Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(123)

“Now you’re trying to read my mind. Bend me to what you want. Just like Dylan Cody.”

A flash of something in his eyes when she says Dylan’s name. He’s still so shaken by the scene inside the refrigerator; he can’t hide it from her. But this is different from horror, this feeling that flares bright in his piercing-blue eyes. Hurt, betrayal.

“I am not just like Dylan Cody.” There’s a tremor in his voice. “And I didn’t want any of this.”

She believes him.

Maybe she shouldn’t, but she does.

“Come with me. We’ll talk. Things will become clearer—I promise.”

She looks down at Pemberton. So twisted and deformed by terror, agony, and pain as to be almost unrecognizable from the man who strapped her to this very table only moments ago.

She backs away from the table, rounds its foot, and starts toward Cole and the staircase. Instantly one of Cole’s men aims his gun at Pemberton. The other takes aim at her, even as he sidesteps closer to his partner and the operating table, allowing her to join Cole.

Cole gestures for her to go first.

“I could tear you apart,” she says. “You know that, right?”

“I do. And I trust you not to. Just as I hope you’ll trust me not to do anything to harm you or your men.”

My men. So he’s reminding me he’s got Marty and Luke, she thinks. So much for avoiding threats.

She steps forward. Takes the stairs carefully, one at a time. They’re rickety. Too much pressure might punch a hole through them.

For a moment, she thinks she’s stepping into a quiet house. Pottery Barn furniture; bland hotel-room-ready art on the walls. It’s all a front for the work Pemberton did in the basement; most of the rooms seem as neglected as the vineyard fields beyond the fence. Then she sees the glass doors to the backyard have all burst inward. There’s a regiment of rifles pointed at her from all sides, through every opening, through every possible escape. Helmets, visors, goggles. Black tactical gear, sticking out amid the house’s beige walls and clay pottery like some infestation from an alien world. It all reminds her of the SWAT team that burst from the woods and tore her from Abigail’s arms.

She isn’t frightened, but she feels numb. Dislocated. As if she’s crossed a barrier into a world trying as hard as it can to deny the existence of the one she just emerged from. There will be order here, the guns of the helmeted men in black seem to say. There will be order and structure and rules. Maybe not laws, exactly. But rules, at least.

Fat chance, assholes, she thinks.

Cole walks out from behind her and into the foyer. The house’s front door stands open to the driveway. Beyond, more rifles, more men in combat gear, and farther out, impossibly, the giant hulk of a helicopter that’s somehow landed just outside the house’s front fence.

With each rifle she walks past, with each soldier down in a crouch, ready to fire, the momentousness of what she’s capable of is somehow more apparent to her than it was as she broke Pemberton’s bones. Down there in the basement, the twisted laws of his madness ruled.

Up here she is a terrifying aberration amid firepower that could have overpowered her only an hour before.

She follows Cole outside.

When they reach a fallen section of fence, she sees Luke, Marty, Rucker, and Brasher standing in a huddle off to one side of the driveway, watched over by windbreaker-clad guys like the ones she assumes are taking Pemberton into custody down in the basement right now.

She stops.

Cole stops.

“I’ll bring them to you once we’re done,” he says. “They’ll be safe. I promise you.”

Luke makes eye contact with her, nods. His expression is stone cold, jaw tense, but the nod’s slight enough to say it’s intended just for her. She figures he’s telling her to do whatever these people have said. Telling her he doesn’t feel like the group’s in any immediate danger if she leaves. She doesn’t know whether or not to trust his judgment. For the first time, she sees the rest of Marty’s crew, the guys who should have been up at the surveillance point. They’re huddled with the group, too. How they got rounded up, she has no idea. But seeing them all together frightens her. Yes, she has strength. Impossible, almost otherworldly strength, but to fight off an army of this size would require coordination and skills well beyond that.

“Charley?” Cole calls.

“What do you want from me?” she asks. “Why can’t they come with us?”

“Because there isn’t room.” He smiles and gestures to the helicopter, as if he’s inviting her to dine with him at an exclusive restaurant. He starts toward her. She feels every man in her vicinity stiffen and raise his weapon by an inch or two. “Charley, do you really think I’m going to try something stupid at two thousand feet with you in your current condition?”

“You get thirty minutes. If you don’t put me down after thirty minutes, with them, we’ll all get to see how I fare in a crash landing.”

“Deal.” His smile is bright, confident, as if he’s never seen the horrors in Pemberton’s basement, as if he’s the type of man who’ll be able to stash them away for the rest of his life. Maybe he is.

There are two other men standing next to the chopper’s open door. The tall bald one radiates a quiet confidence that some of the other men lack, even as they point guns at her. The other is short, bespectacled, and his rigidity and vacant-eyed stare as she approaches could either be terror or a laserlike focus that borders on sociopathy. Or he’s terrified of whatever’s inside the thick briefcase he holds in both arms.