Would she trail them all the way down to that grimy alley? “Don’t go,” Alex begged her.
But Len thought she was talking to him. “Open the door, you useless bitch.”
Alex reached for the knob. Let me in. The metal was cold in her hand. She started to open the door, then shut it. She flipped the lock and turned to face Len and Betcha and Ariel.
“What now?” Len said impatiently.
Alex held her hand out to Hellie. Stay with me. She didn’t know what she was asking.
She didn’t know what she was offering. But Hellie understood.
She felt Hellie rush toward her, felt herself splitting, being torn open to make room for
another heart, another pair of lungs, for Hellie’s will, for Hellie’s strength.
“What now, Len?” Alex asked. She picked up the bat.
Alex didn’t remember much of what happened next. The sense of Hellie inside her like a deep, held breath. How light and natural the bat felt in her hand.
There was no hesitation. She swung from her left, just as Hellie had when she’d played
for the Midway Mustangs. Alex was so strong it made her clumsy. She hit Len first, a hard
crack to the skull. He stepped sideways and she stumbled, knocked off-balance by the force of her own swing. She hit him again and his head gave way with a thick crunch, like a piñata breaking open, chips of skull and brain flying, blood spattering everywhere.
Betcha still had Hellie’s ankles in his hands when Alex turned the bat on him—she was
that fast. She struck him behind the knees first and he screamed as he collapsed, then she
brought the bat down like a sledgehammer on his neck and shoulders.
Ariel rose and at first she thought he might reach for a gun, but he was backing away,
eyes terrified, and as she passed the sliding glass door, she understood why. She was glowing. She chased him to the door—no, not chased. She flew at him, as if her feet were
barely touching the ground. Hellie’s rage was like a drug inside her body, setting her blood
on fire. She knocked Ariel to the floor and hit him again and again, until the bat broke against his spine. Then she took the two jagged pieces in her hands and went to find the
rest of the vampires, a coven of boys, asleep in their beds, wasted and drooling.
When it was done, when there were no more people left to kill and she felt her own exhaustion creeping into Hellie’s limitless energy, Hellie was the one who guided her, made her put the pink plastic shoes on her own feet and walk the two miles down to where
Roscoe crossed the Los Angeles River. She saw no one along the way; Hellie steered her
down each empty street, telling her where to turn, when to wait, when it was safe, until they reached the bridge and climbed down in the dawning gray of early morning. They waded in together, the water cold and foul. The city had broken the river when it had flooded one too many times, had sealed it up in concrete to make sure it could never do
damage again. Alex let it wash her clean, the shattered remnants of the bat flowing from
her hands like seeds. She followed the river’s course most of the way back to Ground Zero.
She and Hellie placed Hellie’s body back where it had been, and then they lay down together in the cold of that room. She didn’t care what happened now, if the police came,
if she froze to death on this floor.
“Stay,” she told Hellie, hearing the thunder of their hearts beating together, feeling the
weight of Hellie curled into her muscles and bones. “Stay with me.”
But when she woke, a paramedic was shining a light into her eyes and Hellie was gone.
20
Winter
What had Alex been thinking the night that Darlington vanished? That she just had to get
him back to the Hutch. They would talk. She would explain … What exactly? That they’d
deserved it? That killing Len and the others had given not only Hellie but her some kind of
peace? That the world punished girls like them, like Tara, for all their bad choices, every
mistake. That she had liked doling out the punishment herself. That whatever conscience