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SNOWED BY A SNOW
by Sheliakena
Summary: Among many sudden and unsettling complications, Wendy Blackwell, a sniper for the Demiakela gang, is thrust into a whirlwind of chaos when she stumbles into a drunken one-night stand with her brother’s boyfriend.
CHAPTER ONE: The Small Mistake
Steady gunfire, ear-splitting screams of agony, and the sound of rapid footsteps on the cracked, splintered concrete brought Wendy back into the present. Midnight, and dark in this part of the city. Danger, murder, and war. Again, she admonished herself for allowing her mind wander yet again. They depended on her to carry out this task. One error - just a little, tiny one - would be near to fatal. The end of it; possibly the last thing she’d ever do.
Clutching her pistol closer to her chest, she inched backwards into the shadows of the crumbling overhang of the apartment complex behind her. Temporary heaven in this time and place.
Two dark figures darted past her hiding place, both scurrying low to the street and dodging the occasional bullets. Her heart beating faster, Wendy almost lifted her gun to squeeze off a round of her own, but stopped. Only two rounds remained in the pistol. If she was to give her position away, she had to be a hundred percent certain she was aiming for the correct person. If she shot and killed these guys, and neither turned out to be him, she was done for. Dead.
Several minutes passed. No one else came. Perhaps she’d already made the terminal mistake. If that was the case, she could just as well as dance out into the street and begin singing the national anthem at the top of her lungs. That’s assuming she managed to get that far before receiving seventeen extra holes blown through her body.
Her stomach sinking, Wendy pushed a hand through her blue hair, clenching her fingers and tugging. What was she supposed to do now? Stay here and wait? Go and find him? Her orders had been to stay in this specific alley and hunt him down, but these guys… What if he’d been one of them? She’d let him go!
“Terrific,” Wendy muttered, furious at herself. Terrific, akin to terrible. She was trapped in her own hideout, unable to move elsewhere without having the other sharpshooters jump her like a pack of hungry, ravenous wolves.
A loud gunshot rang out, then a crackle and an explosive sputter, and the last street light went out. She cursed inwardly, half relieved for more shadows to hide in - but that also meant more shadows for the enemy to creep through. There could be someone several meters away, behind her, or even in front of her. Waiting for her, their gun raised, a finger ready to pull the trigger and blast her to Kingdom Come.
Out of the corner of her eye, a shadow shifted. A tiny red speck of light appeared. She whipped her head around and tried to focus on the shape. It was too dark, so she let her eyes slide a bit to the side as she relied on her peripheral vision. A scantily clad woman stood several meters away, smoking a cigarette - in the middle of a gunfight.
Wendy was sorely tempted to waste a bullet on her just to remove one more idiot from the human gene pool, which, in her opinion, was too polluted. Didn’t the godforsaken prostitute know she could be shot and killed at any moment? Oh, oh, the whore was probably hoping a knight in shining armor would come and rescue her from the meanies who might have the nerve to shoot a (horrendously ugly) woman. Well, she was in for a rude awakening.
Hugging the grimy, musty brick walls of the towering, supposedly abandoned buildings, she crept through the shadows toward the woman. These apartment complexes weren’t actually empty, just . . . conveniently forgotten about by their landlords. Drug dealers, addicts, and prostitutes resided here. While Wendy herself didn’t live in the most decent neighborhood, it still was a lot safer than this one, where numerous murders occurred every single night.
The whore’s head lifted. She’d seen Wendy, but she didn’t make a move to defend herself, unless suddenly sucking the life out of that cigarette would turn her into a nuclear weapon.
“You have to get away,” Wendy hissed, nodding toward the street, where two men lay sprawled, presumably dead. “There’s a gunfight. Can’t you hear?”
The prostitute shrugged, casting Wendy‘s pistol a nervous glance. “I’s supposed to wait.”
“For what?”
She exhaled thin wisps of gray smoke out of her fat-lipped mouth, which had probably seen too many filthy things in its lifetime. “Fight be over, then him come to me.”
Wendy almost laughed in disbelief. “Lady, it’ll be a while. You’d do best to leave.”
“I’s supposed to stay here!” the woman insisted. “He promised cash.”
“So you’re a whore.”
“No, that ain’t it.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’s prostitute,” the whore said, a brittle edge to her raspy voice.
Whore, prostitute, desperate idiot. All same things. The only difference was that whore was a slightly more offensive term than prostitute, but it sure as hell fit this woman, whose chest threatened to burst out of her teeny black spaghetti-strap tank. Wendy noted with disgust that the cheap, flimsy thing could’ve fit an anorexic eight-year-old.
The woman squashed the butt of her cigarette under a thin heel, and, at the same time, pulling out another one from her bulging cleavage. Ah, one useful thing about owning giant silicones, other than being capable of whopping the guy silly if he was bad in bed.
An certifiable cretin, that one. Wendy knew a lost cause when she saw one, so she turned away.
A thud echoed behind her.
Raising her eyebrows, she slowly turned back around and was greeted with the unpleasant sight of the prostitute crumpled in a heap on the cracked sidewalk, dark crimson blood pooling from beneath her body. Her cigarette had rolled out of her hand into the street and was still alight.
Another tally on the list of daily murders. This place definitely hadn’t lost its reputation.
Wendy backed away, ignoring the sudden twinge of guilt as she quickly took shelter behind a smelly Dumpster. Her hand brushed over several shallow dents that ammunition from older gunfights had left when they ricocheted off the surprisingly sturdy metal.
The prostitute’s sudden death, in the midst of a crossfire, had reminded her of another death fourteen years earlier. Her senses clouded over as she slowly succumbed to the depths of faraway memories.
She’d been a toddler at the time, stacking colorful blocks like the innocent child she once had been in the living room of her grandmother’s house in the suburbs. Even now, she could clearly recall the somber expression her grandmother had worn when she approached young Wendy with an unfamiliar man who brought the grave news.
He’d bent down to her three-year-old self’s eye-level. “Them gangs got your mommy,” he said, his face expressionless as her grandmother translated his words into sign language, since Wendy had then been stone-deaf. “Goner, she is, stone-cold and rotting wherever her body’s been dumped. But don’t fret, you be okay with your papa, yeh?”
For the next six years, Wendy and her brothers lived with him. When she turned nine, she decided she wanted a cochlear implant. All of her friends could hear each other. They could hear the anger, the laughter, and the sadness in each other’s voices. She was the only one that couldn’t hear anything. Of course, she’d become quite adept at lip-reading and interpreting facial expression, but it wasn’t enough. Her father fought with the insurance company until they relented and covered the expenses of the surgery and installing of the device.
The first sound Wendy ever heard outside of the hospital was the postman’s swift knocks on her old condominium’s door. That was the day her father found out he had to go to Iraq. Six months later, he was killed in a car bomb accident in Baghdad. He’d been dead for a little over seven years now, and she barely remembered her mother. For the last eight years, Leo, an older cousin, had looked after her brothers and her. He was twenty-seven and without his meager earnings, they’d all be begging for a handful of grimy coins on the streets.
She couldn’t help but ponder about the alternate paths her life could’ve taken if her mother hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one knew which gang had been responsible for the fatal gunshot that turned her life upside-down. Certainly not the one she’d joined at the age of twelve. The Demiakela had been new, put together by a bunch of macho guys in her neighborhood.
If her mother was still alive, Wendy wouldn’t be crouching behind a stinky Dumpster in a dark alley full of trigger-happy sharpshooters, her life depending on how silent and motionless she was. Or would she? Only in a different alley, working for -
Suddenly, an arm locked around her waist and dragged her upward. Her pistol clattered to the ground as she whirled around, a series of panicked gasps ripping free from her throat.
A calloused hand covered her mouth. “A mite twitchy, aren’t we?” a familiar voice whispered softly in her ear, a hint of an amused undertone.
Wendy breathed heavily, her heart thudding against her ribcage. “Damn,” she cursed irritably. “I didn’t know you were out there.”
“Sort of the point.” The guy picked up her gun and handed it back to her. “Stealth. You may have heard of it.”
“Rex.“ She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why are you here?”
“Solomon wants us all back.” Rex kept his arm around her as he guided both of them back through the deepening shadows in the direction he’d come from. The sounds of gunshots from the alley gradually faded into silence.
“We’re giving up?” Wendy asked, surprised.
“Did I say that?”
Wendy returned the placid stare. “Nor did you ask if I was finished in that alley before you dragged me out.”
In a flash, Rex’s expression shifted. “What? You didn’t kill him?”
“Um. . . .” She winced.
“Good God, Blackwell!” he exploded, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Richard’s dead! Lawrence’s dead! Solomon - he declared them defeated! We all assumed you’d done it! Wasn’t any reason not to believe so, not with your record, but, oh God - Blackwell, you know what you’ve done?” A vein throbbed dangerously in his temple. “You’ve fucked us all! Fucked! That’s what you‘ve -”
“I had no chance!” Wendy shouted, shoving his hands away. “None! Only two rounds were left!” She shook her pistol in his face for emphasis. “William probably never came by, anyway!”
“Probably?” Rex’s icy gaze bored an hole through her. “Because of that one slight probability, the guy’s still alive.”
Wendy frowned defensively. “I’d like to see what you would’ve done in my position.”
“I would’ve hunted him down.” He crossed his arms.
“I was!”
He snorted. “Then please explain to me why there’s a turd out there named William who’s still friggin’ breathing.”
Wendy clenched her fists, keeping her gaze straight ahead as they silently moved through less despondent neighborhoods. She could sense signs of somewhat normal lives. Walls flickering in the soft light of late-night television shows, dogs barking and a variety of music blaring. Her own home wasn’t far.
Beside her, Rex sighed but didn’t speak. They crossed the empty street and rounded a corner. Ahead, Wendy spotted Solomon and several others gathered in front of the local tattoo shop, owned by Nora Scarborough’s parents. Her blonde head was easy to spot in the small crowd of dark-haired teenagers. Nora was actually the only natural blonde Wendy knew, other than herself.
As the two walked closer, Wendy came into earshot of Solomon’s conversation with the most recent recruit. A young boy, and a twitchy one. He stood, quivering from head to toe, avoiding Solomon’s eyes. The older man leaned against a streetlight pole as he spoke, his Southern drawl evident.
“So, with that happening, how’d ya do?”
The boy flinched. “Uh, well, I haven’t - I’ve - I’ve never shot nobody before -”
Nora stepped forward and laid a delicate hand on his trembling shoulder. “I was there,” she said, smiling gently, “and I’m fairly sure you haven’t shot anyone yet.”
The boy’s face fell.
Solomon let out a hearty laugh. “’Tis ‘kay, Jimmy,” he consoled. “Ain’t a thing to be terribly proud about, killin’ and murderin‘. But sometimes it is necessary.”
By then, Rex and Wendy had both reached the crowd. She tried to appear invisible by lurking behind several of the quieter guys, hoping they wouldn’t speak up.
“Wendy!” one of them cried, waving frantically. “Solomon, look! She’s here!”
She cringed as Solomon’s head snapped up. He pushed away from the pole, a toothy smile blossoming across his handsome, African face.
Oh, fuck, fuck. She glanced up at Rex, desperate. He stared stonily back at her, his eyes cold and unreadable.
“Blackwell!” Solomon crowed. “Richard, that ass, came by, an’ William ain’t seen with him an’ so we knew you’d gotten him!” He stuck out his hand, still grinning, pleased. “Well done, well done! Once again, girl, you prove you’re a damn Blackwell!”
Wendy swallowed; a lump had formed in her throat, constricting it. “Uh, n-no . . . Solomon -”
He grabbed her hand and pumped it, interrupting. “No, no! Words, they’re too much.”
“No. Look, I - I-”
“Let’s party!” One of the guys threw a triumphant fist into the air and whooped.
Wendy felt awful. Terrible, horrified, and a traitor. These people were jubilant that they’d supposedly finally defeated their archenemy, the Lionhearts. When, in reality, they hadn’t. Because of her. Her fault. All her fault because she hadn’t fired her gun at the right time. She felt like quickly scanning a map of New York for the biggest, tallest bridge to jump off.
“Sure, dude, why not?” Solomon shrugged. “Where?”
Wendy’s older brother smiled broadly, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Strip clubbing! Oh, I know this good one, it‘s on -”
A sound of disgust escaped Nora. “Dominic,” she said, shooting him a glare of condescension. “Please. I’ll be scarred for life. Girls don’t like watching other girls dance around naked, shaking their bulimic asses! You cretin. That’s why we adore the wonderful invention of clothes.”
“Damn,” Dominic muttered, and then pretended to whisper in Rex‘s ear. “And I thought she was a guaranteed lesbian. In love with -”
“I’m straight!” Nora snarled, but she couldn’t hide the small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “I’m straight, got it?”
Dominic laughed. “Whatever you say, Scarborough. We all know the truth, though, don’t we?” He winked in her direction.
“Enough, Dominic,” Solomon cut in. “So, Jeremiah, your folks ain’t home Saturday?”
“Nope, man. Not this whole month.”
Wendy groaned inwardly. She would need to find another time and place to break the news to Solomon. Privately. It was bad enough fearing his reaction, let alone everyone’s. She simply didn’t have enough guts to throw everyone surrounding her into the depths of despair. It was a long fall from the current gleeful state they were in. She watched as Solomon negotiated the suggestion of a party with plenty of beer kegs and the works at Jeremiah’s place. A party to celebrate the defeat of the Lionhearts.
Looking up at Rex, she knew she didn’t have long. Either she would need to inform Solomon soon, or Rex would, regardless of her wishes.
The next chapter’s titled Psychobabble.