by Lily Sparks
I hoist myself up to my feet, the knife still in my hand. The smell of smoke is getting stronger.
“Hey—” He stretches out his arms, grinning at me. “Come here. Come give me a stab.”
I stand there panting and cupping my sore throat, gritty from the sole of his foot.
“Come on!” He beckons with one hand. “Come on, little girl! Come stab me! Clear shot, right to the heart, have at it.”
I roll the handle of the bowie knife in my hands, holding it properly, and take a wary step toward him. His eyes are sparkling.
“It’s not a trick!” he sings out merrily. “I just know you’re too chicken to stab someone. I know that for a fact.”
I stumble toward him, gritting my teeth. Javier is in a cellar. Even if by some miracle he’s okay, and I don’t kill this guy, we’ll both be dead. This man is evil. He preys on girls. He brainwashes them. He’s built up a personal army of ruined lives.
Angel tips his head back, eyes closed, arms outstretched, a dopey smile on his face. It could be the drugs are making him act erratic. Or it could be complete contempt.
I grip the knife with both hands and raise it level with my face. I’m right over him. One down stroke and the knife goes into his heart. I stand there, trembling so hard my teeth chatter.
He peeks open one eye and starts hooting again.
“What stops you?” he asks, flabbergasted. “What in the world stops you?”
Nothing. Nothing will stop me. I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this.
I have to do this!
I bring the knife down through the air with all my strength, yelling out loud as the blade breaks his skin and buries itself in flesh, and then I spring away, unable to bear the sensations any longer.
I’ve buried the knife maybe three inches in his right shoulder. Because I couldn’t go for the heart.
Because I’m not a killer. I never was, I never will be. No matter what the Wylie-Stanton diagnosed me as. I am not the Girl From Hell. My fate is mine to choose. My knees buckle and I burst into tears of relief as the nightmare fears of a year release me at last.
And then Angel swings out and seizes me, his laughter echoing through the loft. His fingers tear at my flesh as he wrenches me toward him, the fabric of my sleeve ripping from the force.
“You poor little idiot.” He laughs, the knife still quivering in his shoulder.
He reaches up and takes the knife out of his shoulder with a swift jerk. Barely a flesh wound. He lays the blade flat against the fine hairs of my cheek, and slowly wipes his blood off on my skin. First one side, then the other, smearing stripes of blood across my face, his laughter in my ears as I try to twist my head away.
“Aww, are those tears? Were you crying at the thought of killing me?” he howls. “What could make anyone that stupid? That weak?”
My head falls back, and that’s when I see it. A dark shape silhouetted by the neon stars overhead. A shape like a shoulder, on a figure lying prone on the beam just above us.
Angel looks up, following my gaze, and as he does the figure drops, like a leopard leaping down on its prey from a tree.
I scramble back as they sprawl across the floor. Hot, orange light streams in through the space between the floorboards, and glowing curls of smoke drift around Erik’s face—Erik’s beautiful, focused face—as he knocks Angel to the floor, grabs Angel’s head with both hands and jerks hard to one side.
It takes both hands pressed to my mouth to keep from screaming as Angel rolls away, clearly shaken, his hands reaching for his neck.
Erik, all in black, waits for him to get up.
Standing but unsteady, Angel turns on Erik with a roar. Erik is ready for him, both arms out, his teen idol smile spreading across his face.
They circle each other the way we circled each other a moment before, but there’s no taunting or laughter from Angel now. An animal silence hangs between them, and Angel’s jerky feints forward, his quick, clumsy lunges, seem desperate across from Erik’s self-possessed calm. When he pretends to pounce, Erik doesn’t even flinch.
“Look, kid—” Angel starts in, and that’s when Erik strikes. He grabs Angel’s hand holding the knife and snaps Angel’s fingers backward while sinking his teeth—actually sinking his teeth—into the wound I made in Angel’s shoulder.
Angel lets out an agonized yell, and the knife clatters to the floor.
Everything happens very fast: Erik punches him, once, twice, three times hard in the gut, and while Angel struggles to get his breath back, Erik snatches up the knife and they grapple, Angel howling and snapping his teeth, Erik’s face utterly blank.
The smoke billows up from the first story, a gray veil rising between us just as Erik twists Angel on his back, and stray pieces of chaff light up as the hay behind me rips into flame. I spin around to see tongues of fire zipping up to the tall ceiling, then turn back to where they were fighting a moment before.
It’s just a wall of black smoke.
“Erik?!”
A figure all in black comes through the smoke, and I see his red, bloody mouth and, more horrible, the look in his eyes, and know he’s won.
“Signal!”
The flames roar behind us as more of the hay catches, and Erik reaches out his hand. The tendons stand out strangely in his wrist and neck, and down at his side he’s flicking the tightly held knife again and again on his pants, compulsively, and I understand that he is not yet done.
“Come here,” he says through gritted teeth.
The smoke from the fire sends my gauzy skirt rising in a white cloud around us as I step forward and take his hand. He spins me around, my back almost bouncing off his chest, and says something I can barely make out over the flames.
“I’m sorry—this is the only way—”
“Erik, what are you doing?!”
“Setting you free,” he answers, his mouth right against my ear, his arm crossing over my chest.
And with those words his knife slides into my neck.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wound Assessment
As the blade cuts through my flesh I kick backward. Go for his knee, his outer thigh. Remember what Javier told you, dig in with your elbows—stomach, instep, go!
In a fury of embarrassed rage, I stomp on his instep, dig my elbows backward, but he grips me tighter, the knife ripping deeper as I struggle, hot blood pouring down my shoulder.
“Signal, stop, I’m trying to help—”
Another stomp on his instep and I’m loose, running through the smoke, toward the window. And then, impossibly, Javier appears above me; he straddles the windowsill, lit up by the inferno below.
Javier twists the end of a rope to some kind of fastening under the tall square windowsill, then rappels down the wall, onto the steaming floor of the burning hayloft, lifting the collar of his shirt up over his mouth to screen the smoke.
“What took you so long?!” Erik calls to him. “Could you hold her, please?”
Javier’s expression is hidden behind his shirt as he grabs my arms and grips me like a vice. “Javier, NO!” I plead, choking on the burning air. He grabs my hair, yanks it into a tail and pulls my head to one side as Erik steps behind me.
“You got her?”
Javier’s voice, muffled: “Just hurry, all right?”
Erik’s fingers dig into the wound, right above my kill switch scar. My scream is lost in the sound of fire and something else, a knocking, a beating like a drum. Javier is saying something over and over I can’t make out, and the drum-like beating grows louder and fiercer.
“It’s out!” Erik bellows. “Take her and go! GO!”
Just as suddenly as he grabbed me, Javier releases me, and I turn to see Erik holding a chrome pill blinking like a firefly. He drops it between the broad planks of the floor, letting it fall into the fire below.
He’s cut out my kill switch.
I grab Erik’s arms, the fire behind him so bright I can’t make out his face.
/> “Signal, GO.” He yells before I can say anything, pushing me toward Javier.
CRACK!
The trap door flies open and the Heavenly Brides, faces streaked with ash, start pulling themselves up from the floor.
Javier’s hand closes around my arm and he pulls me toward the rope still swinging from the hayloft window.
“Erik! Come on!” I scream.
Javier pulls me up after him, up the rough timbers of the inside of the barn. I clutch at the rope, the gash in my neck still streaming as I climb. I get one arm over the windowsill and turn back around, wringing the blood from my open wound. I don’t care, I have to make sure he’s behind us.
“ERIK?!”
Below us the crowd of Angel’s followers have circled the end of the rope, their faces twisted masks of rage, their hands clawing out toward me, their shrieking at a fever pitch.
“Hell demon! Murderer!”
They want to pull me down and rip me to pieces, but they can’t, because Erik is crouched in a battle stance, knife out, ready to take them all on.
“ERIK!” I cry down to him. “Come on!”
But he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t take his eyes off them. What is he doing?! Even if he could fight them all, the room is a hell of fire and heat. I scream to Erik again, but Javier, who is now side-saddle on the windowsill, grabs me up and pulls me tight against his chest.
“NO!” I fight against him. “ERIK!” I need to climb back down, but Javier tilts forward and we fall into the night, but then somehow fly out and across at an angle, shooting over the ground in a low swoop that ends with us sprawling across cold grass far from the barn.
Javier had fastened the rope to a post fifty yards from the hayloft window, and used that as a zip line away from the burning building. The few cult members outside don’t notice us. They’re too busy trying to save the barn and members inside with a pathetic makeshift fire brigade. Javier tries to lead me toward the fence, but I tear myself away.
Panting and coughing, I hurl myself toward the barn, or what used to be the barn and is now just a raging red fire caged in black timbers.
“ERIK!” I sprint toward the barn, my voice breaking into a hoarse wheeze. “ERIK, PLEASE!” I try to yell, but it comes out like a seagull cry.
With a thunder crack the loft falls in on the first story, its timbers crumbling into piles of molten red jewels, a pillar of smoke soaring up through the night sky, flames roaring with a sound like applause as they swallow the barn.
“NO!” I scream, sobbing, fighting to free myself from Javier’s grasp. I bend in half over his arm, trying desperately to get loose.
“We have to go!” Javier coughs, dragging me away. “Signal, we have to go!”
Javier impatiently throws me over his shoulder and starts running for the back fence. I try to yell for Erik again but my voice is gone, it’s all gone.
Just outside the fence Ray is waiting, not with the bikes, but idling in the Volvo. Javier gets us into the back seat and before he’s even slammed the door shut Ray guns the motor and we fly across the moonlit field, the car bucking and jouncing over brush and clots of earth. Sobbing, I turn to stare at the column of smoke we’ve left behind.
“We have to go back!” I rasp.
“The cops are going to be here soon,” Ray yells. “Trust me, Jenny, you don’t want to stick around!”
“There’s no way we can help him now,” Javier says softly, rocking me in his lap. “This is what he wanted. He wanted you out.”
Javier gently lifts my blood-drenched hair from the back of my neck and I hear him suck his breath in through his teeth.
“Oh hell, man, what happened to her?!” Ray yells. “She needs stitches, man! We gotta get her to a hospital!”
“We’ll handle it in the room.” Javier carefully rips my torn sleeve off, balling it up and pressing it to the back of my neck.
Their voices seem far away. I keep seeing Erik, knife out, holding back the crowd so we could escape. I keep hearing the crack as the barn sank in on itself, the horrible red heat. I can’t bear to think of him in there. I can’t bear it.
* * *
Ray hands me a flask as I sit on the floor of the motel room, my white dress half scarlet from my blood.
“You’ll need it for the pain,” he says quietly.
I take the bottle from his hand, unscrew the top and tilt my head back. The alcohol sears my raw throat on the way down.
“What happened?” I wince. Javier threads a needle from a small hotel sewing kit and Ray peels off his bandanna, which is stiff with sweat, and lets out a heavy sigh.
“When I went out to get my bike, your friend Erik appeared out of nowhere. And I mean nowhere. I thought he was one of Angel’s followers at first, but he said he was with you guys and had your car parked down the road, and how could he help. I told him to give me the keys and I’d take the car around the back fence—it’d be an easier getaway than the bikes—and that you both were in the barn. He threw me the keys and took off. I walked the bikes past the fence, parked the car out back, and took a nap for a while. Still gotta go get those bikes,” he says pointedly to Javier. “After you get her sewn up, you can drive me and my buddy out.”
Javier, who has been holding the needle in the flame of Ray’s lighter all this time, pulls it away and shakes it, then hands the lighter back to him.
“Soon as I get this done,”
“Well.” Ray takes the lighter and stands, looking down on me uneasily. “I need a smoke.” He walks out, and Javier gently pinches the flesh together at the back of my neck.
“This is going to hurt.”
He tilts the flask over the wound and the burning makes me ball my fists, but it’s welcome. I absorb all of it but it’s still not enough to distract me.
“What happened with you?” I wheeze.
Javier’s needle breaks through first one and then the other side of my wound, and there is the itchy pull of thread dragging through skin as Javier explains.
“When I went out with Compass, she led me out to some cellar and called three guys over. They were trying to wrestle me down the stairs, and they probably would have, except Erik came out of nowhere. We ended up locking the four of them in there instead.”
He lets out a sigh and begins the second stitch.
“Erik told me then he’d driven out to an internet station to check in on some chat thread he had with Dennis, and they messaged back and forth. So the good news is, Dennis is still alive.”
“Oh, thank God!” I gasp. “Where is he? Is he safe?”
“Erik said after Dennis turned off your switch, he turned off his own and Nobody’s. But HQ caught on and started locking everything down, so he and Nobody cut their switches out, ditched their phones, and drove to LA. But the Director rerouted Jada and Kurt to go after them.”
Rage heats my face. Javier’s needle bites through my skin for the third time, and I feel the pinch as he gently pulls the stitch through.
“How could Jada and Kurt do that?” I wince.
“They didn’t have a choice,” Javier sighs. “It was either bring Dennis in or get their kill switches tripped. Dennis didn’t have time to turn off all of ours.”
He hands me the flask. “Have some more of this, you’re shaking too much.”
I choke down more. When I set it down it falls on its side, empty, and the room rocks gently around me.
“So then what? Go on.”
“Jada and Kurt are currently escorting Nobody and Dennis back to camp, but they agreed to look the other way while Dennis got online and explained what went down to Erik. They figured Erik needed to know, since Kate was getting the switches back online and would have them all up and running again in a few hours. So Erik cut his out, and came back to get yours.”
“What? Erik cut out his kill switch?” I’m so confused. “How? Dennis never turned off Erik’s kill switch.”
“Yes he did, yesterday, before we got to Ojai,” Javier says quietly. “When Denn
is told him you’d volunteered your kill switch, Erik insisted Dennis do his first. In case something went wrong.”
It’s like a punch to the gut. I cup both hands over my mouth.
“Hold still, hold still,” Javier says.
Erik volunteered his kill switch in my place. And I’d told him he didn’t understand real strength. That he didn’t know what it was to really help someone.
And he hadn’t said a word.
“Back at Owl’s Nest,” Javier goes on, “after the cellar, I filled him in on our plan. We snuck back around to the barn and heard you were upstairs. I knew I’d need a rope to get us out of the hayloft, since all the cult members were waiting for Angel to get done with you. I went to fix up the zipline while Erik tried to find a way in.” He swallows, hard. “You know the rest.”
It’s a while before I can speak.
“And the fire?”
Javier shakes his head. “When I was looking for rope around the barn, someone saw me. I knocked over one of the lanterns to distract them.” He snips the thread, and then there’s a sigh as he sits back against the bed. “It was my fault.”
I turn, very carefully, to stare at him.
“I thought they’d be able to put it out,” Javier says, not looking in my eyes. “I didn’t realize how fast everything … the hay and everything, you know, I didn’t know …”
“You didn’t mean to …”
“Of course not!” Javier cries angrily. I close my eyes, the room rolling around me. It’s tempting to just push it all on Javier. To absolve myself that way. It would be easier to pretend Javier caused Erik’s death than to that it’s all my fault.
Both our phones go off, and Javier picks his up. I reach for mine but he knocks it away.
“Hello? Director? Yes, it’s safe to talk. I’m fine but Signal … Signal is dead. Yes, that’s her phone. We left them in the room before going into the compound.”
He puts my phone down. It continues to ring beside me.
“Yes, Erik too. He came to help us out, I guess … In a fire, yes. I saw it myself. I can give a full, uh, debriefing or whatever when I get back. Okay. Really? Okay. Thank you, sir. We’ll speak again tomorrow.”
