He’s alive. But I can’t celebrate just yet, knowing that neither of us will be alive for much longer if I can’t get us out of here.
Blood stains his shirt. The bullet could have hit him in the chest or stomach. Either way, nothing good. I shouldn’t be moving him, but I don’t have a choice.
He cries out when I wedge myself under his shoulderand stagger upward, bringing both of us to our feet. He’s deadweight at first, but then he manages to hold his own.
He rasps my name, his breath rustling the hair at the nape of my neck.
I look around us. Smoke in all directions, and behind that, the orange pulse of flames. Bertram and Annie are nowhere. If Annie meant for Bertram to survive, she’s forced him out of here by now. She wouldn’t have to work hard at that. The human instinct for self-preservation is stronger than our heroism. Once his lungs filled with smoke and he felt the suffocating threat of death, he would have moved in the direction that promised oxygen—even if he hated himself for it later. I can’t fault him for that. And Annie will have made her own escape, ensuring she’s long gone before the police arrive.
There will be no evidence that she was ever here. As always.
Sometimes criminals get away with it.
I’m sorry, I think. But the words aren’t for Waylen, or Collette, or even for me. They’re for my brother, who wanted this to be my shot at redemption. One last mission to prove that good triumphs over evil. But when he hears about this on the news, he’ll know the truth. Sometimes, evil wins, and not only that; evil masquerades as the good guy.
When the firemen found me lying still in the yard behind my burning house, they thought I was dead. One of them said, “We have to try to save this one, at least.”
It wasn’t until hours later, after spending the morning at the hospital, that I learned Jeremy was still alive.
It didn’t look good, the police officer cautioned me. He spoke to me like I was five, not twelve. He kept calling me“sweetheart” and pausing after each sentence, like he was telling me it was my turn to talk. But I never did. I didn’t know what to say.
“I love you,” I say to Waylen now, my voice strained. Despite my confusion about so much of our relationship, that much is true. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
He fights to stay conscious, both of us staggering in a direction that I think is the exit. It was blocked off earlier, but Annie must have gotten out somehow.
“I knew you were innocent,” he tells me.
These are our final confessions because we know that we’re about to die. Maybe that’s why we’re speaking so calmly, even as we cough. I feel an eerie sense of peace, and although I try to fight it, eventually I don’t want to anymore. I drop to my knees and Waylen comes with me, breathing hard. He doesn’t know the story of my past. He doesn’t know what a fitting end this is for me. It all started with a fire, and now it’s going to end with one.
After the fire happened, when I was a child, I dreamed about it almost every night at first. Eventually the dreams tapered off to an occasional haunt—the kind I never saw coming because it came after a period of tentative peace.
Did you do it?some asked me. But that was better than the ones who said nothing at all, because they’d already decided that I was to blame.
Something grabs my arm, reeling me away from Waylen. For a second, it’s as though I’m flying, my spirit going up, up. This is what dying feels like, I guess. I watch Waylen still lying on Earth, among the living, as I start to slip away. He’ll join me soon. I hope that we can at least look down on Collette from wherever we are.
My ascent stops, and I’m confused by the feeling of my feet on the ground. “Damn it, move, woman!” a voice says. An angel? I turn, and through the smoke I see the pristine platinum curls of my savior.
Not an angel. Elodie Blevins, cursing like a sailor in a most unladylike fashion.
I think I ask her what she’s doing here.Howshe’s here, and if she’s some sort of oxygen-deprived hallucination. In any case, she doesn’t answer. She only pushes me up, farther into the flames.We’re going the wrong way, I think.She’s going to kill us.But then she pushes open a door to the emergency stairwell that runs parallel to the elevators. The smoke is less intense in here, and I can almost think clearly.
“I didn’t start the fire,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says.
“I don’t mean this one,” I insist, as she shoves me down the stairs.
Before she turns around to go back into the smoke to save Waylen, she nods, sweat beading her entire face. How is she always so ethereal, even when soot mars her cheeks? “I know what you mean,” she says. “I know you didn’t start it.”
A week after the fire had killed my parents, I was able to see Jeremy. He’d been in a medically induced coma, they told me, because his legs were so badly burned they still weren’t sure if they could be saved. But he was awake now, and he was asking for me.
As soon as I stepped into his hospital room, I started to cry. This scared the nurse, and she left us alone and closed the door. I had been imagining all sorts of horrible things when they told me he’d been burned. His face charred and peeling,his skeleton exposed, or his skin horrifically mangled like I’d seen in a horror movie I wasn’t supposed to have watched.
But his face was spared, miraculously, and he looked the way he always had. Whatever horrific scars he bore were hidden under the blanket.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Come here, kid, let me see you.”
I shuffled toward him, my vision blurred. I was afraid to touch him. Afraid of pinching a wire or breaking a bone.
