Lexi flips it open and reads, “ ‘Felicia’s auburn hair cascaded over her dewy bosom.’ ”
I grab it away.
“Dewy,” Lexi snorts. “Seriously, you should write one of those. You could do better than that.”
I shake my head. “I’ve tried. But me writing about romance is like … like a blind girl describing colors she’s never seen.”
Lexi swallows a mouthful of pizza. “Don’t get all sad and dewy-eyed on me. You ready for a movie?”
I put Stormheart in my closet love library. “Go ahead and cue one up. I’ll be right back.”
I’m out in the hall when I realize she’s following me.
“I’m just going to the bathroom, Lexi. That’s kind of a solo act.”
“Okay. But let me check it out first. Make sure there’s nothing potentially dangerous.”
I can hear Mom downstairs in the kitchen, so I lower my voice.
“What am I going to do, scrub myself to death?”
“You never know. Your shadow’s pretty sneaky. Right now you really are your own worst enemy.”
Can’t argue with that. “I guess you’re right. After you, then.”
She leads the way and does a quick check of the medicine cabinet and the cupboard under the sink, confiscating scissors and the hair dryer.
“What, am I going to blow-dry my brains out?”
“Electrocution. You could fill up the tub and toss it in. Or stand in the toilet with it plugged in and drop it.”
“I think my craziness is rubbing off on you.”
“Okay. It’s clear now.” She’s like my very own secret service agent making sure the room is safe before I go in.
I close the door behind me and look at myself in the mirror.
Running my fingers through my hair, I unsnarl some knots, saying a silent goodbye to it all. My thumb finds the little dent where the nail entered, and the bumps left behind when they took out the stitches. It’s still just a tiny bit tender as I touch it, like the memory of a bee sting. The patch of scalp they shaved there is growing some hair again. I rub at the purple scar visible under that new fuzz, like I can erase it somehow.
After I pee, I’m washing my hands when I feel a rush of dizziness. As I brace myself on the sink, my reflection in the mirror goes blurry. What’s this? My eyes tearing up? I try to blink it away.
But no. It’s not tears messing with my focus.
The faucet’s still running. I want to splash some cold water on my face, but I feel stuck.
Hard to think. My head’s filled with fog. This feels wrong.
I try to call out, but can’t make a sound. I’m losing control.
I see everything from a distance, like it’s happening to somebody else. I can make out a shadowy blur; then my hands are moving, fingers working. And I hear the metal clink of something falling in the sink.
My ring.
Then I’m climbing. Up on top of the toilet. Reaching out and opening the small window above it. Pulling myself up and squeezing through.
I slip out onto the slope of the roof below the window. Into the cold and the wind. Crawling on wet shingles, over to the edge.
Is he going to make me jump? Throw myself off?
But my hands grip the rain gutter at the corner of the roof. I swing over the edge, climb down the metal pipe and fall the last few feet to the grass.
The fog in my head is so thick I can’t see a thing. He’s smothering my mind, knocking me out.
But I can feel myself standing up. My legs start moving, carrying me away.
Where are you taking me? I try to ask.
I’m picking up speed. Faster. It’s like running with my eyes shut.
Racing blind.
But where?
I snap awake standing in total blackness.
My lungs are burning, my legs aching. How long have I been running? How far?
Reaching out, I hit something rough and pull back. But it’s just tree bark. I can barely see my own hand in front of me, only a pale smudge.
My heart is thudding. All I hear is rain dripping from branches. Feeling around, I find thick trunks surrounding me and breathe in the smell of wet pine.
I try to make my way through the bodies of the trees.
How lost am I now? Where—
A scream rips through the night, freezing me up.
No. Not a scream. More like … a screech. Like a bird up in the branches above me.
Get a grip, Jane! Don’t lose it.
My eyes are adjusting to the blackness. I catch a faint light through the trees and follow it. I’m stumbling along in my torn wet socks, my feet so sore it feels like I’ve just run a marathon.
The stupid bird comes with me, making me flinch every time it calls out.
Everybody must be going crazy right now with me disappearing. If I can just make it to a phone somewhere, or even a road so I can figure out where I am.
Please! I just want to go home.
In my T-shirt and pajama bottoms, I hug myself against the cold and head for that glow.
The trees are thinning out. I stop at the edge of a clearing. The light’s coming from a small house. The windows are boarded up, but a glow leaks out through the cracks.
I wait and watch a minute, but nothing’s moving. No signs of life. I really don’t like this.
Now that my eyes are used to the dark, I notice something strange about that house. And I go stiff.
It has horns!
A trappers’ hut.
I know where I am.
Get out of here! Go!
The bird screeches down at me again. Can’t see it, but I know what it must be. A crow.
Blackjack.
Get out! Now!
Turning away, I’m hit by a blinding light. My hands fly up to shield my eyes.
“You lost?” asks a low voice, male.
A flashlight is aimed right in my eyes. Can’t see past its glare. I only get an impression of the man’s height, looming over me.
I back up into a tree trunk. It’s him!
Say something. “Y-yeah. Lost.”
“Where were you headed?”
“I was … just meeting up with my friend. Must have turned down the wrong road.”
A moment of silence goes by.
“Do I know you?” he asks.
“No. I—I mean, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve seen you somewhere. I never forget a face.”
“I really—really have to go. My friend’s waiting.”
I take a step away, but he moves with me.
“Hey, I know. You’re that cop’s daughter. Aren’t you? I saw your picture in the paper, and on the news.”
Damn! I can’t deny it or he’ll know something’s up.
“Yeah.”
“Right. Saw you on the news. You were there at the landslide, when they spotted the dead boy’s bones.”
“Yeah.” I step back and nearly trip over some roots. “Anyway, I should be going.”
“What are you doing way out here? In the middle of nowhere?” He doesn’t sound threatening, but almost friendly, like he’s making small talk.
“Just took a wrong turn.”
I start walking along the edge of the clearing, my hands out to feel my way past the trees.
“Lost, eh?” He follows along. “Why don’t you come inside? You can call your father.”
If I go in there I’ll probably never make it out again.
“No. Thanks.”
He keeps the light on me. Can’t see a thing. Which way to run.
“I can’t let you go like this. In the dark and the rain.”
“I’ll be okay.”
A few seconds pass with only my shaky breathing and racing heartbeat loud in my ears.
“You know, like I was saying, I’ve got a real memory for faces. Did you happen to be out at the ranger’s station yesterday?”
My heart squeezes tight. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Y-yeah.
Must have been somebody else.” My voice is breaking up.
“No, I don’t think so.” His voice is still calm and friendly. “You been following me?”
“No. No, of course not.”
Can I outrun him? Lose him in the trees?
“This place is way too far from anything for any kind of wrong turn. And you didn’t come down the wrong road, because there are no roads out here.”
I just shake my head. Go! Now!
“Funny thing,” he says. “You being there at the landslide when those bones showed up, then you show up at the station. And now you’re sneaking around here in the middle of the night, spying on the place.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think you’re lost.”
His grip on me tightens. He turns the flashlight off, and the night seems darker than ever.
“Please, I—”
Then something else flares to life in his hand, with a crackling blue light. A jagged electric flash.
Stun gun!
I try to pull away.
He hits me in the ribs with it. The shock rips through me like lightning. I go rigid. Muscles clenched tight.
Shaking wildly, I drop to my knees.
Falling, my head hits the ground hard. I lie limp.
But it feels like I’m still falling.
Down and
down and
down.
I wake up surrounded by blue light.
What is this? Where am I?
I ache all over, my head throbbing with my heartbeat.
I’m lying on my back with my shoulders pressed up against hard surfaces. Squeezed in tight. Trying to get my eyes to focus, I make out another flat surface right above, closing me in.
A coffin?
No. I’m not thinking straight. My head’s messed up.
Can’t be. Must be dreaming.
With that blue glow it seems more like a drawer. In a morgue!
No. Stop it! I shake my head, making it pound even harder. How did I get here? Where’s here? And what hit me? The last thing I remember—
The ranger! Catching me. The electric flash of the stun gun. The shock burning through me. I fell and kept on falling. Then—here.
In the morgue? A coffin?
My nightmares are coming true.
No. No. No.
Think! I blink my eyes into focus. Where’s that light coming from?
Reaching up, I’m able to extend my arm before my fingers touch what feels like stone above. It’s stone all around, the walls wedging me in.
With an effort I turn on my side and get to my knees. I stay hunched over, no room to sit up. I’m shaking real bad, and breathing fast.
There’s a strong chemical smell in the air. Like ammonia or some kind of cleaner.
Now I see what’s making that blue light. It’s a long fluorescent tube on the wall. In the glow I can make out the rest of this cramped space. From where I’m crouched at one end, it’s about eight feet to the other end, where there’s a pile of blankets heaped up.
This is like some kind of jail cell. A cage made of concrete. What’s going on?
Sorry.
I stiffen up at the voice in my head. Leo. I feel that familiar shiver. He’s here with me.
“You did this! You brought me here.”
I didn’t want to do it like this.
“Get out of my head.”
I tried to make it quick. And painless. But you always fought it.
Scanning this cell, I spot something on the ceiling. Looks like a hatch. A way out.
I crawl over beneath it. The hinges must be on the other side. It’s just a flat metal plate. I try shoving it open, but it doesn’t budge. So I scramble onto my back and push up with my feet. Nothing.
It won’t work. You can’t get away.
I hold back from screaming my lungs out. I don’t want to get Starks’s attention.
It won’t be long.
“Shut up!”
He won’t keep you. You’re not what he wants. He only likes boys.
There are no cracks around the edges of the hatch, no way to see what’s up there.
“What is this place?”
He calls it the pit. It’s where he breaks you.
I swallow back my panic. I can’t fall apart now. Just keep talking.
“Like the way he broke you?”
Silence. Is this how Starks turned the smiling Leo on the MISSING poster into the creature he is now?
Think, Jane! Nobody’s coming to save you. If only I still had my ring. They’ll be searching for me, but won’t have any idea where to look. I don’t even know where I am. How long was I running blindly? How far? The middle of nowhere, Starks said.
No. I’m on my own.
I reach out to touch the light, but it doesn’t give off any heat.
My shadow finally did it. Leo never could manage to kill me himself, so he delivered me to a pro to do it for him.
I shudder, leaning back against the wall.
Then I hear something. Holding my breath, I stare at the hatch. Is Starks up there? Coming back for me?
There it is again. A rustling sound. So close.
But not from above.
I catch movement over by that heap of blankets at the other end of this pit. There’s something under there.
What? Mice? Rats? Or worse?
What am I locked in here with?
I scramble back as far as I can, pressed against the wall in this corner of the cell. Shaking and panting. Bracing myself. A scream rising in my throat.
Something comes out from beneath the blankets.
My heart seems to stop.
I see hair. Eyes. A face. It looks corpselike in the blue glow.
“Help me,” it says.
The pit.
This is where he breaks you.
Billy Hughes knows that better than me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, after he told me his name.
“Don’t know. What month is it?”
“January. The thirtieth.”
“Still January? Last day I remember was the tenth.”
Nearly three weeks for Billy. But not always down here.
“What’s up there?” I asked.
He went silent for so long then, I didn’t think he was going to answer. The eerie blue light made him look frozen and half dead.
“Bad place,” he mumbled finally. “Bad things.”
It took a while getting it out of him. This cell is hidden under the floor of a small house. The trappers’ hut.
I made him describe it to me, down to the smallest detail he could remember, so I could build a mental image of the layout. Where the door is, the boarded-up windows. There’s a woodstove, a table, a long workbench with all kinds of tools.
I kept him talking for a while. It seemed to calm him a bit, and helped keep my own panic from swallowing me up.
Billy Hughes is from Mill Valley, farm country in the interior, a long way from Edgewood. He’s thirteen. Same age Leo Gage was when he was taken.
“How did you end up here?” I asked. He stayed quiet on me a long moment. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want.”
“I should’ve run,” he whispered. “I would’ve, but the bird stopped me.”
Billy was walking home from the grocery store on a back road in the valley when a truck drove past him. He was just a half mile from his family’s farm. The truck went over a hill and out of sight. When Billy got to the top of the hill he saw that the truck had pulled over to the side. There was a tall bald man in a strange uniform standing beside it, looking up into the trees. “Lost my bird,” he said. “He’s big and black. You seen him?”
Billy just shook his head and kept on going. Then he spotted it, hopping out from the underbrush onto the road straight ahead. A crow, dragging one wing in the dirt.
“That him?” Billy called back to the man.
“Yeah, that’s Blackjack,” he said. “Looks like he’s hurt. Don’t let him get away.” The b
ird kept hopping, toward the far side of the road, so Billy rushed to cut him off. The crow stopped right at Billy’s feet, one wing hanging limp.
“Don’t scare him off,” the man told him. “Don’t move. Does it look like his wing’s broken?”
Billy was staring down at the bird when the man reached him.
“Then it was like I got hit by lightning,” he said. “I saw a big flash. Felt like burning under my skin. And … I woke up here. But it wasn’t lightning. He’s got an electric gun.”
“I know. It’s a stun gun. That’s how he got me too.”
Lexi was right. Starks uses the crow as a lure. The Amazing Blackjack knows a lot of tricks.
“What’s with this blue light?”
“He says it’s a special kind of light—ultraviolet. It kills germs. He likes things clean.”
That explains why it stinks of ammonia in here.
Billy quit talking after that. Now he’s just crouched under the hatch. I won’t press him to tell me what’s happened to him since he got caught—really don’t want to know. His own MISSING poster must be buried somewhere in Dad’s task force files, with all the other lost kids and runaways.
I hug my knees to my chest, trying to conserve body heat.
If it was just me alone in here I’d be freaking out of my mind by now. I don’t know, maybe it’s being a cop’s daughter, but I feel like I have to step up and take charge for both of us. So I tell him what must be my worst lie ever.
“Hey, Billy. We’ll get out of this. Just hang in there.”
“I’m never getting out,” Billy mumbles. “Gonna die here.”
Then he retreats to his end of the pit.
My turn to go silent. I’m trying to believe my own lie. There’s got to be some kind of chance. Look at how many times I’ve cheated death. The odds were always against me. Like Lexi says, I’m the girl with nine lives. So maybe I’ve got one more life in me. Have to fight for it.
I run through all the self-defense moves Dad ever taught me. Eye gouges, throat chops, head butts, kicks, bites, punches, elbows and knees. Whatever it takes to survive, he said. I remember the moves, but that was all so easy back in the community center, practicing on a man-shaped dummy that didn’t fight back. Starks is more than a foot taller than me, with a longer reach and a stun gun. I don’t have anything to use as a weapon—no keys, pen or nail file. All I’ve got is me.
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