Running Shoes (The Shades of Northwood) (24 page)

“It doesn’t
give you the right to shout your gob off whenever your in a
mood.”

“Never said it
did.” Jaye walked over to give Katie a hug, wrapped her arms around
her shoulders, thinking better of touching the grime streaked skin,
and whispered, “you look like crap.”

“Thanks for the
compliment.” She unwrapped the pale arm and stood once more,
standing four or five inches above the other girl. Being tall
wasn’t always a good thing. Jaye had to look up at her and Katie
felt almost guilty for it. “You okay?” Which was a stupid question.
Of course Jaye wasn’t okay. None of them were okay.

“As well as can
be expected, I guess.” There was cold coffee in the pot and Jaye
poured herself a cup of blackish liquid thick enough to chew. She
drank it without milk or sugar, not wanting to tarnish the intense
caffeine hit. It looked disgusting. “Things happen, don’t
they?”

“Yeah, but this
is Dina we’re talking about. She’s your best friend. Not just some
random thing that happened.”

“Northwood is
nothing if not random.” There was something they could all agree
on. “I know how this sounds but she’ll be fine. It’s not just some
blind denial of the truth or cliché that she’s stronger than this.
Whatever happens to her now, she’ll just have to be fine with it
because she chose this route.”

“No, she chose
to die because she couldn’t face being here any longer,” said Leo,
earning a warning glare from Katie. “So you called an ambulance and
kept her here. I’m sure she thanks you.”

“Don’t listen
to him, Jaye. He’s just pissed off about us disturbing his beauty
sleep.”

“He planning to
sleep until the next century?” The joke got much more laughter than
it really deserved but it lightened the mood. That was the main
thing. “Did I interrupt something in here? Please say yes. We
really need an illicit love affair round here. And the
possibilities…”

“Oh, hell no.”
Katie stopped her thoughts before they went to any really dangerous
places. “We’ve just both had a bad day and decided that, if we
can’t be friends, we can at least not be openly hostile to each
other.”

“This could be
the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Leo rolled his
eyes. “If you’re gonna get sappy on me, I’m off.”

“Stay. Stay,
stay, stay.” Jaye grabbed his shoulders and hauled him back with
unnatural ease. Her muscles weren’t bulging. Her tendons weren’t
pressing against her skin.
They were right. A human – living,
breathing – would have been using all their strength to hold
some-one like that.
Leo was only a little taller than Katie and
was not a big guy; not a skinny as Dina but hardly a muscle man of
Adams standards. Still, she could see him trying to pull away, push
himself out of her grip. But he didn’t manage an inch. He reached
up, put a hand over Jaye’s and squeezed with a jerk of his head
towards Katie. It was as though she suddenly remembered that this
display of inhuman ability was inappropriate in front of the young
audience because she let go of him and put her hands together in a
praying position, pleading with him to sit down with them. A look
of white hot rage flared across his face and then was gone. Had
Jaye forgotten her apology and what the apology was about already?
If another fight was coming, Katie wanted to be far far away when
it came.

But nothing
happened.

Perhaps the two
had already put the whole religion thing behind them. Stranger
things had happened. Were, in fact happening, right now.

“So, are we all
friends now?”

“Can we just
say there are no current plans for warfare and leave it at that.”
Katie slid onto a chair and covered her face with her hands,
peeping through her fingers. While Jaye had been trying to stop Leo
leaving she had slipped the cold coffee into the microwave and had
removed it using a folded tea towel and fingertips, it was so hot.
But now Jaye was sitting with her hands wrapped around the jelly
bean patterned mug and slurping the bitter muck as if it had no
temperature at all. “Better?”

“Not really.
Cold coffee really doesn’t give you the same buzz.”

Leo jumped when
Katie reached across to him but was too – stunned? – surprised to
pull his hand away. She brushed the back of his fingers against the
ceramic . Leo yelped and pulled back, blowing on his singed
fingers. “What d’you that for, bit – oh.”

Jaye put the
mug down quickly and flexed her hands. They did look red and
over-heated. “My brain – it lost the ability to function
somewhere.” No argument. The brain differentiated between extremes
of hot and cold. It was interesting to put that theory to the
test.

“Have you slept
at all?”

There was
silence. Jaye, pure caffeine now rushing through her system, didn’t
look as if she needed sleep as much as a change of clothes and a
good cry.

“You gotta
rest, otherwise you’ll be no good to her.” The compassionate streak
in Leo was well hidden but it shone through every so often. Katie
thought she could probably learn to like the nice version of him.
“You have to –“ the word
pray
was about to trip off his
tongue, Katie practically saw it form, “ –think of her and how she
feels now. Hold her hand. Talk to her. She’ll know you’re there.”
The words were soft and gentle and wholly unexpected. Silence
crashed into the room. The heavy shutters fell on his face like he
had said something he never meant to.

In the hush,
Katie felt that tingly darkness creep around her. She tried to
ignore it but couldn’t stop herself wondering what it was. It had
been seeping through the town all this while and Katie had felt it
since her arrival without even knowing what it was. Perhaps
believing there was something so deeply
wrong
here had made
it so much easier for her to buy these stories about ghosts and
ghosts in waiting. Having been told that at night, in the middle of
a storm,, by a dying girl and a wild west cowboy, screamed
nightmare
or
bad bedtime story
. Only she hadn’t been
asleep and the story didn’t have a happy ending. Anyone else would
have buried themselves in denial, anyone with a molecule of sense
that is, but Katie was running on Reddy Brek and sense sounded like
something she could only aspire to.

“Is she..?”

Jaye nodded. It
didn’t look good but the longer Dina clung on to life then the
longer Jaye still had hope. And without hope, what was the point in
anything? “Still unconscious. I just needed a break from her
bedside, watching people shoving needles into her skin, sticking
her with patches and wires. And all that happens is… nothing. It
just carries on beeping. There should at least be something, right?
Just to say hey, I’m still here.” Her slack face was lifeless, her
eyes unseeing, as she grabbed the coffee pot, refilled her mug and
sat back down. The false cheer of thirty minutes ago seemed to be
in a war with exhaustion and it was losing. A lot. Every move Jaye
made looked clumsy and mechanical. “They just keep saying Dina lost
a lot of blood and she’s just making more. I don’t believe
that.”

Katie wasn’t
sure she trusted that diagnosis either. “Doctors really aren’t
wrong very often.” She felt as though she should say it but the
words seemed hollow. The hospital had got it terribly wrong when
they had stripped her and photographed her and generally made her
feel guilty that she’d been raped. And then they had sent her home
with a leaflet for Victim Support, telling her she was fine. So,
yeah. They didn’t get things wrong a lot, but when they did, they
screwed it up in some style.

“It’s not just
blood loss any more. She lost something else too – her soul, chi,
energy, whatever the,” she fired a glance at Leo who was listening
intently but working hard on his detached and bored mask, “heck you
want to call it.”

Katie covered
Jaye’s hand with her own as it trembled on the mug. “I’m so sorry
hon. I had no idea Jack was going to do that.”

“You’re
sorry?”

“If I’d known…”
What would she have done if she’d known? Could she have done
anything at all? “I heard everything. Saw everything. I didn’t
know, Jaye, I didn’t know. What Jack did – I’m not sure I can even
forgive him myself for what he did to Dina. He as good as killed
her.”

Leo shot out of
his chair and slammed a box of tissues down between them. Obviously
not good with crying girls either. Surprising how many men had
emotional issues. “Don’t blame yourself, Katie. It’s not like he
gave you the choice.”

Jaye frowned
and shifted in her chair, getting up. “I’m first in the shower. We
so need another bathroom in this place.” And she was gone, clomping
up the stairs in the heavy platforms she must have been wearing
since yesterday. They had to be killing her feet by now. It made
Katie glad she spent half her life in flats and trainers.

“So.”

Katie reached
out for the darkness that drifted, unseen, through the room, tried
to catch hold of it and beg it to take her back into that hellish
world where Jack died over and over again, just so she could prove
to herself it was real. The night before had taken on a dreamlike
blurriness. But the invisible black mist kept slipping through her
fingers.
Its not meant for you. Not yet.
And she knew Jack
had put those words in her head. It scared her, the way he could do
that.

“Quit that!
It’s freaking me out.” It wasn’t until then that Katie realised she
had been physically reaching for the dark energy, trying to grab it
with her hand fingers as well as her mind ones. “What you doing
anyway?”

“Good question.
I can’t believe you can’t feel it. Maybe it’s just because I know
it’s there.”

“You’re parents
know you babble like a whack job?”

“It’s one of my
more endearing features,” she shot back. She felt like a crazy
person at that moment – fully functioning but not mentally
there
. “Okay.” Katie pulled an ice cold Diet Coke from the
fridge and ran the dripping can over her head. Her face was
sweating and red with – not quite heat but something close to it,
although the chill of the still-early morning was making her button
the shirt over her dress and curl herself into as tight and warm a
ball as possible on the uncomfortable kitchen chair.

“You look
different.” Leo pointed to the tiny cut over her head and Katie
frowned, taking a few seconds to even remember it was there. The
night had been long and her brain was on the edge of overload.
“Something got you.”

Yeah, it really
had. “That’s what we need to talk about. I –“

Her speech was
stopped in its tracks by Lainy blowing through the room to get
water, biscuits and a quick glance in the mirror as she tried to
smooth her mussed up hair. She glanced at them with a cheeky grin
she tried (and failed) to hold in. there was a question in her face
but no time to voice it as Adam shouted, “Lainy! Getting bored
here!”

Katie returned
a silent question of her own but Lainy just shook her head and
scampered back out. “Too young.”

Katie decided
that yes, she was indeed too young. The amount of things she was
too young for had been growing rapidly lately but there was no time
to consider the mall. Plus, if she did, she would only get
depressed about it. “I’ve just been having these weird dreams
lately. You were in one of them. I thought you were trying to kill
me.”

“You know what
they say. You die in a dream, you die for a real.”

“I’m starting
to believe that. I got hurt in a dream and…” she gestured to the
cut by her eye. The inch long gash on her arm would have been a
better example but rolling up the shirt sleeve seemed like too much
work. “You know you came here to die, right.”

“What?”

“This place.
College is gonna kill us.”

“No more
caffeine for you.” He moved to pluck the can from her fingers.
Katie slapped his hand away and he slapped back, but his heart
wasn’t in it. His face mirrored the haunted, lifeless look of most
of the housemates. “You mean it. How? When?”

“I don’t know
and I’m not even sure I want to know. I need to think about this.
But, it’s not over when we die.”

“Sure. The
afterlife, Heaven.”

“No. Well, not
quite. I don’t know that either.” She drained her can, crumpled it
and aimed it at the bin. It hit the window, skittered across the
sideboard and landed on the floor a few inches from the bin. She’d
always had terrible aim. The terrified look she could see on Leo
out the corner of her eye made her heart sink. He hadn’t known
anything about what she had told him. But she couldn’t stop herself
talking now. There was one more thing she had to say. “But I could
get killed before I find that out.”

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

“You can’t tell
anyone!”

Leo stared at
the insane girl sitting opposite him, hearing her get crazier by
the minute. But, Katie could see it in his face, that even if he
didn’t want to believe her, he did. In some deep, dark place he
probably didn’t know existed inside himself, he just
did
.
And that was enough for now.

“I mean it,
Leo. No-one!”

“So what
exactly do you want me to do?”

Wow, that had
been easy. Katie had expected the normal teenage boy apathy mixed
with point blank refusal due to the act he didn’t like her very
much. But no. it felt wrong that he was this ready to help although
this was very much not the right time to be doubting help when it
was offered. She saw him looking at her, impatiently, and realised
she hadn’t answered yet. “Just keep me awake until I figure out a
plan.”

“Some random
bloke’s trying to kill you in your dreams and you haven’t come up
with a plan yet?”