Blood Ties

Prologue

Mallory's last day was, by all accounts, a truly beautiful day. It took less and less to tire her out as time went on, but still, a day spent with her daughter at the Botanical Gardens was as close to perfect as anyone could have ever hoped.

Alice smiled, giving her mother a careful squeeze and sliding a beautiful autumn mum into her corn-silk fine hair, held in place more by the hand-made scrunchie than the strands themselves. "You be careful, okay?"

Mallory was a woman who had seen times come and go with those fading blue eyes of hers. She had lived through wars. She had been in those factories with the other young ladies who weren’t content to sit back and wait for their men to come home. The idea that after all that she would be bested by a walk back to her front door was hilarious to her. If it had come from anyone other than Alice, it would even be a little insulting. She clicked her tongue, clapping Alice on the shoulder with a gnarled hand. "Ally, you need to stop your worrying. In all my eighty-four years, I have made more bullets than anyone around here’s ever seen.”

"Making bullets isn’t shooting them, and all it'll take is one if someone decides to break in!" Alice let out an exasperated sigh, shaking her head. She had to have known that arguing with her mother wouldn’t lead anywhere, but still she tried. "Mom, just promise me you'll lock up this time? That guy is going around right now, you know, and we worry."

Ah, right… that man.

She'd seen the news, and she couldn't deny that his demographic of choice had her a little out of sorts. There had been some serial killer going around targeting old ladies such as herself. A real coward, as far as she was concerned, but a worrying one all the same.

Mallory sobered a bit, shifting her weight onto the ornate black oak cane she hated using but loved smacking people with. "Fine, yes, you're right. I'll make sure" she said, relenting for once with a hefty sigh.

"Thank you, mom." Alice hugged her again with a relieved smile, then climbed into her cherry red Sonata. "You better. Things have been getting bad, and you're not as fast as you think you are."

"Oh, is that so?" Mallory raised her cane with a malicious grin, "Fast enough to give you a smack if you don't get out of here!" She mimed swatting at the car, both of them dissolving into laughter as Alice pulled out of the long, curved driveway.

"I swear," Mallory said, gingerly setting the cane back on the asphalt. Even that little antic had all but wiped her out, and she couldn't help but feel somewhat betrayed by her own body at the realization. "That girl will be the death of me..." But the words were heavy with affection, and as Mallory made her slow way back inside, she made sure to lock the door behind her.

That night, after a rousing hour or two of puzzling with her cat Hendrix supervising her every move, Mallory found herself flagging. The day had already been so full, and she just couldn't stay awake much longer, despite it being almost two hours before her normal bedtime. With crickets and the ticking of her old clock singing her a chaotic lullaby, she decided an early night wouldn't go amiss. After all, what schedule did a retired old widow have to keep?

Mallory beelined to her husband's bedside table the moment she was in her room. She reached out an arm, tendons popping and shivering with the effort. The pain didn't bother her anymore. Well, that is to say, it didn't concern her. Her body had been falling apart for a long time, and if she spent time dwelling on every ache and pain, she would never get to the end of it.

Instead, she focused on the surge of affection that came every time she looked at his face, even though the man himself was long gone. “Hello, Ted. I’ve had just the best day, but I’m sure you know that already.” She winced as her fingers closed around the frame of the photo, and pressed her thumb against the top corner where he’d once spilled a small splatter of ketchup.

Her lips twitched upward in a fond smile. "Alice is growing up so well... I think you'd like the young lady she's become." She sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling the frame into her lap. "Her children are getting big too, Ted, you wouldn't believe it. Mare is almost old enough to drive, and Liam..." She sighed. Liam was more of a mystery. He never seemed to engage with the rest of the family, and she swore they were speaking different languages so often that she almost couldn't blame him for being reserved. "Liam's doing alright too..."

She put the picture back. It was sad that Ted would never see Alice's children graduate or get married, but she decided she'd just have to stick around long enough to tell him all about it when she got wherever he was. Another few years. She could do that.

Everything was routine. It was the only way a woman her age remembered much of anything. A handful of pills, a knotted finger pressed painfully against the glass of Ted's picture frame, a last pee to try to stave off the midnight trip to the bathroom -- which couldn't be avoided, of course. A quick brush through her hair dislodged the mum, which she carefully laid next to Ted's photo. She stroked the soft petals a moment, a wistful smile on her lips. "Alright..." she sighed, finally settled into her bed with the vague hope that she wouldn't have to get out of it in the morning and the vague fear of the same. She set her glasses on the bedside table, welcomed Hendrix up onto the bed, then let his purring and a book about a war veteran lull her, fitfully, toward sleep.

She never got there, the exhaustion simply never overtaking her despite her mind screaming at her that she had nothing left for the day.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The grandfather clock across the room seemed to mock her in counting out each second she stayed awake.

In another room, in another house, a different clock ticked the same lengthening moments. This one was a much higher, tighter, more mechanical sound A girl's throat bobbed, tears staining a pillow and turning the black dye soaked into the case a deep purple. A heavy hand struck out, succeeding only in knocking a yellow pill bottle off her bedside table. It rolled under her bed, and a strangled whimper faded into bleary hopelessness.

And still that clocked ticked on.

An hour later, the ticking began to sound wrong to Mallory, and at first her overtired mind had her convinced she was just hearing things. That clock had been the metronome to her life for as long as she could remember. Now, though, as she laid in her bed with sleep evading, it sounded somehow distorted. It was as if something paced near the clock, pulling the pendulum ever so slightly towards them with each passage, and the more she listened to it the more she was sure something was terribly wrong.

What a ridiculous notion, she told herself with a scolding tsk. Grandfather clocks don’t work that way. She turned over, feeling her hip creak with the movement. Nothing had changed, and yet something was different. Another twenty minutes had her getting more antsy than irritated. Maybe something really was wrong? Maybe her doctor had been right and that horrible chronic insomnia was settling in? Or... it could be that it was something to do with that ticking. She rolled back over, staring up at the ceiling.

She was being silly and her dear ma would have told her to stop being such a skittish kitten. "Why not do something about it if you're so afeared?" Mallory mumbled to herself, her mother's familiar scolding given voice. The sound of it comforted her, and she managed to convince herself that all she needed was a little walk to calm her nerves. Yes, that was it. It had to be.

Then, she realized what had changed. The world had gone silent, save for that ticking. A feeling of otherworldly wrongness surrounded her. Even the crickets had stopped, and so had Hendrix’s purring. She had only just registered the sound of a breath when a weight slammed into her chest. Mallory tried to cry out, but no sound would come. It got stuck in her throat. A single click of something tapping against something in her room, loud in the ungodly silence, then a flash of hot pain blotted out the world.

It ripped up through her body, and all her panicked mind could conjure up was that she'd gone and had a heart attack. But heart attacks weren't made of metal, were they?

She could have sworn …

…she heard...

…metal...

And two final gasps sounded, in two separate houses, as two clocks ticked the same moments away. A yellow, bloodstained flower slid from knotted fingers to the worn floorboards below, its petals scattering. In another house, a yellow pill bottle came to a rest beneath another bed, its cap nestling itself further still into the shadows.