Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Beautiful. That’s what Melanie and I had named ours, because he was the ugliest cat we had ever seen. Melanie did most of the dissecting. She wanted to be a doctor someday and cutting up Mr. Beautiful was the most fun she ever had in school.
    I stopped bothering my wounds and rubbed my hands over my face, winced through the pins and needles. The room was small and square. No closet. The door was closed. The candles smelled like vanilla, cloyingly sweet, but it wasn’t enough to hide the stink. Bleach, and beneath that, unwashed bodies and sweat, piss and shit, the faint metal stench of blood.
    Everything was red. So dull and dirty and red.
    The woman was staring at me.
    â€œWhere are we?” I asked. “Are we still in the farmhouse?”
    â€œWhat farmhouse?”
    â€œAt the church. In Nebraska. Mr. Willow’s church. Isn’t that where we are?”
    â€œOh, is that how they got you?” The woman laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. “That’s perfect. Did they tell you they wanted to save your immortal soul and take away everything that makes you evil?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œAnd you walked right into it.”
    Walk right into it was exactly what I had done. I hadn’t seen the danger until it was too late.
    â€œI have no idea where we are,” the woman admitted. “We’re in a house, but I don’t know where. It might be Nebraska. We could be on the freakin’ moon, for all I know. I was in Colorado when they grabbed me. This guy bought me a drink.” She made a face and touched her jaw with one slender hand; there was a fading bruise on her left side. “Tasted like shit. Never trust a frat boy in a Steelers jersey who wants to buy you a drink. I can’t figure out what you are.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou. What are you? I’m usually good at this, but I can’t figure you out at all. You’re breathing now.”
    She unfolded her legs and stood, walked closer and sat down again on the other side of the candles. She was strikingly beautiful, so beautiful I felt guilty for my initial impression of horsiness. She had auburn hair cut in a severe pageboy, pale skin, and wide golden eyes, and her limbs were long and ballet elegant. I guessed she was in her thirties, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. She wasn’t a killer. There were no shadows of guilt clinging to her.
    â€œCome on, share,” she said. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What are you?”
    â€œSchrödinger’s cat. Nice to meet you.”
    She snorted, unimpressed. “It’s not like it will matter by the time they’re done with us. What’s your name? Will you tell me that, or do I have to keep thinking of you as Smelly Girl?”
    â€œBreezy,” I said. I could have lied again, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
    â€œSeriously?”
    â€œSeriously.”
    â€œWere your parents hippies or something?”
    My parents had named me Breezy because they were young and sleep deprived and overly fond of marijuana when they found themselves in possession of a newborn neither of them had planned for. They were graduate students, Dad in biochemistry at MIT and Mom in neuroscience at Harvard, and they wrote their theses in a one-bedroom Somerville apartment while a fat, red baby squalled in the crib. As an infant I looked like a lumpy red potato with a smear of black slime mold for hair. It’s not like they were planning on getting any sleep anyway, Mom liked to say, so after they got their PhDs, they decided they might as well get married and make more screaming, red-faced, half-Chinese, half-Irish babies. Two more, also girls, Meadow and Sunny, because Mom and Dad never got over the embarrassing-names phase of parenthood. We all grew up to be short and black-haired and looked mostly Chinese except for our freckles, which came from Mom’s side of the family.
    The woman’s