62 Joey
Joey
They wind up the steep driveway with their hearts in their throats, silence screaming in their ears.
Sophie’s headlights pale compared to the massive glass house and its clinical halogen glow.
Joey catches a movement inside a ground-floor window.
It’s him. It’s Cal. He’s doing something with his back toward them, but he turns when he notices the car.
And when he does, the screaming silence turns into a real scream.
It’s coming from Sophie, and one second later, Joey realizes why. Because now she sees it too.
Someone lies on the couch, at the level of Cal’s knees, unmoving.
Joey’s not even sure Sophie puts the car in park as they both leap out and race toward the house.
Cal is clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and it’s as bright as the middle of the day inside the house.
He looks concerned at first, calculating something.
And then he turns back around, kneeling.
Elena. Her beautiful hair is two-dimensional beneath her, flattened on the slick black couch. There are no wounds that Joey can make out, but she isn’t moving. Her eyes are closed, like she’s passed out or—
Joey watches Elena’s chest, waiting for it to rise.
Any second now, she’s going to see her ribs move up and down.
She waits. She searches her body for signs of movement, for a twitch or a blink.
Cal has finally started to check her vitals, or at least that’s what it looks like.
But then he moves down toward her feet and tugs up one of her pant legs.
He runs a finger along her bare skin, in a motion that makes Joey’s own skin tingle.
He shifts Elena’s leg and lowers it so it hangs limply off the side of the couch.
Joey runs to the front door and slams her fists into it.
She calls for him to let them in, but he only gives her a half glance and then continues doing what he’s doing.
She tries the handle, but it’s locked. She runs back to the window, and when she gets there, she thinks she sees the smallest movement: Elena’s chest rising an inch, then falling. Did she imagine it?
“Joey.” Sophie’s voice has the thin timbre of sheer panic. Joey can’t see Cal clearly with his back to them, but she can see needles and vials and strange medical devices and a very sharp knife.
She runs away from the window, leaving Sophie to bang on the glass and scream. Joey slips in mud as she scours the ground around the driveway.
“Soph!” she calls as loud as she can, hoping she is heard over the torrent of rain. A colorless flash of lightning momentarily brightens everything around her.
She sees Sophie splashing toward her. Soon, she’s there, at Joey’s elbow.
She doesn’t stop to ask questions. She doesn’t need to.
She sees what Joey needs and bends down to help.
Their motions are completely in sync as they lift the enormous rock.
Their hands are slick, and they almost drop it several times on the way over to the house.
It has to weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, but somehow they manage to lift it up to chest height.
They nod a countdown in unison and then hurl it at the glass with a duo of guttural roars.
It chips the window and drops with a violent crack.
When it hits the pavement, a piece slices off the side, like glacial ice cascading into the sea.
Cal jerks straight up at the sound. He does not seem to meet their panic with equal emotion.
Instead, he looks annoyed, no more than a father about to demand they keep the noise down so he can concentrate.
Joey thinks about calling the police, but her phone is with Nicola. “Hurry, call nine-one-one,” Joey says.
Sophie looks stricken. “I don’t have my phone.”
They turn back to the window. “Please!” shouts Sophie at the same time Joey yells, “Let us in, you piece of shit!”
Joey looks down at Elena and sees that she is still lying awkwardly on the couch. Joey thinks, in a moment of elemental relief, that, yes, she does see Elena’s chest lift and then fall. Lift and fall. And again. She is alive.
Cal chooses to ignore them and grabs a glass bowl, then kneels next to Elena’s leg.
His body obscures Joey’s view. She can’t see what he’s doing, but only a few seconds pass before he stands decisively.
What Joey sees there alerts every cell in her body, and they respond with rigid shock.
He’s sliced her skin. No, deeper than that.
He’s sliced an artery by the looks of it.
Blood gushes from the wound like oil from an impaled gas can.
It begins to collect in the bowl beneath her.
Joey cannot breathe. Her muscles are incapable of movement, except for a slight involuntary tremor, but her brain—her brain revs like an engine in a stalled car.
She has to figure out how to get in. There must be a way in.
She scans the side of the house for any cracks or open windows. You’d think a glass house would be fragile, that there would be vulnerabilities somewhere, but it seems in this horrible moment to be a fortress.
Sophie, meanwhile, has collected fist-sized rocks and is hurling them at the glass, to no effect except to further irritate Cal.
“Stop!” he shouts. It’s the first time he’s spoken, and Joey’s shocked that she can hear him so clearly despite the barrier between them. He holds his head between his hands as if the noise is too much for him. “I just need a minute.”
Sophie, unbelievably, seems to find words. “Cal,” she says. “It’s not too late. You need to apply pressure. Stop the bleeding.” Her voice is steady, and Joey has no idea how since her own body is quaking so hard, she thinks she might start convulsing.
He doesn’t move except to curl his fingers around a vial in his palm. “Elena came to me,” he says. “Just like Quinn.”
Joey feels like she’s going to burst open. “Don’t say her name,” she manages. She doesn’t clarify which name she means. She’s not even sure she knows.
Joey joins Sophie and launches a rock at the glass, and then when it makes no more than a tiny scratch, she picks it up and does it again. And again. Cal half turns to them again. “Stop it!” he shouts. “I need this. It’s as much mine as it is hers,” he says.
Joey keeps looking around, keeps assessing.
How is there no way in? Sophie joins her in the barrage of rocks being chucked at the glass.
Cal’s eyes drop to the nicks the small stones make, which are just next to the deep chip the bigger rock made.
For one flash of a moment, he looks worried.
But, just as quickly, the moment is over, and he turns back to work.
The sole of Elena’s foot is submerged in her own blood.
The bowl is filling up fast with crimson liquid.
It’s obvious now that her face has lost its normal color.
Her hands, too, look pale. She is being emptied.
Cal takes a vial in his fingertips and dips it into the bowl of blood.
Joey watches in horror as he pulls at the fat syringe.
Thick red blood fills it to the top. He inverts the syringe, then replaces the tip with a thin intravenous needle with practiced deftness.
Looking directly at Joey with red eyes and a manic smile, he pulls his shirt up, revealing the muscular shadows of someone who exercises compulsively.
He jabs himself and presses the blood—Elena’s blood—through the syringe, from the needle into his body.
A surge of bile finds its way to the back of Joey’s throat.
She forces it down with her rage at this glass house—impenetrable, and yet somehow the only thing keeping her from saving Elena.
Elena is dying, and Cal Pierce is a fucking lunatic.
Beside her, Sophie is alternating between desperately calling, “Cal, please,” and kicking at the glass with the heel of her boot.
Suddenly, Joey is all adrenaline. She races away from the house and ducks into the car.
“Sophie!” she calls out. Sophie turns toward the headlights.
She must understand what Joey wants because she runs toward her and leaps into the passenger side.
They each take a steadying breath and nod a synchronized mental countdown.
And then Joey’s foot is on the gas, and the car is squealing forward.
In a few seconds, they’re at the window.
Joey closes her eyes as the car smashes into the house.
The sound of shattering glass is everywhere.
They’re inside. The window wall is gone.
Cal stands, wolfish, just on the other side of the couch.
Joey tumbles out of the car, shards biting her knees as she scrapes her way to her feet.
She has no plan. She has no thoughts other than one: He will try to stop her from getting to Elena, but she also feels, primally, that it doesn’t matter.
She will get to Elena anyway. Shards crunch beneath her shoes.
Sophie climbs out of the car and stands behind her.
Joey and Cal are squaring up now, two boxers in a ring.
He watches her for a moment and then bends down slowly.
When he stands again, it’s with something in his hand.
The knife he used to cut Elena. Joey’s heart is a ticking bomb in her chest, but she does not falter.
As if in preparation, Cal closes his eyes.
This is it. He’s going to come after her, and Joey takes a second to work out a plan.
She can dive behind the couch and try to trip him up.
She can dodge him to the side and attempt to run around.
She thinks of the car and wonders if there’s a way she can use it again to her advantage.
Cal opens his eyes, and he wears an expression of having won.
Joey has no time to understand what it means because without warning he turns and runs.
Within seconds, he disappears down the hallway, pulls open a heavy door, and slips through it.
Joey’s instincts pull her toward him. She has a distant thought that he’s going to the spell circle to finish the bloodspell. She wants to tear him apart, to scratch out his eyes, to smash a rock into his skull. But her body, and the rising sobs from Sophie, force her to resist.
Instead, she hurries over and drops to her knees, where Sophie has already lifted Elena’s dripping foot up onto the couch.
She is leaning on the wound with all her weight, trying to stanch the blood.
Joey can see, though, that she doesn’t need to.
Elena’s not bleeding anymore. Joey’s hand goes to Elena’s neck, where she wants more than anything to feel a pulse, but she doesn’t.
She keeps her fingers there for as long as she can bear it.
Still, she feels nothing. She buries her face in her own hands and tugs at her hair, screaming until her throat is raw.
It’s a release, a powerful fuck-you, and it doesn’t feel good because how can it? It is not nearly enough.
Eventually, she wets her wounded throat with a swallow and looks around.
The blood that splashed onto the floor, the bowl of blood, and Cal’s footprints leading out of the room—all of it reflects the bright lights overhead.
There are traces of him everywhere, she thinks as she feels the tremor returning.
There is no way he’s going to get away with this.
Distantly, she hears the revving of a dirt bike, but there’s a shrill ringing in her ears, and she recognizes it.
It’s the cry of burgeoning grief, and it drowns everything out, even Sophie next to her, who sobs into the neck of their dead friend.