Vengeance Bound (12 page)

Enough!
I roar mentally.

Megaera has grabbed him by the hair, ready to slam his face into the ground. The sight of the blood on the snow gives me the strength to shove Them into the back of my mind and shut the door. They shimmer in the night air before fading away. Once back in my mind, They howl with frustration and claw at my mental barriers. Dylan may be an asshole, but killing people at parties will not make me popular.

I’ll deal with you later,
I hiss at Them, even though the threat is empty. There isn’t much I can do but restrain Them in the back of my mind. Correction. There isn’t much I
want
to do.

I go down on a knee next to Dylan. The pain of his beating has finally cut through his rage, and he writhes on the ground. I reach out a hand to him, and he shies away. I sigh. “Are you okay?”

“You broke my fucking nose!” He’s blowing bloody snot bubbles and making these little moaning sounds like a wounded animal. I feel a little bit sorry for him.

But not that sorry.

“Look, in a few minutes people are going to come out to see what just happened. You have two choices. You can tell them I kicked your ass, or we can pretend it was someone else.” Dylan doesn’t seem to realize that I had some help, and I’m not going to enlighten him. I’m already shaking from my loss of control. The threat of discovery is the last thing I need.

Dylan calls me a word I would never repeat. I sigh again and grab him, my fingers sinking into the soft spots behind his jaw. He tries to pull away, and I force him to look at me. He swears again, and I tighten my grip until he stills.

“Listen. You can spend the rest of your high school career being the guy who got beat up by the tiny little blond girl, or you can be the guy who got jumped at a party. I suggest you think long and hard about which one you want to be.”

Dylan doesn’t answer. There’s some commotion from the direction of the house, and I release him. He flops backward into the snow. “Think fast,” I hiss. I clean my hands with snow and fight the queasiness that rises up at the sight of the blood. My secret shame, my inability to stomach the sight of blood. I can hand down justice to a herd of guilty men, but one little bloody nose and I swoon like a Southern belle.

People run up, exclaiming over the blood on the ground. I take a few steps back and let them get to Dylan’s side. I recognize a few of the guys from his table in the pizza shop. They speak with Dylan in low tones. Mindi runs up next to me, her hair messed up and eyelids drooping. I frown at her appearance. She’s trashed. “What happened?” she asks, the words heavy with alcohol.

I shrug, feeling the eyes of the other partygoers on me. “I dunno. I just found him like that. I think he said something about some guy jumping him.”

Dylan curses, blinking. “My contacts are all fucked up, and I can’t see shit. Help me up.” One of his friends takes his outstretched hand, and Dylan uses it to lurch to his feet. I can’t believe my luck. Thank God for corrective lenses.

A huge Asian guy steps forward from the jock huddle. “The assholes from the beer store did this. Who can give D a ride to the emergency room?”

Dylan fishes his contacts from the back of his eyes while the crowd watches in sick fascination. His face is a mess of blood, and in the moonlight he looks like a refugee from a UFC match. He’s going to need to see a professional about that nose. He flicks the offending lenses onto the ground and spits out a stream of bloody saliva. “No way, dude,” he says. “I’m coming with you to kick their ass.” A few people clap and cheer, while a murmur goes up, wondering at these mysterious guys who drove out in the middle of the night to fight Dylan.

No one noticed the melted patches of snow. Now the ground is churned from people trying to figure out what is going on, the mud mixing with the drifted snow into a brown mush. I am once again anonymous.

I move back toward the house while Mindi talks to a redhead I don’t know. The two girls I overheard gossiping in the kitchen talk animatedly, wide grins on their faces. I’m glad I could liven up the party for them.

There’s movement near the bushes on the far side of the deck. I watch openmouthed as Niko walks over. My heart pounds. How long was he standing there?

He walks toward me, a knowing smile on his face. I wait for him to say something to me, but as he opens his mouth, Mindi squeals and runs up, wrapping him in a hug. Whatever he was about to say falls away in the wake of her overzealous greeting. But the appraising look in his eyes makes one thing clear.

He saw something.

The question is, how much? Because if he saw too much, Niko may be the next person on my list.

COMMITTED TO MEMORY

By the time we leave the party a few hours later, the snow is falling hard enough to make driving difficult, and it’s way past Mindi’s curfew. I reluctantly let her spend the night on my couch so she won’t end up grounded until the end of time. She’s too drunk to notice that she still has yet to meet my imaginary mother. When her dad comes to pick her up early the next morning for church, she hugs me hard enough to bruise my ribs.

“You’re, like, the best friend I’ve ever had,” she says, and I’m sure she’s kidding, until she pulls away and I see the tears glimmering in her eyes. The show of emotion makes things awkward, but deep down it makes me feel kind of glad. I think Mindi could use a friend, and I’m happy to help.

The snow continues through Sunday, and West County Township gets more than two feet, breaking a twenty-five-year-old record. By Sunday night everything is covered in white, and school on Monday is canceled. Newscasters stand knee-deep in the drifts and declare the county in the middle of a snow emergency. No one goes anywhere.

The snow keeps even me housebound. The plows are slow in removing the snow, and my car is not really equipped to deal with the weather. The cable goes out sometime on Sunday, leaving me without Internet or television. Instead I’m stuck with nothing to do but think.

My mind inevitably turns back to one of my first sessions with Dr. Goodhart. I liked him immediately. He was only a few months out of school, an earnest sandy-haired guy in his midtwenties who really wanted to help. He wasn’t like some of the other doctors, who had long since given up on saving anyone and just prescribed meds so they could collect a check, their eyes all but rolling as they pretended to listen. I felt like Dr. Goodhart lived up to his name. He listened to me when I told him about Them, about the ways They made me feel—or not feel. He asked me questions and laughed at my jokes. He gave me calming exercises I could do to maintain control, even though they never really worked. Still, I thought he tried. He made those first few months at Brighter Day tolerable.

The Furies didn’t like him, but that was pretty much expected.

Despite being unable to find fault with him at the time, there was always something about him that put me a little on edge. He always seemed a little too eager to talk about my hallucinations, like the only thing that was important was making sure They were quiet.

Like the day he saw me in the hallway. He approached me with a smile, his face seemingly open and friendly. Behind him followed a woman with a clipboard. She wasn’t a nurse and I didn’t recognize her, so I figured she was one of the clinical trials people. I’d been told during my intake interview that Brighter Day participated in a number of pharmaceutical trials so that they could offer patients the most cutting-edge treatment. It wasn’t until later that I found out that the trials were mostly so the doctors could supplement their incomes. In my mind They were uneasy at his approach. “And how is my favorite patient doing today?” he asked.

He is dangerous! We do not like him.

He seeks money and fame, not your health
.

I shrugged. “Fine.”

“Are you still having trouble sleeping? Still hearing voices in your head?”

I nodded, afraid to say anything more. If he knew what They were saying about him, he wouldn’t be happy. And for some reason I thought it was important to keep Dr. Goodhart happy. Because he was my ticket out of Brighter Day. One day he would have to sign my discharge paperwork. I needed him on my side.

Dr. Goodhart frowned. “Amelie, the dosage you’re on is very high. Are you sure you’re still experiencing audio-sensory hallucinations?”

I shrugged again, not looking him in the eyes. He leaned in close, grabbing my upper arm and squeezing until I flinched. “You aren’t lying to me, are you?” he growled, his voice so low, I almost thought I imagined it. I shook my head, afraid of the hard set of his mouth. But all he did was release my arm and make some comment to the lady taking notes on a clipboard. She hadn’t reacted at all during our conversation, so I figured I’d imagined the whole thing. After all, there was a very good chance that I was crazy.

That was when I realized that Dr. Goodhart didn’t care about me or my problems. He cared only about himself.

That night there were two extra pills in my cup after dinner, one blue, one orange. I took them, and spent the next few days in a woozy haze. By the time my body adjusted to the dosage, They were oddly silent, the bruise on my upper arm had faded to a mustard color, and my parents were dead. While I was out of it, they’d skidded into an oncoming tractor-trailer. I didn’t even get to go to their funeral.

I want my sword in Dr. Goodhart’s chest so bad, I can taste it.

I blink away the sudden anger and take a deep breath. The last thing I need is Them waking up, anxious to hunt.

Once the Internet comes back on, I spend the rest of the day reading articles. I have no problem dealing with kidnappers, murderers, and rapists. What I really want to know is what guys like. You know, like if beating up a football player is considered hot.

Niko. Lately my thoughts always come back to him.

At the party he said hello to everyone and then made some excuse about getting to work and disappeared. Disappointment welled up inside me, and I felt like a kid robbed of Christmas. Before he left, he gave me one last, long look. That look seared my skin and turned my bones to jelly. It was a look that seemed to say,
We’ll talk later.

Or that’s what I want it to have said. It could just as easily have been a look that said,
You are a psycho.
I’m not very good at deciphering long, meaningful looks.

Mostly I wonder how much he saw. Did he see Tisiphone and Megaera? I kind of doubt it. If he’d seen the Furies, he definitely wouldn’t still be talking to me. More than likely he would’ve run the other way when he saw me.

The silly thing is that I’m relieved, not because it means my secret’s safe but because I might still have a chance with him.

So I spend all of Sunday and most of Monday reading articles with titles like “Ten Surefire Signs That He’s into You” and “How to Wow Him Without Trying.” They give me absolutely no insight into what to do about Niko, but I do get some ideas about how to get rid of Adam from an article entitled “Just Friends: Drawing Clear Boundaries with Guys.”

By Tuesday I’m even more confused about guys than I was before. I’m almost glad for the distraction of school.

ADMIT IT

When I open my locker on my way to lunch, a yellowed newspaper clipping falls out. I pick it up with excitement. I’m not looking forward to killing a man, but the return to a familiar ritual is comforting. Especially since I have a new BFF that I have no idea what to do with.

All day Sunday and Monday, Mindi kept texting me, wanting to rehash what a great party it was on Saturday. This morning she cornered me in the hallway to ask if I wanted to go shopping or something this weekend. Trapped, I stammered out something that I think was a yes. The thought of going to a mall, with all those people pressing into one another, makes me sick to my stomach.

Being normal is much harder than I thought it would be. Handing down justice to the guilty is so much easier.

It’s been a week since I tried Hank Meacham, and I’m amazed at how patient They have been (not counting the lapse with Dylan). I usually can’t go more than a week between justices. The exceptions are the years I spent in treatment, especially my stint at Saint Dymphna’s. While I was there, They never woke, thanks to the heavy medication I was on. Not a strategy I want to try again.

On the way to the cafeteria, I study the article. The clipping is almost ten years old and discusses a truck driver named Alex Medina. Medina was arrested for the murder of several prostitutes who frequented the truck stops where he parked. He was supposed to go to trial, but he somehow managed to escape court. The article ends with speculation about whether Medina could have left the country, since he had family in Nicaragua. I shove the slip of paper into my jeans pocket with a smile.

Mr. Medina must be somewhere close. Otherwise They never would have brought me the article. They don’t bring me just any target, only the ones They know we can punish. I owe Them after ruining their fun on Saturday. If I don’t cooperate with Them now, things are only going to get worse.

I push through the double doors of the cafeteria with a smile. Dealing with Medina is just what I need to relieve my rapidly accumulating stress, not to mention Their rising bloodlust. I welcome the relief.

Mindi and the rest of the group are already at our table along the back wall. They look away guiltily when I walk up, except for Niko and Amber. Niko glances at me with raised eyebrows. Amber wears a smirk. I plop down next to Adam and smile. He looks away, a blush creeping across his cheeks.

“Uh-oh. Were y’all talking about me? I feel like I interrupted something.” I open my lunch bag and take out my hard-boiled eggs and a knife. I slice into the eggs a little too roughly.

Adam eyes my lunch and clears his throat. “Uh, it’s nothing.”

I chew the egg white thoughtfully. They aren’t acting like it’s nothing. “No, tell me. What’s going on?”

“Amber says she saw you.” Mindi whispers it so quietly, it takes a moment for me to realize she spoke.

For a moment I’m scared. Where did she see me? At the party, beating the shit out of Dylan? How much did she see? Did she see the Furies? Or just the beat-down? If she saw what I did, my cover’s blown.