“I know what’s going on, Lucy.”
My heart stopped. Packed its things. Ran away. I felt a lump of lead in my mouth and a cold chill down my spine.
“What?”
“Lucy,” Mom said. She turned to be side-by-side with me and slipped her arm around my shoulders. “You can’t do this to yourself.”
“Do…do what to myself?”
“You aren’t fat, Lucy,” Mom said, and looked me up and down. “You look fine, honey. There’s no reason to starve yourself or start turning into a bike nut.”
I laughed. It just burst out of me before I could slap my mouth closed. Of everything I had expected to come out of her mouth, that hadn’t been it. I popped my fingers over my mouth and tugged my lips together. I tried to calm my eyes, bring them under control.
“What?” Mom said, leaning back, a little annoyed. “What’s so funny?”
“N-nothing, Mom,” I said. I turned and hugged her. “I just… It’s hard for me to be comfortable with my…fatness. You just made me feel a whole lot better is all.”
“Oh,” Mom said.
She drew up, and I could see the pride welling up. She’d been the perfect mom, and she’d solved the problem. She practically glowed with satisfaction. My lips quivered, and I remembered how much I loved my mom. I hugged her again and let her go.
“What was that one for?” she asked.
“Just for being you, Mom,” I said.
She looked confused yet pleased, so I left it at that.
“Make a plate for me,” I said. “I promise to eat the whole thing. I just need to get some fresh air, if that’s okay.”
She nodded. “Okay, hon. Nothing wrong with being healthy just…just don’t overdo it, okay?”
“I promise to stay off of Oprah, Mom. You have my word.”
I waved my hand at her and bounced out the back door.
I raced down the street, pumping as fast as I could.
The harder I rode, the faster the cold set into me. But I didn’t stop. The wind against my face couldn’t compete with the icy chill spreading through my muscles. My bones. Every part of me felt sluggish. Frost poured out of my labored lungs.
The only upside was that I had yet to sweat a drop. Hurray for hypothermia.
The road flew past me. I zipped through the yellow pools of the streetlights, flying up to the curb whenever I feared smashing into a parked car. I was getting weaker—the pumping of my pedals came slower and slower, and the crisp wind in my face was dying. I was coasting more than I was riding, and it took all of my strength just to balance on both wheels.
The bike creaked to a stop, and I fell over.
Everything became dark, and I could feel the sharp wet crystals in the wind. Just like snow.
No.
I stood up. I thought of the little boy running through the cornfield, but nothing came. I tried to picture him as hard as I could, and for a moment the wind stopped. A fluttering of something warm blossomed in my chest and then was gone. Whatever it was, I’d used it up. I tried to picture the little boy, but this time there was nothing.
My tank was empty. But I had a little strength left.
I looked up from the ground and laughed. Of course. I’d fallen over in the parking lot of St. Elias. I picked up my mom’s bike and shoved it into a long stretch of bushes. I ran through the parked cars without a look back.
The hospital wasn’t very big.
I pushed through the swinging glass doors out front and entered what looked like every hospital I’d ever been in. Short, hard gray carpet where there wasn’t blinding white tile. Taupe walls. Long corridors of doors with tiny placards. Disinfectant stink. Fake plants in little wicker pots. A small round nurse or secretary at a half-circle desk.
I walked up to her and tried not to sound out of breath.
“H-hello,” I said, and my teeth chattered. A swirl of frost accompanied the words. “I’d like to know which room Kent Miller is in?”
She glanced up at me from behind half-lidded eyes and fiddled with the keyboard at her desk.
“Family?”
Oh crap. I’ve seen enough hospital shows—that really shouldn’t have caught me off-guard. Luckily my quick mouth saved my idiot-brain once again.
“No, I’m actually in his History class. I’m one of his students.”
Wow. Good work, mouth. You get a raise or something. Maybe I’ll up the cheesecake ration or something.
“Oh,” the little nurse/secretary said, perking up considerably. “That’s so
sweet
of you. Yeah, let me look it up. If I could just get you to sign in here…”
She pointed at a clipboard, and I scooped it up and scribbled
Allison Belle
on the visitor sign in portion. The signature was shaky in my frozen hand, but readable. Ally Belle was my alter-ego as a little girl. Sometimes she was a superhero, sometimes a princess, but it was the name I always ran with. Nowadays I mostly used it as my junk email name.
“Looks like Room A6. Just down this hall,” she said, pointing to my right. “And on the left. I think his wife is there right now, just so you know.”
I glanced down at the sheet. Just over my
name
, written in a measured, steady hand was the name Maria Miller. The sign in time was two hours ago, and there hadn’t been a sign out time. I glanced up the visitor roster to see she’d signed in and out at least five times throughout the day.
“Thanks,” I said. She handed me a visitor’s badge, and I clipped it to my shirt.
Needless to say, my steps down the hallway were measured. What should I do? The wife might have a hard time believing my high school student story, especially if Kent was awake to ruin my identity. Then again, if Kent was awake and he recognized me from the crash, it would be even worse.
Why did I come here?
As I reached for the door, the naked, blinding urge to run hit me. It was pure panic, flushing me with adrenaline and telling me to run or die. Run or die.
My eyes shot around the hallway, but I saw nothing. No one but the secretary at the little half-circle desk. For the first time that night, sweat began pouring through my skin despite the icy freeze. I watched my arm in fascination as a drop of sweat crawled halfway down my elbow and then turned to ice.
I was breathing too hard. My nostrils flared, and the urge to run hit me again. Despite my better judgment, I threw open the door and leaped into Kent Miller’s room.
Inside the room there were three people. Kent Miller sat up in the hospital bed, looking groggy but awake. Maria Miller, a thin but very ugly woman, sat at the little chair by his side. A man in white I first mistook for a doctor stood in the corner of the room.
He was tall and thin with a gaunt, stretched out face. He didn’t look over thirty, and yet he surely wasn’t under forty. His smooth face belied his age, and his eyes were so dark they looked black. A white lab coat hung from his frame, and underneath it, a white t-shirt and a pair of white Dickies slacks. It didn’t surprise me to see a pair of white sneakers capping off his legs.
When I looked into his eyes, I felt my blood drain.
The primal, gut-wrenching fear had a source. It was staring me in the eyes, and I knew if I didn’t run I was going to die.
Chapter Nine
Fear the Reaper
My foot pivoted—that’s as far as I got. I grabbed the door and tugged as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.
I spun back toward the man-in-white, who stared at me with those coal-black eyes. He didn’t look happy—I half-expected a maniacal grin to spread across his face. Perhaps a soul-sucking evil laugh. He didn’t move though, except to pull his hands from the pockets of his lab coat. They were long and slender and fine—the hands of a piano player or a surgeon. He folded them together and let them fall to his belt-buckle.
“Good evening, little miss,” he said, in a voice like dark chocolate. “Please, sit.”
I looked around the room, adrenaline scouring my veins. I tugged at the door again, but if anything it was stuck harder. I turned back to him, my hand still gripping the door handle with white-knuckled strength.
I looked at Kent Miller and his wife, Maria. Both of them seemed awake, but neither was talking. Or moving. Their eyes drifted lazily across the room, like they were following the path of an errant butterfly.
“Hello,” I said to them. “Please help! Help!”
They didn’t hear me. They kept following that invisible butterfly with marked disinterest.
I turned back to the man-in-white. “What did you do?”
The man-in-white unfolded from his corner. He took a step forward, and I slid my back against the wall, toward Kent. The man-in-white stopped, an apologetic look on his face.
“Please, please, calm down,” he said in the velvet voice. It was hard not to obey. “There is no need for this.”
The fear, both natural and supernatural, was building, despite his words. He’d hurt Kent and Maria, because of me, and he was going to hurt me, too. He’d been following me in that ugly white car of his with the green tinted windows. I knew it without a shred of doubt. I should have checked the parking lot.
“What did you do?” I screamed at him. I couldn’t help it.
“Nothing,” he said, with what sounded like an embarrassed laugh hiding in his words. “I just fascinated them. It doesn’t hurt.”
Fascinated.
I didn’t like the way he said that. Like it was…magical. He said it too casually, too business-like. None of this was new to him. It sounded almost mundane.
“Why…why are you following me?”
I glanced around the room. The door was locked. The windows were a possibility, but they were on the other side of Kent’s bed from me. And I’d have to pass within arm’s reach of the man-in-white. I tucked tighter into the corner, my hands digging around me for something to grab. Something harder than my hand, anyway.
The man-in-white took a step forward.
“I knew you’d come here, eventually,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, eyes scrambling for an escape route. “Why’s that?”
He shrugged, “They always come back. To finish their victims, I mean. Though I don’t really understand why you didn’t just do it during the car crash.”
My body went numb. Whether it was the insidious cold or his words, I wasn’t sure.
“He’s not…he’s not my victim. I didn’t—”
“No, you did,” the man-in-white said. “You did. You took from him those things most precious, and you were going to take more tonight.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. That wasn’t the reason I’d come. I’m not a killer. I’m not a monster, I just—I just wanted to go…
For no reason. No reason at all.
“Yes,” he said, but his eyes looked pained. “You came to take away his
essence
. His memories, his soul. You are a monster, little miss.”
“No, I’m not.”
I backed even tighter into the corner. I felt my legs buckling, their strength leeched away by the frost. The unending frost that told me to eat. To warm myself. To steal life. To take what wasn’t mine.
He was right.
“Please,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“I know,” the man-in-white said. “I know, little miss. But I can make it go away, do you understand? I can make it all better.”
The room began to brighten. I looked up to the ceiling, but the long florescent tubes hadn’t changed at all. If anything, they dimmed against the brightness. It took me a moment, but I realized it was him. The man-in-white. A glaring radiance, the white light welling up like water through the holes in his clothes. Through his arms, out from his neck, down in little circles around his shoes.
He smiled, and he was a kind of beautiful. His eyes burned brighter.
“You can go home now, little miss,” he said.
A pulse of light rippled from him, hitting me in the chest. Heat flooded through me and receded just as quickly, a kind of warmth I’d never known. The feeling I’d stolen from Kent was a pale shade of the light burning out of the man-in-white. The shudder of warmth slid across my skin, up my spine, across my face.
Then the ice returned. Colder. Abyssal. The black freeze of nothingness. I heard a long loud tone…then a beep.
Incredibly, my phone was ringing. It was so absurd in the face of the man-in-white’s nova.
I tugged my phone out of my pocket and flipped it over. A text message from an unknown number.
Snap the hell out of it.
You aren’t going to Heaven.
Run your little behind off.
I clutched the phone so tight I thought it would explode into parts. I stared into the screen, and another white pulse washed over me. The death-rime etched lines of agony across my bones. There was no warmth in that light. It was a trick.
I looked up at the man-in-white, squinting to see through the blinding glare. His eyes were two black pits. I reached toward the little bedside table, hoping to use it as a club to bash him. Anything to break his concentration, maybe, or to confuse him—
My hand passed right through the table. An icy wind slid up my hand with the motion. I turned back toward him and a grin spread across my face.
“Sorry, Charlie,” I said, and I saw his face fall in the white light. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I held my breath, closed my eyes, turned around, and jumped toward the wall next to Kent.
If I break my nose trying to run through a wall
, I thought suddenly,
I am going to be so pissed.
I leaped and landed on my feet. I opened my eyes. The wan moonlight streaked through the window of a darkened hospital room. A door stood half-open on my right, leading back into the hallway. I’d run through the wall. I turned around and saw nothing but a mint-colored wall and a poster about abdominal pain.
Joy reared its stupid head, and I pumped one fist into the air.
On the other side of the wall, a terrifying roar ripped the air. It sounded like death, like a dragon, like the biggest lion ever dreamed of. The wall rippled, and the man-in-white, beaming out that pulsing white light, began to walk through the wall. He didn’t slip through it like it was smoke, like I must have. His passage caused the wall to ripple and buck like it was made of water. No, something thicker, some viscous substance that didn’t want him to pass. Like tar, or super glue. He yanked at it, trying to wade through the ugly, mint-green wall. Black smoke curled out of his eyes, which were yanked wide and glowing with rage.