Jill Cicero was dead. Jill Cicero didn’t exist.
Jill Cicero was fucking immortal.
Chapter 22
Lonelyworld
Alice didn’t want to remember where she was.
She was crouched on the wet ground, a loose ball of limbs and tangled hair, and when she began to shake off her daze, the first thing she felt was ice-cold water soaking through the knees of her pants and the fabric of her gloves, and a dull throbbing ache in her right hip where—what? Had she fallen? When? She blinked sleepily, rubbing her dribbling nose with the palm of one damp glove. Snow. Wet snow. It was starting to come back. Little portions of reality, like water dripping into an empty bucket, stinging as they landed.
She was staring into the forest, where not even the bright moonlight bleeding through the clouds could penetrate the gloom. She searched along the edge for the footprints of her friends, something to anchor her to the present, but all she could make out was the uneven snow-surface, glacial and eerily beautiful, spreading away in either direction along the tree line. To her right, the white-glazed road rose up and over the first low hill, glittering like tiny glass shards under the moon’s bulging eye. A set of clean tire tracks furrowed the surface, but further on the snow had been disturbed, churned to slush. She followed the markings with her eyes. The tracks wove back and forth across the road, carving crazy angles into the snow, and beyond that...
Alice felt her face go tight all over. The slate-gray SUV rested against a broad-trunked oak tree leaning over the edge of the road, docked against it like a boat in a harbor. The back bumper was crushed inward in a V, and both windshields were struck through with lightning-shaped cracks. Alice could not see into the front seat, but the passenger door hung ajar, and there was steam rising from one corner of the smooth gray hood. A marshmallow pile of snow piled on the roof, covering part of a roof rack. There was no movement from inside the vehicle.
Ben and Kaity were nowhere.
She fought to her feet—her head swam like it was full of soapy water, and her bottom hit the wet ground again before she realized she was falling. She slid onto her back with a wet crunch, letting the world spin around her for a moment, blinking moonlight out of her eyes. Then the rest of it came flooding back, playing on fast-forward: the SUV thundering down the hill towards her, swerving, nudging her off the road, Kaity screaming her name, and then Ben—
No. She would not think like that. It was all she could think about.
She must have imagined it.
She could remember it clear as day.
The crash. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she could still hear the sharp, solid thud of impact. It played on loop inside her: the too-distinct noise of a body striking moving metal, then silence. This over and over, without ceasing, without variation. She wanted to cry out, but when she opened her mouth, all that emerged was a wet gurgling sound. She had to have imagined it. She struck the snow beneath her with her open hand, feeling the snow break and crunch beneath the blow. She had to have imagined it. The thought rang like a prayer between her ears. It couldn’t be real. She hadn’t wanted it to end like this. She hadn’t wanted it to end at all.
A horrible thought struck her. Had she wanted this? Her stomach twisted, tightening like a constricting snake. After all… Wasn’t this exactly what she’d wished for? To be alone with Kaity. The endless flat beach, the quiet world, the empty chairs and umbrellas and windows. All of it. Maybe, just maybe she had invited this outcome somehow. Willed it into existence—on the whim of a selfish, greedy, jealous little monster. She had loved Ben, yes, but what use was her love to him when she could throw it aside the second she tired of him? It chilled her to the very marrow. Perhaps this, too, was how Lutz felt about the world. Capricious. Impulsive. Cruel.
But even this could not be true. If it was—where was Kaity? Why was Alice alone in this silent, moon-washed world? If she was going to tear her reality down with a thought, why hadn’t she saved the one person she couldn’t possibly survive the end of everything without?
She got to her knees, peering around desperately at the snow-covered landscape. Nothing moved. The surface of the frozen pond gleamed like a broken mirror, and across that the dark wall of the forest towered up from the opposite bank. She prayed she would see something among the trees—a light, a house, smoke from a chimney. Anything to tell her she wasn’t really alone in this great half-darkness. But nothing stirred, and no sound answered her silent cry. She thought she would weep, but instead she grew very still, curled inward on the snow. She remained like that for a long time.
Then sudden movement caught her eye. A person-sized flash of color flitted behind the SUV, just out of sight by the time she looked. “Kaity?” she whispered hopefully. There was no response. Then it moved again—closer, and quicker than before. It was among the trees, between her and the wreck. It was stalking her. Alice scooched backwards on her rear, kicking in the snow, her head still full of brine. Why couldn’t she hear it? Her own movements crushed the snow beneath her like gravel under heavy tires. And there it was again, and again. Alice’s heart leapt up into her mouth—but then, mysteriously, the movement stopped. Stillness returned to the forest. The moonlight dimmed as thick clouds crossed over. Alice released a breath, not even realizing she had been holding it.
“Hi, babe,” said a male voice.
Ben was gliding across the snow towards her.
But Alice felt no fear. In fact, she hardly felt anything at all. All emotion peeled away, strip by strip, replaced only with a kind of shallow melancholy that draped across her heart like thin gauze. Numbness settled into her skin, and the cold was suddenly but a distant memory. Even her hands and feet and behind felt dry—and then she could not feel them at all.
Ben’s body was whole . She had not seen his injuries, but she had imagined horrible things: blood everywhere, his midsection pinched off, internal organs crushed to jelly or leaking out his lacerated flank. But there wasn’t a mark on him. No blood, no bruises, no signs of violence on his beautiful face. Even his glasses were undamaged, gleaming in the half-light. Perhaps the skin was a little flushed, the lips slightly chapped. But Alice could forgive this. Deep within the armor of her numbness, her heart swelled, looking at him—and what was the harm in that, after all? Who was she hurting, taking a little happiness from this apparition. She understood implicitly that it would not last, after all. She had conjured this too. A comforting nightmare to keep her company while she succumbed to the cold.
But something wasn’t right. Ben angled his face towards her, and when the light struck him full-on, his eyes were… wrong, somehow. Like drawings of eyes. Like the cutouts in a paper mask, glaring and empty. A thin finger of fear stirred within her but not enough to make her back away from the vision. She watched the ghost approach her, the tips of his boots just dragging the delicate surface of the snow.
“Aren’t you going to say anything to me?” he asked, his voice deep and friendly.
Alice shook her head. “You’re not real.” Her lips stuck together with every word. “You’re dead. I heard it happen. You—”
One hand drifted up, tapped the skin next to his eye with a forefinger. “Through the eye,” he interrupted solemnly. “Did you think I would forget that?”
“No…” Alice’s face screwed up in confusion. “You didn’t get shot. A car hit you.”
Ben waved her off. “Yes, yes. You’ll have to excuse me. There’s been a lot of dying happening around here. I guess I lost track.” His glasses flashed moonlight, and beneath that, his horrible cutout eyes narrowed at her cheekily.
“Does it hurt?” she asked timidly.
Her boyfriend nodded. “Oh, yes. It hurts. You can’t imagine it.”
Alice looked at her knees. “I’m sorry.”
“You let me go, babe.”
She jerked her head up. “Please don’t say that.”
“Why not?” Ben drifted closer, looming huge in her vision. “We were going to have to talk about
it someday anyway.” He tapped his wrist, then shrugged. “Or, I don’t know. Were we? What was your plan, exactly? Maybe you thought you could just disappear—leave me behind like Heart-Brecker left you. Wouldn’t be the first time it happened to me.”
“No!” Alice shook her head, trying to shrug the numbness away. “No, I would never do that. Not to you.”
“But you wanted to,” he insisted. He spread his arms out as though he would embrace her. “You thought about it, at least. I suppose this must be a lot easier for you. Now you don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings anymore. Now you don’t have to say goodbye.”
“I didn’t want this,” she protested. “Don’t you think I wanted to say goodbye to you?”
“But you were going to say goodbye.”
“I…” Alice’s face pinched up, uncertainty bubbling in her heart. “I don’t know. Everything’s so strange now. I don’t know what to think.”
“I love you, Alice Gorchuck.”
She stared up at his blank face, not speaking, her heart in tatters.
“I want to hear you say it,” he intoned.
“I did say it,” she protested. “Remember? Last night, in the bedroom. Only…”
Only it wasn’t you, she thought to herself with dawning horror. It was Lutz.
Right before he walked into Kaity’s room.
Right before all this horror began.
“I want to,” she sniffed. Again she tried to conjure the feeling within her, search it out like she had tried dozens of times before, in private moments, in intimate settings, after kisses before class or just turning out the lights in his bedroom or hers. Choose it, she thought. Choose to love. But it wouldn’t come. The feeling would not rise, no matter how hard she struggled. She plunged the bucket into the well again and again, but every time it came up empty. “I tried, Ben,” she moaned. “Why can’t you understand that? I wanted to. I tried so hard.” She felt scooped out, staring into the glare of her boyfriend’s glasses. Like the knife-scraped insides of a pumpkin.
Ben angled his brows, turning away to show his profile. “Maybe it’s not so easy for you after all,” he sneered.
“Ben, stop it.” She rose and took one imploring step towards him, then stopped. Another shimmering form had appeared behind him, just over his left shoulder. Then another, and another beside that. The air above Alice was becoming crowded.
“Who’s there?” she asked, fighting the urge to retreat—to pivot and run, up the snowy road or back into the dark forest, to start running and never stop.
“It’s so warm here,” Ben told her in a peculiar voice. “Pleasant. We all think so.”
Alice took one hesitant step backward. “Who’s… Who’s we?”
“Riley.” He gestured to one humanoid glowing shape. “Cormac. And Jill Cicero—you’ll like her, I promise. We’re all here, Alice. All of us together. And it doesn’t hurt anymore. There are so many of us now. I can’t wait for you to meet them all.”
As one man, Ben and the other glamouring shapes reached out to her, but Alice scrambled back, ice spreading over her heart. “Ben… I can’t…”
“Can’t what?” Anger crept into his tone. “Are you going to abandon me again, Alice?”
She stared at the shimmering forms. They all had Ben’s eyes now, like eyes cut from a magazine. “You’re scaring me,” she murmured. “I… I don’t like this anymore.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Had Ben spoken, or one of the other ghosts? She could not tell one from the other now. They moved and shifted, swapping places and features like they were shuffling a deck of cards.
“We love the warmth,” said the voice. “And we love him.”
“Who?” Alice demanded, creeping backwards—but the shapes pursued, drifting swiftly over the snow, faster than thought.
“He protects us,” said two of the voices in unison. “He would never let us suffer. We’re like hollow trees. We don’t feel a thing.”
More voices joined the chorus, male and female, in swelling, terrifying harmony.
“We don’t feel a thing.”
Alice took another step back.
“We don’t feel a thing.”
She clapped her hands over her ears.
“Don’t leave me alone again, Alice Gorchuck—”
“I DIDN’T,” she screamed, and in her anguish she reached forward, grasping his hand in both of hers as tight as she could as if she could silence him, quiet his rage with even this superficial display. But as her hands wrapped around his, more stretched out and grasped her wrists, her arms, her shoulders—and awful, liquid, wriggling warmth slithered down her fingers and into her heart like a rat disappearing down a rat hole.
“Alice, don’t…!” screamed out Kaity’s voice, but the sound of it reached her as though across a great chasm. The other voices rose up, overwhelmed her—and Alice submerged herself in the tumult, submitting to the flame scorching up the veins of her arms like acid. She allowed the warmth to take her, feeling Ben close by, drawing her toward him, and the others as well. She was not afraid anymore. This was how it had to be. She was paying her penance.
She had finally come in from the cold.
Chapter 23
Welcome
It happened in slow motion, in the honeyed pace of a nightmare. But she was already too late. Kait let Ben’s weight slip from her lap onto the bloodied, slush-slick road, but when she turned back up the path, Riley had already slunk free of the SUV’s wreckage and was stalking towards where Alice lay, impossibly quiet, her long and crooked shadow stretching across the surface of the snow like a claw. Kait never saw the corpse’s face—only the shape of her bronzed, slender shoulders bobbing as she crept toward her dearest friend, her bare feet hardly leaving footprints in the snow’s surface. But she could imagine the huntress smile splitting those ruined lips, Riley’s handful of remaining teeth bared in awful mimicry of Lutz’s lopsided grin. And now Alice was looking up, turning just in time to see the dead girl almost upon her, her own face a beatified mask. She smiled in recognition, standing to meet Riley’s approach, almost glowing in the moonlight.
A thought struck like lightning. She doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see the train coming. In that instant Kait was on her feet, fighting for balance, actually bracing her heel against Ben’s rigid form to keep from sliding across the ice. Whatever her friend was seeing coming across the snow towards her, it wasn’t a carcass. It probably wasn’t Riley. It probably wasn’t even real. She screamed Alice’s name, jerking the Model 94 to her shoulder, but she was too slow by a shade. Her finger found the trigger guard, but the corpse was already stretching out bare arms toward her friend, and Alice moved forward into them, accepting the embrace as a gift.
Alice’s eyes closed—and Lutz opened them.
There was no use for her scream now, but Kait could not force down one last shattering cry of horror and rage. It tore at her lungs as it left, leaving her ragged. Riley’s body collapsed to the ground like a doll, and Kait watched Alice sway like a tree in a windstorm, momentarily off-kilter, a newborn deer wobbling on knock-kneed legs. Then she shook herself, vocalizing a few frosty nonsense syllables, and showed her teeth.
The Model 94 shook in Kait’s hands. Even if Lutz himself had stepped out of the woods that very second—the real Lutz, not this false idol—she would not have been able to shoot straight. Her heart split down the center groove watching him gangling towards her inside her best friend’s flesh, that stupid, stupid, stupid smile stretching across stolen lips. But there was nothing she could do. She thought of Riley Loomis, dashing herself to pieces against the corner of the wooden strut, begging for the bullet, and her stomach turned in her guts. Even that had not saved her friend. At least, it had not freed her. It would not free Alice.
So she let him come, glowering under her bangs, breathing cold air that smelled like nothing and death all at the same time. Hating him. Hating him like she never had before.
“Are yo
u hurt, Kaity?” Alice called out to her.
“Let her go.”
The words burst out of her in an unexpected gasp, her voice hardly human to her numb ears. God help her—he had sounded just like her. It wasn’t only her voice that sold the trick. It was her inflection, her expression, the concerned crinkle of her eyes, her… her Alice-ness. Everything, faultlessly replicated in real time. Kait had prayed she would be able to tell the difference now that she knew the change was coming. She wanted to find some seam, some loose stitch, anything to prove that the imitation was not total. But there was nothing to find. What had Lutz had to steal from her friend to create this mirror performance?
What had he sliced off her mind to steal her soul this completely?
“Let’s try this again,” Alice replied as if she hadn’t heard. “Can’t we, Heart-Brecker? Can’t we at least pretend this is a happy moment for the both of us?”
Then her eyes fell on the rifle in Kait’s hands, and a pained expression crossed her heart-shaped face. “Oh, for the love of—point that stupid thing somewhere else for once. You’re going to give me a panic attack.”
“Why?” Kait snarled, looking down the ironsights. “What are you afraid of?”
She still couldn’t hold the weapon steady, but that didn’t matter anymore. At this distance, there was no way she could miss the target, even if she shut her eyes.
“I don’t want you to do something we’re going to regret,” came the reply. “Or—oh, what the hell.” Suddenly Alice took two quick strides forward; Kait jerked the rifle up, but instead of moving out of her line of fire, the other girl seized hold of the muzzle with both hands, thrusting it up under her tilted chin.
The Unwelcome Page 27