I grabbed the people around me, but their bouncing and jostling made it impossible to get back to my feet. A knee smacked me in the side of the head, and white star-bursts exploded in my eyes. I looked up in shock, trying to hold a hand feebly above my head, but I realized I wasn’t being attacked, just trampled.
I pushed up against the crowd, but it was like trying to shove a brick wall. I came down hard on my hands and knees, which protested with bright red stabs of pain. Something soft but unyielding cracked into my head, and my elbows buckled, forcing me into a bastard-version of the downward dog. I shoved and struggled, but the ocean of flesh tugged me down like the worst riptide. My left hand, its fingers splayed wide against Benny’s parents’ glossy hard-wood floor, didn’t last long. A brown-and-red sneaker came down like a piston on my fingers. I heard them break before I felt them. A dry machine-gun burst of cracks, four in total.
Agony. Bile rose in my throat, and a strangled animal-scream squeezed out of my mouth. The sneaker came up, and I yanked my mangled hand out and shoved it tight to my stomach to protect it. My fingers were engulfed in flame, throwing sickening pulses of pain up my entire arm. I wanted to look at it, but some well-equipped part of my mind told me that now wasn’t the time. I tried to curl up as best as I could, to resist the crushing machine of people.
Something grabbed the back of my shirt and twisted the fabric, tugging and pulling.
Then I was being lifted by the twisting hand, yanked back to my feet. A huge arm wrapped around my waist, holding me steady against the press.
I looked up at my savior. I wish I could have felt surprised.
Zack wasn’t looking at me. He held me to him against the battering sea of blood-thirsty teenagers, but he stared off toward the center of the circle, his eyes small and calculating. It had all the imagery of a romance novel, I realized. Dashing figure, whimpering maiden, eyes cast to the sea. I would have been disgusted if he hadn’t just saved my life.
Zack wasn’t small. With one hand around my waist, he plowed through the whirling teenager death machine and got us out of the crowd in seconds.
Sara tugged me out of Zack’s arms, and I didn’t even have enough presence of mind to resist. Zack didn’t either, because I realized Sara had seen what was in Zack’s eyes the moment he burst out of the crowd.
Benny had half-turned on the floor, and Tyler’s punches were knocking the side of Benny’s head into the hardwood floor with a sick cracking sound. No one was stopping him. Why wasn’t anyone stopping him?
Zack leaped at Tyler’s back, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him away from Benny. Tyler
flew
. He sailed into the coffee table, which despite what I’d seen in movies, didn’t immediately explode into splinters. Tyler just bounced off of it and rolled away. Zack was already moving, but so was Tyler’s black-haired friend.
Tyler’s friend snapped a forearm into the back of Zack’s head. Zack stumbled, turned, and threw a right cross that would have made Cassius Clay proud. It connected with a crunch, and Tyler’s friend stumbled back into the crowd.
Tyler was up, I realized, coming at Zack. Something small glittered in his hand—not a gun, I realized with an all-too-familiar jolt of fear. Just a pocket knife, the blade popped out. Zack was looking down at Benny. Tyler looked confused, and afraid, but he didn’t stop moving.
“Zack!”
Zack half-turned, and Tyler’s fear turned into panic. He jabbed the knife at Zack.
I could think of nothing but a pool of yellow arc-sodium light, the rough scrape of blacktop under my feet, and the yawning barrel of a revolver pointing into my gut. The gun and the animal behind it that had killed me.
“Stop!” I screamed.
He did. Tyler sailed backward across the room like he’d been punted. I didn’t see Zack move, but Tyler was lifted off his feet and tossed over the sofa. His legs caught the back of it, and he spun and landed in a heap behind it.
His pocket knife wobbled in the hardwood floor.
The crowd, finally, came alive. Tyler’s friend tried to sway back into the fray, looking dazed, bleeding from the lip, but a dozen hands grabbed each of the combatants and a dozen bodies flooded into the gaps between. I lost sight of Zack, Benny, Tyler, and Morgan.
“Luce…”
I followed the source of the sound to see Sara sitting on the arm of a chair, rubbing the side of her head. I jumped up to my tip-toes to try to see over the crowd, but I could only make out the top of Zack’s head.
“Luce…”
I glanced at her, trying to hide the impatient annoyance in my voice.
“What the hell happened? Why was Tyler beating the crap out of Benny?”
Sara shook her head and pointed at my stomach.
“What?”
I followed her gaze. I didn’t think anything had happened to my stomach—
My eyes rounded. Dizziness swept over me, my nerve endings tingling and my head was swimming. The first three fingers of my left hand were hopelessly mangled—a fleshy twisted claw, the fingers sticking out at unnatural angles with far too many knuckles. The skin, yellow and blue and black, promised agony.
I looked away, took a huge swallow of air, and covered the mess with my other hand.
It hurt, but in a distant way. More like a fresh memory of incredible pain. I knew enough to worry about shock—but I also knew I wasn’t as
normal
as I should be either.
“Lucy,” Sara said, the thin veil of concussion peeling away from her eyes. “You need to go to the hospital. Right now.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to—a little voice screamed that the tests would prove I was an alien or a vampire or a Scientologist or something. Maybe they wouldn’t test anything—my injury being pretty obvious. Did they
always
run tests? I wasn’t sure. Television hospital dramas hadn’t prepared me as much as I thought they might.
“Morgan…she’ll take me,” I said.
Why Morgan? She didn’t have a car, and it wouldn’t have been legal if she had.
Because she was going to know everything sooner than I’d like anyway. I didn’t need to spew my freakishness all over everyone. She’d be the easiest to convince that maybe I shouldn’t go to the hospital.
“Where did Morgan come from? I thought she was grounded?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Are you okay?”
Sara frowned at my evasiveness, but she still touched a spot above her ear and winced.
“I think so,” Sara said.
“Sorry, hon,” I said, checking her temple.
Sara snorted, “Your fingers are kindling, Luce. Get out of here, I’m fine.”
I nodded—when she mentioned my fingers, a dull ache of pain swirled up from my hand. I wanted to find Zack first, but I also knew that Zack was fine, and I wasn’t. Still, as I dug through the ridiculous mass to find Morgan, I couldn’t keep myself from swiveling over my shoulder every six seconds to pick Zack’s spiky hair out of the crowd. By the fourth look, he’d disappeared, no doubt to help Benny to his feet.
Stupid good-looking hero idiot.
Daphne ran smack into me. My obsession with Zack was now officially messing with my equilibrium. I gave her a look up and down, but she seemed okay.
“You okay, Daph?”
She made a face and gestured toward my cradled hand. “Are you?”
“I’m…no, not really. Have you seen Morgan? Or Wanda?”
“Morgan is here?” Daphne asked, and seemed to immediately reconsider. “Forget it. Wanda needs you. Right now. Come on.”
I followed her upstairs, where Daphne stopped at a door at the end of the hall. The upstairs was dark, except for a gentle amber light welling out from the bottom of the door in front of us.
“What happened?”
Daphne shook her head. “Benny found them…”
I pushed past Daphne and went in the room. I heard the door click shut behind me.
Only a small desk lamp illuminated the room—judging from the twin bed, the movie posters, and the impressive-looking glowing computer tower on his desk, I knew I was in Benny’s room.
A tiny girl sat on the tiny bed, Wanda. She looked like she had shrunk, curled in on herself. Her hair, coiffed and delicate before, stuck out and hung in tangled lumps. Her shirt was ripped along the shoulder, and one of her shoes sat forlorn and cast off at the foot of Benny’s desk chair.
“Wanda?”
The girl on the bed made a mewling sound—half-sob, half-spoken word. It sounded like despair, and I felt my heart jump.
“Wanda? Are you okay, hon?”
She wasn’t—I knew that much.
Dull, ghostly images skimmed through my mind. Like old yellowed snapshots, I thought of Ms. Crane, my guidance counselor. The images I’d had taken from her by accident—and the feelings came with them. Faded, ancient, and over-used like the images themselves, but I got a hint of it. The violation. The shock.
I touched my cheek and felt my fingers shaking. Calm down, calm. I crossed to the bed and climbed onto it next to her. She still didn’t move or look at me.
“Wanda, hon?”
I touched her back, and she jerked under the motion. She mumbled something, and I leaned in closer.
“What is it?”
I didn’t even try this time. Just a little breath and I felt a live jolt of fear and anger splash into my lungs. Images of Tyler’s lean, ugly face. Twisted and angry. Wanda had said no, and Tyler hadn’t taken it like a gentleman. Grabbing, pawing hands. Wanda’s terror spilling into me, her outrage, even through the alcohol haze. Clothing tearing, just as the door flew open, filling with Benny’s slender silhouette. Benny moving like a flash, grabbing Tyler…
No wonder Tyler had been bouncing Benny’s head off the floor.
“Oh, Wanda…” I breathed, just above a whisper.
“Luce…just. No. Go, please. Just go.”
I frowned and squeezed her shoulder. “Wanda, you’re not okay—”
“Please. Just. Go.”
She didn’t sound angry. Her words warbled, caught in her throat. She sucked in a breath and looked at me through her curtain of hair. The smile she tried to pull off broke my heart.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Can I go home?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Just let me…”
And I was still shaking. I felt weak, almost dizzy. I ignored the feeling.
“Is Benny okay?” she said, suddenly, her eyes lighting up. It looked like fear, or hysteria.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He got… let me just find someone who can give us a ride.”
Wanda retreated, her arms folding around herself, her eyes snapping out of view behind her hair. I didn’t know what to do. I clenched my hands into fists and left the room.
“She needs to go home,” I said to Daphne. “Know anyone with a car?”
Daphne nodded. “Mostly seniors here. I know a couple. I can…yeah. Do you need a ride, too?”
“No, just get her out of here and try to cover with her parents.”
“Yes, sir,” Daphne said, without a hint of sarcasm. I tried a smile, but she made a face and pulled me into a quick, tight hug. Pins and needles pricked at my broken hand.
Daphne ran downstairs. I searched the hallway for the bathroom and went inside. The bright compact-fluorescents stabbed my eyes when I flicked the switch.
I glanced into the mirror and immediately regretted it. My skin looked translucent—the kind of pale reserved for vampires and the Irish. I leaned in close to the mirror, my eyes wide, trying to remember if dilation was good or bad. I flicked the switch off. Waited. Flicked it on again.
My eyes didn’t change. When the lights turned on, my pupils were already two black dimes.
“Crap,” I said.
With more than a little reluctance, I pulled my twisted hand away from my stomach. A wave of dizziness crashed over me the second I jostled it, and I hurled lunch, dinner, and more than a few alcoholic libations into the toilet. When I recovered and cleaned up a little, I went back to examining the hand.
The fingers weren’t as twisted and awful as I remembered—maybe being trampled in a crowd had exaggerated my perceptions. Still, they were pretty gross. The index finger made a side-ways snake shape, the middle finger popped forward then back again, and the ring finger looked…mushy? The skin was torn on all three from the impact of the foot, and they were all red, purple, blue, and yellow. Some blood spattered my hand, but I didn’t think from any compound fractures. Mostly just the tearing.
I took another few moments to hurl. When I was finished I was shaking, and cold sweat ran in rivulets down my back. My forehead positively glistened. I took a deep breath, and the room began to spin.
Not good
. I cleaned up again, swirled enough Listerine to get me a little buzzed, and dug through the medicine cabinet and under the sink. Success! I tugged out the first aid kit, swallowed a handful of aspirin, and wrapped my Fangoria hand in a long roll of Ace bandages.
Wrapping the fingers was the worst part. Every tiny motion, every rasp of skin against bandage sent a wave of misery rolling up my entire body.
I went downstairs, not surprised to see the party clearing out. The crowd had thinned to mostly my friends and a few stragglers. Benny sat on the couch as Sara and Morgan attended to him. He looked thrashed—most of his face was swollen and badly cut up, and the hand cradling his ribs told me he’d probably taken a hard hit there as well. Zack stood above them all, his arms crossed, his eyes going between Benny, the door, and the ground.
Daphne stood in the corner with a catatonic-looking Wanda. Wanda had been wrapped in some guy’s huge puffy coat, and she hugged herself and stared off serenely at some phantom landscape. Daphne whispered in low tones to some senior guy I didn’t recognize, and he looked both annoyed and compliant. Daphne had that effect on people.
I didn’t make it three steps before Zack caught sight of me. He ran to meet me at the foot of the stairs, and despite everything, I smiled.
Stupid hero idiot.
“Are you okay, Luce? Sara said—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a little crowd-stomped. It looked worse than it was.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sara look up in stark disbelief. I waved my bandaged hand at her and tried to ignore the searing flashes caused by the sudden movement. She frowned but went back to patching up Benny.