Gone Series Complete Collection (209 page)

But he sensed that what he had with Astrid was fragile. She was back, but not all the way back. He didn’t want to start a battle with her. There was a war coming, no time for battles with someone he loved.

But her abrupt departure had the effect of leaving him with only one thread to follow, one thing to think about: the solution.

The solution that did not exist.

Penny lived alone in a small house on the eastern edge of town. From her upstairs bedroom window she could see just a narrow slice of the ocean and she liked that.

She wanted to move into Clifftop. But Caine had denied that request. Clifftop was Lana’s to do with as she pleased. Even when Lana had moved to the lake—temporarily, as it turned out—Clifftop had remained a no-go zone.

“No one messes with Lana,” Caine had decreed.

Lana, Lana, Lana. Everyone just loved Lana.

Penny had spent some time with her when Lana fixed her shattered legs. It had taken a long time, in fact, because there were so many breaks in the bones. Penny found Lana stuck-up. It was certainly a relief to have her legs fixed, and it was very nice not to have that pain, but that didn’t mean Lana had a right to act all high-and-mighty and above it all.

And have an entire massive hotel all to herself. Deciding who could come or go.

It bothered Penny that Lana had that kind of respect. Because Penny knew she could leave Lana crawling and crying and tearing her eyes out like Cigar had done.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Five minutes alone with Little Miss Healer. See how she liked it. See how high-and-mighty she was then.

The only problem was that Caine would kill Penny. Caine felt nothing for Penny. She had hoped after Diana took off . . . But no, there was no disguising Caine’s look of contempt whenever he saw Penny.

Even now, even with all Penny’s power, Caine was still the big man, the popular guy, the good-looking guy who would spit on someone like Penny, with her scraggly hair and awkward, bony arms and flat-as-a-board chest. Even now life was all about who was hot and who was not.

But Caine wasn’t the only boy around.

There was a soft knock at the back door. Penny opened it for Turk.

“Were you careful?” she asked.

“I went way out of the way. Then I jumped a couple of fences.” He was breathing hard and sweating. She believed him.

“All that just to see me?” Penny asked.

He didn’t answer. He flopped down in one of the easy chairs, sending up a cloud of dust. He leaned his gun against the side of the chair. Then he pulled off his boots, making himself comfortable.

Suddenly a scorpion crawled onto his arm. He yelled, swatted at it frantically, jumped out of his chair.

Then he saw the smile on her face.

“Hey, don’t do that to me!” Turk cried.

“Then don’t ignore me,” she said. She hated the pleading sound in her own voice.

“I wasn’t ignoring you.” He sat back down, carefully inspecting for scorpions—as if it had been real.

Turk wasn’t the smartest guy, Penny acknowledged with a sigh. He was no Caine. Or Sam. Or even Quinn. Maybe they could ignore Penny, and not even treat her like a girl, and curl their lips in disgust at her, but not Turk. Turk was just a dumb punk.

Penny felt a surge of fury so strong she had to turn away to hide it. Overlooked, ignored, forgotten Penny.

She was the middle of three girls in her family. Her older sister was named Dahlia. Her younger sister was named Rose. Two pretty flower names. And a plain old Penny in between.

Dahlia was a beauty. As early as Penny could remember their father had loved Dahlia. He had dressed Dahlia up in all kinds of outfits . . . feathers, silky underwear . . . and taken hundreds of pictures of her. Right up until Dahlia started to develop.

And then, when their father lost interest in Dahlia, Penny had naturally assumed she would be the one, the beloved, the admired one. She assumed she would be the one posing, bending this way and that, showing and concealing, making little coy faces or scared faces, depending on what her father needed.

But her father had barely noticed Penny. Instead he’d moved past her to pretty little Rose.

And soon it was Rose starring in the pictures her father uploaded to the internet.

It was a few years before Penny came to understand that what her father did was against the law.

Then she had waited until her father was at work and she had taken his laptop with her to school and shown the pictures to some of the kids. A teacher had seen and called the police.

Her father had been arrested. Penny’s mother started drinking more than ever before. And all three girls had been sent to live with Uncle Steve and Aunt Connie.

Surprise, surprise, poor little victimized Dahlia and Rose—poor, pretty little Dahlia and Rose—had gotten all the sympathy and all the attention.

Their father hanged himself in his jail cell after other inmates had beaten him.

Penny had put Drano in Rose’s cereal, just to see how pretty she would be with her throat burned out. And then Penny was shipped off to Coates.

In two years at Coates she had not heard from her sisters. Or her aunt and uncle. Her mother had written her once, an incoherent, self-pitying Christmas card.

Penny was as ignored at Coates as she had always been. Until she began to develop her power. It came late to her. After the first big battle in Perdido Beach, when Caine had walked off into the wilderness with Pack Leader.

When he returned at last, ranting and seemingly insane, Penny kept her secret to herself. She knew better than to show Drake. Drake was ruthless: he would have killed her. Caine was softer, smarter than Drake. When at last Caine came back to something like sanity, Penny started to show him what she could do.

And still she was ignored in favor of Drake and, worst of all, that witch Diana. Diana, who never loved Caine, who always criticized him, had even betrayed him and fought with him.

In that terrible moment standing at the edge of the cliff on San Francisco de Sales Island, when Caine could save only one of them, Diana or Penny, he had made his choice.

Penny had endured pain like nothing she could have ever imagined. But it cleared her mind. It strengthened her. It obliterated what faint echoes of pity were still left in her.

Penny was no longer ignored.

She was hated.

Feared.

No longer ignored.

“You have anything to drink?” Turk asked.

“You mean water?”

“Don’t be stupid; you know I don’t mean water.” Water was no longer in short supply. The eerie cloudburst Little Pete had created still rained down. There was a stream running right down the street, all the gutters carefully blocked so that the stream ran all the way down and out through a gap in the wall to form a pool in the sand of the beach.

Penny fetched a bottle from her kitchen. It was half-full of whatever vile liquid Howard brewed. It smelled like a dead animal, but Turk took a long, long drink.

“Want to make out?” Turk asked.

She slinked toward him, unconsciously mimicking the things she’d seen Dahlia and Rose do.

Turk made a face. “Not like that. Not like you.”

Penny felt it like slap in the face.

“Like you were the other time. You know, in my head. Make it like the other time.”

“Oh, like that,” she said flatly. Penny had the power to send horrifying visions. But she also had the power to create beautiful illusions. They were one and the same. It was one of the ways she had driven Cigar over the edge. She’d found a picture of his mother and made him see her . . .

Now, for Turk, she made a vision of Diana.

And a while later she spoke, using the vision of Diana still to say, “Turk, the time has come.”

“Mmm?”

“Caine humiliated me,” Penny said with Diana’s voice.

“What?”

“He’s the only one who can stop me,” Penny said. “He’s the only one who can humiliate me like that.”

Turk was dumb but not that dumb. He pushed her away.

She became herself again.

“One of these days he’ll kill you, Turk,” Penny said. “Remember what he did to your friend Lance?” She drew a long arc in the air and punctuated it with a “Splat!”

Turk looked nervously around. “Yeah, I remember; that’s why I am totally loyal to the king. He’s the king and I don’t mess with him.”

Penny smiled. “No, you just fantasize about his girlfriend.”

Turk’s eyes widened. He swallowed anxiously. “Yeah, well, what about you?”

Penny shrugged.

“Anyway, she’s not even his girlfriend anymore,” Turk said.

She stayed silent, waiting, knowing he was so very weak, so very fearful.

“What are you even talking about, Penny?” Turk cried. “You’re crazy.”

Penny laughed. “We’re all crazy, Turk. The only difference is I know I’m crazy. I know all about me. You know why? Because sitting there with my legs broken and wanting to scream every single minute, eating the scraps Diana brought me, that kind of clears out your mind and you start seeing things the way they are.”

“I’m out of here,” Turk yelled, and jumped up. He made it two feet before Caine was standing right in his path. Turk stepped back, one leg collapsing, barely caught himself from falling.

The Caine illusion disappeared.

“Just let me go, Penny,” Turk said shakily. “I’ll never tell anyone. Just let me go. You and Caine . . . whatever, okay?”

“I think you’ll end up doing what I want you to do,” Penny said. “I’m done being ignored and I’m all done being humiliated.”

“I’m not going to kill Caine. No matter what you say.”

“Kill? Kill him?” Penny shook her head. “Who said kill? No, no, no. No killing.” She pulled a prescription bottle from her pocket, twisted it open, and shook six small, pale, oval pills into her palm. “Sleeping pills.”

She slid the pills back into the bottle and closed it again.

“I got the pills from Howard. He’s very useful. I told him I was having a hard time sleeping and I paid him with . . . Well, let’s just say that Howard has his own fantasies. Which, by the way, you would not believe.”

“Sleeping pills?” Turk said in a shrill, desperate voice. “You think you’re going to take Caine down with sleeping pills?”

“Sleeping pills,” Penny said, and nodded with satisfaction. “Sleeping pills. And cement.”

Turk’s face was drained of color.

“Find a way to get him here. To me, Turk. Bring him to me. Then it will be just the three of us running things.”

“What do you mean, three?”

Penny smiled and with Diana’s lips said, “You, me, and Diana.”

Howard smelled them before he saw them. The coyotes smelled of rotten meat.

He quelled the urge to run in panic when Pack Leader slouched onto the road ahead of him. He couldn’t outrun a coyote. But the coyotes hadn’t attacked anyone in a long time. The rumor was that they had been warned off by Sam. That was what people said, that Sam had laid down the law and threatened to go medieval on the whole coyote population if they messed with anyone.

The coyotes were scared of Bright Hands. Everyone knew that.

“Hey,” Howard said with all the bluster he could summon, “I’m a good friend of Bright Hands. You know who I mean? Sam. So I’m just going to walk on.”

“Pack hungry,” the coyote said in his slurred, high-pitched, mangled speech.

“Hah, very funny,” Howard said. His mouth was dry. His heart was pounding. He swung his heavy pack down. “I don’t have much food, just a boiled artichoke. You can have that.”

He reached into the pack, fumbling noisily among empty bottles, searching for the feel of metal. He found it, closed his hand around the heavy knife, and pulled it out. He waved it in front of him and yelled, “Don’t do anything stupid!”

“Coyote not kill human,” Pack Leader said.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’d better not. My boy Bright Hands will burn you mangy dogs down!”

“Coyote eat. Not kill.”

Howard tried a couple of times to speak but the words would not come. His bowels were suddenly watery. His legs were shaking so hard he feared they would collapse. “You can’t eat me without killing me,” he said finally.

“Pack leader not kill. He kill.”

“He?”

Howard felt a prickling on the back of his neck. Slowly, horror draining the strength from his muscles, he turned.

“Drake,” he whispered.

“Yeah. Hi, there, Howard. How’s it going?”

“Drake.”

“Yeah, we did that already.” Drake unwrapped the whip hand. He looked more wolfish than the coyotes that now emerged from cover to form a circle around Howard.

“Drake, man, no, no. No, no, no. You don’t want to do this, Drake, man.”

“It’ll only hurt for a while,” Drake said.

His whip snapped. It was like fire on Howard’s neck.

He turned and ran in sheer panic, but Drake’s whip caught his leg and sent him facedown into the dirt. He looked up to see one of the coyotes looking at him with greedy intensity and licking his muzzle.

“I’m useful!” Howard cried. “You must be up to something; I can help you!”

Drake straddled him and slowly, almost gently wrapped his tentacle arm around Howard’s throat and started squeezing.

“You might be useful,” Drake allowed. “But my dogs gotta eat.”

Howard’s eyes bulged. His whole head felt like it would explode from the pressure of blood. His lungs sucked on nothing.

Mohamed saw the circle of coyotes.

He ducked quickly behind a scruffy bush that wouldn’t really hide him if anyone was looking. But it was all the cover he could find. He had come across a slight rise in the road and, reaching the top, was practically on the coyotes before he saw them.

Then he realized he was seeing more than just coyotes. Drake.

Mohamed took a sharp breath, and the ears of the closest coyote—maybe a hundred yards away—flicked.

There was something . . . no, someone . . . on the ground. Drake had his whip hand around someone’s neck. Mohamed couldn’t see who it was.

Mohamed had a pistol. And a knife. But everyone knew Drake couldn’t be killed with a gun. If he tried to play hero, he would just get himself killed, too.

There was no right answer. No way to stop what he was witnessing. There was only surviving.