Chapter Thirty-Six
Thirty-Six
The cold has made a home in my bones. I can hardly remember a moment when I wasn’t shivering.
Snow started falling at some point, coating the car, the debris, and me in a thin layer of white. I have called Harper’s name so many times, my voice decided to up and leave, but she hasn’t responded. Thinking about what that might mean turns the pounding in my head up to a thousand.
The silence switches itself out for sirens. Through the haze coating my vision, I see the lights, red and blue. Loud noise and bright lights and so many voices. Hands gently lifting me onto something flat, and then more light, right in my eyes.
“We’ve got a pulse here.”
I wait for them to give the same call from down in the ditch. But it doesn’t come. And I am too cold, too tired, to hold on to the light any longer.
Ringing. My ears are ringing. My head throbs, and my thoughts are slow and sticky, like someone doused them in molasses.
Everything comes back to me in pieces.
Nora’s house. Ingrid’s voice. A walk through the dark, a barn, a hatch, and then—
Somewhere off to the side, an incessant beeping—a heart rate monitor—speeds up, following the tune of my rising panic. I peer through slitted eyes, but the light above my head is a piercing white. I squint, trying to bring my hands up to cover my eyes.
My arms won’t move. Something thick and sturdy encases both my wrists, and a quick shift of my legs tells me those are bound, too.
“Sorry about that,” a voice says, muffled through the pounding of my heart.
“I wasn’t expecting you to wake so soon.
I’ll have to adjust your sedatives.” The bright light winks out overhead, leaving only a stripe of lighting across the ceiling.
Much less piercing, but it does nothing to alleviate the panic sparking every nerve in my body.
Fear balloons so wide in my chest, I swear it’ll spill out of my mouth.
If I were braver, I’d open my eyes. Take in whatever nightmare I’ve woken in.
Opening my eyes means acknowledging that this is real, and it can’t be real.
“I am sorry about all this,” the man says.
His footsteps shuffle as he moves around. When a shadow cuts through the light behind my eyelids, I force them open.
And everything in me crumbles.
I am in a room that could arguably be a doctor’s office, if regular doctor’s offices had lighting a bit too dim and mismatched old equipment.
Standing to the side of the exam table I’m strapped to is Oliver Holden.
Horror tastes like tar, clogs my throat, and thickens my tongue.
Holden. Paige and Mom’s childhood friend. The friendly neighbor always willing to help at the bookstore, always giving my aunt moon eyes.
If I had free hands to pinch myself awake, I would do it. But I can’t move. I can’t move, and I can’t think.
This whole time, the boogeyman hasn’t been lurking in the woods. He’s been at the neighborhood block parties.
“Why?” I ask. I mean to ask, Why are you doing this?
and Why are you doing this to me and to Jasper?
But the words refuse to come together in my mouth.
Probably from whatever Holden is pumping through the IV sticking out of my arm.
I can see it, liquid sliding down from a bag and into my veins, turning me to cement.
“You have to believe me when I say I never wanted you or Jasper to be involved. I care about Paige and your mom,” Holden says. He’s so casual, like we’re at the bookstore or in my kitchen. “But family comes first.”
He comes to lean over me, making it impossible to look away.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say, and my words come out more like a croak. Except I don’t even know what he’s doing. Not really. Only that he is the one doing it.
Not a monster. Not a creature in the woods. Just a man.
“You think I enjoy this?” Holden stops at the edge of the table, leaning so he can meet my eyes. “I never wanted this. Never wanted to—” He pauses. “I’m trying to keep my daughter alive.”
I shake my head. Tears well in my eyes and slide down my cheeks.
“What have you done?” I whisper, realizing too late how asinine it is to piss off the man who has me strapped to a gurney.
Holden goes quiet. I fight the urge to look at him. Instead, I stare at the ceiling. Cement with exposed piping running through it. I wish I were tiny, small enough to slip into the pipe and follow it out of here.
“Paige and your mom told you about Cecily? Her illness?”
I lift my chin, refusing him the dignity of a response. He continues like I’ve given one.
“She was four years old, Jo. Four,” he says. “And the doctors—my colleagues, my friends—gave her less than six months. She’d be dead before her fifth birthday.” He takes an unsteady breath. “In the span of one hour in her doctor’s office, we watched all the dreams we had for her die.”
As he talks, I test my restraints again. Ankles are cinched tight enough to hurt, but the wrists—
“Her mom couldn’t handle it. Three days after the diagnosis, she’d packed her things and taken off.
And two days after that, I lost funding on my study, the one keeping Cece alive.
So we moved home. Took the weight off my parents’ shoulders with the clinic and put extra eyes on Cece.
But the basic treatment wasn’t working.”
Paige mentioned Holden’s return to his hometown, described it like a reluctant adventurer returning.
“Just because my trial lost backing didn’t mean the concept was a failure.
The drug, Dyebucetin, it saves the dying from death, but we needed more time!
” He clenches his fists. “It takes a lot to convince a sick body it’s well.
Transplants from people my age would do nothing.
But a child? Cells that are still growing, learning?
” He waves a hand. “It was the most reasonable assumption. I had no choice. Cece was getting worse. I had the power to save her.”
“I don’t care about your reasons,” I say.
“She was innocent,” he says, a sudden rage lighting him up, face red and flushed. “And she was dying.” His jaw sets. “The entire purpose of my study was to figure out how to cure the incurable. Save the unsavable.”
I can’t stop the tears now. They come so fast, my vision blurs, and my throat closes.
“Isn’t there someone you’d do anything to save?” Holden asks. His eyes are frantic, and for a moment, he is as monstrous as all the stories.
I shake my head, hard, so hard I swear I can feel my brain smacking into the sides of my skull.
“Not even your friend?”
I have wished to swap places with Harper more times than I care to admit, but I can’t fathom trading someone else for her. A stranger. A kid, a teenager, like her. Someone else with their whole life unfurling ahead of them.
And even if I could, she’d never forgive me. I would never forgive me.
“We’re kids,” I say.
“And so was she.” He moves to the cabinets, hands shifting mindlessly over the random assortment of medical equipment. “It was never meant to be this way. I’d thought one round of treatment, one full circulation of healthy cells, would be enough. And for two years, it was. And then it wasn’t.”
Bile burns in the back of my throat. “So you did it again.”
All at once, the emotion clears from his face. “You can judge me, but all of those kids…” His lips curl in disdain. “This town barely blinked when they were gone. Their names never made it past the local news. No one fought for them. Not the way I fought for my child.”
Violence isn’t a language I’ve had much interest in speaking, but it’s what Holden deserves. He’s wrong, deluded, shrouding himself in mistruths to protect himself from what he’s done. The posters on the corkboard are proof enough that someone cared. That lots of people cared.
“Ingrid Halstead’s parents did,” I say. A dark grin tugs on my lips. “I bet that made it harder.”
He waves a hand. “Ingrid was a mistake,” he says.
Vitriolic anger burns through my limbs, making me tremble against my binds. “And Jasper?”
“Opportunity,” he says.
It would be too easy to be caught on some camera transporting a kid from another town or out of state. He’s trading risks.
“He’s seven. He trusted you. And you—”
“Did what I had to do.”
“All those kids,” I say. “All for one? How the hell is that a fair trade?”
Holden gives me a sad smile. I want to punch it off his lips.
“Welcome to the real world, Jo. Nothing is fair.”
He grabs a syringe off the cabinet and pulls on my IV. I instinctively scramble back to no avail.
“Sleep well, Jo. This will all be over soon.” He pauses. “For you, at least.”
He pushes down on the syringe, plunging the murky liquid into my line. I watch it slide into my veins.
It won’t be over, I want to scream.
It won’t be over. It wasn’t over for any of them. This is only the beginning of a slow, horrific march toward death. But the sedatives are swimming through my blood, and I can’t say anything at all. I fight the exhaustion until it drags my eyes shut and pulls me under.