The Merciless (The Merciless #1)(29)

Without hesitating, she wraps her fingers around the pen and drives it into her leg.

“Shit!” Brooklyn screams. A dark circle of blood appears on her jean shorts. Tears spring to her eyes, and she throws her head back against the pillar, sobbing. She pushes the pen into my hand, and I immediately wrap my fingers around it, trying not to feel ill. I can’t bring myself to look down at the blood staining the pen’s tip.

“Oh my god!” Riley shouts. She’s at my side now and watches the blood spread across Brooklyn’s leg, her eyes bright—proud.

“She tried to escape,” I lie. “As soon as you went for the staircase, she started pulling at her ropes.”

Riley presses her lips into a thin line and squeezes my shoulder. It simultaneously comforts and disgusts me. “I knew we could count on you.”





CHAPTER ELEVEN


My grandmother told me about an exorcism she went to once. She was very young, at a small country church in Mexico. A five-year-old boy was brought before the congregation. He’d cut the skin on his arms to ribbons using a straight pin he found in his mother’s sewing kit, and he spoke in a language no one knew. The priest spent the entire day dousing the boy with holy water and saying prayer after prayer for his salvation. The day grew late, and most of the congregation left. But my grandmother and her mother stayed and prayed over their rosaries to give the priest and the boy strength.

My grandmother’s voice—strong and deep before she got sick—always got quiet when she told the next part of the story:

“The boy, he tembla—trembles—and he cries in pain,” she’d say in her shaky English, grabbing and motioning with her hands as she spoke, like she was trying to pull the story from the air. “His eyes glow red, and he falls to the ground, and he screams. When he opened his eyes, mija, they don’t glow anymore. We knew he was saved. Free.”

I turn my grandmother’s words over in my head while Brooklyn howls in pain. I think of how her leg gave way beneath the pen’s sharp tip and my hands quiver. Footsteps echo across the floor.

“Oh my god. What happened?” Alexis asks. Grace hovers behind her, keeping to the farthest corner of the basement.

“Brooklyn almost got away, but Sofia stopped her,” Riley explains. “We can’t stop now, not when she’s weakening. Let’s pray.”

Alexis reaches for Riley’s hand, but Riley takes mine instead. “Alexis, can you pray over Brooklyn? I want Sof next to me.”

Jealousy flashes across Alexis’s face, but it’s gone in an instant. “Of course,” she says. “Whatever you think is best.”

Riley tightens her hand around mine. She sees me as one of them now. Brooklyn whimpers, and I glance up, meeting her eyes. Even now her pupils seem to glow red.

Grandmother’s low, gravelly voice echoes through my head.

“The boy, his eyes glow red, and he falls to the ground, and he screams. . . .”

Cringing, I look away. It’s just the candles, nothing more.

Alexis closes her eyes and starts speaking in another language. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis,” she whispers, swaying. The Latin sounds strange when spoken in her Southern accent.

Brooklyn writhes on the floor below her. Her eyelids flicker open, but she rolls her pupils so far back that all I see are the whites. I’m reminded, again, of the boy who shook and trembled while my grandmother and her mother recited the Lord’s Prayer in that empty church. Then Brooklyn snickers, breaking the spell.

“She’s screwing with us,” Riley says. She grabs the backpack and pulls out a pack of matches. A cold finger of fear traces down my spine.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Trust me,” she says. She strikes a match, and for a moment we’re all quiet. The sulfur lights, shooting blue sparks from the tip before the fire deepens to a flickering red-orange. Riley turns the match in her fingers, and its flame reflects in her dark eyes.

She throws it at Brooklyn.

The match lands on Brooklyn’s bare leg, just below her frayed cutoff shorts. All at once her face seems to fold in on itself. She sucks in a sharp breath, shaking her leg wildly to get the match off her skin. It falls to the concrete and dies, leaving only the smell of burning pennies.

“Your turn.” Riley takes my hand and places the pack of matches on my palm. I hesitate. The cardboard box seems heavy, even though I know it’s practically weightless. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” I say too quickly. I slowly remove a single match from the pack and light it against the sulfur strip on the bottom of the lid. I run through every option I can think of, trying to figure a way around this, an excuse, a distraction—anything. I search every dusty corner, but there’s nothing. No plan, no other options.

The match’s flame flickers, first blue then orange.

I have to get out of here, I tell myself, but the words don’t have much power. Riley’s testing me, and I have to pass if I stand a chance.

The flame creeps slowly down the match. My fingers tremble so badly it almost goes out. I lift my hand and toss the match into the air. Luckily, my shaking fingers cause the match to land on the concrete next to Brooklyn instead of on her bare skin.

“So close, Sof,” Riley says, but she isn’t watching anymore. She picks the knife up off the ground.