Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (35 page)

He can feel you.

It isn’t much of a warning but at least Gabriel

managed to say something before the pressure changes. Someone strong tugs hard. It’s as if the rope around the power inside me is yanked hard.

Caldwell
.

He is a cold northern wind blowing across the desert. Gabriel stiffens and Caldwell’s threatening hold lessens. The tension is released in the line and I know that somehow Gabriel has done something to protect us from Caldwell. Or was it me? I’m losing my ability to distinguish between the two.

“He’ll come find me now that he knows I’m out of the box,” I realize.

Yes.

I push myself to my feet and climb the stairs quickly back to the kitchen, still clutching the sleeping child. But I freeze when I hear a sound above me. Someone upstairs is moving in an unseen room.

I don’t so much as breathe as I strain to hear.

“We have to hurry,” I whisper, watching the ceiling. And Julia stirs in my arms. “We’re almost out of time.”

Ally

M
y heart hammers wildly. I’m huffing white pillars of smoke out of my mouth as I tear through the woods after her. Jesse is not an athletic girl. I go to the gym more in a week that she does in six months but she is flying through these woods. It isn’t natural, the speed she is maintaining and yet I’m watching her grow smaller and smaller in front of me. Lane is beside me, trying to keep pace and he has a small lead on me because of his longer legs, but he can’t catch her any more than I can.

I marvel over the fact that Jesse can move at all so soon after a death. I’ve watched her moan and whine for days and days after a replacement leaves her stiff and grumpy. And here she is scaling fallen trees and branches like a monkey in its natural habitat.

“Jesse, stop!” I say. I’m desperate for her to slow down. The distance between us terrifies me especially after we break through the clearing, past her grave into the opposite trees, the ones we knew to be full of Caldwell’s henchman. But she doesn’t stop here. It isn’t the grave she came back for. It is something else in the woods.

My side burns. I can’t keep the pace I’m using to follow her. And at this pace she is gaining more and more ground.

“Jesse, please!” I call out. I don’t know who might hear us on this side of the clearings. I’m still waiting for Jeremiah and Nikki to pop up or for one of us to trip over their bodies. In the woods it is so much darker. The last traces of sun are unable to penetrate the uppermost branches.

Then she disappears. I can’t see her at all.

“Jesse!”

“Damn, do you see her?” Lane asks. His breath is as panicked as mine.

“No.”

I run harder and harder but she isn’t there. Then I see the break in the trees, the light suggesting a clearing or at least a break in the woods of some kind. I slow just a tad as I emerge, taking a precautionary look around, but it’s just an open field lined with corn. Thick high stalks of it. Then I hear the sound of the stalks swaying and I look up. A few yards ahead, something is knocking them down.

Jesse.

“Where did she go?” he asks me.

“Shhhh,” I say. I motion for him to be still and quiet. Thank God he listens.

I take a sharp left toward the sound of breaking stalks. This is terrifying, being in a cornfield as dusk runs its icy fingers over the earth’s collarbone. I don’t look anywhere but straight ahead, because the sound of corn rustling is making me sick with fear. I half believe that if I look to the left or right of me I will see some unimaginable horror in the corn, leaping toward me.

When the corn ends suddenly, giving itself over to a grassy front yard, it is like coming up for air. I stop long enough to clutch the side of my burning ribs. It’s a large white farm house in the middle of nowhere. God, this is a horror movie waiting to happen.

But then I see Jess, climbing the steps of the porch and entering the house. A house I am certain she’s never entered in her life.

“Jesse!” I hunker low, looking left and right but I don’t see anyone. Lane mimics my movements.

He must feel as exposed as I do. “Why the hell did she go into that house?”

“I don’t know.” And am I really going to enter a strange house in the middle of nowhere just as night falls?
Really
?

I make Lane go first and he pushes the front door open carefully and the groaning creak is hideous. Straight ahead is a door leading to a kitchen. I know it’s the kitchen because I can see the white sink illuminated beneath the window. To the right is a staircase leading up. On the left is an open archway leading to a room. It looks a bit like a living room or study: furniture and books. A fireplace that looks cold and unused, coated in a dusting of gray soot and ash. Ruins from years of neglect.

I place one foot on the step to ascend the stairs, thinking I hear movement up there when a cold hand grabs my wrist. I open my mouth to scream my head off but the cold hand releases my wrist and clamps itself over my mouth.

Jesse.

It’s Jesse covering my mouth. I want to throw my arms around her. Squeeze the living shit out of her and maybe even cover her face with kisses—to hell with Lane. But I can’t because she is holding a child.

“Jesse,” Lane whispers. He is just as visibly relieved as I am.

“Don’t go up there,” she says. And she takes a step away from me, urging me away from the stairs by giving me room to step away. I don’t like the looks she gives the ceiling above our head. “It’s not Caldwell but someone is hiding up there.”

Jesse holds a little girl. And not just any girl. Regina’s little girl. I need no other evidence to know this is Caldwell’s place in one way or another.

“How did Julia get here?” I ask.

Jesse offers me the little girl and I take her. She is heavy in my arms and I expect her to stir or wake but she doesn’t. I use a gentle finger to pull open her eyelid and realize she isn’t sleeping. But she is too warm to be dead and little soft breaths puff from her nose. She is drugged to unconsciousness. Maybe on the same sedative Gloria is on.

“Caldwell’s been capturing people who’ve been replaced and he’s trying to use them to—” Jesse begins. “—to make their replacers ‘wake up’ or to access their power somehow. But he’s about to realize he can’t, and when he does, he’ll kill them.”

I think of the list Nikki and I poured over searching for a connection.

“There are more downstairs,” she says.

“More people?” Lane asks and the second her arms are free he pulls Jesse to him. Normally, I can’t bear it. But it’s an awkward embrace with Jesse’s face pinched in annoyance. And that makes it bearable.

Jesse pulls away from him and motions for us to follow her. Lane brings up the rear, still holding the gun Brinkley gave him ages ago and I’m behind Jesse holding Julia.

There is a basement door inside the kitchen, just past where the hallway and kitchen meet. She opens the old, chipped door and enters. I want to stop her. Scream for her to, but floorboards above my head creak and I don’t dare. Someone is in this house and here we are creeping around. What the
hell
? I want to get out of this house, not descend into its bowels.

Jesse pulls me into the dark, then Lane and closes the door behind us. For a moment we are in pitch black darkness with only rickety shallow steps beneath our feet. I’m terrified I’ll fall with Julia in my arms, but then the light flares to life and I realize Jesse isn’t beside me as I thought she was. She’d silently slipped down the stairs and pulled the rope chain before I’d realized she’d even moved.

At the base of the stairs I gasp, and hug Regina’s little girl closer to me.

I don’t count them all. They lay in rows, arranged, uniform. The fact that nothing else is in the basement tells me that furniture, old boxes, the things that collect in a basement in a normal house were removed to make room for these bodies or they never existed because this is a ghost house, some kind of phantom illusion. The two small windows at ground level on the far concrete wall are covered with aluminum foil, blocking out all light.

“Are they alive?” Lane whispers.

The anger boils inside me. “We don’t have a car. And we’ll need vans or something to move this many people.”

Jeremiah should really be here. Where the hell is he? I was going to kill Brinkley.

“What did you mean he is looking for a way to get to ‘people like you’?” Lane asks her.

She doesn’t answer. And I have a feeling this is connected to the
special
traits Jeremiah was worried about but I just can’t deal with that right now. One problem at a time.

“One by one,” I say. “We’ll have to carry them out and hide them in the cornfield. That way if Caldwell comes he won’t be able to find them, for a while at least. Then we will call for help.”

“Who will we call?” Jesse asks.

“I know people who can help.”

Nikki. Jeremiah. And if they are dead then Parish will know what to do. We just have to get somewhere with some cell reception.

Lane kneels beside a body. I recognize him as one of Jesse’s replacements. Frank, I believe. A construction worker. Jesse watches me though the dark of the poorly lit basement. It isn’t the horrible animal eyes I saw earlier. It’s just Jesse. Yet—

Then she breaks her intense gaze. “He will be here before we can move them all.”

“Who? Caldwell?” Lane asks. Jess nods.

Lane hefts Frank from the ground and starts to carry him out of the basement. With Julia Lovett sleeping innocently in my arms, her moist breath warming my neck, I follow him.

I cast one last look at the swelling darkness, and listen to the vibrations of their unified breath. We are almost out of the basement when someone opens the door.

All three of us freeze, panicked by grey light from the kitchen. But I recognize the face.

“Oh thank God,” I say and squeeze the unconscious child in my arms. I ignore the burn in my arms and heft her higher.

“Brinkley,” I whisper. “Where is Gloria?”

“Here,” a meek voice says. Another shadow peeks around the edge of the kitchen door and relief washes over me.

“The drug wore off?” Lake asks.

Brinkley grunts. “Thank God. I couldn’t have carried her another step.”

“How did you find us?” Lane asks. He steps into the light, still holding the large man. He’s strong. I’ll give him that.

“I saw you go in,” Gloria says. And she doesn’t mean with her own two eyes.

“You weren’t out for very long,” Lane says. “Shitty sedative.”

“How long?” Jesse asks.

“I’m not sure,” Brinkley looks at me and Lane for confirmation. “Less than an hour.”

Jesse’s brow furrows in concentration. “He couldn’t have moved me from Heath to Chicago in an hour. Either he kept sedating me or he can move with people.”

“What are you talking about?” Lane asks.

She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“You’re just in time to carry some bodies,” I say.

Jesse takes the lead, cutting a path through the high corn. We move adjacent from the front door, left at a diagonal. In the middle, Jesse lies a child down then turns and heads back to the house alone. Brinkley, Lane, and Gloria do the same for the ones they are carrying. Gloria struggles with her bad shoulder but I don’t chastise her. If someone had cut one of my arms off I’d still be trying to haul Julia out of here. I could hardly chastise her this once for pushing herself.

I hesitate. “It’s chilly out here. We can’t just lay them in the dirt.”

“We just need time for the sedation to wear off. Then they can walk on their own,” Lane says. “This is the best plan that we have.”

I can’t argue. So I lay Julia down beside the woman Jesse carried and straighten her little jacket. I button it around her and pull up her knee socks, making sure her little legs are covered at least. Then I follow the others back into the house.

It’s harder than it sounds, carrying unconscious bodies up stairs. I heave, and more than once I am
certain
that whoever is upstairs must hear us. “He” must hear feet slapping at the steps,
kalump, kalump,
as we struggle (some of us more than others) to drag the people to safety.

An explosion rocks the house. I scream. I don’t mean to, but I scream. I’m terrified. I rush into the house and see Gloria and Brinkley coming out of its mouth and entering the corn with one body between them. I rush into the house and find a second body abandoned on the floor. Someone must have dropped her and ran when the explosion rocked and I drag this woman out into the corn myself.

“Where is Jesse?”

“Upstairs,” Brinkley groans as he lowers his person to the ground and then helps get the woman off my shoulders. Thirty. We only saved about thirty, give or take, if I missed one or miscounted. That means at least ten bodies are still in the basement.

“Upstairs?” I run toward the house. I hear Brinkley swear and tear through the corn after me, saying my name. But I still reach the house first.