Either way, my personal attempt to get away had failed.
A dark sadness enveloped me as I was taken through the screaming and cheering crowds. All along I’d been secretly hoping that I wouldn’t need to implement this stage of the plan. I’d been hoping that my short 9-1-1 text had gotten through and that my dad would show up at any minute, a cavalry of ex-military soldiers at his side, all of them armed and stronger than Hercules.
But he must not have gotten my text. And a sharp pinch in my backside was all the warning I got that my reign as Supergirl was over. I saw Nicole’s Murderer palm an empty syringe, dribbles of a black liquid inside, and my strength began to fade. My eyes struggled to stay open as my body fell limp. Two words were all that came to me as I slipped into a strange state of coherent unconsciousness.
Black Skies.
He had given me a shot of Black Skies, a knock-out drug so strong it could overpower both Pink Lightning and Blue Thunder.
So strong it could kill.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Nicole’s Murderer rambled on and on as he paced the dressing room, talking to his bodyguards and to himself. I struggled to stay awake, my eyes flaring open from time to time, only long enough to capture an image here and there. I had no idea how much Black Skies he’d given me. In my head, I was chanting, don’t die don’t die don’t die.
All the girls were gone, but I wasn’t sure where. The costumes had been packed up and the curtains that covered the large, two-way mirror still hung open. Fistfights and threatening arguments were scattered around the slowly emptying hall. Most of the fights were between two or three men, but one was a mass of punching arms and kicking legs and flying beer bottles, possibly fifteen men in all, with their testosterone spiking and voices bellowing.
“You’re not worth the trouble you cause,” he said, pointing a thick finger at me. “Phase Two is good for the community. We keep kids off the streets and out of gangs. But you come along and now we’ve got the FBI poking into our business. Four bodies!” He tucked his thumb into his palm, then held up four fingers and wagged them in my face. “Four! That’s how many people we have to get rid of tonight because of you—”
I blinked and forced myself to sit up straighter, all of my muscles screaming at me to stop. “Who are you getting rid of?”
His eyes glistened with something that looked like excitement. He’d been waiting for me to wake up enough to tell me this. This was his revenge, I could feel it. “They’re all out in the van right now and my boys are just waiting for me to give them the go-ahead. You want to know who they are? I’ll tell you. Komodo, because you beat her so bad the other night she was completely worthless onstage. That FBI agent, because you told him to come here. Madison, because she tried to help you. And Lauren, because you told her how to escape.”
An arrow of pain shot through my chest. Neither Lauren nor Madison got away?
He laughed. “They’ll all be dead within a few hours, but those girls could have been sold. If you hadn’t gotten involved.” He leaned nearer and pulled something from his pocket to show me, holding it in front of my face. My iPhone. “You thought Daddy was coming, didn’t you?”
A sick feeling twisted through my stomach and I thought I was going to throw up.
“Wanna see the texts we sent your precious papa? Look. First we said, sorry, didn’t mean to send that—after you sent that stupid 9-1-1 message. He replied, are you okay? We said, yeah, but I’m gonna spend the night at Lauren’s. K? We even matched your misspellings and abbreviations. He never suspected a thing. So, your parents won’t be looking for you until after school tomorrow.” He paused to study my expression, his gaze lingering on my lips just long enough to make me wish I could slug him. Then he held up two Platinum Level tickets. “Guess who these are for?”
I shook my head, a gesture that took all of my strength but was almost unnoticeable. Outside the room, the lights in the arena flickered on, then off, then on, but dimmer than before. I couldn’t hear what was going on because the intercom had been shut off, but some of the fighting men turned around, looking at something I couldn’t see, something in the corner of the room.
“These tickets are for your little friend. Zoe.”
“No.” All I could do was whisper, although I wanted to scream. Not her. She wasn’t strong enough for this place. She wouldn’t survive. I wanted to lunge at him and rip out his throat, my fingers on his windpipe to stop him from talking. The lights outside the room blinked off one final time. The only light left on came from the EXIT sign and the cherry glow of cigarettes that seemed to hang in the air like angry fireflies.
Nicole’s Murderer cocked his head, then traced one finger along my jawline. I shuddered. “We’re going to invite Zoe to Platinum Level. We’ll get her tomorrow night and that’ll help pay for all the damage you’ve caused. Maybe I’ll even set up a little fight between you two, after you’ve been worn down so far you don’t recognize her. I think the crowds would love a duo like that. Maybe I’ll take you both around the country.” He leaned even nearer, his lips close enough to touch mine. “That is, until one of you dies.”
Tiny pinpoints of fire flared back in the arena, on the other side of that two-way glass. I couldn’t hear it, but I imagined it sounded like sniper rifles firing rubber bullets, stuff used to control crowds during a riot. Those cigarettes fell, one by one, a puff of red and then the outline of bodies falling to the ground. Someone, probably one of the guards, flicked on a flashlight and for a brief moment, before the light was extinguished, I saw a team of men, all dressed in camo, their faces and skin painted with stripes of black and olive green. Then they turned into shadows again and everything out there was still.
A brief glimpse of a face, a familiar face, appeared close to the mirror, as if trying to look inside.
It was my father. Even disguised in camo and in an unlit room, I knew who he was.
“Zoe won’t accept your invitation,” I said, my words slurring.
“Why not?”
The door to the dressing room slammed open, the hinges taken off. Four men shuffled in, all with rifles pointed at the Man Who Had Murdered Nicole. He stumbled backward, but not quick enough, not before two of them had him by the arms.
“Because my dad’s here, that’s why not, you fucking monster!”
And then my father was there, arms around me, asking if I was okay, had that man hurt me, was I drugged, could I walk. I could barely answer him, so in the end he carried me out, into the midnight air where a caravan of police cars and ambulances waited, where all the men who had been inside were getting cuffed with plastic cable ties.
“They got Lauren,” I managed to say. “They’re going to kill her.”
Dad said something I couldn’t hear.
My head slumped onto my chest. I was losing consciousness, that drug they had given me was too strong. I couldn’t fight it.
“Hang on, you’re going to be okay,” he said as he leaned closer, then he waved toward one of the paramedics. “Hey, get over here and take a look at my daughter! Make sure she’s all right.”
Dad stayed with me. I could sense his presence, despite the black clouds that rolled in and engulfed everything. His hand was in mine when I got in the ambulance, he walked beside me when I was carried on a stretcher into a hospital.
And when I started to black out, the world fading into muted sounds, I knew if I survived, he would be there when I woke up.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I slept for a long, long time. I sailed through black heavens where flickers of lightning sparked, craggy and pink, and where every boom of thunder turned the skies blue. I thought I heard voices calling me, crowds chanting my name. But it wasn’t my name, was it? It was the name of a character in a story.
Odette—Odette—Odette.
I’d lost everyone I wanted to save, they had all ended up like Nicole, broken and bruised and left by the side of the freeway like trash.
My eyes flared open now and then—
in the midst of a series of unending nightmares—and I saw an IV snaked into my arm. The world was softer than I remembered, all made of cotton and pastel colors and voices that whispered. I saw my dad once and my mom. Another time I saw Kyle, pacing back and forth, running his fingers through his hair. As soon as he noticed I was awake, he stopped, a haunted look in his eyes.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse as if he’d been crying. “Or else I never would have gotten in a fight with you that morning. I should have known something was up when I didn’t see you at lunch. I should have gone looking for you.” He moved closer, one hand reaching out to touch mine. “I’m so sorry, Rach—”
“It’s not your fault.” That’s what I tried to say, but I wasn’t sure if the words came out of my mouth or if they stayed trapped in my mind.
Once, I woke up and Molly was in the room. The only problem was, she had on a long LOTR cosplay gown and wig, and for a minute I thought I was hallucinating. It didn’t help that she would only talk to me in J.R.R. Tolkien quotes or that she claimed to have elven ‘lembas’ bread and that it would heal me. I finally realized who she really was when she broke character and started crying.
“You can’t keep doing this,” she said. “You can’t keep ending up in the hospital, half dead.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
She stayed with me until I fell asleep again.
The next time I opened my eyes, it was morning. But I didn’t know if it was the first morning since I’d been here or the third or the fifth. Light washed the room, pouring in from the window, making the sterile space a little more friendly. Hunger gnawed at me and I wondered how long it had been since I’d eaten.
I couldn’t remember what had happened. Had my dad really come to save me or had that been a hallucination? Thoughts of fear jumbled through my head, knocking open doors that led to more corridors and more horrors. Remnants of the drugs that had been pumped into me made my mind work differently than it usually did. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything. My thoughts kept jagging off on semi-related tangents, all of them frantic.
Where was Lauren, was she safe, and what about Madison and Komodo, and was Agent Bennet still alive?
Then a silhouette appeared in the doorway to my room, a man, hunched over and moving awkwardly, as if in great pain. He paused and looked in at me, his features still hidden in shadow. One arm was held close to his chest, the other leaned on a crutch.
“May I come in?” he asked and as soon as he spoke I recognized his voice. It was Bennet. A tear slid down my cheek as I nodded.
It took him a while to make his way into the room, to sit in the chair beside my bed. I winced as I looked at him, his injuries revealed now that he sat in the light—purple bruises on his face, a swollen eye, a broken arm, and a cast that went from his left foot to his hip.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I was crying then, unable to talk for a long time. “I’m so sorry,” I said at last. He reached out, just like Kyle had, and took my hand in his.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said with a crooked grin. “We won.”
“Is Lauren—is she—”
“Lauren’s fine. Some injuries from her fight, but she’s—” He paused. “I was going to say she’s at home, but she’s actually been staying at your house. During our investigation we found out what has been going on with her father. Your mother’s been working with child protection services to get her set up with one of Lauren’s aunts in Riverside.”
I glanced down at the blanket that covered me, wondering if Lauren had been sleeping in my bed, beneath that afghan Grams made me. A sliver of jealousy trembled from my shoulders down to my fingers. Obviously Lauren and I still had issues. Maybe we always would. But at least she was safe.
“Did you find Madison?” I asked.
He nodded, then grimaced in pain and closed his eyes. “We found most of the girls. Madison, Haley, Emily, Hannah, Sammy, and Brooke, plus some others we didn’t even know were missing—”
Sammy. Komodo. The girl from my history class with the dragon tattoo. I sighed, and leaned back against my pillow.
“We found documents on a laptop that led us to most of the missing girls, all the way to a network of underground fight clubs that had been set up in Seattle, Detroit, Miami, and Houston. We’re in the process of shutting those down, just like we did with the ones here in Los Angeles.”
That was good news. No, it was great news. Still, there was something in his expression, something he didn’t want to tell me and there had been one name he hadn’t mentioned.
Janie Deluca. Cyclone.
I saw her again, blue hair spinning around her as those European-looking thugs had dragged her off the stage.
“What about Janie?” I asked, my mouth dry.
He stared past me, like he was looking for another answer, a better answer. But there wasn’t one. He shook his head. “All evidence pointed toward the club in Detroit. That was where she was supposed to go. But that’s not where they took her.” His voice cracked and his eyes glistened and once more I wondered if he had lost someone once, some younger sister or niece. “I’m sorry. We’ll keep looking, but I don’t know—”
I saw her on her front porch with that bat, and in the club lifting her chin when I smiled at her, as if some measure of self-confidence had been restored. But I realized that I might never see her again. She’d gone into the midnight deep, just like Nicole. She was lost and she might never find her way home again.
“We wouldn’t have rescued any of those girls if it hadn’t been for you.” Green eyes searched mine, probably hoping that this would be enough—shutting down clubs in five cities, putting the men responsible behind bars, and saving twenty-four girls. I found out later that was how many kidnapped girls had been rescued in total, plus almost as many boys.
Almost fifty lost girls and boys. It should have been enough.
But for me, it was a hollow victory.
I hadn’t wanted to bring some girls back. I’d wanted them all.
“You were brave to do what you did,” Bennet said as he stood up. “I know how it feels...to not bring everyone home. And I know you still have to finish high school and college, but if you’re interested, you might want to consider a career with the FBI.” A boyish grin revealed dimples I hadn’t even realized he had. “We’d be honored to have someone like you working on our cases.” He put his business card on the table beside my bed. “If you decide you ever want to work with us, or if you just want to talk, call me, okay?”
I nodded.
And then he was a shadow again, walking away from the light that poured in the window, heading out the door and into the hallway. Disappearing, as if he’d never been here, as if he had never risked his own life to save these girls. Or to save me.
...
It was another day before I was ready to go home from the hospital. I kept slipping in and out of a thick, suffocating sleep, waking up only occasionally. Sometimes my room was empty, nurses shuffling papers in the hall, carts rattling over linoleum floors. Those were the good times. I could be myself. I could cry and struggle to focus my thoughts; I could look forward to the day when I would be back in my own room, curled on my side, cocooned in my afghan, blocking out the world that tried to smother me with all its smells and sounds and bright lights. It was all too much right now.
The bad times were when I woke up and someone was in my room, staring at me, waiting for me to say something brilliant or profound.
My therapist appeared beside my bed once, looking like Cruella De Vil with her red lipstick and designer sunglasses. All she needed was a coat made from Dalmatian puppies to complete the picture. We didn’t talk long. I didn’t want her to see the darkness seething inside me. That was my secret. I’d already realized that I couldn’t blame anyone else for what had happened to me. I’d gone to those clubs willingly, excited to find someplace new to fit in, to be a star. I just needed to find another way to feel special now, although
I wasn’t sure whether that would ever happen.
Another time I woke up and Lauren was here. Sitting in the chair, wearing a pink dress, her hair in long braids, like she was Heidi or something. Like she was completely innocent and all was forgiven.
We didn’t talk long, either. I gave her a grin, asked a few vague questions, then acted like I couldn’t hear her when she kept apologizing.
I was probably going to forgive her someday. It just wasn’t today.
The worst of them all was when Dylan showed up, standing in the doorway as if hesitant to come in. He looked even more gorgeous than before, despite the fact that there were dark circles under his eyes and his hands were trembling. I’d been thinking about him a lot, when I had coherent thoughts, and now that he was here I didn’t know if I could do what I needed to do.
“Hey,” he said from the doorway, like a creature of the night hoping to be invited in. He didn’t wait long enough to hear whether I wanted to see him or not. He made his way across the room, his eyes always on mine, his lips parted slightly like he wasn’t sure whether he should talk or take a chance on kissing me.
He settled for talking, which was the better choice.
“I’m really glad you’re okay,” he said as he sat on the edge of the chair, his fingers tugging at a small rip in the hem of his jacket. A long pause followed and I tried not to look in his eyes, at the person deep inside who had revealed so much of himself to me, the person I had fallen in love with when I wasn’t paying attention. Somewhere between that middle-school crush and finding out the truth about Phase Two, I had fallen for him. Deeply. Madly. And it was making it hard to breathe.
“I’m going through a detox program. It’s been pretty rough...” he admitted finally, his voice trailing off as he tucked his hands in his pockets to hide the tremors. “And I’m going to testify against the leader of the club, that guy with the Brooklyn accent. But I’ll still have a lot of community service to do, to get the car theft charges dropped. Your friend, Agent Bennet, is helping me and the other Ravens get everything straightened out.” His gaze flicked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look in my eyes. “I know you’re starting to remember things—”
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