by Simon Holt
The basement windows exploded, showering the floor with glass. Black smoke began to pour inside the room.
“It’s as simple as tearing down this glass wall, Macie,” Reggie said, trying to ignore the rumbles that shook the basement. “We can go back together. It’s not too late for you to have a life.”
The stone walls were cracking on both sides of the glass wall, and dim light filtered through. Reggie saw human bones scattered on the floor around the rocking chair. Jeremiah’s bones.
“Look—pick up that femur and break the glass!”
Macie swiveled around and saw the large leg bone. She knelt down by it but hesitated.
The walls groaned, and the ravenous forces beating against the basement tore a piece of the ceiling away.
“There’s no time!” Reggie shouted. “You have to do it now!”
But instead of taking the femur, Macie picked up a tiny rib bone. She looked at Reggie and cocked her head.
“It’s not about the glass.”
“What do you mean?” Reggie demanded.
“We’re part of each other now, it and I. One can’t exist without the other. There’s only one way to stop it and set myself free.”
Reggie’s heart fell and she beat her fists against the glass, but it held firm. On the other side, Macie took the sharp bit of bone and sliced open her throat. As black smoke gushed out of the wound, a scream echoed through the basement, ripping away the rest of the ceiling and bringing the walls down completely. In the same moment, the glass splintered and fell, and Reggie rushed to the other side. She caught the small girl in her arms.
Macie looked up at her, a mixture of blood and inky smoke seeping from the gash in her neck. Reggie held her hand to it, trying to staunch the flow, but the girl pushed her hand away. Before Reggie’s eyes she aged eighty years, until she looked just like the old woman in the hospital bed. Only this woman had no fear in her eyes, and she smiled at Reggie.
A cyclone of black smoke formed around Reggie and the body of the old woman, whipping at them, screeching in their ears. Reggie felt cold fingers press down on the wound on her shoulder, and she winced in pain. She looked up to see the haggard, demonic face of the Vour in the smoke. It gnashed its teeth and howled at her, but Reggie stared it down, until it was lost amid the rest of the swirling, spinning storm.
Reggie closed her eyes and held Macie tightly. Slowly the wind ebbed, the haunting shrieks faded away, and warmth crept back into her body. When she opened her eyes, she was kneeling on the floor in Eben’s apartment, Macie’s body spread across her lap. They were both covered in her blood, which spurted out of the gash in her neck. Macie’s breaths were coming fast and shallow.
“Hang on, Macie. You’re going to be all right,” Reggie insisted. It’s what people always said, no matter how hopeless the situation.
Macie shook her head only slightly and gripped Reggie’s hand. She said nothing, but her breath slowed and, to Reggie at least, when the last one came, it seemed like a sigh of contentment.
At long last, Macie Canfield was free.
26
The pond, the forest—all of it vanished, though the boys were still very cold. Aaron and Quinn blinked several times. They had each other in a headlock and were draped over the side of the fire escape at Eben’s apartment. A mound of snow fell off the landing and smacked on the ground two stories below.
“Guys! Stop! It’s over!” Reggie was shouting at them from the living room, trying to crawl through the window to get to them.
Aaron rose first and nearly slipped on the ice that covered the iron platform. He grabbed the railing just in time and stopped his fall.
“Jesus, be careful!” Reggie cried.
“I got it. I’m okay.” Aaron rubbed his neck. It was sore, and he was having a little trouble swallowing. Quinn sat up and groaned.
“What happened? It was so real.” He turned to Aaron. “You tried to kill me!”
“You tried to kill me!” Aaron shot back. They looked like they might attack each other again.
“You both tried to kill each other,” Reggie exclaimed, exasperated. “Macie made you see the things you were afraid of. You saw each other as enemies, even though that’s stupid because we’re all on the same side now. Now come inside.”
Moving slowly, because of both their cold limbs and their sore bodies, Aaron and Quinn managed to make it back inside the apartment. But they each snapped to attention when they saw Reggie covered in blood.
“Reggie, oh my God!” Aaron burst out.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s not my blood.”
“Well, whose blood is it?”
Reggie exhaled deeply.
“Macie’s. It’s Macie’s blood. She’s dead.”
Aaron and Quinn followed Reggie back to where Macie’s body was sprawled across the floor. Her head was cocked to the side, and her eyes were still open. Aaron knelt down beside her and shut them.
“Machen will know what to do,” he said. “Reggie, tell me, are you okay? Are you hurt at all?”
She shook her head.
“And the Vour… is dead? You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. We’re going to have some other problems, but we can consider this Sorry Night officially closed for business.”
Aaron nodded.
“I want to hear everything that happened, but I think we should take care of this… er… situation as soon as possible. Plus, Machen should be here for the story.”
The three of them looked at one another. Besides Reggie’s bloodbath and some scarring from the Vour’s attacks, the boys had welts and cuts all over them, and their clothes were ripped. Aaron’s neck was particularly bruised, and Quinn had a gash running the length of his hand and what looked like rug burns on his cheeks and forehead.
“Are you guys… okay?” Reggie asked doubtfully.
Quinn raised an eyebrow and glanced at Aaron, who exhaled a low chuckle.
“Yeah, we’re okay.”
“We just had to straighten some things out.”
“And they’re straight now?”
Both guys shrugged.
“Yeah.”
“Sure.”
“Ugh. Boys,” Reggie muttered.
It wasn’t until later the next day, however, that the four of them were seated around Eben’s living room, sipping coffee that Machen had brought over. As Aaron had prophesied, the ex-Tracer had called upon some “friends” to take care of Macie’s body. He himself had spent most of the night trying to keep the Tracers off their trail and had not realized until later how much danger the three of them had been in.
Sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, Reggie told them her tale. The three men listened without interrupting until she had finished. Then Quinn wrapped an arm around her and kissed her forehead.
“You’re amazing,” he said. “You saved us all.”
“I didn’t save Macie.”
“I think you did,” Machen countered. “I think she was right, that she was inextricably linked to the monster. While one lived, so did the other, and vice versa, like Siamese twins.”
“She went out on her own terms,” Aaron added. “And she took a super-bad Vour with her.”
“Well, at least now she really is free,” Reggie said.
“So are you,” Machen said.
Reggie looked up at him, surprised.
“I’ve reached an agreement with the Tracers. As long as you agree to stay out of trouble on future Sorry Nights, so that you don’t go getting yourself turned into a Vour, they’re not going to come after you. I think there’s even potential for a partnership. With everything that’s happened—Macie, and the discovery of all of Unger’s research—they know there are more questions that need answering.”
“They’re changing their zero-tolerance policy?” asked Aaron.
“Well, I don’t know about that, but they’re not going to shoot any of us on sight, which is an improvement in our relationship, I think.”
“
What about all the damage the Macie hybrid did?” Reggie asked. “There are a lot more Vours out there after this Sorry Night.”
“And their fearscapes were forcibly ripped open,” said Aaron. “We don’t know what those places will be like.”
“We’ll deal with them,” Machen replied. “But not today. I think that today everyone has earned a good rest. And I think Reggie’s earned a night in her own bed.”
Reggie’s head shot up.
“What?”
Machen smiled at her.
“The immediate danger is past. You can go home, Reggie. I think that you should go home.”
“But my dad…”
“After what happened at Home, I don’t think he’ll be sending you off to any more hospitals. That man just wants his daughter back.”
Reggie glanced at Aaron, and he nodded at her.
“I’ll take you.”
So within the hour Reggie was belted into Aaron’s car, leaning back against the headrest with her eyes closed. She was so tired. They drove in silence for a few minutes, then Reggie opened her eyes and looked at her best friend.
“I didn’t tell them everything,” she said.
“What?”
“When I was talking about that Core place, I left out a bit. But I think you should hear it.”
“Okay. You can tell me anything, Reg.”
Reggie took a deep breath.
“When I was lying there, and I thought there was no way I could get up, and I thought I was just going to waste away and die, I started thinking about you. And I just repeated your name over and over, until I felt like I could move again.” She paused and bit her lip. “I just wanted you to know. Even when you’re not there, you’re with me.”
A smile played on Aaron’s lips, and he seemed to sit a little taller.
“Okay,” was all he said as they pulled into her own driveway.
“I’m still not sure about this—” Reggie began, but Aaron squeezed her fingers.
“It’s going to be fine.”
They got out of the car, and Aaron helped Reggie up the icy front walk. A Christmas tree glittered in the front window. Reggie had almost forgotten that the holiday was just a couple days away now. Warily, she pushed open the door and stepped inside.
It was so warm, and she could hear the crackling of a fire in the living room. With Aaron following behind, she walked slowly into the house.
Henry was doing a puzzle on the coffee table, and Dad sat on the couch, reading a book. They both looked up as Reggie appeared in the doorway.
“Reggie!” Henry yelled, and he jumped up, scattering the puzzle pieces everywhere. He ran to her and hugged her, and she squeezed him back so tightly he had to tell her to loosen her grip.
She looked over his head at her father, who had risen to his feet.
In two strides he was across the room and had drawn both Reggie and Henry into his arms.
“Hi, guys,” Reggie said. “I’m home.”
EPILOGUE
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Reggie’s eyes fluttered open. It was dark in the room, but she could feel someone sitting next to her on the bed. Fingers reached out and stroked her hair, and sweet-smelling breath brushed against her cheek as the figure bent over and whispered in her ear.
“Time to wake up.”
A shiver speared through her when he touched her.
“My dad will kill you if he finds you in my bedroom in the middle of the night.”
Quinn muffled a chuckle.
“Technically it’s almost sunrise. But I don’t think that distinction would make much difference to him, so we should probably try to be quiet.”
“Too early,” Reggie groaned as she rolled over to face him. Quinn leaned down and kissed her. Her eyes drooped closed again as she happily let his lips explore hers. They were soft and warm, and she liked the pressure of his body against hers. She was in a lovely state of semiconsciousness when he pulled away.
“No, no, you temptress, I’m here to get you out of bed.” Reaching over, Quinn snapped on the bedside lamp. Reggie squinched her eyes shut in the glare, but Quinn took both her hands and pulled her up into a sitting position. Reggie could feel the finger nubs on his right hand, but she barely noticed them anymore. They had become as familiar to her in the last several months as the faint scars that lined Quinn’s cheek. She opened her eyes and ran a finger across one of these now. Quinn shied away.
“Don’t,” said Reggie. “I like them. They make you look—”
“Tough?”
“Real. Different. Special. All of the above.”
“I think they make me look human.”
“I like that, too.”
Quinn smiled and kissed her again.
“Okay, now we’re really running late,” he murmured after a couple of minutes. “You get dressed, and I’ll go get the car started.”
He rounded her bed and ducked out the window, the same way he had entered. Reggie watched as he crept along the eave below her bedroom to a nearby tree and swung himself down to the ground. She’d seen him do this many times before, but she was still impressed by his athletic grace. She always felt like a discombobulated monkey when she attempted the move.
She dressed quickly and before long had joined Quinn in his car, which he had parked a safe distance down the street from her house. As he revved the engine and headed off, he handed her a slim stack of manila folders, each labeled with a name.
“Today’s crop,” he said.
Reggie sighed as she perused the contents of the folders. Even though this was now a regular part of her routine, it always felt a little intrusive to study a compendium of a person’s fears, like she was breaking into a private part of another person’s self. She was fully aware of the ironies there, since she would, in less than an hour, literally break into these brains to try to help these victims conquer their fears; still, there was something cold and clinical about reading up on them first. But she couldn’t deny how helpful these dossiers were in defeating fearscapes, the best defense being a good offense, as it were.
In another bit of irony, she had the Tracers to thank for this assistance, or at least some of them. After Sorry Night, the organization had faced a crisis of conscience, and small factions had broken off from the group, split by disagreements as to how to handle the “Halloway Factor.” But Machen had managed to garner support from the majority of the membership, and they had formed a tentative alliance with Reggie and her friends. Reggie had quickly discovered that fighting a war with resources such as the ones the Tracers possessed certainly had its benefits, and a team of investigators who researched victims’ histories and the possible terrors she might encounter in fearscapes was one of them.
And that was hardly all. There was a special squad devoted to seeking out and capturing Vours, and a group of scientists who were studying Dr. Unger’s research and monitoring Reggie’s health and body chemistry. Quinn, who possessed the extrasensory Vour detector, had joined the former and had been responsible for bringing in several of the monsters. Mitch Kassner, after spending some time in the hospital following his encounter with Macie, had also been prevailed upon to join the ranks of the new Tracers.
They drove for a little over half an hour, and the sun was up by the time Quinn parked the car behind a ramshackle brick building that looked like an abandoned factory. It had in fact at one time been a factory that produced sneakers, but it was now the headquarters for Machen’s team of Tracers.
Reggie and Quinn entered through a side door. Reggie had still not quite gotten used to the disparity between the building’s exterior—that of a crumbling old building—and its interior, which had been completely gutted and refurbished. Labs and equipment were housed on the first floor, and the Vours’ cells were in the basement. The second floor contained training rooms and gyms, as well as the place where Reggie spent most of her time: the Icebox.
The Icebox was a room specially designed for entering the Vours’ fearscapes.
It was cool, of course, but after some experimenting, the Tracers had found that Reggie was able to move about more easily in the mental worlds if she herself was not subjected to the frigid temperatures that the Vours were. Tracer engineers had constructed a special couch for her that kept her body temperature high, similar to a car’s seat warmer. Vours were strapped to a different couch containing cooling panels that made the creatures weak enough for Reggie to enter their fearscapes.
And so, for the last few months, one or two mornings a week before school, Reggie had sat in the Icebox and, one by one, tried to save the humans trapped inside their own minds.
The decision that she would continue going into fearscapes, especially after Machen had confirmed that the very act of defeating Vours was changing her biological makeup, was not made lightly. But a lot of damage had been done on Sorry Night. Macie’s actions had resulted in a huge number of Vourings, and though she had been defeated, the Vour world still existed. Until she and her friends figured out another way to combat the monsters, Reggie would take them out one by one. It was the only way she knew how. But at least now she had some help.
Machen came out of his office and greeted them.
“Good morning. Did you have a chance to look at the files, Reggie?”
“Yep, in the car.”
“Good. All pretty basic today, I think.”
Reggie sometimes marveled that any of this could be considered “basic,” but she chose not to mention it.
“I’ve got to go on a raid,” Quinn said. “See you at school?”
“Sure. Be careful.”
“You too.”
He kissed her and headed off to one of the training rooms. Reggie was about to go into the Icebox when her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She looked at it and hesitated; the number was blocked.
“I have to take this,” she said to Machen, unconsciously gripping the phone tighter. Machen raised an eyebrow but nodded.
