“Shit, man, calm down,” said Betcha. “Don’t be like that.” But he wasn’t going to step in. He wasn’t going to actually do anything to stop Len.
Hellie’s ghost tipped her head back, looked at the ceiling, started drifting toward the wall.
“Come on,” said Len to Betcha. “Grab her ankles.”
“You can’t do this to her,” Alex said. It was what she should have said the previous night. Every night. You can’t do this to her.
Hellie’s ghost was already starting to fade through the wall.
Len and Betcha had her body slung between them like a hammock. Len had his arms under Hellie’s armpits. Her head lolled to the side. “God, she smells like shit.”
Betcha gripped her ankles. One of her pearly pink jelly shoes dangled from her foot. She hadn’t taken them off before she came to bed. She probably hadn’t noticed. Alex watched it slide off her toe and thunk to the ground.
“Shit, put that back on her.”
Betcha fumbled awkwardly with it, setting down her feet, then trying to jam the shoe back on like some kind of a footman in Cinderella.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, just bring it with you. We’ll throw it in with her.”
It was only when Alex followed them into the living room that she saw Ariel was still there, asleep on the couch in his undershorts. “I’m tryina sleep, for shit’s sake,” he said, blinking drowsily at them. “Oh shit, is she… ?”
And then he giggled.
They paused in front of the door. Len tried to reach for the knob, knocked over his stupid gangster bat that he kept there for “protection.” But he couldn’t balance Hellie’s body and get the knob to turn.
“Come on,” he snapped. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”
Let me in.
Hellie’s ghost hung halfway through the window and the sky. She was fading to gray. Would she trail them all the way down to that grimy alley? “Don’t go,” Alex begged her.
But Len thought she was talking to him. “Open the door, you useless bitch.”
Alex reached for the knob. Let me in. The metal was cold in her hand. She started to open the door, then shut it. She flipped the lock and turned to face Len and Betcha and Ariel.
“What now?” Len said impatiently.
Alex held her hand out to Hellie. Stay with me. She didn’t know what she was asking. She didn’t know what she was offering. But Hellie understood.
She felt Hellie rush toward her, felt herself splitting, being torn open to make room for another heart, another pair of lungs, for Hellie’s will, for Hellie’s strength.
“What now, Len?” Alex asked. She picked up the bat.
Alex didn’t remember much of what happened next. The sense of Hellie inside her like a deep, held breath. How light and natural the bat felt in her hand.
There was no hesitation. She swung from her left, just as Hellie had when she’d played for the Midway Mustangs. Alex was so strong it made her clumsy. She hit Len first, a hard crack to the skull. He stepped sideways and she stumbled, knocked off-balance by the force of her own swing. She hit him again and his head gave way with a thick crunch, like a piñata breaking open, chips of skull and brain flying, blood spattering everywhere. Betcha still had Hellie’s ankles in his hands when Alex turned the bat on him—she was that fast. She struck him behind the knees first and he screamed as he collapsed, then she brought the bat down like a sledgehammer on his neck and shoulders.
Ariel rose and at first she thought he might reach for a gun, but he was backing away, eyes terrified, and as she passed the sliding glass door, she understood why. She was glowing. She chased him to the door—no, not chased. She flew at him, as if her feet were barely touching the ground. Hellie’s rage was like a drug inside her body, setting her blood on fire. She knocked Ariel to the floor and hit him again and again, until the bat broke against his spine. Then she took the two jagged pieces in her hands and went to find the rest of the vampires, a coven of boys, asleep in their beds, wasted and drooling.
When it was done, when there were no more people left to kill and she felt her own exhaustion creeping into Hellie’s limitless energy, Hellie was the one who guided her, made her put the pink plastic shoes on her own feet and walk the two miles down to where Roscoe crossed the Los Angeles River. She saw no one along the way; Hellie steered her down each empty street, telling her where to turn, when to wait, when it was safe, until they reached the bridge and climbed down in the dawning gray of early morning. They waded in together, the water cold and foul. The city had broken the river when it had flooded one too many times, had sealed it up in concrete to make sure it could never do damage again. Alex let it wash her clean, the shattered remnants of the bat flowing from her hands like seeds. She followed the river’s course most of the way back to Ground Zero.
She and Hellie placed Hellie’s body back where it had been, and then they lay down together in the cold of that room. She didn’t care what happened now, if the police came, if she froze to death on this floor.
“Stay,” she told Hellie, hearing the thunder of their hearts beating together, feeling the weight of Hellie curled into her muscles and bones. “Stay with me.”
But when she woke, a paramedic was shining a light into her eyes and Hellie was gone.
20
Winter
What had Alex been thinking the night that Darlington vanished? That she just had to get him back to the Hutch. They would talk. She would explain… What exactly? That they’d deserved it? That killing Len and the others had given not only Hellie but her some kind of peace? That the world punished girls like them, like Tara, for all their bad choices, every mistake. That she had liked doling out the punishment herself. That whatever conscience she’d always assumed she possessed just hadn’t shown up for work that day. And she certainly wasn’t sorry.
But she could say she was. She could pretend she didn’t remember the feel of the bat in her hand, that she wouldn’t do it again. Because that’s what Darlington feared—not that she was bad, but that she was dangerous. He feared chaos. So Alex could tell him that Hellie had possessed her. She would turn it into a mystery that they could solve together. He would like that. She would be something for him to fix, a project like his broken town, his crumbling house. She could still be one of the good guys.
But Alex never had to tell those lies. The thing in the basement made sure of that. Darlington was not abroad. He was not in Spain. And she didn’t really believe he’d vanished into some pocket realm to be retrieved like a child who’d wandered away from the group. Dawes and Dean Sandow hadn’t been there that night. They hadn’t felt the finality of that darkness.
“It’s not a portal,” he’d said in the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. “It’s a muh—”
One minute he was there and the next he was enveloped in blackness.
She’d seen the terror in his eyes, the plea. Do something. Help me.
She meant to. At least, she thought she meant to. She’d replayed that moment a thousand times, wondering why she’d frozen—if it had been fear or lack of training or distraction. Or if it had been a choice. If the thing in the corner had given her a solution to the problem Darlington presented.
This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow. Darlington’s words like fingers reaching into her mouth, pinching her tongue, keeping her from crying out.
At night, she thought of Darlington’s perfect face, of the feel of his body bracketing hers in the sleep-warmed sheets of his narrow bed.