Feral (36 page)

Claire snapped a photo, the flash illuminating the inside of the locker.

In the harsh, white flash of light, her own face filled the dusty mirror one of the old janitors had attached to the inside of his locker door. Her terrorized face, iridescent with sweat and tears. Her face and her raised hands and her gold satin clutch—and the four gray metal walls.

When the blackness returned, so did the rippling fingers of fog—and Casey's black-and-white face—and Serena's soul, curdled with rage.

Claire's stomach lurched. Something startling had happened in that flash. But she couldn't quite explain the revulsion that rippled across her body.

Tears searing her fevered skin, Claire took another picture, again seeing only her own image in the mirror. And in the darkness that returned, the fog swelled—far too thick, it seemed, to have ever really disappeared at all.

“Hey!” Claire shouted. “Don't do that! Stop moving around!”

She took another picture, but Serena, Casey, and the fog disappeared in the flash.

“Don't think I won't get you,” she said, taking several rapid-fire shots, and finding only the gray walls on the screen.

“Come on,” she said, but her lip was wobbling because the locker looked so
empty
in the photos. As though Claire was the only one inside. But that couldn't be true. Serena was there. Casey was there. The fog was there.

Claire trembled, tears increasing, flowing like tormented rivers. She took still another picture; in the blinding flash, her face was the only image filling the mirror on the locker door.

“No,” she sobbed. “No, no, no.” She snapped another quick cluster of pictures. And in the mirror, with each repeating flash, she saw only herself—only her own scars.

“Get back!” she heard Rich shout, bursting into the janitors' office. “Get away from the locker!”

Claire made a limp fist, struck the inside of the door to her tiny prison cell. “Rich?” she called, through her tears. “Is that you?”

“I'm coming!” Rich shouted, tugging forcefully against the locker door.

“What's going on in here?” Rhine shouted as he clomped into the room.

“The door!” Owen cried out. “I can't get it to open!”

“Claire?” her own father's panicked voice cried out. “Are you in there?”

“Dad?” she asked. How was it possible for him to be there? Where did he come from?

A steady light streamed into the locker, as though someone was holding a flashlight against the vents in the locker door. “Claire?” her father called again. “Say something if you're in there.”

In the steady light, Claire could see everything—her own face in the mirror. And Serena's necklace, dangling from her fingers. No fog. No Casey. No murdered Sims girl. Not in the light. She was alone, in the light and the mirror's reflection.

“Here,” she called weakly. “I'm here.”

“The door is warped!” Owen shouted. “I can't lift up on the handle.”

The light disappeared; feet stomped; metal rattled like hands were sifting through a drawer of wrenches.

In the darkness, Casey and Serena were still with her. In the darkness, Serena fought against Casey, ready to slip inside Claire's body, take it for her own, ravage her in ways that even those boys in the Chicago parking lot never could have dreamed up.

As the search for a tool to free Claire continued, she sifted again through the pictures she had just taken on the phone: Her face. The locker. No Serena. No Casey.

Glancing behind the screen, she saw them all, still there, swirling through the darkness.

But what, exactly, did that mean? Maybe, she thought, they simply had a way to hide. Maybe the flash was so strong that it obliterated them. Maybe spirits just couldn't show up in a picture. Of course that was it, she told herself. They were hiding. Surely they were. She didn't make things up. She didn't see things that weren't there.

“Claire,” her father shouted, shining the light back against the grate. “Say something.”

In the light, she saw herself in the mirror again. Her terrorized face was the only thing filling the locker. No spirits. No fog. No dead girl.

What was happening to her?

“Please. No. It can't,” Claire begged. But the light had illuminated the truth: she was alone in the locker. The fog and Serena and Casey were not there, crowding the tiny space where she was trapped.

Flashes of memory burst in front of her eyes, just as quickly and powerfully as the flash from Serena's camera. In the basement, the reflection of her face in the doorway had erased the vision of the alley—and Casey. After the funeral, the reflection of her face in Serena's temporary marker had erased the fog. Owen had been cleaning out Serena's locker when the reflection of her face in the window had erased the ice in the hallway. Over and over it had happened: her reflection erased the fog—and the ice—and Casey—and now Serena.

She wailed. Because as she struggled to breathe, as she fought for her own life, she knew what she wanted most, what she had always wanted, ever since that night in April: her old life back. She wanted her old body. And if she could not get her old body back, she wished she could trade in her body for a new, better one. A body that did not look as scuffed and battered in her own bathroom mirror as the body of the old calico she'd met outside in the woodpile.

She didn't want to be a half-dead thing lying in a parking lot. She wanted a second chance at that night back in April. She wanted to never leave the library alone. She
wanted her old life back.
The words echoed in her head. Didn't that sound like something Serena had said?

We both want the exact same thing? How is it possible?

But Claire already knew the answer: it was possible because Serena had never existed beyond her death. There was no spirit manipulating Claire's surroundings. The cats in her room really had just been after a place to get warm. Owen's car really had just had an electrical malfunction—and the heat had frightened Owen because he knew how Serena died.

Claire gagged against the blasts from the boiler. Her lungs refused to open. She was suffocating.

Out in the woods, the spirit of Serena had tried to get inside her body. Back in Chicago, that was what the boys had wanted. To get inside her. Good God—it was all the same.

Serena and I want the same thing
, Claire thought, coughing against the fiery breath of the boiler, wheezing as the remaining oxygen slipped away through the vents in the locker.

Serena wanted her old life back. Serena didn't want to be reduced to a half-dead spirit rattling inside an awful body.

“Neither do I,” Claire moaned, hitting the door limply. “We
are
the same.” Serena had become the voice of everything Claire wanted. Everything she was afraid to say.

“Here,” Rhine shouted. “Stand back.”

He attacked the locker door—it sounded like he was hitting the handle with a hammer. A loud boom exploded as he knocked the handle off; the broken metal piece clattered against the tile floor below.

Metal claws of a couple of crowbars slipped into the side of the door. After Rhine shouted, “One, two,
three
,” both crowbars pulled at the same time, popping the door open.

Claire tumbled out, coughing and wheezing. Rhine and Rich both stood before her, crowbars in their hands. Rich dropped his tool, squatting down beside her. “Claire?” he asked, tilting his head, trying to get her to look in his eyes.

She pressed her palm against the cold tile floor to steady herself. In the harsh fluorescent office light, she glanced back at the locker—just one more look. Just to make sure.
Empty
.

The necklace tumbled from her hand, the cameo clinking against the tile floor.

Claire gasped, filling her lungs with cool air. Owen stared straight ahead, Isles's lipstick still staining his mouth.

“Claire,” her father shouted, lunging for her, sprawled across the basement floor in front of the open locker. “Are you all right? Talk to me. Rachelle sent me about a hundred texts, and I came to the school right away.”

“Dr. Cain showed up in the gym right after you'd left,” Rich said, obviously still upset. “He told me something was wrong. We had to find you.”

Claire glanced up, finding Becca and Chas in the basement, too.

“Phone,” Claire coughed, wiping at her tears, her chest lurching as she tried to catch her breath. “It's on Serena's phone—proof—of them—together—in the basement.” She pointed first at Isles, who suddenly appeared in the doorway, then swiveled her hand back toward Owen. A tear building in Owen's left eye rolled off his lower lid, down his face.

“You?” Becca whispered, staring at Isles. “
You?
”

Isles shook her head at Rhine, unaware that her lipstick was smeared into one of her cheeks. “I didn't know what was going on,” she tried to tell him, pretending to have only just arrived in the basement herself. “I was just—I was—there were noises. So I came. To check on them.”

Owen turned a wounded face toward Isles. “It's out,” he shouted. “They know.”

“I have no idea what he's talking about,” Isles said.

“Are you really going to do that?” Owen wailed, through the lipstick stain on his mouth. “After everything I did? I tried to hide it all for you, but now that it's out, you won't stand up for me? Huh? I love you, and you said you loved me. And now, you won't stand up for me?”

“I don't know what he's talking about,” Isles repeated.

“He met with Serena,” Claire coughed. “The afternoon of the ice storm.”

“You were
here
?” Becca asked. “You didn't tell me that. You said you unloaded groceries for your mom.”

“He was,” Rhine said. “He came back. Asked me to let him in. I didn't think anything about it, because a few teachers and some students came back, too. Said they'd left their books or papers, in their rush to get out.”

“What did
you
leave?” Becca demanded, grabbing Owen's arm.

He only shook his head and looked at the floor.

“
When
did he leave?” Becca asked, turning her angry face toward Rhine.

“I never saw him come back out. Not that I noticed, anyway. I just assumed I must've missed him—that he came out with another student or something, so that it didn't stick out in my head. But I swear, I had no idea Serena was still in the building.”

“Serena had proof,” Claire said. “On her phone. Proof of Owen and Isles. Cheating.”

“Good God, Owen,” Ms. Isles whispered, her face blanching. “What did you do?”

Owen screamed, kicked the locker, as though to punish himself. “I only wanted to scare her!” he shouted. “Scare her into giving up her phone! I met her down here—where we'd have privacy. We fought—I tried to grab her and she fell back into the locker. I figured I'd let her think about it for a while. Then she'd be glad to give up her phone. So I turned the lights out and left her. I slipped upstairs and hid out in a bathroom stall. I was afraid someone would see me. I never would have left her in there if I'd known—if I'd heard—when I came back, maybe an hour later, she was so quiet. And the door was all dented. It took me a while to open it. When I did, she was—how could that
happen
?”

“Asthma,” Claire said. “Her asthma.”

Owen collapsed onto the floor. Isles covered her mouth, her red dress now blotchy with sweat and fear. With shock etched across his face, Rhine began dialing his phone. Three buttons: 911.

Claire tried to stand, but stopped when her hand brushed against her ankle. She braced herself for searing pain from what had been an oozing black sore only that morning. Now, when she touched it, the wound was merely tender. Peeling her dress back, she found that the scabs had been all but completely absorbed by her healing skin.

As her father's face shifted to reflect all the love and concern he felt for his daughter, Rich reached for Claire's hand, offering to help her to her feet.

Claire glanced about the room; she could feel everyone's eyes rolling over the pink crisscrossing marks on her shoulders, bare now that her gossamer cardigan dangled in tatters from the knot at her waist.

It was a relief, she thought, to let them see her, scars and all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

C
laire's father drove her straight to a Kansas City hospital. He rushed her to the emergency room, where doctors in scrubs began to search for the wound that had brought her to them, the torn-open place, the broken thing that needed mending.

She was talking the entire time, chattering on like a radio with no off switch. At first, the ER doctor who tried to examine her treated her endless yammering like a sleeve that had to be rolled up, hair that had to be pulled aside so that he could find the source of whatever was hurting her.

After a few minutes, though, the doctor squinted at her, began to really pay attention. And he draped his stethoscope around the back of his neck, pulled a chair close, and listened. Because Claire's words weren't something he needed to brush aside so that he could begin to treat her wounds. Claire's words
were
the source of her hurt.

She spoke in a long ramble, about reflections and ghosts and cats. And she began to talk about a gang. About an ice storm. About being hunted.

It poured out of her—every event, every fear. “I wanted it to be over,” Claire said. “Last spring, as soon as I woke up in the hospital, I just wanted it all to be over. More than that,” she confessed, “I wanted it never to have happened. Any of it. I just wanted—all of it—to be gone. I thought—if I could just get control over everything, it would be different this time. “