Girl One(70)

The bearded man’s face loosened into blankness. He dropped the gun; maintaining eye contact, I stooped to retrieve it, kicking it backward toward Cate and Isabelle. The man began to fumble with the knots that were holding Tom’s hands behind his back. “Go faster,” I said sharply, and the man hurried, fingers slipping.

“Let me drive,” Isabelle called behind me.

“I don’t understand this,” Tom said. “Why is he listening to you, Josie? What is this? Is it—” His ropes slid loose, slithering to the gravel. Still training the gun on the stranger, I started backing away. Tom looked at his hands like he wasn’t sure they were his anymore. His wrists were embedded with ligature marks, thick and red. “What are you doing?” Tom asked.

I didn’t have time to explain. I looked Tom in the eyes, and for just a second before his face went blank, I saw a twitch of betrayal. Hurt. Like he could sense what was happening to him, could sense my influence behind it, and he hated it. “Give the keys to Isabelle,” I said. “Get inside the car.”

He stared at me before he broke away, obeying.

As Tom moved toward the Volvo, the man glared at me, furious now. “What’d you do to me, you creepy bitch?” he asked, low.

Inside the house, shadows and movement. Fuck. Orange Shirt must’ve gotten loose, my power over him waning, my makeshift handcuffs not strong enough. Or maybe it was the stranger who’d been shot in the leg—and they were going to find Black Shoes soon—

I backed away from Tom’s captor, the gun aimed at his chest. “Stay there,” I said. “Stay there and don’t move. We’re getting out of here.”

But it wouldn’t help. That was what I knew at the back of my mind. Delilah. What they’d done to her body. Forcing men back into the gene pool, violently, cruelly. I’d recognized the frank anger in Black Shoes’s eyes when he’d said that, but there’d been something else beneath it, thin and bitter. Fear. This wasn’t a lone incident—it was the beginning of something bigger. Ricky Peters, innocent or not, had known this would happen. That when he’d landed in prison he would still be connected to a hatred that he’d only briefly dipped his fingers into. We weren’t safe. Even after we left Kithira, we wouldn’t be safe.

The Volvo’s headlights punched on, catching me in the illumination. The engine rattled to life. When I glanced back, I saw that the others were in the car already. Cate pounded the windows, shouting something at me, her face unrecognizable in its urgency. I heard shouts—noise—coming from inside the house, a sudden turmoil. I ran for the car. The noise didn’t matter. Just dispatches from a different world. We were free now. Free.

I reached for the door handle. A single crack rang through the night. The noise was so loud that I felt it inside me, condensed down into a hard knot, slamming into me.

I collapsed into the backseat and then Tom was yelling, “Drive! Drive!” Isabelle, at the wheel, lurched us out of the driveway, tires spinning, the worn-out brakes screeching with the sudden movement, and we were off, going too fast for Kithira’s narrow roads. It didn’t matter, nobody was going to stop us now, we were okay, unhurt—I looked at Tom and grinned, loopy with triumph, but he didn’t grin back. His eyes were wide.

“Morrow.” Cate craned around from the front seat. “Jesus Christ, you’re—” Then she turned around. “Isabelle. Stop. Stop. You have to fucking pull over.”

“Not yet,” Isabelle said, reasonable and resolute. “They’ll get us if we stop now.”

The pain burned, deep and hot, but it was more than that. The wrongness of something foreign and unfamiliar stuck in there with all my organs. I brought my hand away from my stomach; it was blackened and slick.

“How did this happen?” I whispered. I’d let them off too easy, and now—now—

“What are we going to do? We can’t let her—” Tom was saying, frantic.

I was trying to hold on, trying to stay present, to cling to their voices, but I was slipping now, going too quickly backward, into the darkness that waited, ready to suck me up, ready to take me under.





31

It was quiet, the air close and stifling. Swollen with the fake florals of cleaning solution. I was prone on my back, stretched out. I shifted against a cheap nylon coverlet that was already slippery with blood. Somebody loomed above me. My mother. No, Bellanger. No. My eyes adjusted and I understood that it was Cate.

“Where are—are we—” I was trying to articulate a question that hovered beyond the reach of my clotted mouth. “Are they—the others—”

“Morrow, listen. Do you think you can relax for me?”

I could only lie there, my body heavy and drugged, and watch as Cate closed her eyes, then opened them again to reveal a different face than before. She held her hands above me, hovering just over the flesh. Energy built between her palms and my body. The tug of a magnet against its opposite. It made the pain flare hotter for a minute.

I couldn’t bear it.

Then Cate’s hands were on my stomach, her skin soft against mine. My heartbeat thumped up into her palm, so steady that after a moment it felt as if she were transferring the pulse into me directly from her own body. She’d taken over, she was giving life back to me, that shivery beat spreading across every inch of my skin, slipping across the surface, settling into my corners and edges and crevices. Through the murkiness of my pain and confusion came a stirring of life, hard and stinging and good, like the blood in my veins waking back up.