Velveteen (35 page)

The big man staggered, reached out, and braced his palm against the door. Nick was doing it, she thought. Velvet turned to the girl, and her heart sank as she saw the craziness invading Simanski’s victim’s face. There was no getting around that, though. Insanity had been Velvet’s only escape from the shed.

She didn’t waste another second. Velvet dove into the girl and quickly went to work shutting down her thoughts and ruminations—if nothing else, she could provide a little
vacation from the horror. As traumatized as the girl was, Velvet was easily able to tuck her into the little mind-box.

Velvet opened her eyes and looked out through a veil of tears.

A big blurry version of Bonesaw shambled about recklessly, bumping into things. His knives fell to the floor around his ankles, clanging noisily. He stumbled toward her, tripping and very nearly falling. She braced the girl’s body as best she could as the man’s bulky frame barreled into the chair. It tipped and, try as she might, Velvet couldn’t shift the girl’s center of gravity enough to right it.

She hovered there for the briefest of seconds. Dread filled her, and then a violent crash against the floor jarred her ghost loose from the body. Velvet hung half out of the girl. She twisted back to look at her and noticed the girl’s face turning blue. The brace about her neck had caught on a gap between the floorboards and forced her windpipe closed.

The girl gagged. Spittle flew from her lips and drizzled down her cheek.

Velvet wriggled away, flipped onto her butt, and focused on the legs of the chair. She kicked upward and out, over and over, until her foot caught against the wood and the whole thing jumped, chair, girl, ropes, and most important, the choking brace. The bar dislodged from the crack in the floor, and the girl fell over onto her side, gasping for air.

“Have you got him?” Velvet screamed as she saw Bonesaw settle and still himself next to the worktable.

But when Simanski turned around, he held a knife in his fist and his face was red with determination; his eyes were black and soulless. Where was Nick?

Velvet scrambled to climb back into the girl before the knife started plunging into her. She’d take the girl’s pain. She owed her that much. But he was coming fast. So fast.

By the time Velvet sank into the girl, working the possession as rapidly as she knew how, Velvet could feel the stainless steel blade pressing against her skin. Moving slowly, purposefully.

Sawing.

“You bastard!” she screamed.

Bonesaw’s hands were on the girl then, hefting her upward until the chair was upright.

Velvet closed her eyes. The man’s breath was hot on her face.

“Don’t,” she whispered, and felt the slow hot trickle of blood drawing a line around the girl’s wrist. He was cutting her now.

But she didn’t feel it. The only pressure she could feel from the depths of the body were the slowly loosening bonds around her chest. The brace falling away.

“Nick!” Her eyes snapped open, and the killer’s eyes crinkled pleasantly, a faint glow blistering around his pupils like a solar eclipse. “You did it!”

He nodded and slipped the knife as carefully as he could between the fishing line and the girl’s right forearm. The thin plastic thread broke free, and she found that she was grinning, giddy for Nick’s success, for the girl’s impending freedom.

For the first time, Velvet smiled broadly at her killer out of happiness rather than spite. But what she saw there made her heart skip a beat. Nick was slipping away. The man’s eyes
were going from a safe glow to dead black and as dark as murder. He slashed the knife at her brutally, and Velvet held out the girl’s hand to defend her face.

She didn’t realize Bonesaw had succeeded until a spurt of blood showered the dry floorboards. Velvet fell from the chair onto the girl’s knees, clutching the wounded hand to her chest, grasping the rapidly soaking shirt like a makeshift bandage. Her ankles were still connected to the chair by taut rubber tubing.

The man growled and squatted down next to her, teeth bared and eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s going on, girl? You got somethin’ special in you?”

Velvet’s eyes flew open wide.
How can he know I’m inside the girl?
she wondered. He couldn’t.

Behind him, Nick was rushing forward, falling into a crouch and then straight into the killer’s back. For a second, Velvet thought she saw the struggle at play. Bonesaw’s eyes flashing with light, and then he was biting his lip in the same way Nick did when he was thinking. The knife in his hand turned back toward himself.

Velvet panted, licked at the girl’s lips in violent anticipation.
Make it brutal
, she pleaded without speaking.

Make it worth it!

Nick plunged the knife into the man’s leg hilt-deep and cried out from the pain. His ghost stumbled forward, breaking free from his Bonesaw suit and landing next to her on the floor.

“Ugh!” The man lurched a bit, snatching the knife from the wound in his leg and falling to the floor, moaning. As he did, Nick shot upright.

Velvet wasted no time stripping the rest of the restraints from her ankles and was nearly halfway to the door when the man reached out and snatched her ankle, drawing her body to him. She swung around him, climbing atop him rather than pulling away, figuring he wouldn’t expect it.

Another thing he wasn’t expecting was her index finger widening the hole in his leg, scratching at the bone, twisting the sinew. Bonesaw screamed, a loud mewling sound that rolled over Velvet’s borrowed flesh.

She heard another sound and realized it was laughter.

Her own, projected through the girl.

“Damn,” she heard Nick say, and she pulled herself off Simanski.

He lay beneath her, eyes closed, his breathing shallow.

Velvet looked up at Nick. His mouth hung open, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “Is he dead?”

Velvet shook her head. “Still breathing.”

Standing up, she surveyed the scene. The man’s body was twisted in the center of a puddle of blood that pooled around the guy like ink draining from a broken pen. His rubber apron was bunched up around his waist like a tire, and the wound gurgled from a spot high up on the inside of his thigh.

Velvet felt like she should know why there was so much blood from such a little cut, but it was Nick who answered the question.

“Femoral artery,” he said somberly. “I wasn’t aiming for it. I promise I wasn’t.”

Bonesaw spat, and his eyes crept open, training on Velvet, and he started screaming.

She couldn’t take another moment in the same room with him, and the farther Velvet could take the girl’s body, the better. She turned, threw open the door, and bolted, Nick breezing along behind her.

They ran not back toward the road but around to the back of the shed. Velvet expected Simanski to come tearing around the opposite side and head them off at the pass, but he was still screaming from inside. Cursing her. No. Not her.

Cursing the girl.

Velvet hefted her body onto the back fence and tossed herself over, never breaking speed. A path zigzagged through the forest and on the other side let out into a children’s playground, thick with mulch to pad the inevitable fall from jungle gyms or to cushion heroic leaps from the swing set, her personal favorite activity when she was a kid.

“Help!” Velvet screamed.

A pair of mothers in designer tracksuits sprang to attention from a nearby bench, and upon seeing the girl covered with blood—so much blood—began shouting insanely. One grabbed her cell phone and called 911, and the other drew Velvet up into a hug.

“Oh, my God. What happened? What happened?” The woman’s eyes pored over the cuts on the girl’s arms, and she brushed the girl’s greasy hair away from her face.

Velvet spoke a single word and pointed toward the path to the shed. “Bonesaw!”

And then she fell out of the girl and onto her back, exhausted.

Nick ran up amid the clamor of the two women caring
for the teenager and gathering their own children. He kept swiveling back toward the forest, an expression of dire emergency on his face, as though he were sure that Bonesaw was bound to come barreling toward them, fully prepared to kill both the girl and her rescuers, but he didn’t come. Nick crouched down onto his knees, and Velvet curled close to him, resting her head in his lap. She was crying, but the tears weren’t wet; they were clear and dropped to the ground like pearls.

“Are you all right, Velvet? What can I do?” He wiped the tears from her eyes as she shook her head.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do.

Nick lowered his head to hers and planted soft kisses on each eye.

“It’ll be all right. Everything will be fine.”

It was later, as Nick supported a sobbing Velvet in his arms and led her back down the path, giving the psycho’s property a wide berth, that she realized that she was crying out of relief, but now there was a new issue.

Nick knew.

And not only did he know that Velvet was totally guilty of haunting; now, in effect, so was he. And it was all her fault.

“You don’t think I’m horrible, do you?” Velvet asked, the words muffled in his sleeve.

Nick reached down and pressed his palm against her cheek, turning her toward him. “Never. You’re wonderful. The most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“You can’t tell, Nick. You shouldn’t have followed me.”

He shook off her words. “I’m glad I did, and I won’t tell a soul unless you want me to. Not a soul. Ever.”

They held each other for a while, Nick’s back pressed against the dead tree with the lightning-blackened crack, and Velvet against him. His breathing was soft and shallow against her face. He stroked her hair and cradled the back of her neck as he gazed into her eyes.

“We have a secret. It bonds us.” He nodded, suggesting she should agree.

And she did. They settled onto the squishy loam of the glen floor.

“You want to tell me what was going on back there?”

Velvet’s brow furrowed, and she looked away. “It’s what you think it is.”

“Haunting?”

“Yes, but …” She jerked away from him. “I didn’t mean for it to go on like this. It’s just that he’s such a monster and he kept picking up new girls. I couldn’t let him. It wasn’t right.”

Nick finished her thought, “No matter what the consequences.”

She slunk back into his arms. “No matter what.”

They lay like that for a few moments, a pair of gelatinous ethereal creatures, barely visible except for the shimmer of dew that caught on their flesh for brief moments, before drifting through them and settling on the clumps of dry pine needles carpeting the glen.

Velvet felt herself drifting away, losing herself, slipping through time. Bonesaw’s blood had been so black. It pooled and pooled, and he screamed and screamed.

Still alive.

She shot up then from the waking dream, startled, and crawled toward the gap in the trees. Nick chased after her, catching her around the waist.

“I have to go back. I’ve got to finish this. I can’t go on. Not now that you’re involved. Now that I’ve sentenced you to the same fate as me. The lies. There are so many to keep track of. I’ll be caught eventually. And now … you.” Velvet rolled onto her back, and Nick crawled across her until their eyes met.

“What you’ve done is right. No matter what the rules of purgatory are. And if saving that girl’s life means that neither of us ever get to dim and move on to heaven or hell or wherever, then I’m fine with that. There’s something here.” Nick reached up and placed his hand over his heart, and then gestured toward Velvet’s chest. She reached up and gently took his wrist, drawing his palm close to her breast.

“And here,” she agreed. “It’s true. I know it.”

“So you understand that it doesn’t matter to me if they find out. As long as I’m here. With you.”

Velvet sighed and started to turn her head, to resist.

“Shh,” Nick whispered, and pressed his lips to hers, softly.

Velvet moaned quietly.

Nick studied her face. She smiled for him.

“Well. That’s a welcome change.”

“The kiss?” she asked.

“The intent and the smile. You should do it more often.”

She poked him in the ribs, and despite the fact that they were both technically ghosts and shouldn’t have had any access to physical sensation at all, somehow the two of them
were connected. Attached by something bigger than them, bigger than purgatory, and much bigger than the dark secret they shared.

“What are you going to do if I fall in love with you, Nick?” she asked.

Nick nodded slowly, eyes intent on the question. “I don’t know. That sounds kind of dangerous.”

“Good answer.”

V
elvet pushed herself up from the rubble beneath her. Her ankle was twisted between the tangle of Nick’s legs. All around them purgatory was crumbling, stones dropping free from mortar shaken back into powder. She heard screams in the distance, the warbling moans of the injured, and couldn’t help but think that what they’d just done was completely to blame.

Her second thought was that her first impression was ridiculous.

“Shadowquake!” she shouted, pounding against Nick to get moving.

She reached for a mound of stones that rose a bit taller than the others and dug out the crate where she’d left her clothes. She pulled them on recklessly, inside out, torn, the boots finding the correct foot by sheer chance.

“Hurry up, Nick!”

He scrambled up next to her and slipped his hand into hers.

“Follow the walls when we get out to the street. There’ll be stuff falling everywhere,” she said, and pulled him after her.

They were nearly past the Paper Aviary when a building up ahead exploded into a cloud of dust. The gaslights shot flames into the air like Roman candles.

“I guess we’re not going that way,” Nick quipped, and pulled her in the opposite direction, across the street and around the block.

Souls trying to get to the safety of the station crowded the nearby funicular platform, and Velvet searched the faces for Logan and Luisa, but they weren’t there, or if they were, they were obscured in the stampede of frightened denizens, most of whom had abandoned hope for a railcar and were shakily traversing the tracks in droves.