This is the third installment of a fantasy story that I am posting here. You can find the second installment here. You can find the first installment here.

III.

“It is so cold,” Elly said, rubbing her hands up and down her arms in a futile effort to warm up. Josh looked at her pityingly and pulled her in close, enfolding her in his embrace and pulling the sides of his jacket as far around her as he could.

“We need to get you a warmer coat,” he said, and she nodded, the chattering of her teeth making it difficult to speak.

They stood just inside the entrance of the department store while she thawed out, and looked around. “I can’t believe we’re actually in New York,” Elly said. “I had no idea it would be so cold!”

Josh laughed. “It is winter,” he said. She threw a playful elbow into his ribs, and he laughed again. “I think I’ll see if I can find a coat as well. I knew it was going to be cold, but I don’t think I actually got just how cold.”

“Text me when you’re done and we’ll meet back here,” she said. She gave him a quick kiss on the lips and took off into the store, looking for a sign that would tell her which way to go.  She’d never been a great lover of shopping and had always hated department stores; the enormity of them ever overwhelming.

She located the coats without too much trouble and found a particularly warm looking jacket that she liked. She tried it on at the rack and looked around for a mirror. “It suits you,” said a woman’s voice. Elly looked around and located the speaker.  The woman was tall and slender, with long black hair and flawless, pale skin. Her accent was strange, but pleasant.

Elly smiled at the woman. “I wouldn’t mind seeing for myself,” she said. “Have you seen any mirrors around?”

“In the shoe section,” the woman said, indicating a point behind Elly.

Elly looked in that direction and saw the rows of shoes. “Thank you,” she said.

The woman nodded. “You are very welcome.”

Their breath still puffed out in little clouds of fog in front of them, but in the press of people, they barely felt the cold. Elly usually hated crowds, but she was caught up in the excitement of New York City on New Year’s Eve, and she took everything in with wide-eyed wonder, an enormous grin plastered on her face. They had arrived later than they probably should have and had been directed to an area that was closer to Central Park than to Times Square, but even that didn’t faze her.

“I can’t believe we’re actually here!” she said, yelling into Josh’s ear to be heard over the roar of the crowd. He squeezed her hand, turned to her and gave her a smile large enough to match her own, then turned back to the festivities, not wanting to miss a moment. A celebrity she’d never heard of was ceding the stage to a band she didn’t particularly like, but she cheered as loudly as the rest of the crowd, thinking that she would never experience a New Year’s Eve quite like this one even if she lived to be one hundred.

The ball was dropping when she saw a familiar face in the crowd. She was looking at the profile of the woman who had spoken to her in the department store, when the woman turned towards her. She caught Elly staring and smiled, raising a hand in greeting. She pointed at Elly’s coat and mouthed the words clearly: “It looks good.”

Elly smiled. “Thank you,” she mouthed back. The woman turned away and Elly turned her attention back to the ball dropping, to find that she had missed it.

Her head hurt. It hurt a lot. She opened her eyes and quickly closed them again, the dizziness making her nauseous. She opened them again as she leaned over and was sick on the ground, and she thought her head would split open. She closed them again when she thought her vomiting was done and so she smelled the blood before she saw it. She didn’t know what it was, at first. The steaming pile of partially digested food and bile beside her was pungent, but there was a coppery smell that was just as strong. She knew that she needed to open her eyes, but didn’t want to. Her head still hurt too much. And not just her head, she realised. Everything hurt.

She tried a few deep breaths but her stomach gave a threatening lurch and so she breathed shallowly through her mouth instead. The taste was awful, and she wished desperately for some water to rinse it away. The thought of water called her attention to where she was, which was as much a mystery to her as why everything hurt so damn much.

Elly forced her eyes open a crack, her lips pressed tightly together against the pain. It was dark, the only light spilling from an adjacent street and only partially illuminating the alley. So that was that then. She was on the ground in an alley, though that only raised more questions; questions that she could barely form, let alone answer. Turning her head caused the world to spin again, and she closed her eyes once more until everything was still and then opened them again. And saw him. He was no more than a dark shape sprawled on the ground beside her and she couldn’t tell whether he was breathing but knew that he wasn’t moving. She reached for him, urgently, desperately, ignoring the pain and the spinning, and everything but the too-still shape beside her and before she could even try to find a pulse her hand touched something wet and sticky and abundant. There was so much of it, too much of it, and she tried to tell herself that she didn’t know what it was, that it wasn’t the source of the smell that she had suddenly and horribly identified, but she couldn’t make herself believe it.

Blood. It was blood. It was too much blood and she tried to ignore it and to reach for a pulse anyway, but before her hand could do any more than hover in the air the whole world tilted and turned upside down. Elly passed out again.