Chapter Nine
The blood on the floor continued to flow down the length of the bus, a small, morbid river. I could feel the eyes of millions watching us, watching me. The scientists, the government, the spectators that I had only a short time ago been among. So instead of allowing the tears trying to push their way past the brink and spill over, as part of me wanted to, I held them back, and swallowed my horror. I wouldn’t let myself look at the blood again.
“Where were you going?”
Tommy was staring at me when I turned. I think he was trying to smile, but it came off more as some kind of grimace.
I didn’t want to encourage conversation, but my conscience tweaked when I remembered how he helped me a few minutes ago, shoving me under the seat like he did. “I was going downtown,” I answered shortly. “To visit… family.”
“Hey, us too.” Tommy nodded at me as if we’d just made some kind of agreement. “Me and—”
“She’s not interested, little brother,” Knight drawled. “Just save your breath. Girls like her normally wouldn’t talk to guys like us. Being in an experiment has just messed her up for a little bit. When this is all over, she’ll walk away and never look back.”
I smiled, forgetting about Tommy momentarily. “Oh, did someone break your heart once, Knight?” He didn’t like my using his name; his lip curled, and I relished the moment. “That’s strange,” I went on, “because I would have guessed you didn’t have one.”
He quirked a brow. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Uncomfortable, I didn’t have a retort, for once in my life. In some ways, this boy reminded me of Mattie. I didn’t like the similarities, but they were there, blatantly demanding that I acknowledge them. Just minute similarities, but to me, they were monumental, and I questioned whether or not I would be able to defend myself if or when the time came.
They both had that way of looking at me as if they knew my thoughts, and both seemed to know just the right things to say to get to me. The two of them had blue eyes—though Mattie’s were a darker blue, I noted—and even shared a crooked grin. Of course, Mattie’s smile didn’t contain the derisive twist this Knight person’s did, and he never would have glared at me like that, no matter what I’d said or done.
While the clock ticked down to the time when that horn would blow, I studied Knight. He was either avoiding my gaze or wasn’t aware of my scrutiny, because he just stared out the window, his defined jaw clenched in a way that looked painful. Underneath the leather jacket, he was wearing a simple white t-shirt and some kind of necklace. His appearance said nothing about him, but somehow, I knew he was every inch the threat my instincts were telling me he was. After all, he’d been cold enough to just watch that woman and her daughter die.
So were you, a whisper brushed past my ear.
I shivered and turned my back on the two boys.
“Why won’t my damn cell phone work?” the businesswoman burst out, jabbing the buttons with her index finger. Her hair—once slicked back and perfected into a bun at the back of her head—was coming out, and it frazzled around her head.
“Do you really think they would allow us to call anyone?” someone asked, though I didn’t look up to see who.
“Where do you think the cameras are?” the boy asked his mother. She just shook her head at him, her mouth set in a razor-thin line. It startled me that someone so young as him seemed to understand what was going on. I wondered what this experience would do to him, how it would affect the rest of his life.
One of my knuckles cracked suddenly, and I glanced down. My fist was tightly curled around to the handle of the knife. Too tightly; I winced as I relaxed my grip. I ran the three middle fingers of my left hand down the shining blade. When I blinked a second later, it was coated with dark blood. I gasped, and when I blinked a second time, it was clean again. I bit my lip and my eyes fluttered shut.
No one else spoke again. The bus sped down the highway, and I realized we were leaving L.A. completely. Not wanting to have my back to Knight when the horn blew—it would shortly, now—I slid back in the seat until my back was pressed against the window. I could feel Chubby Boy’s gaze, but I didn’t look at him again.
“I’m Tommy,” he said abruptly, unsmiling this time.
I was thinking of Mattie, of how much I needed him—wanted him—and hating myself for it. He’d left; he didn’t need or want me. And what if he really had betrayed me and put my name in the box? Or known about Dad doing it? Had it been for the money? For simple hate purposes? Or was I becoming one of those people that I hated, the ones that jumped to conclusions and agonized over things that might not even be true?
When Tommy spoke right in my ear, I leaned away, clenching my knife harder. “I know” was all I said. Tommy didn’t try to speak to me again, and I wouldn’t let myself look at Knight, to see if he was grinning that smug grin. I’d pretty much proven him right, about “girls like me”.
None of that matters. You might die in a few minutes. Think about something that will make your last moments worthwhile.
My chest constricted, but I forced myself to picture Mom and Mattie again. Despite my doubts about him, he was still such a huge part of my world, and I loved him. The last words I’d ever said to him echoed back to me: Just go away. Get it over with.
And the final, the most ironic statement of them all: I won’t be waiting for you when you get back.
I’m sorry, Mattie , I told him, wishing he could hear me and that my voice would travel across the hundreds of miles separating us now. I didn’t mean—
The horn blew for the third time.
My nerves were already strung taut, stretched to the limit. I whipped around to face Knight, my curls wild about my shoulders and my eyes wide. He’d already taken his own knife out of its hiding place, but he didn’t point it at me. Instead, he just looked at me some more, and neither of us moved. Tommy was talking, but I didn’t discern his words. I was lost in Knight’s endless gaze, and I noticed the long, dark lashes surrounding his piercing eyes. The air crackled between us.
“Are you going to kill me, princess?” Knight finally murmured, breaking the silence. No, not silence. People were screaming again, and the floor vibrated with the movement inside the bus.
I found my voice. “Don’t call me that!” I snapped. “My name is Wren. Wren. And I won’t touch you as long as you keep away from me.”
He smirked, the infuriating bastard. I could have killed him right then and there. “Wren, huh?” he repeated, testing the name. I couldn’t deny the attraction that shivered down my spine at the sound of it on his lips, but I wasn’t about to let him see it.
“What’s going on?” Tommy squeaked. “Why is he—”
“I told you, bro. The guy is bent on living, and he’s not going to let anyone else live as long as there’s a threat of a bomb.”
I turned to see what they were talking about. My mouth went dry when I processed the fact that the huge man—what had Knight called him? Mr. Badass?—was pulling his blade from the chest of a Latin-looking man, and was now making his way toward the girl with tattoo sleeves. People scrambled to get out of his way, none of them brave enough to stop him.
The girl with the tattoos stared straight back at the man, unwavering. For the first time, since her face was turned away from me, I could see the tattoo curving around her right eyebrow. It looked like a bent finger, shaped around a grotesque, bloody heart.
But I forgot all about the stupid, interesting tattoo as the man got closer. From what I could see, Tattoo Girl had no knife, and I closed my eyes. She’s going to die.
“Get the hell away!”
My eyes popped open. A boy was diving at the man, a boy with a tattoo that matched the one on the girl’s face: A curved finger, cradling a small, veiny heart. For some reason, I focused on the tattoo as he shouted out and tried to defend his girlfriend.
“Jason!” she cried, looking alive for the first time.
Jason jerked his knife upward, trying to drive it into the man’s gut, where he seemed to most vulnerable, but he moved too slowly. The huge man jumped out of the way, at the same time driving his own knife home into the young man’s back. The girl with the tattoos screamed once. Just once.
Jason slumped, dropping to his knees.
“Stop! You can’t do this!” The man who’d defended the college girl earlier shoved his way down the aisle, running to the Tattoo Girl. Her eyes were dry, and she was just watching the big man continue on at her. He adjusted his grip on his blade—
“Wren, look out!”
Too late, I realized that I’d been so involved with the horror up front that I hadn’t been paying attention to anything else around me. Another man was coming at me now, and I knew I would have no time to move before his weapon found me.
But then someone was yanking me out of the way, and I tripped over my own feet and tumbled to the floor. Pain sliced through me, and black dots danced across my vision.
“Knight!” a voice cried. Tommy’s.
Dizzily, I tried to gain a sense of what was going on. I forced my head up and caught the boy’s mother staring at me. I couldn’t see Knight, but I heard a grunt, and then a shout of pain.
It was too much. I closed my eyes and let darkness take me.
* * *
Red. So much red. Blood? No. Just the insides of my eyelids. My first instinct was to open my eyes, to look around and find out what was happening. Was Mattie up? Was Mom crying again? But just as I began to open my eyes, they resisted. Don’t, instinct whispered. Don’t wake up.
Images flashed past me. A bus, a woman screaming and clawing at a window. A beautiful boy wearing a leather jacket, and a woman shielding her small daughter.
Slowly, I felt my whole body slowly release all the tension that had gathered in my muscles. A dream. It had all been just a dream. I let out a sigh of relief. Now you really do need to wake up , I told myself.
“Wren?”
At the sound of that voice, my frown came back. That wasn’t Mattie… who else would be in my room?
“Wren, you need to wake up. The horn is going to blow soon.”
Horn? What was this stranger talking about? I’d been dreaming about that experiment—no one had been killed, I hadn’t been on that bus, and my father had never called me. How would this person know about my dream?
While I tried to work all of this out, there was the sound of an impatient sigh. “Get out of my way,” a different voice said, this one deeper. I stiffened at the sound of it. “Hey, princess,” this new voice said. My brow furrowed in instant annoyance. “Wake up. If you don’t, I’ve got your cell phone here, and I’m going to text this Phil guy to tell him you hate his guts and that you never want to see him again.”
This had to be a dream. I snorted softly. “Go right ahead.”
Now there was a grin in that voice. “See? She’s fine. You didn’t have to freak out, woman.”
“My name is Shelia, not ‘woman’. And the girl’s lost a lot of blood. She’s lucky the cut wasn’t any deeper or she would have needed stitches.”
“Yeah, real lucky. Now can we move her? I don’t want all of us hanging out in the aisle when all hell breaks loose.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” I interjected, my eyes finally snapping open. Dream or no dream, I hated being treated like a child. A really good-looking boy grinned down at me. Knight , I somehow knew. His straight dark hair—kind of the same color as mine, I suddenly noticed—hung in his eyes, intensifying the whole bad-boy persona he had going.
I gradually realized that my head was lying in someone’s lap. I arced my neck back to meet the shrewd eyes of a familiar woman. The boy’s mother , something told me. Feeling awkward about lying in a stranger’s lap, I tried to sit up. The world tilted, and I couldn’t smother a gasp.
“I would tell you to lie back down, but something tells me that you’re not the listening type,” the woman—Shelia—said dryly.
Knight made a sound that seemed suspiciously like agreement. I glared at him. “You don’t know anything about me,” I mocked him, leaning back against a seat. It was then that I realized that this was no dream. I remembered everything, from Mattie walking out the front door to that man going after the girl with the tattoos, a wicked knife glinting in his beefy hand.
Everything was spinning… “Someone stop this ride so I can get off,” I mumbled.
“Is she going to be okay?” Tommy asked anxiously.
Shelia wiped her hands off on the sides of her slacks—I saw with a start that they were slick with blood, my blood—and stood. “She’ll be fine. Just needs a moment or two to recuperate.”
“What h-happened?” I demanded, hating how weak I sounded. The front of my shirt was covered with blood, and my stomach protested at the sight of it. “Did anyone… was anyone else hurt? I remember the girl, the man tried to help her—”
Tommy cringed. “That was messy.” It was all he would say.
I turned to my “doctor”. Shelia was studiously smoothing her son’s cowlick back. She didn’t look at me. I glanced up at Knight, knowing, somehow, that he would tell me if I asked. I may have just met him, but it was as if I’d known him for a long time.
He was the only one who would meet my gaze unflinchingly. There was no smile on his lips all of a sudden, and his voice deepened in pitch.
“The girl with the tattoos decided to go wild-woman on us. She screamed some guy’s name—Jason—and before anyone could react she threw her knife straight at that big guy up front who killed her boyfriend.” He paused to nod at the man, but I wouldn’t look. Knight went on, “But that guy is faster than even I guessed. He dived out of the way, and that girl’s knife hit some old woman instead.” He abruptly shut up, as if the story was over.
“And?” I prompted, heart pounding. “What else?” Knight was done, though.
Tommy hesitantly spoke up. “Now the woman’s husband—he was a general in the last war, I guess—is planning on killing the girl with the tattoos. Went nuts. He would have killed her right there and then if the horn hadn’t gone off.
“Oh, and the guy who was rushing to help her told the general dude that if he even took a step toward her, he would regret it,” Tommy added as an afterthought.
I straightened, trying to get a look up front at Tattoo Girl. She was sitting calmly, the man who’d told the general off sitting beside her. Neither of them spoke, neither of them touched or looked at each other. But I could feel the girl’s grief, her fury. I remembered the anguish in her voice, in that single word: Jason.
What was it like, I wondered, to love someone as much as she had? It had been so obvious to the world, even with just a glimpse of her face at that fatal moment. What was it like to be devoted so completely, that if he died you felt like you had died, too?
“Those damn scientists are probably eating all of this right up,” I muttered resentfully.
Knight laughed a little; I raised my brows in surprise. He had a nice laugh. “They have their own little soap opera,” he sneered. “Who ever said the—”
“I would watch what you say on live television,” Shelia interrupted smoothly. “You might pay later.”
Knight’s eyes darkened. He leaned toward Shelia, and the teasing, almost normal boy I’d seen for an instant disappeared. Tommy started to say something, but Knight held up his hand. “I don’t care,” he said to Shelia, “about what the world hears. About what the government hears. They’ve already taken what mattered most away, and no price can be higher.” Then, as if he already thought he’d said too much, his mouth shut with an audible snap, and he turned away.
Shelia regarded him coolly. I envied her control. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said eventually, and gave her attention back to the boy. He asked her something in a low whisper, and she gave him an answer that I didn’t catch.
Tommy shifted, and since it was his seat I was leaning against, I felt it. I glanced at him, but it hurt to turn my head, and I cringed. He had the sullen look that I was beginning to think was his normal expression, and I sighed.
“What is it?”
He didn’t reply. I looked from him to Knight. I was closest to him; he was closest to the aisle. I could touch his thigh or his shoe if I wanted to—not that I would. Again and again, I saw myself saying, Help her, and Knight just staring at me.
I look out for me and my own, girl.
But he’d helped me. I knew he had. Because now I was remembering that moment just before I passed out. Someone had shoved me out of the way and fought with the man who’d been trying to kill me. Him. Knight. Why? Why me, and not Nessa’s mother? Had he killed that man for me?
“Why?” I said aloud.
Knight inclined his head, fixing those burning, yet icy, eyes on me. “What?”
I glanced at Tommy and saw he was looking out the window. “Why me?” I asked again. My voice broke when I asked it, but for once I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed. I had to know. Why me and not her?
He knew what I meant instantly. I saw it in those eyes. He hid everything and nothing. And just then, curiously, the confidence that I finally realized was just a guise fell away and left a vulnerable, confused boy in its wake.
“I don’t know,” Knight murmured. He turned his back on me just like he had on Shelia, and said it again as if it bothered him, too. “I don’t know.”
With shaking fingers, I dared to touch his arm. His muscles tensed at the feel of my hand on him, but he didn’t pull away. A current traveled from him to me, and I took my hand away. “You saved my life,” I stated, grateful and pained and resentful all at once.
He laughed once. A hard, bitter sound. “Don’t count on it happening again.”
