Infatuate (22 page)

Then a voice calling out made me jump back to my feet. “Eve- rythin’ all right out here?” It was the supervisor, John. I heard footsteps coming out to greet me. I froze.

“Hi!” I waved, overly friendly. “Sorry, I’m clumsy. Just knocked something over. I’ll clean it up, promise.” With my shoes, I tried to direct some of the jagged pieces into a pile, to convince him it was under control and there was no need to come any closer.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get it later. Don’t want ya hurtin’ yourself there.”

“Thanks.” I simply smiled, hoping he would go away. But he went on.

“You here for Lance, too?”

“Um, yeah, thanks, if he has a minute.”

“Sure is popular,” he said, shaking his head.

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t help calling after him.

He turned around. “That other one.”

“Sorry?”

“Dark hair, sweet, but real upset about that scene over on Toulouse.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but my thoughts were too unformed. Finally, when he was almost out of earshot, I managed: “Can I see him for a minute?”

“He’s not here. He left with the other girl.” He turned around to face me. “Don’t shoot the messenger.” He put his hands up, returning to the construction zone in back.

So Sabine had come by? I struggled to push that to the back of my mind. I knelt down, sifting carefully through the pile, but I was so distracted, I nicked my index finger on a piece of glass. Blood trickled down, but I didn’t have time to deal with it. I gingerly sorted until I found that folded piece of paper: thick, cotton soft, familiar. I opened it up fast, leaving the slightest streak of crimson on it. It read:

H—

You’re right about Clio. Sabine will be next. Meet me at midnight. Please.

L

I read it again, letting it all sink in.
Sabine will be next.
It haunted me, that line. I felt the blood drain from my face, as though it was all pouring out of that small, stinging slice in my finger. My hands burned like they were being brushed with hot coals. Without warning, my fingers tossed the note. The second it hit the floor, the paper burst into flames.

A crackling ball of fire the size of a grapefruit began to grow, dancing over the shards of glass and shooting out rays of light. I watched in sheer disbelief for a moment, then my foot, acting on its own, stomped on the flame. Three hearty stomps and it was out. Nothing left at all, not even charred bits of the paper. I took a deep breath, prepared to gather the broken glass and be done with this. But it was gone. All that remained of the dark glass shards were quarter-size puddles scattered at my feet. I studied them and they seemed to be evaporating. They shrank until there wasn’t even the slightest trace of them. No sign that a bottle had shattered, or ever even existed.

On automatic pilot, the flash of that flame still burning in my eyes, I went next door in search of Lance. I knocked on his door, but no response. I let myself into my room, but found it empty as well. Where were they? Since I was home anyway, I decided to take another look at those pictures. I’d made it only a few steps up the ladder to my loft when a crash jangled my thoughts. My heart lurched. It had come from somewhere outside. I went to the window to peek out, but I got stopped in my tracks.

Something—no, some
one
—came flying through the glass. But he didn’t even fall to the floor; he kept running, right into me, knocking me over. I felt myself scream but I couldn’t hear myself. I just kept hearing the sound of that shattering glass over and over on a loop in my ears. The guy was too fast and furious for me to even get a good look at him. He was a long, lean flash of blond and tan.

He jumped off me literally, his sneaker pushing off my stomach, and launched himself at Sabine’s bed. With one hand he lifted it and flipped it over, then ran up the wall and propelled himself to the other side, landing on our desk and breaking it in half, a pair of its legs snapping off in the process. He looked at me then, and his whole form compressed a few inches. The angles in his face changed, his hair went dark, even his clothing morphed—his T-shirt from black to white, his pants into jeans—but his mad rage remained: now it was Jimmy. But not the Jimmy I’d previously encountered. This Jimmy had wild, angry eyes, like a jungle cat midattack. His hair was mussed as though it hadn’t been washed in days. His clothes were dirty, bloody, ripped. A gash on his upper arm had dried into a fat tar-colored wound, but there was no mistaking its shape: it was a scabbed-up, flaming fleur-de-lis.

He threw the desk chair at me and I retaliated with the alarm clock from Sabine’s bedside table. It soared through the air and he punched it as it came his way, shattering it. I needed to get past him up to the loft so I could destroy the photos of him. I grabbed the floor lamp and swung it at his shins, managing to knock him off his feet. I took a few long strides to the ladder. He yanked my foot as I scurried up, and I tried to shake him off but he just gripped tighter. I pulled myself up one rung and then clocked him in the head with my other foot.

For another hiccup of a second he flickered back to being that blond man, and then back to Jimmy. My eyes couldn’t make sense of it. I ripped open my night table drawer, the entire thing coming off its track in my hands. I grabbed the knife and stack of pictures as the rest of the drawer fell, everything spilling out. Jimmy’s photo was still at the top. He seized both my legs, tugging them out from under me. I landed on my chin. He tried to pull me back down the ladder. I sprang open the blade, held his picture against the loft floor, and sliced. Slice, slice, stab.

But his grip didn’t loosen at all. I looked at the picture again. It was grotesque and disfigured, evidence of his corrupted soul, but my violence against it wasn’t having any effect. This had never happened before. He was laughing now as he pulled me down the ladder. I gripped the top rung with one arm and swung the knife at him with the other. I sliced him once but he didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to feel it. Instead, he let out a howling, wild roar, mocking me. My legs scissored trying to buck him away. I scanned the room for anything that could help me. If he managed to get me down the ladder, then I could go for one of the desk legs that had been stripped off and try to fight him with that. I continued swinging and kicking and I kept that sharp, strong metal leg in my sights. The more I stared at it, the more attainable it seemed. And then, in a flash, it flew up at me. I whipped the knife away and caught the leg in my one free hand.

I beat Jimmy back, swinging the leg at him, striking him as many times as I could, trying to tire him, though it seemed impossible. He landed on the floor but popped right back up. I hopped to the ground, wound up, and shot the leg at him like a spear. It landed in his chest and hurled him against the back wall with enough force to elicit a grunt. He slumped to the floor.

The door to my room burst open. Connor and Brody stormed in. Brody charged at Jimmy as Connor ran to my side. But Jimmy sprang to his feet again and took off, zipping past Brody, back through the window he had destroyed and out onto the balcony. We ran to look out and made it in time to see him leap straight down from the railing to the courtyard below, startling Emma, who had just walked in the front gate. By the time she saw who it was, he had grabbed her and then flung her away, so hard she landed on the ground by the fountain. Brody and Connor jumped over the railing to chase him. I followed a few steps and then felt the trauma of the past few long minutes catch up with me and my legs buckled. Jimmy tore off through the gate and out into the darkening evening streets. A little while later, Brody and Connor came back through the gate, panting and hanging their heads low at having lost him. He was gone.

18. I Should Have Been There

All of us assembled in the common room, in nearly the same places we had our first morning here. Except there was no Jimmy. And Sabine sat beside Lance. I hadn’t gotten to talk to him yet. Connor had called over to the library to order everyone home immediately after the tutoring session. Lance, as it turned out, had texted me that he and Sabine were meeting me at the library after work, that she had been upset so he was keeping her company. But I didn’t get that text, of course. I had been too busy sparring with Jimmy, or whoever this version of Jimmy had been who had crashed into my room and tried to kill me. Every muscle ached and every nerve throbbed now.

Brody and Emma, who were supposed to be on night watch tonight, had had the afternoon off and had witnessed bits of Jimmy’s rampage. “I was watchin’ SportsCenter and heard the crash,” Brody explained to the group. “Jimmy was crazy, never seen anything like that. Out of his mind.” He shook his head and ran his fingers through that blue streak in his hair, tense. Across the room, Emma sat on the sofa beside River, who had her arm around her protectively. Emma clutched a balled-up tissue in her hand; her freckled face had gone red and puffy from so many tears shed. Even now, her glassy eyes looked like they just might spill over again.

Connor stood at the front of the room, addressing us with a serious expression and tone. His T-shirt and jeans were rumpled and torn in a few places.

“I don’t have any answers to all the questions I’m sure you have,” he said, pacing. “What I can tell you is that Jimmy’s soul has been captured.” A soft collective gasp swept the room. He looked at Emma, who fixed her eyes on the ground.

“Does that mean he’s not coming back?” Dante asked.

Connor breathed out a huge sigh, hands behind his head, perplexed. “There’s no way to know yet if it’s reversible. But if he returns to us and we can keep him here, then we can attempt to reclaim him.” I scanned the room. Everyone seemed to be hanging on his words, as though he were pulling us through a storm, our only hope for survival. “This is what I’ve been warning you about. They will find you, and we need to keep close to one another, to know where everyone is all the time, in order to defeat them. You are all going to be sought out, that is a given. Do you hear me?” He looked at each of our faces to make his point clear. “This is part of your test: separating out the defeated part of your soul.”

“How do we do that?” River barked at him, angry, still holding Emma.

“We lift it out, which is why I expect to see everyone practicing their levitation.” He pointed down the hall in the direction of the padded room. There’s one person in there every night, and she is the only one who will stand a chance, unless you all get your sorry asses in there and start getting strong.” I felt myself blush. I had been quietly working levitation into my routine, a necessary daily task, like brushing your teeth. It had paid off today.

“Emma says Jimmy had been spending some time with someone new lately—” As Connor said that, I could feel how that line must have sliced through Emma. It was as if she lost him twice: first his body to this other person and now his soul. “Beware of everyone. Report anything suspicious to me. We’ll pool our information. Catching your attacker quickly and having a will to fight back, these are the things that will protect you. There’s a group we’ve learned of called the Krewe, and we now know they’re who you need to watch out for. I’ve posted descriptions here.” He smacked a few typed sheets of crisp paper taped to the wall behind him.

I had offered Connor my morphing photos, but he had ultimately decided he didn’t want to share them with the group. “Can we keep this just between us, Haven?” he had asked me, making me feel, for the first time since I’d arrived here, that I did have something special. “These,” he had said, tapping the stack of photos, “can help me keep tabs on all y’all.” At his request, I printed a set of photos for him to keep under lock and key in his room.

“Be careful,” he went on now at the meeting. “Travel in pairs, keep an eye on each other. If anyone asks, tell ’em Jimmy decided the program wasn’t for him and took off. He’s eighteen, so I wouldn’t’ve been able to stop him, anyway. Discretion is the name of the game, okay?” With that he clapped his hands, a few quick rousing claps. “That’s it for now.” He dismissed us, adding with serious, scolding eyes, “Sabine, can I see you?” A look of worry clouded her face as she sashayed over to him.

Lance glanced in my direction, but too nervous, it seemed, to look me in the eye. When we all got up to leave, he grabbed my elbow as I tried to walk ahead of him.

“I should have been there,” he said, the heavy tone in his voice evidence that he was censuring himself. “I should’ve known when you didn’t text me back.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t needed saving; that wasn’t the issue here. “I’m fine. I didn’t need you. Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was bruised and scraped up—I had pulled a piece of glass the size of my index finger out of my upper arm, which I’d bandaged—and with my torn clothes I looked like something that had been dragged in off the street, but I hadn’t actually gotten hurt. “I mean, it wasn’t the way I’d prefer to spend an afternoon, but I’m still alive, so it’s all good.” But there was no masking the iciness lacing my words. We neared Lance’s room and I made no motion to stop, so he walked on with me until we reached my door.

“I hope your arm is better,” I said coldly.

“How did you know about that?” he whispered.

I glared at him. “Are you kidding? Who do you think cleaned you up last night?”

“What do you mean?”

“No, you’re right. I guess you were drunk or whatever. What was that about?” I felt like he was a completely different person lately.

He thought for a moment, then whispered some more. “I don’t really remember last night. At all. And I’m pretty embarrassed that I got this.” He wore a T-shirt over a long-sleeved shirt, which he pushed up to expose that spot on his arm. He peeled back the bandage and the wound seemed to have taken on the shape of a fleur-de-lis, but it had scabbed up in such a way that you couldn’t even see the actual ink, only this odd-shaped injury.

“It didn’t look like that last night. It was just a gash.” I leaned in, studying it. Just like Jimmy’s. “You need to tell Connor about that. Like, right away.”