Poison Ink (17 page)

A couple of Reinas staggered away—one with a hand over her face and another holding her arm against her chest like it was broken. They headed for the back of the school, where paths would lead out to the main road and escape.

Katsuko straddled a girl on the pavement, punching her repeatedly. A Reina named Teresa grabbed her by the hair and tried to haul her off. Katsuko went with the momentum, thrust herself up and twisted around, reached out her hands and clawed Teresa’s face and neck. The girl screamed and shot a fist into the side of Katsuko’s head. The swimmer barely flinched as she grabbed Teresa, pulled her in close, and started to punch and then knee her in the gut and chest, driving her to the ground.

T.Q. threw Jesenia up against the bus, pressing her face against the metal, smearing blood from a gash on the girl’s cheek and from what had to be a broken nose onto the yellow paint.

Shouting, Zak grabbed T.Q. by the shoulders and pulled her away. T.Q. yanked away from his grasp, turned, and launched a vicious kick at his balls that made him cry out and fall to his knees, then curl into a fetal ball on the pavement. Zak started hyperventilating, air whistling through his teeth.

Rachael ran to him. T.Q. ignored her.

Sammi stood and stared, saw it all unfolding at once. When she could breathe again, she turned to Anna, whose eyes were wide with horror.

“Get back inside. Find coaches, teachers, whatever. Call the police.”

Anna ran.

Sammi heard another cry, a wail for mercy, and from the darkness near the front end of the bus came a figure bent at the waist, staggering in pain. The girl looked up, searching for some escape, and in the moonlight Sammi recognized Cori.

Then Letty went after her.

Letty didn’t run. She had done enough damage that she knew Cori wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. Instead, Letty strode after her, fists clenched with grim purpose. Blood spattered her grinning face, but Sammi did not think the blood was Letty’s own.

She caught up to Cori and launched a savage kick at the base of the girl’s back that knocked her to the pavement, sliding on her palms, scraping them raw.

Then Letty started kicking. She caught Cori in the head, in the ribs, in the arms the girl lifted to defend herself, and her grin never wavered.

But she never said a word.

Underneath all the horror and revulsion, her former friends’ silence filled Sammi with fear. Las Reinas cried out in pain, they cursed, but Letty and the girls said nothing.

Cori covered herself as best she could with her arms. Tears streamed down her face. Letty kept kicking.

Sammi began to scream.

“Stop it! God, Letty, just stop!” she cried.

Her awful paralysis broke at last and she rushed across the parking lot. Caryn looked up and gave her a dark, warning glance. Katsuko reached out to try to catch her, but Sammi darted past, bolting toward Letty.

Sammi had never had a fight. She had never thrown a punch. As she ran at Letty, she could think of only one way to stop her from hurting Cori any further. At full speed, she slammed into Letty from behind, wrapping her arms around her and driving her to the ground. Letty twisted in the air and they hit the pavement side by side, rolling.

“You little bitch,” Letty said, seething. She reached behind her, trying to pry herself loose, but Sammi held on as tightly as she could.

Letty bucked and Sammi started to lose her grip. They were roughly the same size, but Letty was so much stronger. She began to shake Sammi off, shrugging herself free. Sammi struggled to hold on, her arms slipping down around Letty’s waist. The girl’s shirt rode up, baring a stretch of her lower back. Her skin glistened in the moonlight, goose bumps rising in the chilly September night.

Pistoning her legs against the ground, Letty tore herself loose.

“No!” Sammi shouted, and reached out, hooking her fingers into the rear waistband of Letty’s pants.

Then she froze.

In the golden glow of the moon, she stared at the tattoo Dante had drawn on Letty’s lower back. Dread spider-walked down her spine, and her skin prickled all over.

The core of the tattoo remained just as Dante had originally designed it, just as it had been that night when he had engraved it in the flesh of her friends. But the five waves that came up from the heavy black circle at the center were no longer waves at all. They were black lines curling like vines in all directions, radiating out from that circle like veins from a heart. Like poison, they were spreading.

“Let go!” Letty snarled, twisting around to glare at her.

Sammi looked into her eyes and saw nothing familiar. It felt as though she were staring into the eyes of a stranger.

With a grunt of effort, Letty pulled away from her again. Sammi tried to grab hold, but too late this time. They were both still sprawled on the pavement when Letty drew up one leg and kicked her in the face, one hard heel striking Sammi’s cheek. Pain shot through her, and she felt bone give way. The crack echoed in her ears.

Sammi cried out, then tried to catch her breath as she dragged herself across a few feet of pavement. Letty rose, fury etched on her face, lips twisted into a mask of hatred. Sammi tried to get up.

She staggered right into Caryn, who caught her by the arms. For a second, Sammi thought the girl might be trying to help her. But then Caryn hauled back and punched her.

Darkness gathered at the edges of Sammi’s vision, and she went to her knees. Disoriented, she tried to rise again, looking around in search of some kind of help even as she attempted to back away.

Katsuko came up behind her, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and forced Sammi to the ground.

“Please,” Sammi said, tasting the copper tang of her own blood in her mouth and on her lips. One side of her face had gone completely numb save for the deep pain of broken bone. Even uttering that one word was like having shattered glass in her cheek.

The pavement felt cold against her other cheek. The leather jacket she’d worn seemed to be weighing her down.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sammi saw legs moving toward her. She kicked out, trying to do damage, to hurt one of them—all of them.

T.Q. loomed over her, red hair glinting in the moonlight but falling like a curtain to hide her face in the deepest of shadows. From those shadows came a laugh that burrowed into Sammi’s skin and froze her to the marrow of her bones. Insidious and intimate, her laugh seemed simultaneously loud and a whisper in Sammi’s ear.

The rest of them started to laugh with that same soft malice.

T.Q. kicked her first. Sammi grunted, bones jarred by the blow.

“Please, don’t do this,” she said, her cheek stabbing with pain as she tried to get the words out.

They all moved in then, kicking her in the side and the legs. Every blow made her want to scream. She rolled on her side, but that was worse. Kicks struck her spine, her breasts, her belly, and she let out a roar of agony and frustration and sorrow.

Tears slid down her face. The world had become a nightmare. These were her friends.

Someone kicked her in the face, breaking her nose. Pain shot back into her eyes. Blood cascaded down over her lips and slid along her cheeks as she twisted and moved, trying to find a spot where she could best defend herself. But there was no defense.

Nearby, people were yelling. She heard Zak’s voice. Rachael screamed for help. Someone stopped kicking long enough to stop them from interfering with the beating. Sammi heard adult voices and, in the distance, police sirens.

A heavy shoe struck her in the temple.

Consciousness fled into the shadows; darkness enveloped her.

The last thing she heard was the sound of their shoes slapping the pavement as the girls ran away.

Damage done.

11

S
ammi had the sensation of floating, drifting in the ocean. Her skin felt cold. Somewhere in the distance she heard a steady beep and muffled voices. A squeaking wheel passed by. Someone swore, and she heard the chirp of rubber soles on linoleum.

Floating. Drifting. For a while—how long she could not have said—she heard nothing. Instead she felt herself gently swayed by the currents eddying around her. Her fingers and toes were cold but the rest of her grew strangely warm.

Arms outstretched, she floated.

Drowning…

With a gasp, she opened her eyes, dragging in a painful breath as though she had been suffocating a moment before. Inhaling hurt her chest. Breathing, she immediately discovered, sent small splinters of pain through her upper torso.

It felt as though her brain were wrapped in gauze. She’d been hung over before, but this was no hangover. Her eyes opened only to slits. Every muscle felt slack and a terrible film covered the inside of her mouth. On her tongue she tasted the copper tang of blood. Lips twisting in disgust, she winced with fresh pain in her nose and forehead, and only then did she feel the deep, throbbing ache in her left cheek, as though some sadistic dentist had ripped out all of the upper teeth on that side with a wrench.

Her tongue probed that spot and found that one tooth had been broken, but the others were intact.

The pressure across the bridge of her nose and in a band across her forehead increased. The sudden urge to move made her try to sit up. She became dizzy and weak and slumped back to her pillow, disoriented. Sammi took a few moments to steady her breath and let the strange fuzziness of her thoughts clear. Experimenting, she lifted her hand, thinking to investigate her face and head for bandages. But the weight of that hand distracted her. She heard something shift, felt a pinch on her wrist, and when she managed to turn her head, she saw the cast on her right hand and saw the IV that had been hooked up to her arm. Moving around had made the needle shift where it lay jutting from her forearm.

“Oh shit,” she whispered.

“Sammi?”

Her mother’s voice.

“Sammi, honey? Are you awake?” Linda Holland said.

Just hearing those words made Sammi want to cry with relief. Whatever had happened to her, whatever was wrong, at least she wasn’t alone. Her mother would be there to look out for her.

Carefully, she let her head loll to the right. Her mom rose from where she’d been sprawled beneath a blanket on a large, soft chair. There were dark crescents beneath her eyes and she wore her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her clothes wrinkled, her face without any makeup.

“Mom?” Sammi croaked. Her voice was a harsh rasp.

“Oh, sweetie, I was so afraid,” her mother said, coming around to the other side of the bed and gripping her unbroken hand. “But I’m here. Mom’s here, Sammi.”

The tiniest smile touched the corners of Sammi’s lips, sending a fresh jolt of pain through her face. Her mother was talking to her as if she were still a five-year-old. Normally it would have driven her crazy, but right now Sammi just wanted to be taken care of, and Mom knew how to do that better than anyone.

“What…,” she started, then winced in pain. She forced herself to overcome it and studied her mother closely. “What happened to me?”

The question drew curtains across Linda Holland’s eyes. Whatever her mother was really feeling, Sammi understood that she had determined not to reveal too much to her daughter.

“Oh God,” she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “Is it bad?”

“No, no,” her mother said, shaking her head, touching Sammi’s arm. “I mean, you were pretty beaten up, sweetie. But you’re going to be just fine. You’re already on the mend. The doctor says you’re very tough.” Her mom smiled. “Of course, I told her I’d always known that.”

Sammi tried to return the smile, inviting fresh pain.

“I know it hurts, honey. They can give you something more for the pain if you want.”

“No,” Sammi said. “I just woke up. I’ll be okay for a little bit. I don’t want to zone out.”

Every word hurt, but she tried to conceal her pain as best she could.

“Okay. But when the nurse comes in, she’ll probably ask you again about the pain. And the…the police wanted to talk to you as soon as you were up to it.”

The pain had begun to throb deep in her cheek and jaw. She hurt in other places as well. Bandages had been wrapped around her body just beneath her breasts and inhaling created a rhythmic ache. But her face was the worst.

At the mention of the police, however, the pain receded.

“I don’t understand,” Sammi said.

“How much of the attack do you remember?”

Butterflies fluttered in Sammi’s chest and stomach. Flashes of violence splashed across her mind, terrible images of her old friends savagely beating Las Reinas, and then turning on her when she tried to interfere. Worst of all, she remembered the grin on Letty’s blood-flecked face.

And then one last thing—something that made her catch her breath and close her eyes. Burned in her memory was the image of the tattoo on Letty’s lower back, its five waves turned into black tendrils of poison that had spread like vines. The tattoo had changed. And in her memory—because it could not have been in reality—she could almost see the tendrils moving, the black etching now fluid just beneath Letty’s skin.