Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (36 page)

“Jesse? Jesse!” I scream her name. No need to be stealthy now.

But she doesn’t answer.

The house is burning and she does not answer. I watch paralyzed, the black smoke funneling into the sky.

Jesse

I
don’t want to die.

I accept that I saw it as my only way out once upon a time and even in all the death replacements in the years that followed, I was still running. But now—

Now I feel my desire to live even more strongly than I did the night I managed to kill Eddie.

I don’t want to die.

I won’t let that happen
Gabriel assures me but that doesn’t make me feel any better about taking the stairs one at a time up toward the sound of feet pacing in the upstairs rooms.

Every time I bring my foot down the wood creaks and my heart speeds up, pounding. Why does this house have to be so freaking old?

I’m so shaky and jittery with the power I stop and lean against the fading wallpaper.

Can you pull out or something?
I ask him in my head. I feel so jittery and shaky. My hands tremble in a soft
tap pat tap
against the wall supporting me.
I do not want to go all Rachel and carve myself up okay? I need you to manage this somehow. Gradual increases. Anything. I just feel like I could rip my eyes out if it meant relief.

The power decreases. Not as much as I’d like. My skin is still unbearably itchy and burns and I feel like I might piss myself, dancing that fine line between extreme need and loss of control, but at least I can think. At least I don’t feel like I should run through a solid wall and brain myself.

My shoes scrape the top step in a last shaky lift. A decaying rug runs the length of the hallway toward a door at the end. It once must have been a beautiful vibrant red but it’s now more of a rust color. Just beyond its dull frayed tassels, the door is cracked. Through the crack I glimpse a man pacing back and forth. His shadow moving along the wall, large and looming behind him.

I take another shaking step toward him and then another.

“Who’s there?” he demands. It isn’t a man’s voice. And I think this is the only reason I can bear to proceed.

I reach out and press my fingertips against the chipped white wood. Splinters pull at my fingertips as I push more and more weight against the wood door. With my palm flat against the scratchy surface, I force the crack to widen. A slow groaning creak announces me.

He’s just a kid.

He can’t be older than sixteen with his dark hair and eyes. He wears the same black fatigues as all of Caldwell’s men, but he is so scrawny the clothing hangs loosely around his slumped shoulders. There is something sunken about his face. He’s got the look of someone who is sick and has been for a long time.

When he sees me those huge brown eyes double to the size of tea cup saucers.

“Hi.” I even manage a little smile.

“Not you,” he says.

I hold my hands up in a sign of peace. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

And if he’d wanted to hurt me he wouldn’t have called out to me when I was in the hallway. He would have waited to jump me or something. He’s just a kid. A scared kid.

The boy’s lip begins to quiver. His shoulders slump even more. When the boy coughs again I notice the deep puffy pockets under his eyes.

“Are you sick?” I ask. I ease into the room. It is a bedroom, disheveled and lived in. Take out boxes are piled over the dresser and overflow from the small wastebasket in the corner. The bed is rumpled and slept in. A small bag with clothes protruding from partially closed zippers tells me he’s been staying in this room for a while.

“Yes, I’m sick,” he says and it’s with such hatred and derision, as if he thinks it’s my fault. My mind still struggles to focus against the power rolling me over and over like a wave.

“You look really sick,” I tell him. I let my concern show. “Do you need something?”

Caldwell appears behind the boy.
Snap
and there he is. It’s as if I blinked and in that instance he positioned himself between the boy and the window behind him. His pristine appearance doesn’t fit the decay of the room, not in his soft gray suit and red tie. He should be on television, not in a dilapidated farm house in the middle of nowhere.

Another voice breaks into my head, not Gabriel’s.

Caldwell won’t save you if you let her go. He promised to heal you but he won’t if you fail him.

“You can’t heal the sick,” I say aloud. I look right at him because I want the boy to turn around and see him too. “No replacement can.”

“Shut up!” the boy screams. He pulls a gun from beneath a rumpled pillow on the bed and points it at me. “Get out of my head you devil!”

She wants to hurt you,
the other voice warns.

“No I don’t,” I argue. “Turn around.”

It’s a trick. She wants you to look behind you so she can get the gun the moment you turn your back.

Now I understand. It is Caldwell’s voice. And those words are the lies he’s feeding to the boy.

But why project them into my head too? Why let me hear?

She is one of them and she is here to kill you.

“No,” I say argue. “That’s a lie.”

The boy’s eyes are like glass marbles, reflective and hollow. Caldwell has him. How many people can Caldwell enter like this? Control, confuse and manipulate? One? Ten? A hundred? How many minds twisted under the weight of lies and false promises of salvation? The boy doesn’t even hear me.

The boy lifts the gun from my chest higher, right between my eyes.

This is a kill shot. Even for me.

I don’t have time to react. I don’t have time to realize I can’t break the spell Caldwell has on the boy. And he knows it—the sick smile on his face tells me so. One instant my brains are about to be all over the peeling wall paper and then—

Gabriel waits for nothing.

He throws the door wide and the voltage erupts through my body. I’m screaming from the pain of it. It’s not the sort of pain you feel if injured. More like the way a tooth aches from an exposed nerve—times a thousand. Raw, sensory overload.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the shivers of agony raking my spine and I hit the ground on my hands and knees. I’m screaming and screaming but it isn’t helping.

“Gabriel, please!”

You are stronger than you think
.

I don’t feel strong. The live wires inside me are burning me alive and I don’t know what is happening except that it is Gabriel’s doing, not Caldwell or the boy. I have no idea where those two are or what I must look like to them in my agony.

Then it stops. Just as suddenly as the flood of burning pain overtook me, it’s gone. The connection between Gabriel and I goes slack and I collapse completely to the floor whimpering. I shake and shiver. Blinking back water as if a great wind has just blown through me.

Gabriel tries to get my attention.
Get up.

But I don’t believe I can move. The fetal position in the only position I can manage just now. It takes several long moments before I can focus on the old, peeling wallpaper. A certain hiss and crackling is strange. And the heat. I feel heat coming from somewhere.

When I open my eyes the whole side of the house is gone.

Gone.

It’s as if the boy turned into The Hulk and jumped through the window taking Caldwell and the rest of the wall with him. Boards and planks hang from all angles, broken and jagged like teeth. Outside I can see the trees through the curling smoke fuming from the room and the haze of heat escaping.

The bed and walls are on fire. And in none of it do I see the boy or Caldwell.

I desperately search the flames until I start choking on the smoke. Oh my God, I did this. I did this.

Get out
, Gabriel warns.

“But the kid!”

Get out!

I hold onto the doorframe and pull myself up, stumbling into the hallway hacking and wheezing. It isn’t until I’m down the stairs and out the front door that I dare to draw my first breaths of clean air, great big lung fulls. Tears sting the corners of my eyes and my throat feels as if I’ve jabbed a hot poker down it.

“Ally?” I ask him. I left her in the basement with the others. I have to go back.

Alive.

I turn toward the corn. The stalks sway gently as if whispering my name. The heat from the house wafts against my back and blows my hair into my face. The last light of day has been replaced with thick shadows.

Jesse
. It isn’t the corn calling me down off the steps.
Jesse I’ve waited so long for this.

Caldwell’s pale face emerges, first a phantom before his dark limbs take shape. And Gabriel doesn’t wait for him to pull any tricks. He fills me, pushing like a hand into a glove. And I have only a moment to feel Ally and the others behind me before Gabriel takes me completely.

No
. I can’t let him throw a firebomb with her so close.
No
!

You are capable of so much more than you think,
Gabriel pleads.
You must trust me.

Caldwell drags the burned body of the boy beside him and it is enough to make me collapse.

Only Gabriel’s power holds me up on my feet as more and more of them emerge from the shadows.

Caldwell’s men with their guns raised at us.

I can feel Ally so close now but I don’t look back. I can’t afford to take my eyes off of Caldwell for an instant. Not now that I am the only one standing between him and the people I love.

OK,
I tell Gabriel.
I trust you.

Ally

T
he house is engulfed in flames. Bits of wood are collapsing, smoldering and the rest is gone. I feel the heat rolling against my back as Lane and I scramble away from the steps. But as I turn away from the porch I see Jesse.

I start to rush toward her but Brinkley grabs the back of my coat.

“No, no, wait,” he whispers. “Look.”

Then I see them. The black shadows moving in the corn. The corn itself sways back and forth as the sharks cut closer to us.

Then I see him. Caldwell emerging from the corn, dragging beside him a dead body by the hair. At first all I can see is him, my mind absorbing and reconciling the many faces I have in my mind of this man: Caldwell, the TV personality. Caldwell as Jesse’s father. Caldwell as Eric Sullivan, who I saw only in photographs, which Jesse lovingly showed me when we were children. All of it coming together in one very real moment as I first lay eyes on the man.

Then I see the dead body.

A dead body
. But it isn’t someone we know. A flush of shame burns my cheeks at the relief I feel. Men are emerging from the corn around him. Maybe three or four dozen—or more—I can’t tell. I can only see their black shapes separating from the stalks, menacing shadows slinking towards us. They don’t shoot us. Or sedate us. For now they are just watching. Guns raised, they wait.

“He was supposed to guard this house,” Caldwell drawls. He releases the dead body and steps over it. “But he was afraid to confront you.
Afraid
, hiding upstairs like a cowering dog.”

I look at the man. At his dead eyes.

“I only gave him two jobs. Sedate,” Caldwell says. “And annihilate any unwanted guests. It was hardly too much to ask for, now was it?”

Where is Gloria? Nikki? Jeremiah? And where the hell did these men come from? There are no cars here. No sign of transportation. How will we get away? Because that is what I want to do. Take Jesse and run.

“You look well, Alice,” Caldwell says. His grin stops me cold. “It must be the physical exertion. It adds color to your cheeks. And what were you doing to exhaust yourself so thoroughly?”

“He can read your mind,” Jesse says. Her shoulders are taut, tense. I don’t know what she is waiting for. But something subtle is changing around her. As strange as it sounds, I swear I can feel it.

Lane stiffens beside me.

“Oh, there isn’t a clever thought in your head,” Caldwell says to Lane. “It’s Alice here that interests me. What have you been doing with yourself these days, my dear?”

I don’t gratify him with an answer. And I can’t hold his gaze. Even though he is several feet away from me, I can feel the pull. The magnetism. It is a snake’s gaze. The snake that lures the mouse into its mouth with the slight sway of its body. I know better.

“You are a smart,
smart
girl,” he says. “If only you hadn’t caused me so much grief I’d have liked to get to know you better.”

Something happens. Jesse makes the smallest of movements. Then I see the pale purple shimmer.

Caldwell must see it too because he lifts his hands and I think he is going to touch her. I step forward again, ready to run at him, to do anything to keep him from touching her but Brinkley twists his fist around my coat more firmly.