by Chelsea Cain
Archie thinks he sees a shape dart past one of the lamps—a flash of red.
He steps back into the darkness, heart pounding.
Why would she be here, on the island?
But he knows she has come for him.
He is supposed to go down there. He is supposed to follow her.
And then, in a moment of clarity that surprises even him, Archie thinks, no.
He looks back in the direction of the house. The lights are just visible through the trees.
Susan is back there somewhere.
Along with a host of dangers: Razor Burn, who was practically wearing a lanyard that said sexual predator; the Russian, who looked like he knew how to kill someone with his kneecaps; and Jack, who had a billion-dollar drug business to protect. Then there was Leo. He had choked Archie unconscious. Who knew what he was capable of?
Susan, Archie knows, will not be safe until she is off that island.
Archie starts walking, away from the stairs, away from phantom images at the edge of lamps. He doesn’t know if Susan is somewhere on the grounds or in the house. He hopes they have her at the party, because if she’s in the house, he won’t stand a chance, especially without a weapon. He’ll search the party, and if she’s not there, he’ll make a run for the bridge. So Archie follows the music. He can smell plants as he passes them, lavender and rosemary and lemon thyme. He focuses on Susan. A hundred feet ahead, Archie can see the torches and the shadows of partygoers moving in and out of their glow. Broadleaf plants tear under his feet. This part of the landscaping is lit with pink gel cans that make everything blush-colored. His mask itches. His shirt cuffs are pink.
If he can’t find Susan quickly, he tells himself again, then he will go the bridge and hail the surveillance team, even if it costs Leo the operation.
A sound makes Archie stop short. Maybe it isn’t a sound—maybe it’s movement, a shuddering of leaves; but something sets off an alarm deep in Archie’s lizard brain. The vegetation parts and Archie catches a glimpse of pink light reflected on the scales. A snake. Archie’s spine goes rigid. The pink lights illuminate the ground just enough to reveal a creature as thick as Archie’s arm. It’s too big to be anything native. It has to have been intentionally released at some point on the island. Archie doesn’t have an irrational fear of snakes. He has a rational fear of huge fucking snakes. He takes another step, but stops again as his foot hits a log of thick, coiled reptilian muscle. Archie feels the snake curl around his ankle. Archie lifts his leg off the ground and kicks it in the air like it’s on fire. The snake has not managed to secure itself yet and Archie is able to shake it free.
As soon as it lets go, Archie pivots and lunges away. He manages to cover twenty feet in three steps before he loses his balance and falls. It takes him what feels like minutes to hit the ground. Even then he doesn’t get his hands out in time. He expects to hit vegetation, soft ground. So he’s surprised when his head smacks hard against something on the way down. He sees stars, but somehow manages to end up on his hands and knees in the dirt. He’s lost his mask. He’s no longer bathed in pink light, so he grapples with a hand for what he’s hit, both to figure out what it is and to hold on to something. The information comes to him in fragments. A dog-sized figure. Cast in concrete. Batlike wings. Tucked among the plants like a garden gnome. Archie can just make out its silhouette through the thickening haze: a gargoyle—hunched and waiting for meat.
Archie feels blood dripping down the side of his face. He clings to the wing of the statue, trying to stay upright, but the garden is rotating around him, the inertia pulling him away. He loses hold and sinks backward into the foliage.
He knows the symptoms of a concussion.
But the ringing in his ears is making it hard to think. He can feel his consciousness fading.
Susan. He has to remember. He says her name again and again as the blackness takes him, until her name stops making sense, until he can’t remember anymore where he was going or why.
The sky above him is like velvet.
Where was he going?
He can feel the plants under and around him, soft leaves and earth under his fingers. His eyes are closed. But he can still see an image. It’s like a photograph on the inside of his eyelids: the gargoyle lamps on either side of the stairs leading down to the boathouse. He can smell the lake.
That’s where he was going.
The boathouse.
He has to get down the stairs to the boathouse.
He doesn’t remember why.
CHAPTER
45
Susan’s ear hurt. It had taken fourteen stitches to close the skin over the cartilage where Karim had sliced her with the knife. Now she’d never be an earring model. They hadn’t spared on bandages—the entire side of her head was enveloped in gauze and tape. Her left arm was in a sling. She looked like she’d just gotten back from World War I.
Susan ran a finger along the edge of the bandage on her head. The tape itched and she couldn’t really hear out of that ear.
Her mother said something.
“What?” Susan asked, turning to peer at Bliss, who sat in a hospital armchair, knitting with neon-pink yarn.
“Don’t pick at it,” Bliss said.
Bliss’s patchwork cargo pants were tucked into purple sheepskin boots and she was wearing a black OCCUPY WALL STREET T-shirt. She’d brought a plate of caramel apples, which sat on a tray one of the nurses had rolled in. Bliss’s wooden knitting needles made a familiar clicking sound that Susan found comforting. Those first few hours, when they’d given Susan the good pain meds and she was drifting in and out, she liked hearing that sound every time she came to—it meant her mother was nearby.
“I thought they were coming to discharge me,” Susan said. She was already dressed. Bliss had brought her clothes to change into—a blue and white batik blouse that Bliss had given Susan four years ago and that she’d never worn, green corduroy pedal pushers, and an ancient pair of Keens that Susan had bought at Goodwill to wear when she went beachcombing one summer for a story for the Herald. She looked ridiculous and the shoes smelled faintly of rotting seaweed. But Bliss didn’t seem to notice.
“They said soon,” Bliss said. She smiled approvingly. “Your sling matches the shirt.”
They’d said “soon” an hour ago. Susan still had the IV port in her hand. A small bruise had formed where the needle pierced her skin. Archie’s blood had taken a long time to come off her hands. They’d let Susan take a shower after she swore not to get the bandage wet and Susan had washed her hands raw under the hot water until every speck of blood was gone. But now she saw a faint line of red at the edge of her nail bed.
Susan curled her hand. “I smell like hospital soap,” she said to her mother.
“How does your shoulder feel?” Bliss asked.
Susan rotated her shoulder gently. The doctors had done an MRI and seemed to think she’d be fine. She was lucky, they told her, that someone with medical training had performed what they called a “closed reduction” before long-term damage was done. “My shoulder’s fine,” she said, hopping off the bed. She walked to the window.
“And your vagina?” Bliss asked.
Susan blushed despite herself. “It kind of … throbs,” Susan said. Karim had bruised her, but an examination had shown that he’d never gotten his vicious little hands inside her. “Luckily my vagina had titanium doors,” she added.
“It’s those Kegel exercises I taught you,” Bliss said.
You could see almost all of the east side from her hospital room up on the hill at OHSU. The complex loomed above the city at the top of a winding road. Serious cases, like Archie, arrived by helicopter. There were no mountains on the horizon today. The cloud cover blotted them off the landscape as if they had never existed.
“I want to see Archie,” Susan said.
The clicking stopped. “I know,” Bliss said.
Susan scratched at the fine scrape on her neck. It hadn’t needed stitches. A fin
e crust of scab had already formed at the places where Karim’s blade had nicked her flesh.
“Don’t pick,” her mother said, and the clicking started again.
Henry had stopped by with updates. Archie was out of surgery, in the recovery room. They knew that much. But Susan wouldn’t feel right until she saw him.
In the distance, the OHSU aerial tram glided silently up the hill, over the houses of John’s Landing. It carried hospital workers and patients from the medical buildings at the top of the hill to the medical buildings OHSU had at the South Waterfront. It had been controversial at first. No one in John’s Landing wanted it built. But Susan thought the silver, egglike tram had a strange, graceful beauty.
“She’s long gone by now,” Susan said to her mother, and they both knew who she meant.
CHAPTER
46
Susan was still at the window when Leo Reynolds walked into her hospital room. She had been expecting some news about Archie, or the nurse with her discharge papers, and her face must have registered a flicker of disappointment because Leo stopped dead in his tracks.
He stood just inside the door, hands in the pockets of his smart-looking suit. There was an awkwardness to his bearing that Susan had never seen before. His easy confidence had an edge of nervousness to it.
“Come in,” she said.
He glanced at Bliss.
Susan’s mother made a humming sound and stood up. “Well, I think I’ll go find a chai latte,” she said. Then she left the room without her purse.
Susan stayed next to the window. Leo stayed where he was, just inside the door. The gap between their bodies felt like a canyon.
“Sorry about your dad,” Susan said. She knew what it was to lose a father, even a nasty one like Jack Reynolds.
“Thanks,” Leo said quietly. His hands were still in his pockets. He seemed drained. There were dark circles under his eyes. His shoulders hung. The jittery affect she’d noticed the last few times she’d seen him was gone. He was unusually still.
He’d lost everyone in his family, she realized—his mother when he was young, and now both his siblings and his father to violence. Her eyes went automatically to Bliss’s purse, her knitting materials splayed out on the seat of her chair. She missed the sound of the wooden sticks.
“How are you?” Leo asked.
“Fine,” Susan said. She forced a laugh and pointed to her bandaged head. “This is my Halloween costume. I’m going as a World War I vet just back from the Battle of Cantigny.” Susan waited a beat, but Leo didn’t smile. “All the nurses thought it was funny,” she said.
“How are you, really?” Leo asked.
“I’m fine,” Susan insisted. She shrugged and winced from a twinge in her shoulder. “I’ll be fine.” She tried to look nonchalant. “Only with a tiny bit less ear.”
Leo nodded. “Good,” he said. Then he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That you were brought into this. About what happened to you.”
“You didn’t bring me into it,” Susan said. She knew where this was going, and was in no hurry to get there. She turned to look out the cold glass again.
Leo walked over to her and stood next to her and they both looked out the window for what seemed like a long time.
“Do you want me to do it?” he asked finally.
Susan felt her eyes well with tears and her throat constrict. She could barely look at him. But she made herself. She had told herself that she was going to do this like an adult. She knew what she was going to say. She’d already gone through it in her head. But now, faced with him, she couldn’t find the words. She wanted to explain. She wanted an explanation.
His eyes remained steady on her, waiting, all of a sudden an attentive boyfriend. It just made Susan angrier.
“You didn’t come after me,” Susan blurted out. She could forgive Leo for abandoning her at the party. But not stepping up when she was being held hostage by a serial killer?
Leo nodded. He hadn’t flinched at the accusation. He’d known it was coming.
“Archie did,” Susan continued. “But you didn’t.” It sounded so selfish said out loud. “I understand,” she added quickly. “Jack was bleeding right in front of you. The cops were coming. I understand all of it.” She understood, but it didn’t matter. “But you didn’t come.”
“The police arrived right after the elevator doors closed,” Leo said softly, not looking at her. “They held me for questioning. They had to. It would have looked suspicious if they hadn’t.”
She could tell that he was explaining, not offering an excuse. But Archie had made it. Leo could have, too, if he’d wanted to. He could have gotten onto that elevator. And there was something else that didn’t make sense. “Jack is dead,” Susan said. “The investigation is over—why would your cover still need to be protected?”
Leo looked at her, and there was something in his eyes that made her uneasy. “I’m Jack’s successor,” he said. “I can take over the business. I’ll have access to the international partners now.” His neck was blotchy with color and his voice was low. “I can bring them all down.”
Susan searched Leo’s face. She couldn’t tell if he was seething with ambition, or revenge. “But you’re miserable,” she said.
Leo shook his head. He looked fevered. “This makes it all worth it,” he said. “Otherwise…” He sighed and his face changed. He looked out the window again and became circumspect.
Susan hated it when people became circumspect. It was always accompanied by silence, and she always felt compelled to fill that silence. But this time, Leo spoke first.
“Go ahead and say it,” he said.
He was right. If she didn’t say it, he would, and they both knew that if he said it, she’d never be able to forgive him. Her face flushed with heat. “I think we should break up,” Susan said.
Leo touched her cheek, and she gazed into his ice-blue eyes. She wanted to lean into his hand, to let him wrap his hand around her skull and pull her into him, but she didn’t.
His hand lowered to her shoulder and he adjusted the strap of her sling. “Okay,” he said.
Okay?
Just like that?
Leo leaned close to her and kissed her lightly on the cheek. His lips were cool and soft. She heard him mumble something, but the bandage on her ear muffled what he’d said.
“What?” she asked.
He took a step back and smiled.
“I didn’t hear you,” Susan said. She pointed at her ear. “The bandage.”
“It’s nothing,” Leo said.
He turned and walked toward the door, leaving Susan standing by the window. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
Leo was halfway across the room when he stopped.
Susan’s heart leapt. He was having second thoughts. He was going to turn around and profess his love for her, offer to make it work whatever it took.
“Can I have a caramel apple?” Leo said, pointing at the rolling tray.
Susan’s eyes went to the plate of caramel apples Bliss had laid out. “Help yourself,” she said.
Leo picked up an apple by its Popsicle stick, leaving some caramel on the wax paper where the apple had been, and he left her.
CHAPTER
47
The first thing Archie saw when he opened his eyes was a beautiful angel. She was dressed all in white, her silvery wings spread out behind her, and a gold halo hovered over her chestnut hair. Her round, sweet face was peaceful, and a gentle smile played on her rosebud lips. Her eyes were on the word search book she had in her lap.
“Hey, kiddo,” Archie whispered hoarsely to his daughter.
Sara’s eyes brightened and as she hopped out of the chair, her halo bobbed up and down on the wire that attached it to her head of brown hair. “Daddy’s awake!” she announced, as she scrambled to his bedside.
Archie’s body felt like cold black water, like a lake. He lifted his hands to see the IV port taped there and the tangle
of clear tubes. Images flashed in his mind as the night before pieced back together for him. Fresh white bandages covered his bare midsection.
Susan. Panic cleaved through Archie’s chest. “Susan?” he asked, trying to lift his head, his voice cracking.
Ben and Debbie came into view. “She’s fine,” Debbie said with a reassuring smile, and relief washed over him. “Henry’s here,” she added, though Archie couldn’t see him. “He’ll explain everything soon.”
She was alive. Somehow, she was alive. Archie nodded. He blinked heavily at them, his eyes warm and full of grit. His body itched and his arms felt heavy.
“You’re on the good stuff now,” Debbie said. “Morphine. So don’t worry if you fade in and out.”
Archie fought to keep his eyes open, training his gaze on his son, who was wearing a black turtleneck, a black beret, sunglasses, and a fake goatee. “What are you supposed to be?” Archie asked weakly.
“I’m a beatnik,” Ben said, glancing to a corner of the room Archie couldn’t see. “Henry lent me his bongo drums.”
Halloween. How could it still be Halloween?
“I promised I’d take them trick-or-treating after we leave,” Debbie said.
Archie tried to do the math, to figure out how long he’d been in that room, to sort through the memory fragments. It was all so disorienting.
“You were brought here early this morning,” Debbie said, reading his confusion. “You were in surgery for hours, but they say you’ll make a full recovery.” She had done this so many times now, the hospital vigil—she was an expert at it.
“Gretchen?” Archie asked, and the name seemed to float above his bed and hover there.
Debbie’s pleasant features hardened. “Missing,” she said. “I’m taking the kids trick-or-treating at the mall,” she added pointedly. “They’ve told people to stay inside tonight.”
The words condensed in Archie’s brain like a clot. Gretchen had escaped. She was still out there. Somewhere. Archie could feel himself slipping away into oblivion again. He grasped for the angel’s hand and touched her dress instead, the polyester smooth beneath his fingers.