In Stone (22 page)

We did it.

Like a pack of wild dogs, howls and vicious growls circulate around the remaining beasts. My opponent turns to me. I brace myself for the full weight of his wrath, but in the blink of an eye he’s flung across the room, and I’m whipped into Jack’s arms.

“Hold on,” he orders. I obey.

Jack is running, the crazy kind of immortal running. My stomach feels like it’s filled with lead, and the skin around my face is being pulled so tight I’m almost certain it’s going to rip. He’s fast. Faster than Lisa. The only sound I hear is the shattering of the icicles as Jack runs straight through them. I can’t even begin to imagine the sort of damage that’s being done to his skin. But I am safe, cocooned in his arms and tucked tightly into his chest underneath his jacket, until, unexpectedly, my body hits the floor, and I roll several feet.

It’s painful. My already angry bones throb some more, but I ignore them. I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about him. He dropped me. He’d never drop me unless he was really hurt. When I look up I can’t see anything. It’s like trying to look through a sheet of obscured glass. My senses are screwed.

“Jack?” I whisper, feeling my way across the floor. I hear him moan in response. In the fog I see a figure stand up and stumble toward me.

“Are you okay?” Jack asks. It takes several seconds for him to come into focus. And when he does I wish my vision would go screwy again.

“Oh my god. Look at you.”

“I’m sorry I dropped you,” he says through a mix of pained hisses and inhales. Sweat and blood are dripping from his face. He looks like he’s been in a fight with a razor blade. There are deep scarlet gashes everywhere. Tiger skin. All over his body, his face, his neck, his arms. I’ve never seen so much blood, and I’ve seen every slasher flick available at FilmsToGo. One of the cuts begins at his top lip and runs diagonally, all the way up his face, straight across his eye.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, pushing my chin up and making my mouth snap shut. “It’ll heal in no time.” He pulls me into his chest. There’s hardly any strength at all in his hold. But we’re here at the foot of the brown wall where we first fell.

“How do we get out?”

“We climb.”

“Look at you. We can’t climb now. You need time to heal.” He might be quick at healing, but there’s no way a couple of minutes is going to be enough. Hours, days maybe. But minutes. Not a chance.

“We could wait for Rachael.”

“Beau, we don’t have time. We need to get out of here,” he chokes just as a chorus of angry shrieks sound off in the distance. They’re coming for us. Why isn’t he healing already? Nothing is changing. There’s so much damage. He’s losing too much blood; it’s going to take forever.

“Hold on,” he urges. With some reluctance, I wrap my arms around his neck and have to bite back the gag when my arm presses against raw, open skin.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” I whisper into his neck. Tears well in my eyes, but I don’t want to drop salt water into his wounds. I swallow them back.

Terrified that he might crumble in my arms, I cautiously tighten my grip, and we’re off up the wall. No tail comes out to secure me. Just like he’d scaled the storage unit, he starts scurrying up the wall like a spider.

His climb becomes sluggish at about half way up; his breathing labored against my ear. We’re just over an arm’s reach away from our exit, and he’s not even begun to heal. His body is shutting down.

He tries to snatch the edge of the slit in the sky but misses. I brace myself for the plummet, but a familiar tattooed arm reaches down the hole and catches Jack’s wrist. His body goes limp. His eyes close, and his free arm drops to his sides. I look up to see a very strained Rachael, trying to haul us to safety.

“Guys, my grip is slipping.” She winces, holding more blood than hand.

“Climb up,” Jack urges breathlessly. I don’t argue. The sooner I’m on solid ground the sooner I can help her wrench him to safety.

“Hold on,” I order softly and kiss him on the cheek. I snatch hold of the rock face. It’s a sheer vertical drop. If I get a cramp in my fingers I’m toast. The rocks cut into my hands as I hoist myself up, but I’m out and on the surface in a second.

“I can’t hold on,” Rachael hisses through clenched teeth. She stumbles forward. I grab her waist before Jack’s weight pulls her into the hole, too. She’s heavy, or maybe the limp stone body hanging at the end of her hand is making her feel that way. I have to plant my feet firmly in the ground to stop myself from slipping.

“Jack, you have to help me out here, man,” she pleads. I look down at Jack. His eyes are rolling around in his head. Apart from that, he’s not moving. I’m useless again. If I let go of Rachael I’ll lose them both to the hole. She’s trying her best, but I can see her fingers slipping. A shrill screech sails up from somewhere beneath us.

“Dude, come on. We have to close this sucker up,” Rachael flusters.

“Jack?” I whisper. He forces his head up and attempts a smile. He looks tired and just about ready to give up. An awful feeling makes my stomach shrink. Dread. “Don’t do it,” I mouth. “Don’t you dare let go.” But Rachael screams his name, and I know he’s done it. I know he’s let go. I watch him vanish. Rachael falls backward into me, and we both end up in a pile on the floor. I shake her off quickly and crawl to the edge of the abyss.

“Jack,” I scream, leaning into the hole. There’s nothing to see but blackness. The sound of demons squawking rings in my ears. My heart leaps into my throat, and I want nothing more than to throw myself down the hole and go after him, but Rachael is pulling at my waist.

“Beau, are you crazy?” she curses as she pulls me clear.

“We need to help him,” I shout.

“We can’t.”

Hysteria takes control of my mouth. “He’s pretty cut up. He needs a chance to heal. We need to get him back up here so he can heal,” I chatter robotically, like a mad woman. It’s the noises that I can hear, the noises of the damned fighting over his body. It’s the thoughts; the thoughts that creep into my mind of what they can do to an immortal. How they can torture him and death will never come to relieve him. “Please. Please, we have to do something. We have to do something,” I beg. I’m not above throwing myself at her feet.

“Wait here. I’ll go get a rope...or several ropes,” Rachael replies, starting toward the house.

“We’re coming. We’re coming to get you,” I assure the hole and stroke its edge, like he can hear me, like he can feel me.

A minute later and Rachael is jogging back over with armfuls of heavy duty rope when the ground starts rumbling. Dismay floods her face. She drops her arms, and the rope falls to her feet. Her gaze is trained on the ground behind me. With narrowed eyes and a crumpled brow, she lopes toward the hole.

“What are you doing?” I shout hysterically. The hole is closing. It’s knitting back together and shutting us out of the Underworld.

“Nothing. I’m not doing this. This isn’t me.”

“Can’t you stop it?” I ask.

“I can’t. It’s in the rules,” she panics. The ground stops shaking and the last few inches of the earth join back together. It’s like the hole never existed.

“Open it up,” I order.

“I told you I can’t.”

“Open it now!” I scream and shake her shoulders.

“Once they close it from the inside it’s gone for good. This gate no longer exists,” she reminds me through gritted teeth. I can see that she’s irritated by my behavior, but I can also see that she’s trying her hardest to restrain her temper. I take a deep breath and release her from my grip.

“Is there another gate?” My words come out in a whisper.

“Yes,” she replies with very little enthusiasm. Her eyes fall to the floor. “There are hundreds, but I have no idea where they are.”

“So that’s it? He’s trapped down there?” I massage my throbbing temples. She paces and says nothing for an eternity. Then she starts laughing, really laughing, from the pit of her stomach.

“This isn’t it. Jack is Jack for Christ’s sake. He’s the strongest son of a bitch I know, right? Resourceful, too, right? Right?” She’s laughing again. She’s gone crazy, like me. “There’s no way he’s staying down there. There’s just no way,” she concludes, slamming an affirmative fist into the palm of her hand. I suddenly realize that I’m not the only one who’s suffering from his absence. I don’t know how many friends Rachael has. I don’t know anything about her relationship with Jack -- how long they’ve known each other, how well they’ve   known each other. With a surge of effort, I bury my own anguish to console her because at least when I leave here I won’t be alone.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. He’ll be fine. He’ll heal and find a way back to us. Definitely.” I stop before I over sell it.

“LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING SERIOUS
is going down,” the taxi driver informs me as his car comes to a standstill. My eyes almost fall out of their sockets as I spy the something serious he’s talking about. There are two cop cars parked outside my house. I know instantly they’re here for me. I’ve been so numb, alone, travelling for hours. My mind was consumed with thoughts of Jack’s face as he gave up and let go of Rachael’s hand. Time hadn’t even entered my head. How could I have been so dumb? I check my watch. It’s eleven-thirty on Monday night. I’m seven hours late, and judging from the police presence, Mom knows I never went camping.

I’m dead.

In a frenzy, I throw a fist full of money at the driver and clamber out of the cab.

I bound into the house and am met by two police officers, lingering in the hall. I charge through them like a wrecking ball and into the kitchen. Mom is at the table, staring vacantly into a mug of coffee. A suited woman with scraped back hair and a pointy face sits by her side.

“Mom,” I say softly. They both look over at me. The shock on Mom’s face lasts all of two seconds. The look of elation is even more fleeting. The scorn, the piercing glare of anger however, sticks like glue.

Several thousand questions later, my house is cleared of police officers. My Mom listened in as I told old Pointy Face a story about me and a boy taking off for the weekend to go sightseeing. The plot was so punctured, void of specific detail and lacking in conviction, but they seemed to buy it. I’ve gotten good at acting. Explaining the cuts and bruises on my face was easy; I blamed a car accident. I put my failure to communicate down to the car accident, too. I played ignorant when Pointy Face started asking questions about Jack, acted as if I barely knew his name let alone his agenda. She wanted to speak to him, but I told her that we’d separated during the trip, and that I wasn’t likely to ever see or hear from him again. She said some horrible things about him, compared him to low-life criminals. At one point, she implied I’d been abducted. I just bit my tongue. Throughout our interview the pair of them, Mom and Pointy Face, kept eyeing my lace top. It’s a loan off Rachael. You can see my underwear through it, but my shirt was too covered in Jack’s blood to bring back.

When the interview is over, I eat bowls and bowls of humble-pie as Pointy Face metaphorically slaps me across the wrists and lectures me on the dangers of taking off with strangers. She also tells me they’re looking for Jack. I think, you’ll never find him.

Then it’s just me and Mom at the table in a graveyard silence. There’s so much tension in the room I worry it might push the kitchen walls apart. She glares at her coffee cup, and I just sit there, chewing on my sleeve.

We sit there for hours without uttering a word, until finally, she gets up and drifts out of the room. I hear her plod up the stairs and slam the door as she disappears into her bedroom.

Feeling cold and alone, I head upstairs. I flop down on my mattress. Everything, the weight of the last few weeks, Jack falling, the look on my mom’s face, it all flops down with me, and I don’t know how the bed frame doesn’t collapse under the weight. I curl up in a ball. No matter how small I make myself, I want to get smaller. No matter how buried in the covers I am, my skin still feels frozen. Thoughts and feelings are assaulting me more than any demon ever has. Every image my eyes have ever captured of Jack has been replaced by only one; that sallow shadow of who he was right before the Underworld swallowed him. I’m desperately craving the sanctuary of sleep, but it never comes.

Mom has already left for work by the time I get downstairs the next morning. I know this because she stuck a post-it to the door that tells me so. Three simple words. No kisses. No loving adieu. Just gone to work. I sigh at the note, turn away from the steaming cup of fruit tea on the table, and make my way out of the house.

I consider ditching school and going to sit in the park to stew in my own self-pity for a few hours, but I don’t. Mostly because I’m already in trouble, and the laws of the Universe say that today mom will definitely come home early from work and catch me.

Tuesday morning and the kids of Plumbridge high rub the sleep out of their eyes just to get a better look at me.

Beau Bailey, the creepy mortician’s daughter, who ran away with a stranger for the weekend. I also heard I ran away with a teacher, killed somebody, and robbed a drug store. The rumors are wild, and I’ve only been in the building five minutes.

I slip into the cafeteria because, firstly, we’re not allowed in classrooms before morning bell on account of the lab-fire of ’93, which is still talked about in school assemblies. And secondly, because I really need to see Leah. I scan the room, don’t see her wild hair. She’s not here. I drag my body over to our table at the back of the room, hit my chair hard, and fall forward into my folded arms.