Nine hours later, Katie woke up to the heartless buzz of her alarm clock with possibly the worst headache she’d ever had. The hours she had been asleep were among the best she’d ever had. Nine hours of solid sleep uninterrupted by dreams – well, none that wee scary enough to remember. So that was good. It would have been too much to ask to wake up feeling refreshed and in tiptop condition, she supposed. Typical. But her headache would fade away once she started doing something. It felt like a too-much-sleep one anyway. Figuring that an extra tem minutes couldn’t hurt, Katie slapped the snooze button and rolled over, falling straight back to sleep. So it was a bit of a shock to find her alarm buzzing again what felt like a minute later. She shoved an arm out and flailed an arm around, trying to turn the thing off once and for all. That only succeeded in sending the alarm clock crashing to the floor and the buzzing winding down like a warped cassette. Well, it was one say to shut the noise up. Katie pulled the covers over her head, wanting to both hide from the cold outside and mentally prepare for it. Inch by torturous inch, she slid the covers down her face.
“Katie!” someone yelled up the stairs, sounding louder than it should. Two reasons for that. First, her bedroom door was open. Second, her headache made even her own breathing sound like being caught in a wind tunnel. “You planning to go to college today?”
”No.” Because she didn’t plan on it. Planning should involve only things she wanted to do – yeah… wishful thinking. But everybody knew that she would.
“Okay. Say goodbye to your scholarship.”
That got Katie out of bed fast. Just the thought of being chucked out of the academy and being forced to slink back to her parents house admitting she couldn’t make it on her own was more than enough to propel her into action. Going back was… it was going back. Back to being scared to leave her own house, back to the sixth form at Arthur Claymore High where the teachers had all known her since she was eleven, back to being pitied and protected until she wanted to scream. No. Katie definitely wanted to stay here where nobody knew or really cared about her past and where her mistakes were her own. Telling Mom and Dad she was moving back because she wasn’t really ready for this much independence would not fill them with confidence when she decided to try again. They would always be expecting the worst.
It was then, as she rummaged through the medicine cabinet for painkillers that she realised she was still wearing last night’s clothes. She had been so tired when she finally got back that she had fallen right into bed fully clothed. Rumpled and a bit skanky but with a change of underwear and plenty of deodorant Katie decided she could squeeze another day out of them.
“Morning, Sleepy.”
“Morning, Dopey,” Katie yawned back and slid into a chair at the kitchen table. The lemon yellow walls seemed just a bit too cheerful this morning and, as appetising as the honey sweetened Reddy Brek Adam put in front of her looked, every mouthful was a chore.
“Too tall to be a dwarf. Shortcake.” Although, Katie was fast catching Adam up in the height stakes. While she might never quite reach his lofty six two, she was going to end up model tall. She’d already grown half an inch since moving here.
“Lainy?”
“Bed. It was a tough day yesterday. I told her I could handle you pair for one morning.” Male domesticity was always doubtful. Adam had always seemed competent though. “Look, I don’t know what you think happened but it wasn’t… it wasn’t what you think.”
Oh, it’s exactly what I think. Katie knew what had happened in that room but letting that slip would not do anyone any good right now. She remained non-committal. “Oh. What do I think happened?”
“You know I would never do anything to hurt Lainy or any of you guys, don’t you? You believe that?” This was the closest to begging Adam had been. It was a bit heartbreaking to watch. “Things just got out of hand. She started crying and then things just started flying around. I didn’t do anything and it’ll never happen again.”
“Won’t it? You can promise that?”
“Katie, I promise I’ll never hurt her.”
“You can’t protect me- her,” she corrected as quickly as she could. “You can’t protect her forever. You might want to, probably think it’s for the best, you’ve got her best interests at heart. But she needs to hurt sometimes. She needs to feel the pain and work it out in her own way. And if that means not talking about it and smashing up everything in this house... then they’re only things.” Expensive things, true, but she reckoned this house was mostly designed by Ikea. Not exactly the top of the financial spectrum.
“I don’t know what I can do to help. Is there a girl code for emotions?”
“Chocolate, tissues and hugs. And strictly no talking.” So, exactly the opposite of what she was offered by the police and their damn counsellors – basically drug reps for Valium.
“That’s what you wanted isn’t it?” Adam asked. “That’s how you wanted to – needed to – deal with things. But they didn’t let you.”
“”Talking didn’t help. And they never caught the bastard anyway.” Kate pushed her bowl away. “Insufficient evidence, they said. I still have the God damned pictures they took!” A pause as she allowed the sudden flare of anger to die down. Was she ever going to stop feeling angry about it? It wasn’t even the attack that hurt the worst – it was the way she had been treated afterwards. And she would never forgive her attacker for subjecting her to that. “Against my will I talk, I held still for tests, I relived every second of that…” (rape) “… that ordeal over and over again.”
“If things had been different, would you still have come here?”
That all depended on whether Katie would have been offered a place under other circumstances, but probably not. There would not have been the desperate need to escape her once-safe little bubble of existence now ripped apart. She could be looked after and unchallenged at every turn… and really, really bored.
Adam took her thoughtful silence as a cue to change the subject. Or, at least, to go back to the original one. “I meant to say thanks. For helping yesterday.”
“Glad I could.”
“I’ve never seen Lainy get that out of control. It scared me a little bit to be honest.”
“She’s never lost two kids before,” Katie pointed out, assuming the fact.
The clock told Katie she was going to miss registration if she didn’t hurry and ditching in the first week didn’t really hold much appeal. “I’m already late. Taking your bike.” It had been just over a year since she had ridden a bicycle, having outgrown the red BMX she had ridden every day for four years and handed it down to Dan, but it was true what they said. You never forgot. It wasn’t quite as exhilarating as it used to be but that was likely due to not having traffic to dodge. Balancing her heavy backpack at the same time made it almost as much fun but she only fell off once. She glanced around the grounds outside the academy as she cycled through the gates. One or two security-conscious students had chained their bikes to the chainlink fence but most just leaned them against the wall or stood them in the racks by the corner. Nobody else seemed to be that bothered about keeping their things safe. Perhaps they didn’t really need to worry. Katie couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have that much faith in her peers. She was too used to having to nail everything down so no-one nicked it. But that was modern society. Sucked. Better off out of it.
“Cartwright… Cartwright… Miss Cartwright?”
It took Katie a few long moments to remember she was Miss Cartwright and suddenly looked up to answer. Big mistake. The sharp movement sent a bolt of icy pain behind her eyes and shocking out through her brain. “Sorry, sir. Here.” She was too pre-occupied by this headache to more than half-listen to Mr Conroy finish listing names and reminding the class to quietly continue with any work they could be doing while he attended to the older half of the group… Katie fumbled through her bag and mad
e an impressive dent in her maths work. A brief flick through revealed the rest of the book to get much harder very quickly but it was probably no worse than her GCSE work had looked at first glance. She managed to sit through an hour of art while the teacher rambled on about some brilliant artist of the1700s she had never heard of, then her first sports science session grabbed attention. It wasn’t hard to dismiss the nuisance in her head when she was interested in a subject, but as far as it dulled, it never quite went away. Lunch was the first chance she had to drop the smile that felt like a vice on her skin. It wasn’t a bad headache as far as pain went. No woodpeckers trying to get out of her skull. Just a kind of light, cool pressure all over.
“You look like shit,” Katie muttered to her reflection as she used her compact mirror and hair rush.
“You look like shit.”
“I’m fine, thanks for asking, Leo. Wait… you didn’t.”
“About last night… you got shot.”
“Did I? Well, I never knew that.”
“You don’t get it.” There were too many people within earshot for this conversation. Not that the other kids were likely to listen to them, or care if they did, but even so… he grabbed Katie by the hand and tugged her over to a marginally quiet. Not that quiet here resembled quiet anywhere else.
Katie clung to her table for as long as she could. “I’ll lose my seat.”
“You’re not eating.”
“My bag?”
“You think any of these losers wanna steal a load of textbooks and tampons. Come on.” Oh, that was just so wrong for Leo to be saying.
Oh, Christ, she did not want to be having this conversation with him right now. Or ever, actually. Call it more a bad feeling than physical dread.
“You got shot, right. Messed up but it happens.”
“Either I’m an accident magnet or God hates me.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her and almost smiled. Almost. He was far too grouchy to ever crack a proper Cheshire Cat grin. “You were shot. There’s no blood, no scar, nothin’. It ain’t right, Katie, ain’t right at all.”
“Name one thing in this place that is right.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, stopping just short of grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. One invasion of her personal space was enough for today – another was likely to send Katie screaming bloody murder. “Your life has been threatened so many times in less than three weeks and you act all ‘okay, whatever’ about it.”
“I’ve got a monster headache, Leo. I haven’t got the energy to give a crap so tell me… how should I react?”
“Act like this is serious,” he ordered. “Your friend put a bullet through your head.”
“Our friend.”
“Whatever. You’re sure it was Jaye?”
Katie thought about things. This pressure in her head had started right after she had been shot and it felt like it was spreading slowly. No scarring, no shattered skull or damaged grey matter. No damage anyone could see but what had it done to her insides? The bullet had been a ghost bullet, Jaye had said, when she could have easily taken physical form and used the real thing. It seemed that it had the same qualities as a Shade and could pass through anything solid without making any bodily impact.
“Is this guy annoying you?”
Katie glanced up. And up. She only knew one person here who was that tall and sure enough, it was the red haired young man who had helped her yesterday. He turned to Leo. “She’s a kid, dude. Back the hell off.”
“She can take care of herself.”
“Sure she can. Sure she’d do it a lot better without you in her face too.”
Leo shrugged. Maybe Katie would find things a lot easier if he wasn’t at her side all the time, wanting to know what she was up to. Well, he was only trying to help. And he knew Katie wasn’t exactly happy about any of this – just doing her best to hold it all together when any lesser person would have had a full-on breakdown. Accepting help obviously didn’t come easy to the girl but God she needed it. And if being a Christian wasn’t about helping people, whether they appreciated it or not, then he was in the wrong religion. “We’re just talking. Cool it.”
“Talking. Talking does not leave bruises.”
Katie looked down at her arm. Tiny red patches were darkening where Leo had held on to her. She bruised quite easily on her arms anyway, the limbs not being quite as road-hardened as her legs, but the marks were the least of her worries.
Filled with a sudden need to get out of this confrontation, Katie slipped past them without either noticing, grabbed her bag and rushed outside. Air. Cool, clean air. And it was everywhere. Now that the chaos of the cafeteria was not masking her headache, she realised how bad it still was. Katie set her back down on a bench under a tree, popped a couple more paracetamol and dry swallowed them. Urgh! Disgusting things. She wondered if Leo and the tall one had finished their fight, and then if it had remained a war of words of had devolved into fisticuffs. Much as the idea of two men fighting over her appealed, it would be a distraction she could do without. Too hard to explain both here and at home. But it would keep him out of the way for a while… that was important somehow. A few minutes before she had to head to her next class, Katie locked herself in the nearest toilet and looked in the mirror. She was pale, lined and shadowed by painful memories. The girl staring back could not be Katie. And yet, it was. All she wanted was to forget the trauma of the last fortnight had ever happened and carry on trying to carve out a life for herself. Just be an ordinary girl on a running scholarship. But however screwed up this town was, it was hers and it was home.
She filled the sink with freezing water and splashed it all over her face, trying to shock herself into life. It helped a little. A memory of the previous night descended. Katie was looking down at her eerily still body on the floor of Shimma, feeling a wind from the open fire door. Only she wasn’t there. Not really. Jaye was pointing a still-smoking gun at the air where Katie would have been standing. The grin she gave, the words she said, they were all too careless. They were all wrong. The shot Katie’s eyes started fluttering and began to roll back in her head. She fought an impulse to sink to the ground and try to help, reminding herself that this was just a replay and she knew everything turned out alright. It was hard to convince herself that she wasn’t just watching herself die but she had to force it to the back of her mind. She tried to focus on Jaye but it only made it harder to believe that she had been shot through the head by the girl she had thought was her best friend.
“Ghost bullets,” Jaye said and backed off. For the briefest of instants there was a flash of something so completely and utterly horrified at what she had done. Then that emotional centre shut down and an unseeing hardness settled back over her.
Katie drifted after her. There were metal steps leading up the side of the building but Jaye was going around the side of the club. She glanced back at her physical body, still and pale, and told herself somebody would come. “Does Dina really mean that much to you that you’d kill for her?”
“What do you think?” Jaye replied. A question for a question.
“Well done. She’d be very proud.”
“Find them. Find where they’re all hiding and take me there. I know you can do it.”
“Why do you have to go there? I can find her. I’ll bring her back Jaye, you know I will.”
She smirked. Jaye knew that too. She took a step back and gripped one of the railings of the fire escape. She reached a hand out and gently pressed the spot in the centre of Katie’s forehead, smiled the sparkly Jaye smile and then her teeth turned from enamel to metal shiny and grew points. And then this daydream world blipped away and Katie was back in the bathroom, frowning in the mirror. She put a hand to her face and checked everything was still where it should be. The reflection didn’t seem entirely trustworthy. She didn’t even fully believe that there
wasn’t a perfect round hole blasted through the centre of her forehead until her fingers poked and prodded it. Then something even more unexpected than sinking her fingers into the front part of her brain happened. Her eyes went completely black and shot through with purple streaks. Even when she took her hand away, the dark, inhuman eyes remained. Information began to clamour for entrance into her mind but Katie blinked before she realised that and her eyes went back to their ordinary dull brown.
“How is she?” The moment she asked that question of Mr Bayliss, Katie wished she could take it back. It was a stupid thing to say but hospitals didn’t really seem to bring out the best in her.
Mr Bayliss, to give him his due, didn’t seem to have taken her words on board, merely the fact that she was here and she had said something. Hours of nothing but beeps and buzzes probably made a guy glad of any human contact. “Waiting. It used to drive Dina crazy, you know. Waiting for the exam results over summer was worst, she always said. I thought coming out to visit me might help but the day her exams finished, she wanted the results. She did brilliantly, I knew she would, but she said waiting was the worst part. Even if she’d failed, she wanted to know straight away. At least it’d be over then.”
A breeze of understanding touched her face. Was it the waiting to die that had driven to do this? According to Jaye, she had known when and where it was going to happen, and she definitely knew that she was coming back. But rhyme and reason were not things she could afford to worry about. Getting Dina back, if not completely fit and healthy again then at least back in this world and not lost in the End Place and standing on the edge. A realisation had come over her as she had been watching herself working the cross trainer to its limits in the huge mirrored wall at the gym. She had already figured out that getting Dina back would likely bring Jaye back home too. And she knew where the spirits were – or, at least, where they had been last time. Touching her head where the ghost bullet had buried itself deep inside activated some kind of sixth sense. It sent her eyes black and lined with purple every time, and she could see things. Things no person was ever mean to see. Things like dark clouds of energy, roughly humanoid in shape, lined up at the edge of a cliff. Only there was no sea or city below this cliff. Just a pit of nothing – a nothing which smelt of fire and blood and hate. Hate had never had a smell for Katie before.. a look and a horrible slimy feel sure, but she could add a bitter, acidic smell to that list. Every once in a while, the darkest of the shadows would move backwards and the closest Katie could come to describing it was that they just stepped off the edge and fell into that nothing. She had seen it happened twice, out of the thousands she could see crammed onto that clifftop of nightmares and the snail speed of it made the event all the more horrifying when it happened. There was silence when the dark shapes fell, a hush of respect or terror of please don’t let me be next and it was the worst silence she had ever heard.
Things like Dina against a backdrop of storm clouds and screams – a scene Katie recognised all too well because it had nearly been the last one she ever saw. She held her hand out into the angry storm, one foot in that world and the other on the calm grass leading to the cliff. The cloudless, blue sky of perpetual spring on the cliff spoke of perfection and tranquillity and she saw Dina suddenly step back into the figurative arms of the dark clouds of energy, buying into the dream it was showing her. Did she really believe this was some kind of Paradise?
Welcome to the End Place. It will be your turn soon.
Katie had woken from her vision with only one thing in her mind. She couldn’t let Dina be next.
She walked over to the girl in the bed, only distantly aware that she was now alone and not really minding because she would have done this whether anyone had been there or not – it no longer felt like something in her control, or something that could be put off until later. Katie glossed over the chair and knelt at the bedside, taking Dina’s hand in hers. If anything it felt even thinner and more breakable than a few days ago. If being in a coma was doing this to her body then what might it be doing to her mind? Her soul?
“I’m trying to get to you, Dina. I thought I found you but…”
You were so close. You were there, standing right next to us.
“Then, why couldn’t I feel you? I dreamed you were there.”
And we were. We are. But then she came looking for us and we had to hide. He hides us. He gave us shelter when she started searching.
“She?” There had been a hundred or more people at the club last night. She could be any one of them, but… “Jaye?” A low crackle like static buzzed in her head and Katie was sure this was the sound of Dina thinking – whatever mechanical process passed for thought in her drugged out state.
Not exactly. She is just… wearing her.
“I don’t understand.”
We know. And we wish we could explain it all to you, there’s so much you need to know, but there are rules here. There isn’t time.
“Dina, where are you?”
Too close. No-one said it would be like this.
The mix of voices fell apart and rejoined over and over as the next part came out. It was confusing for Katie to hear. Trying to understand each of these voices putting their contributions forward was a little disorienting but she knew that ignoring a single syllable would be a very bad idea.
Find us…
Thinnest part of your world…
It hurts…
Standing on the edge…
Too young to fall…
Know you can…
The possibilities…
Get to us first…
Don’t trust her…
You can’t give up…
Need rescue...
No-one tries…
Just don’t look down…
A rush of wild power hut Katie like an invisible lightning bolt and she rocked back on her heels. She was glad she hadn’t been sitting on the chair because a concussion on top of this headache would be just what she needed. “I’m coming, Dina. I’m coming.” At least she already knew where she was going this time, even if she had no idea what to do once she got there.
Please hurry. Time is running out.
Chapter nine
Circle of Arms (The Shades of Northwood 2) Page 8
