Chapter 7
Donna sucked on the straw until her mouth was full and then spat orange juice into the nurse’s face.
The nurse squawked and patted her face with the sleeve of her uniform. While the nurse was trying to recover her composure,
Donna kicked the cart. It went over with a jingling crash and the glass bowl with the oatmeal in it smashed.
“Be good,” said Joe Valentine.
“Make me,” Donna said. She was almost enjoying herself.
Until Joe Valentine flipped on her TV and she saw Van. He was in bed, wrapped in a cheap quilt just like the one in her room,
turned on his side. His skinny feet stuck out from the bottom of his cocoon.
“What’s your point?” Donna said. She wanted to sound dismissive, untouchable, and didn’t quite pull it off.
“Donnie didn’t have breakfast, and because of you, now he’s not going to have lunch. If you still can’t control yourself,
we’ll pump sodium pentachlorophenate into his room.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Neither do I, really. When it was applied to prisoners in North Vietnam, it caused chest pain, breathing distress, and a
feeling that the arteries were filled with acid instead of blood. Convulsions, eventually, although I’d like to avoid that
on the first day.”
“You can’t do that. We have rights. Even in a war, prisoners have rights. You can’t just . . . set his blood on fire.”
“What about Haruto Sagawa and the thirty or so followers who died with him? What about Horation Matthews? Were their deaths in the spirit of the Geneva Convention? I don’t think so.
To be clear, nor do I care—my sympathies for a man who offered aid and comfort to the Oklahoma City bombers are limited.
The point I’m making is that there isn’t going to be one set of rules for you and your friends and another for us.
If you can burn up people who bother you, well, Donna, so can we! ”
Donna looked at the TV. Her brother didn’t move. It might almost have been a still picture.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Good girl. Let’s start small. What do you call it? The creature that obliterated three of my men, several bystanders, and
half a dozen parked cars?”
She had decided to tell him something, until he called her a good girl. It turned out one didn’t need to inhale sodium pentachlorophenate
to feel their arteries were on fire.
“I’m not supposed to say,” she said. “That’s one of the rules.”
A line appeared across his handsome brow. “There are rules?”
She nodded.
“Why can’t you say his name?”
“It’s like what you said in Penn Station. Names have power. And if you know his name,” she said, “you can command him.”
His eyes widened slightly. Donna looked at the nurse, and past him to the bored-looking widebody with the Tom Selleck mustache
who stood by the door. She nodded toward them meaningfully.
“They can’t hear,” she said. “The fewer people who know, the better. Can you send them out of the room?”
“No, but what if you whisper it to me?”
Donna considered, then nodded shyly.
Joe Valentine sat on the foot of the bed with her and leaned his head toward hers. She put her mouth close to his ear—then
snapped her teeth together on it.
Valentine screamed. She chewed. She sank her teeth in as hard as she had ever sunk them into anything in her life, chewed and twisted, her mouth filling with the sweet salty burn of blood.
He struggled to get away, shrieking, batting ineffectually at her.
The widebody came alive, reached her side, and tried to pry them apart.
For a moment she opened her teeth, but only to get a better hold, taking half the ear into her mouth, snarling with delight.
She gave a last violent wrench of the head and tore off nearly the entirety of his right ear. She spat it into Joe Valentine’s face.
The big man gave her an elbow in the breastbone and she was driven back, fell across the tangle of sheets. Valentine screamed
and screamed, clapping one hand to the side of his head, falling off the foot of the bed to his knees, the nurse grabbing
for him. Donna sprawled on the bed, making desperate gasping noises, tears trickling from the corners of her eyes.
By the time the widebody and the nurse got Valentine to the door, Donna had her breath back, and her gasps had resolved into
laughter.