“I think she killed him.”
“With a touch?”
“With a touch, then a kiss.”
“Dude, do you have any idea how fucked this all sounds right now?”
“Death is too good for you, but it’s all I have to give.” I leaned back into the soft cushions of the couch. “That was the last thing I heard her say to him.”
Dunk removed the peas from his swollen nose and lowered the bag to his lap. When he turned to me, his face was white. “The flowers.”
I remembered the flowers, too.
I didn’t want to think about the flowers.
“That was what, five? Six years ago?”
“Five.”
“You told me she picked up the flowers and they died in her hand. Just shriveled up, dried, and fell apart when she touched them without her gloves on. You said the old woman made her go back to the bench and forced her to pick them up without gloves on. The old woman made her do it, and she wanted you to watch, like tonight. The old woman—”
“Oliver. Latrese Oliver.”
“—Oliver, right. This Oliver woman wanted you to see that way back then, she wanted to scare you off. That didn’t work, so now she’s showing you this. Whateverthisis.”
“When Stella touched Visconti, on the cheek, at first I thought she burned him. That’s what it looked like, some kind of dark burn, but I don’t think that’s what happened at all. She kept talking about life force—she said there was a finite amount, a carefully maintained balance. When one thing dies, the life force doesn’t die with it but moves on to something else. Shifts, transfers, some kind of balance of power. I think her touch somehow took the life from that spot. The black spot was death. It only took a second.”
“And what? She can’t control it? That’s why she wears gloves? The longer she touches someone or some living thing, the worse…”
I nodded.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“She can’t touch anyone.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not without hurting them. Or worse.”
I hadn’t told him about the pool. I couldn’t. I was still trying to sort that out myself.
“You need to stay away from her,” Dunk said again.
“She doesn’t want to be there. They’re making her do this.”
Dunk blew out a breath. “If this is all true, nobody ismakingher do anything. This girl could walk out of there any time she wants. Nobody is going to try and stop her.”
I leaned forward. “I think that’s what all the guns are for. I always thought those people in white were some kind of guard, security, protection. What if they’re really there to keep her under control? She might get past one or two of them, but they’re everywhere. I saw a couple dozen, probably more.”
Dunk frowned. “You think they’d shoot her to keep her from getting out?”
“They’re not gonna let her go,” I replied. I knew what I had to do. “I’ll find the house. I’ll get her out.”
“I’ll help you,” Dunk said. “After my nose grows back.”
13
When we woke the following morning, Raymond Visconti was all over the news, his body found less than a block from our building, in a very familiar alley. One of the most infamous human traffickers in Pennsylvanian history, now nothing more than a husk, a shriveled up dead thing. The condition of the body was the same, too—dried and black, as if the result of some kind of fire that ate the man from inside out, leaving his clothing untouched. Unlike Flack, the local television network KTOD managed to not only get a shot of the body but show that shot on live television no less than four times before the police chief and finally the mayor stepped in and got them to pull the footage.
