Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  The one by Ella was the imprint of the paring knife, the one I’d shoved into my back pocket the night of my birthday party and Dad had taken from the scene.

  The other was the carved wolf knife with jeweled eyes.

  Both were just inches from their bodies.

  Both were smothered in blood.

  “There was a weapon that could be traced back to you, both times,” Rob/Rich said, still staring at the photos. Still afraid to look at me. “Both times you were found at the scene. The crimes were the same.” He looked up at me now, cupped my eyes with his. “We can’t ignore the evidence this time, Claire. Not even for your father.”

  “You need evidence? Ask Lacey!” I yelled, slapping my hands against the table. “And Patrick. Lacey Jordan and Patrick Gillet. They saw the wolves, you need to talk to them. They’ll tell you about the wolf attack at Lacey’s bonfire. It was right by where they—where they found Grant.” I tried to swallowed up the image of Grant’s bloody face, but it had burned itself into my brain. Permanently.

  He shook his head. “No one has been able to locate Mr. Gillet at this time. It seems as though he’s skipped town. And we’ve already questioned Ms. Jordan. She denied the existence of any sort of party.”

  I closed my eyes and tipped my head back against the chair. Damn it. Of course Lacey would deny having a party, let alone seeing any wolves. Hating me would be a good enough reason itself, but her mother would murder her if

  she found out about Lacey’s binger bonfires. Plus I was sure she was trying to avoid the whole “crazy” label. Smart girl.

  “Ryan.” The voice came through the door first, and soaked through to my bones. And then Dad followed, his eyes heavy, shoulders slumped.

  “I’m sorry,” Ryan said as he stood to meet Dad. Their faces were so close I thought their noses were going to smash into each other. “We can’t let her go—”

  “I know,” is all Dad said. His head dipped between his shoulders. “I know.”

  Ryan started toward me and my heart beat, beat, beat against my ribs. Should I run? I should run. But where would I go? Where could I go where they couldn’t find me, where the wolves couldn’t either?

  How could I go where Ella went?

  “No. Please.” Dad choked back a scratchy sound in his throat. “Let me do it.” Dad stepped toward me and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket.

  I didn’t run. I couldn’t hide. There was nowhere to go where the wolves wouldn’t gnaw apart every piece of my life until all that was left was cracked and brittle bone. I held out my wrists and stared him in the eye.

  “You know I didn’t do it,” I said.

  Dad carefully snapped the cuffs around my wrists. “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of Grant Buchanan.”

  thirty-five

  The cuffs made the skin on my wrists sting. They made me think about birds and wings and angels.

  I thought about Ella in the Christmas play as the angel Gabriel. The way her dimples looked like deep little sockets under the lights, how the tips of her wings were stained orange in typical Ella flare. She looked so beautiful, just like an angel on fire.

  There was one part in the middle of the play, right after the angel Gabriel came to tell the shepherds about baby Jesus. Ella was standing off to the side of the stage, and someone had tried to follow her with the church’s crazy excuse for a spotlight. The light around her quivered and trapped her in bars made of shadows. It was only for a second, and no one else probably noticed, but I never stopped watching her. She looked like a dimpled bird whose wings poked through the bars of its cage. And then it was gone and she was free.

  I shifted my hands so that the cuffs slid down my arm. A ring of shiny pink already crawled around my wrists, and I’d only been wearing them for three hours.

  I might be wearing them the rest of my life.

  If I had wings like Ella’s, I would let them poke through the bars of this cage so they could catch the breeze from the station door that kept opening and closing. I’d let the breeze ruffle their tips until they caught a big enough gust of wind to help me slip through the bars. And it wouldn’t even matter if I had handcuffs, so, so heavy or not; I would still fly away, away from the cement and earth and into the place where Ella was now. Wherever that was. If I had wings, I could find her.

  I could find the wolves.

  I’d fly so close to the cornfield that the stalks would tickle my stomach as I flew by. And I’d find them there, howling and snapping and waiting to steal someone else’s soul. I’d kill them, all of them. Or maybe just the one with the yellow eyes. And everyone would see that I’m not crazy, that I would never hurt Ella or Grant, that they were all so wrong.

  Why couldn’t I remember?

  That’s what they were all thinking out there in their moldy-smelling office. Why can’t Claire remember?

  Is she lying?

  Was I?

  No. I could only remember in snapshots. A flash of a knife here. Constellations of blood there. Eyes, all gray, everything gray, staring up at the sky. Howling and paw prints that were smudged to look like nothing at all.

  The feeling of metal sinking into skin.

  Into wolf skin. It was definitely wolf skin. Wasn’t it?

  Seth’s voice floated by my cell before he did. He stood outside my cage and wrapped his paws around the bars, smirking. “Just checking on you,” he said, but there wasn’t a drop of concern in his voice.

  I didn’t bother to say anything to him.

  He tipped his head forward so that the fat of his chin dribbled through the bars. “I always knew you were batshit like your father. It was only a matter of time.” He pulled away and two red stripes raced down his forehead. “One Graham down, one to go.”

  And then he was gone, just like a bad dream.

  Minutes ticked by, but I don’t know how many.

  The phone rang in the alcove, just down the hall from my little cell.

  Footsteps on floorboards and a sigh so heavy that I swore the whole room dimmed around me.

  “Hello?” Dad answered, and I heard his body sink into a creaking desk chair. He sighed again. I could almost see him rubbing his forehead, elbows planted to the desktop. “Dr. Barges, thanks for calling me back.”

  I held my breath. Thanks for calling me back? Why had he even bothered to call my ridiculously useless doctor? So that he could answer Dad’s rhetorical questions about the state of my mental health? So, Dr. Barges, do you think Claire is insane?

  “Right,” Dad said into the phone. “Listen, doctor, I’m at a loss here. You’re the best in the country for this kind of thing.” He choked back a breath. “I need you to give it to me straight. Did Claire do this because of … of her … what did you call it? Anxiety over the accident? Or mental illness? Or what is it?”

  If I could have burned a hole in his head with my eyes, I would have. If I was crazy, then he was just as big of a lunatic as I was. He would never admit that, though. Not with Amble breathing down his neck. So this had to be some kind of act; he had to be doing this for the sake of looking like the normal, concerned father instead of the crazed wolf hunter.

  There was a long pause on the other end. The floorboards creaked; the coffee machine gurgled somewhere down the hall. I held my breath. I needed this answer just as much as he did.

  Time ticked away, ate at my skin, poked a hole in my heart.

  Tick.

  Tick.

  Something like a palm slapping the desk echoed around me and made me jump out of my skin. “But we sent her all the way to you in New York,” Dad said. “Do you know what I had to do to keep her out of the system here? I would lose everything—my life—if anyone ever found out the measures I took to keep her safe.”

  A pause. “Will she hurt anyone else? Herself?”

  Another pause. Then a sigh.

>   “You really think Havenwood is our best shot?”

  Havenwood. I pressed my palm to my mouth and choked back a sob that bubbled up from my throat. I hadn’t realize I’d been holding it in for so long—years even.

  “Okay, we’ll just have to do that then. Thank you, Dr. Barges. We’ll be in touch.” Click.

  I shoved both of my fists against my lips and stuffed the sobs back down until they sank into my stomach.

  Dad’s shadow spilled into the hallway. In a second, he was standing on the other side of the bars, hands in his pocket, his forehead lined with stripes of sweat. He blinked at me, watched me. I’d never felt more like an animal in my life.

  “I just got off the phone with Dr. Barges,” he said, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets.

  I pulled my fists from my mouth and licked away the tears that had pooled in the creases of my lips. “I know.”

  “He thinks your only shot of getting out of this is pleading insanity. He’ll testify on your behalf.” Something jangled in his pocket, and a second later he pulled out a fat set of keys. “He thinks Havenwood is the best place for you, Claire.”

  “I know,” I whispered. The sob threatened to crawl its way back out of my throat.

  Seth’s booming laughter echoed from his office. Dad glanced down the hall, and then starting flipping through a ring of keys. “We don’t have much time,” he whispered.

  I blinked at him, my brain slow to shudder to life. “What?”

  He stopped at a fat silver one and shoved it into the lock. “You have about thirty minutes tops before Seth comes back here to check on you again. He’s still suspicious of me, wants to make sure you don’t go disappearing on him before he has a chance to drive you over to the county prison.” The lock clicked and my cell door creaked open.

  I jumped to my feet and rushed to the door. “But you’ll get fired! You’ll lose everything.” I bit my lip. “Amble’s going to retaliate against you for this.”

  Dad just looked at me, his eyes soft and watery, and brushed my sweaty cheek with the back of his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “You’ll go and find the wolves, find Ella. And then you’ll come back and clear my name.” And then another key, another click, and my handcuffs were off.

  “Clear our name,” I said, planting a kiss on his cheek. He held the door open, probably to prevent it from creaking again, and I slipped out. I turned to look him one last time. “I’ll be back before you know it,” I whispered. And then, like a little bird, I flew out of my cage and into the night.

  thirty-six

  The wind cut into my skin as soon as I stepped out the back door of the station and into the night. I tucked my hair into the collar of my shirt to block out the chill creeping down my neck. Snow littered the tiny parking lot. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. At least not anything I could see.

  Dad had given me the gift of time. How much, I didn’t know, and I had no idea where to start.

  For a split second, I thought about just running, about climbing on the next bus to Michigan, to the Upper Peninsula, and escaping before they even had a chance to catch me. But everything about that felt wrong.

  I had to see Grant. That’s what I had to do first.

  The one good thing about Amble is that you can see just about anything you might need from wherever you’re standing. I could see the roof of the hospital—if you could even call it a hospital—poking up over the town like a cement-colored stalk peeking out from the snow. I started running.

  The cold gnawed at the raw skin on my wrists, and my lungs ached. But my legs kept moving forward, one boot print after another. I wanted to stop, to lean over and grab at the stitch in my side until it quit hurting. But I felt the weight of the invisible time bomb strapped to my chest, tick tick ticking away the last slivers of any future I had a chance at.

  Grant.

  Ella.

  I said their names over and over in my head, watched in my mind flashes of their dimples and eyes and tutus and half-grins. And I kept running.

  Sometimes I caught a flash of something shifting through the cornfields. I knew it was them, waiting for me, growling at me.

  I kept running.

  There was nothing the wolves could do to pull me back into their universe. There was no message they could send me that would make me want to cut through the field and tear them apart. There was only this:

  Grant.

  Ella.

  A howl pierced through the night, and then another and another. Ice dripped down my spine, and it wasn’t from the cold. I whipped around the corner and was blinded by the lights lining the hospital parking lot. I stopped just long enough to clutch my stomach and forced the air back into my lungs. And then I stepped inside.

  “Can I help you?” asked a chubby woman behind the front desk.

  I stepped up to the desk. “I’m here to see Grant Buchanan.”

  She tipped her head forward and stared at me over her thick glasses. I bit my lip and looked away. Did she know who I was? It wouldn’t surprise me, since gossip hung in the air around Amble like smog in Manhattan. My only shot was if enough time had ticked away and she didn’t recognize me as Mike Graham’s pariah daughter.

  My head snapped up. “I’m Rae Buchanan, Grant’s sister. Can I see him?” It was a long shot, for sure, but it was all I had.

  The woman looked at me for a long time before scribbling something down on a sticky note. “Visiting hours end in twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be done in fifteen.”

  She kept writing for a second, then nodded. “Better hurry then,” she said without looking up. “Second floor, room sixteen.”

  I headed for the elevator. Everything ticked around me: the buttons on the wall, the blood in my veins. It was all moving too slow, but way too fast at the same time. My time was running out, but I wasn’t moving fast enough to catch up to it.

  The doors creaked open and I bolted.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  Room 16. My stomach lurched when I saw his name scrawled on the whiteboard outside the door. Under it, someone had written Cranial contusion, multiple facial wounds, abdominal injury.

  If only they knew.

  I opened the door so that a sliver of the room came into focus. There was a machine that churned in the corner, whirring and beeping on repeat. There was just the tip of Grant’s ear, poking out of his pillow. I stared through the crack in the door, waiting for that ear to move, his head to shift, his voice to croak out an awkward sound. He didn’t move.

  If I stared at his perfect, pink ear long enough, then maybe it would be okay. Maybe his face would be the same, and there would be no angry claw marks striping his lips. Maybe he’d still have his soft voice and sweet words still stuck in his throat and maybe they wouldn’t have been taken away like Ella’s.

  His head twitched and the tiniest corner of a bandage slid into the sliver of the room I could see.

  “Hello?” he said, just above a whisper.

  The sound of his voice punctured my lungs, and all the breath I’d been bottling up seeped out. His words; he still had them. He could still use them.

  I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me with a quiet click.

  Grant blinked at me from behind a cluster of bandages. They looped around his head and shadowed his face like tufts of gauzy clouds. Another set completely smothered his nose.

  But his mouth, his lips, they were still there.

  The way he stared at me, his eyes glassy and empty, punctured my lungs and my heart and everything else inside all over again.

  “Grant,” I whispered as I sank into the chair next to his bed. “It’s Claire. You remember me, right?”

  He blinked at me slowly and then closed his eyes. His head tipped back on the pillow and I thought
for a second he’d fallen asleep. My heart clawed its way into my throat as I watched him lie there, his mouth open and the reflection of the florescent lights pooled into the creases of his lips. My brain grabbed at an image that I’d just seen, one that looked something like this. When had I seen this? I pressed my hands over my eyes.

  Grant’s picture skidded across the desk at the station, his eyes closed and his head surrounded in a halo of blood-speckled snow. His mouth was open then too, and the Big Dipper on his nose was soaked in congealed blood.

  I watched him. He could have been dead, if it weren’t for beeping machines telling us both he wasn’t. I got up and sat at the edge of his bed.

  “Can I see?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t answer me. Or if it mattered if he did. I touched the edge of the bandage on his nose.

  Grant’s eyes snapped open, but he didn’t say anything. He just watched me, and as much as I wanted him to look at me like he had just a day ago, there was nothing. But he didn’t stop me, either.

  Gently, I pulled at the edge of the bandage until it slid off. A line of angry stitches zigzagged through Grant’s star-freckles and sliced off the handle of the Big Dipper. I felt the tears climb up my throat before I felt them on my cheeks. Something in Grant’s eyes flickered, but he still just watched.

  I touched the tip of his nose. “Did you know I used to think your freckles looked like the Big Dipper?” My finger trailed down to the bandage at his throat that was held in place by a spot of blood. “And that the handle pointed to your eyebrows? That’s one of my favorite things about you.” A smile crept onto my face as I thought about how much I’d wanted to touch the tip of that handle on Grant’s nose two years ago, when he gave me my birthday cupcake in the cornfield. How I’d finally gotten to, that night in Alpena.

  Grant’s eyebrows knitted together as he watched me. He swallowed and said, “You have one too.”

  My heart thumped so hard in my chest that I almost didn’t hear his words. I dropped my fingers from his bandages and forced his voice back into my head. I didn’t want to lose his words; I couldn’t lose them. “What do you mean?” I asked.