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Mark regarded him coolly, then tucked the envelope back in his jacket.
“It’s not as simple as that, Kevin,” Mark said as he slid out of the booth and rose. “The situation has changed. I can’t discuss it, but all I can say is I hope we find them. I hope we find them before something else does.”
Kevin’s face darkened in confusion and concern.
“Something else?”
But Mark turned without replying and disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Maddy woke in utter darkness. A few moments passed before she remembered where she was. The gym. Angel City High. She was hiding with Jacks, and they both must have fallen asleep. Something was different from when they went to sleep. Then she realized it: all the lights were off. Reaching for Jacks, she discovered, with sudden panic, he wasn’t there. The air around her suddenly felt harder to breathe. Her hands groped in the darkness. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, she felt a finger press delicately, but firmly, to her mouth.
It was Jacks. Silencing her.
She could just barely see him now in the dim light that crept in from the cracks under the gym doors. He was sitting up and utterly still. Something was wrong. In that same moment Maddy realized it hadn’t just been her panic—the air around her really was harder to breathe. It scorched her lungs as she sucked it in. The entire gym had grown blisteringly hot while they slept. It was stifling. What was going on? A bead of sweat rolled down Maddy’s forehead and splattered against the mat. Her hair was damp and sticky. She turned to Jacks.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“I’m not sure,” Jacks whispered back. “Something’s in here with us. I turned the lights off, but it knows we’re in here.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like it. It’s like pure evil. It’s not friendly,” Jacks said.
Maddy began to tremble. Taking her hands, Jacks wrapped them around the ring on her neck.
“We’re going to go into the hall together, and then I want you to run. Don’t look back. No matter what you hear, just keep running.”
“What? What are you going to do?”
Jacks was silent.
“You’re saying goodbye, aren’t you? You’re going to try and fight it.”
“Whatever it is, it knows we’re in here. It will never let us just walk down the hallway and out of here. It’s our only chance.”
“What if there’s another way out?”
“A way we can go without using the halls?”
Maddy willed her terrified mind to think logically. Rationally. Then she saw it.
“Yes. Some of the classrooms connect. If we go out through the locker room, we could cut through the classrooms to get to the other side of the school. Once we’re there, let’s just hope the gate is open.”
She could barely see the silhouette of his face in the darkness.
“Which way is it?”
Maddy led them silently toward the girls’ locker room door. When they had passed through it, she made sure the latch reengaged without making any noise.
In the dark, the silent rows of lockers seemed alive and menacing, like some kind of horrific, hallucinatory maze. Fog covered all the mirrors. Condensation dripped down the glass, reminding Maddy of rivulets of blood. Could something be hiding in this labyrinth, waiting for them? She looked at the lockers hanging open, the few towels left on the ground. Everything was utterly still. Maddy took Jacks by the hand and led him down one of the rows. They passed the coach’s office.
A voice called out to them from the darkness.
Maddy felt Jacks’s hand crush down on hers. He turned to shield her from whatever might leap out at them from the darkness.
“Baby, when I think of you-ou-ou, I get so blue-ue-ue.”
