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Her hair was wild and matted with blood, and one of her sleeves had ripped so it was dangling loosely around her bared arm. With her wide eyes and runny makeup, she looked feral, desperate: she was every inch the final girl with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
And for a moment, she looked at him as if he were the monster.
Then she drew in a ragged, wheezing breath.
“Raffi?” she whispered, blinking hard. “Y-you’re alive?”
He’d told her the saying thatlife imitates artwas a lie; but Adonica Blake had always become everything she’d ever touched.
So he could spare her this.
Taking a running start, he shouldered Johnathan’s son hard with his good arm, which sent him stumbling back a few disoriented paces before his heel hooked on a rock.
He saw Donni’s eyes open wide, and she sucked in hard enough that she choked a little on the moisture in the air, as Jason Steel found himself with nothing but air at his back and began to scream. It was a solid drop. He screamed for a good five seconds before there was a muted crack, followed by silence, which was broken only by the popping, sparking circuit, and the rain.
“He jumped,” Rafe said. “You attacked him in self-defense and then he jumped.”
“What?” She whirled around to look at him. “Nobody’s going to believe that.”
“They will. I saw the whole thing.”
He saw her realize what he was telling her to do. She looked horrified before another, grimmer emotion rushed in to fill it, and her expression melted into something that looked like acceptance.
“He jumped,” she repeated, lowering her hands. Which was when she noticed the blood.
And then she was bending to wipe her hand on the wet grass, with the hysterical desperation of Lady Macbeth ridding herself of the spot on the back of her hand. In the distance, Rafe could hear sirens, blaring in and out of sync with the pounding music rocking the walls of the shed.
“Donni.” He caught her by the arm, pulling her to her feet. She had managed to rub off some of the blood, breaking off some of her nails in the process, but now it was caked with mud, and he could see that she was hurting herself. “That’s enough.”
“I can’t do this again,” she said. “I can’t, Rafe.”
“Come with me.”
Numbly, she followed him to the shed.
He pulled on the repaired handle, grimacing with the effort, revealing two chairs and a projection screen. Jason’s sick little film was playing and he looked at what was on the screen only for a moment before reaching over and snapping the reel. There was a zipping sound, and then the screen went white, mottled with small burnt-looking specks of dust.
Rafe bent to retrieve one of those brown liquor bottles and sloshed it over the player and the shed and even the graffiti, too, for good measure. Taking a page out of Jason Steel’s book. He pulled out his lighter and tossed it on the player, backing both of them out into the cleansing rain as the film equipment and the old crumbled shed both went up in a blaze.
“You just destroyed evidence,” said Donni.
“I told you I’d help,” said Rafe. “Whatever it takes. I’d do anything for you.”
She kissed him, smelling of sweat and blood and earth, as the rain beaded on their skin and stung their eyes. The air was thick with ozone and pine, and the mineral reek of petrichor.
“I love you,” she whispered, and he squeezed her harder, tightening his grip until she gasped.
When the cops finally arrived, they were huddled together under the largest trifold, which showed Donni standing outside Opal’s house with the jack-o-lanterns glowing like fireflies.
Behind them, the shed was similarly diffused as it burned, smoking like the burned-out circuit.
In the photograph, Donni looked angry and defiant, with a sagging edge of defeat. But the woman sitting beneath it, wrapped in the arms of the man who loved her, looked free.
A THOUSAND LIFETIMES
Chapter Twenty-One
You Have Me by the Throat
