Sadie awoke with a start, unable to see anything in the pitch blackness. She didn’t know what had woken her, or where she was, but then the horror show of the past day all came back to her.
She listened carefully for a minute or two, but heard no sound. Her body was stiff and sore because she’d slept away the afternoon and a good part of the night on the hard marble floor of this abandoned clothing store in the Ghost Mall. Now it was dark, and maybe she’d stayed safe, but nothing had changed. Her life was still shit. Twenty bucks wasn’t going to last long and she had no place to go anyway, unless she went back home where Reggie would beat the living crap out of her.
She pictured his smug, creepy face—how he’d get that slow grin of his as he stood up from his recliner and took a step in her direction.
That wasn’t going to happen. Not anymore. She was done being his private punching bag.
But the downside was, all she could exchange for living with Reggie and Tina was being homeless and on the run, and if today was anything to go by, she didn’t think she could cut it.
While Sadie liked to pretend she had street smarts, she knew Aylissa could run circles around her when it came to being tough. Even Riley and Gabriela were better equipped. Their bodies weren’t like hers, a scarred road map of all the ugliness she couldn’t keep bottled up inside.
She didn’t know how they did it, how they were able to compartmentalize the crap they confronted in their lives when she couldn’t. But Reggie wasn’t as bad with them because Child Services checked in from time to time, and foster children represented money. Not so with Sadie, his natural born daughter—she was all cost and no benefit. Unwanted from the get-go, as he’d often reminded her. So at the end of the day, the other kids just weren’t the mess that Sadie was.
But bad as her days usually were, this past one had really sucked. And the worst thing was she felt like she’d been channeling Reggie in the past couple of days, like all those years of living with him had turned her into some sketchy bitch version of the douchebag he was.
She bit at her lip until she drew blood. The metallic taste in her mouth helped keep the rising anxiety at bay.
If her life were one of those Hallmark special movies that Tina liked to watch, this was the point where she’d be trying to make amends to those she’d hurt, and get their forgiveness just in time for a happy fade-out to the next set of commercials. But she’d learned a long time ago that life was nothing like a Hallmark movie—at least her life sure as hell never was.
And as for forgiveness, she wasn’t going to get it any time soon. Not after the things she’d done to all these people who’d genuinely been trying to help her. She’d pretty much tried to ruin Steve’s life. She’d stabbed Aggie. But maybe the worst was what she’d done to Ruby.
What she needed was a way out—a permanent way out—but she didn’t have the cojones for that, either. If she did—if she could just draw the blade of her utility knife across her own throat—she’d solve a lot of people’s problems. And since she’d been so stupid making that deal with the witch, she couldn’t even piss somebody off enough to kill her because the witch’s spell made her invisible to anybody who meant her harm.
If it was going to get done, she’d have to do it herself.
She sucked at her lip and reached into her pocket, fingers closing around the handle of the knife.
Maybe if she had some dope she could find the nerve.
Then she heard something stir out in the hallway and her usual sense of self-preservation kicked in. The idea of killing herself vanished as though it had never crept up the back alleys of her mind to whisper in her ear.
“Who’s out there?” she yelled.
The sound, whatever it was, stopped.
She scrabbled around on the floor, feeling for the mess of hangers she’d seen when there’d still been some light. It took a moment to find them in the dark. Grabbing a handful, she flung them in the general direction of the store’s opening where they made a loud clatter out in the hall. She heard some kind of animal scurrying away. A packrat, maybe. But what if one of those creepy animal people had come to give her some payback? A hybrid scorpion man would make that same scratchy sound.
That scared her enough to get her to her feet. Her eyes had adjusted enough that there was the vaguest bit of illumination from the grimy skylight, but not much. She found her way to the main corridor of the mall mostly by inching her way forward, hands in front of her to avoid walking into display cabinets or clothing racks. She knew she was near the front of the store when glass crunched underfoot. The ’bangers must have had a field day smashing all the windows in this place. She just wished they hadn’t pissed everywhere because out here in the hall it smelled like a urinal.
She stood quietly, listening. The only sound was her own ragged breathing.
Screw this, she thought. On top of everything else she didn’t need to be in this freakshow of a place.
She eased her way in the direction of the main entrance, sliding her feet along the marble floor so that she was pushing glass away rather than stepping on it. Every so often she’d stop to listen. Nothing. But finally, the solid wall of darkness around her gave way to a diffuse light ahead.
It seemed bright when she finally made it to the entrance and outside. Darker than she’d ever experienced except for that night out in the desert with Steve, but nothing like the near absolute blackness inside the mall.
She stood by the entrance, looking around at the shadowed hulks of abandoned cars and other crap. It seemed like she had the place to herself, but she studied the parking lot for a long time before deciding it was safe to move away from the mall. She didn’t get more than a half-dozen steps before she heard the sound of wings flapping, loud in the night air.
She’d forgotten about her own personal freak crow-stalker.
“Manny?”
She heard the sound of wings again, circling. They disappeared somewhere behind her and she heard the approach of footsteps crunching on broken glass. She turned in the direction she thought they were coming from.
“Come on, Manny,” she said. “Stop screwing around.”
“Manny’s not here,” a voice responded from the darkness.
It had the same timbre as Manny’s—raspy and rough—but it definitely wasn’t him. Sadie’d already heard enough of his annoying comments that she’d have known if it was him.
“My name’s Gonzalo.”
“Who the hell are you? Where’s Manny?”
“He can’t be here, so he asked me to look in on you.”
Yeah, creepy much? She couldn’t make out his features very well in the dim light, but he was tall and dark-skinned like Manny, and from what she remembered of the rest of his crew, they all kind of looked the same.
“What for? Where’s Manny?” she repeated.
Gonzalo hesitated, then said, “He’s at the hospital with Señora White Horse. She was concerned for your well-being, so Manny sent me to check on you.”
It took Sadie a moment to figure out who that was. “So she’s okay?” she asked.
“She’s recovering, no thanks to you.”
“Hey, if she hadn’t—” Sadie broke off what she’d been about to say. She took a breath and forced herself to at least sound calm. “I need to talk to her.”
Gonzalo laughed without any humour.
“Seriously. I’m not going to hurt her.”
“Because we won’t give you the opportunity.”
Sadie took the utility knife out of the pocket.
“Relax,” she said when she sensed the crow man stiffen.
She drew back her arm and threw the knife off into the darkness. It hit something metal with a sharp ping, then clattered on the ground.
“See?” she said. “Now I can’t hurt anybody.”
Gonzalo stood silent for a long moment.
“Manny still says no,” he finally said.
Sadie gave him a puzzled look, then realized he must have a Bluetooth earpiece.
“Give me your phone—let me talk to him.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Then how can you…never mind. I get it. You’re all magic people. You can change into birds and now it turns out you’re telepathic. But that crap doesn’t make you the boss of me. You tell Manny I’ll find out what hospital she’s in and I’m going to talk to her whether he likes it or not.”
“I’ll stop you.”
Sadie smiled. She wasn’t sure if he had superhero night vision on top of everything else, and she didn’t really care.
“You know what?” she said. “You probably can’t. I’ve still got that witch’s spell working for me. I’ll bet as soon as you try anything with me I’m just going to disappear and you won’t even know where I am.”
“Wait.”
“No thanks. See you later, loser.” She started to walk away.
“No, wait,” Gonzalo called after her.
She paused, but she didn’t turn around.
“He wants to know why you want to see Señora White Horse.”
Sadie made him wait a couple of moments before she finally came back. “Tell him I want to apologize.”
Gonzalo just stood there, but a moment later he said, “Manny says that’s not going to change anything.”
“You think I don’t know that? But it’s important to do it anyway.”
Again there was the lag while Gonzalo mentally filled Manny in.
“For you or for her?” he asked.
“For both of us.”
Pause.
“Okay,” Gonzalo told her. “Manny says you can come by. But if you try anything…”
Sadie kicked the dirt. “What the hell am I going to try?”
Gonzalo gave a slow nod. “Come along then.”
He set off, easily picking a way through the junk. Sadie trailed behind at a slower pace. When they got to the chain-link fence, Gonzalo hopped easily onto the top. He balanced there for a moment before jumping down on the other side. He didn’t make a sound. Sadie thought she was going to have to climb it herself until she realized that he’d led her to a spot where someone had cut a hole in the chain-link.
Gonzalo looked back before continuing down the street. Sadie squeezed through the hole and hurried after him.