The shoes shift in the light, toes rubbing together.
“Jesus.” I jump back, colliding with Devon.
His arm jolts, and light sprays upward, revealing…her.
A girl, seated on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, in the crypt area. Her coppery hair, long and straight, catches the illumination, turning fiery in the darkness, her center part a chalk-white line.
“Holy shit,” Devon whispers.
Squinting, the girl holds up a trembling hand to block the light, but that doesn’t hide the shiny tears tracing down her pale cheeks.
After a second, she lowers her hand, looking up at us, imploring.
“Help me,” she whispers.
26
Instinctively, I start toward her, Devon right behind me.
Another victim, one we’re in time to save, for a change.
But I stop short, just before the typewriter, my boots skidding on the gritty floor. Instinct is screaming at me, and I’m not sure why.
“What’s wrong?” Devon asks at my shoulder, tension winding through the question, like vines clinging to brick.
I shake my head, unable to explain. Just the feeling that something iswrong, as if my subconscious is aware of details I’m missing and trying desperately to set off flares.
The girl’s mouth moves rapidly, words spewing everywhere, with frantic hand gestures, but I can only catch portions of what she’s saying. Her voice is somehow… diminished. Like hearing a voice on speakerphone from across a football field. Tiny, tinny, almost inaudible.
“… before he comes back, please! Don’t leave me here. He’s going to turn me into… suck all the life right out of me!”
“Who?” I ask.
She turns blue eyes, golden lashes damp with tears, toward Devon. “Please.”
“Is everything okay in there?” Carter’s voice floats in from outside. “Jocasta?”
“Yes, fine, just a minute,” I call back. “Stay out.”
“Jo,” Devon begins. “We should get her out—”
“What does he look like, the one who put you in here?” I persist, moving a little closer to be able to hear her.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. He was tall, I think?” She smooths her hands over her legs, and the tiny red-and-blue checked pattern of her pants shivers with the movement, the wide hemmed fabric nearly touching her shoes. “Kind of shaggy hair, grayish. Light eyes. Handsome but… freaky deaky.” She shudders.
Handsome but also like if you looked at him from the corner of your eye, you’d see a skull leering at you from beneath his skin? Eyes like frozen slush, a color between blue and gray and also somehow colorless at the same time?
Shit.
“My father,” I murmur to Devon, who blanches.
He could have easily stuffed this girl in here, like an alligator hiding his food for later, though I don’t know why he would.
Even where’s she sitting, behind some kind of magical barrier that prevents her from leaving, surrounded by objects from those poor dead girls—the typewriter, the necklace, a sparkly headband, and a framed photo of a beautiful dark-haired girl with her hair cut in a flippy bob—reeks of my father’s sense of drama and ritual.
“Please just get me out before he comes back,” she begs, carefully enunciating each word so we can hear her. I detect a hint of a southern accent. Georgia, maybe? “I was walking back fromclass, after all that fuss.” She waves her hand in the direction of the torn-up street and the Foreign Language House. “Next thing I know, he’s in front of me.” Her lower lip shakes. “I don’t know what happened after that, I just ended up here. He said he would be back for me, to take my life. Turn me into one of those skin things.”
“The husks?” I ask.
