by Gregory Ashe
In her panic, she was going to kill us. Just like she would have anyway. I’d tried, and I’d failed, and we were going to die. Fuck, who cared about we? Austin was going to die. Austin. The toes of his boots, still burnished with beeswax, kicking feebly in the air. This boy had transformed from the biggest asshole in town into someone I couldn’t get out of my head, let alone out of my heart. And he was going to die because I couldn’t keep him safe.
Weeds grew out of the driveway at hyper speed, like an old movie sped up for special effect. They snapped out at Emmett, and he stumbled, shouting. He came around in a full circle, and he leveled the pistol and squeezed off a shot. The clap of gunfire muted the hissing of the vines and creepers for a moment. On the road, tires squealed. Kaden bailing. Kaden jetting out of here like a coward. Over my left shoulder, in those milky-white panels of light on the grass, I saw Krystal had dropped to her knees. Her nails ripped bloody furrows down her face. Reflected light cast a sheen over her; the blood wasn’t red. It was silver. And the sheen made it hard to see details, but I was pretty sure she’d clawed out one of her eyes.
Another squeal of rubber on asphalt, and this time, the sound was closer. Maybe Kaden hadn’t left. Maybe he was turning around, maybe he was coming closer, coming to help. I squirmed against the plants chaining me to the gate, breathing short, shallow breaths against the rush of pain as they pressed my forehead tighter against the crossbar. I looked up through the bars toward the highway.
The Camaro, its yellow paint shining in the reflected glow of the headlights, was still parallel to the house, sitting at the edge of the road. But now it was the shoulder closest to the house. And then I spotted Kaden: in the middle of the goddamn highway, his chin on his chest, his palms out like the Da Vinci sketch I’d seen in my history textbook.
The Camaro rattled.
Austin spasmed again; the bar rang out as his head struck again, and the sounds he had been making stopped mid-whimper.
On the Camaro, metal shrieked, and glass cracked and pebbled the shoulder.
Austin’s boots no longer drummed on the fence. Now there was only an ominous silence below me.
Kaden grunted, and even from the road it reached me clearly. It was a familiar sound. Austin made it all the time. That sound came up to me from the basement with the clang of weights falling, with the smell of rust, with his sweat. It was the sound of somebody lifting something really, really heavy.
Then the Camaro flew. It wasn’t this long, graceful blur like somebody pitching pro. This wasn’t Temple Mae’s level of work; this was amateur. Not even bush league. Close to four thousand pounds of metal and leather and glass wobbled, spun, turned end over end, and looked like a five-year-old’s first toss. Maybe a drunken five-year-old. Maybe a drunken five-year-old who needed glasses.
But it was moving. And hell, it was moving fast. And it got faster. And it was so surreal that I didn’t even think about shouting a warning. All I could do was stare at the tumbling hunk of American autobody and think that Kaden had the ability to control metal, and instead of the fence, instead of the guns, instead of anything else he might have chosen, he’d picked up his own car and used it like a rock in a catapult. My boyfriend’s best friend, the boy he was still head-over-heels crushing on, was an absolute, tremendous, fucking idiot.
The Camaro sheared through the fence to my left. The noise of torn metal and shattering glass swallowed everything else. After clearing the fence line, the Camaro thunked once into the lawn, tearing up a stretch of grass at least thirty yards long, and then it flopped over, slid another ten yards on its roof, and came to a stop. One wheel was still spinning. Kaden let out a whoop, and I had to admit it was all very impressive.
Except for the fact that he’d missed Krystal.
The Camaro lay a good five paces from the girl, and she hadn’t even shifted when all that steel and metal tumbled across the ground like hell’s worst tumbleweed. The shock and noise, though, must have penetrated the fears terrorizing Krystal because her head came up. Her face was ruined. There was nothing poetic about that description; her face was no longer a face. It was skeins of raw flesh, and a limp balloon of one eye, and the gleam of teeth where she had clawed open the cavity of her mouth.
But she was still alive. She was still moving. And when her gaze snapped past the tangled metal of the fence and toward the road, I realized she was still dangerous. Kaden let out a surprised shout. Glancing back, I saw him falling in a tangle of rangegrass.
The stretch of fence where I was pinned drooped slowly toward the ground, its structural supports demolished by the Camaro’s passage. With the loss of tension, the section under us separated from the rest and sagged inward under our combined weight, the base still anchored in the ground. My feet caught the pavement and I stepped backward awkwardly, supporting the length of fence across my chest. The creepers loosened enough for me to duck my head out from under their hold. With my feet on the ground and my head free, I had more leverage. Krystal’s attention was still fixed on Kaden, and I took advantage of the distraction to rip free of the bramble shackling my ankle. I braced myself against the fence and shoved, pulled, and tore myself free of the remaining vines.
Austin lay in front of me, senseless; he had slipped to the ground when the fence fell. I scrambled toward him; he was trapped under the fence, the creepers holding fast around his neck and arm, and he was lying so still. As big as my wrists, the thick vines were impossible to shift or pull free. I was running out of time before Krystal turned her focus back on us.
I spotted Emmett lying on the driveway, barely twenty feet away. Weeds wrapped him in a straitjacket, the pistol a dull polymer block just a few feet from his hand. I ignored it. I had to ignore it because it wouldn’t do shit to the vines. Instead, I rushed over to Emmett and gathered handfuls of the weeds and yanked on them. They came away in fat clumps—maybe Krystal had gone easier on him because of their relationship—but they were thick, and it was taking so damn long. I ripped, I ripped, and I ripped, and the smell of chlorophyll and rot and dirt made me choke. Then I saw a swatch of gray fabric. I dropped onto my knees, plunged my hand into the pocket of Emmett’s gym shorts, and prayed. He was such a cocky bastard. He was just so damn cocky. And he’d been right when he came into my room, he’d been right that I was a chickenshit. Please, God, I thought. Please let Emmett be as cocky as I think he is. Please let him be the kind to carry around a trophy when he’s really proud of himself. Please. Please, God, please let him be just as cocky as he always had been.
My fingers closed over the folded compact knife. The same knife Emmett had brought to my house. To teach me a lesson.
On the way back to Austin, my knee buckled, and I fell onto the edge of the fence, bounced, and scrambled to keep my footing. I tried to move faster; Krystal was coming back. I just knew it.
The vine snaked around his neck and arm, thick and rubbery near his face. The knife skated along the surface at first, peeling away a thin layer that oozed clear, wet sap. I gathered a loop farther from his head. This time, I sawed with the blade, forcing the edge deep into the vine as I used all my strength to keep tension on the loop. When the cut ran deep enough, I yanked, hard, to snap the vine. I peeled off the next coil, and then the next. As I peeled and cut, they fell thrashing and mindless and furious, still alive. Already the first one that I had cut was curling around the iron bars, moving up toward Austin again. I had to get him out of here.
Then the last loop around Austin’s neck gave way, and I dragged him free. I caught him up against me, where he slumped, boneless. He was so still. And in the reflected glow of the security lights, he was so pale. So washed out. He was limp. He wasn’t dead, though. Austin couldn’t be dead.
Austin couldn’t be dead.
A tendril of vine slid around my wrist, and I jerked backward, away from it. Someone was screaming. Not me. My screams were stitched to the inside of my throat. My screams couldn’t get out. And not Austin, because Austin was—I c
rushed the thought. And not Emmett. I’d recognize his screams. So who?
Metal warped and bent and thrummed like someone running a mallet down a xylophone.
Kaden.
Kaden was screaming like he was being ripped limb from limb. That was a possibility. A very real one. The vines curling around ankles and wrists, tugging, tugging, fueled by Krystal’s ability. I just needed to get a little farther. I just needed to get to the asphalt, and then I could run to the garage, get—I had to bite back a hysterical laugh—pruning shears, get gasoline and a match, get a goddamn weed whacker.
In my arms, Austin weighed more than I’d ever remembered. I’d held him in bed. I’d hugged him. Once, in the shower, I’d gotten him up against the wall, his feet clearing the floor, and his head had bonked the low, sloping ceiling. None of those times had he ever weighed this much. Especially not in the shower. That night, he hadn’t weighed anything. Not for me. When his head bonked the ceiling, we’d laughed, and the water streamed off his face and ran onto mine, touched the corner of my mouth, tasted like him, and he’d squeezed my biceps and said maybe I should think about the circus. Be a strong man. And I’d bitten him on the collarbone to teach him about teasing.
Only I didn’t feel strong tonight. When it mattered, I hadn’t been strong enough, when it mattered—
Something caught my ankle.
I stumbled. My knee hit the asphalt hard, the pain running through me in a shock wave, and Austin slipped to the ground in front of me. I grabbed for him, tried to steady him, and then something latched on and hauled me backward. Another of those damn vines had caught me, and it tightened around my ankle until bone grated and popped. I let out a howl. Twisting around, I hacked at the vine around my ankle. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was luck. This time, it parted in two blows, and I scrambled back. The rough abrasion of asphalt burned my palms. I had to get Austin out of here. Through the back maybe. In the pool. I wanted to laugh. Plants couldn’t swim, could they? No. No, they damn well couldn’t swim. But they didn’t need to swim. I was willing to bet they could reach me from the shore. So the pool was out; I had to get out somehow, though. The garage, maybe. If one of the cars were still there. Maybe. Maybe. I flipped over onto hands and knees.
Then I saw Emmett and froze. Somehow he had wrestled free of the weeds, and now he knelt facing me with Austin sprawled on his back. As I watched in disbelief, Emmett rolled him roughly onto his side, struck him between the shoulder blades, and rolled him onto his back again. He bent low, his face over Austin’s. What the hell was he doing?
“Get the fuck off him.” I crawled across the broken asphalt, caught Emmett’s shoulder, and tried to push him away from Austin. “Leave him the fuck alone.”
Emmett’s right hook was huge and sweeping and was so fucking telegraphed somebody probably could have read it all the way in England, but all I was thinking about was Austin, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. His fist connected with my eye. The world went dusty white. My momentum pitched me forward, and the only thing that saved my chin from cracking on the driveway was the fact that I landed face first in Emmett’s lap.
Emmett’s fingers wove through my hair and shook my head once, gently. Then he shoved me away and scrambled back to Austin. Chips of broken driveway had tracked a line of road rash down the side of Emmett’s face, and the blood and torn flesh made black and white motley. His mouth slashed a hard line across his face. His eyes were dark and furious and, I thought, afraid. But controlled. Sweat curled hair at his temple, and he was beautiful, really beautiful, and I was the only one—I knew this the way I knew my own heartbeat—who had ever seen this part of Emmett. He pressed two fingers gently against Austin’s throat, paused there, and then leaned down to place his ear against Austin’s mouth.
“Quit looking at me like you’re having a fucking stroke and do something.”
“What? Should I . . .” I made a helpless gesture at Austin’s mouth. “Do you want me to—”
“I don’t fucking need you to fucking kiss him. He’s not fucking Sleeping Beauty.”
“No, I wasn’t—”
“Shut up, tweaker, and do something about Krystal.”
From the street, Kaden gave a shriek that cut off abruptly. That wasn’t good. That meant that our distraction might be over. It meant Kaden might be dead. It meant, in the next moment, Krystal might stop Emmett, and then Austin would be—
This time, something pulled on my leg so hard that I left the ground. I didn’t fly far, maybe a yard, but when I came down, I hit so hard that the air left my lungs. Groaning—a breathless, empty noise—I flopped onto my side. Vines wrapped my ankles together, and they ran in a straight line back to Krystal.
She was on her feet now. Her left eye sagged and hung down over the eyelid, like a water balloon with a slow leak. Behind the mask of scratches, Krystal looked beyond pain, beyond fury, beyond sanity. There was nothing left that I recognized in her face except murder, and when I glimpsed her through my third eye, she wasn’t even a whole person anymore: she was like two thunderheads clashing together, a kind of cloudlike, substanceless collision of madness. And then the vines dragged me toward her.
I had lost the knife at some point while carrying Austin, and I grabbed at the ground, trying to catch hold of anything to slow myself. Vines shot out of the darkness, twisting my arms behind my back, turning me onto my stomach so that my chin dug into the grass. Unable to move, I found myself staring back at the driveway, where Emmett still knelt over Austin. Then a coil of brambles snared Emmett around the neck and dragged him into blackness.
I was still watching. Waiting. Praying—not to any god in particular, but to whatever would listen. I didn’t want the world. I didn’t even want my own life. I just wanted to see him move. I just wanted a breath, a single breath. Kaden was gone; I had heard his death-cry. Emmett was gone; I had watched the brambles spool him back into the darkness. But not Austin. I couldn’t lose Austin. No god would be that cruel—or, if one of them was, all of them couldn’t be.
But Austin just lay there.
I came apart.
My inner eye flashed open. I stepped into the other side. Those things had happened before; I had done them before. But this—this was a different order of magnitude. It was like I’d been striking matches in a dark room, so impressed with the light I could create, and then the sun had come out. It was like I had walked around with my eyes closed for my whole life. It was like, for the first time, I had really woken up.
And it did feel like waking, the way I slid out of my body as though everything—Lawayne’s hands on my back, the way he had counted out every horrible thing in my life; Emmett watching me with a smirk; Austin, his back arching, as light slowly left his eyes—had been a nightmare, and now I was awake.
Of course, that wasn’t the truth. It had all happened. All of it. But standing on the other side, it all seemed to matter . . . less, somehow. Distant. Like it had happened years and years ago. Or like it had happened to someone else. And it was easy, so very easy, to brush aside the hurt of it all. It was easy to feel good, in a way I’d never felt good, not really, in my whole life.
It was easy, too, to turn back and look at Krystal. Her savaged face was still twisted in hatred. She studied my physical body as the vines dragged it across the lawn. She was thinking of all the ways she would take me apart: thorns and brambles and incredible force and saplings growing out of my eyes. I didn’t have to step inside her head to see it; the thoughts were there on the surface, as easy to read as a picture book.
It was easy to see the threads that made up this side of reality. It was like turning over a piece of embroidery and spotting all the stitches. It was clearer than it ever had been for me. And it was easy, so easy, to see how Krystal was threaded together. It was easy to see the loose threads and the dropped stitches. I thought of what Mr. Big Empty had told me: a true psychic can touch both sides. He can pull things across.
And
it was easy to pull.
At first, she didn’t seem to notice. Maybe it was the fact that she was in so much pain already. Maybe it was her broken mind that hid the truth from her. Maybe she knew, but the horror of it didn’t reach her face. But as I ripped the soul from her body, it came free in a series of stuttering pops, like seams giving in a pair of old jeans, and then, all at once, I dragged her across to the other side. The glowing, hypersaturated version of her—her spirit, her soul, whatever you wanted to call it—hovered for a moment, overlapping her physical body, doubling it like a mirage. It flaked away like ash in a high wind. And then it was gone.
Her body dropped. The vines flexed, quivered, and went still. Everything in the whole night went still.
And then, ahead of me, figures slipped from the shadows. Leo Lyden, the red-headed boy who had been buddying up with Emmett at school, came first. He was the one who had made a cow explode. After him came a rough-featured man, massively built, who had to be Kyle Stark-Taylor. He had knocked a prison down with an impossible earthquake. And then came the boy, his skin like copper in a forge, dark braids spilling over his shoulders, his eyes ringed with smoke. The Crow boy. He looked at me. He saw me. He pointed.
That was fine. Let him see. I smiled; it was so easy to smile. Why hadn’t I smiled more before this? Why had it always seemed so hard? I thought about how easy it had been to rip out every stitch in Krystal’s existence, how easy to pull her across to the other side. My smile spread until it hurt, and even that felt good. When you could do something like that, when you could unravel somebody like an old sweater, why wouldn’t you smile? And when you could do it again and again and again—
The Crow boy said something. Leo and Kyle paused. Then, sharing a glance, they backed away.
The Crow boy took a step toward me. Something flickered at the edge of my vision, and I glanced to my right.
The Crow boy was there too.
And to my left.