Lost Girls(70)

“She’s not gonna make it,” one of the guys in the front said. “And nobody made any bids on her.”

“Take ’em up to the cabin, that’s what you said we should do,” the driver said.

“Changed my mind. We should get rid of her. But we don’t want any bodies laying around in the woods, drawin’ attention to our tradin’ spot.”

“True.”

“If we dump her in the city, it’ll look like a normal kidnapping.”

“Except she’s not dead yet. She could still talk if somebody finds her,” the driver argued.

“I can fix that.”

The van slowed and the whole time I was screaming, but it was a sound no one heard but me. Don’t hurt her, don’t leave her here, let us go, we won’t talk, we promise—

They were dragging her out into a thicket by the side of the road. She lifted her head one last time and glanced back at me, terror in her eyes. I wept and screamed until my throat was raw and I could only whisper, still I cried out.

One of our captors—the burly one with the slate-gray eyes and the pale skin—kicked her again and again. In the face and in the gut and in the chest. Until her frail body slumped back and forth like a duffel bag. Then, when she didn’t move anymore—when I still hoped that maybe there was still a flicker of life hiding inside somewhere—then they rolled her into a ditch. They wiped their hands on their shirts and they scraped their boots in the grass.

They were trying to wipe away her blood, but as far as I was concerned, it would never come out.

I saw their faces clearly then, in the headlights when they came back toward the van.

One, tall and slender, with pock-marked, bronze skin and thinning black hair.

The other, broad-shouldered, with pale skin and eyes like a tornado.

They were demons who needed to be sent back to Hell.

They kept me, helpless and bound, as they drove all of us up into the mountains, to a small hunting lodge where it took me two days to escape. Then it took me almost two weeks to climb down the mountain, careful to stay off the main trails and roads, knowing that they would be looking for me and that they had made a good deal for me—they were planning to sell me for more than any of their previous victims. I heard them bragging about it after the deal was made and my buyer was on his way up the mountain.

But my memories began to fade away as I blazed new trails across the San Gabriel valleys and crests, on my way home. No matter what happened, I knew I had to get home. But, as hard as I tried, by the time I made it to that ditch, that gully where I collapsed, too weary to climb onto the highway, even the thought of getting home was temporarily erased.

I collapsed in a ravine, just like Nicole, my body bruised and worn out, my clothes torn and bloody, the soles of my shoes worn out, and when that rain fell it washed away everything. At that point, the memory of Nicole’s death and our kidnapping and my escape were too horrific for my mind to hold on to. It all slipped away, like a shadow in the mist, waiting in the dark, until just the right moment to loom back into my line of sight.

.

Tonight was that moment.

Here and now.

When I remembered everything.

A long, deep breath pulled through my lungs, all of me feeling raw and bleeding and mangled, my soul black. But my mind was clearer than it had been in a long, long time because of that Pink Lightning.

I turned around slowly, away from that two-way glass and the visage of a stage that would be mine soon. Madison sat on a chair, her face bruised, her nose possibly broken. She lifted her chin, staring at me as if she wanted to know what was different about me now.

I ran my gaze over those two guards in the room with us, from one to the other, taking everything in. One of them I didn’t recognize. The other one had been in that van—he was slender, with dark, pock-marked skin, his hair black and his eyes darting away from the knowledge he saw inside me. And the man who had walked into the room last, the broad-shouldered brute with steely eyes—he kept his gaze steady and even, a grin widening on his face, as if he’d been waiting for this moment all along.

This was the moment we had all been waiting for—my therapist, my parents, my friends—when I would remember what had happened when I went missing. But none of us had expected it to happen when I was standing in the same room as the man who had murdered one of my closest friends.





Chapter Thirty-Seven


The world was beautiful and horrible, every inch of my body ready for battle and every synapse in my brain firing like it never had before. Step by step, I was being led toward the arena stage, Madison at my side. Lauren and the Man Who Had Murdered Nicole were somewhere behind me, their footsteps in tandem. The crowd cheered my name, my Swan Girl name, and clouds of white smoke billowed from the edges of the room.

Stars fell and worlds collided and civilizations were destroyed.

My body felt like it belonged to someone else, like it was being manipulated by remote control, like I was some kind of hero action figure being sent into a skirmish.

The worst part of it all was that I couldn’t wait to get up on that stage. I wanted to fight, I wanted to tear holes in the fabric of existence, I wanted to do surgery on Lauren’s face with my knuckles, I wanted to clutch her throat in my fist and watch as all her dreams slipped away, beat by rugged beat.

I wanted to leave her in a pool of her own blood, no one to help her.