Chapter 30
I run down Mercer Street, cut through a neighborhood of graceful almost mansions, wood and stone, over to the Institute for Advanced Study, where, Alice told me, Albert Einstein taught before Princeton University was willing to hire more than a few Jewish professors (she’d read a historical fiction murder mystery).
In the open field in front, there are two rows of towering, half-bare London plane trees lining what looks like a promenade for giants, which leads up to the stately building.
Everything smells like the late-fall forest, which is just a fringe of purplish brown and dusty orange around the perimeter.
This whole town wants to be a forest, is secretly a forest.
I loop back, weaving through the European-feeling labyrinth of campus: slate and ivy and gargoyles with their beaks open in a silent shriek of old-fashioned arrogance.
I am thirsty but it isn’t holding me back.
Down steps and through quiet courtyards where centuries-old cedar trees lift their lumbering, proud heads.
Up steps again. There’s almost no one here—the students must be on Thanksgiving break; they have vanished in a puff like a wizard waved a wand over the place.
I see my hand connecting with Ella’s small face, I hear the sound, see her eyes.
I dash over the bridge that crosses Washington Street, fly by a small herd of shirtless guys running the other way.
So not all the students went home; the wizard missed a few.
Flick, flick, flick, flick, I make eye contact with each one like thumbing through a deck of cards.
I think I can smell their healthy sweat.
I feel like a raptor, talons flexing toward them even as my wings haul me obediently away.
The way I changed Dee, manipulated her.
My friend’s husband. I might have done it.
I hit Ella.
I am losing myself, forgetting myself. Replacing myself with this upgraded, jacked-up version who can run forever. Who never tires. Who feels unfulfilled and unstoppable. Who isn’t quite right. Who might kill someone not just by accident but for fun.
Dark is spilling down the sky; the moon comes on like a searchlight as the trees spread into shadows.
I think about Joel’s grandmother. Telling him they’re saving the world, they’re eradicating evil, whatever it was she said to him.
His healing touch, the way it kills us. It’s supposed to kill us. We’re supposed to die.
Is he right? Am I a disease? Not really human? Am I evil?
Al said no, I’m good. But I’m unusual for it.
For trying to be good. The evil is very much there in me.
And now that I’ve been feeling so strong, can I really return to weakness?
I don’t feel noble, like he seemed to think I am.
I feel like I can hardly last a day. I feel like I’m on the verge of splitting apart like dry wood, cracking down the center.
I shake my head as though a biting fly has landed on me and I refuse to be bitten.
My chest begins to ache as I push myself faster. I want the thud of my shoes on the pavement to blot out my thoughts, to fill my head with nothing but forward movement.
But I am home already, at the top of our little hill, the dried-out echinacea bristling against the porch, Piggie lounging, oblivious, in the chill dusk, the cold moon swollen just above the trees.
I pant for a few moments on the porch, bent over, hands on my thighs, bile spiking in my throat.
There it is, my limit. I almost didn’t notice I had reached it.
And then Dee is in the doorway, and light pours out of the house in a sudden river. I straighten as she says, “Fuck,” and I realize she’s regained her memory, she knows what I did, she’s furious.
But it’s not fury.
“I thought you were Ella,” she says. “We can’t find her!”
“What?”
“Mom got distracted. I thought she was watching her, I was upstairs. She’s just—gone.” She’s not panicking, that isn’t her way, but she’s incandescent with alarm.
“Did you check the nook?” A window seat on the stairs up to Mom’s room we turned into a little blanket cave for Ella.
“Of course. And the backyard. Why would she go outside, though?”
“She wouldn’t.” Ella doesn’t do things like that. Ella likes things to be predictable and safe. “Al is out looking for her, but he said he can’t smell her as well as you or something because she doesn’t have the right blood— I don’t know!”
I push past Dee into the house. “Ella!” I call, just in case she’s angry and needs to hear from me specifically.
There’s no answer.
“Is she mad at you for some reason?” Dee asks, as tuned in as always.
“Maybe.”
She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t know I hit Ella. It has been erased.
I don’t even know where to look; they’ve already looked. Here’s Mom, coming out of the library/art room/mudroom, frazzled and fraying, guilt radiating off her.
“I must’ve turned around for a minute, just a minute,” she emphasizes to me.
Dee holds up a banishing hand at this.
I turn on my heel, staring stupidly across the kitchen. And then I see something. Or rather, I don’t see something.
The skateboard is missing.
I left it right there, propped against the shoe basket on the other side of the bench by the front door.
Ella was supposed to take it down to the basement, but she forgot, of course, and it’s been there since we went to the playground and got stalked by Joel.
Since we met Al. The helmet had ended up in the basket with the shoes, as Ella’s outerwear tends to, but it isn’t there now.
Her pink coat with the flying rabbits is also gone.
“She went out,” I say, and then I’m rushing outside again.
Where did she go? To the park? I whirl back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, startling a woman walking her dog. She tiptoes quickly away, around the corner.
“How long has she been gone?” I call back to Dee, who turns out to be right behind me.
“Not long—we’ve only been looking for, I don’t know, minutes, maybe—but I don’t know how long it took Mom to tell me. It feels long, it’s probably not that long.”
But I don’t see Ella.
I did this. This is all my fault. Obviously. “Where did you go?” I whisper.
“Ella!” Dee yells, practically in my ear. “Ella! Can you hear me?”
Our neighbor’s dog starts barking.
“She went to Joel’s,” I say to myself. I leap over the steps, rocket back into the house, snatch my phone from the kitchen counter, where it has been patiently waiting for me.
My fingers slide as I pull up his name. I call him, already outside again, jogging down the hill.
Dee is going the other way. Mom is outside now, too, also yelling for Ella.
She was mad at me. For some reason, my power doesn’t work on her, or maybe I didn’t try.
She wasn’t fooled. She must be devastated, furious, a snarl of confusion.
Dee was busy and not acting like herself.
Mom was probably checking Facebook. She got her skateboard and went to see the adult who always listens to her.
“Pick up, pick up,” I tell the phone, looking from side to side as I go. She wasn’t even close to confident enough on the board to go down this very slight hill. She must’ve carried it.
“Why are you calling me?” says Joel’s warm voice in my ear. My brain stumbles, his voice and the words at odds, negating each other, a tiny space-time rupture. He should know why I’m calling.
No, she might not be there yet.
“Ella isn’t there?”
“Here? With me? No. Why would she be?”
“Because she took her skateboard and she’s gone!” I hear that I sound panicked.
“Oh no,” he says. “Wait, I’ll come. Where are you?”
“I’m just on our block, but she might have cut through the park. Or maybe she went up— ” I’m suddenly forgetting the names of streets.
Why am I so afraid? Ella can find her way to Joel’s. She will probably show up there in a minute. But it’s almost full night now. A little girl, alone in the November dark. Even at 6:00 pm in a safe town, it’s a risk.
“I’m outside,” he says, and I hear the door shutting behind him. “I don’t see her here. I’m going to go toward the park.”
“Okay,” I say, and then I see it.
The skateboard, abandoned on the grate of a storm drain.
It’s far away, hardly visible, at the bottom of the hill across the street from here.
Near the yard of the white house that Ella and I sometimes say a friendly witch might live in, with the orange door and the front garden full of twig skeletons that were recently lush, fanning ferns.
I almost didn’t see the skateboard, but now that I do it seems unmissable. It’s like a tropical fish flung by a wave onto the beach where it lies dead, sleek yellow-and-purplestriped sides shocking, even when grayed by the dark.
“Joel,” I hear myself say into the phone, which I am still pressing to my ear. “I see her skateboard.”
“What do you mean?” he says instantly.
“Did someone take her?” I ask him.
Then I’m running, and I don’t hear his response if he says anything. I’m no longer even aware of myself holding up the phone. I tear down the hill.
I hear someone behind me. “Do you see her?” Dee is yelling. She must have seen me launch into a sprint.
Someone took her. Someone drove by—the car that was following us that day, it is catapulting back into my mind. Is it connected to me? Is it my fault? But how? My brain is frantic with stammering, demented explanations that evaporate even as they form.
I hear Dee see the skateboard. She cries out, anguished. “Oh my God! T, is that—is that hers?”
I don’t answer.
“T, where is she?” There is something guttural, something animal in her voice, something that will gnaw off its own leg if trapped.
I swing around the boxwood bush at the bottom of the hill.
Across the street from the skateboard. And I almost trip over something.
A fallen, wrong thing with a bright smooth top: a pink helmet.
I slow way down. In fact, I feel like I’m in slow motion—the air has turned to sludge and I push through it as I bend down, lift the helmet into my jellyfish hands.
There is something inside it. A piece of paper, folded neatly.
Now Dee is beside me. She takes the folded paper out of the helmet, snaps it open. I see the words.
Just the succubus. 7:00 at the battlefield monument.
Bring nothing and no one. Otherwise the girl dies.