Free The Path of Razors by Chris Marie Green

happening with Della?
    On another screen or two, the caretaker saw an oddity: ravens gathering.
    Still, the caretaker monitored the hotel’s screen while beginning to access earlier film from this same camera.
    Violet’s film. And the custode would find her, if only to facilitate some trouble for the bitch.
    Meanwhile, Della backed away from the window on the telly, her hands covering her mouth as she sank to the floor out of camera range, so the keeper paid due attention to the job at hand, where other screens were showing larger gatherings of ravens heading south of the Thames.
    Suddenly, the custode had the feeling that perhaps Della had not been undergoing the visions at all. That she was quite busy with another activity ...
    But the ravens were only the beginning.
    Hours later, the cameras at the Queenshill dorms revealed something equally noteworthy.
    The lenses, clouding over, just as they had on Billiter Street one week ago.

    SIX

    LONDON BABYLON, STILL -TEMPORARY-HAVEN-BOUND

    Later
     
     
    DELLA had not meant to go so far with the ravens.
    Not so far at all, and even hours after it had happened, as a seething dusk enshrouded London, she sat between Polly and Noreen on the hotel’s floor near the beds, wishing she could do something, anything, to redeem herself.
    Their backs against the wall, they could hear Mrs. Jones talking to Wolfie on her secure mobile phone in the confines of the loo, reporting to the too-distant Wolfie what Della had confessed about Violet and the ravens. Their housematron had discovered it upon returning from Wolfie’s. Bad welcome-back tidings.
    Yet there had been no use in hiding it.
    Actually, the sooner told the better, because Della was beyond fear now. She had lived so long in a constant state of waiting for reprisal that this last act had finally brought about a protective numbness, and she took a chance on using the mind-link that connected the class of Queenshill girls, even though Polly and Noreen had been staring straight ahead, avoiding her this entire time.
    I didn’t mean it, she apologized once again.
    Polly turned her face away a little more, her hands splayed over bent knees that, in her human days, had been constantly scratched by the grass of field sports. Her fingers arched as if she were trying not to claw at Della.
    Noreen merely slumped, the legs that she so loved to dance on stretching before her. She resembled a doll with red-thread hair left out willy-nilly after playtime.
    You already apologized, Della, she thought back in response. Drained. Stunned. Apologized a thousand times.
    In sharp contrast, Mrs. Jones’s voice rose and fell from the muffle of the loo as she and Wolfie discussed what should be done about Della now. It didn’t escape Della’s attention that the housematron realized the girls could overhear every syllable, although Wolfie’s sorrowful tones were slightly garbled by the mobile.
    She didn’t understand his sadness since Violet had recently fallen out of his highest favor. Still, Della supposed he had loved Violet because she was one of his darlings.
    Della wished he were near enough to hear her apologetic thoughts, too.
    She shifted on the ground as Mrs. Jones told Wolfie that he was not the only one to have lost quite a bit with the death of Violet.
    Della wasn’t exactly certain of what she meant, but the entire conversation was pressing a sense of dread against her chest, and she could hardly concentrate on anything else.
    It was the worst form of punishment, this dread. It was torture that all but made her want to hurl herself out the window in an act of redemption. And wouldn’t that be perfect? The slow wait of her broken bones mending, the inability to end her own life so that she would have to endure even more dread from Mrs. Jones’s endless watching ...
    Della curled her arms round her bent legs, resting her forehead on her knees, but it did nothing to dash away the memory of what she had done with the ravens.
    She had