High Voltage (Fever #10)(51)

Believing—long past the time I’d been given every conceivable sign that I was nothing to her, and no one was ever going to save me—endlessly believing I mattered. That she cared.

Behind them the telly played a rerun of Happy Days and I lay paralyzed, synapses charred, watching them bend to grab my feet and drag me from the cage, and I wondered about the kind of people that got happy days, and I wondered why mine had been so brief.

I had no doubt their cage would be even mightier, my incarceration far more difficult to bear.

Sometimes, something inside you just breaks.

It’s not repairable.

I died on the floor that night.

My heart stopped beating and my soul fled my body.

    I hated.

I hated.

I hated.

I hated.

I hated with so much hate that things went dark and I was gone for a few seconds, then I was back but every single thing inside me had snapped, changed, rewired.

Me, the happy curly-haired kid with such grand dreams, swaggering about, little chest puffed out, waiting, always waiting for someone to love me.

When Danielle Megan O’Malley died someone else was born. Someone far colder and more composed even than the Other I’d slipped into so often of late. Jada.

I welcomed her. She was necessary to survive this world.

She was strong and ruthless and a stone-cold killer. She was human, all too human, yet not human at all.

Jada stared up at them, as they talked and laughed and removed the length of chain and collar from my neck.

Oh, the feel of air on my skin beneath that bloody band!

They had handcuffs and chains. A hood.

Jada coolly analyzed my brain, my body, deciding how the current had altered things, and then Jada undid it all, remaining deceptively passive, helpless, defeated.

I remember thinking, God, can’t they see her in my eyes? She’s Judgment. She’s Death. I’ve seen her in the mirror since.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have multiple personalities. I learned dissociation to deal with the hunger and pain. The Other was a cooler, numb version of me. But Jada is the Other on steroids. Dani is my foundation, Jada is my fortress. Danielle was my mom’s daughter. Jada, the daughter of Morrigan, goddess of war, a mother worth having.

    Danielle is the one who died.

I kept the pure heart. I kept the savage.

It was the little girl who loved Emma O’Malley that quit breathing.

The moment I was clear of the cage I kicked up, flashed into freeze-frame and ripped out their hearts, one after the next, squeezing each between my fingers until they exploded, dripping blood all over myself, all over the floor.

Then, quietly, in my threadbare, bloodstained nightgown, I walked to the kitchen, washed my hands, and ate an entire loaf of stale bread.

She hadn’t been home in three days.

I wasn’t afraid of her anymore.

I was no longer afraid of anything.

I took a long hot shower, God, the bliss, the ecstasy of a shower and soap!

God, the bliss of merely standing upright.

I dressed in my too short, too small jeans I’d outgrown last year, a faded, holey tee-shirt, and filched one of my mom’s jackets.

Then I ate every can of beans in the pantry, all three. Then I turned to the half-soured contents of the fridge.

When there was nothing left to eat, I sat at the kitchen table, folded my small hands and waited.

He came first.

The man that was supposed to pay her. He didn’t bring money. She sold me for drugs.

I killed him, too, and took them.

She came shortly after.

Saw the open cage, the dead men in the living room.

My memories of that night are crystal clear.

It was three days to Christmas, the telly was showing an old black and white version of It’s a Wonderful Life. The volume was low, the strains of “Buffalo Girls” faint but unmistakable as George Bailey flirted with Mary Hatch beneath a starry sky in a world where people lassoed the moon for each other.

    She saw me sitting motionless at the table and stood in the doorway a long moment.

She didn’t try to run.

Eventually she joined me at the stained, peeling yellow Formica table trimmed with aluminum, sitting across from me in an orange melamine chair, and we looked at each other for a very long time, neither of us saying a word.

Sometimes there’s nothing to say.

Only things to do.

I removed the Baggie from my pocket.

She gave me her lighter and spoon.

I learned almost everything I know about life from TV. I watched things kids shouldn’t see.

Taking subtle cues from her eyes, a shake of her head, a nod, with eight-year-old fingers and an ancient heart I cooked my mother’s last fix and gave her the needle.

Watched her tourniquet her arm and tap the vein. Saw the tracks, the gauntness of her limbs, the flaccid skin, the emptiness in her eyes.

She cried then.

Not ugly, just eyes welling with tears. The emptiness went away for the briefest of moments.

She knew.

She knew whatever was in that needle would be her last.

If I’d understood more about heroin and fentanyl, I’d have made sure there was enough heroin in the needle to make the dying beautiful, but those sons of bitches must have brought pure fentanyl.

    She closed her eyes a long moment, then opened them and poised the needle above her vein.