Chapter Seventeen Dreams may come
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dreams may come
THE ROOM WAS DARK, PITCH-BLACK almost. The only light came from the soft glow of an emerald ceiling lamp.
Against its cool radiance, metal gleamed all around me: the outlines of machines.
There was a table saw covered with blocks of wood and shavings.
A line of rolling tracks led into it—a conveyor belt, I realized.
For feeding wood into the machine. But the tracks were stained with rust, the color so deep it almost looked like—
I stumbled back again, knocking into a cabinet.
Handheld jigsaws sat discarded there, and a nail puncher tumbled to the ground as my back collided with the shelves. Across the room, there were more machines. A row of band saws—the metal lengths of their blades glinting and stained in the light—a wood processor, and others I couldn’t recognize.
At the center of it all, shining in the hypnotic gaze of the emerald light, was a long metal table saw.
I realized that the humming and trembling I’d felt from earlier had been coming from the machines.
Someone had turned them on. The roar of their blades made the whole room shake.
Something living was here. I didn’t know how, but it was pulsing, shrinking and expanding with the groans and sighs of the heavy machinery that made up its organs.
Outside, the figure’s laughter rippled from the walls.
“A life for a life. His numbered days are bound to yours.”
A force yanked my hand.
Kasem’s bracelet. It’d gotten caught on a notch.
I lurched forward, trying to pull my hand away.
But the more I tried to free myself, the harder it was to keep my balance.
The force was anchoring me there, using my weight against me.
It pulled me forward and pain ripped through my wrist as it yanked me along the track, toward the mouth of the table saw.
The ground rumbled beneath me. Lights flickered. Cold numbed my fingertips.
The table saw. It roared to life. A rusty blade emerged from its mouth. Its jagged edges were streaked with the same russet stains I’d noticed earlier. But now, with the lights flickering and the machine groaning, it was clear what the stains were. Blood. Not rust. Blood.
I screamed, clawing at the bracelet, yanking and pulling until blood streaked my nail beds. But it wouldn’t give way. And neither would the machine.
If I didn’t stop the machine, I was going to die.
Fear gripped me, blurring my vision and twisting my insides into a gooey pulp.
I searched frantically, but there was nothing close enough for me to grasp that I could use to jam the gears or the blade.
Helpless, I reached for my shoe, tearing off my loafer and sock and throwing them into the mouth of the machine.
But the rusted blades tore them apart, relishing the brief taste of leather and cotton.
My terror gave way to despair. I’d thought that coming to Westfield would fix everything. I’d been wrong. So, so wrong. In the piercing screams of the engines, a refrain swallowed the room.
Beware the mark of blood debts. Beware, beware, beware…
Suddenly, the engines halted. It was only for a moment, but in that second, something pulled me from the arms of the machine.
I—or, we—fell with a crash. My elbows hit the hard ground and the length of my arm was seared by skid marks as we tumbled beneath the machine.
It was pulsing and quaking, but strong arms shielded me from the worst of it.
When I looked up, I found myself staring into the depths of warm brown eyes.
“Jojo,” I whispered. But the mirage faded and it was Kasem who stared back at me.
I pressed my eyes shut, fighting the fear that coursed through my body. His grip tightened around me, his left hand firm along the small of my waist, his right acting as a barrier between my head and the ground.
With his tall height and how we were curled together, our legs were intertwined. Blood rushed to my cheeks at the feel of him and the weight of his body on top of mine. Even as I tried to shift away, my lips brushed his exposed collarbone, my mouth just inches from his neck.
Kasem swallowed at my touch, the curve of his Adam’s apple stark against his throat.
Despite myself, I sank into the warmth of him, relieved, terrified, and bitter, even as our racing hearts beat in time with each other.
If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have to be here. I’d have full control over my powers without pain. I wouldn’t have this all-consuming doubt about Jojo and what happened that night in the alleyway.
The machine loomed above us, trembling, enraged at the missed encounter for blood.
Before I could speak, Kasem took my hand.
“Want to explain why you have this?” he said. He held up my wrist, where his bracelet dangled.
When I tried to answer, the only thing I could do was search for words; a string of disconnected sentences escaped my lips.
“The accidents. Gus’s shop. Help.”
Kasem frowned, incredulous.
“You want my help,” he said. “After you, my brother, and Alaster tried to get me expelled?”
“That was all them,” I said, breathless.
“And it was probably just Alaster who orchestrated the meeting with the president. I never lied about what happened. You helped me. But you saw the figure—and you were hiding it.” It had tried to kill me in the maze.
It’d tried again here in the woodshop. When I said these thoughts aloud, the color drained from Kasem’s eyes.
“You’ve been marked.”
“Marked,” I repeated. “What are you talking about?”
My gaze fell to his right cheek. Moments before, in the president’s office, it’d been scratched and bleeding.
But the skin there was freshly healed, the only trace that he’d been injured at all barely present in the faint trail of red against his jaw.
Again, my migraine gnawed at my head. I reached for him, and he flinched.
Gently, I brushed the back of my palm against where the wound had been. His skin was cold, as if the chill in the air had seeped into his very bones.
“It’s gone,” I whispered. “It healed. But it was just there.”
He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
Impossible. This was entirely surreal. Even with my visions and ability to see into lifelines, I’d never seen something like what I’d witnessed in the maze and the woodshop, or even now. Something like… magic. Something not of this world.
Kasem wrapped his fingers around my wrist. I hadn’t expected his hands to be so big, so encompassing, and as he moved my hand away from him, he wouldn’t look at me.
“Let’s go somewhere where it’s safe,” he said. “Come with me.”
Instead of standing, we stayed beneath the machine, crawling to the other side of the room where another door stood ajar.
Metal shards cut my palm, but I could barely feel them.
All of me was focused on escaping, which might have been easier to do if Kasem would let go of my hand.
But he didn’t and I didn’t want him to, afraid that if he let go, somehow I’d be devoured by the machine and the figure without eyes.