Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(74)

Luke’s terrified shouts and the truck’s squealing brakes deafen her.

Despite her best efforts to keep them open, she screws her eyes shut. She’s rocked back on her heels as if from a sudden, strong wind and in the same moment it feels as if her arm has exploded into flame. Then she tilts forward onto the balls of her feet again, and her lips kiss the steel grill.

The truck didn’t stop just in time.

She stopped the truck just in time. With one arm.

When she opens her eyes again, she’s dwarfed by the truck’s grill, and her arm’s buried deep inside it, in a fresh gash that looks custom designed just for her. The pain, in its Zypraxon-muffled form, ricochets up her forearm, sings through her shoulder, then arcs across her upper back before it leaves behind a dull, throbbing ache she’d normally associate with lifting something heavy. The entire process feels as if the pain searched for a place in her body where it could perform its expected, agonizing work, but it kept getting denied entry, so it decided to give up and evaporate altogether.

The truck shudders, as if its very carriage is coming to terms with the miraculous strength that just brought it to a halt, a force that was not just sudden and powerful enough to stop it but impossibly precise.

Slowly, she removes her arm from the hole.

She’s bleeding from a dozen different scratches. The bruising is fierce and terrible. In her fist, she holds on to a chunk of metal from the grill. She passes it to her left hand, then twiddles all of the fingers on her right. They work perfectly. No additional spike of pain shoots up her arm. Nothing’s broken. The skin’s a mess, but the bones are intact.

With her left hand, she slowly crushes the chunk of metal and lets it drop to the concrete.

Then, a few feet away, Luke makes a sound like a bird that doesn’t know if it’s dawn, dusk, or feeding time. She’s never seen someone who literally looked as if he were about to jump out of his skin before, but that’s how Luke looks. He’s in a half crouch, his arms spread on either side of him, as if preparing to dive through the air to knock her out of the truck’s path. He’s frozen in midcrouch, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. Without meaning to, he tossed his phone. It lies on the pavement a few feet away.

The driver’s screams come to a sudden, choked halt when he sees her. Reflexively, she hides her not-injured-enough arm against her chest and covers it with the other. “I’m OK,” she cries. “I’m OK.”

Just as the truck driver drops from his cab to the sidewalk, she hops up onto the pavement as if the entire event were nothing more than a brief stumble. At the sight of this, the driver lets out a moan so full of relief it sounds almost sexual. He clasps one hand to his chest, forcing breath back into his lungs.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s not your fault. You totally stopped in time. I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry. Thank you. We were just . . . my husband and I, we were fighting, you see, and I got distracted because he was being such a huge dick.”

The driver stares at her in a daze, whispering words under his breath, too quietly for her to make them out, but she’s willing to bet every other one is profane. Hands braced on his knees, he bends forward, mouth agape. His baseball cap falls to the sidewalk, revealing his sweat-soaked rat’s nest of wiry black hair.

She bends down and picks up Luke’s cell phone, slides it into her pocket with a sliver of the force she’d normally use for such a task.

Luke hasn’t moved, but his heaving chest makes it clear he’s still breathing. She’s about to wrap one arm around his waist before she realizes it’s the bruised and bleeding one, the one that should be broken, if not torn from her body entirely, and isn’t. She goes to wrap her good arm around his waist and remembers that if she pulls too hard she might detach his torso from his hips.

“Thank you, sir,” she tells the driver.

The driver just stares after her. Still bent over in a crouch. “Thank you,” she says. “I owe you my life. Honey, we should go. We’ll be late to get the baby.”

“What fucking baby?” Luke whispers.

“Now, sweetheart,” she hisses.

He takes a step, then another and another. He lags behind, his expression making him look like he’s the one who just stopped a speeding truck with one arm. He’s swallowing over and over again, sucking in half breaths through his nostrils, staring dead ahead as if he’s being marched toward the gallows. But they’re making decent enough time. Within a minute or two, they round the corner, putting the still stunned driver out of sight.

“You OK?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” he croaks; then he stumbles a few steps to his right, grabs a public trash can by the rim, and empties the contents of his stomach into it.





III





26

The woman he might kill next is doing a lousy job of stretching her quads. She’s bracing herself against the cargo door of her RAV4 with one hand, but her form’s still off. And when she pulls back on the ankle of her bent left leg with her other hand, her hips wobble and she bites her lower lip.

So she’s an inexperienced jogger. That’s good. She’s also doing her stretches out here in the parking lot on Portola Parkway and not closer to the trailhead, where there’s more space, which says she doesn’t have much experience with Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, either. Another very good sign. When she does take to the trail, she’ll be self-conscious and insecure, preoccupied with how she looks to the other hikers and bicyclists and, more important, not very aware of her woodsy surroundings.