When the Sky Fell on Splendor(64)

Our phones went off again, ignored.

“Oh my God,” I gasped as my eyes fell onto a blur of lead I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the drawing in my hand. I checked the one beneath it and beneath that. Two letters scrawled on every page. Initials.

M.S.

Mark Schmidt.

My skin erupted in goose bumps. “He took these from our house,” I whispered, and then, the much worse realization: “He’s been in our house.”

Why?

What did he want? To figure out what the thing in the disc had told us? To hurt us?

Remy’s phone started ringing. “Shit,” he choked. “All these texts—we have to go. He’s on his way back!” He answered the call, and on the other end, I heard Nick spring into rapid-fire talking.

I spread the drawings across the table with shaking hands.

“Take pictures,” I told Arthur. “We need to get proof.”

He was staring at the table in a daze, fear torquing his features. The buzz in me was worsening, the lights still strobing, and reaching for my own phone would be useless.

“Art, now! We have to go!”

He shook his head. “We can’t leave these here. He can’t have them, Franny! They’re Mark’s, and they’re—they’re our family!”

“Arthur, unless the sheriff finds them here, we have nothing!”

“He’ll think we planted them anyway!” Arthur cried. “He’s more suspicious of us than he is of this asshole!”

“Then we’ll find some other way to lead him down here,” I promised. “Just take the freaking photos, Arthur!”

Remy hung up the call midword and held up his phone, snapping a few pictures. Then he pulled the chain to turn the light off, but it did nothing. My emotions were out of control, and so were my surges of power. In the flashing light, I thrust the pages back into the folder, all except the lone drawing of Arthur, which he grabbed from my hand.

There was no time to argue, and even if there had been, I was momentarily distracted by the sight of my own arm.

The scars had shrunk again; I was almost sure.

Whatever. It didn’t matter right now.

I stuffed the folder back on the shelf under the table, and we fled.

At the top of the steps, I grabbed the broken padlock as Remy and Arthur pushed the doors closed—it was extremely unlikely a man with something to hide wouldn’t notice the missing lock, or that his stuff had been disturbed, but there was nothing else we could do.

The rain had stopped, but everything was drenched and muddy as we sprinted through the woods, away from the gravel driveway and the sounds of tires crackling up it. We ran down through the valley, then curved back toward our house, and when we reached our property, the others were just pulling up.

We ran up, and they jumped out and met us partway, and everyone started talking at once.

“Wait!” I half shouted over the din as I latched on to something Sofía had said. “The steel mill?”

“What about it?” Arthur said.

“That’s where he went,” Nick explained. “First to a cemetery, then to the steel mill.”

“Is he building the weapon out there?” Remy asked.

“We don’t think so,” Levi said.

“We couldn’t follow him into the cemetery without making it too obvious, and we couldn’t get all that close at the mill either,” Sofía said, “but it looked like he was loading more metal into his truck. Like stripping the wire and pipes from the building.”

“I don’t understand,” Arthur said.

“It was bound to happen to you eventually,” Nick said.

“There was no sign of the materials in his cellar,” Arthur said. “If he’s not building it at the mill either, where do you think he’s doing it?”

“In his house?” Sofía said. “Somewhere in the woods?”

“Did you find anything we can use?” Nick asked. “A jar of human teeth or something?”

Remy flashed me a dark look. “You could say that.”

Arthur held out the picture on his phone, and the others stared at it.

“Dozens of those,” I clarified. “Well, not that, exactly. But drawings of our family.”

“He’s been drawing you?” Levi said, wide-eyed.

“Not quite,” I said.

“They’re Mark’s,” Arthur explained. “He stole them.”

My gut twisted as I thought back to what the sheriff had said when he’d questioned us about the substation. “It might be some kind of trophy. Maybe he’s got stuff from everyone who was hurt in the accident.”

“If this dude’s got serial killer trophies in his basement, it’s officially time to stop calling it an accident and call the police,” Nick said. “Again.”

“We need to get them out here before he moves anything,” Arthur agreed.

Remy looked to me, and I nodded. He took out his phone and paced the length of the car as he dialed. “He’s not picking up.”

“We’ll have to go back to the station,” I said.

“By the time we get there and the sheriff gets back here, the stuff could be gone!” Arthur cried.

Remy thrust his phone toward Levi as he climbed back into the car. “Put that on speaker, and don’t stop dialing until he answers.”