The Hearts We Sold(19)

He would not waste this opportunity. After all, every heartbeat could be his last.

Turned out, he was more right than he knew.





ELEVEN


G remma returned from spring break in a rumpled, mascara-smudged state. She made a sound like a dying animal when Dee turned on her bedside lamp.

“Sorry,” said Dee, and flicked off the light. “How was your spring break?”

“Not very memorable.”

“Because nothing happened or because you don’t actually remember what happened?” asked Dee. Part of her took a perverse delight in her roommate’s suffering.

Gremma blinked, as if she didn’t know quite how to answer.

Dee said, “Is that ketchup or blood on your shirt?”

Gremma glanced down. “Not mine.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Ignorance,” said Gremma, with as much dignity as she could muster, “is a good policy.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead, as if she was trying to hold her brain together. “Next year, we stay in.”

“We?”

Gremma’s fingers eased apart, and one eye slid over Dee, disconcertingly perceptive. “You look more hungover than I am. So you went out? Met some people? Did something crazy?”

Dee considered several answers before saying, “Ignorance is a good policy.” Her fingers went to the soft yarn of the knitted heart in her pocket.




The average resting heart beats between sixty and ninety times a minute. It varies from person to person, depending on age and fitness level. Dee knew her own resting heart rate had been around seventy—she’d had to take her own pulse during her last gym class.

Dee spent hours sitting with the knitted heart tucked into the crook of her elbow. With her left hand, she kept two fingers on her throat. Waiting, searching. For that familiar flutter of sensation, for any hint of movement.

But there was nothing.

She tried not breathing. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but something about it felt wrong. Stasis, the demon had said. Her body would simply go on without her heart. But did that mean all her other systems were frozen? What about going to the bathroom? Eating? Was she going to spend the next two years without her period?

Actually, that might not be so bad.

But there was a sense that something vital had been taken from her. Which it had. She felt strangely hollow.

Two years. Two years of this.

Two years, and then her life was utterly her own.

That thought calmed her when nothing else would. She would never have to worry about going home, about cramming herself into tiny nooks, hoping to remain unnoticed, would never have to force herself to look down and swallow so many hurtful words that her stomach was always in knots.

And with this hollowness came something else—buoyancy. She felt lighter without her heart, without the throb and pulse of it.

It was easy to slip into old routines, to ignore the knitted heart shoved in her purse and the deadened sensation in her chest. She could tell herself everything was fine, everything was normal, and there were stretches of time she actually believed it.

It felt as if everyone should have known just by looking at her. Dee spent her classes feeling oddly conspicuous, waiting for someone to touch her and realize. Surely something like this left a mark on a person, some indelible sign that some part of her was missing.

A week after her encounter with the demon, she woke to a strange text from an unknown number. It contained a bank account and password. When she checked the balance online, she let out such a curse that she woke Gremma from a sound sleep.

Perhaps the demon didn’t know how much schools cost these days, because he’d overshot it a bit.

All right. He’d overshot by a lot.

Brannigan was paid for.

So was college. And possibly her first year of grad school.

But she would be damned—if she wasn’t already—before she informed him of his error. She stared at those numbers and thought: This is how much a human heart is worth.

Dee picked up the scrap of paper James had given her at the hospital. She knew Portland well enough to recognize the address’s general location—Pearltown, an odd place for a demon to make its lair. Somehow she had thought this paper would lead her to a sewer or a castle.

It was a Saturday. She had a signed permission slip that allowed her off campus on weekends—she had forged her mother’s signature herself. If she wanted to check out this address, she might as well get it over with.

“I need to get out of here,” said Gremma, as if hearing Dee’s thoughts. She was sprawled across her bed, a chemistry book before her. “You want to come get coffee with me?”

Dee hesitated.

“Can’t,” she said. “I’ve got errands to run.”

“And you can’t make time for a teensy coffee with your roommate in between whatever you’re doing?”

Dee didn’t bother to think about it. “Nope.”

Gremma rolled over. “You’re heartless sometimes.”

Dee snorted out a laugh. She snagged her purse and her bus pass and hurried out of the room.




The address did not lead to a sewer. Nor a dark tower, a castle, or a cave.

It was one of those warehouses—the kind that had been converted into apartments for young up-and-comers. There was a food truck parked on the opposite curb, and a man in a custom suit held the door for Dee when she walked into the building. It was clean, neat, and everything she had not expected. She took the stairs, too keyed up to stand still in the elevator.