At first, I couldn’t hear anything except a roaring in my head, a mangled mixture of noises overridden by a high-pitched whine. I’d seen a tornado once, back in Oklahoma, and it had sounded something like that. Blood filled my mouth, and I spat out the coppery taste and sucked in a lungful of air. It tasted like dust—which made sense, since the air was full of drifting particles of plaster. Through the hole in the wall, I saw Hailey marching towards me. Austin shouted something, and even with Kaden across his shoulders he grabbed at Hailey, trying to slow her down. Hailey shrugged him off without bothering to look at him, and Austin stumbled and fell backwards and out of sight.
I managed to get the Glock up, although my arm was weaving back and forth and my vision was still blurry. The first shot went wide—a puff of plaster, momentarily doubled by my vision, showed where the bullet punched through the wall. The next two shots were true, though. They hit Hailey right in the belly, tearing through a silvery t-shirt with bold black letters that said Forever 21. Both bullets sparked when they hit Hailey. One of them ricocheted and buried itself in a wooden credenza against the wall.
Like the fucking Terminator, Austin had said. I was starting to realize what he meant. Those bullets hadn’t penetrated her skin. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t even scratched her. Leveling my arm as best I could, I squeezed the trigger again, but it just clicked. The slide was locked back, I realized. The magazine was empty.
If I managed to make it out of here alive, the Glock would still be valuable insurance against Lawayne, so I tucked it into the back of my shorts. As I scrambled to my feet, Hailey plowed through the remaining lath and plaster. She didn’t pick up speed or seem to employ any additional force—she walked at her normal pace, and the strips of wood snapped away from her as though she’d hit them with a sledgehammer. Even though I was tired, I was big and strong and, on a good day, I’d bet on myself in a fair fistfight. Today, though, was not a good day. And this was definitely not a fair fight. So I had a backup plan: scram like hell.
“Austin,” I shouted past Hailey as she continued to close the distance between us. “Run!”
Hailey threw her first punch right then, and true to form, she threw it like a girly-girl—fingers loose, wrist limp, all the power coming from her shoulder. I ducked back out of reflex, thank God, because girly-girl or not, that punch would have ripped off the front half of my face. Her fist hit the wall behind me, instead of me, and tore through the tile like it was paper. Ceramic shards whizzed through the air, and a handful of them slashed my face and arms.
Not eager for round two, I threw myself towards the door. I was lucky: it opened. I skidded down the hallway, shouted one more time for Austin to run, and then I took my own advice. I ran like hell. But instead of running towards the exit, where Austin was struggling under Kaden’s weight and would be a vulnerable target, I turned and headed the other direction—and deeper into Belshazzar’s Feast.
When I reached the archway that led into the portion of the house meant for customers, I turned. Instead of whitewashed plaster and floors of pale, scrubbed wood, this portion of the house was richly decorated. Luxurious rugs cushioned my steps, and the heady smell of incense still brushed against the wood paneling in smoky spirals. I had only a moment to realize that the fleeing crowds had finally managed to escape the house. Then I ran straight into someone, and we both crashed to the floor.
Nails raked the side of my face, while a fist cracked into my ear. I had a flash of silver eyeshadow, and I squirmed away from the next blow. Then I caught her hand.
“Becca?”
“Vie? Mother of God, what are you doing?”
Behind us came the sounds of Hailey’s footsteps. I got my feet under me and helped Becca. “Never mind,” I said. “Run.”
We had three choices: the stairs, an archway opposite where we had entered, or the passage that led to the front of the house. I tugged Becca towards the front, but a spray of bullets ripped through the passageway, and we stumbled back.
“No luck that way,” Becca said. “I heard the guards—they’ve been ordered to kill everyone. I don’t mind so much about the customers. They’re getting what they deserve. But the people they’ve got captive here—”
“All right. Then we go this way.”
But as I took a step towards the archway opposite us, a wall of flame swept through the opening. Through the flames, I saw Jim in a stumbling run, one hand held behind him as he tried to maintain a defensive line of fire, and wearing a mask of blood. Heat pounded against us, driving us back again.
“Mr. Spencer—” Becca cried.
“We’d be toast before we even got to him.” I tossed a glance over my shoulder; Hailey was within throwing distance, and as though she had heard my thought, she reached up and, with a casual turn of her wrist, ripped a lamp from the wall. She hurled it at us, and Becca yanked me out of its path. Glass shattered, and the bronze lamp lodged in the wood paneling.
“Up,” Becca said.
So we ran up the stairs, with Hailey trying to pick us off from a distance, throwing anything that came within reach: another lamp, a marble bust of a man wearing a Navy-style cap, the incense stand, a bookshelf. The bookshelf was the most frightening—not because it came close to hitting us but because Hailey threw it with the same indifference as she had thrown the incense stand.
“Jesus,” I said as the bookcase struck the wall and flew apart, spilling shelves and broken wood and books everywhere. “She’s strong.”
With a handful of my shirt, Becca dragged me down the hallway. “We should have figured it out earlier. We knew Makayla’s ability had something to do with suppressing other people’s powers, but we should have suspected that Hailey had some sort of ability too. After all, someone—someone strong—had lifted Mr. Warbrath up to that noose. The rope was too short for them to have pulled him up, remember? And someone had ripped the door off his safe. I guess now we know who did those things. I just wish I’d figured it out earlier. It would have made sense, knowing that Hailey had an ability all these years. It would have explained why she was such a bitch sometimes.”
“I don’t think she’s had this ability for long,” I said. “Just since her disappearance. That’s what this place is, at least in part. It’s . . . there’s a woman here who wakes up people’s talents.”
This hallway was lined with doors, and Becca rattled the first doorknob. The door swung open. An older man, his hair dusted with gray, rushed past us, swearing and screaming. His pants sagged around his hips, and his blue-striped dress shirt was misbuttoned. He looked scared enough to shit himself, and I wondered if he’d ever felt bad for the girls—or boys—that he used here. I wondered if he’d seen the same frightened look on their faces.
I wasn’t ever going to find out, though, because he reached the stairs at the same time as Hailey reached the landing. Her hand swept out, fingers extended, and hit him with a knife hand strike. The man’s neck popped: that was the sound, like a cork shooting out of a champagne bottle. His legs jimmied for a second, and one arm flopped out. Then he slanted across the railing, his weight dragging him forward, and fell to the hallway below.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Let’s not get close enough to see what that feels like.”
“Good plan,” Becca said. She poked her head through the doorway, grabbed something, and emerged a moment later with a rail-thin girl. A rail-thin girl who was completely naked and, if I were a good guess, probably no older than twelve. The girl looked completely numb; she didn’t even bother to cover herself, and a mixture of bruises, old and fresh, covered his breasts and arms.
“Becca—” I started to say, casting a frustrated glance up and down the hallway. It was lined with doors—at least a dozen of them.
“We are not leaving them, Vie Eliot.”
“Why does everything think I’m suggesting that?” I growled. “I was going to say you’d better go on ahead. Get them out of here.”
“And you?” Becca threw an anxious look at Hailey, who was still coming towards us with that same implacable pace.
“I’m going to try not to get my neck wrung.”
Becca waffled for a moment; then she pecked me on the cheek, grabbed the girl, and hustled down the hall. Behind me, another door opened as Becca continued her search.
“Hailey,” I said, but before I could continue, another of those shrieking groans ripped through the house. The floor quaked under me, heaving and then sagging down so hard that I lost my footing and fell to my knees. A moment later it happened again, and this time Hailey went down too. For a third time, the house seemed to twist, like an animal writhing in pain, and the shriek of warping metal drowned out every other noise.
Then the house ripped in half. The floorboards separated, and my side of the structure slanted backwards. Delicate Chinese vases tumbled from their stands and shattered against the floor. Curio cases toppled, their glass doors swinging open and spilling jade and marble and ivory carvings. Behind me—now, also below me—Becca gripped a doorjamb and helped another emaciated girl from her prison. The girls must have been drugged, or perhaps they had simply been hurt too many times to care what happened any longer. At Becca’s urging, they scooted along the canted floor, moving towards a window at the end of the hall.
“Better hurry, Becca,” I shouted.
The structure sagged again, and the floor dropped. Light fixtures ripped free from the walls and ceiling, and the exposed wires snapped as they were pulled too far. Showers of sparks trailed through the air, turning pale and lifeless where sunshine showed through the fractured ceiling. This was more than the aftershocks of Jim’s fight with Troutt. This was something else. Something huge.
I regained my footing, balancing my weight on the steep angle of the floor. A moment later, Hailey appeared at the edge of the other side of the building. Testing the broken boards with the toe of her high-heeled shoe, she gazed down at me. Her face still had that blank expression, and it reminded me of the rescued girls. Hailey had looked like that ever since the day we had found her in the woods, and I had the feeling it was never going to get better. Whatever had happened to her in this place, whatever process was used to wake her dormant abilities, it had broken something in Hailey. And while I might not miss her shallowness or her snide, petty cruelty, I knew it was much more than that: something essential, something human, was gone from this girl in front of me, and that was a tragedy.
“I can help you, Hailey. You don’t have to do this.”
She considered that for a moment. Then, with a graceful bend of her knees, she launched herself into the air. Hailey landed a few feet away from me, and our side of the house sagged and groaned under the impact of her landing.
As she moved towards me, I scuttled backwards. “They’re making you do this—Lady Buckhardt, Makayla, Mr. Big Empty. They’re the ones who hurt you. Even if you do this, they’ll keep hurting you.”
Hailey kept coming. I shoved a fallen cabinet into her path, and she kicked it back at me like it was a bouncy ball. Throwing myself to the side, I barely escaped being clobbered.
“I have an ability too,” I said. “We can do this together, Hailey. We can try to fix whatever they did to you. We can—” I was already gathering my strength, hoping I could find that place inside her and heal it.
She pounced, and her fingers tightened around my throat, cutting off my air and my words. I would have died right then, except the building shuddered again. This time, instead of falling, the structure jerked sideways. Hailey staggered back, and for what might have been the first time in her life, her shoes failed her. The spindly heel snapped, and Hailey fell backwards. In an attempt to save her balance, she released me, her arms windmilling. I planted a hand on her chest and shoved.
With an indignant huff—a mixture of disapproval and shock, the kind of sound a matron might make when she saw blue jeans at church—Hailey rocked backwards, tottered, and fell over the broken edge of the flooring. A crash followed, and then a single, strangled shout from Hailey that cut off abruptly. Massaging my throat, I inched to the splintered ends of the boards and looked down.
This side of the house hung at an angle, and consequently, Hailey had not fallen far. She lay on a broken joist, but that wasn’t what had stopped her—I’d seen her plow through a lot worse just in the short chase through Belshazzar’s Feast. What had stopped Hailey was a bundle of yellow and orange wires that had split when the house separated. Sparks arced from the wires, hissing as they filled the air with the smell of hot metal. Hailey’s eyes were wide and glassy, and her body quivered as electricity pumped into her. It lasted only a moment longer, but it was long enough for me to notice the smoke rising from her head and the smell of burned hair wafting up towards me. Then, with a pop, the lights went out.
Not knowing if Hailey was dead or incapacitated or if she had somehow survived the electrocution intact, I slid down the canted floor towards the window at the end of the hall. Natural light poured in through the fissures in the structure, and I was able to make out Becca helping girls and boys through the double-paned opening. Skidding to a stop, I waited until Becca had helped a boy, this one no older than four or five, onto the grass outside.
“That’s all of them?”
“All I could find.” A jagged cut ran across Becca’s cheek, a bloody fringe hanging to her jaw. “Hailey?”
“Dead, let’s hope.”
“I need a cigarette.” Becca looked around; her eyes were dead, lit only by the refracted glow of her silver eyeshadow. More gunfire strafed outside, and then a man’s scream. The steady pound-pound of explosions that had signaled Jim’s battle with Troutt had ended. Whether one was dead, or both, or they had simply turned their attention elsewhere, I didn’t know, but Jim hadn’t looked good the last time I had seen him. Becca cleared her throat and gestured to the window. “Let’s go, before Temple Mae pulls this thing down on top of us.”
I helped Becca onto the sill and then paused when I understood what she’d said. “Temple Mae did this?” I glanced back. An entire wing had been torn from the house the way a particularly vicious toddler might rip the wing off a fly.
“Jake’s covering her with a hunting rifle,” Becca said, dropping easily to the ground. As I slipped through the window, she added, “The guys here have a lot better weapons, though. We need to get the hell out of here.”
“You can say that twice.”
Without needing to say anything else, we linked arms and ran away from the toppled building. The people Becca had rescued—boys and girls, adults and children—were already streaming towards the open fields, clambering over the split-rail fence and plunging into the knee-high buffalo grass beyond. Becca moved to follow, and I tugged her towards the gate instead.
“We’ve got to get away first,” I said. “We’re not any good to them if we’re dead.” Becca grimaced and nodded. I spotted Emmett’s Range Rover parked across the compound’s gate, and as I watched, Jake poked his head around the front of the SUV and fired off a shot. I threw a glance at the front of Belshazzar’s Feast, where at least two dozen men were huddled behind impromptu barricades: a splintered marble fountain, a trellis covered in creeping vines, an overturned oil barrel, even one of the front doors of Belshazzar’s Feast that must have been ripped free from the building at some point in the fight. “There are a lot more of them. How’s Jake keeping them busy?”
“Jake,” Becca said, and in spite of the tension of the moment she sounded drily amused, “is not their main concern.”
As Becca spoke, Temple Mae—her feline eyes tight with concentration, squirmed out from behind one of the Range Rover’s tires. A tractor, which had been sitting behind one of the outbuildings, flew into the air like God had given it a kick in the ass. It slammed down right on top of the man hiding behind the marble fountain—crushing man and fountain both—and then it rolled twice more with a squeal of metal. When the windshield shattered, thousands of beads of tempered glass made a dry clicking noise, like a sack of marbles being emptied. The man hiding behind the door had both legs crushed, and he screamed for his mother as the other guards split and darted clear of the tumbling piece of farm equipment.
“Fuck me,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Becca said, and this time the note of amusement was definitely there. “Hope Jake wasn’t planning on challenging her to a game of kickball anytime soon.”
With the guards distracted by the threat of being squashed, Becca and I made it easily to the Ford. To my relief, Austin was there, and he had loaded Kaden into the truck. Austin’s eyes went huge, and he slugged me in the chest before grabbing my hair and pulling me down for a kiss.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” he said and then he kissed me again. Holding me back so he could look at me, he shook his head. “Never again.”
“Glad you’re ok too. Kaden?”
“Still out.”
“If you too aren’t going to suck each other’s faces all day,” Jake snapped, “it’d be nice to get the hell away from this place.” He leaned around the Range Rover and fired. The man whose legs had been crushed stopped screaming.
I turned my attention to the rest of the group. “Where’s Jim? Mr. Spencer—has anyone seen him?”
“Not since he saved us,” Austin said.
Jake should his head, and Temple Mae, as she wormed her way out from under the SUV, shook hers as well.
“What about Emmett?”
“He—” Austin started to say, but his voice failed him.
“He went back to deal with Makayla,” Temple Mae said. Her voice had a flat quality to it; I suspected, based on the looks she was giving me, that she was trying very hard to hide her anger.
“Damn it,” I said. “And you let him go? We’re not leaving without them.”
As though in response to my words, the windows at the front of Belshazzar’s Feast burst. Glass sprayed outwards, followed by lacey white curtains whipping in the air, and then tongues of flame. The flames gobbled up the curtains and then licked the air, hissing as they pulled in oxygen. Even from the distance, currents of air swirled around us, dragging puffs of orange brick dust across the drive.
Some of the men still guarding the house screamed as the flames caught them. Some of them simply fell. Some rolled when they hit the ground. Others dropped and didn’t move again. A lucky few, those who had taken up the farthest positions from the building, broke and ran.
Jim Spencer emerged from the blaze like an ancient, terrible god. His clothes had burned to scraps, and the muscles of his chest and abdomen, even smeared with soot, rippled as he pulled in painful breaths. His face was still masked in blood, and more blood matted his hair to his head. In one shoulder, a deep puncture wound leaked a steady stream, and that arm hung loose at his side. Limping, Jim crossed the empty yard towards us. The flames died from around him as he came, but his bare feet still left a trail of burned grass and blackened stone. Temple Mae watched, ready to provide cover, but it wasn’t necessary; the last of the guards had fled.
“Holy fucking shit.” Jake was the first one to say it, and even though he propped himself on his hunting rifle and tried to look tough, it was easy to see the fear in his eyes. It was easy to see because it was in everyone’s eyes: mine and Austin’s and Temple Mae’s. It was even in Jim’s eyes, those Monet water-lily eyes.
Reaching us seemed to take the last of Jim’s strength. He sagged, and he would have fallen if I hadn’t caught him. One of his lean, muscular arms hooked me around the neck, and the smell of smoke filled my nose. It wasn’t the pleasant smell of wood-smoke this time. Instead, it was a burning plastic smell, and it made my stomach flip.
“He’s hurt pretty bad,” I said, lowering Jim to the ground. He was pale, and in spite of the heat that still poured off his body, he was trembling. “He’s lost a lot of blood. He might be going into shock. I need something to tie up his shoulder, and we need to clean up his head and see how bad it is.” I started to tug my shirt free, with the vague thought of using it as a bandage, but Becca used her hips to knock me aside and knelt next to Jim. In her hands, she carried a first aid kit the size of a tackle box.
“Some of us,” she said, “come prepared. Jake, grab a bottle of water from the Range Rover. We can use these—”
“Isn’t this sweet?”
Makayla’s voice made me twist around in surprise, but it wasn’t surprise that sent a flood of ice through me. It was fear: pure, liquid fear, so cold that I thought for sure I had frozen solid. Not fear of Makayla, not necessarily, but fear of the knife in her hand. The knife she held pressed to Emmett’s neck.
Emmett was bloody. His nose was broken, his lower lip split and puffy, but it was his eyes that hurt me the most. Those were the eyes of a man who had been betrayed. Those were the eyes of a man who had lost everything—a man who had put all his chips on the board, all his hopes and dreams and promises, and didn’t even have a pair of shoes left for the long walk home. Without even thinking about it, I opened my inner sight, reaching out for Makayla. This would be easy. I wouldn’t let her hurt Emmett, even if it killed me to stop her.
But instead of reaching the other side, I felt that enormous pressure on my chest, like I was at the bottom of the ocean. My ears had the over-full sensation, as though I needed to pop them, and my jaw ached. I grimaced, straining against that weight, scrabbling for the other side, but it didn’t make any difference. Whatever barrier I had encountered inside Belshazzar’s Feast, it was nothing compared to this. Makayla’s ability had canceled mine out.
I glanced at Temple Mae. Her lips were parted, her breath coming fast, and her eyes were wide with shock. So. She couldn’t use her ability either. I wasn’t sure if Jim would be able to do anything, but it didn’t matter—he had lost consciousness.
Makayla, in contrast to Emmett’s bloody, broken state, looked like she could have just come from the club. She wore a shimmering teal dress with playful tulle folds that gathered above her knees, and she had matching heels. She had even done her hair, which fell across one shoulder in a cascade of tight blond curls. I was so fixated on her ridiculous appearance, so unsuited for the brutal violence of the day, and so worried about Emmett, that I didn’t see Deputy Fort until he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Makayla. The two of them faced the rest of us—Makayla with a smile, and Deputy Fort with red cheeks and a painful hitching sound to his breath. Deputy Fort drew his gun slowly and tiredly, like it was his last chore after a long, hard day.
“You know, Vie,” Makayla said, reaching up with her peach-colored nails to pinch Emmett’s lip. She squeezed hard until a bead of blood appeared and Emmett whimpered and tried to pull away. “I don’t think things are going to work out between Emmett and me. He’s damaged goods, of course, but I figure you probably still want him. And, in exchange, I think you have something that I want. Isn’t that right?”