“Okay,” she said, patting my back. “You go be with your friend, Nina. I understand.”
When we said good-bye, the desert shadows stretching long, I let Becca hold me longer than I should have. I’d miss that house, its birds and wind chimes, its pastel bathroom that strove in vain to deny the past.
The whole time I was waiting for the fateful sign, the twitch of my eyelid. Can Dylan see this? Is he inside my head?
I can’t reach him, either. Not the normal way.
Not now, I tell myself for the hundredth time as I gun it toward Albuquerque. When it happens, I’ll know. And that won’t be for a while, because Dylan keeps vampire hours.
Except those nights when I staked out his house or his hideout—and now I know why he was all tucked in by midnight. He suspected I was watching him, and he wanted to be sure.
As I cross the New Mexico border under the darkening desert sky, a passing car blinds me, and shivers cascade down my spine. The Legacy floats toward the median—have I lost control? No. A twitch of the wheel rights me.
A twitch. Dylan knew the whole time. He knew when I was in his head, too—he must have figured it out at some point—but he kept the awareness from forming into telltale thoughts. He repressed, he compartmentalized, so all I sensed was the faintest anticipation, like something bright flickering at the corner of his vision. She’s here.
God, I hope he didn’t see me and Warren in the motel room when we…
How did my dad and Denise stand it, knowing about their connection the whole time they were growing up? And that makes me wonder—if I’d been raised with Dylan, would things have been different?
If we’d grown up together, I’d have agonized during his tour of duty, checking on him every night in my sleep, terrified of losing him. After he killed the old man in upstate New York, I would have had to choose. By now, one of us might be dead or in a cell. Or worse: I might be keeping his secrets.
I don’t want my eyelid to twitch; it’ll mean he’s in my head or looking through my eyes, polluting me. And I do want my eyelid to twitch, because then I’ll know he’s asleep and Warren is safe—for now.
Call me, Warren. Text me. Do it.
Still no calls when I hit the city limits at eleven thirty, so I race to Dylan’s house first.
Piedmont is as placid as ever. Eliana’s Civic sits in the driveway, but the Sequoia is gone. Where is he?
No way to know. I head to our motel, forcing myself not to run the last red light. Be there be there be there.
The window’s dark. I catch the seat belt in the car door, let it go, dash up the stairs so fast my eyes tear and my heart hammers in my ears.
Be here anyway. Be sitting in the dark watching a marathon of a stupid cop show, surrounded by empty bags of Funyuns. Look at me like I’m nuts. Ask me, “What are you freaking out about now?”
I fall into the room. Empty except for his stuff.
I grab a T-shirt Warren left crumpled on the bed and bring it to my face, breathing him in. He was here this afternoon after the bed got turned down. Where did he go?
Then I spot the blue plastic bucket wedged under the motel desk, and I already know what it is, and I groan aloud.
I’ve seen buckets like this before. I don’t have to open it to know what’s inside—flashlight, restraints, ammo. I don’t even have to read the Post-it stuck to the lid, but I do anyway.
It says in Warren’s neat handwriting: Watched DS cache this in piñon pines behind Big Lots. Bring to PD.
Instructions for me, I suppose, if I don’t find him. Without a word about his current location.
He didn’t expect me back tonight. He was probably hoping I’d never read the note at all.
Dylan couldn’t have come here and taken Warren—he’d have spotted the bucket and grabbed that, too. Maybe Warren meant to hide the evidence later. But he went out somewhere—for junk food, probably, or to case Dylan’s house—and then…
I collapse on the bed like a puppet with cut strings. I need to get up and drive, but my exhausted brain tells me, Too much. Too much.
Maybe Warren didn’t go out to the desert. Maybe he’s eating pie right now.
I clutch his shirt to my chest and pull my feet up on the spread, Chucks and all. I’m only resting here for a moment, enough to get a second wind, and then I’ll go downstairs to the car.
After all, I can’t make myself sleep. No matter how helpful that might be.
Back when I was trying to pull all-nighters, before I got the pills, all my straining to stay awake just made my vision blur and my body go heavy like I had the flu. I remember how my head fell back, how I’d trace circles on my palms, how I’d pinch myself or pull my hair just to hold myself fast in this body a little longer—
Yes. Like that—and I force my eyelids open. I need to stop letting myself slip into this grayness, I need to be alert, I need to go—
Behind my drooping eyelids, I’m still awake enough to see a tiger-striped pyramid rise from the desert floor. Becca appears beside me, tears in her eyes. “It’s okay,” she says. “I know the way out.”
My eyes snap open. There’s my childhood mobile with its clinking tigers and starfish, sun from the window setting them afire. Tiger stripes on the desert. Tigers, tigers, burning bright.
I’ll get up. I’ll go.
I don’t feel my eyes close this time. Shapes flit in the dark like stray radio signals, parts of my brain that haven’t shut down.
Then, without warning, light.
I’m in a dark place staring into the glare of a flashlight.
My chair is straight-backed, uncomfortable, and I’m facing somebody else in a chair, only he’s not sitting alert like me.
He’s slumped, bound. Dead weight.
The angled light glints on the duct tape that covers his mouth and, above that, on his glazed eyes. Half-open. One lid puffy. The cheek below it is bruised and swollen, too, so it takes me a second to recognize Warren.
Oh, God. Where are you?
But Warren can’t hear me.
I recognize that chair. The one in the cabin.
I feel the crick in my back—Dylan’s back. The knee aching where he banged it climbing into the cave. I feel his body’s determination to sit here as long as it takes with his eyes trained directly on the boy slouched in the chair, still breathing.
Breathing.
The boyfriend. A skinny kid playing with a man’s tools. Disgust mingles with pity in Dylan’s mind, and we don’t want to look, but we have to.
We’ll sit here as long as it takes, waiting for the twitch.
The hole in the ground is ready. Deep.
Don’t think about that.
Dylan’s eyelid twitches, and then he knows. He doesn’t mask or muffle his triumph this time as his eyes—my eyes—slide down Warren’s body and fix hard on the white thing pinned to his army jacket. A sheet of drugstore notebook paper with words scrawled in black Sharpie. Not as neat as Dylan would like, because his hand quivered as he wrote the message to his sister. He may be the Thief in the Night, he may control death, but he can’t always control himself, and right now he’s a bit pissed at her. Prepared to forgive, but still annoyed, because she could have prevented this. None of this should have happened.
The paper says: Text yes if you know where. Before sunrise. Bring anyone, he dies first.
He stares at me.
I have to let my eyes drift to the side. Sometimes I close them—anything but return that gaze.
The headlamp he placed on the ground is angled up at me, so his eyes are just glimmers of reflected light. It could be worse—the glare is a small price for not having to see the expression on his face.
Things that couldn’t be much worse: my zip-tied hands going numb behind my back. My ankles duct-taped to the metal legs of the chair. Breathing through my nose and knowing the tape on my mouth is gonna hurt like hell when he rips it off.
Knowing he may never rip it off.
He’s going to kill me.
>
This is not speculation. The way my captor looks at me, for him it’s a done deal. In his mind, I am not breathing laboriously through my nose, in out in out, smelling the gluey fumes of duct tape and wondering if I will get high on them. I’m silent and still.
When he puts me in that hole, will he remove the duct tape and zip ties? Or will he let me stay like this, shackled, till I turn to black goo and only noxious plastic remains?
You have to fight before they tie you up. Every kid who’s ever watched TV knows that. Once you’re tied up, it’s curtains, baby.
I fought. In my mind I’m still out there on the ridge, fighting him.
His first blow catches my chin, stops me from pulling the trigger. When he twists my arms behind my back, I kick him in the balls and jab my elbow in his ribs.
The second blow makes the world into a carousel, my stomach dropping.
I don’t remember a lot between that and being plunked in this chair. A glimpse of the dark ridge against the stars (no moon yet). Scrubby grass casting enormous shadows as I gaze down from a height, blood rushing to my head. His hand probing the cabin floor, finding a crack between the boards and pulling.
A trapdoor.
The cabin has a cellar. Nina didn’t mention it, so she must not have known. Not that there’s much to it—a musty hole furnished with this shitty chair and another chair where he sits, staring at me.
After he trusses me to the chair, I learn to breathe again and watch him rifle through the stuff in my backpack. He hasn’t gagged me yet—no one in earshot.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Shadwell’s headlamp washes the cellar, and I see how the sandy hole narrows into a burrow, a blackness the headlamp doesn’t penetrate.
The cabin can’t extend that far. A passage?
He must see me looking, because he takes off his headlamp and aims a flashlight into the darkness. Packed-earth walls, reinforcing timbers.
“It’s a bootlegger’s hole,” he says.
His first words since he’s ambushed me, his voice no longer dead but normal, almost impersonally friendly. Like he’s giving me a tour.
I take a deep breath, ready to force out words, but only a laugh emerges. More of a grunt, really.
Shadwell keeps talking. Bootleggers in the ’20s built their still in the cabin and used the cellar tunnel as an escape route. When the five-o closed in, they’d scurry through the underground passage into the abandoned gold mine, where they kept their overflow stock of gin until the state dynamited the main entrance shut.
“There are two exits. One behind the ridge, outdoors. One in the old mine.”
I register this info like I register the itch of toothed plastic on my wrists and the throbbing in my throat and left temple. That’s how he ambushed me. From the cabin, he used the passage to slink under the ridge, crept up behind me, and tossed stones over my head.
“There’s evidence,” I croak, trying to save myself. Draw a deep breath, swallow, remembering I left that damn bucket in the motel room, practically in plain sight. If he goes back there, he may find Nina—
He doesn’t seem to be listening, though. “Password?”
He jiggles my phone irritably in his palm, trying to unlock it. I shake my head.
“What’s your password, kid?” His voice returning to that dead level.
“No real service out here anyway. Tried. Call her yourself. Or were you not smart enough to buy a burner?”
Dylan Shadwell looms over me, all six feet plus of him.
Out on the ridge, his dead voice vaporized my last doubts. When he restrained me, more businesslike than brutal, I knew he’d tied people up before.
His other victims must have realized what they were dealing with, too, right before the end. The animal part of us recognizes a predator, just as that predator knows its prey.
But he is still human, isn’t he? He has motivations deeper, more gnarled and perverse than hunger.
He doesn’t bother asking for the password again. I don’t bother shaking my head.
Instead I say, “You’re not gonna make her come here. You’re not gonna hurt her.” Not while I can do anything to stop you.
Still he stares down at me, letting me feel the silent threat. I shake my head and shut my eyes, bracing for a blow.
None comes. When I open my eyes, I’m looking down the barrel of a rifle—not the .40-cal he used to scare me earlier, but a slim little Remington 597 with a fat suppressor like the one I found in the bucket.
Nina said he did Mr. Gustafsson with a .22-LR like this one. His kill weapon. A plinker, more than adequate to put holes in my head. Which is where—in the middle of my forehead—the muzzle is lodged.
I swallow, and something like a moan slips from my mouth. Not now. Not like this.
But if I tell him my password, Nina may get texts from a dead guy asking her to join him in the desert. Urgent texts, and she’ll speed to my side.
She knows I love her. And she—maybe a little—loves me back.
One last look at the half-lit cellar room and the blurred barrel of the .22 and Shadwell’s finger on the trigger. Dying won’t hurt. I won’t even be here.
I shut my eyes again, visualize the desert stars, shake my head. The gun moves with me.
Then it withdraws, and I brace myself, thinking he’s setting up a kill shot he likes better.
Instead, footsteps kick up pebbles. I open my eyes and find Shadwell pacing the length of the cellar. My breath returns when I see the 597 propped against the wall.
His mouth contorts in a cartoonish grimace. He doesn’t look at me—I’m still dead to him. Still, seeing him pissed off makes me less scared and more angry.
“She’ll never come here,” I say. “Not unless it’s with the cops. You better hide me somewhere else, good and deep, because she’ll bring them out here to dig up this whole place, and she knows all your dirty secrets, and you’ll be fucked, you—”
Shadwell stops pacing at the word “knows.” I halt in mid-sentence, wondering why, and that’s when he gags me.
That all happened an hour ago. A half hour? Fifteen minutes? Ten?
Since then, he’s been staring at me like a cat at a mouse hole, while I twist and flex my wrists and ankles and read and reread the sheet of paper he pinned to my jacket.
I feel like a slow kid on a field trip whose mom labeled him with his home address. It takes me a while to grasp that he actually thinks Nina’s going to read that. Through his eyes.
He believes in dream telepathy, too.
Just as I figure it out, he slumps to the side, his gaze leaving me. His phone pings, signaling an incoming text.
I try to send her my own message with sheer force of will: Don’t. Don’t. Don’t do what he wants. Don’t come alone.
I know it’s too late.
The first few miles are fine, because I’m going to kill him.
Resolution pumps in my blood, depressing the pedal for me as I gun it to eighty, eighty-five, ninety, my fears of dark freeways as distant now as childhood snapshots.
Warren left me the key to the box in the trunk, and in the box are guns, and I’m going to kill him.
Dylan. The brother who calmed me on long desert drives to the penitentiary. The boy who’s shared my dreams since I was born.
I feel no fear for the first few miles, no doubts. Just the bright, metallic taste of knowledge in my mouth.
He’s asking me to kill him. No, he’s begging me. Like he knows it’s better for Becca that way, better for Trixie, for Eliana, for all of us.
He didn’t call me. He waited to contact me in the way only he can. Now, if I shoot him and bury him deep in the abandoned mine, nothing will incriminate me but a one-word text.
If Warren and I die tonight, no phone record will incriminate Dylan, either. I left a note on my bed in the motel: If I don’t come back…Then the address of the cabin in the desert, or as close as I could get. Then Dylan’s home address. At the bottom I wrote: Ask him about the Gust
afssons. Take fingerprints from the bucket in the closet.
Voices of reason are starting to chatter in my head. Call the cops now. Let them handle it; they’re trained for these situations.
That’s what Mom and Kirby would say. Warren, too. They don’t know my brother. When he says he’ll shoot a hostage before the cops have both feet out of their patrol car, that’s what he’ll do.
Bring anyone, he goes first. The word “first” is key to the message. If the cops drive up, Warren will get the first bullet, Dylan the second. He won’t be taken alive.
Near Bernalillo, the fuel gauge dips into red, and I screech into a rest stop for gas and coffee, rapping on the steering wheel and hissing to myself: Soon soon soon.
I want movement, asphalt blurring in my headlights. Out of the car, I can barely walk, barely stand, barely speak. The mini-mart’s stainless-steel counter bloats me like a funhouse mirror.
Dylan felt so powerful at the midnight rest stop, flirting with Jaylynne, luring her to his car. I feel limp, adrenaline draining from my veins. I need to be there now.
A dollar eighty-six. Two quarters, three dimes, one nickel, one penny. I had two singles; why am I counting change? Warren could be dead now. Warren could be dead over and over.
A scaly, furtive thought rears its head through storm-wrecked earth. Why should Dylan keep him alive? He knows I’m coming.
Don’t think. The coffee sloshes. The parking lot is endless. Turn the key. There will be no choking, no sputtering. No crisp click-click of a busted starter like we heard on the way to Schenectady.
Oh God, Warren.
You’re the Thief’s sister. Stop being afraid. Be like him. Think like him.
The engine roars to life, and I hit the gas. The Legacy eats up desert highway.
Dylan wants something from me. Warren is a hostage, a means to an end, not disposable yet. But he won’t let Warren go.
Not a fear but a certainty, a sickening pattern emerging in my mental wallpaper. A broad-shouldered troglodyte looming over the swamp. No, Dylan won’t let Warren go. Why would he? How could he?
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