Girl One, page 21
“You’re going to kill us the same way you killed the Strouds,” I said.
“No,” Black Shoes said gently. “It will be quicker than that. I can do that much for you.”
“You’re cowards,” Cate spat.
They barely reacted. “Deal with these two,” Black Shoes said, like we were something to tick off a checklist. The people of Kithira had worked a miracle of their own, banishing the Strouds. They would dispatch us just as effortlessly. The third man grabbed me. His arm, slung across my chest, pinched hard against my breasts. In the scramble and confusion, I’d lost my chance. Black Shoes was turning away from me. I couldn’t reach his eyes.
Black Shoes went to Isabelle, holding out his hand. I tried to telegraph some of my own urgency to her: Wake up, dammit. But, unmoved by Cate’s bleeding, she accepted Black Shoes’s hand. He lifted her off the couch and led her out of the living room, toward the back of the house. He was gentle with her, almost mannerly. I thought of Delilah, alone, pregnant against her will, furious and scared. That bloodstained dress, a pale banner in the trees.
My rage arrived as purely and completely as a breath drawn after I’d been held underwater. Every nerve ending flickered, alive with heat. The world slowed down to accommodate me. I was what had been hiding inside all along.
Cate stared at me. Her lips moved, a whisper: a prayer, an encouragement, the syllables of my name.
“You’ll have your turn,” Orange Shirt said in her ear, voice humid with a leer.
Orange Shirt was looking at me. Openly, brazenly. His gaze flickered, up and down my body, but when I caught his eyes again I held them, snagged them, thinking Don’t look away, don’t look away. Burrowing deep. “Let her go,” I said.
His facial muscles slackened instantly, his arm around Cate faltering and then dropping, distracted. She didn’t move, face tense, like she didn’t trust that she was safe to go. Still clutching me close, the third man watched, and I sensed his surprise, the way he was more bemused than scared.
“I know your voice,” I said to Orange Shirt. “You raped Delilah. You killed her.” I recognized his voice from the answering machine message. It was hard to connect those stumbling, earnest words with this cold-eyed young man.
He didn’t answer. I spoke directly to his mind, the deepest, primal parts. “Tell me if you’ve been following us all this time,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t followed you. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Step away from her,” I said.
He didn’t even hesitate. He took a step, creating half a foot of space between his body and Cate’s, and I saw her muscles visibly unfurl in relief.
“What the hell?” the other man said in my ear, looking for the joke. “Get it together, man.” His arm around me was still pinching.
I had to think carefully, quickly. Choose each word to hold as much power as possible. “Shoot him,” I said to Orange Shirt. Clear and calm. “Shoot him in the leg.”
It was a gamble. I wasn’t even sure Orange Shirt had a gun. But he was reaching into his waistband, pulling out a revolver. Pressed against me, the third man stiffened. His breath against me, that tangy smell of his sudden fear. He began a syllable in his throat, a protest. In that second, he let go of me, stepping toward Orange Shirt, reaching out—
Orange Shirt, his gaze emotionless, like a dreamer’s, angled the gun downward and fired. The sound was so loud, in that still and quiet room, that for a moment I was sure he’d hit me instead.
But I was still standing. I was free. The man who’d held me crumpled to the floor, his body strangely graceful in that split second. He screamed in pain. “Goddammit,” he said through gritted teeth. “Are you fucking her too? Why are you listening to this—”
I spoke over him, addressing Orange Shirt. “Put the gun to your head,” I said.
Orange Shirt convulsed once, his hand holding the gun trembling. I watched him, fascinated in a cool corner of my mind. The way he tried to fight against it. The trapped look in his washed-out blue eyes. The man who’d been shot in the leg was clutching his thigh, his fingers slicked with blood, his jeans stained with a rapidly spreading blackness. When I looked into Orange Shirt’s eyes, I saw that same disbelief that I’d seen with the man at the motel. He didn’t think this was really happening: a girl was forcing his body and brain to bend to her own. I was inside a childhood dream, bounding unharmed off a cliff, wondering what I’d ever been afraid of.
Cate moved across the room, carefully, finding her way to my side.
Orange Shirt held the gun against his temple. “Are you going to kill me?” he asked, his face greasy with sweat.
“Am I going to do what you’d do if you were in my place, you mean? That’s what you’re all afraid of.” He blinked rapidly. “Keep your eyes on me,” I said, and he stopped blinking, eyes collecting a glossy scrim of unshed tears.
In the paralysis I’d created, Cate whispered in my ear: “We need to find Isabelle. We have to get out of here, Morrow. Please.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to step outside of this current of power I’d created. I had no idea how long it would hold. If I told Orange Shirt to press the trigger, his finger, obeying my words instead of his own brain, would make the one tiny movement that would end him.
For a moment I wanted to. I wanted to so totally and completely that I couldn’t even imagine feeling guilt afterward. Was this what my mother had felt, holding the match? When I’d seen that joy in her face, was it because she’d just murdered a man who’d deserved it? Maybe it had been the purest thrill of her life, blazing so brightly that the rest of her life could only ever be pale and ordinary in contrast. Maybe she’d played it safe, my whole childhood, just to save us both from that hot, dark impulse always tugging at the back of her brain.
“I have a daughter,” the man with the gunshot wound said. He was saying it in a whisper, resentful, like he didn’t want to admit it. “A little girl. Please.”
“Morrow—” Cate said, urgent.
“You,” I said to Orange Shirt. “Kneel down.” He was shaking as he obeyed, lowering himself onto his knees; I crouched next to him. Gently, I pulled the gun from his hand, laid it on the ground. I took his belt off and wound it around both his wrists in a sloppy figure eight, then strapped the belt tightly to the leg of the couch until he was held in place. “Don’t move,” I said. Then I took his gun, which was heavier than I expected, metal warm to the touch. I examined it, uncertain. The gun almost felt like a movie prop to me, unreal.
“The safety,” Cate said, urgent, and when I hesitated, she took the revolver from me, quickly clicked a lever into place. She tried to hand it back.
“You keep it,” I said.
I fixed my eyes on the men until we turned the corner; they watched me back, baleful. I didn’t know how long my hold over them would last. I didn’t know how long it would continue after I snapped that wire that stretched between our eyes. Would it linger for five minutes, an hour, more?
Cate and I hurried down the hallway. The walls were scuffed and bare, all the doors closed. I caught a noise, a weak mewl, a sound of distress, and I opened the nearest door.
It was a bedroom, floral wallpaper, untidy piles of clothes clotted around the baseboards. Black Shoes was with Isabelle. They were together on the bed, Isabelle on his lap, skirt hiked up to expose those tender, skinny thighs. I took in their bodies together, the way Isabelle lifted her head up to look at me in surprise through tangled hair, Black Shoes’s stare that met my own without wavering or apology as he sat against the headboard, surrounded by the frilly bedding of Delilah. The girl he’d murdered.
It took me a moment to realize that Black Shoes was dead.
Isabelle adjusted her dress on her shoulder, smiling at us. Black Shoes’s skin was already lifeless and slack. Looking at him, drained empty, I felt my own hard pulse drumming through me. Alive, alive.
Isabelle rose off his lap and came toward us, smoothing down her dress. “Are you okay?” she asked, and reached up to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You look upset.”
I couldn’t stop staring at Black Shoes. The first corpse I’d ever seen outside of a medical setting; the heavy slump of his body. Those dark, gleaming shoes, shining more brightly now that he was fading. A deep and savage relief passed through me. As I watched, a thread of blood drooled down his chin.
“How did you do that?” I asked Isabelle quietly.
She shrugged like she didn’t know what I meant. Turning, she wandered toward the dresser, Delilah’s dresser. She ran her hands over the balled-up socks, lip-gloss tubes rimmed with glittery crust, library books, crumpled receipts. She picked up a book with a bright pink cover, flipped through it. Her eyes widened.
“Isabelle, don’t touch Delilah’s stuff,” I said, queasy. “Don’t touch anything.”
“This could be important,” Isabelle said. “It’s her diary.”
Cate had gone to the window and pushed aside the blinds, hands shaking as she scrabbled with the lock. She managed to hoist the window open. She stood for a second, head cocked, listening, then slid the screen free of its frame. The night air that came in was chilly, throbbing with the sounds of insects. Cate slid her way through, dropping to the grass below. I followed. As I reached up to help Isabelle, taking her small hand, I marveled at the flexible lightness of her body. Such a tiny thing, to have left behind a death. She’d kept the book with her: I didn’t press it. All I wanted was to get out safely.
Moving together, close enough to hear each other’s breathing, we crept around the side of the house. The Volvo was still sitting where we’d left it hours ago, as if nothing had changed between that moment and this one.
The front yard was empty.
Cate whispered: “Does Tom have the keys?”
I cursed under my breath. “He does.” For a moment escape had been so close that I could feel freedom on the back of my tongue, light and cool. “Maybe there’s a spare set.”
But I wondered what they’d done to Tom in the woods. Would he be as easy to discard as the three of us? Or was he on their side now? I wasn’t even sure what I wanted for him after he’d betrayed Cate. My anger and fear roiled in my gut.
After a silent consultation, we ran across the grass toward the Volvo. I heard shouting from inside the house, only a few windows illuminated. Isabelle tried the car doors—locked, all four of them. Cate slumped against the side of the Volvo, exhausted. We were stuck here, in this strange town, at night, bloodied. How far would we get with no vehicle?
“I’ll have to go back for Tom.”
“Forget him,” Cate said. “Please, Morrow. You’ve seen what those men are like—” She reached for my hand, held on so tightly it almost hurt, and I understood that she was transmitting something to me that went beyond just our survival. But I had to focus on getting us out of here.
“We can take them on. We just have to find the Tom and get the keys—”
“If he’s even alive,” Isabelle said calmly.
“Morrow—please. We have to look out for ourselves. We told him not to call anyone, but he did what he wanted, and now look—”
Before I could answer, the crunch of footsteps approached from the side of the house. Two forms emerged from the shadows, one loping casually, the other hunched and bent. Tom. As they stepped into the light from the windows, I saw that Tom’s face was bruised and swollen, a starburst of blood against one eye. His hands were tied behind his back with thin yellow ropes. The man behind him held a gun to the back of his neck. Tom’s role as a betrayer flickered. So they’d hurt him too. I softened.
His captor was tall, his lower face obscured with a heavy beard. The stranger stopped, said something too low to hear, and Tom fell to his knees. I realized, with a strange shock, that Tom was the most defenseless of the four of us right now. While the stranger was distracted, I gestured to Cate, frantic, holding out my hand at hip-height: she understood, passing me the gun, the soft click letting me know she’d undone the safety again. I stepped into the light. I held out the gun, faking my certainty, letting the confidence I felt in my own power extend into this weapon.
It took Tom a moment to catch on to my presence and look up. His face tightened with panic—I watched him begin to frantically mouth, Get away, run, but I ignored him. Instead I looked directly into the stranger’s eyes, catching his gaze as he looked up. I pushed myself through into his skull, settled in there. As easily as winding my fingers through strands of hair and tugging. “Drop the gun,” I said. “Untie him.”
The bearded man’s face loosened into blankness. He dropped the gun; maintaining eye contact, I stooped to retrieve it, kicking it backward toward Cate and Isabelle. The man began to fumble with the knots that were holding Tom’s hands behind his back. “Go faster,” I said sharply, and the man hurried, fingers slipping.
“Let me drive,” Isabelle called behind me.
“I don’t understand this,” Tom said. “Why is he listening to you, Josie? What is this? Is it—” His ropes slid loose, slithering to the gravel. Still training the gun on the stranger, I started backing away. Tom looked at his hands like he wasn’t sure they were his anymore. His wrists were embedded with ligature marks, thick and red. “What are you doing?” Tom asked.
I didn’t have time to explain. I looked Tom in the eyes, and for just a second before his face went blank, I saw a twitch of betrayal. Hurt. Like he could sense what was happening to him, could sense my influence behind it, and he hated it. “Give the keys to Isabelle,” I said. “Get inside the car.”
He stared at me before he broke away, obeying.
As Tom moved toward the Volvo, the man glared at me, furious now. “What’d you do to me, you creepy bitch?” he asked, low.
Inside the house, shadows and movement. Fuck. Orange Shirt must’ve gotten loose, my power over him waning, my makeshift handcuffs not strong enough. Or maybe it was the stranger who’d been shot in the leg—and they were going to find Black Shoes soon—
I backed away from Tom’s captor, the gun aimed at his chest. “Stay there,” I said. “Stay there and don’t move. We’re getting out of here.”
But it wouldn’t help. That was what I knew at the back of my mind. Delilah. What they’d done to her body. Forcing men back into the gene pool, violently, cruelly. I’d recognized the frank anger in Black Shoes’s eyes when he’d said that, but there’d been something else beneath it, thin and bitter. Fear. This wasn’t a lone incident—it was the beginning of something bigger. Ricky Peters, innocent or not, had known this would happen. That when he’d landed in prison he would still be connected to a hatred that he’d only briefly dipped his fingers into. We weren’t safe. Even after we left Kithira, we wouldn’t be safe.
The Volvo’s headlights punched on, catching me in the illumination. The engine rattled to life. When I glanced back, I saw that the others were in the car already. Cate pounded the windows, shouting something at me, her face unrecognizable in its urgency. I heard shouts—noise—coming from inside the house, a sudden turmoil. I ran for the car. The noise didn’t matter. Just dispatches from a different world. We were free now. Free.
I reached for the door handle. A single crack rang through the night. The noise was so loud that I felt it inside me, condensed down into a hard knot, slamming into me.
I collapsed into the backseat and then Tom was yelling, “Drive! Drive!” Isabelle, at the wheel, lurched us out of the driveway, tires spinning, the worn-out brakes screeching with the sudden movement, and we were off, going too fast for Kithira’s narrow roads. It didn’t matter, nobody was going to stop us now, we were okay, unhurt—I looked at Tom and grinned, loopy with triumph, but he didn’t grin back. His eyes were wide.
“Morrow.” Cate craned around from the front seat. “Jesus Christ, you’re—” Then she turned around. “Isabelle. Stop. Stop. You have to fucking pull over.”
“Not yet,” Isabelle said, reasonable and resolute. “They’ll get us if we stop now.”
The pain burned, deep and hot, but it was more than that. The wrongness of something foreign and unfamiliar stuck in there with all my organs. I brought my hand away from my stomach; it was blackened and slick.
“How did this happen?” I whispered. I’d let them off too easy, and now—now—
“What are we going to do? We can’t let her—” Tom was saying, frantic.
I was trying to hold on, trying to stay present, to cling to their voices, but I was slipping now, going too quickly backward, into the darkness that waited, ready to suck me up, ready to take me under.
31
It was quiet, the air close and stifling. Swollen with the fake florals of cleaning solution. I was prone on my back, stretched out. I shifted against a cheap nylon coverlet that was already slippery with blood. Somebody loomed above me. My mother. No, Bellanger. No. My eyes adjusted and I understood that it was Cate.
“Where are—are we—” I was trying to articulate a question that hovered beyond the reach of my clotted mouth. “Are they—the others—”
“Morrow, listen. Do you think you can relax for me?”
I could only lie there, my body heavy and drugged, and watch as Cate closed her eyes, then opened them again to reveal a different face than before. She held her hands above me, hovering just over the flesh. Energy built between her palms and my body. The tug of a magnet against its opposite. It made the pain flare hotter for a minute.
I couldn’t bear it.
Then Cate’s hands were on my stomach, her skin soft against mine. My heartbeat thumped up into her palm, so steady that after a moment it felt as if she were transferring the pulse into me directly from her own body. She’d taken over, she was giving life back to me, that shivery beat spreading across every inch of my skin, slipping across the surface, settling into my corners and edges and crevices. Through the murkiness of my pain and confusion came a stirring of life, hard and stinging and good, like the blood in my veins waking back up.
