Lottie’s body crumpled like a rag doll, limp and awful.
Her teammates downed sticks and hared over to where she lay.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was hopping over the barrier and running over too.
Carvell’s head coach was crouched on the ground beside her, two fingers to her wrist. ‘She’s breathing, and she has a pulse, but we need an ambulance.’ She pulled a mobile out of her tracksuit pocket. ‘Tell them it’s a brain injury with loss of consciousness, at least a grade two concussion.’
Blood roared in my ears. I couldn’t get anywhere near Lottie, since she was so swamped with teammates and a first-aider who’d run over with a crate of water bottles. Nearby, the opposing team huddled around the tall, spindly player who’d hit her.
‘If she ’adn’t’ve run straight at me, it wouldn’t’ve happened.’ She spat on the ground, a thick glob of white spit. ‘She ’ad it coming.’
Then, despite the ritual, despite the fact I was supposed to be Good Alice right now, something tore through the veil separating the two sides of my soul.
A red dagger of anger so sharp it obliterated anything in its path.
I saw crimson, and I charged.
Straight at the defender, who was easily a head taller than me.
I planted a palm on each of her collarbones and shoved with all my might. She fell back on to the squelching ground, letting out a shriek of shock.
‘How fuckingdareyou,’ I hissed, my voice low and hoarse and cruel, and this time, this time I was fully aware of how monstrous it sounded.
Something had broken.
A clowder of hands clawed at my arms and hair; the defender’s teammates pulling me back.
With a strength I never knew I had, I stood firm, rooted like a tree, immovable despite being vastly outnumbered. I felt invisible roots burrow down into the earth, and their hauls were nothing more than a gentle breeze among my leaves.
‘Apologise,’ I rasped. ‘Apologise now.’
‘To who, you?’ the defender snarled, hands pressed into the mud as she pushed herself up. Her badly bleached hair was plastered to her forehead, and there was a salt crust of sweat along her upper lip. ‘Or to ’er? Because it don’t look like she’s waking up any time soon.’
And then she smiled. A proud, hateful grin.
As though my hands were no longer my own, I lunged forward and grabbed her by the throat.
Skin and muscles and arteries wriggling frantically beneath my iron grip, I stared her straight in the muddy hazel eyes and said, ‘If you ever,evertouch Charlotte Fitzwilliam again, I will snap your neck like a twig.’
Her eyes bulged as I tightened my grip, then flung her back down to the ground. She coughed and heaved in the mud, elbows buckling beneath her weight.
When I turned back to see if Lottie had woken up, every single member of the Carvell team was staring at me. Not with disgust, nor with awe, but with genuine bewilderment.
Nobody approached me. Neither to reprimand – although the head coach looked like she was considering it – nor to make sure I was okay.
Because what I smelled on them was fear. And it smelled fucking delicious.
*
‘Ward sixteen, bed A,’ the nurse told me from behind her semicircular station.
I’d been sitting in the hospital waiting room for thirty minutes while Lottie was examined. I wasn’t allowed to travel in the ambulance with her – something about having grabbed her attacker by the throat mustn’t have screamed ‘calming presence’ – but some of the urgency of the situation eased when she woke up a few minutes after being struck. She was groggy and confused, but she was awake. It was likely a concussion, albeit a serious one.
Once she was lifted into the ambulance on a stretcher, I drove full throttle towards the nearest hospital, which was fifteen miles away, and tried to use the time on the road to clear my head; to figure out what the ever-loving fuck just happened.
Something had shifted.
There was a darkness jutting through the soul veil like a mountain range. The veil fluttered around it in rags, and gusts of evil drifted through on the breeze.