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Her expression turned dark and she shook her head. “Don’t be stupid, Poe. Think about it. Who really wanted my mother dead and was waiting for a scapegoat? Who really wanted you dead and was waiting for an opportunity? We have a common enemy.”
I knew immediately who she was talking about, of course. My foster-father was always on my mind too. In my head, I weighed the possibilities. To be honest, Nina and Mr. Aaron were pretty equally likely suspects. The only thing Nina had in her favor was that the precinct had been tracking her in New York State when Alana Faucett died and I knew my foster-father had been working hard to kill me for the past month. After a long minute of pensive thought, I finally nodded hesitantly. “What do you know?”
“I know that he’s been watching you,” she whispered. “We need to go somewhere more private.”
I looked out at the busy Baltimore street and frowned. Was it possible that Mr. Aaron was stalking me? It would be easy, really, to find out that I was staying with Frost and to track me from there. After a moment, I nodded my consent and followed Nina around the building to the alley. It was incredibly dark back there without the lights of the city all around. Only the snow illuminated the claustrophobic space. I wondered what Nina could possibly have learned in the process of running from her parole officer, as well as why she had skipped parole.
Suddenly, somethingsmackedinto the side of my head with enough force to send me crashing to the filthy alley floor.
Nina chuckled darkly as I groaned in pain and realization at my stupidity. Lying there in the muck of the alley, I clenched my fists in pain and anger. What in God’s name had I been thinking?
“Get up. Come on! Get up!” she taunted.
I cursed myself and got to my knees. My head was throbbing and something warm and sticky was in my hair. Was it alley scum? Alley scum would be cold, which meant that my head was bleeding. Slowly, I tried to open my eyes, then closed them again before I got dizzy. The whole alley was spinning.
I was just getting off my knees when Nina hit me again, this time in the ribs, with what I now saw was a metal baseball bat. There was acrackand a shot of excruciating pain and I went back down, rolling over on the ground with the force from the blow. As I lied face-down in the muck, Nina started going ballistic.
“You thought you could steal him from me, didn’t you? You littlebitch! You stupidwhore! He was my lover,mine!”
I groaned and tried to reign in the nausea and dizziness that were rising inside me. “Wasn’t Anastasia enough?!” I shouted in fury. “Wasn’t it enough to murder his sister before his eyes?! Why go to all this fucking trouble?”
I thought she’d hit me again, but instead Nina started laughing. It was a low, dark laugh, an endless one that turned more maniacal as it went on. It was the sort of laugh that I could picture her getting lost in for a full day after Anastasia’s death. “You really think this is just about Caleb’s rejection? About his betrayal? Oh no, Poe. This is so much more than that.” Her laughter overtook her words and I waited, hoping she would take a long time to regain composure so that I could recuperate. Finally, hate crushed the laughter and the bat came down on my back, pounding me into the gravel. Thecrackof the metal seemed to echo in the alley and I wondered why no one could hear it. Maybe the echo was just inside my concussed head.
As I grimaced in pain, Nina snarled down at me. “You stupid fool. You stupidbitch. I hated my mother almost as much as I hate you. Don’t you see? I was the one he was supposed to want, the one who loved him! Not her and certainly notyou.”
My stomach churned in horror as I began to realize what she meant. Gritting my teeth against the vertigo, I looked up at her. What little illumination streamed from the distant street illuminated her wild red hair and her vicious jade-green eyes glared down at me with a malevolence far greater than anything I’d ever seen in Mr. Aaron. “My God,” I muttered. “You were in love with my foster-father.”
“Of course I was and still am, you self-righteous fool!” she screamed. “Jonathan is the greatest man I’ve ever known and his idiotic whims with my mother and with you are the bane of my existence! I’ve forgiven him, but I will never forgiveyou.”
Eying the baseball bat, I choked on the urge to scream back at her and tried to keep talking. “Wasn’t Lex enough? You’ve destroyed my life! I will never recover.”
Nina smiled slowly, maliciously. “I held the grudge over you and over Caleb for putting me in jail all those years while I was locked away. And when I got out, I took care of my mother, and then I decided to check on the two living people I hated the most. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’d found one another. Call it destiny. But I could see that the damage I’d done, beautiful though it was, was not permanent. Do you know what is permanent?”
The baseball bat arced down and slammed into my temple. I rolled with the force of the impact in the icy sludge. When I stopped, I was lying on my back, staring up at a kaleidoscopic image of Nina’s face contorted with rage. Every muscle in my body had turned to water and I could feel the blood draining from my head. Nina leaned down towards me and smiled in satisfaction. “Losing the one thing that keeps you sane.”
A door opened at the back of the restaurant and Nina grinned, leaning across me to take my key to Frost’s apartment from my front jeans pocket. With the key in hand, she stood once more. “You won’t survive that wound. Even if you do, it’ll be too late. Caleb will believe you’re dead. That’ll be the end of you both.”
As she vanished into the darkness, I shouted for help, screaming for someone to hear me, someone who would warn Frost of what was coming for him. But though I heard shouts and frantic footsteps, the blackness of unconsciousness from which I wasn’t sure I’d wake seeped around me, pulling me under.
----
“Poe.”
I opened my eyes and was standing in Edgar’s conference room. As if on cue, he materialized about ten feet from me, staring somberly at me. I shook my head, tears of rage rising in my eyes, and ran to him, grabbing him by the collar of his cloak. “Are you fucking kidding me?!” I shouted at him.
Edgar shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Poe. She began the affair with your foster-father over ten years ago. Jonathan Aaron is a mentally ill man. I suspect the only reason he let you escape his intentions was because, though he’d lost Alana Faucett, he still had her daughter.”
I shoved myself away from him, turning away and clutching at my thick, dark hair, so much like his, wrenching it in a half-hearted attempt to rip it from my scalp. “That’s fuckingsick!” I shouted. Then, I turned back to him. He was watching me with a passive misery. He had known everything as it was unfolding and could do nothing to stop it. “Why Frost?” I asked, the rage falling before a far greater emotion: my pain for him.
“Mr. Aaron ended his affair with Nina, moved on to other diversions. She was panicked and desperate and latched on to Frost. When he discovered her as a sociopath, he ended their relationship. She got her revenge, as she had gotten revenge on you, but sat in jail for four years sharpening her nails and plotting bigger things. When she saw that you and Frost had somehow found one another and even worse that you were each precisely what was needed to heal one another, she decided to destroy the both of you. She began by pushing Frost to the same point of desperation you are at by annihilating his family. Then, tonight, she moved in for the final blow. It does not matter whether you live or not. She has already informed Frost that you are dead.”
I stared at Edgar in mute horror. “What?”
His entire body seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, with several hundred attached to those ancient eyes alone. Misery and pain were tangible presences in the conference room. “She called from the restaurant, pretending to be one of your coworkers. She called it a mugging. She is on her way to his apartment with your key to watch.”
I shook my head, falling to my knees. There was no pain as my burnt knees hit the floor and I was sorry for that. “No…” I moaned, a low groan issuing from deep in the pit of my stomach.
“Frost isThe Raven, Poe,” Edgar said quietly, the same way he’d tell me if Frost died in a car accident or fire. “At midnight, he will commit suicide. You will not be able to stop him.”
