Poison Ink

by Christopher Golden

  “Oh no,” T.Q. said, sobbing. “Oh no, Letty. Caryn. No, no.”

  Sammi stared at Caryn’s dull, lifeless eyes. Her cheek lay in a widening pool of blood that soaked and matted her hair.

  Katsuko bent over Letty’s twitching body, weeping from somewhere deep in her soul, and pressed both hands against the wound in her chest. Sammi pulled Letty’s head into her lap and stroked her face.

  She glanced toward the window, but Dante had vanished.

  Outside, a motorcycle engine roared to life, then began to diminish into the distance.

  Sammi slipped her cell phone from her pocket. This time, when she flipped it open, she had service again. She dialed 911, and as she lifted the phone to her ear, she began to shake uncontrollably. The stink of blood filled the shop, and somehow she knew it would linger always in her mind.

  EPILOGUE

  I t rained on the day they buried Caryn Adams. A tent had been placed over the gravesite and mourners gathered beneath it. The floral arrangements gathered around the casket produced a sickly sweet aroma that seemed to saturate each drop of moisture in the air. Sammi could taste it on her tears. She wept silently as the priest read over Caryn’s grave.

  Mr. and Mrs. Adams had framed several of their daughter’s most beautiful dress designs and they stood—along with an enlarged photograph of their smiling daughter, her eyes sparkling—on easels around the edges of the tent. They wanted everyone to know that their loss had also been the world’s loss. Sammi agreed.

  Caryn would never drag her into another art studio down on Washington Street, but she had a feeling that she would find herself wandering into them on her own. She would stare too long at antique paintings and little artifacts handmade by local artists, and now and again when she had money, perhaps she would buy one.

  At the wake, the casket had been closed.

  Sammi stood just beneath the tent, barely out of the rain. It pelted the canvas so loudly that she could hardly make out the priest’s words. Not that it mattered. A hollow ache filled her and she wouldn’t have been able to really listen. Her ribs had been injured all over again and she’d set back the healing of her fingers a couple of weeks. Other than that, physically she would be fine. But the numbness of her spirit would take longer to heal.

  Her mother and father were both in the gathering, sharing a black umbrella out in the rain at the edge of the crowd. Sammi did not bother looking around for them. They would be waiting when this all came to an end, and then they could all stop pretending to still be a family.

  Sammi felt a hand touch her own, fingers twining in hers, and she looked up at T.Q. She’d tied her red hair back into a ponytail, perhaps thinking even that bit of brightness too much for such a black day. From the other side, Katsuko slid her arm around Sammi’s waist. She laid her head on Sammi’s shoulder. They cried together, the three of them.

  Conspirators.

  As they embraced, Sammi could not help feeling the new bond that they shared, a bond manufactured from lies. That terrifying night, amid the stink of the blood-soaked abbatoir that Rachael’s shop had become, they had waited for the police and ambulances to arrive, and Katsuko and Sammi had kept looking at one another.

  “What if he knows she’s still alive?” Katsuko had said, her voice a rasp, even as she put pressure on Letty’s wounds to keep her from bleeding to death.

  Sammi had said nothing. They all knew what had to be done. With Dante gone, the power worked fine. She had taken up the tattoo needle and the small plastic pot of that black ink, and she’d gone to work on Letty’s tattoo. Rachael had shouted at her, but she refused to leave Zak’s side and so could not stop them. Not that she would have tried. They were risking Letty’s life by turning her on her side, even as Katsuko kept pressure on that wound. And Sammi did a terrible job with the needle. If she lived, Letty would have scars and a hideous blotch of a tattoo. But if the ambulance took her away and Dante still controlled her, could still make her his puppet, she might as well have been dead already.

  Letty survived.

  It had been a near thing, touch and go for the first forty-eight hours. The knife had missed her heart, but only barely. Had Katsuko not grabbed her arm, she would probably have been dead. Zak had also not yet been released from the hospital. The abdominal wound he’d received had led to a section of his intestine being removed, but he would survive.

  Katsuko, Rachael, and Sammi had all been treated and released, but had remained in the hospital all that first night waiting for word about Letty and Zak. During that time, the police had questioned them all, and each of them—Rachael included—had stuck to the story. A madman named Dante had broken into the shop while Zak and his cousin, Sammi Holland, and her friends had been waiting for Rachael to close up so they could all go and get ice cream. Dante must have been on some kind of drugs because his speed and strength were shocking. He stabbed Zak first, taking out the one person who might have been able to stop him easily. He had two kitchen knives and he went crazy, stabbing Letty and slitting Caryn’s throat.

  The police believed it all, but Sammi thought they believed it mostly because there were so many other things they didn’t understand. Why had they all started bleeding from their noses and eyes and ears? None of them knew.

  But they found Dante’s blood all over the broken shards of Rachael’s plate-glass window, and when they went to the address the girls gave them, the police had found it burning. Sammi felt sure he would have taken his grimoires with him when he left, but she hoped that the Polaroids were all part of the scorched ruins.

  A chilly wind blew across the cemetery, making the tent billow and flap and driving the rain sideways for a moment. November would not arrive for another week, but already Sammi could feel winter coming on. Autumn could be beautiful, but it was the season of the dead. Today she truly understood that for the first time.

  With her left hand still in the cast, she reached up and used her unbroken fingers to wipe tears from her cheeks. Her eyes burned and her body felt heavy with exhaustion. All through the wake and through the funeral and now here, awaiting Caryn’s burial, she found herself staring again and again at the casket and wondering when it would be her time to lie within, to be lowered into the ground.

  Sammi let out a sob and turned to bury her face in the crook of T.Q.’s shoulder. Katsuko rubbed her back, and the three of them embraced, taking strength from each other. They cried not just for the loss of Caryn, but for the loss of everything they had once meant to each other. Discussion of such truths had been taboo, but Sammi knew they all sensed it. T.Q., Katsuko, and Letty each had black blotches where those tattoos had been, and Sammi had a small circle with a hole in the center—a hole like the one in her heart. They had been branded, marked forever by the atrocities they had endured. The tattoos had bonded them, but not in the way they had hoped.

  And Letty—the one they had all loved—would never recover from the knowledge of what she had done. Dante had murdered Caryn using Letty as his weapon, but Letty’s hand had still held the knife. The secret would haunt them all.

  The priest completed his words, and the mourners began to file past the casket. Following the example of so many others, Sammi plucked a single flower from the arrangements around the grave and dropped it on the casket as she passed. She touched the cold surface and whispered her final goodbye through a veil of tears.

  She walked from beneath the tent with T.Q. and Katsuko, letting the rain mix with her tears, though already they had begun to subside. Anna Dubrowski spotted her in the departing crowd. She had come with a group of other students from Covington. Sammi nodded to her and forced a thin smile. Rachael Dubrowski had not attended the funeral. With Zak still in the hospital, her shop wrecked, and the police investigating whether she had been illegally tattooing minors, she had chosen to stay away. Sammi would go and talk to her, eventually, to see if Rachael could forgive her for Sammi’s dragging her into the midst of such horror.

  If not, Sammi would survive. She could
survive almost anything, she had learned. One day soon, in a few weeks’ time, she would be playing guitar again, and all of her sorrow could be expressed in music. Until then, she would carry it with her and keep it close.

  “Your parents…,” T.Q. said.

  Sammi looked up and saw them, standing together under that black umbrella, rain spilling off the edges.

  “Nothing’s changed. They’re getting the divorce.”

  “Sorry,” Katsuko said.

  “Me too.”

  The three girls said their goodbyes and promised to call each other later. And they would, this time. But Sammi knew the time would come when such promises would not be kept. It was inevitable now. Blood and sorrow were what they shared now, and who wanted to be reminded of that?

  Sammi went to her parents. They stood together, but would be leaving in separate cars. She kissed her father on the cheek.

  “I love you, Dad. Thanks for coming.”

  He mumbled something in return, but Sammi wasn’t listening. She kept walking, let her mother catch up to her, and they climbed into the car.

  Linda Holland drove home in silence. Sammi knew her mother was giving her space, and she appreciated it. When she felt like talking, her mom would be there for her. Someday she might even tell her mother the story and explain the half-finished tattoo on her lower abdomen. Linda had been so terrified by coming so close to losing her daughter that she had not uttered a single word about the tattoo upon first seeing it. Sammi had told her they’d talk about it, soon, but she had a feeling her mother didn’t really want to know.

  As they turned up Washington Street, Sammi reached into the glove compartment for her cell phone. She’d left it in the car. Now she turned it on, and a soft jingle played.

  She had a text message.

  For a trembling moment, she feared that, somehow, it would be from Dante.

  The text had come from Adam.

  Saw the news, it said. I should’ve listened to u. So sorry. Can we talk sometime?

  Sammi hesitated a moment, then deleted it.

  Sometime, Sammi thought. But not today. Maybe not ever. Being with Adam would only remind her of all of this. If she was with him, she’d never forget it, just as with her friendship with the girls. She and Katsuko and T.Q. wouldn’t stay close for very long. It hurt too much. They would drift apart now. Dante’s poison had tainted everything, spread much further than even he could ever have known.

  Dante was still out there, somewhere, hurt but alive. She wished she had finished the job she had started with him, ended it once and for all. What troubled her most was the fear that he would feel the same, that he would be back someday.

  The shushing of the windshield wipers was broken by the distant, guttural roar of a motorcycle engine. The sound had come as though summoned by her thoughts, and she flinched. Sammi peered out the windows, searching the streets for the source of that familiar roar, but saw nothing.

  Only the rain.

  Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of many novels for teens and young adults, including the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, and the horror quartet Prowlers. His novels for adults include The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, and The Boys Are Back in Town. Golden cowrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the coauthor of the dark fantasy series The Menagerie, as well as the young readers fantasy series OutCast and the comic-book miniseries Talent, both of which were recently acquired by Universal Pictures.

  Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. There are more than eight million copies of his books in print. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

  Also by Christopher Golden

  FOR TEENS AND YOUNG READERS

  The Body of Evidence Series

  Body Bags

  Thief of Hearts

  Soul Survivor

  Meets the Eye

  Head Games

  Skin Deep (with Rick Hautala)

  Burning Bones (with Rick Hautala)

  Brain Trust (with Rick Hautala)

  Last Breath (with Rick Hautala)

  Throat Culture (with Rick Hautala)

  The Prowlers Quartet

  Prowlers

  Prowlers: Laws of Nature

  Prowlers: Predator and Prey

  Prowlers: Wild Things

  The Hollow Series

  (with Ford Lytle Gilmore)

  Horseman

  Drowned

  Mischief

  Enemies

  The OutCast Series

  (with Thomas E. Sniegoski)

  The Un-Magician

  Dragon Secrets

  Ghostfire

  Wurm War

  Force Majeure (with Thomas E. Sniegoski)

  Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Golden

  All rights reserved.

  Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-84897-1

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