I SPUN. THE FAST-APPROACHING night covered my vision in a thick, hazy glare. Tearing back down the rise, I lifted my hand up, shading my eyes with the gun, as if that would help, trying to see Zora. Just as I started to make out a darker shadow against the wall, something swiped at my leg midstride. I stumbled, falling forward. My arm shot out, trying to break my fall, and the pistol sank into the dune.
Before I could process what had happened, he was on me. Like a striking snake, Jasper’s smaller frame somehow coiled around mine. I heard a grunt, then a strange keening laugh, as I fought for my life.
Together, we rolled down the dune. His fingers felt like ice-cold nails boring into my flesh, one set on the bicep of my right arm, the other digging into the corded flesh of my neck. As my airway slowly thinned, I sucked in a desperate breath. With it came a plume of sand. The crystals coated my mouth and tore at my esophagus. I coughed and sputtered as his grip tightened.
Somehow, I still held the gun. Laughing, he slid his hand down my forearm, reaching for it. Unable to get a breath, I panicked. I knew I could not let him reach it. If I did, I would be dead. A part of my brain that had been dormant fired to life. It drowned out the rest, forcing its will over every muscle in my body. It had one purpose. One drive. To keep me alive.
A sound rumbled up from my chest but caught in my throat. With it came a burst of strength. I twisted my body, using my weight to manhandle Jasper. His laughter rose, piercing the night. I twisted my shoulders, and his grip on my neck broke. Folding in on myself, I tried to push up to my feet.
Jasper just kept laughing. The sound held no mania. No anger. Not even effort. Instead, he sounded like a child struck by something novel, like a baby seeing his mother sneeze for the first time. It would have unnerved me, but that kind of thought did not exist. Instead, I fought.
Somehow I circled my left arm around his head. Twisting again, he rolled over my body, his back slamming into the sand. His laughter broke for just an instant, then came back with double the intensity.
“Zora!” I screamed, my voice tinny and frantic. “Help!”
Jasper moved like lightning. Somehow he was atop me again. Both hands slammed into the pistol. He grabbed a finger and pulled it back. I heard a crack and grunted in pain.
The gun flipped through the air, landing softly on the sand a few feet away. I clawed at it, but Jasper didn’t. Instead, his knees pinned my shoulders and his viselike grip took my throat again.
“Nononono,” I pleaded.
Then, I could not make a sound. I could not breathe. I felt my muscles fading. A strange, dangerous heat sparkled up and down my spine. Forgetting the gun, I thrashed, mauled at Jasper, yet somehow he controlled me. This birdlike man, twenty years my senior, half my weight, held. Firm as stone.
I tried to beg. To cry. To talk my death away. Instead, powerless, immobile, I looked up into his face. I saw the serenity. I felt his hot, predatory breath as he moved closer to me. His sickening smile threatened to draw my soul into him, to feed on my very existence. Then his lips parted. And he spoke, loudly, almost theatrically.
“Did she love me?”
My lips parted, but I barely heard his words. All that would have come out was more pleads to spare my life. But Jasper reacted. His head tilted. A look of hunger crossed his face, unlike what had been there before. His face lowered, moving even closer.
“Did she love me?” he asked again.
His voice changed. As the words slipped from his mouth, he sounded younger and younger and younger. I tried to scream. To rage against my own end.
Like a jolt of electricity had suddenly run through his body, Jasper shuddered. His eyes seemed to reboot. A clarity slipped across the rictus that had been his face. Miraculously, his grip on my throat loosened.
I didn’t hesitate. As oxygen filled my lungs to bursting, I lunged. My grasping fingers found the revolver’s handle. The gun moved quickly, flashing toward Jasper’s head. He turned, but that content expression never faltered. Even as the barrel struck him in the dip between his nose and forehead. Even as I pulled the trigger, sending a single bullet into his orbital, through his brain, and shattering the back of his skull.
A red mist shot from Jasper’s ruined eye. He never made a sound. In a shocking instant, his body went utterly limp. Not even a flinch. One beat of my heart and he had been trying to kill me. The next, he floated to the sand like a sheet of paper.
Though Jasper never made a sound, I cried out. Not in words. Instead, a sound I could never have imagined came up from deep in my core. It rang out across the sand, over the rumble of the ocean. It emptied me, leaving me as lifeless as the Halo Killer.