by Jenna Black
“Won’t the light from the laptop keep you awake?” I asked before accepting.
“I’m used to sleeping in less than ideal environments,” she said with a wry smile.
I took her at her word, and once she turned out the lights, I sat on my bed with the computer on my lap and tried to catch up with everything that had happened while I’d been Nightstruck. Bob decided the bed was big enough for two. I didn’t think letting him on the bed was a great precedent, but when he stretched out beside me using my legs as a bolster, I didn’t have the heart to make him get down. I used one hand to navigate the laptop while the other idly stroked Bob’s fur, enjoying his comforting warmth.
The most disturbing thing I read and that no one had told me about was that Piper’s “cure” was public knowledge. She was the only person—before me—ever to have recovered from being Nightstruck, which had apparently made the government really, really interested in her. Unfortunately, the only thing they were able to determine—at least the only thing they reported to the public—was that her recovery was linked to her near-death experience.
At first, there was a widespread fear that people would take to the streets at night and try to almost-kill their loved ones in an effort to bring them back to normal. However, there was an unexpected and interesting side-effect to the city’s most selfish and mean-spirited being drawn to the night: the people who were still around in the daytime were all the best citizens. There was no rioting or looting during the day, there were no vigilantes screaming for the blood of the Nightstruck and taking it upon themselves to hunt them down. And there were apparently few if any people who thought almost killing the Nightstruck in order to maybe bring them back was a good idea.
Still, I hoped the government wouldn’t learn of my own return to normal. I didn’t think anyone had seen Luke pull me from the square, and even if they had seen, they’d have no reason to believe I was one of the Nightstruck. They probably thought I was some crazy person trying to get into the square, and that Luke had heroically rescued me before I managed it. So it was reasonable to assume no one knew that Piper wasn’t the only person ever to have been brought back. I hoped it stayed that way.
But of course the outside world still had all kinds of people in it, and those people had a lot of opinions about what the government should do about the problem of Philadelphia. People who didn’t think having the entire city and some of its suburbs under quarantine was enough protection. I kid you not, there were people out there who wanted the military to raze the city to the ground in hopes that it would wipe out the “contamination.”
There were also tons of people who wanted to get in past the quarantine. People like my mom, who wanted to do it because she was separated from her loved one, but also people who were dangerously curious or who found the idea of being Nightstruck appealing. Which meant the quarantine was now being steadily reinforced, with both police and National Guard patrolling its limits. Impromptu roadblocks had turned into solid walls, and miles of fences kept people back.
I tried to keep myself from wallowing, but it was damn hard. Everything that had happened was because of me. So many dead, so many hurt, so many who had lost everything or who were separated from their loved ones, unsure if they would ever see them again. Try living with that on your conscience day in and day out and see how you feel.
After a while, I closed the laptop and set it aside. There was only so much I could take.
But there was no way I was going to sleep, either. Dr. Gilliam tried to be subtle about it, but I was aware that every hour or so, she turned over to check on me. I prayed she was just checking to make sure I hadn’t left, because I did not want to have another conversation about how I felt.
My prayers were answered, and she let me be.
CHAPTER TWELVE
My luck ran out in the morning, when I tried to put off calling my mom until later in the day. Dr. Gilliam wasn’t about to accept any excuses.
“She deserves to know you’re okay,” she said in a voice that announced there was zero chance she would change her mind. “I’ll go into the other room to give you some privacy, but you’re making that call. Now.”
“Okay, okay,” I agreed. I knew a losing battle when I saw one.
Dr. Gilliam handed me her cell phone, and I’m ashamed to say I was sorely tempted to dial a wrong number and have a fake conversation with whoever or whatever answered. The idea of some unknown person checking their voice mail and getting my half of an imaginary conversation with my mom was almost amusing, but I was in no mood for childish pranks. Best to just get this over with.
With a resigned sigh, I placed the call. Dr. Gilliam retreated to Luke’s room. I wondered if she and/or Luke would be keeping an eye on the hall outside to make sure I didn’t try to slip away, then decided I didn’t want to know. I didn’t deserve their trust, but it would still hurt to see how little of it I had.
When my mom didn’t answer on the first few rings, I thought I’d get away with leaving a message, and my body was flooded with relief. Relief that was premature, because my mom picked up before the call went to her voice mail.
“Yes?” she said in a curt, clipped voice.
I realized she thought it was Dr. Gilliam calling, and it pissed me off that my mom would be rude to someone who had done so much for me. So instead of starting off with a pleasant, heartfelt greeting, I said, “You really should be nicer to Dr. Gilliam. Unless you expected her to put me in shackles, there was no way she could have stopped me from leaving.”
My mom gasped. “Becket?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Predictably, she burst into tears. I suppose it was the only response that made sense when she’d thought I was probably lost to her forever, but I was still annoyed with her for how she’d treated Dr. Gilliam.
Actually, in a moment of surprising clarity, I realized I’d been angry with my mother for a long time. Ever since she’d decided to move to Boston, actually. She and my dad had agreed I could choose which parent to live with, but really what kind of choice had they left me? My mom was moving away from the only home I’d ever known, going to a strange new city where I would know no one. I would have had to start a brand new school for my senior year, and because my mom is every bit as much a workaholic as my dad was, I would have been on my own most of the time. My mom had to know that there was only one choice I could reasonably make—and she’d left anyway, just so she could make a little more money and gain a little more prestige at a shiny new job.
“Where are you?” my mom asked when she could form coherent words again. She was still sniffling and hiccuping. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m with the Gilliams.” She’d probably already figured that out, seeing as I was calling from Dr. Gilliam’s phone. “It would be nice if you’d apologize to Dr. Gilliam for being such a bitch to her.”
I expected a mom-reflex scolding for my language—even though my mom curses like a sailor when she gets angry—but she let out a shuddering breath instead.
“Are they all right?” she asked tentatively. My mom is never tentative. I’m sure she has doubts and fears just like the rest of the human race, but she’s allergic to showing it.
It took me a moment to understand that sound in her voice, to realize she thought I was still Nightstruck and had hurt the Gilliams. It was a relatively logical assumption, especially for someone who wasn’t living in the center of the madness and didn’t fully understand what life in this city was like.
“If I were Nightstruck, I wouldn’t be calling you at eight in the morning,” I pointed out. “The Gilliams are fine. They’ve taken me in again is all.”
“So Dr. Gilliam was wrong and you weren’t … Nightstruck?” She said it like it was some kind of hard-to-pronounce foreign word. “Then where have you been for the last four weeks?”
“I was Nightstruck. I’m not anymore.” The last thing I wanted to do was go into some detailed explanation of either how I’d been cured or how I�
��d become Nightstruck in the first place. I doubted my mom would go running to the authorities to volunteer me as a research subject in the quest to “cure” the Nightstruck, but it wasn’t impossible she might say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Like most of the people who lived outside the quarantine, she thought everyone inside it was ill or poisoned or drugged—certainly she didn’t believe there was anything magical or otherworldly going on—and who knew what she might do for “my own good.”
“I can’t explain how it happened,” I told her. “I think the night just didn’t have a very strong hold on me in the first place. But—”
“We need to get you to a hospital,” my mom interrupted. “I want you to have a full physical and a mental health evaluation, just to be safe.”
I groaned. “I’m fine, Mom. Dr. Gilliam examined me already and gave me a clean bill of health.” Except for the broken nose, but my mom didn’t need to know about that.
My mom snorted. “If you think I’m ever again entrusting the life of my daughter to that woman—”
“Don’t!” I snapped. “If you say another word about Dr. Gilliam, I’m hanging up. I swear it.”
There was a frustrated hiss on the other end of the line. “I still want you to have a thorough physical, and you need to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.”
Great. My mom basically wanted to commit me to a mental hospital until I could prove I wasn’t batshit crazy. The warm fuzzies were just overwhelming.
“I don’t need to see a shrink,” I growled through clenched teeth, “and I don’t need a physical. I. Am. Fine.”
Which of course was a gross exaggeration. I was physically intact, and I wasn’t running around tearing my hair and screaming gibberish, but that’s not the same as being “fine.” Maybe if I kept saying I was, I would magically make it be true.
“I’m sure you feel fine,” my mother said in a condescending tone that would have grated on my nerves in the best of circumstances, “but people who are sick don’t always know they’re sick. It would make me feel a whole lot better if you were … looked at.”
“And this is all about what would make you feel better, after all.”
If my mom had been in the city when the quarantine started, what were the chances she’d be Nightstruck by now? I’d always thought of her as a good person, but maybe that was instinctual loyalty, not wanting to think ill of my own mother. Certainly she wasn’t a bad person, but she was in her own way as self-centered as Piper. Nothing and no one could come between her and her goals without suffering the consequences, and that seemed like prime Nightstruck behavior.
My mom was obviously taken aback by my comment, because she was silent for a long moment. I felt no inclination to break that silence or take back the words. Instead, I just stood there stewing in my own resentment.
“I’ve taken a leave of absence from my job,” my mom said quietly. “I wanted to have every minute of every day available for my campaign to force the government to let family members come to Philadelphia to be with their loved ones. I’m working with other families to launch a class-action lawsuit, but I don’t give a damn about that. All I want is to find a way to get to you and take care of you. I’m fighting with every breath in my body to be allowed into a quarantine zone, which I may never be allowed to leave, to be with my daughter. I’m doing it even though I know that I’ll become sick, too, and have to spend all the hours of every night huddled inside fearing for my life. One thing you can be damn sure of: I’m not doing that for myself.”
It seemed like a giant weight was pressing down on my shoulders. I’m not sure my mother’s motives were as selflessly altruistic as she made them sound, but it was true that if she got through the quarantine, she’d be giving up everything familiar about her life as well as giving up the career that had always been her be-all, end-all. And if she made it through, not only would she be another potential hostage for Aleric, but she’d also maybe be vulnerable to the night’s appeal. Instead of her looking after me, I’d have to look after her, and if the night ever got its hooks into her, if she wandered out and got herself Nightstruck, it would be like Aleric putting a collar and leash on me.
I had to convince her to drop it and stay safely in Boston, but I didn’t know how. Especially when I didn’t want to tell her that I was at the center of it all. The best-case scenario was that she wouldn’t believe me, that she would think it was just a delusion brought on by my “mental illness.” But it was hard to predict what she might do if she did believe me. If she knew I was “Patient Zero” for all the madness, she might feel like she had to tell someone—both for my own good and for the good of all the other residents of Philly. I don’t know what the government would do to me if they found out I’d started this whole thing, but I didn’t imagine it would be anything I’d enjoy.
The one thing I knew for sure I couldn’t afford to do was encourage her. Ordinarily, after that passionate little speech, I’d have apologized for having implied she cared only about herself. Even if she wasn’t as selfless as she’d made herself sound, she hadn’t deserved my nasty comment. But hell, who gets what they deserve in life anyway?
“So I guess you aren’t getting any press coverage in your efforts to break the quarantine?” I inquired. Of course I already knew she was. When my mom does something, she throws herself into it headfirst, and she was making enough waves to get national attention. “And that isn’t the kind of thing that could potentially raise your profile and help you get an even better job? Maybe even run for office?”
I could hear my mom’s harsh breathing, so I knew she was still on the line despite her lack of response. I channeled my Nightstruck self—not hard, when I’d been that person less than twenty-four hours ago—and shoved the blade in deeper.
“The best part about it is you know it’s never going to work. The government isn’t going to set a precedent by letting someone into the quarantine zone just because she’s making a bunch of noise, and you know it. So you get all the fame you want without much risk that you’ll actually get what you’re asking for and have to suffer the consequences.”
Later, I was going to feel bad about the shitty things I was saying to my mom. She’s self-centered and ambitious, but I knew she loved me, and I knew she genuinely wanted to protect me. Just like I knew she’d taken the potential impact of her campaign to get into Philly into account before she’d launched it, making a decision guided mainly by love but with other motivations lurking in the wings.
If her motivations had been exactly what she’d said, if she’d been acting only as a desperate mother trying to get through to her child, then my words probably wouldn’t have hurt her so much. The fact that she remained speechless when I fell silent told me I’d hit close to home. I was all too familiar with guilty silence.
“I don’t need you here,” I told her mercilessly, giving her a swift kick when she was already down. “I don’t want you here. Stay in Boston and be near the daughter you actually like.”
I could almost feel the spike of guilt in her heart. My older sister, Beth, is a lot like my mom, driven and completely focused. A chip off the old block, who’d known practically since birth that she wanted to be a lawyer just like our mom, and who’d therefore set her sights on going to Harvard, just like our mom. I had never truly been able to relate to either of them. Or my career-focused dad, either, come to think of it.
My mom still couldn’t gather herself enough to reply. I figured it was a good time to quit while I was ahead—and while I was able to stand firm against my desire to apologize. I hung up, wondering if my mom was going to call right back.
She didn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next few days were really rough. I still couldn’t sleep, so I let Dr. Gilliam give me a sleeping pill one night. It knocked me out like a light—right up until the nightmares started. I woke up screaming three times—that I remember. For all I know, I kept everyone in the entire hotel awake all night. I kept waiting for Dr. Gilliam to su
ggest a therapist again, but she didn’t. I think she knew I still wasn’t open to the idea, even though I kind of thought it would be a smart thing to do. But when I thought about telling anyone the details of what I’d seen and done while I was Nightstruck, everything within me recoiled. I couldn’t talk about it. To anyone.
I didn’t have to convince Dr. Gilliam how much of a threat Aleric could be. She agreed with my assessment that he wouldn’t just let me go and that she and Luke would be in danger. I tried to argue that meant I shouldn’t stay with them, but of course I didn’t have to be staying with them for Aleric to use them against me. Instead, we took the precaution of moving every night, shortly before sunset. Sometimes we just changed rooms within the same hotel, but sometimes we moved clear across the city. I didn’t exactly feel safe—there was always a chance that he or his minions could get hold of someone who knew where we were and force them to cough up our location—but I believed we were being as safe as possible.
On the fifth night after my rescue, Dr. Gilliam was scheduled to work a night shift at the hospital. She offered to stay with me instead, but I knew how badly the hospital needed her.
“You’re going to be extra careful, right?” I asked her. Even before I’d been Nightstruck, Piper and Aleric had orchestrated an attack against her at the hospital, and it worried me to know she would be somewhere she could so easily be found.
She smiled at me. “Don’t worry. The hospital beefed up security since the night I was attacked. I’ll be safe there.”