Free Bone Orchard by Doug Johnson, Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi

almost jumped out of me skin,” Sian said with an anxious giggle. There was a tension in the room she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and when she was nervous, Sian drank.
    Lazarus lifted the tea tray and Sian lifted her teacup. She downed it in one gulp. Lazarus gaped with horror and his face ashed over gray.
    “What?” she asked. “I love Lemon Zinger.”
    Kitty burst into peals of laughter. “Your face! It’s priceless!” It was genuine glee, which made it all the more infuriating to Lazarus. He grabbed her by the elbow and escorted her out of the parlor, leaving their guests more confused than ever.
     
    “There’s nothing wrong with the water,” Kitty confessed in the butler’s pantry.
    “Don’t lie to me.”
    “I was just messing with you. The water’s fine.”
    Lazarus slumped. He was certain the stun gun had something to do with it, but suddenly his body felt too heavy for his bones to support.
    “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?” The words puffed from his mouth like a wheezing bellows.
    “Oh honey, there’s not enough time in the world to answer that one.” She arranged some sugar-dusted cakes on a serving plate. “Besides, we mustn’t keep our guests waiting.”
    Lazarus pulled a bottle of Glennfiddich from a cabinet as Kitty headed out the door.
    “But I did put ground glass on the cakes.”
    He shook his head in disbelief and ran an index finger through a sprinkling of coarse sugar crystals she’d left on the countertop. Tiny pinheads of blood beaded across his fingertip.
    “Shit!”
    He bolted from the pantry, cursing himself for wasting precious seconds with his skepticism, and now half-expecting to find both Dylan and Sian drooling blood from their glass-filled mouths in the parlor.
    Dylan was, in fact, about to sink his teeth into a cake when Lazarus stormed into the room and swatted it from his hand in the nick of time. It sailed off like a shuttlecock, slapping against the wall with a dry poof and a spray of glassy crumbs that was muffled by the thick Persian rug on the floor.
    “Hey!” Dylan whined. He rather enjoyed a nice cake.
    Lazarus took Kitty by the elbow again, thankfully retaining the presence of mind to snag the plate of remaining cakes with his free hand as they made a hasty stage-left exit.
    Back in the kitchen, he slung the whole plate into the rubbish bin.
    “Stop this. Just stop.”
    “But I’m having so much fun,” Kitty taunted, twirling free of his grip.
    “I’ll get rid of them. I’ll go back and toss them out.”
    Kitty yanked a knife from the block on the counter and spun at him. For a split second, Lazarus wondered why he hadn’t grabbed it himself. In fact, Kitty had also wondered, but the fleeting thought sailed off like a glass-dusted cake when she saw the delicious look of fear on his smug face.
    The tip of the knife sliced through the fabric of his shirt and Lazarus withered in retreat, stumbling into the kitchen table with his back to the doorway.
    Kitty held the blade against his stomach. “Shut up and listen. I’m running this.”
     
    Sian could hear a tense volley of gasps and whispers through the wall as she crept through the dining room, sharp but indefinable like fractured steam jets.
    “Get away,” Dylan hissed from across the room behind her.
    She giggled but ignored him.
    “Come on , Sian”
    “I’m just having a look.” She peered into the kitchen through a crack in the double-swing café door that separated it from the dining room and saw Lazarus and Kitty standing face to face, his face glossed with sweat and muscles taut as his hands gripped the lip of the table behind him.
    Wait a minute. Is she…
    Lazarus grimaced as Kitty rocked her arm back and forth, flicking the knife point at his abs again and again, leaving a crosshatch of shallow nicks like paper cuts.
    Sian, however, saw no knife from her slivered perspective behind the café door. In fact, for all intents and purposes it looked as if Kitty was…
    She