From the Bookshelf of Scripted in Fantasy and Fiction …

Whether to stay, or go, or spite him. She should go, of course. Her curiosity is piqued, but she is not one to bend beneath the weight of other people's rules. Least of all a man's.

Whether to stay, or go, or spite him. She should go, of course. Her curiosity is piqued, but she is not one to bend beneath the weight of other people's rules. Least of all a man's.

A lovely girl.
A perfect mark.
Sabine has no way of knowing that this one night will tip the balance of her life. That this one girl will be both the beginning and the end of everything.

There are eighteen stairs between the hotel lobby and the landing. Alice counts them as she climbs - eighteen moments of before and after, then and now, eighteen chances to go forward, or move back. Only there is nothing behind her anymore, nothing ahead, the whole road has been erased, and she wants to know why.

The lights come on, and suddenly the Co-op is just a house, too crowded and too bright, and Alice looks around, but the violet girl is gone, and the bodies she's been fighting through all night are moving in the same direction now, a tide carrying Alice away, down the hall and out the door and down the steps onto the street. The night is a hand on the back of her neck, heavy, unwelcome, and she feels dizzy, unmoored, the world gone soft under her feet, her senses knocked off-kilter - like taking a nap in the afternoon and waking to find it's dark outside, or stepping off one of those moving sidewalks, or lying for too long under the stars on a clear night as they slide around so slow you don't notice until you stand up again.

She decides early on that she will only take the lives of men.
She even goes so far as to seek out the ones with meanness in their thoughts, violence in their air, tells herself it is a kind of virtue.
As if one life is worth more than another.
Sabine teases her, says it is like choosing tonic over wine, that women taste far sweeter.