The demon watched as the thief darted away. “Did I interrupt something?”
The sun beat on the back of James’s neck. Sweat rolled down his stomach, and his fingers were still slick with the grease of his lunch. But he stepped forward without hesitation.
He would not waste this opportunity. After all, every heartbeat could be his last.
Turned out, he was more right than he knew.
ELEVEN
Gremma returned from spring break in a rumpled, mascara-smudged state. She made a sound like a dying animal when Dee turned on her bedside lamp.
“Sorry,” said Dee, and flicked off the light. “How was your spring break?”
“Not very memorable.”
“Because nothing happened or because you don’t actually remember what happened?” asked Dee. Part of her took a perverse delight in her roommate’s suffering.
Gremma blinked, as if she didn’t know quite how to answer.
Dee said, “Is that ketchup or blood on your shirt?”
Gremma glanced down. “Not mine.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“Ignorance,” said Gremma, with as much dignity as she could muster, “is a good policy.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead, as if she was trying to hold her brain together. “Next year, we stay in.”
“We?”
Gremma’s fingers eased apart, and one eye slid over Dee, disconcertingly perceptive. “You look more hungover than I am. So you went out? Met some people? Did something crazy?”
Dee considered several answers before saying, “Ignorance is a good policy.” Her fingers went to the soft yarn of the knitted heart in her pocket.
The average resting heart beats between sixty and ninety times a minute. It varies from person to person, depending on age and fitness level. Dee knew her own resting heart rate had been around seventy—she’d had to take her own pulse during her last gym class.
Dee spent hours sitting with the knitted heart tucked into the crook of her elbow. With her left hand, she kept two fingers on her throat. Waiting, searching. For that familiar flutter of sensation, for any hint of movement.
But there was nothing.
She tried not breathing. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but something about it felt wrong. Stasis, the demon had said. Her body would simply go on without her heart. But did that mean all her other systems were frozen? What about going to the bathroom? Eating? Was she going to spend the next two years without her period?
Actually, that might not be so bad.
But there was a sense that something vital had been taken from her. Which ithad. She felt strangely hollow.
Two years. Two years of this.
Two years, and then her life was utterly her own.
That thought calmed her when nothing else would. She would never have to worry about going home, about cramming herself into tiny nooks, hoping to remain unnoticed, would never have to force herself to look down and swallow so many hurtful words that her stomach was always in knots.
And with this hollowness came something else—buoyancy. She felt lighter without her heart, without the throb and pulse of it.
It was easy to slip into old routines, to ignore the knitted heart shoved in her purse and the deadened sensation in her chest. She could tell herself everything was fine, everything was normal, and there were stretches of time she actually believed it.
It felt as if everyone should have known just by looking at her. Dee spent her classes feeling oddly conspicuous, waiting for someone to touch her and realize. Surely something like this left a mark on a person, some indelible sign that some part of her was missing.
A week after her encounter with the demon, she woke to a strange text from an unknown number. It contained a bank account and password. When she checked the balance online, she let out such a curse that she woke Gremma from a sound sleep.
