Dance Till You Die
Part Five

Outside Nikolas and Emily's apartment building:

Lucky swears. “Where the hell did you go Nikolas?”
He asks the question, but he’s pretty sure he knows the
answer. And it scares him. What he knows now has changed
the situation. Whatever this is, it isn’t a simple kidnapping.
Whoever has Emily, is out for more than money. And
wherever he was, Nikolas was heading into a situation that he
wasn’t prepared for already blindsided by his concern for
Emily.
Lucky has a choice to make. He can chase after
Nikolas or he can use what he has learned and go after the
real problem. He can’t do both. He mentally curses all
Cassadines, especially young and hotheaded ones. Then with
a deep sigh, he heads back into the apartment building. It will
take Nikolas a little while to pick up the money and make it to
the drop off site. If he’s lucky, no pun intended, he’ll have just
enough time to make it all work out.
Maybe.
He heads up the stairs to Nikolas and Emily’s
apartment as fast as he can and plows through the doorway.
Liz is hanging up the phone. He knows its not the kidnappers.
“I know who’s behind all of this” both Liz and Lucky
speak at once and the stop, staring at each other in shock and
surprise.
“You do?” they both say at once and then Lucky
motions for Liz to go first.
“I know it doesn’t make sense, chalk it up to women’s
intuition or something like that, but the fact is that there is
something I didn’t trust about that Melissa Sanders and when
she talked about Emily shopping for wedding dresses all of
these alarms and buzzers went off in my head. I know that
Emily has always dreamed about wearing Lila’s wedding
dress. Ok, maybe she went looking at other dresses for a lark
but I still wasn’t sure. So I called up Em’s credit card
company, pretended to be Emily, and checked to see if any
purchases had been made. The last time Emily used her credit
cards was three days ago.”
“So, she paid with cash. It’s not like she can’t afford
it.”
“Cash? Emily? Emily Quartermaine. No way. With
Emily it’s plastic or nothing. Carrying any real cash freaks her
out.” Liz finishes in a rush and waits. “I know its not a lot to
go on, but its something isn’t it?”
“No, it’s great.” Lucky smiles at her and Liz beams.
“Maybe you should have joined the Bureau instead of taking
art classes. I just had a conversation with the woman
downstairs. She was home all evening with her curtains open.
She doesn’t remember seeing Emily get dropped off or
anything suspicious.”
“That’s because Emily was never dropped off.” Liz
concludes. “Whatever happened to her happened earlier.”
“Bingo,” Lucky says. “Now I have to call the WSB
and see if I can reach Frisco in time to have him stop my
brother from walking into what I think will be a deadly trap
while I see if I can catch the black widow who sprung it.”
“Don’t you mean we catch her?” Liz points out.
Lucky doesn’t take the time to argue with her but calls the
WSB instead.

Inside Emily's mind:
Emily is flying. She is soaring and dipping and soaring
again through the most brilliant of moonlight skies. She is
unstoppable. She is in a place where the pain and the fear can
never reach her. Not now. Now she is unreachable.
Untouchable. Unhurtable. Unlovable. She falters.
Momentarily. Then flies again. She has been here before. A
long time ago. She remembers the feel of flying and it feels
the same. The freedom. The joy. The need. They are all
pulsing through her blood like a forgotten lover.
Forgotten lover? How could she forget Nikolas? She
loved him. Didn’t she? Didn’t she? She doesn’t remember.
She can’t remember. Along with the pain, the joy is gone. She
feels nothing. Nothing. Nothing good or bad. Just nothing.
She doesn’t want to feel nothing. Or at least she
doesn’t think so. She can remember Edward telling her to
make something out of her life. That being an actress would
lead to nothing. Edward was never wrong was he? Dead
maybe, but never wrong.
Edward dead? Or Edward dead wrong? She couldn’t
remember which was which. She had this vague image of
herself and Nikolas by a tombstone but the image causes the
pain to briefly reemerge so she sends it away. Maybe she’ll go
after it.
That’s it. If her memories won’t come to her she’ll go
chasing after them. Who needs a future when they have
memories. Then again maybe she will let the memories go
away and never bring them back. She could live without
memories. Jason did. Jason survived. Jason liked the
nothingness. Maybe she could be like Jason.
She is vaguely startled to find herself able to get up
when she tries to. But why should that surprise her? She’s
always been able to walk. Into poles. Into trees. Into
bedrooms where the guy you were crazy about was having
sex with someone else. There was that thought again. If she
could just catch it. Something was wrong. Something was
strange.
Nikolas? Having sex with someone else? Nikolas? The
thought pierces the nothingness. Emily hates that. The name
Nikolas defies the nothingness. The mind numbing cold inside
her. It brings joy that gives her warmth. It brings pain that
burns. She wants it to go away. But it won’t. There is
something she is supposed to remember. Something she
knows. Always has and always will. It is there and if she
focuses hard enough she might remember. But there is
something seductive about the nothingness. Something that
promises her what she wants most right now. To forget. To
stop feeling. To stop the memories.
They come by in flashes. One after the other without
stopping. The family arguments. The lies. The bitterness. The
isolation. The loneliness. The betrayal. Everyone she loved
had betrayed her. Jason. AJ. Edward. Alan. Mark. Nikolas.
No that’s wrong. It wasn’t Nikolas who betrayed her. It was
Mark. It was Nikolas who saved her. Nikolas who saved her.
Nikolas who saved her.
Her eyes fly open clear and lucid. She has time to say
one word, barely a whisper, before the nothingness reaches
out and pulls her back in.
That word is Nikolas.

The studio on the lower east side:
Mark swears as he hears it and resists the temptation
to hit her again. He looks at Emily rolled into a ball in the
corner, shaking from the effects of the drugs he had injected
in her. There would be no point in hurting her if she couldn’t
feel the pain. And he knew he had shot her with enough
heroin that she couldn’t feel anything.
Not that he would hurt her anyway. He just needed to
convince her that she had it all wrong. Nikolas was the one
who had hurt her. Nikolas was the one who had lied to her.
Nikolas was the one she had caught having the affair. All he
had done was get drunk one night and have sex with a girl
whose name he couldn’t remember. It had cost him
everything. Emily. Her money. His scholarship. Her money.
He had tried like hell to get her back, but he had moved in.
Nikolas. Nikolas the saint. Nikolas the prince. Nikolas who
wouldn’t let him within one mile of Emily.
Look how close he was now, he thought as he reached
out to touch her. She was his. He longed to make her
completely his again. And he would.
She had promised him that he would have Emily back
again when this was over. She had promised him that
everything would be okay. She had never lied to him before.
She wouldn’t lie now.
Emily Quartermaine. Her money. And Nikolas
Cassadine dead. That had been the plan. Simple. She had
taken care of giving him Emily back. Now all he had to do
was take care of Nikolas and the money. He knew what he
had to do. He reached for the automatic pistol on the counter
and checked to make sure it was loaded. With any luck,
Nikolas’s death would be slow and painful. The thought made
him smile.

57th St:

Nikolas feels the weight of the money he is carrying in
the gym bag. It is not nearly as heavy as the fear that he has
carried around him for almost 24 hours now. As far as he is
concerned the trade is equal: Emily for the money. He
considered it a bargain.
He looks at his watch. He has five minutes. His heart
is pounding. He knows deep inside that the chances of getting
Emily back alive are fading. He hopes the money will buy his
life back. His life because that’s what Emily is. His life.
His nerves are stretched to the breaking point. He
wishes, just for the moment, that Lucky was with him. He
would be a lot less nervous if someone who knew what they
were doing was around. But the thought of Emily steadies his
nerves. Being without her last night had been hell. He won’t
do it again.
Nikolas has just about reached the phone booth when
he suddenly hears someone call his name-
“Cassadine,” Nikolas turns in time to see this brown
blur head in his direction and push him to the side. There is a
scream as the a bullet shatters the sidewalk where he stood.
The man who knocked him down draws his gun in a defensive
mode, all the while keeping Nikolas pinned down. His gun is
aimed in one direction and as a shocked Nikolas follows his
train of sight, he sees a dark figure down the street turn and
flee.
The man grabs Nikolas and pulls him up.
“Come on,” he urges Nikolas as he pushes him
towards a nearby sedan double parked.
‘I’m not going with you until you tell me who you
are.”
“We’ll save the introductions for later. I’d rather not
be around when the police arrive or try to explain to them
why you have a million dollars in your bag or why you didn’t
notify the police immediately when your girl friend was
discovered missing.”
By now they are in the backseat of a sedan. The man
gives directions to the driver who immediately takes off.
“Okay, who the hell are you?”
The man smiled a brilliant smile that lit up his eyes.
“My name’s Frisco Jones and Lucky sent me. As far as your
explanations, you’ll have to ask Lucky. All I got was typical
Spencer talk- a time, a place, a description of you, and the
advice that someone might just try to hurt you”
“But don’t worry,” Frisco smiles again. “We WSB
agents have always been fast learners.”
And a stunned Nikolas says nothing else the rest of the
ride to his apartment.

Queens:

Lucky and Liz track Melissa down through her
membership in AFTRA. She lists a small one bedroom in
Queens as her home address. The building is nondescript and
at odds with the rest of the cute family dwellings that
surround it. Her apartment is on the third floor. As they climb
the stairs, Lucky is careful to keep Liz behind him where she
is safe.
There is no answer when they knock on the door and
Lucky doesn’t hesitate to break it. He even flashes his badge
and yells “FBI”. From the hallway, Liz can’t help but smile.
A quick glance around the apartment confirms that no
one is there. “Look around and see if you can find anything
that gives us any kind of clue about where Emily is. You look
in the living room, I’ll check the bedroom.”
Liz nods. She starts at the desk and leafs through
some bills. Nothing unusual there. Except that a lot are
marked “second notice” and over due. She moves to the
bookshelf and starts looking through the books collected
there. One in particular catches her eye. It’s a yearbook. From
Port Charles High. She recognizes it because she has one just
like it in their apartment in Washington. With her heart
beating wildly in her chest, she opens it to the picture of the
senior class and finds the picture of Emily Quartermaine. Or
at least where the picture of Emily is supposed to be. Instead
of the picture, there are only gauges and cuts like someone
has literally ripped it. Yelling for Lucky, she quickly turns to
the other pages where Emily’s picture is. A picture of the
three of them in the hallway. Emily in her first play. Emily in a
crowd shot. Each picture is the same. Like someone was
literally trying to cut Emily out of existence.
She hears Lucky enter the living room. “You won’t
believe what I found,’ she begins to say but stops and stares
at what Lucky is holding. “Oh my God,” she whispers as, for
the first time since this ordeal has began, she begins to realize
that they might not find Emily alive.

The studio on the lower east side:
Mark hates to go back to the studio. He has failed her.
She wanted him to kill Nikolas Cassadine and he couldn’t do
it. He hated it when she was mad at him. He always had. Ever
since they were children. He remembered how mad she had
been at him when Emily had broken up with him. She would
be that angry now.
She was waiting for him. And she was angry.
Viciously angry. He almost felt sorry for Emily. She hated
Emily. Always had. It had been her idea that he start dating
Emily. He hadn’t wanted to. Who would want such a mixed
up graceless person? But she had told him to so he had.
And somewhere along the line he had fallen in love
with Emily Quartermaine. But she didn’t like that either. So
he hid his feelings from her and tried to play the game like she
did.
But he had blown it that night two years ago. He
knew that she had never forgiven him for destroying their
plans. This was to have been his second chance. A chance to
have Emily back again. A chance for her to have the money
again. A chance for her to forgive him.
And now he had blown that too.
“What the hell did you give her?” her attention is first
on Emily who is now barely coherent. “She’s a zombie.”
“I gave her that injection you left.” he says sullenly.
“All of it? You idiot. There was enough heroin in that
sedative to fry her mind.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“No,” she sighs trying to keep her patience. “I’m not
angry. Maybe its better this way. She’ll be easier to control.”
“I still get to keep her?” he asks, afraid of the answer.
“Yea,” there is a note of affection in her voice so he
doesn’t hear the lie underneath “You get to keep her.”
“Even though I didn’t kill Nikolas? Or get the
money.” Her eyes go wide with anger at this news.
“Damn. You worthless piece of,” she stops and tries
to control herself. He cringes. “We’ll have to move on to plan
B.” Melissa Sander’s eyes are cold and calculating as she
looks at her half brother. “Listen to me Mark. Listen to your
big sister. If you want Emily Quartermaine to be yours again,
Nikolas Quartermaine must die. Just like we decided”
Eerily there is no trace of the childish fear on Mark’s
face- just cold determination. “No problem.”