IT WAS TWILIGHT by the time we reached the outskirts of Chicago, the skyline a sparkling row of towers off in the distance, stretching out impossibly far in both directions. We left the highway on a looping cloverleaf crowded with speeding traffic.
Despite the brief nap in the motel, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I must have drifted off, because when Prairie gently shook my arm to wake me, we were parked behind another motel, this one huge and new and anonymous, backing up to a wide avenue across from a car dealership. I didn’t even ask where we were. I went through the motions of getting Chub, who was fast asleep, as Prairie took care of Rascal. In the room, I collapsed with Chub and didn’t wake up until late the next morning, when the sun was streaming in the windows.
I sat up, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings. The room was almost a copy of the one from the day before, but reversed, the television on the opposite wall. Chub sat on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs, watching TV with the sound turned low. He was already dressed, and his hair was sticking straight up.
Prairie stood at the window, clutching the fabric of the drapes in her hand, staring out into the parking lot, Rascal sitting at her side, staring at nothing. When I said her name, she jumped.
“Good morning, Hailey,” she said. “Are you feeling better today?”
To my surprise, I was. I felt rested and strong, and the events of the past few days had faded in my mind, like a movie I’d watched but would someday forget. Not that I would ever lose the images of the wrecked kitchen, of Gram on the floor, but as I washed up and packed, I felt like it was all in the past, like that phase of my life was over.
I felt the faint stirrings of hope.
It was almost one in the afternoon by the time we walked Rascal and put our things in the car. We went to a diner next to the motel for lunch. My appetite was back, and I ordered a burger and fries and a big glass of milk. Even Prairie ate most of her chicken salad, and the worry lines around her eyes had smoothed.
“So,” I said as I finished the last of my fries, “I guess it worked, huh? The… thing you did. So he wouldn’t be able to find us.”
I didn’t say his name, could barely stand to think it. Rattler. The image of him plunging the knife into the man in the gray jacket flashed through my mind and was gone, leaving only a shadowy outline of the terror of that night.
Prairie nodded thoughtfully and sipped at her coffee. “If he was going to be able to track us…”
She didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what she was thinking. He would have found us by now, if his visions were able to lead him to us. I wondered if Prairie had slept, or if she’d stayed by the window worrying all night, waiting for his old truck to roll up in front of the motel, waiting for him to come crashing through the door the way Bryce’s men had the day before.
I felt guilty because I’d collapsed and slept like a rock, leaving all the guarding and worrying to her. I almost apologized, but I couldn’t quite find the words.
“So he probably stayed in Gypsum,” I said hopefully.
Prairie nodded. “Mmm. With any luck I can finish… what I need to do tonight, and we can move on.”
She was looking not at me, but out the window. I had so many questions. She said we, but did she mean all three of us? And I had no idea what she meant by “move on,” or where we would go next, how we would live.
“What do you have to do tonight?” I asked.
She looked at me directly and chose her words carefully. “I need to destroy Bryce’s research.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I have some ideas. First thing is to get into the lab. And for that I’ll need my key. It’s too dangerous to go back to my house, but I keep spare keys at my neighbor’s.”
“Don’t you have a key with you?”
Prairie pushed her salad around on her plate without looking at me. “This is a special key, Hailey. It’s a prox card for an electronic lock, and I’m pretty sure that by now Bryce has changed the code so I can’t get in. But I have a master key at my friend’s place.”
“Does she know you’re coming?”
“No…” Prairie hesitated and bit her lip. I could tell she was trying to figure out how much to tell me. “I thought it was best that I didn’t call or do anything that might tip someone off. I do have a key to her house, so I can let myself in. The quicker I get in and out, the better.”
I… She said I. Not we. Panic stirred in my gut-panic at being left alone, left to defend Chub against any threat that came along.
“I’m going with you,” I said quickly, my tone harsher than I intended. “We’re going together.”
“I don’t think that-”
“Please. We can wait in the car, it’ll be better this way, we can watch for… for…”
I didn’t finish my sentence, but I figured Prairie knew what I meant. I could watch for the men Bryce had sent or for Rattler or for any of the other threats I’d never thought to worry about, threats that until a few days ago hadn’t existed for me, but that had changed the course of my life.
I’d argue with Prairie if I needed to. I wasn’t going to let this drop. She had saved me from Bryce and Gram and Rattler, and I was grateful. But she couldn’t leave us now. I wouldn’t let her.
I didn’t have any other choice.
“All right,” she finally said, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You can come with me to Penny’s. But after that, when we get to the lab, I go in alone.”
I wasn’t going to argue that-yet. One step at a time.
She wanted to wait until dark to make the trip to her neighbor’s house, so we spent the afternoon in a park. Chub played on the swings and the slides and dug holes and tunnels in a sandbox with a plastic shovel someone had left behind. I tried to interest Rascal in chasing a stick, but he just walked beside me and sat whenever I stood still. Late in the afternoon Prairie drove us north of the city to Evanston, the suburb where her apartment and the lab were. She parked near the lake and we walked out on a strip of land from which we could see Chicago to the south, the setting sun glancing off the windows of all the high-rise buildings, making it look like a city made from gold and mirrors. Chub was more interested in throwing rocks off the pier than at looking at the city, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the skyline and the sun sinking toward the inky blue of the lake.
At last it was nearly dark. Prairie drove around for a while before choosing a parking spot on a quiet side street, near an alley. Cars were jammed in tight on both sides of the street, but a red Acura pulled out just as we were cruising past. It took several minutes of careful maneuvering to get the Ellises’ big car into the spot, but when Prairie finally shut off the ignition, she seemed satisfied.
“I wish we had a leash for Rascal,” Prairie said.
“He’ll stay close. He won’t run off.”
“Yes, but there are leash laws here. Well, we’ll just make do. When we get to Penny’s house he can come inside. She loves dogs.”
We started walking and entered a residential area. Prairie set a quick pace, cutting across a wide street and into an alley that ran behind a row of houses. We made our way down a few blocks, hurrying across when we came to an intersection. I tripped over a hose that had been left coiled behind a garage. We had to hush Chub several times; he was tired from skipping his nap and stumbled along half awake, rubbing his eyes and mumbling.
Prairie put her hand on my arm and pointed at a small, shingled coach house set back from a bigger house that fronted the street. I squeezed Chub’s hand and he leaned against me, his face pressed into my legs. He was so exhausted that he started to cry silently, small sobs muffled by my jeans. We had stopped under the low-hanging branches of an elm that was leafing out for spring, and I hoped we were hidden from anyone who happened to look out their bedroom window.
“Is this Penny’s place?” I whispered.
“Yes. I don’t want to knock because she’ll turn on the porch light, but she won’t mind me letting myself in. We have an arrangement. We water each other’s plants when we travel, that kind of thing.”
Prairie didn’t look as confident as she sounded. She dug for the keys she’d pocketed in the Wendy’s bathroom.
I picked Chub up as she turned the key in the lock. He stiffened in my arms and I hushed him, holding his body tighter. I realized only after I heard the gentle click of the door opening that I had been holding my breath, waiting for-what? A gunshot?
Back in Gypsum, I was always on edge-I never knew what I’d come home to, who I’d find slumped at the kitchen table. But this was different. The things I worried about in Gypsum all seemed kind of stupid now-kids making fun of me, or Gram being in a bad mood, or Dun Acey trying to grab my butt when I walked past him.
“I guess she went to bed early,” Prairie said as she stepped aside to let me into the dark foyer of the coach house, Rascal following.
She slid her hand along the wall. I could barely make out its outline in the moonlight coming through the door. There was another soft click as Prairie’s fingertips found the light switch, and the room was illuminated by the soft light of a lamp on a low table.
A few feet in front of us, an elderly woman in a pink quilted housecoat sat in an overstuffed chair, her feet out in front of her at an odd angle, one of her satin slippers upside down on the wood floor.
For a second I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then I noticed a dark stain that ran down her neck and into the folds of her housecoat, and when I took half a step closer, the reason became clear.
Her skull had been bashed in.
PRAIRIE MADE A SOUND next to me, a cut-off little cry. I pushed Chub’s face hard against my shoulder, shielding him from the sight of the dead woman. When he’d been crying moments earlier-he’d known that something bad waited inside.
I saw that bits of shattered white skull showed through the woman’s ruined scalp and blood-matted hair, and I took a step back. My foot hit something on the floor and I tripped, nearly dropping Chub. Instead, I staggered sideways and managed to stay on my feet. I looked down to see what I’d tripped over: a skillet, an old black one with a wooden handle.
“Welcome home,” came a deep, rough voice. Another lamp switched on and I could see a man sprawled lazily on a floral-print couch, one arm slung along the plump cushions, the other hand dangling a handgun.
It was Rattler Sikes.
A purple bruise showed through the stubble on his jaw, but otherwise he looked none the worse for wear. My heart sank. All our efforts to throw him off-they hadn’t worked. Had he seen every move we’d made?
As if reading my thoughts, he chuckled softly. “Bet you’re surprised to see me. You really thought you could get me off your trail with that wild-goose chase? You must of forgot I ain’t got any quit in me.”
“Rattler,” Prairie said, her voice choked with fury. “What have you done?”
“Before you go lookin’ around for something you can throw at me, Pray-ree, you might ought to consider I got a gun and you got a little boy with you ain’t done anything to anyone.” The way Rattler said her name, it was like he was mocking her with it. “And I got a itchy finger, so’s if you so much as make me nervous, why, I’m liable to go twitchin’, and I know none of us wants that, right?”
“You’ll have to shoot me first.” I turned so my body was between Rattler and Chub.
“Hold up, there,” Rattler said. “I ain’t shootin’ nobody just yet. Don’t you want to know how I came to meet your friend here, Pray-ree? She weren’t any too hospitable, though, I gotta say.”
“How could you-”
“She saw me knockin’ on your door, and come over wearin’ garden gloves and waving her pruning shears and askin’ me all kinda nosy questions. Liked to have pruned me to death, way she was lookin’ at me. And I got to thinkin’, maybe I’d just wait for you from her house here. Nice window I could look out of, make sure I saw when you got home. And now look, it must be my lucky day, ’cause you gone and come to me.”
“She never hurt anyone-”
“Hey, all’s I asked her to do was leave me be and set quietly in this here chair while we waited on you all. I wasn’t fixin’ to kill her or nothin’. Then I tell her to git me some tea and she come back with a skillet and she’s ready to haul off and hit me on the head with it, only she didn’t move quick enough. Guess that didn’t work out too well for her, now, did it?”
I thought about how frightened the woman must have been when Rattler forced his way into her home. His grip on the gun looked sloppy, but I knew better. He could hit a can on top of the trash in the burn barrel in Gram’s backyard while standing in the middle of the field next door. I’d watched out my bedroom window one summer twilight as he and a few of Gram’s customers took turns shooting. The other guys hit the barrel or missed entirely, but Rattler nailed the can every time.
Now he was staring at Prairie with an intensity you could light fires with. And she stared back. There was something between them, all right, something crackling with tension and danger, something almost… alive.
“You slowed me down, girl,” he said, so softly that I knew he was speaking only to her. I might as well have not even been there. “But you can’t stop me. Not when I’m coming for you.”
My fear curled and stretched into something new, a realization that Rattler didn’t want to kill us-he wanted something worse. It was as if he wanted to own Prairie, and I realized that I was more frightened of Rattler Sikes and the other Banished men than I was of the professional killers who’d been chasing us.
More frightened of Rattler than all of those guys put together.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Prairie said, but there was a tremor in her voice, and she shrank back from him. It was like the twisted energy around him diminished her.
Suddenly Rattler laughed, and the spell was broken.
“Now let’s get back on a friendlier track,” Rattler said, his voice oily. “Set on down, girl, I think you ought to be comfy enough in that chair. We got a little talkin’ to do ’fore we all git on the road.”
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie hissed.
But Rattler only shrugged. “I’m gonna take you girls home, where you belong. You can go easy, or you can go hard. Up to you. Hailey, go on, take the kid and git him settled in one of those bedrooms. And take that mangy hound with you.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I edged through the room, avoiding looking at the dead woman, Rascal at my heels. I wished he was a better watchdog-it was like he didn’t care at all that Rattler was threatening us. My heart was pounding so hard, it seemed like everyone ought to be able to hear it. In the hall a door stood open to a small room with a tidy bed made up with a quilt and a pile of embroidered pillows. As I put Chub on the bed and slid my backpack off my shoulders, I tried hard not to think about the woman with half her head leaking out in the other room.
“I like how you look all eased down in that chair,” I heard Rattler say from the other room. “You’re lookin’ real good, Prairie.”
I had to do something to stop Rattler. I unzipped the backpack and dumped everything out. I handed Chub his giraffe and sorted frantically through the rest of the contents.
“Bedtime?” Chub asked, yawning. “I want my bed.” Even through my terror I noticed how well he was speaking, how clear his words were. Evidently he had forgotten his fear, or maybe he was simply too tired to care.
“You can just nap here for now,” I said, pulling the quilts and covers back from the pillows. I could hear Prairie murmuring something.
“Okay. Good night.” Chub got up on his knees to hug me and I kissed the top of his head.
Chub started to wiggle under the covers, but suddenly he sat up, frowning. “I don’t want to watch.”
“What, sweetie? What don’t you want to watch?”
“Bad man’s eye. I don’t want to watch.”
My nerves were so skittish, it took some effort for me to smooth the hair off Chub’s forehead and kiss him gently and get him to lie down again. “You don’t have to. You just go to sleep.”
“ ’Kay.” He closed his eyes, his long lashes casting shadows on his soft cheeks.
In the other room Prairie and Rattler talked in low, intense voices. There was nothing I could use-just my old clothes and Prairie’s purchases. I glanced around the room but saw only framed snapshots, a fancy silver comb and brush, china figurines, a basket of dried flowers. There was a chest of drawers pushed up against the wall and I ran my hand along the top of it.
“You can’t tell me you don’t remember how much fun we used to have,” Rattler said, his voice rising. “You used to love skinny-dippin’ with me and the rest of ’em.”
“I never loved it,” Prairie snapped. “I hated it.”
“That ain’t true. You know you an’ me should of been together. Everyone knew it.”
“No. No.”
I yanked open the top dresser drawer. Slips and camisoles, folded tissue. I tried the next drawer.
Scarves. A soft pile of scarves, lengths of silk in every color of the rainbow-beautiful, but nothing I could use. My heart plummeted.
“Only, you didn’t do like you were supposed to,” Rattler continued. “I waited, I followed your mom’s rules, even if you didn’t. You think I didn’t know about you and that boy from Tipton?”
“He was-”
“You thought you were so smart, sneakin’ around with him? Thought nobody’d figure it out, just cause you kept it from your mom? Well, I knew. I knew.” I was shocked at the bitterness in Rattler’s tone. Was he… jealous? Was that possible?
I stuck my hand in the drawer and seized the scarves and pushed them to the side. My fingers brushed against something hard and sharp. I picked it up. It was made of pale bone or ivory, with two delicate long, curved points at one end and a pearly fan-shaped decoration carved at the other. Some sort of hair ornament, I guessed.
I picked it up and held it in my right hand so that the long, curved points lay against my wrist, then stepped into the other room.
“Don’t matter anyway,” Rattler said. “ ’Specially since your sister beat you to the big prize.”
I heard Prairie’s sharp intake of breath. “What do you mean?”
Rattler laughed bitterly. “Only that once you took off, your mom said she guessed Clover was old enough to date after all. It took some convincin’, like to hurt my feelings the way she kept turnin’ me down, but I finally got her to see things my way. I guess I had a mighty fine time with-”
“Don’t say her name!”
“I’ll say what I want, Pray-ree,” Rattler hissed. “You need me to spell it out?”
I stepped into the light.
Rattler glanced at me, and for a split second his face was open to me, his expression unguarded, and I saw something there I would have never imagined in a million years.
Pain.
Because of Prairie. It wasn’t love-I refused to believe a man like Rattler could love-but a longing so strong he wore it like a second skin; and it was suddenly easy for me to believe that their connection went back not just generations but centuries. The thing binding Rattler to Prairie knotted tighter the more it was resisted.
But when Rattler saw me staring at him, the hurt vanished and was replaced with something else, something sharp-eyed and crafty. Amused, even.
“Little Hailey girl,” he said. “Look at you, practically grown up.”
“You never-you couldn’t-she wouldn’t-” Prairie gasped for words and looked like she was going to come out of her chair and attack him. But Rattler raised his gun hand without even looking and leveled it at her.
“Go easy, Prairie,” he warned, his voice barely more than a raw whisper.
Then he looked at me full-on, his eyes glinting green sparks in the dim light. One corner of his cruel mouth quirked up.
“You know who I am, don’t you, Hailey girl,” he said softly, and suddenly I did-I knew, and my hand clutched hard at the handle of the hairpin as the knowledge thundered in my brain. “I’m your daddy.”
I lunged at him and raised my hand, clenched that hairpin tight, and the sound when those elegant curved points found their mark wasn’t like much of anything at all, like sliding a knife into a melon-
But the sound that came out of Rattler made up for it, a sound that was neither human or animal but something in between, a wild something, a furious something, as he clawed at the thing that was sticking into his right eye.
“Prairie!” I yelled. I whirled around and saw her bolt out of her chair.
I ran to the bedroom and yanked back the quilts. Chub was propped on his elbows, his little face winding up for a scream of his own. He wasn’t all the way awake, I could see that-it happened sometimes, when he was startled out of a deep sleep; it was like a sleep-waking nightmare.
“It’s me, it’s me, Chub,” I said as I yanked him out of the bed, stuffing everything back in the backpack and shrugging it over my shoulders. He started to wail, squirming in my arms as I ran out of the bedroom. Rattler had got the hairpin out of his eye-blood covered the hand he had pressed against it-and he raised his gun hand and swung it from Prairie to me.
Then he shot at me.
I waited for a jolt of pain that didn’t come, but there was a crash from the bookshelves behind me.
“Down,” Prairie screamed, and pushed me away from her, but I stood my ground as she raced for the kitchen and jerked open a drawer and pawed frantically through the contents.
“Rascal!” I screamed, and he appeared in the hall, looking uninterested. “Sic him, boy!”
The change in Rascal was astonishing. In a flash he went from standing still to snarling and hurling himself at Rattler, teeth bared. He clamped down hard on Rattler’s shin, and the sound coming from his throat was guttural and feral. Rattler yelled in pain. As he brought his gun hand down on Rascal’s skull, the gun went off again and Prairie stumbled against me. She didn’t say a word, just made a sound like “unh.”
“Are you-”
“I’m fine,” Prairie said, yanking on my hand and pulling me toward the door.
“Rascal, come on!” I yelled, and we ran as Rattler hopped back, clutching his leg where Rascal had attacked him.
When we reached the porch, Prairie stumbled and barely caught herself.
“You’re not fine,” I said, heart pounding. “Did he shoot you?”
I saw the spreading damp of her blood and the jagged tear in her sweater, the awkward angle at which she was holding her arm.
“Ahh,” she said, breathing hard. “All right, I’m hit. But we have to get out of here. It’s not just Rattler, Hailey. There were lights on in my house that weren’t on before. Didn’t you see? Bryce’s men are over there, and they must have heard something going on.”
“But-”
“They’ll come here, Hailey. To see what happened.”
And then they’d come after us.
Again.
“How-What can I-”
“Just help me run. We can get to a pay phone, there’s one a couple of blocks back.”
I remembered her cell phone, crushed under the Buick’s tire.
If there was a moment for me to be strong, this was it. Prairie had taken the lead since the moment we’d met, and I’d followed. Not always willingly, and I hadn’t always believed or trusted her, but I followed.
Now, though, she needed me. And I had to set aside my doubts, my questions, my fear. I set Chub down, yanked my old shirt out of the backpack and tied the sleeves tightly around her arm, above the bullet wound, to slow the blood flow. She stood still and pale, biting her lip but not making any sound.
I held Chub’s hand and supported Prairie with my other arm, half dragging her, retracing our steps down the alley toward town. Rascal followed, docile again. Any traces of the vicious attack dog he’d been moments ago were gone. I listened for footsteps behind us, the sound of tires on gravel, but there was nothing.
We reached a shuttered drugstore and I could see the pay phone in a pool of light at the edge of the parking lot. I hesitated-we’d be a visible target for anyone who came along.
A taxi cruised slowly by.
I jumped into the street. I’d never hailed a cab in my life, but I held my hand high and waved it hard. For a moment I thought the cab was going to pass us by, but at the last minute it slowed.
“I can’t-my arm,” Prairie said.
“We can cover it-”
Prairie shook her head. “No. It’s too dangerous. If he sees blood, he might insist on taking us somewhere. A police station, or a hospital.”
“Would that be so bad? Come on, Prairie, you’re shot. You need a doctor.”
She shook her head hard. “No. You don’t understand. Bryce is connected. In more ways than you can imagine. I’m sure he’s got people covering the police scanners, the highway patrol-if we end up with the authorities, we’re as good as dead. Besides, we can’t take Rascal.”
“But-”
The cabbie rolled down his window. “Excuse me, miss. You coming?” he asked in a thick accent.
Prairie shook her head again. I made a split-second decision. “I just need to use your cell phone, sir. Please. We’ll pay.”
The cabbie narrowed his eyes and frowned. “No ride?”
“No, I’m sorry, I just really need to use your phone.”
He muttered something I couldn’t understand and started to roll up his window.
“No! Please!” Frantically I gestured for Prairie to give me some money. She dug in her pocket and handed me a roll of bills. I peeled off three twenties. “Here. Just for a few minutes. I promise we’ll give it right back.”
The cabbie hesitated, then sighed and reached into the pocket of his coat. He handed me his phone and I passed him the money. “You stay right here,” he said, stabbing a finger at me.
“Yes, okay.”
I handed the phone to Prairie. She stepped back into the shadows while I waited next to the cab, Rascal sitting calmly at my side. Chub watched the transaction closely from my arms, his eyes wide and worried. “Phone,” he said. “Prairie call.”
“That’s right, Chub. We borrowed the nice man’s phone so Prairie could make a call.” I glanced at the man, hoping his expression would soften when he saw how sweet Chub was, but he stared stonily ahead, arms crossed.
It didn’t take long. Prairie shuffled back and handed me the phone. She was trembling. “Thank you,” I said as I gave the phone back to the driver. He didn’t respond but took off, wiping the phone on his shirt.
“I talked to Anna,” Prairie said. She had started to shiver all over. “She’s coming. We need to stay out of sight. I told her we’d be in that first yard.”
She pointed back the way we’d come. A compact bungalow was separated from the street by a row of mature trees and a thick hedge. With luck, the trees would keep us hidden.
Before I could reply, Prairie started to sway. I grabbed her good arm and steadied her, then half dragged, half carried her. Chub walked behind us, hanging on to my jeans belt loop.
A low stone retaining wall ran along the side of the yard. There were no lights on in the house. I prayed that the people who lived there were heavy sleepers. Once I got Prairie settled on the stone ledge, I looked at her arm again. I couldn’t tell in the dark whether it was still bleeding, but the makeshift tourniquet was wet with blood.
“Isn’t there something I can do?” I asked. “You know… heal it?”
Prairie shook her head. “Healers can’t help each other, Hailey.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just how it’s always been. But we’re strong. Stronger than most. I’m going to be fine.”
Her shivering eased as we waited, but the stone was freezing beneath us and the night seemed to be getting colder with each passing moment. Chub burrowed against my knees. “Sleepy,” he murmured, and I ran my fingers through his hair, over and over, the way he liked.
The minutes ticked by, the occasional car passing just a few yards away. Finally, a car pulled along the curb. It was small, and in the light of the streetlamps I could see that it was old and dented. The man who got out of the driver’s seat was tall and broad-shouldered.
He stood silhouetted against the streetlight, fists clenched at his sides as he looked around. I couldn’t see his face-he had a hood pulled up over his head-but something stirred inside me, the deep, intense feeling I sometimes got around the Morries, of longing and loss and connection and fear all run together. Could it be one of the other Banished men? How could he have gotten here so fast?
Prairie saw the man too, and I could hear her surprised murmur. Terror shot through my veins when I saw that he’d spotted us. I got ready to run, even though I’d never be able to move fast enough, not with Prairie and Chub.
But Prairie put her hand on my arm to stop me.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s Kaz. Anna’s son.”
HE CROSSED THE LAWN in a few long strides and barely looked at me before giving Prairie a careful hug.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” she said, wrapping her good arm around his shoulders. “You’re so tall! I think you were only twelve last time I saw you.”
“Let’s get to the car,” he said urgently. “Mom’ll kill me if I don’t get you home fast, Aunt Eliz-”
He stopped and shook his head like he was embarrassed. “I mean, Prairie. Sorry. Mom told me.”
“It’s okay,” Prairie said. “I was Elizabeth for a long time… don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah, it’s just… I mean… Anyway, I’m Kaz,” he said, finally turning to me and offering his hand. I couldn’t make out his features in the darkness, but the faint light from the streetlamp glinted off his teeth as he smiled.
When I took his hand, I felt the electric connection I often experienced around the Morries. It wasn’t as strong as when I touched Milla, but it was alive with energy. Kaz’s skin was chilled by the night air, and his fingers were rough and callused, but his hand felt good in mine, and I held on for a second longer than I meant to.
And in one way he was different from any of the Morries I knew except Sawyer: he felt safe.
“I’m Hailey,” I managed to say. “And this is Chub. And that’s my dog, Rascal. Nice to meet you.”
He nodded, then turned his attention back to Prairie. “We can talk more at home, but Mom’s got everything ready and it looks like you’re going to need it. How did you get here?”
“Drove,” Prairie said, gritting her teeth. “But the car’s fine where it is, no one will notice it for days.”
“And… does the dog come?”
“If it’s okay with you,” I said quickly. “He’s good.” I couldn’t leave Rascal after he’d come so far with us.
“Doesn’t bother me. My car’s seen worse. Okay, Prairie, how bad off are you?”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“If you say so.” He took her good hand and pulled her carefully to a standing position. “I’d offer to carry you, but-”
“Considering I used to read you Elmo books, that might take a little getting used to,” she said with a weak laugh.
I followed, carrying Chub, who was nodding off. When we got to the idling car, Kaz helped Prairie into the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt while I got Chub settled next to me in the backseat, Rascal in his usual spot on the floor.
Kaz pulled away from the curb and accelerated fast. We didn’t talk much on the drive, winding through tight-packed streets to the core of the city. Kaz took a road that curved along the lake, and suddenly there it was-all of Chicago laid out like a sparkling wonderland on the right, the black emptiness of Lake Michigan on the left. I couldn’t take my eyes off the view, but soon we were back in a grid of city streets. Beautiful old buildings rose up all around us, but as we went farther, they gave way to plainer neighborhoods with run-down buildings.
“Almost home,” Kaz murmured. “Hang in there.”
He turned down an alley and into a tiny garage behind a little house tucked between others just like it. As soon as he turned off the engine, he got out and went around to help Prairie, easing her out of the car.
“I’d better get her inside,” he said, almost apologetically.
Chub had fallen asleep again, and I tried to unbuckle him without waking him. I finally got him out, and found myself on a neat concrete walk in a tidy square of shrub-lined yard, tall fences separating it from the neighbors’. Rascal followed me and made an efficient tour of the yard. Three steps led to a brightly lit back stoop, where a woman waited, silhouetted in the door.
Yet another new thing to face. I took a deep breath and headed for the steps.
“Hailey,” the woman said softly. She was about my height, with softly rounded curves and pale hair curling around her shoulders. “I am Anna. Welcome. You come in. Dog too, is okay.”
The door opened directly into a kitchen. It was warm and cozy and smelled like bread and spices. Prairie was seated at a round table, and Kaz was setting a steaming cup in front of her. He had pulled his sweatshirt hood down, so I could see his face. He had sandy brown hair that was just a little too long, and a strong jaw. When he smiled, his eyes glinted like blue ice.
“You’re safe here,” he said, and I felt his words as well as heard them, his low voice skimming along my skin, my nerves.
Anna went to the sink and began scrubbing her hands with a small plastic brush and a generous amount of soap. “Please do not think I am rude. I think I must fix Elizabeth now. I mean, Prairie. Yes? Then, we talk.”
“We have tea,” Kaz said. “Milk for Chub, if you think he’d want any?”
“Uh… I don’t think he’s going to wake up,” I said. A clock on the wall read 1:40. I couldn’t believe it had gotten so late, but a lot had happened already tonight. I was exhausted down to my bones, and Chub was unbearably heavy in my arms. I longed to sit, but the kitchen table was covered with first-aid supplies-gauze, scissors, plastic bottles-and I was afraid I’d be in the way.
Anna turned from the sink and shook her hands, droplets sprinkling the air. “Kaz, show Hailey their room. This handsome boy-”
“Chub,” I said. “His name is Chub.” I’d carried him for hours, and my spine felt like it might never be straight again. I could smell the stink of my sweat and fear. Even worse, I felt the hot pooling of tears that threatened to spill onto my cheeks.
“Chub,” Anna repeated. “Let’s get boy to bed, okay? You and Chub have Kaz’s room tonight. Prairie will stay with me, I have big bed. I will take good care of her-I am studying to be nurse, so no need for worry.”
“I can’t take your room,” I protested, but the hitch in my voice was obvious even to me.
“Oh. Oh, ukochana. You poor child, go with Kaz now.” Anna pursed her lips as she settled in the chair next to Prairie. Then she took Prairie’s arm gently and began to cut away the shirt I had knotted in place. Prairie stayed silent, but her skin was pale and shiny with sweat, and she had purple circles under her eyes. Her hair hung in greasy clumps and her mouth was set in a bunched line.
“Come on,” Kaz said. “Do you want me to take him?”
Before I could protest, he lifted Chub out of my arms and laid him over his shoulder, Chub’s face tucked into his neck. I slid my backpack off and dangled it in my hand, my muscles numb from carrying Chub. Anna was dabbing at Prairie’s wound with cotton, and there was a strong smell of antiseptic in the air. The skin around the wound was black with blood, but the cotton came away bright red. I shivered and turned away.
I hoped Anna knew what she was doing.
The hall was narrow. At the end I could see a tidy living room. On one side were a bathroom and another room, with its door slightly ajar and a lamp glowing softly inside. Kaz opened a door on the opposite side.
“I’m, uh, sorry about the mess,” he said. “I didn’t have a lot of time to clean before you got here.”
It wasn’t cluttered or even messy, like kids’ rooms on TV shows or in the movies. I had been a neat freak my whole life, but I knew it was due to the rest of my life being so out of control, and Kaz’s room wasn’t like that either. It was comfortably disordered, with an iPod and books lying open on the desk and an empty soda can on the floor near a big bean-bag chair.
On the shelves, books were lined up neatly along with lacrosse trophies and a compact set of speakers. Posters of lacrosse players lined the walls, as well as pennants from Johns Hopkins and Syracuse and a few other teams. Crates on the floor held gear-gloves twice the size of an average person’s hand, rolls of tape and elbow pads and other things I could only guess at. A blue and white helmet sat in a place of honor on top of the dresser along with more books and a Mac laptop. The bed was made-barely, a quilt pulled crookedly over a lumpy comforter and pillow.
“If you pull back the covers, I can set Chub down and maybe he won’t wake up,” Kaz said.
“You’re good with him,” I said as we got Chub settled.
“I babysit for a family down the street,” he said with a shrug. “They have four kids. I like this age. They’re so… determined, you know?”
I did know. It described Chub perfectly. And suddenly I wanted to tell Kaz all about him, about our life with Gram, about the way it had all ended. I felt like I could talk to him for hours, without the staggering shyness I usually felt around kids my age.
Maybe there would be a chance, later. But right now I had other things to focus on. “I need to go see how Prairie’s doing.”
In the kitchen, Anna had finished cleaning the wound and stopped the blood flow, but I had to look away-the sight of Prairie’s torn flesh was more than I could handle.
I knelt in front of her, grabbing her free hand and squeezing. I wanted to do something more-but I didn’t know what. I knew that if all the bad things hadn’t happened, she would never have let me see her weak or scared, the way she looked now.
But what was I supposed to do? Prairie and I had saved each other-well, mostly she had saved me-over and over again. She had proved herself to me.
“I’ll be good as new soon,” she said, trying hard to sound cheerful. Anna clucked under her breath and poked black thread through the eye of a curved needle. The smell of antiseptic was almost overpowering. “Anna took the bullet right out. It was just a little thing.”
Bullet-that word did it. I laid my face on Prairie’s knee, my shoulders shaking. Prairie patted my hair, my neck, whispering that it was going to be all right. That made me cry harder, but I was afraid that I would jostle her when Anna was taking a stitch. And besides, my nose was running all over her pants, and even though they were grimy from the past two days, I still couldn’t stand the idea of messing them up. So I got to my feet, shaky and stumbling, wiping my nose on my sleeve and swallowing my tears down hard.
“Hailey, there are tissues on counter,” Anna said, her voice calm but kind. “Please help yourself.”
I did. I blew my nose and splashed water on my face from the sink, and washed my hands and dried them on a pretty yellow dish towel. And then, even though I was afraid to look, I sat down and watched Anna close up the wound with tiny, careful stitches, the line of black x’s the only proof that Prairie had been shot just a few hours before.
Kaz had wandered in without me noticing. “Chub went right to sleep. I left your backpack in there. You can, uh, use the bathroom or go to bed or whatever when you’re ready. You can use my mom’s stuff.”
“Yes, of course,” Anna said. “Thank you, Kaz. Hailey, please make yourself home. There are towels in closet in hall, okay?”
“Thank you.” I knew I was filthy and that I probably smelled, and I was embarrassed for Anna and Kaz to see me like this. But I wasn’t ready to leave Prairie. I stood behind her chair and watched as Anna finished up.
“So, Hailey, you are sophomore in high school?” Anna asked, glancing up from her work and giving me a smile.
“Um, yeah.” Though it seemed unlikely I’d ever be setting foot in Gypsum High again.
“Kazimierz is junior at Saint Michael’s. That is Polish name, we call him Kaz. Saint Michael’s is nice high school, lot of good teachers. You do good in school?”
“Me? I-No-”
“Hailey’s smart, like her mom,” Prairie said, her voice soft. She had closed her eyes and rested her head against the chair back.
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked, worried.
“Oh yes, there is nothing to worry about. I think she is just very tired. This little wound, mostly I just make sure no germs, no bone chip. Bullet comes very close to bone here, see.”
I looked where she was pointing, at the neat stitches in Prairie’s arm.
“But all good. I have to poke around a little, that does not feel very good for Prairie. But I give her something strong to drink, make her relax, make her feel little bit sleepy.”
I watched Anna finish the stitches and carefully bandage Prairie’s arm. I wished I could just put my hands on her and heal her like I had with Milla and Chub, but the rushing urgency wasn’t there, and I knew it was true-I couldn’t help her. Anna, Banished like us, was using thread and a needle and medicine, traditional tools, and in comparison they seemed so… inadequate. And I understood how Prairie could have been tempted to try to use her gifts to heal as many people as she could, how she could have gotten dragged into Bryce’s crazy scheme if she believed that she was going to find a way to share the powers.
I had Prairie’s hand in mine, and I could feel her pulse slow and steady in her wrist. I thought she might have gone to sleep, but when Anna started to pack her supplies back into the case, Prairie sat up and blinked a few times.
“Anna, I don’t know how to begin to thank you.”
“No need to thank-we are family.”
I figured that whatever had caused their rift, it couldn’t have been that bad if Anna still considered Prairie family.
Anna turned to me and patted my knee. “Your aunt has told me all about your grandmother Alice. I am so sorry you had to live with her. In Poland, there were stories among the Blogoslawiony-”
“That’s what they call the Banished in Poland,” Prairie said.
“Yes, the people who came from old country. Anyway, after they left Ireland, sometimes a Healer woman is born who is not right. The gift is too much for them, they are not strong enough to use it right way. They turn mean, families have to lock them up. Usually very sick, die young.”
“Gram was…” I couldn’t think of what to say. She was so many things, all of them bad.
“Anyway, now you are with aunt, with our Eliza-our Prairie-much better.”
Prairie sighed and reached out to touch Anna’s hand. “I owe you so much. You were right. You told me to leave that job, and you were right. I don’t know what else to say… except that I’m sorry.”
That must be it, the reason they’d grown apart. Anna shook her head, eyes cast down. After a moment she squared her shoulders and met Prairie’s gaze. “There is no need to speak of it again.”
“But… all those years. I thought I’d lost you. And Kaz… he’s a man now.”
Kaz looked from one of them to the other. “That’s what you argued about? Prairie’s job?”
“Don’t be angry at your mother,” Prairie said. “It’s my fault. Your mother asked me what we were doing at the lab, and I lied. I felt terrible about it, but Bryce made me sign a confidentiality agreement. He said we were getting funding from the university. I didn’t find out it was coming from the government until a few days ago. And he told me what to say… told me to tell people we were working on a vaccine, for livestock.”
“I can tell when you lie,” Anna said sadly. “Kaz, too. You are not good liars.”
“But Mom, how could you send Prairie away like that?” Kaz was angry now.
“I had to,” Anna said. “She was trying to do science with Healing gift. There is no good in that. Bajeczny powers were meant for one village only, czarownik cursed those who left. Banished maybe should die out. Since the people left Ireland, the men lose the visions, there is fighting and crime. The women are weak, they forget history.”
“What about me? What about Dad? And Prairie? And Hailey?” He looked at me as he said my name. “Do you wish we hadn’t been born?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, do you want us to do something good with our lives? Something important? Or do you want me to be an accountant or a shoe salesman or something?”
“There is nothing wrong with honest trade,” Anna shot back. I could see how they escalated each other’s tempers. “Be shoe salesman-be good shoe salesman, I don’t care.”
“You didn’t marry a shoe salesman,” Kaz muttered angrily.
“Your father was warrior. You know that. He was hero in Iraq.”
“And Prairie is a leader. An innovator,” Kaz said. “She can’t help it if her boss is crazy.”
“Thank you, Kaz.” Prairie cut in. “But I made mistakes and I have to make up for them. Terrible things are happening because I was stubborn, because I refused to see what your mother tried to tell me. Now I have to fix them.”
“This is conversation for tomorrow,” Anna said. “Now is time for everyone rest. Tomorrow is Sunday, salon is closed, everyone get some sleep.”
“What about…?” I asked. As welcome and safe as I felt in Anna’s house, as relieved as I was that Prairie was going to be all right, I couldn’t stop thinking about Rattler, seeing him holding his hand to his face, blood streaming through his fingers. “What if Rattler comes after us?”
There was a brief silence. Anna and Prairie glanced at each other. I could tell they were troubled, that they weren’t saying what they were thinking.
“Please,” I whispered hoarsely. “Don’t keep things from me, I have to know.”
“I think… we are safe for now,” Prairie said carefully. “The injury… I wouldn’t be surprised if Rattler loses that eye. The blood loss alone will be enormous. He won’t be able to do much of anything until he gets some help. Even if he tries to just rest and wait until he’s well enough to travel, it’s not going to be tonight.”
“Your aunt, she describe… what you do.” Anna made a stabbing motion with her hand and I flinched, the memory of the hairpin going into his flesh more than I could bear. “She say it went in far, to eye? Is possible there is damage to brain. Possible he gets much worse after you are gone. You are very brave girl,” she added quickly.
I knew what she was worried about: that I would fall apart if I thought I’d killed Rattler or even disabled him. But that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t grieve over him. I hoped he was lying on the floor even now, his blood leaking out until he was too weak to say his own name.
And I also felt, deep inside where instinct worked against reason, that he wasn’t dying. That whatever damage I’d managed to do to him, it wasn’t enough. That after he healed he would be as strong as ever, and as determined, and that when that happened he would come after us again.
But I had bought us some time. For now that would have to be enough.
Prairie allowed me to help her stand up. Kaz rushed to her other side and together we helped her down the hall, Anna in the lead. Anna opened the door to her bedroom, where a pretty comforter was turned down on the wide bed.
“I will help Prairie freshen up,” she said. “I have nightgown and robe. Now you two, go to bed.”
Kaz offered to take Rascal out for me while I brushed my teeth and washed my face. They weren’t gone long, and Kaz gave Rascal an odd look as he said goodnight. I closed the door, glad for the solitude. All the tension from the day welled up in my heart and I knew I was close to breaking down.
Instead, I climbed into Kaz’s bed and patted the mattress next to me. “Come, Rascal,” I said, and he jumped up and lay down.
It felt good to put my arms around his warm body, to feel his heartbeat strong and regular under his fur. It almost didn’t matter that he’d lost his personality, that he didn’t ever play anymore. I closed my eyes and remembered the way he used to be, and as I stroked the soft ruff of fur around his neck, I felt a little better.
Until my fingers touched something that shouldn’t have been there.
I worked my fingertips through the dense fur and found a small, hard object embedded in the skin. Anxiety raced along my nerves as I rose up on one elbow and switched on the bedside lamp. I parted Rascal’s fur and looked closer. A little bit of black metal protruded from a swelling where the skin was growing over the object. I felt its outlines with my fingers. Small. Knobby.
A bullet.
I jerked my hand away and sucked in my breath, scrambling away from him. My legs were tangled in the sheets and I half fell, half crawled out of Kaz’s bed. Shock mixed with disgust as I wiped my hand against the carpet, hard, making my skin burn. “No, no, no,” I heard myself whispering, and when I closed my mouth and tried to stop, the words became a desperate moan.
I remembered Rascal waiting in the yard at Gram’s, with blood on his back-he must have been shot when Bryce’s men first came to the house. They must have tried to kill him to keep him quiet.
Maybe it had been a superficial wound, just a minor injury that Rascal was healing from on his own. I clung desperately to that thought, even though I knew it was unlikely, as I forced myself to look at him. He hadn’t moved; he was lying still and indifferent on the mattress. I had to know. Nausea roiled through me as I approached the bed on my knees, staring at the place in his fur where the bullet had entered, trying not to look at his expressionless eyes. I gritted my teeth and reached with a shaking hand and touched him, and when he didn’t respond, I felt like I was touching evil itself and my entire body resisted, my heartbeat pounding a crazy tempo.
I almost couldn’t do it. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt hot tears leaking down my face, and still I couldn’t stop making sounds, quiet little sobs of desperation and horror. But I made myself trace my fingers through the fur around his torso, finding two more dented places where bullets had gone into him. One I could barely feel, lodged deep in the muscle, but one had entered his body far enough that I couldn’t feel it at all, right over his heart.
Rascal had been shot three times. He should be dead. But he wasn’t.
Bullets couldn’t kill him. Because he was already dead.
Because I had made him into a zombie.
I was cursed. I was no Healer-I was a zombie-maker.
I’d known it all along, deep inside. The accident came rushing back and images freeze-framed through my head in rapid succession: all the blood, his organs spilling from his body, the way his eyes rolled up a final time.
Their emptiness when I brought him back.
I brought him back. From the dead.
And now he couldn’t die. He’d been shot and the bullets were in his body as proof; they’d ripped through skin and bone and his very heart, and yet he soldiered on, a robot of a dog.
A zombie of a dog.
I screamed and pushed him from the bed, as hard as I could. His body fell to the floor with a thud, and he got up slowly and stood there unblinking, staring at nothing.
I scrambled to my feet and started backing toward the door, and when the wailing didn’t stop I realized I was still screaming.
The door pushed open and strong arms circled me from behind, practically lifting me off the floor. I fought and kicked and tried to break away as Kaz dragged me down the hall to the living room.
“Stop, Hailey,” he commanded, but he didn’t try to protect himself. Slowly, I ran out of energy and stopped fighting him, and my screams turned to sobs and he held me tight against him.
I heard a door open and Prairie’s and Anna’s voices.
“What happened?”
“Is Hailey all right?”
“He’s not healed,” I cried, letting go of Kaz and running to Prairie. I wanted to throw myself into her arms but I knew how fragile she was, so I just hugged myself, shaking all over. “I turned Rascal into a zombie.”
“YOU HAVE TO TELL ME the truth,” I said as Anna tucked an afghan around me and Prairie. We were sitting together on the living room couch. “All of it.”
Kaz had taken Rascal out to the yard after I insisted I couldn’t stay in the house with him for another second. He put water on for more tea, and the four of us huddled in the living room. Chub, thankfully, slept through the whole thing.
“We never… I don’t know if zombie is really the right word,” Prairie began hesitantly.
“That’s what Rascal is!” I burst out. “He can’t be killed. He came back from the dead.” I was struggling to control my breathing, and my hands were shaking so badly that I jammed them together. “Just, please, tell me how it happened. Tell me what I did.”
Tell me Milla won’t end up like this
Tell me I’ll never do this to Chub
“This won’t happen again,” Prairie said carefully. She exchanged glances with Anna, who’d said little since I woke everyone up.
They both looked so worried that my anxiety threatened to bubble up again. I felt the scream building inside me, so I squeezed my hands even more tightly together, the knuckles going white. “How can I be sure?”
“It’s only… you must never heal someone who has died. That’s the one rule. Mary taught us that from the start, me and your mom, before we ever healed anything, even a lizard. She wouldn’t even let us heal a dead squirrel or mouse-she made us promise.” Prairie reached for my hands and tugged at them gently until, like a chunk of ice thawing, I relaxed my grip and let her lace her fingers through mine. “I am so sorry you didn’t have anyone to teach you, to explain it all to you.”
You know you’re the future, Hailey
Gram’s words, the dozens of times she’d given me that strange, hungry look-they chased each other around my head, trying to take hold, to grow into full-blown terror. I fought back, focusing on the feeling of Prairie’s warm hands on mine. After a moment, I realized something-the bandages were off her arm, and the wound that Anna had stitched closed already looked better.
Healers can’t help each other, but we’re strong. That was what she’d told me.
I was strong. I grabbed that thought and held it tight.
“So explain it all to me now.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Just the one rule: you must never heal someone who has died. Their body will come back, for a while anyway, but their soul is gone. They don’t feel love, or pain, or any emotion at all. They respond to basic stimuli and will eat and even sleep, though they don’t dream. They can’t make decisions for themselves, though they can hear and process instructions and will do whatever they are told.”
“Rascal does what I say. If I tell him to come, or stay, or-You knew, didn’t you?”
“I… yes, I was pretty sure from the moment I saw him. That’s why I went looking for scars on him.”
“How could you not tell me? How could you know what I had done to him and, and let me keep him in the car with us, let me keep touching him-”
“Hailey, I’m so sorry, but I didn’t know how to tell you without upsetting you-”
“Without upsetting me? I’m so far past upset, I can’t believe-”
“I had to keep you calm,” Prairie cut me off. “I truly am so, so sorry, Hailey, but you weren’t ready to know.”
We were silent for a moment, and I realized it was true. I had been so close to falling apart these past few days. One more thing might have tipped me over the edge.
“How long have you known about… what happens? If you heal, after?”
“Mary used to tell us stories,” Prairie said. “Horror stories, I guess, meant to scare us so we wouldn’t be tempted. When she was a little girl, one of the other Healers couldn’t help herself and she brought back a cat, a pet she loved, and it was just like Rascal. It frightened all the children, the way it just sat on the porch, not moving. People wouldn’t walk by the house.”
“What happened to it?”
Prairie bit her lip. “Mary said it started to… well, its body began to decompose. The bodies of the healed dead can’t sustain life forever.”
“Oh my God,” I cried, fresh horror surging through my brain. Would Rascal start to decompose? Was his body rotting already?
“One day someone-they never found out who-broke the cat’s neck. It was a blessing, Mary said.”
“But I thought they couldn’t be killed.”
“There are a couple of ways-the brain stem has to be destroyed. A… decapitation would work. Crushing of… that area of the brain… A sharp break of the vertebrae could accomplish that, if… Well, you get the idea.”
“It was good person, compassionate person,” Anna cut in.
I noticed Kaz in the doorway and realized he’d been listening, a pair of steaming cups in his hands. He came forward and set the cups down. His eyes met mine and there was sadness in them.
“I’m sorry about Rascal,” he said quietly, “but it’s not your fault.”
“It is. I did it. No one else.” I didn’t add that at some level I had known that what I was doing was wrong, when I felt the energy rushing from me to Rascal’s lifeless body. Even before I knew I was a Healer.
“How… long?” I asked when nobody spoke.
“The decomposition takes longer than it would in a normal death,” Prairie said carefully. “Depending on the health of the person-or animal-it can take up to two or three times as long for the tissues to fail. And other conditions affect it too, of course.”
Heat, I thought, and humidity and insects, all the things we’d learned about in science. I felt like I was going to throw up. I hadn’t noticed anything yet, except the bad smell, and Rascal had been a young, healthy dog, but how long until his fur began to fall out and his body filled with gases and his skin began to break down?
I pulled my hands away from Prairie’s and covered my face, trying to keep the tears at bay. “I can’t stand to see him,” I whispered. “Don’t make me look at him.”
“He’s outside,” Kaz said. “You’re here, with us. It’s all right.”
I wanted to believe him. He knelt in front of me and Anna leaned in and we all huddled together. Their hands comforted me, patting my shoulders and squeezing my fingers, and it helped. I felt closer to Anna and Kaz than to people I had known my entire life. And as for Prairie-I couldn’t imagine life without her now.
But I knew I was still alone in one important way. I’d done the thing that must never be done, the thing Prairie and my mother had been warned about since childhood. I’d done the unforgivable. And I couldn’t help wondering how many ways I would suffer for it.
I thought of Prairie when her face clouded over with private grief. I recognized the solitary pain at her core. She carried a secret with her too, and I wondered if I would be like her someday, marked with a kind of suffering that other humans couldn’t understand.
“What did you do?” I asked her. I had to know if it was connected to the things that had happened, to the thing I had done. “Why did you leave Gypsum?”
Her face went pale, but it wasn’t surprise I saw on her face. Almost the opposite-a kind of resignation. “Not tonight,” she said, exhaustion making her voice husky. “There’s been enough to deal with tonight for all of us.”
“Stop putting me off,” I protested. “You owe me the truth.”
“I’ll tell you in the morning. I promise. After we’ve all had a chance to rest. The sun will be up in a few hours, and we won’t be able to do what needs to be done unless we get some sleep.”
I wanted to fight her, but fatigue was winning. Despite the shock of learning about Rascal, despite having a whole new nightmare to worry about, I was desperate to close my eyes and let sleep steal in and erase everything, if only for a few hours.
“Promise,” I begged in a whisper.
“I promise.” She looked directly in my eyes when she spoke, and in the pale green depths I saw reflected a shadow of myself.
She stayed in Kaz’s room with me for the rest of the night. I insisted that she take the bed, and when she protested, I curled up in the nest of blankets with Chub. I was asleep before she finished telling me not to worry.
IN THE MORNING she was gone, the bed neatly made and sun streaming through the window when Chub and I woke up. I found her in the kitchen, after I’d taken Chub to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth.
Before I could demand that she keep her promise and tell me the story, she handed me a travel cup of coffee.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. “Grab a bagel and you can eat on the way. Anna will watch Chub.”
Anna came into the room just then, her face pale and tired, but she gave me a smile that looked like it took some work. There was no sign of Kaz in the house, and it seemed smaller without his presence.
“Go, go, you two,” she said, giving my arm a little squeeze. “I’m making gulasz, we’ll have big lunch when you get back.”
I wasn’t hungry, but I took a bagel from the platter Anna had set on the table. It had been split and spread with cream cheese studded with dried apricots. Anna pushed a paper napkin into my hands.
“I don’t want to go out there,” I said, hating the way my voice went high and thin, but the horror of last night was stirring and threatening to return. I was desperate to keep the panic under control, but I knew if I had to walk past the creature that used to be Rascal, I’d lose it all over again. “I can’t see him, I just can’t.”
“It’s all right,” Prairie said gently. “He’s gone. He’s… at rest.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What did you do to him?”
“I did it,” Anna said. She stepped forward and placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me a look that was kind but firm. “It was humane, Hailey. I am nurse, I know what to do. Kaz is burying body in park, a place where there are trees, nice place, forest. When you come back, it will all be over.”
I started to shake, and tears dotted the corners of my eyes. I put my hand up to Anna’s, covering it, trying to find a way to say thank you, but I was afraid my voice would betray me. “All right,” I managed to get out.
“Anna is letting me borrow her car,” Prairie said. “Let’s go, and we can talk on the way.”
We didn’t talk much, though. Anna’s car was only slightly newer than Kaz’s, and it sputtered at every intersection as though it was about to die. Prairie fed it gas, revving the engine, as we made our way through the neighborhoods, away from the lake, back to the cloverleaf and onto the highway.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked as she headed north, away from the distant skyline.
“Not far now.”
A few minutes later, she exited into a neighborhood of tidy brick bungalows and the occasional church or tavern. There were no signs on the brick building she pulled up to. It had neat white shutters at the windows and tulips pushing their way up from planters out front. Long sloping ramps were the only clue to what kind of place it was.
“Is this a nursing home?” I asked as we made our way to the front doors, which glided open at our arrival.
“A convalescent home,” Prairie said. “A very good one, with some of the top doctors in the country on call.”
“Ms. Gordon,” a woman at a desk called out cheerfully. “Vincent’s having a good day. He’ll be so glad you’re here.”
Prairie exchanged a few words with the receptionist as she signed in. Looking over her shoulder, I read Susan Gordon in a neat script.
“And who have you brought with you today?” The woman smiled at me with open curiosity.
“This is Hailey. Her family just moved to the area and joined the church. She’s interested in doing outreach ministry too.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! Hailey, we love our volunteers here. And so do our patients. Especially the ones who don’t have family. Visits just do them a world of good.”
“What was that all about?” I demanded after Prairie thanked the receptionist and guided me across the lobby. We were buzzed through a set of doors and walked down a hallway with a shiny waxed floor and rooms opening up on either side that held hospital beds, many with patients in them. Some sat, others appeared to be asleep. None looked our way.
“I visit every week. I use a fake identity, as you saw. They don’t ask a lot of questions when it’s church people visiting. And I’ve been coming to see Vincent for years, so they’re used to me.”
“Who’s Vincent?”
She slowed as we reached the end of the hallway and took a deep breath. Then she gestured for me to enter the last room on the right.
“Vincent was my boyfriend,” she said as she followed me into the room.
A man sat in the bed, a thin blanket covering his body, his hands folded neatly on its surface. There was something wrong with him. His skin was puffy, with an oily sheen, and his color was off. He had a network of fine scars on his face and also on what I could see of his arms, below the cuffs of his shirt. His dark hair was thin and it hung lank in his face.
But the worst part was his eyes. They stared straight ahead at nothing, blinking slowly every few seconds. They were the emptiest things I’d ever seen. There was no emotion, no evidence of dreams or hopes or plans or disappointments in their depths. As we entered, they flicked over and looked at us without a trace of interest or curiosity, and I had to fight an urge to run from the room and get as far away from him as I could.
“I never told you why I left Gypsum,” Prairie said softly. “I never told anyone but Anna. And I lied to you earlier, when I said I never healed someone who died. The truth is that I did. I healed Vincent. I was sixteen and we were in love. We were going to run away together-Alice never knew. We were just waiting until we had enough money to get someplace far enough away that Alice could never find us, and we were going to take Clover with us.”
She walked to Vincent and put a hand to his face. I couldn’t imagine how she could stand to touch him. He didn’t seem to notice.
“We had an accident on prom night,” Prairie said, adjusting the collar of Vincent’s shirt before she stepped away from the bed. “He was thrown from the car, and he died. And unlike you, Hailey, I should have known better. I had been warned about what would happen if I ever tried to bring someone back.”
“How could you…”
“I loved him. I thought I would die without him. I wished it, I actually wished I was dead too, but I didn’t have the courage to make that happen. So I brought him back instead. I think there was a part of me that believed if I prayed hard enough, if I wanted it badly enough, that just this one time it would work, that God would take pity on me and let him live. A real life, not… this. But of course that didn’t happen. And once I realized what I had done… I left. That part was all true. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that I took Vincent with me.”
“How did you get him in here?” I asked, horrified.
“We came to Chicago by bus, on the night of the accident. I had a little money, enough to get a change of clothes and the bus tickets. It was the next day when we finally got there. All night long, all he did was stare ahead, sitting in that bus seat…”
“But what about his parents? When he didn’t come home, didn’t they freak?”
“I’m sure they were upset, Hailey, but unlike Alice, they knew about me and Vincent. They knew he loved me, and he’d told them if they didn’t give their blessing he was leaving with me anyway, as soon as we graduated. They’d argued about it; they wanted him to go to college, not to spend all his time with me, but he wouldn’t listen. I think they-everyone who knew us-just assumed we’d run away together. And I’m sure they looked for us, for a while. But Vincent was eighteen. Legally, there wasn’t anything they could do.”
“They must have been heartbroken,” I said, imagining how his parents must have worried-after all this time, if they were even still alive, they had no idea what had happened to their son. From the misery in Prairie’s eyes I knew it was a thought that haunted her as well. “Where did you go when you got to Chicago?”
“I took him to a hospital, the best in the city. I made sure of that. I spent almost the last of the money for a cab and took him to the emergency room. There was no one there, so I sat him in a chair. I pretended to be there for myself, which wasn’t hard, since I’d been in the accident too, and unlike Vincent, my cuts and bruises weren’t healed. I told them my parents were undocumented and they treated me as an indigent. I stayed around long enough to eavesdrop on what they were doing with Vincent.”
“Wait, so they didn’t know you were together?”
“No, and he couldn’t tell them. He didn’t even look at me once. After that, I kept track of him, which wasn’t easy, since I was trying to find a room and a job, but I found ways. I… learned to be creative. And convincing. One of the doctors on ER rotation was a young resident who studied immune disorders. That’s what they think he has, by the way… after all this time they still think Vincent has some rare immune problem, and they’ve got him on all these clinical trials.”
“They can do that? Just experiment on him like that?”
“Technically, it’s not allowed, since no one ever claimed him, and they never made contact with his family. He’s a John Doe, but he had an ID bracelet with his name engraved on it, so they’ve always called him Vincent. I used to find that… a comfort. Anyway, as you’ll learn yourself someday, when money’s involved, lots of things are possible. The doctor I mentioned-the one who studied immune diseases-had plenty of funding, and arrangements were made.” She shrugged. “They’ve found ways to keep his skin and organs functioning all this time.”
“But how…?”
“The miracles of modern science.” Prairie’s voice was heavy with regret. “It’s ironic. I’ve often wondered what would happen if the doctors here got together with Bryce, what they might be able to accomplish. But I could never tell them about each other. They work at cross-purposes, I guess you could say.”
“What do the doctors here do to him?” I asked, my throat dry.
“They’re doing research into cell regeneration,” she said. “His systems have responded well. I guess I should thank them.”
She didn’t look all that thankful. I didn’t blame her. What must it be like to see someone she loved here, kept alive artificially? I tried to imagine him at Kaz’s age, full of life, laughing, but all I saw was an empty shell made of skin.
“What does he… do?” I asked.
“He’s very good at simple tasks, like sorting beads and solving shape puzzles. But he’s completely nonverbal. They keep hoping. I… don’t know if that’s worse. Here, watch this.”
She stood in front of the bed, in Vincent’s line of vision. “Vincent, clap three times.”
Without any change to his blank expression, the man raised his hands and slowly slapped them together. Once, twice, three times. Then he let his hands fall back on the covers. His eyes never focused.
Watching him sent a chill through me, but I didn’t want Prairie to know how horrified I was. “You can’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known.”
Prairie shook her head miserably. “I did understand. And I did it anyway. I have to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and that means I have to stop Bryce, no matter what.”
I couldn’t stand to see her this upset. “Don’t worry. If people know what happens when you heal a dead person, they would never do it, not on purpose. Even if Bryce manages to make more Healers, he wouldn’t make-”
“Hailey,” Prairie cut in sharply. “You don’t understand. This is exactly what Bryce wants to make… things like this. He wants to sell them, to the highest bidder. The Healers are just a tool, like an assembly line.”
I looked at Vincent, who was staring at nothing, a faint, shiny bit of drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. I didn’t understand. “What could he possibly want with…”
Prairie’s face darkened. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the bedside, until I was standing only a few inches away from Vincent.
“Vincent, hit yourself,” she whispered, and he immediately started to smack himself on one side of his face and then the other, his palms flat and hard, the sounds of flesh on flesh sharp.
Prairie turned to make sure I was watching, and the pain in her eyes was staggering. “Harder,” she whispered, and the thing that used to be Vincent curled his fingers into fists and now each blow caused his head to jerk and roll, but still he kept at it-
“Stop!” I cried. “Please, Vincent, stop, don’t, don’t hurt yourself.” And just like that, the Vincent creature, the zombie that lived in the ruins of his body, put his hands back in his lap. His face bore fresh bruising and a few cuts; his lip was beginning to swell. But there was no sign at all that he noticed, much less cared.
Prairie backed away from him, her eyes shining with unshed tears.
“Why?”
“Because you can send them into battle, Hailey,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “You can load them up with explosives and tell them to blow themselves up, tell them to walk into shopping malls or schools, and they’ll never think twice, never blink an eye.”
“No,” I whispered, horrified. “No one would-”
“Yes. A dozen of them, deployed the right way, could bring a major city to its knees.”
“But Bryce couldn’t… he wouldn’t…”
“I saw it. I saw the list. On Bryce’s desk. Unstable governments overseas… there were half a dozen or more. And he doesn’t care who he sells to, as long as they show him the money first.”
“But where would he get the…” I stopped, unable to come up with the right word. Raw material? Bryce would need the newly dead, and a lot of them, if he was going to manufacture enough zombies to sell.
Prairie laughed bitterly. “He’s smart, Hailey. He’ll find people that won’t be missed. There are so many more of those than you’d ever imagine… the homeless, and mental patients, people abandoned by their families. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface. If he’s getting help from inside our government, and I have strong reasons to believe he is, he could go to veterans’ hospitals. Soldiers killed overseas-the remains shipped home could be faked, while the real corpses were taken.”
“You can’t think our own government would be involved in something like this!”
“No, of course not, not officially. But there’s corruption at every level. Hailey, Bryce used to get visits from men who looked official. I never paid much attention, since I assumed it had to do with our funding. But thinking about it now, you could totally tell they had once been in the military. They had that air about them. There was someone he just called the General, and we used to joke about that in private-but now I’m thinking that was his principal contact.”
“But why would they let him sell to enemies of the United States?”
“The governments on the list, their battles are on their own soil. They’re extremists, terrorists, at war with each other-or with their own people. I’ve wondered if that wasn’t part of the plan, that some rogue branch of the military might want them to exterminate each other.”
Zombies.
Terrorists.
Shadowy operators, working outside the control of our own government, funding this study in horror.
It was too much. Especially when I thought about the fact that, without even knowing it, I was one of the keys to its success.
A day ago I would never have believed that there could be something worse than being hunted by killers.
But now I knew different. There was something much worse, and it was in me.
WHEN WE GOT HOME, Kaz was in the backyard with Chub, teaching him to throw a lacrosse ball.
“Hailey, watch me, watch me!” Chub shouted, waving the stick around, his voice clear and distinct, the improvements in his speech growing every day. Kaz waved, grinning. But I raced past them with nothing more than a mumbled hello.
Anna had been cooking, as promised, and the house smelled wonderful, but I couldn’t bear to talk to her. I went straight to Kaz’s room, closed the door and lay down on the bed and pulled the pillow over my face, trying to block out the images in my mind.
Vincent in the hospital bed, staring without seeing.
Rascal, after I found the bullet wounds and pushed him to the floor, unhurt and uncaring.
Zombies walking straight into battle, unfazed by the sights and sounds of war.
Public squares full of people, erupting into explosions and flames.
I didn’t know how long I lay there trying not to think. There was a gentle tap at the door. I pulled the pillow off my face but didn’t answer.
“May I come in?”
I couldn’t very well keep Kaz out of his own room, so I sat up and pushed my fingers through my hair, hoping I didn’t look too messed up. “Come on in.”
He opened the door hesitantly and gestured at the bean-bag on the floor. “Mind if I…”
“It’s your room,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I should be asking if you mind.”
He sat, strong forearms draped loosely over his knees, and looked at me. I mean, really looked at me, in a way I wasn’t used to.
“Prairie told me about Vincent and everything. Wow, that’s a lot, you know, to find out. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. At least the healing… well, I was kind of getting used to that part.”
“But the rest?”
“It. Um. I can’t…” I tried to think of a way to describe how I felt-almost like I was guilty of something, because if Bryce did manage to find me, I was pretty sure he could force me to go along with his plan. “The zombie thing. Just, I don’t get how anyone could do that on purpose.”
“Yeah…”
“Did you know? About Rascal?”
“No. I mean, I thought there was something wrong with him, and I was kind of surprised. I knew Prairie could heal animals, because she fixed our cat’s leg once when it fell out of a window, a long time ago. And when I met you I could tell you were a Healer too. So I thought it was strange that you weren’t able to fix your dog. But I never knew about the… reanimated dead thing until Prairie told me just now.”
“Reanimated dead?” I grimaced.
“Well… that’s what Prairie said. I think she has a hard time saying ‘zombie.’ ”
“But Kaz, if you’d seen him-”
“Hey, it’s okay with me, you can call them whatever you want. I mean… decomposing flesh walking around, that’s kind of the definition of a zombie.” He flashed me a tentative smile and I felt a little bit better. “Besides, other than that little issue, I think it’s cool, what you can do. Your gift.”
That surprised me, but then I remembered that he’d grown up knowing he was Banished. “What about you?” I asked. “Do you… you know, have visions?”
“Sometimes. Usually only when something really bad’s going to happen. Like when I was a kid I had this vision of our garage burning down. I made Mom go look, and some paint rags had caught fire in the corner. Or when our downstairs neighbor had a heart attack, I saw it a few days earlier, how she was lying on the floor of her apartment, dead. Stuff like that.”
“Can you make yourself have a vision of something you want to see?” Like whether a crazed one-eyed redneck is coming after you.
Kaz shook his head. “No, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t, you know, summon it or whatever. It just happens sometimes… I get a dizzy feeling and then there’s a sort of extra layer on top of my vision that fades in and out. If I close my eyes, I just see the vision. Otherwise it makes me feel like I’m going to hurl, like motion sickness.”
“So you don’t want to have it while driving or something.”
“Yeah. That would be bad.” Kaz grinned at me and I realized he’d done the nearly impossible: he’d lifted my spirits.
“Thanks,” I said. “For taking care of… burying Rascal.”
“Oh, that was no big deal. No problem.” For a minute I thought he was going to say something else about it, but then he just stood, offered me his hand and pulled me up off the bed. “You missed lunch. I saved you some.”
After all that, unbelievably, it was a good afternoon.
Prairie and Anna were having a serious conversation when we came out of the room, and Chub had managed to corner Anna’s cat and was trying to pick it up and hug it, an experiment that ended with him getting a couple of scratches on his forearms, which made him cry. I thought about healing them, but then I decided that healing should be reserved for when it was really necessary. Chub still needed to experience the little hurts and challenges of childhood so he would grow up strong and self-sufficient.
After Kaz microwaved me some lunch, we all walked to the park, Kaz carrying a couple of lacrosse sticks and a duffel bag. He tried to teach me how to throw and catch, and we lost a few balls in the hedges circling the park. We pushed Chub on the swings and fed stale bread to some ducks, and by the time night was starting to fall, I’d managed to forget for a while, which was what I suspected Anna and Prairie had intended.
On our way to a pizza place that Anna and Kaz raved about, Prairie caught up with me.
“I’m going up to the lab tomorrow, early. There’s only one guard on duty on Sundays. I’m thinking I can wait until he goes to the bathroom or something and get past him. Then I have the prox card to get in the lab.”
She didn’t look all that confident. I figured there was more to the plan, but that she didn’t want me to worry. “Do you want me to come along?”
“No… I think it’s best if I do it alone.”
I didn’t argue. Maybe I should have, but it had been so nice to not think about it for a few hours, and I wasn’t ready to give that up. Instead, I tried to put it out of my mind, telling myself there would be plenty of time to worry later, but when we returned home and got Chub bathed and put to bed, I was exhausted. I hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep in days, and it hit me hard. I crawled into Kaz’s bed, Chub on his nest of blankets on the floor, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
I woke to someone shaking my arm.
“Hailey, wake up.” It was Kaz, whispering, his face hard to see in the moonlight. “There’s a problem. I’ll get Prairie. Meet me in the kitchen.”
I got up quietly so as not to wake Chub. I splashed water on my face and went to the kitchen. When Prairie and Kaz came in a minute later, she looked completely awake, as though she’d never gone to sleep.
“You’ve been through so much already,” she said when she saw me. “Kaz, I wish you’d let her sleep.”
“She has a right to hear this.”
“What?” I demanded as a door opened down the hall and Anna came into the kitchen.
“What are you all-”
“I had a vision, Mom,” Kaz said. “They need to know.”
Anna tensed up, and I remembered that Kaz said his visions always signaled something bad. “What is it?” she whispered, her face going pale.
“Bryce… he’s medium height? Brown hair, going gray here?” Kaz gestured along his hairline.
“Yes.”
“I saw him, in a room… looked like a motel room? Or a dorm room? There were people in the beds… hurt people. Hurt bad, Prairie, they weren’t even conscious.”
“What was he doing?”
“It wasn’t what he was doing. He was just sitting there, taking notes or something on his laptop-”
“What was it?” Prairie demanded, her voice going high and thin. “What did you see?”
“I’m sorry, Prairie… he’s got another Healer.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, another Healer?”
“I couldn’t see her all that clearly. She had long hair, and she was leaning over them, chanting or talking. I couldn’t hear. I don’t hear anything with the visions.”
“What made you think she was healing them?”
“Well, first of all, it was so obvious they were… dying.” Kaz hesitated. “I mean, they were unconscious, and one of them had his head shaved and what looked like a recent scar. And the other one had a breathing tube and a body cast. Young guys.”
“Military,” Prairie said. “Had to be. Only question is whose.”
“And the Healer, this woman, she put her hands on them, on their faces.” Kaz demonstrated, cupping the sides of his face with his hands. “And after… it was hard to tell because the visions jump around, but, after, they, ah, woke up.”
“Woke up?” Prairie repeated sharply.
“Yes, they moved, you know, opened their eyes, sat up. That was about it, all I saw.”
Prairie was silent, but I could tell she was thinking hard.
“Who could it be?” Anna asked after a moment. “There was no one else in your village? You are sure?”
“No one.” Prairie was vehement. “Clover’s dead. Hailey’s here. Alice is broken. Mary’s dead. There’s no one else. I don’t see where he could have found one.”
“One of ours, then,” Anna said. “The Healers must have made it out of Poland after all.”
“We have to go now.” It was me speaking, to my amazement. “Prairie, we have to stop him. You have to destroy the research. We can’t let him find her, we can’t let her make zombies.”
“But we can’t-”
“There isn’t much time,” I insisted. “Isn’t that right, Kaz? How much time between your visions and what happens?”
Kaz looked from me to Prairie. “I don’t know. Maybe a day or two. Maybe… less.”
“There still might be time,” I pleaded.
“I’ll help,” Kaz said, pushing his chair back from the table. “The three of us will go. Mom can take care of Chub. You will, won’t you, Mom?”
“What do you mean to do?”
“Whatever needs to be done to stop that bastard.”
“Kaz,” Anna snapped. “There is no need for that.”
“No need for what, Mom? No need to call Prairie’s boss what he is? She’s right-he has to be stopped. We have to destroy everything.”
“What is this we?” Anna demanded sharply. “There is no we-”
“I’m going with her,” Kaz said. “She can’t do it alone.”
“Do not talk crazy.” Anna was shaking with fear or anger or some combination of the two emotions.
“I’m not crazy,” Kaz said. “Prairie is right. We have to destroy the research and stop this guy.”
“This man is dangerous, Kazimierz. He hired people to kidnap Hailey. They kill all those others.”
“Papa went to war,” Kaz said. “There was killing there, but you didn’t stop him.”
I saw that he wouldn’t back down, and I had a feeling no one was going to be able to tell him what to do. I could relate: no one was ever going to tell me what to do again either.
“Anna,” Prairie said softly. “I understand. I’ll go alone.”
“You can’t!” I protested. “You can’t go alone. Bryce will kill you.”
“Not if I plan,” Prairie said, but I could tell she was grasping at straws. “Not if I come up with a strategy-”
“Strategy is not enough,” Kaz interrupted, his voice hard as steel. “You need help. I can see things. Especially if I’m there, if I’m close. It might make a difference.”
“I can’t ask you that,” Prairie said. She raised her shoulders and let them fall. Her arm, I saw, moved easily, bandage or no bandage. “It’s my fault all this happened, and-”
“I’m not letting you go alone,” I said.
“We’re going with you,” Kaz said. He turned to Anna. “Mom, you didn’t raise me to be afraid. My father was brave, you tell me that every single day of my life. You can’t deny that.”
“Your father is gone, Kaz. I can’t lose you, too… I can’t.”
Anna’s face reflected a mother’s agony. Prairie, too, looked uncertain.
But I knew. I knew that Kaz would not be stopped.
“If something happens, if Kaz gets hurt, we’ll be there too,” I said urgently to Prairie, praying she would understand. We could heal him-he’d be safe with us there.
Anna looked at me carefully, her eyes narrowed. Then she looked at Prairie again. “What do you think?” she asked softly.
“I cannot ask anything more of you,” Prairie said. “Even this, even taking me and Hailey in, this is so dangerous.”
She was right. Bryce didn’t care about the innocent people who got in the way.
He wouldn’t stop. He didn’t care how many people died for his research, for the chance to study Prairie and me and learn how to use our gifts to turn people into killing machines. Everything this man touched seemed to be about killing.
He wanted to use me as a tool, a way to make him stronger and richer and more powerful while other people died.
There was silence in the room. Kaz went to the picture window and stared out into the dark streets with his arms folded across his chest, tense and ready.
After a long moment, Anna nodded slowly. I could tell the decision had been made.
We’d won this round, Kaz and me.
We were going with Prairie.
“I’ll guard him like my own,” Prairie said softly. “Hailey too. I will do everything I can to bring us back from this unharmed.”
Anna nodded. And then we were gone.
Kaz drove. Prairie sat up front with him, not saying much. She had slicked her hair back into a ponytail and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, with an old pair of Anna’s sneakers. Dressed that way, she looked more like a college student than the elegant woman who had first appeared in Gram’s kitchen.
Kaz drove smoothly along Lake Shore Drive, the way we’d come only last night. Tonight the moon-nearly full-hung over the water near the horizon, its reflection shimmering beneath it. When we got to Evanston, I suddenly wished the drive had been longer. I didn’t feel ready.
Prairie murmured instructions. She took us through a neighborhood of stately old homes that got smaller as we drove farther from the lake, until they were mostly squat little bungalows. We crossed the commuter train tracks and I could see Evanston’s downtown ahead.
On the next block there was a cluster of low-slung modern office buildings. “Pull in,” Prairie said. “Park over here, by the Dumpsters.”
Kaz did as she directed.
We were shielded by a row of trees, the Civic nosed in under low-hanging branches. There were plenty of cars in the lot, customers of the Thai restaurant and the Laundromat across the street.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Prairie said. “The data is on computers in the secure lab. The prox card will get us in the main part of the lab-”
“Do you think Bryce could be in there?” I asked.
“Possibly… but what’s more likely is he’s got extra security guarding the place, with instructions to bring me in if I come poking around. By force, if necessary. Although I doubt there would be anyone here in the middle of the night.”
“Let me go,” Kaz said. “Alone. They won’t be expecting a man.”
Prairie shook her head. “No. I have to go with you.”
“What about me?” I demanded.
Prairie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were clouded with doubt. “There will be a guard in the lobby,” she said. “A night guard. Unless they’ve hired someone new, it will be an older man who likes to nap on the job. Still, he’s a danger. He can trip an alarm that will shut the whole place down and bring security running from off-site. And Bryce may have paid the guard to contact him first.”
“You want me to distract him?” I asked.
Prairie looked uncomfortable. “I don’t see any other way. I thought maybe you could pretend to have some emergency, I don’t know, like maybe you’re hurt or something. As soon as we’re in, you get out. Figure out any excuse, tell the guard you were mistaken, whatever you need to do. And then you come back and wait where you can see the car.”
She dug into her pocket and handed me a cell phone. “This is Anna’s. Kaz’s number is on it. Press and hold the three key and it will dial him direct. Call if you see anyone coming in the building after us-anyone at all. Or if there’s any kind of trouble.”
I didn’t like being left behind, but I didn’t see an alternative. “What are you going to do to the computers?”
“I have full administrative access to all the servers. Paul gave it to me, along with the master keys. We’ve got to hope that Bryce never found out. I’m sure he locked me out, but he might not have changed the admin log-in. I just need to get in and start the wipe-disk program.”
“How much data is there, anyway?” Kaz demanded. “Because it takes hours to wipe a big disk.”
“I-I’m not sure.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kaz said, his voice edgy and low. “It’s going to be fire.”
We both looked at him.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw it. A vision… Tonight will end in fire.”
“YOU HAD A VISION?” I demanded, but Prairie interrupted.
“Fire? Oh my God… I should have thought of that.”
“What?”
“The walls… all around the inner offices. They’ll burn.”
“I brought some stuff from the garage,” Kaz said. “To use as an accelerant. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mom-she would have lost it if she knew-but it should help spread the fire-”
“No, what I mean is, the walls are flammable. Bryce had us working with volunteer subjects who claimed to have predictive powers. We had a few who kept hitting it off the charts. Seers, you know? I was sure of it. And Bryce was researching ways to block their visions.”
“For the military application,” Kaz broke in.
“For the what?” I was lost, but the two of them were practically running over each other’s words.
“Like if the other side had Seers? You’d want to block them, right? You wouldn’t want them to be able to sense your next move.”
“Only, it’s very hard to do,” Prairie said. “The only thing we found that seemed to impair the subjects was iron. But it wasn’t like Bryce could put up iron walls in the lab, so he found this guy who came up with a way to embed iron filings in polyurethane foam. The kind you spray? You know, that expands? Only, it’s like a hundred times more flammable than wood, so he hired these guys off the books to spray it in all the drywall one weekend last fall.”
“That’s perfect,” Kaz said.
Perfect for destroying the building, I thought-but not for getting out alive.
“What sort of accelerant did you bring?” Prairie asked.
“I got a couple of cans of lighter fluid and some paint thinner. And matches.”
“Okay, good.” Prairie sighed. “You’ve got this all figured out, haven’t you?”
“Uh… yeah. But don’t tell Mom. She’d ground me for the rest of my life.”
We got out of the car, Kaz carrying his backpack filled with supplies. I stayed back, leaning against the car while they slipped off toward the building. They kept to the edge of the parking lot, as though they were strolling along the street toward downtown. When they got to the building, they cut over and edged along the front wall, barely visible in the shadows.
It was time. I took a deep breath and touched my fingers to my necklace. The red stone felt warm to my touch. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to empty my mind of everything other than what I had to do.
Then I sprinted across the parking lot and slammed into the glass doors at a flat-out run, smacking my palms against them and shoving. I didn’t take a chance on looking for Prairie and Kaz in the shadows. The doors swung open and I was into the building’s lobby. To the left was a bank of elevators, and to the right was a curved desk where an older man with a brown uniform sat reading a folded newspaper.
He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise, as I ran through the lobby to his desk. I leaned on it, panting.
“I need help!” I yelled. “A car-it was driving by-it hit someone. It ran up on the sidewalk by the parking lot. I think they’re hurt bad.”
The man lowered the newspaper more slowly than I figured the situation called for. “You’re saying there’s some kinda accident out there?”
“Yes, please, can you come out? I need-”
“They got procedures,” the man said gruffly. I read the name on the gold rectangle that was pinned to his shirt. Maynard. “I got to call-”
“There’s no time!” I was shouting now, fear making me loud and careless. If he called for help, it would ruin everything; the police would come and Prairie and Kaz would never be able to get into the lab. “Please!”
“Just as soon as I-”
But that was as far as he got. Because when my hand shot out over the desk and came down gently on the side of his neck, his eyes went very wide for a second and his body tensed up as though he’d touched a power line.
Then he slumped over on his desk.
I’d had no idea that I was about to do what I did.
And at the same time, I had somehow known exactly how to do it.
Powerful. The word thrummed in my mind as I backed away from the desk. The gift that I had doubted, that I had resisted, that I had finally used and claimed for my own-it was more powerful than I’d allowed myself to realize.
I knew the guard wasn’t dead or even hurt. What I’d done was like a surge of calming energy that overrode the circuits of his brain and shut him down temporarily. Like sleep-really deep sleep. I knew it in my blood, in the understanding that flowed somewhere inside me where it had lived since I was born. Since I was conceived, even, in the violent union of my mother and father, the source of my gifts descended from the first families.
Behind me I heard the whoosh of the doors being pushed open.
“I saw that,” Prairie said.
I just nodded. Then I remembered.
“We can’t leave him here, not if there’s going to be fire-”
Kaz jogged around behind the desk, picked up the guard and slung him over his shoulders as though he weighed nothing. Prairie hesitated only a moment before pointing down the corridor.
“We’ll put him out the back door. He’ll be hidden there-and safe.”
Then she turned to me.
“You’re done for now, Hailey. Go back out. Wait for us.”
I watched them head down the corridor, the guard’s head bumping gently against Kaz’s back.
Prairie had only just come into my life, and I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.
But we would always be in danger unless we finished this. Bryce would keep chasing us as long as he thought we were useful to his work.
I followed.
Around a couple of corners in the hallway was a reinforced door with no identifying sign. Prairie held up the little plastic prox card, and when the lock clicked, she pushed the door open. I ran to catch up. When Kaz saw me he hesitated only for a second before holding the door for me.
“Hailey, no!” Prairie hissed.
“She deserves to be here,” Kaz said as I pushed past him.
I grabbed Prairie’s hand and squeezed hard. “I’m not going back.”
She stared into my eyes for a moment and then nodded once. “All right. All right. You two start dousing the edges of the room, along the walls. I’m going to start the wipe-disk program. I doubt I can get in the server room-that requires a retinal scan and I’m sure I’ve been blocked-but I can do it from my workstation. And take this, just in case.” She pressed the prox card into my hand and I pocketed it.
Prairie snapped on a bank of lights and I saw that we were in a huge lab, with workstations and sleek monitors and equipment I couldn’t begin to name. There were robotic-looking devices in various states of assembly on platforms, and banks of blinking boxes with cables running in and out in loops. More cables snaked along the floor.
The one thing that was missing was a human presence. Other than stacks of papers and coffee cups and a sweater or two left over a chair, it was as if the people who worked here brought nothing of themselves with them. There were no photos, no kids’ drawings tacked to cubicle walls, no plants or paperweights or figurines.
Prairie disappeared down a corridor at the other end of the room, and Kaz dug in his backpack, then handed me a can of lighter fluid.
“Shouldn’t take much,” he said. “Just concentrate it along the drywall.”
We set to work, stepping around the equipment. At first I was cautious, but then I followed Kaz’s example and shoved things out of the way, pushing desks aside to reach the walls. The acrid smell of chemicals filled the air, stinging my eyes and making me cough, and adrenaline pumped through my veins.
I thought I heard something-a slam, a muffled cry-from the corridor Prairie had entered. Kaz heard it too, and we both went still, looking at each other and trying to listen over the hum of the equipment. Then we were both running toward the source of the sounds.
We were barely into the hallway when there was a crashing of metal on wood and a heavy door rebounded off the walls a few feet in front of us.
Prairie stumbled into the hallway, followed by someone else.
Bryce Safian-it had to be. A well-built man with close-cut brown hair and a starched button-down shirt was holding a gun jammed against Prairie’s back. Kaz reacted before I could absorb the scene-he rushed forward and slammed between Bryce and Prairie, knocking her to the floor. He grabbed for the gun and it went off, and a split second later he grabbed one hand with the other, wincing, blood dripping between his fingers. He’d been shot in the hand, and now Bryce had the gun aimed straight at his heart. Kaz backed up slowly as Prairie crawled out of the way and got to her feet.
The man’s eyes met mine, narrowed, and then relaxed. He smiled, a cruel and calculating expression that wasn’t all that different from the way Gram used to look when she thought Dun or one of her other customers had said something funny.
“You must be Hailey. I’m Bryce Safian. Please call me Bryce.” His smile grew wider. “It’s a good thing I decided to come check on things in the lab when I heard that my employees had managed to let you slip away yet again. You should be congratulated on your ingenuity. Remarkable, really.”
“Your hand…,” I choked out, watching Kaz bleed onto the floor.
“Don’t worry about him,” Bryce said dismissively. “He’s not worth your time. You know, Hailey, if things had gone differently, I might have been your Uncle Bryce.”
I looked from him to Prairie. I had never seen her look so angry.
Bryce followed the direction of my gaze. “Yes, that’s right. I had been thinking of proposing to your aunt. That is, until she made it clear that we had profound, ah, you might say, fundamental character differences.”
“You have no character,” Prairie spat. “You have no shame. You’re-you’re inhuman.”
Bryce laughed, a rich and cultured sound. “That’s pretty funny, coming from you, darling. Seems like it might be you that deserves that title. Did you know,” he said conversationally, tipping his head to me, “that your aunt has chromosomal abnormalities so severe that technically she shouldn’t even be alive in any condition known to science?
“Oh dear,” he added, creasing his forehead and pretending to be sorry. “I shouldn’t have said that, seeing as you-and your young friend here too, I take it-have the same… deficiencies.”
Kaz raised his bloody hands as though he was going to go after Bryce again, but Bryce swung the gun between me and Prairie and back at Kaz. His gun hand was steady.
“Don’t get any bright ideas,” he said to me. “You all bleed regular blood-and I should know, considering all the testing we’ve done here. Presumably, losing enough of it will kill you just like it would any normal human. And I know you can’t heal this one without touching him.”
I could feel the rushing that signaled the need to heal. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kaz’s shredded hand. My fingertips pulsed with the compulsion to touch him, to find the wound and let my energy flow to it. But I couldn’t reach him. Bryce would never let me get to him. And without touching, I couldn’t heal. Milla, Rascal, Chub… I’d had to lay my hands on them to feel the energy from my fingers go into their bodies.
“Kind of funny, really,” Bryce went on. “If you could get to big boy here, you could probably fix him up, but I’ve got lots of extra clips, so I’d just keep shooting holes in him. No doubt who’d win that race, huh, sunshine?”
“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Prairie muttered.
“Oh, but I do! Who’s been running those tests for all these months? Hmm? I’d say I’m intimately familiar with just how your special little powers work, wouldn’t you? In fact, I think I’d be able to hurt your young friend here just badly enough that you’d have a very difficult choice to make. Isn’t that so, Prairie?”
She looked stricken, a choked sob dying in her throat. I remembered her promise to Anna. I’ll guard him like my own.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Bryce went on, smiling lazily. “I don’t need you anymore. I found someone new. She’s not as pretty as you, and I doubt she’ll prove as… amusing. But she’s cooperative-very cooperative, considering she’s become, let’s say, a permanent guest of the laboratory. And now that I have Hailey, the two of them are all I need to get the last of our work done. It’s a shame, really, that you won’t be around to share in the glory.”
So Kaz’s vision had been real. Bryce had found another Healer, and locked her up here just as he intended to lock me up. My heart sank as I realized that all our work might have been for nothing. Bryce planned on keeping me alive, but he clearly didn’t intend to keep Prairie or Kaz around. I felt despair overtaking the determination I’d started the night with.
“You won’t live that long,” Prairie said, surprising me with her fury. She stepped toward Bryce, unafraid. “Shoot me if you want. Go ahead, I dare you. Your new girlfriend’s never going to make zombies for you. That’s not what was ordained, and you can’t fight it.”
Bryce chuckled, genuine mirth crinkling his eyes at the corners. “Oh, Prairie, such idealism, it’s so refreshing. I’ve always loved that about you. If you only knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Where do you think I found out about your little niece here?”
Prairie hesitated, and I saw uncertainty flicker in her eyes.
“The guys you hired,” I said, trying to edge closer to Kaz. “Your men. Your dead men.”
Bryce laughed harder. “That is so amusing to me, you see, because once they traced Prairie’s true identity, we found an unexpected ally. Someone who was willing to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about you, little Hailey, for a price. Someone willing to set up the perfect opportunity for my men to come and get you, someone who not only wouldn’t miss you, but would make sure no one else did, either.”
A murmur started inside my ears and built quickly into a roar. I shook my head and whispered “No,” but I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“Your grandmother, Hailey,” Bryce said, barely able to conceal the smug satisfaction in his voice. “Alice Tarbell. Gave you up for five thousand dollars and a ticket to Ireland. Oh… and the promise that, not to be indelicate, when it was time for you to procreate, we would furnish you with one of your own kind.”
Kaz shot forward, launching himself low against Bryce’s torso, trying to knock him down. But I could see that Kaz’s injury had weakened him, made him miscalculate. Bryce stepped neatly out of the way and his finger tightened on the trigger, almost in slow motion. I heard the shot and saw Kaz’s injured hand fly out at an odd angle and bang against the wall in a spray of blood.
THE HOLE IN Kaz’s bicep stayed neat and round for a second before blood began to leak from it. I could see now that his hand was badly damaged, the fingers bloody and bent at odd angles, his index finger hanging by a thin strip of skin. A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach, followed by shame. I was supposed to be a Healer-how could I be so weak?
Prairie reached for Kaz, but Bryce jammed his gun under her chin and drove her back against the wall. Kaz sank to the floor, his face going white as he tried to squeeze his uninjured hand around his arm, above the bullet wound, and stop the flow of blood.
Bryce sighed. “I told you we could do this the hard way or the easy way, Eliz-I mean, Prairie.”
I stepped toward her, but Bryce swung his arm around and aimed at me. “That’s far enough, Hailey. It might be wise for you to remember that your aunt won’t be a bit of good to you if you get hurt. Kind of an interesting arrangement, wouldn’t you say? It’s going to be fascinating to study that, Healers’ natural resistance to each other’s gifts. I’m certainly looking forward to that research.”
Prairie was inches away from Bryce, backed up against the wall, and the second he turned away from her, she tensed. I could tell she was going to attack him. I shook my head and tried to form the word no, because I knew Bryce would kill her, but I also knew that she was past caring. As she lunged at him, I waited for the sound of the gun, a silent scream building inside.
But Bryce surprised me.
He brought the gun crashing down against Prairie’s skull, above the temple, and she crumpled to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
But he didn’t kill her.
When he looked up, there was something in his expression I recognized. It was part longing and part defiance. It had something in common with the way Rattler had looked at her. The ancient blood connection was missing, but in that second I realized that Bryce too had loved her, in his way. Enough that he couldn’t shoot her.
And I realized that love could be dangerous. “Don’t think I won’t enjoy killing her slowly,” Bryce said, but now we knew he had a weakness, and for the first time I saw uncertainty in his eyes. He kept his gun trained on me, but he knelt beside Prairie and felt for her pulse.
If only there was a way to use his weakness against him. I glanced at Kaz. His eyes were squeezed shut with pain. I could tell that he was starting to lose his balance. A shocking amount of blood was leaking from his arm. The bullet must have hit something important.
The need to heal surged hot and demanding inside me, pulsing its way along my nerves to the tips of my fingers, and my desire to put my hands on Kaz, on his wound, was irresistible.
I willed him to open his eyes and look at me-and he did. The second his eyes found mine, I felt it again, the connection I’d noticed when he first took my hand.
Only, now his life depended on it. All of our lives.
I stared deep into his eyes and tried to shut out everything except the gift that was a part of my lifeblood. Kaz’s eyes flickered, his lips parted slightly. I could feel my heartbeat slowing and then I sensed my breathing diminish to almost nothing. Something happened to my vision, too; the edges fell away, replaced with a haze of shimmering shadow, and there was nothing but me and Kaz. My vision began to fade and my lungs screamed for air, but it was beautiful, too, exquisite and so sharp that it felt like it might tear my heart in pieces, this link between us that was more powerful than either of us could ever be alone.
I fell.
I didn’t realize it was going to happen until I collapsed onto the floor at Prairie’s feet. Bryce yelled something and turned his gun from Prairie to me, and I braced for the impact of the bullet, wondering where he’d shoot me, wondering whether it would be better if he merely disabled me and kept me alive in his laboratory-or if he killed me.
And then Bryce slammed into me hard. It took me a second to figure out that Kaz had shoved him, that he had found the energy, a last reserve of strength, to attack.
“Get away, get away from him!” Kaz yelled. I tried, but Bryce was so heavy and he was scrambling on top of me, heavy knees and elbows-God, it hurt-and what about the gun? He still had the gun, and then he was pulled off me and slammed into the drywall and that was Kaz. Kaz, whose good arm was plenty good; Kaz, whose bad arm was good enough, because I’d healed it, not very well because it was damn hard to heal without putting your hands on someone, but enough. Enough.
Kaz kicked Bryce and the gun went skittering out of his hand and down the hall. I pushed against Bryce as hard as I could and managed to roll out from under him. I tried to reach Prairie, but I knew I couldn’t do anything for her now. I couldn’t heal her, couldn’t wake her up.
Kaz was fumbling in the backpack that lay open on the floor, pulling out the last can of lighter fluid, holding it in the crook of his wounded arm while he twisted the cap off. The smell hit me hard as Kaz shook the can over Bryce, the clear liquid splashing his clothes and his face, and he clutched his eyes and started screaming, a scream of rage that turned to terror when Kaz lit a match.
So much screaming. I had finally found my voice and it joined Bryce’s. I backed away from the fireball that Bryce had become, dragging Prairie with me, watching the trail light up like a sparkler in the dark.
Bryce’s scream turned into a horrible yowl of pain as he rolled toward the door he’d come through. Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me upright.
“You don’t have much time,” he said urgently. “Check the server room, make sure she got the program started. Just in case it doesn’t all burn. I’ll take care of Prairie until you get back.”
“Don’t wait for me,” I said, already backing down the hall. “Just go, take her with you.”
But our eyes met and held and dark energy passed between us, and I knew he wouldn’t leave.
I wouldn’t have either.
I bolted down the hall. Smoke rolled down in hot, gritty clouds after me, and I knew the fire must be raging in the main room. The last thing I saw before entering the server room was Kaz bending low next to Prairie, pulling his shirt over his mouth, and I prayed there would be enough air for them.
The door was open to the smaller, inside server room. It was still cool and dark in there, where the fire hadn’t yet reached, and glowing numbers scrolled at lightning speed along the single monitor on the desk. So Prairie had succeeded-the data on the disk was being scrubbed out of existence.
It was about time for some good news.
I emptied the lighter fluid around the equipment and had turned to go, to run back to Prairie and Kaz so we could try to race the fire out of the building, when I noticed a door along the other wall of the server room. It was a heavily reinforced door, like the one to the main lab, with a scan pad set into the wall next to it.
I hesitated. The fire was burning, and the data was being erased. It ought to be enough.
But the door was locked. Something in there was important enough that Bryce had secured it separately. More data? Specialized equipment?
And then I remembered what he had said: She’s become a permanent guest of the laboratory. His new Healer-she was imprisoned somewhere nearby, and this was the last place we hadn’t looked.
Fear shot through me. I had to find her and get her out of the burning building, to save her if I could.
I didn’t have a gun, didn’t even have any more lighter fluid, but I pulled the prox card from my pocket and jammed it against the pad. I heard the click of the lock releasing; without thinking I grabbed the door handle and yanked it.
What I saw struck me with such blinding horror that I nearly fell back into the raging flames. A scream started in my throat and burst from me with the ragged, howling desperation of a trapped animal. I tried to run, but my legs weren’t working-my terrified brain couldn’t control my movements as electric panic shot along my nerve endings and adrenaline threatened to drown my conscious mind.
Inside, sitting motionless on a dozen folding chairs, were a dozen men dressed in plain T-shirts and khaki pants. As I blinked away smoke and gulped the poisonous air deep into my lungs, I saw that these were no ordinary men. They were decomposing. Their skin ranged from pasty white to gray and purple, and in a few cases it had started to separate from the bone. The smell hit me next, worse than anything I had ever smelled, and bile rose in my throat. Some of the men weren’t wearing shoes, the flesh swollen and splitting from the bones of their feet. The one closest to me had stains on his shirt. With a wave of nausea I realized that his torso was leaking bodily fluids.
Worst of all were their eyes. Empty, as though the souls of these men had been sucked out through the sockets.
Their heads slowly turned to me. One by one, they rose from their chairs and started toward me, arms outstretched.
They were zombies. And they were coming for me.
FOR A MOMENT I couldn’t move, my legs still frozen in place from the shock. Then the closest zombie stumbled in front of me and its fingers scrabbled at my arm. They were crusted with black filth, and the skin covering its hands had started to separate from the bone. I screamed and backed away, but not before I saw that its eye sockets drooped with rotting flesh, that its gums had shriveled back from broken teeth, that its hair was coming out of its head in clumps. The smell was so strong that I gagged on my own vomit.
I turned and bolted for the door, but the zombie managed to grab the back of my shirt. I was yanked backward, and I realized the zombie wasn’t weakened at all by decomposition. A second gruesome hand reached for my neck and spun me around, and I saw that they were all converging on me, their hands out, their mouths slack and open.
I screamed and shoved at the reaching hands. I screamed harder when my own hands touched flesh that was wet and slick and loose. A hand snaked around my face and pressed against my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I breathed in the stench of rot. My screams turned to fury as I fought to pull away from the bodies pressing in on me, but there were too many.
I bit down. Hard.
My teeth closed on a finger. As I threw all my strength into fighting, I heard a soggy crack and the finger separated from the hand. I spat it out and kept screaming, my voice going hoarse. I stomped on the shuffling feet around me, but there were too many. Another hand replaced the first, and then another, tugging at my hair, thumbs poking at my eyeballs.
I was going to die. The zombies had been ordered to destroy me-to destroy anyone but Bryce, I guessed. How long had he been building this ragtag army? Judging by the state of their bodies, it must have been days. Weeks, even, given what Prairie had told me about decomposition slowing. Even longer, if Bryce had been working on ways to retard it.
I was going to die, but my rage kept me fighting. My fingers found flesh, and they shoved and poked and fought, undaunted even when they sank into rotting tissue. I knew I couldn’t kill the zombies. Their pathetic bodies would keep going until all the flesh had fallen away and they were nothing but skeletons, and only when the last of the tissue had rotted would they be truly dead. I, on the other hand, would die as a human dies; they would squeeze the breath from my throat and twist and crack my limbs and take me to the floor to kick and pummel the life from me.
“Hailey!” Kaz burst through the door. He hesitated only a second, taking in the scene, and then he picked up one of the folding chairs. Wielding it in front of him, he charged the zombies. They were clustered in front of me, for some reason lacking the instinct to circle behind and surround me, and Kaz slammed into them, knocking several down right away, and then, with stunning force, going after the ones that remained. He jabbed and slammed the chair the way I’d seen him use his lacrosse stick in the park, with deadly accuracy and the force of all that hard-built muscle.
Their hands fell away from me one by one. They were slow to adapt to the change of circumstances, and they bumped into one another and hesitated, their hands closing on air, their expressions unchanged. The ones that had been knocked down were getting off the floor and coming at Kaz, and I knew I had only seconds until they adapted to the new threat.
I put all my energy into kicking and clawing. I managed to tear my arms free as I delivered a kick to the legs of the last one holding me, and its feet slipped and it went down.
“Now!” I screamed, and grabbed Kaz’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He threw the chair at the advancing zombies, and we both fell through the door as I pulled it shut hard.
“They’re locked inside,” I said, as much a prayer as a statement. Kaz grabbed my hand and we ran back into the smoky hall.
There were flames licking along the floor, and I realized that the fire would reach the server lab in seconds.
“Prairie?” I asked, choking on the smoke.
“Got her to the lobby,” Kaz said. “Try not to breathe until we’re clear.”
I took a last lungful of breath and held it. We ran until we couldn’t see through the smoke, and then we put our free hands to the walls and guided ourselves that way, following the corridors until we were running through fire. The flames licked against us, and I knew that if our clothes caught fire, we were doomed. Then, suddenly, we burst into the lobby, where the smoke was thinner, and I saw Prairie laid out along the floor near the guard desk.
She looked dead, her head lolling against her outstretched arm, and my heart plummeted.
“She’s going to be all right. I’ll get her,” Kaz managed to wheeze, and he slung her over his shoulder, much as he’d carried the guard earlier. I coughed hard, trying to clear the smoke from my lungs, and when I followed him through the doors, out into the chilly night, I breathed the sharp, cold air greedily. Before I could catch my breath, Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the building, into the shadows of the trees lining the street.
“We need to hurry,” he said.
“What about the Healer?” I said, my voice hoarse and raw. “She’s still trapped in there somewhere!”
That was when I heard the sirens.
Kaz heard them too. He looked back at the building, where flames were now pouring from every window. Then he looked at me with such pain in his eyes that I knew there was no hope. The Healer would die, alone and in agony, alongside the horrible creatures she had been forced to create.
Prairie moaned softly and stirred.
“We need to hurry,” he repeated, and I knew we wouldn’t speak of the Healer again.
By the time we got Prairie settled into the backseat, police and fire vehicles were hurtling down the block toward the lab.
I turned away from the burning building and stared out the windshield into the night as Kaz drove us away.
PRAIRIE WOKE UP right before we reached the house. She had a wicked bruise on her scalp, but otherwise she seemed all right.
Kaz filled her in on the terrible discovery I’d made in the room behind the lab, and described how we’d escaped. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it yet. I kept feeling those cold hands grasping at me, and I knew I would never be able to forget the sensation of my fingers sinking into the ruined flesh of my attackers.
Anna got a much-condensed version. By unspoken agreement we spared her the worst of the details. Kaz’s wounds looked like little more than scrapes now-full function had been restored to his hand, and the hole in his arm closed over-so we didn’t tell her the extent of his injuries. We skipped the zombies entirely.
She had the news on, though, and she nearly cried with relief that we’d escaped the fire, which had turned into an inferno that was expected to consume the entire building. Crews had come from up and down the North Shore, and they were trying to save the adjoining buildings. There had been two survivors. One was the security guard, who had been found wandering around the back of the building, dazed and disoriented, but otherwise unharmed. He was unable to supply any details about the start of the fire, because his memory of the night’s events ended at the sandwich he’d had on his dinner break.
The other survivor was taken from the building on a stretcher. We saw the same footage played several times. None of us could look away. “It’s him,” Prairie said the first time, as the paramedics carried the stretcher past the news crews to the waiting ambulance. “Those are his shoes.”
There was only one shoe, though. It was an expensive leather loafer that had blistered and peeled in the heat, but stayed attached to Bryce’s foot. His other foot was bare, and it was clear his pants had burned away. The blackened flesh of Bryce’s leg was visible in the instant before the camera cut away.
“Burns over eighty percent of his body,” the reporter confided in tones that barely concealed an undercurrent of excitement. It was a story that would lead for days, that much was clear, especially as “breaking details” about the lab revealed it had been carrying on important scientific efforts endorsed by the university, though reporters were having trouble getting confirmation.
We drank strong coffee while we watched. Anna set out a plate of sandwiches as the first hint of morning colored the edge of the sky, but no one touched them. I wondered if I’d ever sleep through another night, if dawn would become a familiar sight for me.
As I was beginning to doze off, leaning against Prairie, an announcer cut into the broadcast. “There it goes, folks,” he said, barely containing his excitement. “As predicted, it looks like the building’s a total-Oh my God, would you look at that.”
We all leaned forward as the building fell in on itself in slow motion, the upper floors collapsing like papier-mâché.
I reached for Prairie’s hand. “They have to be dead,” I whispered. We both knew it was a question.
She nodded. “They said the temperatures got well over a thousand degrees. And now this… they won’t find anything by the time it’s finished burning. Maybe some bone fragments.”
I nodded and snuggled a little closer, praying she was right, praying zombies burned like everyone else. And trying not to think about the Healer trapped inside.
A moment later, though, she stiffened.
“We forgot,” she said, tugging at the blanket that covered us both. “We forgot his apartment. We’ve got to get over there and destroy his papers and his backup.”
I sat up straight. Kaz was already getting to his feet.
Anna tried to pull him back down. “This is not the time,” she said. “You’re exhausted. Everything is destroyed there. Bryce is in hospital, probably going to die.”
But she hadn’t seen the zombies. We had.
The argument was cut short when Kaz hugged Anna hard. “I love you, Mom,” he said, every syllable a promise. “And we’ll be back safe.”
The trip back to Evanston was harder than the one before, even though there was nothing left that could hurt us. It had all been destroyed in the fire. But we were no longer fueled by the energy of our quest. This was a sad trip, the culmination of a journey that had as many losses as gains, and we barely spoke at all except for Prairie’s occasional directions.
We found a spot on a crowded street. Kaz eased the little car into a tiny space. The apartment building was only a few years old, a ritzy, gleaming brick and steel and glass tower.
“What’s in the documents, anyway?” Kaz asked as we got out of the car. He’d brought his backpack, but this time it was to take things with us. Prairie said there was less than a single filing cabinet drawer of documents, plus Bryce’s laptop. We planned to shred the documents back at Anna’s, and destroy the laptop there too.
“From what I could tell, it was mostly his notes to himself. He may have transferred them to electronic files later, but these were handwritten lists, like the one I told you about with his contacts in foreign militaries. I don’t really know what’s there, but I figure we need to be safe.”
In the gleaming lobby, the guard nodded and smiled at Prairie. Clearly, he recognized her from past visits. Bryce must not have told the guard that she was no longer welcome. As we got to the elevators, Prairie leaned in close to me, close enough that I could see the fine network of lines around her eyes, the deep purple smudges beneath them. She looked so tired.
“It’s almost over,” she said quietly, and I wondered if she was trying to reassure herself as much as me.
The elevator glided smoothly to the top floor. We walked down a softly lit, carpeted hallway. There were only two apartments, the penthouses. Prairie slid her key in the lock and the last possible obstacle was removed-not that Bryce would have had time to change the locks, but I had learned to take nothing for granted.
The door opened on a beautiful if sparsely furnished apartment. The midday sun sparkled off tabletops, wood floors, a vase of tulips. Sleek furniture was arranged around a richly patterned rug.
Everything looked normal. Inviting, even. My shoulders practically sagged with relief. At last it felt like we had reached the end of our journey.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Prairie said, going to the desk in the den off the main room and starting to gather up papers.
Kaz put out his arm and I leaned into him, letting him support me, breathing in the comforting scent of clean laundry and soap. As my eyes fluttered shut, I wondered if it would be possible for me to fall asleep standing up, because I felt like I could sleep forever.
That was when the voice called out.
“Mr. Safian?”
It was a woman’s voice, heavily accented, like Anna’s but far closer to its speaker’s Polish roots. I froze as Kaz stiffened at my side. Prairie dropped the papers in her hands.
The voice came from behind a closed door in the apartment’s long hallway. I looked at Prairie questioningly.
“Guest room,” she whispered.
I started toward it, but she stopped me, a warning hand on my arm.
“She’s Banished,” I said. I sensed it, even through the closed door, even across the distance. The stirring of the blood, the heightening of my senses, it was all there.
“Mr. Safian!” the voice said again, now wailing. “You leave me all night. Mr. Safian!”
“It’s her,” Kaz said. “The one I saw in the vision. It has to be.”
“We don’t know,” Prairie said. “We can’t be sure-”
“You not come back, you promise come back, you not come back, I am so scared.” The voice broke down in sobs as Prairie’s hand tightened on my arm. “Please don’t be angry, Mr. Safian. We will do your work. No more fight, no more resist. We do what you ask. Now you bring my sisters, yes? Now you bring my sisters back to me?”