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Left turn to enter an alley where no CCTV lurked and the chopper could barely see. With one hand, I gathered my shaggy mess of hair into the tiniest ponytail and tied it there.
The shockwave slammed at me, whirled me around, and sent me skidding and scraping along the pavement. Leaves, paper, plastic cups, and dust went flying with me. My hearing bludgeoned, my eyes blinded, and my brain was smacked into submission by the onslaught. With blood tainting my mouth, I spun out into a whirlpool space that rang a last, keening note then...
Nothing.
CHAPTER2
Zara
Come to Kansas.
The words were emblazoned on a pretty yet stock-standard postcard that was all blue skies andWizard of Oztornado plains. So boring, so ordinary. My hand shouldn’t have trembled. But it did. It trembled because I wasn’t staring at the picture screaming tourism; I was staring at the small broken heart scribbled in the bottom right-hand corner.
Hissymbol.
Bile bit at the back of my mouth. Chest squeezing, I flipped the card.
There was something morbid in human curiosity, a need to see the wreck coming.
MISSING YOU. ARE YOU MISSING ME?
The typed words blurred, faded with my bearings—there, then gone. The postcard slipped from my fingers.
And just like that, my legs couldn’t hold me, not even as I grabbed for the counter, scrambling hands knocking my bag to the floor. A loud clatter of spilled contents.
I slid down the wall, the cool paint pressed against my back.
“Breathe.” My chest hurt. “Just remember to breathe.”
He’d found me again.
He’d left me alone, long enough for me to hope...
I picked up the postcard, my knuckles aching to crumple it—a moment’s gratification that would give me nothing. Instead, I studied the card for clues, every inch, and analyzed even his words, my finger pads exploring the small indentations—scars left by a typewriter’s mechanical violence.
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never harm me.
Buthecould.
The bogeyman could do anything.
He’d broken my friend with sticks then boasted about it in letters sent to torment. Letters with pictures of sticks and rags stained red. A fence with a scarecrow wrapped in the wire. A battered cellar door. A stick pinned in the ground with an empty dog chain.
Meaningless, unless you understood what he’d meant—and I’d become fluent in him.
By the time he’d started sending these little communications, I had trusted nobody. I’d learned the consequences of asking for help. Lessons reinforced for the five years I was analyzed, poked, sedated and temporarily committed.
Caged as ifIwere the animal.
It was the trauma from almost drowning, they’d told me. My friend never existed, they said.
Yvaine. My friend had a name.
I brushed my thumb over the little broken heart drawn in the corner, my hand still shaking but this time it was anger. The day he took her, Yvaine had been wearing her favorite broken-heart pendant, the gold plating peeling off.
Homeless drifters, Yvaine’s parents had set up camp down the road from the farm where I lived. They were a family who wandered with the wind, gypsies in soul if not by inheritance.
When I was sixteen, their nomadic life had seemed romantic. Yvaine was everything I wanted to be—wild and mysterious; even her name was exotic. I had fallen in love instantly.
