Thirty-Two
Parker

Everything that was happening around me felt like it should matter. I knew that it did … but at the same time it felt too far away to worry about it. Since Darkness and I had woken up back in my exhausted body, I wasn’t in charge anymore. I’d given that responsibility to Darkness and it felt great. It was oddly relaxing, especially if I tried not to pay attention to everything outside my head. It was better that way.

When the guards came to drag me into this large room, Darkness had actually seen an opening and head-butted the first guard. My head ached, but the guard’s nose had bled enough that he’d been replaced by a different guard. I knew right then that I’d made the right choice. I didn’t have any fight left in me. Fight was all Darkness was made of.

Fight was what we needed right now.

They pulled me onto a chair. I knew they were setting up chairs next to me, and I could hear someone making noise to my left, but Darkness had his attention focused on the rope that was securing our wrists. He was bent forward, eyes closed, as he wiggled one hand and then the other, trying to find the weakness that might allow him to slip one hand free.

A whimper came from my left and I wondered if something important was happening, but Darkness didn’t care. From far away I heard my brother’s voice. Even Darkness couldn’t ignore that. He barely moved, but he peeked out through the curtain of dirty hair and we saw Jack, Chloe, Finn, Libby, and Addie standing about fifteen feet in front of us.

Darkness felt like snarling at Addie until her worried eyes met mine and I saw the fear in them. This wasn’t the nightmarish hallucination that had been making our life hell. This was my Addie … it was really her. She was here.

But Darkness didn’t care. All he cared about was that no one was watching me. The doorway to the outside was only twenty feet away. He moved his attention back to the ropes on our wrists, no matter how much I wanted to watch my friends and brother—to make sure they were okay.

A glass vial of blue liquid exploded a few feet in front of us and brought our attention back into focus. Darkness let out a low growl around the gag in our mouth and started working on freeing our hands again, his motions growing more frantic.

Then Cooper had a gun in his hands. Darkness’s rage bubbled up inside and his focus on freeing our hands was lost. He just wanted to kill Cooper. His attention shifted to seeing which weapons were within reach and imagining how he could use them to make Cooper bleed.

But I saw Cooper point the gun at everyone I loved, and my entire world stopped.

I fought wildly to wrestle control back from Darkness, but he was in full-on adrenaline-driven panic mode and didn’t budge. His eyes settled on a knife in Cooper’s boot just a couple of feet in front of us. If he could reach it, he could cut the ropes.

I couldn’t force him to listen to me—or maybe I was too weak now to fight hard enough.

A gunshot went off and Darkness jerked back before finally taking a good look around. I was brought back to complete awareness as I got my first view of the whole picture. Mom and Mia were tied up next to me, and on the other side of the room, Finn had just been shot in the leg. My heart pounded hard against the wall of my chest.

Darkness looked up into Cooper’s hard, cold eyes. The madman smiled and the message was clear. Cooper liked what he’d just done. The killing wasn’t over.

Then I felt something coming from Darkness that I’d never expected. He felt remorse.

It only lasted an instant and then it passed, but it was something. He’d experienced one of my emotions without me trying to push it on him. He was changing … and if it could happen once, maybe it could happen again.

Cooper started shooting again. Darkness watched as chaos spread across the room. For an instant, we made eye contact with Jack. I saw pure fear in his eyes. And then he started to run.

This, for some reason, kicked Darkness back into action. He started working on freeing our hands from the ropes again, but I didn’t want to run anymore. I wanted to help. Jack needed me, and I wanted to help my brother finish this—for him, for me, for Dad.

Joey was so quiet beside me he almost seemed to be holding his breath. Finally, he stepped forward and spoke soft enough that I only just barely heard him.

“Enough,” Joey said, putting his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “This has to stop, Cooper.”

Cooper jerked out of his grip and kept shooting. I saw Libby fall down, over by Jack, and my heart ached for my brother. Darkness kept working on the ropes and I just tried to stay out of his way. If he could get our hands free, then we could take the gun away from Cooper. That was the only thing that mattered right now.

Across the room, I saw Chloe trying to pull Jack to safety. His eyes rested on mine, and even from here I could see how badly he wanted to stay, to fight. But instead he backed away, following Chloe slowly toward the crowd of terrified people.

Was this it? Was this where he left me … again?

Joey put his hand on top of Cooper’s gun and forcefully pushed it down. “You have to stop. You’re putting your own people at risk. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”

“Get out of my way. You’ve never belonged here. You don’t have a clue what it’s like to be this way,” Cooper growled, jerking the gun out of Joey’s reach. “You’ve been going soft ever since we captured Parker. If you’re too weak to help me, just stay out of my way.”

In a rage, Cooper screamed. Darkness lifted my head and Cooper met my eyes, stepped toward me, and kicked over my chair. The world tilted and then my head exploded with pain as everything went dark and silent.