Slow Agony (22 page)

I sat back on the couch and unfolded it.

“Doll,” it read, “I know that you won’t understand this, but I have to go to Marcel on my own. It’s the only way I can end this. I have to come to him alone. If either Sloane or Silas were with me, he wouldn’t accept my surrender. I knew there was no way that I could convince you of this, so I’ve gone without your agreement. I’m sorry. If there’s a way that I can come back to you, I will.” He’d signed it with his characteristic scrawl. I could only make out a ‘G’ clearly.

I let the letter flutter the ground, my hands going to my mouth.

That idiot.

What was he thinking?

I was on my feet in a second. He’d left me only minutes before. Maybe I could find him and stop him before he got to Marcel. How far could he have made it by now, anyway?

Finding my jacket, I left the waiting room and hurried down the hall to the elevators.

One was in use, but the other was open, so I got inside and punched the button for the bottom floor.

The doors closed. The elevator lurched to life. I twisted my hands together, willing it to go faster.

I didn’t even know if he’d go to the bottom floor, anyway. For all I knew, he’d go all the way down to the furthest underground level of the parking lot. I really had no way of knowing.

But when the door opened on the bottom floor, I saw him.

He was heading out of the front door, one of those spiral doors that travels in a big circle.

I leapt out the elevator, going after him. “Griffin!”

He didn’t turn around. Maybe he hadn’t heard me.

I picked up my pace, careening through the hospital lobby as fast as I could, dodging the people who were milling about.

I pushed my way through the front door.

Griffin was standing on the sidewalk, ahead of me.

“Griffin,” I yelled.

No response. I was a little out of breath, but I sprinted the rest of the way to him, placing my hand on his shoulder. “Griffin.”

He turned.

I stepped back. He wasn’t Griffin. He was wearing the same clothes Griffin had been wearing, and he had a shaved head, just like Griffin’s. But he was a different person. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“No problem,” said the man, smiling amiably.

A white van pulled up in front of him. The side door swung open. Two men jumped out. “That her?” said one of them to the Griffin lookalike.

The Griffin lookalike nodded. “That’s her.”

Wait. Why did they know who I was? Was the man dressed like Griffin on
purpose
?

I hesitated for a second, looking back at the hospital.

It was a second too long.

One of the men grabbed me by the arm.

“Let go,” I said. “I’ll scream.”

He laughed.

I struggled, letting out the highest pitched, most bloodcurdling scream I could manage.

Another man from the van had gotten a wheelchair out of it. He opened it up. “Transferring an unruly patient, folks,” he said, waving to the people who’d stopped at the sound my scream.

They wouldn’t believe that, would they? I screamed again.

But the people were already moving again, going about their business.

The man shoved me into the wheelchair.

I thrashed, trying to get up.

He held me down.

The other man had a syringe with a needle in it. He brandished it.

I redoubled my attempts to escape.

The needle was coming for me.

I shied from it, trying to keep from getting stuck.

It was no use. The man plunged it into the top of my arm.

The pricking feeling wasn’t that painful, but I shrieked anyway. Almost immediately, my limbs began to feel like rubber.

The men wheeled me into the van.

“What was in that syringe?” I whispered.

“Just something to calm you down,” said the man. “Relax, Leigh. We’re taking you to see Griffin. Isn’t that what you want?”

So they had him already. And now they had me too. Griffin had tried to sacrifice himself to protect me, and he hadn’t even been able to keep me out of it. I slumped in the wheelchair, despair overtaking me.

The van was moving, and I wasn’t in a wheelchair any longer. Instead, I was on a heap on the floor. The lookalike was crouched down next to me. “It’s great how you came down the elevator like that. We weren’t expecting that. I was going to have to go up and find you, lure you down to the van. You made our job so much easier.”

I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t move.

He reached down and pushed a lock of my hair out of my face.

I wanted to recoil from the intimate gesture, but I couldn’t do anything. I glared at him instead.

“You’re the one who killed Wolfman, aren’t you?”

I wished I could talk.

“You’re tougher than you look.”

Whatever I’d been injected with seemed to be some kind of paralytic. I had lost all control over my motor functions.

I didn’t know where a person could get something like that, but it seemed like it might have come from Op Wraith. Wolfman had said that Op Wraith had moved. What had he meant by that? And if these guys were from Op Wraith, what did they want with us?

The van screeched to a stop.

“Oh,” said the lookalike, “looks like we’re here.” He reached down and hooked his arms under my armpits. Then he hauled me to my feet, my back to his front. His arm went around my waist to steady me.

I couldn’t hold my head up. It flopped down against my chest.

“Prop her head up,” said the lookalike.

One of the other men yanked my head back. Even though I was paralyzed, it still hurt when he tugged on my hair.

“Okay, good,” said the lookalike. “Open the door.”

We were positioned right in front of the sliding door. Why did he need me standing up like this, anyway? If we were going to leave the van, surely it didn’t matter, did it?

The other man opened the door slowly, with flourish.

At first, all I could see through the door was the Texas landscape. We were out of town, and there wasn’t much of anything outside of the cities in Texas. Just open space. Flat, open space and blue, blue sky. I felt a pang, missing the mountains of home, wishing I were anywhere but here.

Then I saw the edge of a car—something sleek and black and new with aerodynamic lines, its surface polished until it gleamed.

Marcel was leaning against the car. I recognized him from the night in my house when he’d shot Naomi. He was grinning that same awful grin. My insides turned over in revulsion and fear.

Griffin was standing next to him. His arms were behind his back. He must be tied up.

When Griffin saw me, all the blood drained out of his face.

Marcel laughed. “Told you I had a surprise for you, didn’t I?”

Griffin started to struggle against whatever was keeping his hands behind his back. “You said you wanted me alone.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be much fun, would it?” said Marcel. “Besides, I’ve been curious about this little blonde thing ever since she shot me point blank back in West Virginia. And when I heard she killed Wolfman, well... I knew I had to get to know her better.”

He was leering, and I was really hoping that getting to know me wasn’t some kind of euphemism for something worse.

Griffin looked ill. “This isn’t the deal I made with you, Marcel.”

“You’re hardly in the position to make deals anymore, are you?”

“Let her go,” he said. “You’ve got me. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To make me suffer? Well, you have me. Leave her out of it.”

Marcel shook his head. “No, no, you don’t understand. What better way to make you suffer and to make you cooperate, than to have her around?”

Griffin gazed into my eyes, apologies written on his face. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“She has everything to do with it,” said Marcel. “To you, she’s the most important person on earth. That makes her important to me.”

“Fuck you.”

Marcel laughed again. “Don’t know why you’re so worried, Griffin. She’s got the serum, too, right? Doubt we’ll do much actual physical damage.” He pulled a pistol out. “Hell, I could shoot her in the head right now.”

“No,” said Griffin, suddenly panicked.

Marcel raised his eyebrows. “She does have the serum, doesn’t she?”

I didn’t get it either. I’d been shot before. It wasn’t any fun, but it was usually over before I knew it, and I was all healed. If Marcel shot me, then when I woke up, I’d be healed of this damned paralytic. Maybe I could figure out some way to stop these guys if I could actually move.

Going dark was like being dead to everyone else, but to me, it would feel like passing out. As far as I was concerned, Marcel could bring it on.

“Don’t shoot her,” said Griffin.

“You can’t stand it even when you know she’s going to be fine?” said Marcel. “Oh, we are going to have a lot of fun, Griffin.” He advanced on me, leveling the pistol.

Dead... Wait a second. What would happen to the baby if I—

Griffin’s voice, agonized. “For God’s sake, she’s pregnant.”

Marcel laughed.

The baby wouldn’t survive, would it? If I died, then it would die too. And it wouldn’t heal.

Marcel pulled the trigger.

I felt the painful tear of a bullet entering my flesh. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t do anything. The agony exploded in me, and then—

Blackness.

Chapter Thirteen

When I woke up, I couldn’t see anything, but I realized that was because I was blindfolded. I could feel gentle movement underneath me. I was in a moving vehicle of some kind—probably still in the van. My hands were tied behind my back. My feet were tied too.

I could feel a dull pain in my abdomen, something like menstrual cramps. And there was stickiness between my legs.

I was having a miscarriage.

No, I’d already had a miscarriage. It was over now. I was bleeding it out. The end. I wasn’t going to have a baby. I wasn’t going to be pregnant. Griffin and I weren’t going to be shuffling our class schedules around or carting a little mini-us to daycare. There weren’t going to be any arguments between us about how old someone needed to be to use a gun.

I wasn’t going to get really fat. I wasn’t going to have to worry about going through labor.

There wasn’t going to be a toddler in my wedding photos.

I wasn’t pregnant anymore.

I’d been so worried that I expected to feel relief. But I didn’t. Instead, I only felt an aching hole somewhere deep inside me, a widening chasm of loss.

I started to cry.

“Doll?” The whisper was ragged.

“Griffin?” He was here too? His voice seemed to be coming from the other side of the van.

“You’re awake.”

I didn’t want to be. I wanted to go back into the blackness. Now that I was awake, everything hurt. As if to punctuate my point, I was hit by a wave of cramps. I winced.

“Doll?”

“I’m awake.”

“Are you... okay?”

How could he ask that? I laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’m peachy keen, Griffin.”

He was quiet.

Then I heard the sound of something sliding across the van. He must be scooting closer to me.

I wanted to tell him not to bother. “Why did you go to him? You shouldn’t have done that, Griffin.”

The scooting noises stopped.

“This is all your fault,” I said. And I dissolved into sobs. Because it didn’t feel good to accuse him. It felt bad. I felt even worse now that I’d passed the blame to him. But it was his fault, wasn’t it? He was the one who’d left the hospital to go to Marcel. If he hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have gone after him. I wouldn’t have been captured. I wouldn’t have been shot in the head. I wouldn’t have lost the baby.

Lost. That was a stupid way to put it, wasn’t it? Because it wasn’t lost. It was dead.

“I’m sorry, doll.” He sounded beaten.

That broke my heart. I wanted to hold onto my anger at him. I wanted to scream at him, rail at him, beat my fists on his chest.

But my hands were tied behind my back.

And I couldn’t take it out on him when he was so defeated.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said.

“It
is
my fault,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t want this. You were trying to protect us.”

“Well, I fucked up. I didn’t protect you at all. I didn’t protect anyone. My mother’s been shot. You’re...” His voice cracked.

It was quiet except for the sound of the tires beneath us, whirring against the road. The van went over a bump in the road. It jarred me painfully.

I let out a little moan.

“Doll. Are you hurt?” he said.

“I’m...” I wasn’t sure how to say it. Finally, I settled for the phrase I just rejected. It was the easiest way to get it out. “I’m losing the baby.”

“And that hurts?”

“Y-yes.”

The scooting noises again. I could feel that he was close. I could smell him, hear his breath. But he didn’t touch me. Probably couldn’t. He was probably tied up too.

“It’s not bad. It’s just like a bad period,” I said. “It’s so early.” The baby barely got a chance. It wasn’t even a baby.

“Oh... doll, I’m...” I felt his forehead rest against my shoulder.

“I deserve it, don’t I?” I said. “It’s punishment, because I had an abortion.”

“No,” he whispered. “No, you can’t think like that.”

“If I hadn’t done that—”

“If you hadn’t, you’d be further along, and he would have shot you anyway,” said Griffin. “It’s done. It’s not your fault.”

And there was something in his voice that I’d never heard before. He was crying.

I’d never heard him cry before.

And I wanted—so badly—to be able to take him in my arms right then, to pull him close to me, to comfort him. But I couldn’t do that. So, I lowered my head so that our heads were touching.

“We have to stay strong,” he said. “I don’t what Marcel’s going to do, but it isn’t going to be good. He hates me, doll. He thought I was dead. He thought he killed me in jail. Now that he knows I’ve survived, he’s intent on finishing the job.”

I felt cold all over. “Why hasn’t he killed you then? He’s had the chance.”

“Killing me isn’t good enough,” said Griffin. “It’s got to be worse than that. That’s why you’re here. So that he can torture me.”