Chapter 9
nine
She was awake when the window broke.
Well, maybe not awake but certainly not asleep.
Instead, Sophie was lost in fuzzy half-consciousness, utterly cried-out, wishing for her own bed and her own kitchen instead of yet another clutch of near-inedible fast food.
For people who ate junk all the time they were awfully slim and energetic, each one long and lean and graceful.
Apparently, being werewolves was good for something. Jesus.
She’d refused to eat or speak further, withdrawing inside her head the way she used to when Marc was on one of his rampages.
They left her blessedly alone after a while, so she just curled tighter and tighter around herself, all elbows and knees like an angry preschooler.
Julia had kept turning the television up, Zach kept turning it down, while the smell of fried food made Sophie’s head ache and her stomach rumble.
Werewolves. Oh, my God. Tiny shivers would race through her at the thought. But she’d seen it, Zach’s flesh melting and reshaping, hair sliding free, and that sound—a thunderous growl that shouldn’t, couldn’t come from a human chest, with weird clicking stops at the end.
Oddly enough, he told her she wasn’t crazy.
But werewolves, for God’s sake. And poor Lucy, and Lucy’s body, and the terrible gaping hole in Lucy’s throat…
round and round she went inside her own head, then Sophie would flinch again, pull herself together more tightly, and try to find some way to banish all this terrible insanity from her aching brain.
It wasn’t working. At all
They had arranged themselves on the other twin bed or on the floor to sleep, Julia whining that Sophie had a mattress all to herself and Eric saying, “She’s the shaman,” just like someone would say, It’s raining.
Zach stood near the door for a long time, dark head bowed and muscular arms crossed.
The others whispered, glancing at him until he shook his shaggy hair as if dislodging a bad thought.
They quieted like he’d shushed them, then Zach settled down cross-legged, clearly intending to sleep sitting up.
Sophie turned over, drew her knees up again, and tried in vain to think of a way out.
Her head simply wouldn’t let all the horror fit inside—she would try to put everything together, and one piece would fall out, usually with a terrible zinging pain.
Lucy’s agonized dying gasps would echo inside her, or the thing snarling with its white shirt blackened-wet down the front.
And she would flinch, her stomach churning.
It didn’t help that her skin felt scrubbed raw.
Everything was so loud, clothing and sheets rasping like jagged metal.
The sough of breathing like bellows. Her skin hurt, each sound sandpaper over worn-thin nerves.
Her entire body flushed and tingled oddly.
She wondered if you could get an allergic reaction from just the smell of MSG-laden fast food, and tried to find a comfortable way to lie.
Sleep was an utter impossibility, not least because it would render her even more vulnerable to the craziness.
So when the window shattered and the noise started, she sat bolt upright. A terrible tidal reek of old dirt and rotting spice-rubbed cheesecloth blew into the room. The door shattered, kicked inward; someone leapt on her bed, grabbing and rolling.
The confusion ended with her on the floor between the beds, Zach untangling himself and barking, “Stay down!” before he vanished.
The lamp on the nightstand shattered; the growling, snapping, screams shading into yowls like a huge enraged cat reached a pitch just short of madness.
Habit sent her hand fishing for her glasses—thankfully, they were right on the nightstand where she’d left them, though the lamp’s shards were sharp against her frantic fingers for an endless, nightmarish second.
She might have stayed there, crouched with her hands over her ears, if she hadn’t heard a gurgling noise, like water swirling down a recalcitrant drain.
It reminded her of Lucy’s throat and the terrible bubbling, gaping wound. Her knee pressed something small and pebbled—Lucy’s tiny jeweled purse, the keys inside ruthlessly spearing her patella.
Sophie grabbed the bag and threw herself toward the end of the bed.
Something flew overhead, snapping and snarling; hot drops of foul-smelling liquid spattered.
She screamed, miserably, a small sound lost in boiling cacophony, and crawled for the door.
Someone tripped over her, a booted foot sinking solidly into her side; all her breath fled as her stomach backed up, trying to wring itself out her throat.
Cold air drenched the carpet as a coppery stink roiled.
Sophie scrambled through the shattered door on all fours, crying out again as a sliver the size of a tree trunk pierced the meat of her left hand.
Her hastily swallowed yell was lost in the huge noise, too, and the sliver was pulled free as she raised her hand.
She made it to the pebbled concrete walkway outside, scrambled to sockfeet.
Ran, the little jeweled purse clutched in her bleeding fist and soles slapping the concrete so hard she felt the reverberations in each tooth.
The stairs unreeled under her, and a sudden vivid image of tripping, cartwheeling over and over before smashing her skull on the pavement below, managed to slow her for only half a second.
The parking lot blurred by, a Coke machine screaming red; she made it to the lot’s entrance, framed with high holly bushes.
Her breath plumed white in frosty night air.
And there, looming out of the night like a fresh yellow beacon of hope, was an honest-to-God taxi. Riverside Car Service was painted on the side in orange, with a cheery decal that resembled mushroom but was probably intended to be a grinning cartoon car.
“Stop!” she screamed, waving her hands like a maniac or a drowning woman; wonder of wonders, the cab braked smoothly. She reached for the back door just as the front passenger window rolled down.
“Lady, you on drugs?” The cabbie, a short, thick, bristled fellow, peered through Coke-bottom glasses at her. Her own lenses were smeared and smudged; her head hurt, spikes driven through her temples. The tingling, flushing weirdness on her skin receded under the cold, fresh air.
“Of course I’m not.” Her throat was raw, and she winced, groping for something reasonable to say.
The noise wasn’t nearly so overwhelming out here in the parking lot, but in another few minutes that might change.
“There’s a party going on here and I want to go home.
Can you take me to the train station? Please?
” Oh god, don’t speed away, please give me a break, please God help me.
She tried to look drug-free and vulnerable at the same time, digging in the purse and pulling out a random handful of cash—all she could afford to take dancing last night.
She’d been grousing to herself over the waste—it was half her grocery bill for the month, dammit.
“Look, I can pay and I’m not any trouble, honest. I just want to go home. ” Her breath caught on a sob.
Behind her, dim faraway noise took on a different quality—a chilling animal howl ending a series of guttural broken stops. God, you have no idea how much I just want to go home. Please help me.
The cabbie’s eyes turned round; the lock on the back door chucked up. “Get in, lady. Don’t stand around.”
She clambered into the cab, slamming the door so hard she was amazed the window didn’t shatter.
“You damn lucky,” he said as he pulled away, excruciatingly slowly. “I usually tell people get out, they slam the door that hard. This thing’s my livelihood, ya know.”
Jesus Christ, what the hell was that? “I’m sorry.
” Her throat was on fire and her glasses were probably never going to be the same.
Three hundred fifty bucks she couldn’t afford for the frames alone.
“I guess I’m… I’m sorry.” Werewolves. And what the hell was that?
Something came in the window, they were fighting.
More werewolves? Jesus Christ. I can’t believe I’m even thinking this.
And I saw it and heard it all myself. More fresh night air poured through the driver’s window; it felt so, so good against her fevered cheeks and sweating hands.
She gulped in the close, comforting reek of exhaust, vinyl, the muggy smell of other people who’d sat in this very seat.
Real people. Human people.
“Aw, don’t worry about it.” His cold-coffee gaze skittered to the rearview, returned to the road. “What happened to you, lady? You look awful scared.”
Scared seemed too pale a word to encompass this emotion. So did relieved. Only a massive effort of will prevented Sophie from twisting in the seat to look out the back window.
If this guy got the idea she was maybe being followed, he might decide not to help after all.
“My ex-husband,” she said, softly. Lying, Sophie? But you’re getting away from kidnapping werewolves, that’s got to be a karmic pass. And besides, she had the terrified-woman look down pat; it fit just like an old shoe. “He’s a real… He’s—”
After a few moments, the cabbie felt around on the seat next to him. He produced, of all things, a battered box of Kleenex, held with one hand over the seat back; it was a mercy this cab didn’t have a bulletproof shield between driver and passenger.
“Wipe you face, honey.” He sounded much kinder now. “You leakin’.”
* * *
Fifteen hours later, bone-tired, still in sockfeet, freezing, and so tired even her hair hurt, Sophie locked her own apartment door with shaking, weak fingers.
The scab on her left palm crackled with pain; the familiar warm scent of an apple-cinnamon candle Lucy had brought as a housewarming gift managed to penetrate her running nose.
Christ, I’m a mess. The thought drowned in a flood of relief so strong her knees actually went weak.
She slumped against the door, wishing she had more than two dead bolts and a chain. A mad mental vision of nailing boards over the opening like a cartoon character danced through her tired skull. The little plastic-jeweled purse dangled from her fingers.
Nobody knew she’d planned to go out with Luce. But there were her friend’s car keys, big as life and twice as ugly. She should have dropped them off the train somewhere, except Luce had Sophie’s house keys on her ring as well, and Sophie had left her own at home.
Then throw them away. Just get them out of here.
She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, or the kind of irrational impulse that might take hold of a woman after she’d been kidnapped by werewolves, seen vampires—and, oh yeah, witnessed the death of her best and only friend.
Pale beige carpeting lay stark and sane under pearly morning light, the walls still bare of everything but a single print of van Gogh’s Starry Night—another gift from Lucy.
One bedroom, one bath, a living room, and a kitchen barely wide enough for two skinny women to stand in.
She’d traded the luxurious mansion out in the Hammerheath suburb for this little slice of paper-thin walls and baseboard heating in what Marc always called “the blue-collar slum.”
But it was all hers, and she paid her rent a month ahead of time by living on ramen and frozen peas—plus a generous helping of Lucy’s cooking.
These were, after all, the types of places she’d grown up in.
Big apartment blocks crowding tiny corner stores, trash bins overflowing outside the supers’ doorways, kids playing in the streets, and the sounds of other people carrying on with their lives behind every flimsy door.
She’d even thought Marc was the prince, taking her away from the noise and the stink.
He’d turned out to be something else entirely. Everybody did. For example, she never would have thought flighty, bubbly Lucy would be the friend to stick by her through all through hell and back.
And now Luce was gone. Sitting on a train gave a woman entirely too much time to think; the inside of Sophie’s brain felt moth-eaten and acid-dipped all at once.
Oh, God. She almost slid down the door to collapse on the square of linoleum in front. No welcome mat on the other side, even, but then, Sophie never felt particularly welcoming anymore. She didn’t want anyone to know where she lived.
Except Lucy.
God. Oh, God.
Her face crumpled, and she pushed herself into motion. Her fingers cramped; she mechanically slid the keys back into the purse and dropped both on the counter next to her own cheap black vinyl bag, placed precisely next to a stack of textbooks so she could take the ones she needed every morning.
“I have a Child Development final this week,” she muttered, blankly, to her empty apartment.
It was midmorning and the entire building was strangely deserted for a weekend.
Maybe everyone was sleeping, or hungover.
Another cab had let her off right in front, and nobody—not even the conductor on the train—had said a word about her feet.
She was going to starve a bit next month; she’d had barely enough to pay her way home and her savings were nonexistent.
None of it mattered. Sophie dragged herself into the bedroom. The blinds weren’t down; she’d forgotten to pull them Friday night. It was Sunday, and she could sleep in her own bed—she had escaped werewolves and God only knew what else.
And Lucy was dead. A little voice inside Sophie’s head tried to tell her she was forgetting something, that she was the responsible one, and that it should have been her gasping and choking in that alleyway instead of beautiful, burning-bright Lucy Cavanaugh.
She was rubbing her hands against the flannel shirt they’d given her, Soph realized. Scrubbing and scrubbing, like some mad Lady Macbeth.
With a short sob, she tore the flannel off, stripped herself out of the jeans, and pulled the thermal shirt over her head.
Her own bra and panties followed. She left everything crumpled in a stinking pile right next her bedroom door, took three steps to the floor-bound, neatly made mattress she called her own bed, and managed to crawl under the covers.
At least these sheets and blankets didn’t scrape her skin like sandpaper. And they smelled like comfort.
Like home.
She sobbed for a long while, curled around the one lonely pillow that had seen her tears in the women’s shelter and later as well, during the endless rounds of divorce hearings.
When she fell asleep, it was a slumber so dark and dreamless the fluttering at her bedroom window, under the pale grey sky threatening snow, went unnoticed.
She woke only once, as the sky shaded into cold flat darkness of early winter night, and fumbled for her alarm clock.
With it turned on, she had no more responsibility for the rest of the day, and she immediately fled back into welcome unconsciousness.