Ember Boys (Flint and Tinder Book 1) Page 5

  “Roy, have you seen Harold here? Mr. Vleck?” I mimed the hair again. “One of the techs?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “What about Chloe?”

  Roy rubbed his bald pate; his face was getting a far-away look.

  “Glasses,” I said. “Blue hair.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  Roy stared at me like he was seeing me through a telescope, and I thought of what Minerva had said: the days all run together. Not just the days, though. The hours. The minutes. And doped up, everything ran together faster.

  “Never mind,” I said, and I turned and jogged down the hall.

  I threw open my door. Lights off; empty. I wanted to stay and search, pull out every drawer, flip the mattress, make sure Harold hadn’t dropped off a present that would get me busted.

  Instead of panic-searching my room, I closed the door and headed for Chloe’s room.

  I threw open the door.

  Dark.

  Silent.

  I stepped inside, shutting the door behind me. Something smelled off in the room. Funky. Like the bathroom needed cleaning. I crossed to her dresser. When I pulled open the top drawer, underwear and socks stared back at me.

  I checked the bathroom next; her toothbrush, toothpaste, floss—it was all still there.

  When I opened the closet, the reek hit me hard: shit and piss and something else, something that made me think of a dead dog in the field behind my parents’ house. It was too dark to see anything, so I turned back, reaching for the light switch near the door.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders.

  I managed one solid yelp before one of the hands—cold and puffy and soft, like a stretched-out water balloon—clamped down on my jaw. My first instinct was to generate a shield. For a time in my life, after I’d had half my body cut to ribbons, I’d been able to create barriers. Now, though, I reached for that well of power inside myself and found nothing. The way I had for months, ever since I’d left Wyoming—and Vie—on my Ducati.

  The hands dragged me back toward the closet. They were strong, shockingly strong. The hand over my mouth tightened; I smelled something like gravy. Combined with the cold, jellied feeling of the hand, it made me sick to my stomach. The hand on my shoulder slid toward the back of my head, and suddenly I knew what was going to happen. This guy, strong as fuck, was going to get a solid grip and snap my neck.

  I panicked. I tried the shield again, and I still got nothing. I kicked—wild, blind kicks in the dark. My foot connected with flesh, but it had that same soft, oozing sponginess. Reaching up, I ripped at the hand over my mouth. I managed to force it away from me for a moment, and I shouted for help.

  Nothing came back to me. No panicked response. No sound of surprise.

  I was alone with this thing in the dark.

  When the hand came back, it pressed down over my mouth and nose, cutting off my air. Panic made my heart race; my body burned up oxygen as I struggled.

  No power.

  No one to help.

  No last chance to apologize to Jim.

  I was going to die an unredeemed asshole.

  Physics, I thought through the haze of my fear. It didn’t matter how strong this guy was, not if I played physics against him. I imagined how we must be standing: he was still inside the closet because he hadn’t moved, and I was standing outside it. He had reached out to grab me. He might be strong, but his arms were fully extended, and I was about to become a very heavy load at the end of the impromptu lever of his arms. I was pretty sure it had something to do with torque.

  Grabbing his wrists, I pulled my legs up so that I was hanging from his arm, no longer standing, and I let gravity drag me down.

  The sudden addition of my full weight dragged the guy forward, throwing him off balance. I heard him smack into the doorjamb, and then his grip loosened. I yanked on his wrists, pulling his hands away, and rolled free.

  My throat burned. Spots swam in my eyes as I sucked in lungfuls of air.

  Although the room was still dark, enough light filtered in under the door that, now that the guy was out of the closet, I could see a few details. He was big; I’d already guessed that from how easily he’d held me, but seeing him, even in silhouette, surprised me. I couldn’t tell much more except that his clothes looked bulky, and I was tempted to call them utilitarian. They had the kind of cut and shape that my mind connected to construction workers and mechanics. One glance was all I spared time for, then I scrambled to my feet and shot toward the door.

  I was fast, but this guy was freaky big, with long arms to match, and the room was small. He caught me before I could get the door open. One hand curled around my neck, the other grabbed my shirt. He swung me, slamming me against Chloe’s dresser. It wasn’t quality craftsmanship—mostly particleboard, I guessed—but it still hurt like a bitch when I connected with it. The whole piece, drawers and all, rocked back under the force of the blow.

  The door opened. Light spilled into the room, blinding me. I hoped it would blind my attacker too. Lifting my legs up, I tried my trick again, but he was ready for me. His grip tightened, and he slammed me against the dresser again. I brought my foot up between his legs, aiming blindly as my eyes still adjusted to the light. I felt my foot connect, and I stomped out again, driving as much force as I could through my heel. I connected again.

  And I got nothing for my efforts. The guy didn’t buckle. He didn’t scream. He didn’t even budge.

  How the hell was that possible?

  He slammed me into the dresser a third time, and everything got a little spacey for a minute. I knew I was hanging in his grip; I knew he was trying to kill me. All I could do, though, was drift.

  The rational part of me waited for him to adjust his hold again; he was planning on breaking my neck, and now that I was dazed, he could do it. But a moment passed, and then another. My brain kicked into gear again. I realized he was staring at the doorway.

  I didn’t bother looking; I didn’t need to know, not right then. What I needed was to hurt this guy so bad he couldn’t catch me a third time.

  Brawling, scrapping, street fighting—whatever you wanted to call it, that wasn’t me. Vie was a brawler, sure. And Austin could throw a punch. But I played guitar. I picked out clothes. Sure, I fucked like a beast, but fucking wasn’t going to get me out of this situation.

  Still, I’d learned a few things from hanging out with Vie and his friends.

  I brought my hands up, bracing my arms against the inside of my attacker’s elbows. He was still looking at the doorway. Grabbing his head, I dug my thumbs into his eyes, at the inside corners. I pressed.

  For some reason, I was expecting him to scream. Or drop me. Preferably both. What I didn’t expect was for one of his eyes to pop out and slap against my palm.

  “Oh fuck.”

  That was me. I was the one screaming.

  The guy finally seemed to realize something was wrong as I dug my thumb in at the other eye, still trying to get it. It came free with a second pop. Puke surged in my throat, but I managed to hold it back.

  With movements that seemed confused more than anything else, the guy dropped me and reached for the two dangling eyes. He batted at them, as though trying to find them, and then lifted them.

  “Holy fuck,” I said, hearing the harsh rasp of my damaged voice. I scrabbled back on the vinyl. “Holy fuck.”

  “Don’t let him get close enough to grab you,” Chloe said. I wasn’t sure where she had come from, but in my daze, I didn’t care. She grabbed my shirt and hauled me back.

  “Yeah,” I managed to say. And then, “Duh.”

  We stumbled back into the hall, and Chloe dragged the door shut. Heavy footsteps moved on the other side, and then the handle turned. The door lurched open; Chloe screamed, and I shouted too, my hand wrapping over hers as we tried to drag it shut.

  “Get something,” she said, elbowing me away. “Get something.”

  “Get what?” I yelled back, but I stumbled down the hall. Nobody was going to have rope, not in a psych ward. And there wasn’t a convenient custodian’s cart with brooms and mops. There wasn’t anything but room after room with a bed, a chair, a desk, a—

  A chair.

  I tried the first door I came to, burst into a bedroom—empty—and grabbed the chair. Then I ran back. Chloe was still screaming, but she’d braced her legs on either side of the door and had managed to keep the guy inside from pulling it all the way open. A gap of about an inch showed.

  “Do it, do it, do it,” she shouted.

  I jammed a chair leg behind the handle, positioning the rest of the chair so that, when the guy jerked, it caught on the doorframe. The chair’s metal leg squealed and bent slightly. Inside the room, the guy let out a bellow of rage. Then he yanked on the door again, and the chair shivered.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Go,” Chloe said.

  “All right, come on. We’ll call the police. Fuck, we’ll call—”

  Shoving me down the hall, she ran.

  We ran pace for pace until we reached the end of the residence wing. I was sure about that much. When I got out into the hallway, though, I ran probably a hundred yards toward the rec room before I realized I’d lost Chloe.

  She was gone.

  8 | JIM

  I wasn’t going to apologize; that much was for damn sure.

  And I wasn’t going to listen to his apologies.

  For that matter, I wasn’t even going to talk to him.

  The thing about teenagers, I decided, was that they were selfish, arrogant, conceited pricks. Every single one of them. I had known that back when I was teaching; I had just forgotten it. I’d been too busy being a stupid, deluded, caricature of desperation, panting after a kid who kept me around to flatter his own ego.

  I told myself all of this on repeat as I walked to the hospital, newspaper tucked under my arm. A headache had started behind my eyes, and the light seemed too bright; on a few of the steeper hills, I had a hard time catching my breath and had to stop, coughing hard, my hands on my knees.

  It had been a day. A full day since the fight, which was a really low-quality way of describing the experience of having an entitled eighteen-year-old rip out your heart and stomp the shit out of it. I’d spent twenty-four hours arguing with myself about the newspaper, studying the picture of the girl he called Chloe, and trying to decide whether it was worth getting involved.

  The worst part was that I knew I was kidding myself the whole time. I knew I was going to the hospital. I was just trying to figure out how I could do it without losing my last scraps of dignity. Or without burning the place to the ground.

  I signed in, made my way through the various stations and desks and doors, until I was in the rec room. Emmett was at the same table—our table, although I crossed out that particularly ugly possessive—with his head against the window. He looked like shit. Beautiful, of course—the mess of dark hair, the dark eyes, the sharp line of his jaw, the hollow of his throat—but still like shit.

  My eyes went back to his throat, where faint purple bruises marked the skin.

  I marched toward him.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked, gesturing to my own throat.

  “Looks like a bad shave,” he said. “Although on you, it’s hard to tell.”

  “Answer my question.”

  His head came up from the glass; his eyes gained a familiar spark. “Oh, teacher voice. Did you bring your paddle?”

  I felt a slight rush, like I’d finally slipped over a precipice and was falling. I could just fall and fall. Free fall. That was the term for it.

  “You know what? This is a new low for you.”

  “Fuck off, Jim.”

  “I thought I’d come back and you’d play your too-cool routine. I thought you’d watch me come across the room, I thought you’d do that stupid fucking sexy slouch you’re always trying to pull off, I thought you’d do those eyes, those ones like all you want is—” I managed to stop, but only because I could hear myself getting off track. “But hurting yourself? Jesus fucking Christ, Emmett. We talked about this. You told me you weren’t going to do it. Did you try to kill yourself? Is that what this was? Is it a fucking cry for attention because you didn’t get what you want? Did you think someone would call me and I’d come rushing back? And then you’d get what you always get, right? Your own way. What you wanted. Emmett Bradley never has to make a fucking compromise ever in his whole fucking life.”

  Scarlet ran into his face, two sharp lines as neat as cuts over his cheekbones. But what he said was, “You think I’m sexy. Huh. When I slouch—is that what you said?”

  He sprawled in the chair, suddenly loose limbed, like he’d just worked out or woken up or gotten a platinum-grade fu—

  “Like this?” he asked, his voice low and husky.

  “Stop it.”

  The blush was brighter in his face; his eyes were slate under dead water. He teased his lower lip with his thumb—not a little kid move, the opposite, so shockingly adult that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  “Yeah, yell at me. I can be into that.”

  “Great; this is just a game to you. One more Emmett Bradley game.” I gestured to my neck. “This.” I gestured to his slouch. “This.” I shook my head. “You know what? I’m out of here.”

  “Nice of you to stop by. I’ll keep a seat open for you tomorrow.”

  “I won’t be back tomorrow.”

  His thumb toyed with the corner of his mouth, exposing hints of the darker red of his lower lip. “Just in case,” he said.

  “No, this is goodbye.”

  “Jim,” he said, smiling, the damaged side of his face turning it into an even sharper smirk than usual. “I’ll tell you when it’s goodbye.”

  I slapped the paper down, turned, and left.

  9 | EMMETT

  I stared after Jim. He left, and I counted two minutes to make sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I leaned against the glass, massaging my throat. Two thoughts warred with each other: Jim had come back; and I had been a colossal dick.

  It was how he talked to me. That was the only way I could explain it. When I’d seen him come through the door, when I’d seen him, Jim, my Jim, I’d almost started sobbing. I wanted to tell someone how terrified I was; I wanted to tell someone that I had almost died. No, that wasn’t quite right. I didn’t want to tell someone. I wanted to tell Jim. And I wanted him to do what he always did when he knew I was going through a rough spot: put his arm around me, be quiet, let me talk shit until I was all talked out.

  Instead, he’d come at me, snapping out his fucking questions, demanding answers.

  Treating me like a kid.

  Grabbing the paper, I headed out of the rec room and into one of the residential wings.

  A hissing noise stopped me; to my right, a door stood open a few inches, and Chloe’s face appeared in the gap. She beckoned me over.

  When I went into the room, she shut the door behind me; the room was empty and didn’t seem to be in use: the bed was unmade, the blinds were closed, and a fine layer of dust covered the top of the dresser. Chloe gestured me over to the table near the window.

  “Geez,” Chloe said as she slid into the seat opposite me. She pulled the newspaper across the table, studied something on the page, and then spun it toward me. I ignored it. I was glaring at her. “You sure know how to wind your boyfriend up.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. And how did you see us if you’re hiding here?”

  “I didn’t see you. I heard you.”

  “Where have you been?” I asked. “Jesus Christ, I’ve been losing my damn mind. We were running away from that psycho and all of a sudden you were gone.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What happened? You all right?”

  “Peachy. I sound like I’ve been smoking for twenty years, and it hurts to eat anything except Jell-O, but I’m just fucking fantastic. Where did you go?”

  “I’m keeping a low profile.” She twisted her hair into a bun, glancing at the door. “I thought it’d be smart, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering someone is trying to kill me, and I can’t escape on my own. I need your help.”

  “What?”

  Still working on her hair, she gestured with an elbow. I glanced at the paper, back up, and then back to the paper again. The headline caught my eye—PARENTS PLEAD: HELP US FIND OUR GIRL—but what held my attention were the pictures: an older couple, a ranch-style home, and a photograph of a girl I recognized as Chloe.

  I scanned the article, realized I was reading way too fast to understand anything, and then read it again more slowly.

  “Should I call you Chloe or Amanda?”

  “Chloe.”

  “But your real name’s Amanda?”

  With a roll of her eyes, Chloe said, “No. My real name is Chloe. Those aren’t my parents. And for the record, I don’t belong here. I was going to say neither do you, but the way you treat that poor guy, maybe you are crazy.”

  “Ok, so this is, what?” Then I remembered: I was in a psych ward, and while I technically wasn’t crazy, most of the other people were. I thought about Chloe throwing the TV through the window. The screaming and kicking and fighting. I tried to keep my face clear as I said, “Oh.”

  “No,” she said. “I know that look. Don’t give me that look.”

  “I’m not giving you a look.”

  “You think I’m nutty.”

  “No.”

  “Sure, you do. I can see it in your face. But think about this: the guy last night, he was real, right?”