When the Sky Fell on Splendor(76)

“I can’t let you do that, Frances.”

“Then it’s lucky you can’t stop me.” I sidestepped again, but he was already in front of me, hands buried in the pockets of his Members Only jacket.

“Frances, be reasonable. This is what’s best for everyone—you, your brother, your friends, the being.”

“Me be reasonable?” I said. “I’m a teenage girl, and you’re the old man who came across the country to corner me in an abandoned mill. If you want to help me, then let me get out of here before anyone else turns up.”

I ignored the pain searing through my ankle and pushed past him. He snatched at my elbow and caught a fistful of sweatshirt.

I tried to yank my arm back, but his other hand shot out and knotted into my hair, pain shrieking across my scalp as he dragged me toward him. I tried to scream, but one of his arms had already snaked around my throat, his papery palm flattening across my mouth and his elbow pushing in on my windpipe so hard it made me cough.

Stars popped behind my eyes, and my eardrums gave a red-hot throb at the sudden noise of the fire bells.

I grappled at Bill’s arm, but his grip only tightened as his other hand reached for something in his pocket. Another gun, I thought with a burst of fear that sent a rumble of current through the warehouse.

I clawed more viciously at his arm, and he jabbed the heel of his foot down hard on my ankle, making red explode behind my eyes.

What had I done? What had I done, staying here with him, when no one knew where I was?

He’d freed the thing in his pocket, and in my peripheral vision I watched him whip the white rag out, then bring it toward my mouth.

I could barely breathe as it was, and then the damp rag was being plastered over my nose and lips, his palm cupped over it. I couldn’t breathe at all. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t smell or taste whatever was on the rag, but I had an idea of what it must be.

“Don’t worry,” he coughed. “The energy won’t be wasted. Just like when the gel receptacle was destroyed, the being will leap to the nearest body when its current host dies.”

A quiver ran down my center as I thrashed against him. The room seemed to pulse around me, shrinking as it went. The corners of the room fuzzed and dimmed until all I could focus on was the block in my throat and the buzz building in my middle.

I tried to concentrate, but panic sent my mind and gaze zigzagging uselessly. They hit the clock over the front doors, still quietly ticking out time five years after anyone was left to watch it.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

How long had it been since I’d breathed? My limbs felt heavy and clumsy. But still, that buzz was there, zealous, eager. Use me, it seemed to say.

The forklift, I thought. If I could power up the forklift—it was already angled right toward us.

But even as the buzz was building, the world was getting foggier. My legs were turning into jelly and my lungs were stuttering.

In the movies, this always looked so quick. Painless.

A chloroform-soaked rag swept over the mouth. Eyes rolling back, knees dipping. An unconscious body caught by people in black uniforms.

For me it was five minutes of clock hands ticking. Five minutes of fighting for breath. Of lungs burning, imploding and feeling like I was going to die before the world started disappearing, blotting out bit by bit.

The ground turned soft as warmed butter under my feet.

And then a red face punctuated by curling white eyebrows was over me, a voice melting out of it, slowing impossibly.

“I am sorry, Frances,” Black Mailbox Bill said. “If I didn’t do this, it just would’ve been someone else. Isn’t it better this way? Isn’t it better that someone who really understands gets the gift? Someone who will appreciate it.”

And then the dark closed in.





TWENTY-SEVEN



A SHARP BANG. THE thunder of footsteps scuffing over cement. The sudden intake of breath and a feminine grunt as something whistled through the air, cut off by a meaty thump. The crackle of a storm, and then the feel of rain, splatting against my face.

The pain in my ankle being transmitted to a spot behind my eye that thwump-thwump-thwumped with every pulse of my heart.

My brain felt like alphabet soup spun through a food processor. Fragments of words, images.

That grunt again, a voice I recognized. And then a sickly, humid huff of breath against a clean-shaven upper lip.

Another roll of thunder.

It came back to me. Poured into my mind as quickly as it had rushed out. I’d been drugged.

The girl’s voice let out a scream, and my eyes snapped open. The burnt ceiling was gone, replaced by dark gray clouds swirling overhead, lighting up. Pebbles, not ash under my hands. And the sound—feet scuttling through gravel.

She screamed again.

I sat up with another jolt of pain.

The powder-blue Cadillac was parked in front of me, trunk open and waiting. My legs were dirty, scraped. I’d been dragged.

Behind the Cadillac, a silver Honda CRV had parked at a mad diagonal, headlights piercing through the rain, engine still humming and driver’s side door hanging ajar.

I recognized the lanyards hanging from the rearview mirror.

Christ Hospital, where Sofía’s mom worked.

Sofía.

I tried to jump to my feet and collapsed with a shriek against the bumper. My ankle was swollen, bruised green.