last insult. Looked in the mirror and then touched her hair, and felt the thickness, and took her fingers down and found more blood. . . .
    Weeping, back in the shower, soaking her hair, pouring on the shampoo, scrubbing until she thought her scalp would come loose; and then finally, stepping out, finding a new towel, wrapping herself in it.
    My God, the car. Both cars. If anybody looked in the car in the hangar . . . there must be blood everywhere.
    Loren flicked in the mirror, his mouth open, but she put out a hand and brushed him away, wiping the slate. Loren wasn’t real, she was. And one car was surely soaked in blood, and the other would have at least traces.
    With that, something clicked behind her eyes.
    She looked at herself again. She was standing there, with a towel on her shoulders. She liked her body, normally, but now it all looked blue and cold and slumped, and her hair hung off her head in tangled wet strands, as though she’d just survived a shipwreck.
    Okay. Manage it. Manage it.
    She’d killed a woman. Had she killed anyone else? She must have— why else would she have that little car?
    It was all in there, in her mind, but again, it was like black-and-white panels in a newspaper cartoon. She had killed three people. She had killed them under the guidance of Loren Doyle, a man who’d come from nowhere, and convinced her that Frances had been murdered, and that she was the only possible instrument of