My gaze shifted to Marisa. Physically, she looked fine other than the black eye and the torn sweater. A navy coat with silver buttons was thrown over her desk chair. Loose threads dangled where one of the buttons had fallen off. From the ultra-neat room, it was obvious that her messy state wasn't normal.
Marisa smiled back at Jeremy. I felt like a peeper. “I'm okay,” she whispered. “Really. Nothing happened. The guy tried to grab me, but I got away.” Somehow, I knew she wasn't being completely honest with him, but who was I to butt in?
Gabe cleared her throat. “Um, maybe we should get you both to the ER? Or at least the campus infirmary. Just to be safe?”
I studied the room. My fingers itched to touch something, but my reaction to that ring had been so intense. This city was too much for me. I balled my hands into fists and stuffed them in my jacket pockets.
The girl glared at us, one dark eye flashing, the other hidden behind the purpling folds of flesh. “We're fine. Thanks for helping Jeremy. Can you please leave us now? He needs to rest.”
Jeremy Glass murmured incoherently, his gaze fixed on Marisa, as if he'd forgotten we were even there. I took Gabe by the arm and spoke under my breath. “If they're too stubborn to help themselves, it's really not our business.”
Gabe sighed and with false brightness said, “Okay, then. We'll be close by if you need us. Our campus apartment is only a few blocks away. I'll just jot down my number for you.” She scribbled on a scrap of paper and left it under a pen on Marisa's tidy desk.
Too focused on each other, neither Jeremy Glass nor his girlfriend noticed as we slipped out the door into the hallway.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I grumbled.
Gabe cocked an eyebrow and laughed. “I hate to say itâbut you sound exactly like your dad.”
4
Jeremy
Saturday: 12:25 AM
W
hen the room finally stopped spinning, I sat up. Marisa stared back at me, her eye nearly swollen shut in a purple squint.
“Holyâ For the love of God. What the hell happened to you?”
“Nothing! I told youâa man jumped out at me near the park and grabbed me, but I got away. You're a mess, Jeremy. Do you think you need stitches?”
My head pounded, the dark salty liquid running into my mouth. But I was pretty sure it was just a cut and I was only in shock. I knew what real pain felt like and this was just a scrape for me.
“Not the romantic weekend tryst I was imagining,” I said. “Being you're the future doctor among us, you should know the scalp bleeds profusely from even the slightest scratch.”
I heaved myself to a sitting position and wriggled off my jeans. Under its silly little sock, the stump was a bright raw red. And genius that I am, I had left the massage balm that soothed the angry little bugger back in my dorm at Duke.
Pushing Marisa to talk would just make her clam up even more, so I reached for a tissue on her desk to wipe the blood out of my eyes, and then for another one to wipe down Veronica. She was a little dented from the fall, but basically unharmed.
I slipped the sock back on the stump, positioned it into Veronica's waiting embrace, and then, like a metallic praying mantis, limped into the bathroom to get a look at my sorry self.
Marisa followed, brow furrowed over her bruised eye. “Let me wash it off.”
I brushed her away. “Talk about starting our weekend on the wrong foot. Just go and relax. I may be a cripple, but I'm not an invalid.” I knew it was harsh, but I wasn't going to let her nurse me as a way to avoid her own troubles. We'd been down that road already.
I glimpsed her pouting in the mirror behind me. She stared me down for a moment, then whirled around and stormed out of the bathroom.
I was pretty certain the cut on my hairline was superficial. I'd live. I rinsed it with hot water until it was clean and the bleeding had stopped.
It was so silent in the room that I wondered if Marisa had slipped out. I skidded out of the bathroom, and walked right through an icy cloud. Turning back, I caught a quick glance of the fly-wing woman from the park. Hands fluttering at her side, her blurred mouth opened in a silent howl before she dissipated into nothing.
I found Marisa curled into a fetal position on the bed, bawling her eyes out.
“Why are you such a shit, Jeremy?” she whispered.
“It's what I do best,” I said softly. I kneaded the clenched muscles of her back, feeling each rib through her fluffy sweater. “Now why don't you tell me what really happened.”
She twisted around to look up at me. Her makeup ran down from one reddened eye, the other dark purple, her black hair falling from her usually severe ponytail like spilled ink.
When I gathered her in my arms, she let out a deep slow moan like I'd hurt her. We lay on the bed huddled together and my own warm tears joined hers. She would tell me when she could.
Someone had hurt my girl. And I was going to find out what had happened.
But it was going to have to wait until morning.
5
Bobby
Saturday: 12:28 AM
O
nce we were outside in the brisk March night, I pulled Gabe in close to me. “Don't ever lie to me like that,” I murmured into her hair.
She pulled back to look up at me and smiled, a challenge on her lips. “Or you'll what?”
Bright strands of hair stuck to her forehead like a golden web. My own thoughts were a tangle of confusion as I struggled to make sense of the weird night. “Or I'll hug you to death.”
“Not a bad way to go,” she said. We looked at each other for a moment and then kissed as if we both breathed through the same set of lungs.
Holding hands, we walked in silence the few blocks east to our campus guest apartment. Columbia had put us up in a furnished studio, equipped with Internet, a fully equipped kitchen, and a cheap flatscreen. I was more than eager to get back there. It wasn't every day we had a place of our own, and I wasn't about to waste the opportunity.
“Do you think she's a liar?” Gabe asked suddenly.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
She stared at her feet as we continued walking, lost in her own thoughts. I loped beside her, tensely aware of our surroundings, my nerves jangling with the thought of that ring tucked inside her pocket. The empty streets stretched around us in a network of unknown threats. I wanted to time-warp us back to Morton, where the dangers were familiar ones. Where at least there was a chance I could protect her.
We'd just passed a small patch of park on the corner of 111th Street and Amsterdam when I froze in my tracks. An electric prickle buzzed up from under the sole of my boot straight into my chest. My eyes twitched, the pain behind my sockets kicking from dull to white hot.
“Ouch, Bobby!” Gabe said, wrenching her hand free of my tightened grip. “Why are we stopping?”
I closed my eyes and breathed around the pain. “IâI don't know.” She led me to a bench beside the small park. Shadows and light slithered across my line of sight. My stomach rolled with dread. Not again. Not here.
Not now
.
My flickering gaze locked in on a small silver object glinting on the sidewalk where I had just been standing. “What is that?”
Gabe crouched, picked it up, and plopped Marisa's silver coat button into my open hand.
Before I could pull free, my surroundings were blotted out by a ferocious fluorescent glare. I tried to blink it away, but I could see nothing beyond the grainy brightness. Then my eyesâbecause I was seeing with both eyes, not just the oneâadjusted. Rows of churning coin-operated machines stood at attention in an otherwise deserted laundry room.
Behind the vision, I could hear Gabe's voice, low and distant, talking gibberish to me. I couldn't answerâI was already sucked into someone else's reality.
I floated along, helplessâa disembodied spectatorâin my arms a basket of neatly folded laundry.
Marisa wore the navy coat with the silver buttons. It was hot in the laundry room, but because she was headed out right after to meet Jeremy, she'd worn it to pick up her dry clothes. She balanced the basket on her knee, pulled her phone from her pocket, and glanced at it. Another text from Jeremy.
These were Marisa's thoughtsâher viewpointâbut I experienced them clearly as if they were piped through a mental intercom. I tried to break the connection, but my fist was clenched around the button. I was powerless to resist the onslaught.
â
Marisa carries her basket of folded laundry to the hall and waits by the elevator. It's lateânot the best time to be doing laundry, she knows, but she's been too busy with her studies and now that Jeremy is here she's totally run out of underwear. He's waited this long. He can wait some more.
Meanwhile, the damn elevator was taking forever.
At first she thinks the figure that rounds the corner is one of the dorm's maintenance crew. That is, until she notices the black bandana covering his mouth and nose, the black beanie pulled over his hair, and the mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes. Not your standard maintenance man look.
It all happens so fast. When the elevator doors open, he pushes her in, pulls the emergency brake and throws her to the floor, then reaches up and covers the security camera with something.
It's over in just a few moments. He zips up his pants, releases the brake, removes the covering from the camera, and gets off the elevator, which is still in the basement.
Marisa lets the elevator take her to the twelfth floor, carefully places her folded clothes in the drawer, and calls Jeremy.
â
At last I felt the hard bench beneath me. The cold silver button in my hand. I could feel Gabe shaking me, hear her muffled speaking. But I couldn't see past the scene that had frozen and stuck in place.
“Let go of it,” I heard Gabe say. “Bobby! Let go of the button!”
I couldn't. My heart was racing, my throat tight around the scream I couldn't release.
I felt her pull and bend at my fingers. I held on tighter until finally my fist released, and the burden lifted.
I sagged on the bench, my normal sight and the vision leaching into smoke and shadow.
“We've got to go back there,” I said.
6
Jeremy
Saturday: 1:15 AM
I
was roused suddenly from a brief and fitful sleep to the sound of a soft but persistent thumping at the door. I tried to ignore it, but whoever was there had no intention of leaving. Marisa slept soundly through the steady knocking, her ponytail a wild tangle, stray strands of loose hair stuck to her face and fanned across her torn yellow sweater. Her chest rose in sharp little intakes of air. I rested my head against her thin shoulder then glanced at the bedside clock. 1:15 AM.
She'd cried herself to sleep in my arms until I'd eventually drifted off too. I hadn't pressed her about what happened. We both knew each other better than to pry into things we weren't ready to share.
“Crap,” I muttered. The knocking persisted. I grabbed Marisa's stick umbrella and bunny-hopped to the door. “What the fuck do you want?”
Like I didn't already know.
â
Bobby Pendell's eyes were glazed and wild beneath the disheveled black mop. The red-haired girl looked pretty spooked herself, the skin around her freckles a sickly white.
“What do you want now, wolf boy? Baying at the moon lost its charm?”
“Didn't she tell you?” he demanded. They barged past me into the room.
“Whoa! No way in hell are you bothering her.” I tried to block them, but my human pogo-stick status pretty much killed that approach. Pendell easily circumvented me and strode to the bed where Marisa slept.
“Don't wake her,” I growled.
Ignoring me, Pendell sat on the bed beside Marisa and whispered into her ear. The redheaded piano player glared at me, warning in her yellow cat eyes.
I launched myself airborne and somehow landed on Pendell's flanneled back. Wrestling him off the bed and onto the floor, I had his wrists pinned, my knee digging into his ribcage. “I think you need to leave before I break your face. I told you we were done with you. I don't care about that fucking ring.”
I was about to land a punch on his ugly mug when the wildcat grabbed me by my hair and dragged me off. I tried to scrabble away, but it was pointless. Who was I kidding? I was as lethal as a fish on sand.
The girl towered over me, the tip of her boot pressing against my Adam's apple. I gritted my teeth. Marisa had appointed herself one fearsome bodyguard. “Keep your hands off of Bobby,” she said, nostrils flaring.
“Congratulations, Wonder Woman. You have smote the enemy.”
“We came here to help you, idiot,” she huffed, the boot pushing under my jaw. “Bobby
saw
something.”
I rolled my eyes and swiped the hair from my bleeding scalp. The cut had reopened. “I told you we could handle this ourselves. So can you please remove your boot from my throat?”
In a spectacular blur of motion, Marisa shot from the bed and lunged at the girl. She was a tiny thing, but Marisa knew how to fight. She'd once threatened a guy with a baseball bat on my behalf. I almost felt sorry for the redhead. “Leave him alone!” she screamed, clawing at the girl and pulling at her hair like a banshee.
“Whoa, whoa. Baby, don't⦔ I tried to grab for Marisa's ankles, but my flounder moves didn't get me far. I managed to reach for Veronica, strap her on, and then get to my feet. “It's okay. C'mon, honey,” I pleaded.
But Pendell had already pulled Marisa off his girlfriend. She continued to struggle and cry hysterically in his grip. I still wanted to punch him, but instead, I sucked in a deep breath and tried to channel the voice of reason rather than my inner prizefighter. “Will everyone just calm down? What is wrong with you people? Marisa, baby, come over here.”
From under her nest of wild hair, Marisa stopped struggling and met my gaze, the fight drained out of her. The defeat in her eyes was far more terrifying than her rage.