by Jenna Black
I hated that I was compromising Luke’s safety yet again, but we both knew my mom was never going to change her mind and come in the morning like a sensible person. If we had to leave before she arrived, I was just going to have to hope the creatures in the square had no idea what my mom looked like and wouldn’t realize they had a potential hostage making herself so temptingly available.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
At about a quarter to four, I texted my mom to see if she was still on track to get to the hotel by four-fifteen. There was no response, but I wasn’t immediately alarmed. She could be in the middle of something, or maybe she didn’t hear the phone. It was no big deal. Or so I tried to tell myself.
I tried again at four o’clock, but still no response. My heart rate sped up, and I couldn’t sit still, so I stood up and started pacing in front of the sofa, trying to calm my pulse with some slow, deep breaths. Luke stood up and blocked my path, putting his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m sure there’s some innocent explanation,” he said, but his eyes said he was worried, too. “Try calling.”
I did, but the call went to voice mail. I immediately tried again. And a third time.
“Aleric’s got her,” I moaned, but Luke shook his head.
“It’s daytime,” he reminded me. “Aleric can’t do anything to her in the daytime.”
I wished I could believe that, but I feared the length of Aleric’s reach. “He doesn’t need to get to her himself,” I said. “He just has to force some innocent day person to do what he wants. How hard would it be for him to get a hostage?”
“He’d have to know your mom was coming.”
“Piper could have told him.”
“Piper didn’t know she was coming today. No one except you, me, and my mom knew that. So let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe the battery on her phone died.”
It was a perfectly logical explanation, but every instinct was screaming at me that something was dreadfully wrong. I glanced at my own phone and saw that it was already ten after four. “She’s too careful to let her phone die at a time like this. Something’s wrong.”
The reckless—and frustrated—part of me wanted to rush out the doors into the square to find Aleric and demand answers. I was 100 percent certain he was behind this, that he had my mom. But as panicked as I felt, I wasn’t stupid enough to deliver myself directly into the enemy’s arms.
“We have to get out of here,” I said, already moving toward the door. “If Aleric has my mom, she’ll tell him we’re here at the hotel.” If he didn’t know that already. It was possible the creatures of the square would have recognized me even if I showed up covered head to foot in a gorilla suit.
Luke followed without protest, hastily tugging on his hat and glasses—and grabbing my duffel bag, which I’d completely forgotten about. He was probably still hoping there was an innocent explanation for the sudden radio silence, but he surely wasn’t anxious to hang around the hotel any longer than necessary. If he was right and my mom showed up after we left, we could always meet up tomorrow, and I could hope she acted sensible and stayed inside as any sane person would do after dark.
My mind was whirling futilely, trying to come up with a resolution when I didn’t even know what the problem was yet. Luke and I hurried to his car, both ready to get the hell out of there.
But Luke cursed when he went around the front of his car to get to the driver’s side. “I have a flat,” he told me, staring at his front tire.
I shivered in a chill as I glared across at the square. What were the chances that Luke would just happen to have a flat at a moment like this? I wondered if we’d find a bullet hole if we looked at the tire closely—the Nightstruck didn’t use guns as a general rule, but that was mainly because they preferred to perform their mayhem with their bare hands. There were certainly Nightstruck who had guns, and they’d use them in a pinch.
But it was no big deal to have the flat. We could get to Luke’s new hotel on foot with time to spare.
Luke gave his tire a swift kick, then came back to the sidewalk. As he approached, we both looked up when a pair of police cars rounded the corner from Walnut Street onto W. Rittenhouse, coming toward us. No lights or sirens, and there was no reason to think those cars had anything to do with us, but a new set of alarm bells started clanging in my head anyway as I thought of another reason my mom might have failed to answer my texts.
I reached over and grabbed Luke’s free hand, hoping those cruisers would go ahead and cruise right by, but they pulled in to the driveway in front of the hotel, and moments later the doors opened and revealed several cops—and my mom.
My heart sank like a stone, and I felt like I was going to be sick. My mom hadn’t stopped answering my texts because Aleric had her. She’d done it because she was planning to hand me over to the police.
I had no doubt that she thought she was doing it for my own good. If they finally had enough evidence to arrest me—if, say, Piper had fingered me—then she probably thought surrendering was my best option. In her mind, she wasn’t so much betraying me as forcing me to make the “right” decision.
But damn, it felt like one hell of a betrayal anyway.
It was always possible the police had taken the decision out of her hands, had used threats or intimidation to get her to tell them where I was—and taken her phone away from her to keep her from warning me. But I knew my mother, knew how she thought. She was not one to be intimidated. By anyone. If she was here with the police, it was because she chose to be.
I tugged on Luke’s hand, urging him toward Locust Street, which was less than half a block away. Neither the cops nor my mom had noticed us yet—or if they’d noticed us, they hadn’t recognized me in my disguise—and the sooner we got out of sight, the better. But before we took a single step, my mom looked over her shoulder at the square. I froze like a rabbit, hoping that if I stood still, she wouldn’t notice me.
She was looking at the square, not at me, but I was in her peripheral vision, and I saw her take a quick glance at me. She looked away again, momentarily fooled by the disguise, but then she started, and I knew it was all over.
Luke gave my shoulder a sudden, urgent push. “Run!” he said. “I’ll try to slow them down if I can.”
I wasn’t sure what good running from the police would do, especially when it was so close to Transition and I had nowhere to go. However, if they arrested me, then it was all over, so I took Luke’s advice and ran.
I heard my mom calling to me, then the police shouting at me to stop, but I just put my head down and ran harder. I turned right on Locust Street to get out of the cops’ sight as fast as possible, and I looked frantically around, hoping to see a likely escape route or hiding place.
There was nothing obvious, and I didn’t dare slow down to look more closely. I kept running toward Twentieth Street, figuring my best bet was to turn yet another corner and hope to lose them that way. It was a flimsy hope at best, but at that moment flimsy was better than nothing.
I heard the pounding of shoes on pavement behind me, and once again someone shouted at me to stop. I wondered if that ever worked once a suspect had taken flight. I also heard the screech of tires and cursed. I’d expected them to pursue me on foot only, seeing as Locust was a one-way street and went the wrong way. There wasn’t any traffic this close to Transition, but the cops couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t barrel into an oncoming car the moment they turned that corner.
I ran harder, my legs burning with the strain of my all-out sprint. I probably didn’t have a chance of outrunning the guys on foot, much less the car, but I had to keep trying.
The gun in my coat pocket thumped against my hip with every step, and I realized there was one way I could ensure they couldn’t take me to jail, where Aleric could get to me. The cops would be reluctant to shoot a seventeen-year-old girl—especially when she was the daughter of the late police commissioner—but if I pulled out that gun, everything would change.
I could
draw the gun, turn to face my pursuers, and fire a shot into the pavement, making myself an active shooter. There would be only one action they could take. I remembered Piper’s sly suggestion that if I died, Aleric—and the gateway that let the night magic in—would die with me. That might have been complete bullshit, just her Mr. Hyde planting the idea in my head as revenge, but it was also possible she was right. Maybe the one truly heroic thing I could do right now was turn and shoot, commit suicide by cop. If it didn’t work, if the night magic retained its iron grip on the city, then at least people wouldn’t be any worse off. And there would no longer be any chance Aleric could get to me and convince me to open more gates.
It’s the right thing to do, the only thing to do, a voice whispered in my head, and I believed it.
I plunged my hand into my coat pocket and wrapped my fingers around the butt of the gun, but I couldn’t seem to make myself pull it out. Damn it, I didn’t want to die!
The car that was chasing me finally came into my peripheral vision, and I realized I was almost out of time. Pull the gun, pull the gun, pull the gun, I ordered myself, but my hand stayed in my pocket as the car drove halfway onto the sidewalk in front of me, barely missing a fire hydrant. and shrieked to a stop.
My first thought was that it wasn’t a police car. Police don’t drive fire-engine-red BMWs. My next was that I recognized that car.
The passenger-side door sprang open, and I saw Piper leaning over the seat.
“Get in!” she shouted at me.
I didn’t have time to think about what I was doing, didn’t have time to wonder what the hell Piper was doing here, how she’d gotten out of her house, why she just happened to be driving by the hotel at the exact moment I was running for my life.
I dove into the passenger’s seat, and Piper took off without waiting for the door to close. The tires shrieked and squealed in protest, and the scent of burnt rubber filled the air. I clawed for the door, almost falling out of the car when Piper flew over a pothole. I finally got hold of it and yanked it closed just before it hit a post that would probably have torn it off entirely.
Piper was driving like a maniac, foot to the floor, still going the wrong way on Locust. I was bouncing around so much I couldn’t even get my seat belt on, but I wasn’t about to tell her to slow down.
She blew through the red light at Twentieth, punching her horn as she nearly T-boned another car that had the right of way. If some unsuspecting driver turned onto Locust, we were all going to die, because Piper was going too fast to stop, and the street was narrow and tree-lined so there was no room to swerve.
We reached Twenty-First without a head-on collision. Piper spun the steering wheel and stomped the gas pedal again, making the car fishtail and nearly taking out a fire hydrant. I reached for the grab bar, holding on for dear life as Piper righted the car and started tearing down Twenty-First. Thankfully, we were at least going the right way now.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw no sign of the cops, though I heard sirens in the distance. The cops were probably just now back in their cars after the foot chase and were taking off in pursuit. We weren’t out of the woods yet, though I was half convinced Piper was going to get us both killed the way she was driving.
It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, and we were bouncing over potholes and manhole covers so hard my teeth kept clacking together, but at least we were going straight for a moment, and I was able to wrestle my seat belt into position. Piper skidded around another corner, going left despite a red light. I clung to the grab bar and stared at her, finally out of fight-or-flight mode enough to allow rational thought some room.
She looked every bit as bad as she had the last couple of times I’d seen her. Maybe even worse, with those sunken eyes and those bony fingers gripping the wheel. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed or combed for at least a couple of days, and her clothes were covered with spots and stains.
My heart seized in my chest when the dying light shone through the windshield and I saw the color of those spots and stains. I wanted to reach for my gun, but I couldn’t convince my fingers to release their death grip on the grab bar. That was when I noticed the hint of white bandage that peeked out from beneath both of her sleeves.
“Did you try to kill yourself?” I blurted. There were probably a lot more important questions for me to ask at the moment, but I couldn’t seem to drag my eyes away from those bandages. I’d known that Piper was in bad shape, but somehow it had never occurred to me that she was that bad.
She flicked a quick glance my way as she turned yet another corner. Her speed was dropping as we went, and she was no longer drawing the attention of every pedestrian we passed. We were still going well above the speed limit, but considering how close it was to Transition, that was hardly remarkable. I wondered where we were going. I also wondered if I should be trying like hell to get out of that car. After all, if she’d had time to have her wrists neatly bandaged, then she’d had time to change clothes, too. Instinct told me the blood on those clothes wasn’t her own.
“I’m not really sure what I was trying to do,” Piper said. “It was somewhere between a genuine attempt and what my shrink would call a ‘cry for help.’”
I couldn’t figure out what to say to that. The person sitting next to me in this car might as well have been a total stranger. A potentially dangerous one at that.
“I never used to have trouble making up my mind,” Piper continued. She glanced over at me, and I nodded in agreement. I felt wary enough of her that I probably would have nodded in just the same way if she’d told me she’d been abducted by aliens. Her mouth lifted in a half grin that told me I was wearing my feelings clearly on my face.
“Don’t worry, Becks. I know how crazy I look and sound, so you don’t have to worry about offending me.”
I looked up at the sky nervously. We were getting way too close to Transition. “Where are we going?”
“There’s an empty house I used to like to hang out in when I was Nightstruck. It’s as good a place as any to hide for the night. We’re almost there.”
“If any of Aleric’s watchers in the square realize I got in your car, they might guess where we are if it’s somewhere you used to hang out.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “You got a better idea? We’re kinda short on time here.”
I still had 1,001 questions—and about 1,002 reasons not to trust Piper—but I had no idea where else I could go in the short time we had left before Transition. She pulled the car to a rough stop in front of an unremarkable row of houses. I had the brief thought that her red BMW would be way too easy for the police to spot parked openly out in the street, but of course after Transition, the police would be way too busy protecting people from the Nightstruck to look for little ol’ me.
I followed Piper up a short flight of stairs and watched the sky anxiously as she unlocked the door. The key was on a rabbit’s foot key chain. The rabbit’s foot had blood on it, and it looked pretty fresh. I fingered the gun in my pocket.
The door swung open, and Piper stepped inside, beckoning me to follow. I hesitated on the threshold. The sky took on telltale hues of orange and red. I could tell I was facing directly west, because it looked like I could walk down the street straight into that blazing fireball. As the sun disappeared, the Transition began, the forms of the buildings and the familiar features of the city’s streets blurring and waving as shadows of people who hadn’t been there moments ago began to appear.
There was no time, and there were no other options. I crossed the threshold and pulled the door closed behind me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The abandoned house Piper led me into was the polar opposite of the elegant one in which she and her parents lived. I suspected that was the point. It was cozy and homey, all the furniture functional rather than decorative. Whereas Piper’s house was pristine, with all things kept in their designated places unless in use, this house was cheerfully chaotic. There was a bicycle in the foyer, a ha
lf-finished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table in the living room, and books with ragged covers and dog-eared pages arrayed on every flat surface. A guitar was propped against one arm of the sofa, and an ornately carved ship’s wheel—what on earth was that doing in someone’s living room?—against a fluffy armchair.
Piper made herself at home, plunking down on one end of the sofa and lighting a battery-operated Coleman lantern that sat on the nearby end table. “Power and water were shut off by the time I got here,” she explained. “Hope you don’t need to use the bathroom, because they’re pretty gross by now.”
I could only imagine. Actually, I had no inclination to imagine.
“So what’s the story?” I asked, far too agitated and pumped up on adrenaline to sit down.
“The story?” Piper asked with a pseudo-innocent raise of her brows. It’s hard to look even pseudo-innocent when you’ve got blood splattered on your clothing.
I just stared at her, wondering if I wouldn’t be better off taking my chances outside. The only thing I knew and understood about Piper right now was that she wanted to be Nightstruck again, no matter what the cost. That didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d be eager to come to my rescue. Not out of the goodness of her heart, at least.
“How come you showed up at the hotel at the exact moment I had to make a speedy getaway?” I tried again. “How come you showed up at all?”
“Remember how I said earlier that I never used to have trouble making up my mind?” She waited for my nod of confirmation. “Well, obviously I mentioned that because these days I do have trouble. I can’t make a decision without second-guessing it two seconds later.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Piper leaned back on the couch and crossed her arms over her chest. It looked like a defensive posture, only the way she then propped her feet on the coffee table—heedless of the puzzle pieces she knocked to the floor—looked pretty relaxed.
“I figured you weren’t going to help me escape,” she said. “Not that I blame you, really, but still. The only way I could see to get out of that room and live again was to give Aleric what he wanted. So I called the police and told them you shot me.”