Chapter 1 - The Dropper Bottle
The lens was blinking red, and my mother didn't even try to run.
Instead, she stood up from the mess of shattered glass and cobbler, deliberately wiped the sticky fruit from her designer slacks, and stared straight through me.
"Go ahead," she rasped, her hand clutching her swollen, red cheek where my palm had landed. "Show your little toy video to the police, Mark. Pull it up on your phone right now. See what happens to your family."
"Shut your mouth!" I lunged forward, but my wife, Elena, threw her arms around my torso, screaming my name.
"Mark, stop! Toby’s throwing up blood! Look at him!"
My stomach cratered. I spun around.
Seven-year-old Toby was convulsing on the patio stones, his knees pulled up to his chest, choking on thick, dark foam pooling around his mouth.
I dropped to my knees, scooping his limp, trembling body into my arms. His skin was burning up, radiating heat through his soaked cotton shirt, but his hands were ice-cold.
"Toby! Toby, look at Daddy! Stay with me, buddy!"
His eyes rolled back, pupils blown wide and fixed on the afternoon sky.
"I’m calling 911!" Elena sobbed, tearing her phone from her back pocket, her fingers slipping on the glass screen.
"Don't bother dialling," my mother’s voice cut through the panic, colder than ice. She reached calmly into her handbag, pulled out a small amber glass dropper bottle, and let it drop onto the flagstones.
The dark glass didn’t shatter. It bounced once and rolled toward Toby's shoe.
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"The dispatcher can't help you with what's in that bottle," she whispered, leaning over the collapsed dessert table. "Only I have the counter-agent. And if you let a single cop set foot on this driveway, your boy won’t make it to dinner."
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