Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (10 page)

“We cannot ask for help without him knowing,” she says softly.

I ignore her fears. Fear never accomplished anything. I see the image of the woman tied to the chair in Jeremiah’s safe house. If I tell him a child is missing, I know what it will mean for that woman.

“Have you spoken to your husband? He might know something.”

“He won’t speak to me. He’s furious about what I did.”

And I try to keep my anger to myself. How could he be anything but grateful that his daughter survived? How can he believe in a God that would approve of a child’s premature death? Why do so many idiots assume that we are supposed to stand back and let God’s will be done? What if it was God’s will that Regina’s daughter be saved by replacement? He helps those who help themselves right?

“We need to talk to him,” I say.

“He won’t speak to us. And he leaves tomorrow afternoon for Chicago.”

“We’ll have to try,” I say. “We have to try to get her back, right? We can’t give up.”

She’s quiet and I think she won’t answer me, that she dare not answer me but then she nods. She pulls back from me, her face a mask of smeared mascara.

“Thank you,” she says.

Regina stares at me through her mess of a face. I speak her name twice before her eyes focus on mine. “How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

I inspect the driveway. A heap of car sits behind mine. It looks like it’s been driven through hell and back.

“How did you know where Jesse lives?”

“We all know,” she whispers. “The whole congregation.”

That explains the hate mail Jesse gets. The TP in the trees or the pile of dog shit on the porch. And once there were several windows blotted out with slurs written in soap marker.

And now the brick.

I let out all my frustration in one long breath. “Okay. I can get a tow truck for your car. But is there somewhere I can take you?”

“What about Julia?”

“We’ll get her back,” I say. “But not tonight. We’ll speak to your husband tomorrow morning before he leaves, okay?”

She falls to her knees and begins to inch toward catatonia again.

I kneel in front of her and take her hands. “Regina, where can I take you?”

“No one will take me,” she says. “Gerard is such an important man.”

“Is there someone else? Family maybe? Someone who will shelter you just for tonight?”

Because I need tonight to think. I have to decide if I’m really going to take this to Jeremiah. If I do, I’m all in. I can’t ask for his help and then bail on him later. But this isn’t my problem, not really. I shouldn’t keep trying to save everyone. If I really want to get Jesse out of this hell, I have to quit getting involved. I have to walk away and let someone else deal with it.

But first I need to think—and figure out if I can really do that.

“My sister,” she answers finally. “She lives in Brentwood. In River Oaks.”

I want to get her out of here before Jesse comes home. “Is there anything you need from your car before I drive you there?”

And somehow I manage to get her out of the house and into the car. She wants to grab a couple of things from her car and I let her while I call the tow truck and pay with my credit card over the phone.

“One more thing,” I say to the silent Regina as I fasten my seatbelt and pull forward enough to edge around the demolished car blocking me in. “Promise me you’ll never come to this house again.”

Jesse

I
’m in the back of a big white van, being driven to an unknown destination by a stranger.

It’s every girl’s worst nightmare.

Except most big creepy van nightmares don’t have the following animals involved: three ferrets, two rabbits, a cage of gerbils, and another cage of rats running those multi-colored plastic tubes. Beneath them is a larger cage with two half-squirrel, half-rabbit creatures called chinchillas. Across from me sits Lane and beside him are three aquariums full of snakes and spiders—also known as the reason I wouldn’t sit on that side of the van.

“You owe me,” I say, watching a spider with furry legs press itself against the glass, longingly like it wants to come over and suckle my
face
.

“I have to have someone licensed by the FBRD to observe my last replacement.”

“Your last probationary replacement.” I grin and jiggle the dog tags around my neck identifying my NRD—the official
don’t cut me open
tag—now required

by all death-replacement agents. “And then you’ll get your very own pair of these.”

Lane flashes a brilliant smile, the same great smile: half-eager boy and half-mischievous guy trying to get into your pants. I
really
like that smile.

“You love this, don’t you?” I ask.

“I never knew I’d love doing anything more than comics,” he says.

I lean forward and run my fingers through his hair, ruffling it. I am going to tell him how adorable he is when he’s excited, but my stomach cramps. The nausea rolls me like a surprise wave, pulling me down with it.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Are you getting car sick?”

“Don’t you feel it?” I groan, reach out, and grab ahold of the wire mesh of the rabbit cage. The rabbit inside sniffs my fingers.
Please don’t mistake me for a carrot, Bugs.

“Feel what?”

But I don’t have time to explain it to him. I don’t have time to say maybe he is different. Maybe he won’t get the pre-death sickness like I do. Maybe he won’t get the funky vision either—or if he’s real lucky he won’t hallucinate like I do either. But I don’t have time to do anything except squeeze his hand and say, “Get ready.” Besides maybe it’s a blessing Lane isn’t a freak like me. Maybe he’ll stay off Caldwell’s radar—though I’m not sure how much that has helped other agents.

Lane realizes what I am saying and starts to crawl toward the front of the vehicle, toward John Jones, owner of Petsapalooza and driver of this large white delivery van. One second Lane is poking his head through the little window separating us and the animals from John, the next, we are rolling.

I fly forward and my face slams against one of the snake aquariums. It shatters and I don’t feel the glass as much as hear it. It isn’t until the van stops rolling that I realize I’m lying in a pile of snakes and something is running down the side of my face. My first thought is
spiders
. Then more realistically
blood
.

Near hysterical, I kick open the back door of the van and climb out. I do a funky dance in the street to make sure no tarantulas or snakes have slipped under my clothes. The cars around us stop moving and begin to clot up the road. The sounds of squealing tires and horns echo off the close-knit buildings of West End. A few people are climbing from their cars and taking fucking pictures with their phones. Others sit behind the wheel with their mouths open as something warm spills into my eyes. I wipe at it and my hand come away red.

Limping away from the van, I go to the closest car. It’s a burgundy sedan with a plump woman with teased blond hair behind the wheel. Her mouth is completely open, giving the impression of a round black speaker for the soft country music seeping from the car. Her daughter, or whoever the pudgy blond kid in the passenger seat is, screams bloody murder. It splits my ear drums.

“Gee-zus, shut up,” I beg and press my palm against the glass. “I just need your help.”

The child keeps screaming. My words taste metallic, like I’ve been sucking on spare change. Then I find the raw piece of my cheek flapping against my tongue. Damn. Unless I die—and it is Lane’s gig not mine—I’ll have to heal this cheek the old-fashioned way—with stitches and shit. Just wonderful.

I yell through the window. “Do you have a cell phone?”

At least the driver nods yes, but her child hasn’t stopped screaming at full decibels.

“Call 911 and tell them there’s been an accident at—” I look up to check the signs but I can’t see through the blood in my eyes. “At wherever the hell we are right now.”

And then I feel something on my left shoulder, see the shadow of huge furry legs in my peripheral. I scream like a banshee and tear my clothes off. Just the first two layers, my black hoodie and T-shirt until I’m standing in the street with just my bra and jeans on. Then I shake my shirt like it’s on fire. It isn’t until I watch the spider hit the pavement that I can stop screaming. The kid falls into giggles. The little shit.

But then the child has stopped laughing too and now simply stares at me the way her mother does. Until I realize why.

In those few seconds when my shirt is off and my chest and stomach are bare, they’ve seen my scar. Everyone has. In fact, some of the assholes taking pictures of the accident have turned their cameras my way. My Y-shaped scar cuts just below my collar bone from one side to the other. Then a longer line stretches between my breasts down to my navel. It’s my autopsy scar, the one scar that embarrasses the hell out of me and that I am completely powerless to heal.

In my very first death I was dead for two days. Everyone’s first death is the longest. And by the time the coroner diagnosed my cause of death as smoke inhalation, he realized something was different. My incisions were healing in front of his eyes and my heart started beating while the cavity was still open. Instead of sewing me up, he panicked and made a phone call.

Because my skin was held open, peeled like a freaking banana instead of sealed in a position to grow back together, the healing wasn’t clean. Even the partial decapitation I suffered last fall had healed clean, thanks to Dr. York and Kirk.

“What are you looking at fat ass?” I yell. I yank my

shirt over my head, tears mixing with the blood. Then I slam my hand against the hood of her car. “Go feed your kid another Ding-dong!”

Not my finest moment. And I already feel like shit before I even make it back to the van. And as sorry as I am another part of me doesn’t give a shit. That part is just mad. Mad that people stare. Mad the people standing around took pictures instead of coming to see if I was okay. I’m bleeding from my head. Surely that’s a clue I need assistance.

Even if really I don’t, they’d only be in the way. But that isn’t the point. The point is I am not one of
them
.

I never will be.

Seething, I climb onto the van. It’s still on its side, a redneck truck with ridiculously large wheels, pushes up against its belly. I climb up the side and peek into the van first. There’s John’s body, unmoving, Lane beside it. He’s crawled through the broken windows separating the seats from the back into the front cabin with John. Lane has a deep cut down one arm, which he seems oblivious to. He has straightened John out the best he can and is giving him CPR.

“You’re doing it wrong,” I say. And as soon as I say the words I regret it.

“I know!” Lane snaps at me. His eyes are saucers, white, angry, terrified. “But it isn’t working.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t do it!”

My vision changes. It slips from the normal
sky is blue, grass is green,
vision to the thermal temperature reading. Lane is a blue flame, the way I am a blue flame and anyone else with NRD. But John Jones isn’t the red-orange-yellow of a live one, but a fading green to gray.

“Shit.” I pull myself into the window, falling into the cab rather clumsily and landing on poor John Jones.

“What are you doing?”

“Move back.”

Lane, though clearly angry, does move back. “Be my guest.”

I ignore his tone. He’s as unhappy about rolling around in a van as I am, and he’s just spent the last few minutes trying to save someone without being able to. I try to be compassionate but the best I can manage is indifference to his attitude.

I open John’s bloody shirt and the image of my own destroyed clothes thrown back in my face is clear—
closer than you think
.

I push the thoughts back and focus.
Here, Jess. Be here now.

I put my hands on his chest, rubbing his chest as if the friction could warm him.

A hot-cold chill settles into my muscles and coils around my navel and spine as I push my own flame further into Jones. I try to focus despite the raucous of the overturned animals. Something is getting eaten back there, or trying not to be. I try to block that out too.

And John Jones warms to my touch as I push that electric part of me through him with urgency, aware I’m running out of time.
There
—a spark where our flames dance around each other. Against the line showing the division, I push hard. That electric part of me, the one that destroys electronics and makes owning Williams-Sonoma kitchen stuff impossible, is there. I call on it.

Jones’ chest jerks as if I’ve placed a paddle on his chest. But it isn’t enough. I try harder. I think about the little girl’s look of disgust again. Of the mother’s horror. Of the brick through the window, and my pug shaking with bristled fur against my legs.

And I pulse again.