she’d always assumed she possessed just hadn’t shown up for work that day. And she certainly wasn’t sorry.
But she could say she was. She could pretend she didn’t remember the feel of the bat in
her hand, that she wouldn’t do it again. Because that’s what Darlington feared—not that
she was bad, but that she was dangerous. He feared chaos. So Alex could tell him that Hellie had possessed her. She would turn it into a mystery that they could solve together.
He would like that. She would be something for him to fix, a project like his broken town,
his crumbling house. She could still be one of the good guys.
But Alex never had to tell those lies. The thing in the basement made sure of that.
Darlington was not abroad. He was not in Spain. And she didn’t really believe he’d vanished into some pocket realm to be retrieved like a child who’d wandered away from
the group. Dawes and Dean Sandow hadn’t been there that night. They hadn’t felt the finality of that darkness.
“It’s not a portal,” he’d said in the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. “It’s a muh—”
One minute he was there and the next he was enveloped in blackness.
She’d seen the terror in his eyes, the plea. Do something. Help me.
She meant to. At least, she thought she meant to. She’d replayed that moment a
thousand times, wondering why she’d frozen—if it had been fear or lack of training or distraction. Or if it had been a choice. If the thing in the corner had given her a solution to the problem Darlington presented.
This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow. Darlington’s words like fingers reaching into her mouth, pinching her tongue, keeping her from crying out.
At night, she thought of Darlington’s perfect face, of the feel of his body bracketing hers in the sleep-warmed sheets of his narrow bed.
I let you die. To save myself, I let you die.
That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.
The mechanic leaned over her, smiling. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”
His grip felt so heavy on her neck, like his thumbs might push right through her skin
and sink into her windpipe.
Alex hadn’t wanted to think of that night at Ground Zero. She hadn’t wanted to look back. She hadn’t even been sure what had happened, if it had been Hellie or her that had
made it possible.
Let me in.
Stay with me.
Maybe she’d been afraid that if she opened the door again something terrible might step inside. But that was exactly what she needed now. Something terrible.
Alex’s right hand closed over the discarded golf club—a putter. She extended her left
hand toward North, remembered the sense of herself splitting, willed herself to do it again.
Open the door, Alex. She had time to register the look of surprise on his face, and then the dark cold of him rushed toward her.
Hellie had come to her willingly, but North fought. She sensed his confusion, his desperate terror to remain free, and then a tide of her own need swallowed his concerns.
North felt different than Hellie. She had been the powerful curve of a wave. North’s strength was dark and limber, springy as a fencer’s foil. It filled her limbs, made her feel
like molten metal ran through her veins.
She twirled the putter once in her hand, tested its weight. Who said I’m running? She swung.
The mechanic managed to get his hand up, protecting his head, but Alex heard the bones of his hand give way with a satisfying crunch. He yowled and stumbled backward
into the couch.
Alex went for his knee next. The big ones were easier to handle on the ground. He collapsed with a thud.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who sent you?”
“Fuck off,” he snarled.
Alex brought the putter down and struck the hard slats of the floor. He was gone—as if
he’d melted straight through the floorboards. She stared at the empty place where he had
been, the recoil of the strike reverberating through her arms.
Something smacked her from behind. Alex fell forward as pain exploded through her
skull.
She hit the floor and rolled, scrabbling backward. The mechanic was half in and half out of the wall, his body split by the mantel.