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“No. Fia is not meeting us here.” His words have a strange quality, like they’re being forced through clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry,” I say, glaring because I’m not sorry, I’m frustrated. “I’m not up to speed on what’s going on, and I’d really like to be clued in.”
“I can’t help you with that.”
“But you’re helping Fia.”
“I am not helping Fia.”
My heart thuds fearfully in my chest. “But … I thought … I mean, you were part of it. You picked me up.” Oh, no. Oh, no. I gave him the phone. For all I know, he was delivering a threat or a ransom demand. All Fia did was give me the phone, which was meant to connect me with Adam. Not whoever this is. Tears brim in my eyes.
No. Think like Fia. What would Fia do?
Besides stab the guy.
“I’ll scream,” I say, standing straighter and facing him. “You shouldn’t have brought me to a public place. Leave now or I’ll scream.” I pull the phone back out of my pocket and feel for bumps on the buttons, hoping the call feature will be prominent and that it saved Adam’s number. “I won’t be leverage, not for you or anyone else.”
He swears, then grabs my fingers. I nearly shout until I realize he’s pressing my index finger onto a button. I hear a number dialing.
“Crazy must run in your family,” he says.
“You do know Fia!” I blurt, then bite my lip. He exhales in a silent laugh at my immediate association of crazy with my own sister.
“She stabbed me in the leg.” Well, guess I was right about what Fia would do. “Then I shot her. Then I helped bring her in, against my better judgment, and let her see what we do. And then I followed her after she attacked me and ran. I got to watch as she murdered an innocent girl because I didn’t stop her.”
I hear Adam saying “Hello?” but don’t put the phone up to my ear. This guy’s anger makes no sense. If he’s with Lerner, and that’s where Fia wants me, why is he so mad?
“But she didn’t. Murder me, I mean. I’m still alive.” Obviously.
“Not for the minute it took between watching you fall and finding your pulse.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I mean it. I wasn’t thinking about what it must have been like for him. “If it makes you feel any better, I thought I was dead, too.”
“Why would that make me feel better?”
The sliding of glass doors precedes Adam’s voice. “Cole! And you must be Annie?”
Hearing Adam in person is different from on the phone. I’m flooded with memories of the visions I’ve had of him—the one where I saw girl after girl with abilities being brought into the light and then disappearing into darkness, while Adam’s name bounced around my skull, ricocheting painfully. And the other one, later, where I saw his face. I am meeting a guy whose name and voice I can put a face to. Other than James and his father, that has never happened to me.
It’s too much, all of it. I don’t know how to feel, what to think. I’m not with my sister, who I thought was going to kill me today. Instead, I’m with the guy I tried to have killed. The guy who spells disaster for hundreds of girls like me. The guy whose voice is kind and whose gentle face I will forever be able to see.
An arm comes around my shoulder and I jump.
“It’s okay,” a woman says. “You’re safe.”
“Where’s Fia?” Adam asks.
“How do you all not know?” I ask. “I thought she had a plan. You are the plan. Right?”
“She didn’t tell us anything,” the woman says. “Do you have any idea what she’ll do next?”
I shake my head. Fia’s future is always a mystery to me.
FIA (#ulink_36ffe13f-ddd9-5e60-b27d-e2dc04255cf8)
Five Days Before (#ulink_36ffe13f-ddd9-5e60-b27d-e2dc04255cf8)
“MISS FIA, YOUR SHOULDER—” THE SECURITY GUARD says, eyes wide.
Ignoring him, I skip inside, the opulent, open lobby of the school swallowing me whole. James turns a corner, his suit all well-tailored lines of professionalism, sleek and slippery and mature. I hate it when he wears a suit. When he wears a suit he is Mr. Keane. His easy smile freezes before it can touch his eyes. He’s scared for me.
It’s adorable.
“What happened?” he asks. Ms. Robertson (I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her) is behind him, a sheaf of papers clutched to her starched chest.
I shrug—it hurts—then flop onto one of the leather couches. I’ll get blood on it. I’ve poured a lot of blood into this school, but it’s still thirsty, it’s always thirsty.
“Ran into an old friend. And his knife. Why do so many of my old friends have knives?”
Ms. Robertson stomps toward me, glaring at my arm like it’s personally offensive. “My office. We’ll see if we can patch you up without stitches. Who did this?”
I smile at her. Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris!
She glares at James. “Make her stop.”
James raises an eyebrow at me. “Fia?”
“What? All I said was hello. It’s polite to say hello. Hello, Doris.”
Huffing, she leaves and I stand, slightly woozy, to follow her. “Who was it?” James whispers.
“Dmitri. Russian mobster? He was mad that I stole millions of dollars from him. Silly man, doesn’t he know money is imaginary?” It’s paper that turns into numbers on screens. It’s there, then it’s gone. I put it places, I take it out, I move it somewhere else. Imaginary. Most things are imaginary, when you think about it.
Sometimes I think I’m imaginary.
“Dmitri,” he growls, nodding. “If I had been there …”
“I still would have fought him and won, but then I would have had to worry about you, too.”
James gives me a wry half smile. “At least let me pretend I can defend you sometimes.”
I pat his cheek. “You’re so cute when you’re delusional.”
“And you’re sexy when you’re on a post-fight high.” His eyes search mine, more serious than his tone would indicate, and I know he’s looking to see whether or not I’m falling apart. He doesn’t need to.
I’m better than I was a month ago. A week ago, even. It was bad, but James held me together. He whispered dark, secret things to me and helped me escape myself with promises of flames and freedom. I narrow my eyes but smile, to let him know I know what he’s looking for and that he won’t find it.
“Don’t tell Doris about Dmitri. I’ll be there in a minute.” James brushes a kiss along the top of my head. I lean into him, breathing in, wanting to lose myself there, needing to lose myself there. “Where were Johnson and Davis?” he asks.
I take a step back. “How am I supposed to know? It’s not my fault if my shadows can’t stay attached to me. Call Wendy Darling. Maybe she can sew them to the bottoms of my feet.”
He swears, pulling out his phone. “They’re there to protect you.”
“Do I look like I need protection?” I hold out my hands, one with streaks of blood on it, and give him my best crazy crazy crazy crazy grin. “You know, I like Dmitri. I crippled him, but I like him.”
Whoever he’s calling picks up and he starts yelling about doing a job and consequences and cleaning up messes. I wonder if the Russian guy is the mess or if I am. There’s a smear of blood on James’s suit jacket from where I hugged him, and I think it looks nice there, like it belongs.
I leave him and make my way to Ms. Robertson’s office. She’s already got a massive medical kit out on her desk and I sit, peeling off my shirt. It’s hot in here, the heater in the corner working too hard, drying out the air and making everything feel small and scratchy.
“What did you do this time?” she asks through gritted teeth, fingers surprisingly gentle as she cleans the wound on my shoulder.
“Someone took my parking space.”
“You don’t have a car.”
“That doesn’t mean I should let someone take my parking space now, does it?”
She tears off strips of medical tape, lining them up to pull the edges of the cut closed. “Why don’t you tell me who did this?”
Do you really want to get into my head? I think. It’s not a friendly place. You’ll regret it.
She sneers. “Are you going to kill me?”
I twist away from her, ripping open a package of gauze and slapping it over my arm. “Is there a reason I should?”
“I don’t know. Was there a reason you killed Eden?”
I tap tap tap tap against the table, then use my teeth to tear off enough tape to keep the gauze in place. I hated Eden. I hated her. I can’t think about it, can’t think about what happened, won’t think about what happened. “She deserved it.” I look at Ms. Robertson with the full force of my baby-blue eyes. “Do you deserve it?” They’ll let me, I think at her. They’ll let me do whatever I want, and we both know it.
“And your sister? She deserved it, too?”
I explode out of my chair, inches away from Ms. Robertson’s face, which is no longer sneering. “She was in my way.” Ms. Robertson is standing between me and the door, and I look pointedly at it. “You are in my way.”
She moves.
As I walk past, her voice shakes with anger or fear (I can’t tell, I’m not Eden, Eden Eden why’d she bring up Eden?) as she says, “And Clarice?”
I pause, my hand on the doorway. “I just didn’t like her.” Letting my mind go blank, not thinking anything at all, I turn and smile pleasantly at Ms. Robertson.
In the hall I nearly bump into a girl. She does a double take. “Fia? What happened? Where’s your shirt?”
I glance down, my black bra in stark contrast to my pale torso, then laugh. “I knew I was forgetting something!” I try so hard not to remember their names, so very very hard, but I can’t sleep because I see their faces. Mandy. Twelve. From New Orleans.
I wash myself clean of guilt, of pain, of fear, of emotion. I am the ocean. I am empty. I am nothing. Mandy lets out a little sigh of relief. She loves being around me. Silly Mandy.
“I cut my shoulder and there was blood on my shirt. I was going to find another one.”
“You can borrow one of mine!” She holds out her hand, smiling shyly. I take it and let her lead me to her room, and I do not feel anything, not a thing, not a thing about this life or this girl or working in the school that I will burn to the ground.
When it gets to be too much, I picture the flames, imagine their heat. The noise they’ll make as they devour everything Phillip Keane has built. It’s better than the ocean for calming, and if any Readers look at me funny, I add marshmallows to my thoughts and am just a girl in want of a campfire.
I am a girl in want of complete destruction. But I am patient.
James finds me thirty minutes later, lying on my stomach on the floor of the main dorm common room, looking at fashion magazines with a gaggle of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds around me. They all jockey for position, each trying to slide in next to me, be close to me, be near me, because these girls know nothing.
They know nothing.
I think happy thoughts and feel happy things and I do not let myself near the swirling black edges of the hole that is my soul when I look at them.
I try not to spin. In third grade we did an experiment where we rubbed a needle on a magnet, then dropped it onto water. The surface tension let it rest on top of the water, and the magnet sent the needle spinning.
I used to be a compass, trained on the true north of protecting Annie. Without her I lost my north.
But James is my north now. The flames are my north now. Our dark secrets are my north now.
I tap tap tap tap on the magazine. Annie. Annie. Annie. Annie.
Don’t think about Annie.
James holds out his hand to help me up and I take it, squeezing harder than I need to, willing it to be my anchor. This is what I chose, and I always choose right. James saved me. He’ll always save me.
“Are you leaving already?” Mandy asks, a whine creeping into her voice. “You never stay!”
“That’s my fault,” James says, giving the girls his winningest lie of a smile. “I’ve got to take Fia to New York.”
“New York?” I ask.
His smile goes deeper, sharper. “My father wants us working there. With him.”
I don’t know what to do with this sudden flood of uncontrolled emotion. Finally. Finally. All the things I’ve done, all this blood and betrayal and wrong will be made right. We have a plan (don’t think about the plan, never think about the plan). It will happen now.
It is happening.
James pulls me close, his arm around my waist holding me up. I am dizzy with anticipation. The beginning of the end.
“Will you come visit us?” Mandy asks. “You said the school will always be your home.”
I try to smile, but my eyes dart around the room, tracing the contours of the walls, my finger tap tap tap tapping on my leg. Always.
“Take me away,” I whisper to James, and he does.
ANNIE (#ulink_993b9a5c-f048-5ca1-a9bd-b18899053c58)
Three and a Half Months Before (#ulink_993b9a5c-f048-5ca1-a9bd-b18899053c58)
I PULL THE PHONE OUT OF MY POCKET, TAP IT ON THE table. The noise reminds me of Fia. Who hasn’t called. It’s been two weeks.
Two.
