She was murdered and I was kidnapped.
But something had happened even before that, something I couldn’t remember, and it had propelled me toward that Platinum Level door—I’d broken up with Dylan and lost my teammates and it had left me feeling raw and wounded. And, despite what everyone thought, I hadn’t been taken at school. I’d gotten into Nicole’s car willingly, eagerly, more than ready to face whatever lay on the other side of that Platinum Level door, beyond that blinding white light.
Had whatever lay on the other side been too terrifying for me to remember? Had I blocked it out and erased it?
Those questions jabbed and punched from the shadows, fists reaching out to make me stumble as I grabbed an old sweatshirt from my trunk. When I walked away from my car, my footsteps were unsteady and my concentration limited.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I did what I vowed I’d never do. But isn’t that what always happens when things get tough? We run in the wrong direction, arms flailing, calling for someone, anyone, to help. We climb up muddy inclines and wave our arms as we walk across lanes of traffic, willing cars to stop, demanding strangers to rescue us.
We walk away from danger toward any bright light that flickers.
I shuffled down the school hallway, legs on autopilot as I headed toward first period. My body was willing to keep up the charade, to attend classes and nod knowingly when teachers asked questions. My mind, on the other hand, was doing that flailing thing, forcing my hands to scream for help.
My phone was out and I was texting Agent Ryan Bennet. I was telling him everything.
I’m not even sure how coherent my end of the conversation was, since I was continually interrupted by him texting me back for clarification.
You left school grounds with Nicole Hernandez?
That’s what he wrote but I knew what he was thinking—Nicole, the dead girl, she left with the girl who got murdered, it’s a miracle they both didn’t end up dead.
Do you remember the address of where you went?
I didn’t. The landscape of my past was full of holes, parts of it disappearing off the edges of my vision, as if only a few city blocks existed and everything beyond that was fantasy. And that blinding white light—it erased everything, it mesmerized and it destroyed. The other side of the door wasn’t real. It was the edge of the universe, it was hell, it was the end of everything.
How did you get away?
Why wouldn’t he let that drop? I got away because I got away, because somebody left a door open or because they didn’t tie my ropes tight enough. I didn’t know. I might never know. I only wanted to catch whoever killed Nicole and make him burn. Forever and ever and ever.
“Do you have the answer to the next problem?”
That was my algebra teacher, Mr. Buchanan, interrupting me while I was trying to work out a plan to destroy the network of thugs who were kidnapping and killing girls my age.
“Yes,” I answered, slightly thankful that I had spent the past two nights working with a tutor. Now I could get through the day without my teachers knowing that I was only partly here. The other part of me was hunting monsters. I got out my worksheet, walked to the front of the class, and wrote the equation and the answer on the whiteboard.
When I turned around my gaze fell on Dylan.
We had broken up, right before I went missing. But I couldn’t remember why.
What happened? I wanted to demand. Why had we broken up and why had I felt like I didn’t have any friends? He saw something in my eyes, maybe anger or confusion or maybe the fact that I finally had a specific question to ask him, and he flinched.
You don’t remember all the things I’ve done, things I regret.
Yeah, I thought. Things that I need to know.
I marched past him, refusing to look at him again. Once I got back to my desk I continued to text Agent Bennet. Before I knew it, class was over and the bell rang. Dylan stood next to my desk, looking like he wasn’t about to let me leave the room.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I tried to call and text you about a jillion times since Friday night—”
“Why didn’t you tell me we broke up right before I went missing?” I asked as I stood up, my voice louder than it should have been. The teacher raised his head and looked at both of us. I stabbed a finger at Dylan’s chest. “Why have you been acting like everything’s fine and has been all along, except it couldn’t have been, could it?”
A long beat passed, then a flicker of guilt settled on his face and his brows pinched together. “I—it—you were the one who broke up with me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You don’t remember?” A moment of relief flashed in his eyes. Then it disappeared because he knew this wasn’t over yet. “We can’t talk about it here.” He tried to take my arm, but I yanked it away.
“Is everything okay, Rachel?” Mr. Buchanan asked from the front of the room.
“Oh, it’s just peachy,” I said as I huffed out of the room, Dylan a step behind me. I pushed my way into the crowds that shuffled down the hall, amidst students heading zombie-like to period two, half of them not even awake from the weekend yet. Dylan grabbed my arm again and pulled us over to the side of the hallway. “Nice,” I said. “Are you going to give me some answers now?”
He glanced around us, a look on his face that said he didn’t care who knew about our double lives anymore. I certainly didn’t.
“Why did we break up?” I asked again. “What did you do and how did I end up without my team?”
“You didn’t lose your team because of me. We were at the club and you were having the worst fight ever, so bad I thought about going up there and stopping it—”
“With who?”
“Cyclone, one of the Blue Hurricanes.”
My brow lowered as I tried to figure out who that was. Then a girl who looked like Katy Perry appeared in my memory. It was Janie Deluca and she was slamming her fist in my gut, again and again.
“She was double tapping,” he said, then explained what that meant when I gave him a blank expression. “She took two hits of Pink Lightning and turned into a killing machine, shoving you around. No matter what you did, she wouldn’t back down. It was like she wasn’t human.”
My hands were on my hips and I tried to remember, but all I could see was one image, like a snapshot—Janie’s eyes narrowed and swollen, her mouth dripping blood, a bruise darkening her jaw and her fist reaching toward me, sweat flying off strands of her blue hair—
“She was wearing you out,” he continued, “and your fight had already dragged on for twenty minutes, way longer than you normally fight. You’re usually done within five to ten. At that point you had to get serious—”
So far, none of this explained why Dylan and I had broken up. I got impatient, my left foot tapping the floor, my arms crossed. The school crowd around us thinned until only a few kids still lounged against lockers, some of them staring at us whenever our voices raised.
“You delivered one bone-crunching kick after another until, finally, she tumbled to the floor, a hot mess of blue hair and bruised skin, blood streaming from her nose. But—”
He paused and I could tell by his expression that whatever was coming up next was bad.
“She wasn’t moving and she wasn’t breathing.”
It was like knowing the end of the story, but not the beginning. I knew that everything must have worked out because I had seen Janie alive since then. “What happened?” I asked.
“The announcer lifted your hand and proclaimed you the winner, but you pulled away from him. You got down on your hands and knees and started doing CPR on Cyclone. Not exactly what you’re supposed to do—”
I stared at him with glassy eyes. I still couldn’t remember what had happened, but if what he said was true, then I had broken one of the cardinal Phase Two rules. Never touch your opponent after the fight’s been called. I’d risked everything to try and save her.
“Thankfully, Cyclone
came to,” he continued. “But the cheering stopped and a deadly silence filled the room. The cameras stopped panning the crowd and the rest of the fights that night were cancelled. Meanwhile, you and your patron got into a huge argument. When you were finally ready to leave, you were majorly pissed off and said you never wanted to come back. You even quit your team and told all your girls they were on their own. Zoe and I tried to talk you out of it, and then that turned into another fight—”
Flickers of our argument came back to me. I remembered screaming at him, telling him that he had to drop out of the club, too, or I never wanted to see him again.
“It didn’t matter what I said.” He stared at the floor, his jaw clenched shut.
Everything he said was true, yet it had a hollow ring to it, like there was more to this story. I kept getting flashes of those cars that I’d seen lined up at the rave Saturday night, and a horrible shiver ran over my skin, along with a sick feeling in my gut.
The two of us were running away from a stolen car, being chased by a cop—
I gasped and took a step away from him.
“We were stealing cars!”
He shook his head. “I was stealing cars, you only came with me once. You wanted me to quit, but I couldn’t—”
“Why not?”
He lifted his shoulders, looking defeated. “The club’s a different place for guys. They only give us Blue Thunder until we get hooked.” For the first time I noticed a slight tremor in his hands. He must have been struggling with side effects, just like I was. “Once we’re addicted, our patrons won’t give us more, not unless we do what they say. For a long time, I just had to get new recruits for Phase Two. But once I had the Ravens put together, the rules changed. Stealing became a requirement—we had to bring them a car every week or two.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the cops?”
He laughed. “That’s what you said before. Who would believe me, Rach? I don’t even know who these people are. I tried to quit taking Blue Thunder on my own, more than once, but—it just didn’t work.”
I waited, wondering what else had happened.
“So, we broke up,” he said, looking like he had ended up on the mat at the end of a long fight. “And then a couple of days later, you went missing.” He was staring into my eyes now, a deep, soulful look like he hoped I would believe him and that he wouldn’t lose me again. “I never told you how much I cared about you. Not before you went missing. And when you were gone, I couldn’t live with myself. It felt like everything was my fault—”
I believed what he said—that we had broken up because he wouldn’t leave the club—but there was still some other detail he wasn’t telling me. I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes, almost like when he’d asked me out a few days ago and then wasn’t sure if I’d say yes.
“But something else happened, didn’t it?” I asked. “You’re not telling me everything.”
“You asked why we broke up and that’s it. There isn’t anything else.”
“Yeah.” I nodded my head. “There is.”
But I could tell he was done talking. I frowned, disappointed, wondering why there was such a guilty look in his eyes. “I gotta get to class now,” I said. “See ya later.”
He tried to grab my hand, but I pulled away and headed down the hall. Alone.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I walked away from Dylan more confused than ever. There was a heaviness in my soul now, like I’d been kicked in the chest and knocked backward. The fact that he and the Ravens had gotten involved in stealing cars was worse than I’d expected. Had the Skulls and the Orcs and the other boys’ teams been forced to participate in criminal activity, too, and if so, what? The more I found out about this underground fight club, the worse it got. Still, I wasn’t going to give up, I couldn’t. I had to find out what had happened to Nicole and this was only Round One.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I shoved my way down the hall, from one class to another. I kept feeling like I’d missed something, like something was coming and I needed to be ready for it, like somewhere along the line I was going to get another clue. Then, when I walked into history, I saw that none of the Dragon Girls were in class today.
Had Sammy/Komodo been injured that badly during our fight?
Guilt mixed with the bewilderment I was already feeling.
Throughout history class, I kept getting brief memory flashes from the night Dylan and I had stolen a car together, how it had been exciting at first, but had turned terrifying when we almost got caught. Panic rushed over me when I realized he could end up in prison if he stayed in Phase Two. There had to be something we could do, some way to get him out.
But he wasn’t waiting for me when class was over. When I got to lunch, I discovered he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. Or at least, I couldn’t see him from the lunchroom door, because that was as far as I got. I paused, backpack in one hand, cell phone in the other when I got a text from Molly.
How was your weekend?? Never heard from you again.
Weird. Where are you?
A few seconds passed before a reply came.
Home. Asthma. Going to doctor.
I sank back against the doorframe, letting the throng of hungry teenagers pour past me. This was what it had been like throughout our childhood. If Molly ever got too stressed out, she got sick, really sick. Like she couldn’t breathe and had to go to the hospital sick. You never knew what would trigger her asthma, either, because sometimes she’d have a small attack at first and then a worse one a few days after. I remembered how she had fumbled with her inhaler the other night when we were in my car, right after I’d kicked the crap out of Janie Deluca.
Molly was probably sick because she was hanging out with me again.
Leaving for doctor. Call me after dinner? she texted.
Yeah.
I was just putting my phone away when Lauren came out of nowhere, grabbed me and half-dragged me down the hall toward the girls’ bathroom. All the way, she tried to shush me. I kept asking her the same questions over and over—what’s up?, what’s wrong?, where are we going?—but she wouldn’t talk until the two of us were locked together in a stall.
As far as secrecy went, this place would have been at the bottom of my list.
People had seen us come in here. They could see us now with our legs poking out below the bottom of the stall, and once we started talking they would be able to hear us.
“This isn’t exactly a cone of silence,” I said when she finally released me.
“It is if we whisper,” she said. “Look what I got!”
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, hadn’t God and the universe and my own retrograde memory banks been preparing me for this moment? Still, the serendipity of it caused my eyes to widen and a loud gasp to come out of my lungs.
She held two black and silver tickets in her hand.
Platinum Level.
“It wasn’t just a rumor.” Her voice came out in a low, hoarse whisper.
I shook my head.
“So what do you think? You wanna go with me, don’t you?”
I nodded. My words had evaporated. I kept seeing that door opening and the blinding light; I kept hearing the loud cheering that came from the other side, sounding somehow different from what we’d always heard during the normal Phase Two raves.
“Cat got your tongue, girlfriend?” Lauren laughed.
“I, um, yeah, I guess. Did you get any instructions or do you know where to go?” I didn’t want to tell her too much, like the fact that I had just found out my boyfriend was a car thief or that I had gone to a Platinum Level event before, or that some really bad stuff might have happened there. I had to go to this tonight and I had to find out what was on the other side of that door. It was the only way I would ever find out what had happened to Nicole.
“I have the directions in my car,” she said. “It’s not anywhere they’ve held raves before.”
“Any chance
it’s off the 10?”
“Yeah! How did you know? Did you get tickets, too?” A disappointed expression darkened her features.
“No, it’s just somebody I know went to one of these once. I only remembered it this morning.”
“Really? Did she say what it was like?”
“Nope. She was totally secretive, like, I can’t give you any details.” I was going to Hell for this. I was lying to one of my friends and possibly putting her life in danger. “What if it’s dangerous, Lauren?” I asked, giving her a chance to back out. “What if it’s not what we expect, like we could get hurt or something—”
“That’s why we’re going together. Nothing can happen as long as we stick together, right?”
I swallowed nervously. Well, technically, we could both wind up beaten to death and dropped off by the side of the road, or we could end up missing like the other Lost Girls. I gave her a look that revealed all my concerns and doubts.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asked. “You’ve never been afraid of anything.”
“No. I’m not afraid. I want to go. I just wonder if maybe we shouldn’t go. Not this time—”
She shook her head, sent that long, golden Rapunzel hair spinning around her. “No way. I’m not giving you these tickets so you can go with somebody else. You’re coming with me or not at all!”
There was a slender moment when I could have grabbed those tickets away from her and ripped them up. But it was almost as if she sensed what I was thinking. She pulled them back, then stuffed them in her Prada purse.
“What’s it gonna be?” she asked, a cold expression in her eyes. “Me and you? Or me and somebody else?”
I sucked a long breath through my teeth, forcing myself to relax. I was still tempted to lunge at her and wrestle her to the ground and yank that designer purse away—which would be hard in this tight space. We’d probably smash our heads on the wall or the stall or the floor. If we were out in the hallway, or outside the building, it would have been easy to take her down. But in here, I might lose. Somebody might come in the bathroom, some teacher or janitor or administrator, and think they needed to break us up. They’d be wrong, of course.
Lost Girls Page 19
