She could feel the mask slip off, a Mardi Gras display of feathers and sequins lost somewhere behind her as they ran. The acrid burn of tears had already come by then. And once the schoolgirls had stopped running, Billie was tortured with useless sobs.

"Da 'ell is wrong wit you!" It was more of a scream than a question as James slapped her with plastic-ringed fingers. So hard across the swells of a cotton candy mouth that it instantly drew blood and terror. James herself was out of breath, an evening of violence and cardio had taken the fight out of her. And so after that initial blow, which had thankfully silenced Billie into shadowy nothingness, James sank down on a moldy tree stump.

She drew a pair of cigarettes from her sweater sleeve with fingers stained by gore, and Billie accepted a menthol ultra light with bloody prints. Homicide only suited one of them, and as Billie knelt in the grass, she began to shake with memory of what they'd just done.

"A dead man ain't no man, Billie. A dead man's not nothin'. He's bones. Why ya gonna cry 'bout some bones?"

Billie stared at her, wishing James' magestic composure. But somehow more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her gleeful eyes and smash the killer's pride that curled at her smoking mouth.

James slid from her murderer's throne and rubbed the hem of her sweater, scented with cherry bodyspray and mildew, under Billie's tearful eyes. She kissed her cheeks and mouth, swallowing the girl's sadness between fervent pulls at a cigarette filter.

"You still love me, Billie-Ann?"

Guilt wormed its way into Billie's guts and turned the sweet taste of menthol into rotten, fetid bile. She watched the way her lover's fingers fluttered in the moonlight, realizing for the first time that they looked like baby claws.