The whole room stared in shocked silence.
Two models down from her, another girl cried out, and when she took her hands from her eyes, there were streaks of crimson down her cheeks.
I met Stellan’s horrified gaze, then Jack’s. Elodie screeched to a halt behind them, her shirt loose to accommodate her bandages.
I didn’t know how Cole had done it, but I knew what this had to be.
The virus.
The music kept playing, a wild electronic remix, and then it seemed to hit everyone at once. People screamed, jumping out of their chairs. A champagne flute shattered at my feet, spraying my legs with sticky liquid and bits of glass.
Someone a few seats down from me coughed and convulsed, her eyes the very definition of bloodshot, and then she collapsed—right into Jack and Stellan, who were pushing through the crowd in my direction. The white-haired man himself touched his face, then took off his sunglasses. Red tears were streaming down his cheeks.
I found Cole, making his way toward the door in the midst of the chaos. There was more than satisfaction on his face. There was pure, horrifying elation. Between us, half a dozen people lay dead or dying, some of them with frantic loved ones sobbing over them.
“You guys!” I screamed, but Jack and Stellan were laying the dead girl on the floor and couldn’t hear me through the terrified shrieks of the crowd.
I pushed toward Cole myself. “What did you do?” I screamed.
Cole raised the champagne glass he was still holding, a manic grin stretching across his face.
I suddenly understood. I looked back at Luc and Colette, Circle members, frozen with glasses of champagne still in their hands. “It’s poisoned,” I yelled. Cole must have kept a little of our blood somehow, and a little was all it took.
Cole was disappearing out the door. “Jack!” I screamed again. “Stellan!” I didn’t have a weapon on me, but somebody had to catch him. I even looked around for the injured Elodie. Finding none of them in the tidal wave of bodies, I was about to run after Cole myself when his eyes got wide. He grinned like he’d just seen something delightful.
I didn’t really want to see what made him that happy, but I had to look.
There were plenty of people Cole could have been looking at, but my eyes found her immediately. My mother doubled over in a hacking cough.
Still, it took me a second to understand.
And then my whole world came apart.
“Mom!” I forgot all about Cole, and tripped over my own feet sprinting to her. I reached her just in time to catch her as she fell to her knees, coughing. She looked up, and red tears were forming in the corners of her eyes.
“Mom!” I screamed. “No! No no no!”
Just like with every other person who’d been infected, bloody tears started down her cheeks. It had taken a little longer, but there they were. Her eyes went wide, and she reached up to my face and tried to say something that ended in a choking cough. Then she went limp.
“No!” I shrieked again. I shook her. “Mom!”
Jack pushed me roughly out of the way and felt for a pulse. “CPR,” he said, and compressed her chest. I leaned over her, breathing into her lungs. My own mouth filled with the taste of her blood, my eyes with tears. Chest compressions, frantic. Another breath. More compressions, for minutes, hours, a lifetime. I could tell people were gathered around me, but I didn’t care.
“Mom!” I sobbed.
Colette dropped to her knees, taking my mom’s hand, staring at her soft, now-blank face. “I thought she wasn’t Circle.”
“She’s not!” I gave her another hysterical breath. “This shouldn’t be happening! Maybe it’s not the virus. Maybe it’s something else. Call an ambulance!” I wiped the blood off my mother’s face. “She’s hurt. We have to stop the bleeding. She needs to go to the hospital. Call somebody!”
Hands came around mine, stopping them. “Kuklachka,” Stellan said gently. “She’s gone.”
“No. No! She just needs help. She’s going to be okay.” I looked around frantically. “Help! Somebody—”
Jack put two fingers to my mom’s neck, waited a few seconds—then shook his head. With two gentle fingers, he closed her eyes.
It was like he’d opened mine.
I blinked a few times and realized what I was seeing. My mother. Lying there, motionless. Like every other person affected by this virus around the room. Not hurt. Dead.
I was exploding.
My heart, my brain, my insides exploded in a shower of red and blood and gore. Like a gunshot to Mr. Emerson’s head. Like the blood all over my mom’s face. Like flashbulbs and glass and billows of thick dark smoke. It exploded, expanded, took up every part of me. The world was ending. And I was screaming, screaming, so loud I couldn’t hear myself, so loud it wasn’t real, the world wasn’t real, I wasn’t real.