Taken

Chapter 9

She was awake when the window broke.

Well, maybe not awake but certainly not asleep. Instead, she was in a fuzzy half state, cried-out and wishing for her own bed and her own kitchen instead of yet another clutch of uneatable fast food. For people who ate junk all the time they were awfully slim and energetic, each one of them long and lean and graceful.

Apparently, being werewolves was good for something. Jesus.

She’d refused to eat or speak to them, withdrawing inside her head the way she used to when Mark was on one of his rampages. They left her alone after a while and she just curled tighter and tighter around herself, becoming all elbows and knees. Julia had kept turning the television up, and Zach kept turning it down, and the smell of food made Sophie’s head ache and her stomach rumble.

Werewolves. Oh, my God. Little shivers would race through her at the thought. But she’d seen it, his flesh melting and reshaping, hair sliding free, and that sound—a thunderous growl that couldn’t come from a human chest, with weird clicking stops at the end. And oddly enough, he told her she wasn’t crazy. But werewolves, for God’s sake. And poor Lucy, and Lucy’s body, and the terrible gaping hole in Lucy’s throat…and Sophie would flinch again, pull herself together more tightly, and try to find some way to fit all this inside her aching head.

It wasn’t working.

They had arranged themselves either on the other bed or on the floor to sleep, Julia whining that Sophie had a bed all to herself and Eric saying, “She’s the shaman,” just like someone would say, It’s raining. Zach stood near the door for a long time, his head down and his arms crossed. The others whispered and glanced at him until he shook his shaggy hair as if he was dislodging a bad thought. They quieted as if he’d shushed them, then Zach settled down cross-legged like he was going to sleep sitting up.

Sophie turned over, drew her knees up, and tried in vain to sleep. Her head wouldn’t let all the horror fit inside it—she would try to put everything together, and one piece would fall out, sending a zing of pain through her aching skull. Lucy’s agonized gasping would echo inside her, or the thing snarling with its white shirt blackened and wet down the front. And she would flinch, her stomach churning.

It didn’t help that her skin felt like it had been scrubbed raw. Everything was so loud, the rustle of clothing and sheets rasping like jagged metal edges. The sough of breathing, like bellows. Her skin hurt, each sound sandpaper over ragged nerves. Her entire body flushed and tingled oddly. She wondered if you could get an allergic reaction from just the smell of MSG-laden food, and tried to find a comfortable way to lie.

Sleep was an utter impossibility.

So when the window shattered and the noise started, she sat bolt upright. A terrible reek of old dirt and rotting spice-rubbed fabric blew into the room like a tidal wave. The door shattered, kicked inward, and someone ran into her, grabbing and rolling.

The confusion ended with her on the floor between the beds, Zach untangling himself from her and barking, “Stay down!” before he vanished. The lamp on the table between the beds shattered as something hit it, and the growling, snapping, screams shading into yowls like a huge enraged cat reached a pitch just short of madness. Habit sent her fishing around for her glasses—thankfully, they were right on the night table where she’d left them, though the shards of the lamp were sharp against her frantic fingers for an endless, nightmarish second.

She might have stayed there, crouched with her hands over her ears, if she hadn’t heard a gurgling noise, like water swirling down a recalcitrant drain.

It reminded her of Lucy’s throat and the terrible bubbling, gaping wound there. And her knee was on something small and pebbled—Lucy’s tiny jeweled purse, the keys inside spearing her kneecap.

Sophie grabbed it and threw herself toward the end of the bed. Something flew over her head, snapping and snarling, and hot drops of foul-smelling liquid spattered her. She screamed, miserably, a small sound lost in the cacophony boiling around her, and crawled for the door. Someone tripped over her, a booted foot sinking solidly into her side, and all her breath left as her stomach backed up, trying to flee out her throat.

Cold air drenched the carpet as a coppery stink roiled around her, and she scrambled through the shattered door on all fours, crying out again as a sliver the size of a tree trunk pierced the meat of her left hand. That sound was lost in the huge noise, too, and the sliver was pulled free as she raised her hand.

She made it outside, to the pebbled concrete walkway, and scrambled to her bare feet. Ran, the little jeweled purse clutched in her bleeding fist and her feet slapping the concrete so hard she felt the reverberations in her teeth. The stairs unreeled under her, and a sudden vivid image of tripping, cartwheeling over and over and smashing her skull on the pavement below, managed to slow her for only half a second. The parking lot blurred by, a Coke machine screaming red, and she made it to the entrance to the parking lot, framed with high holly bushes. Her breath plumed white in the frosty air.

And there, looming out of the night like a fresh yellow beacon of hope, was a taxi. Riverside Car Service was painted on the side in orange, with a cheery decal that looked something like a mushroom and was probably intended to look like a car.

“Stop!” she screamed, waving her hands like a maniac or a drowning woman and, wonder of wonders, the cab braked smoothly. She reached for the back door just as the passenger’s window rolled down.

“Lady, you on drugs?” The cabbie, a short, thick, bristled man, peered through Coke-bottom glasses at her. Her own lenses were smeared and smudged, and her head hurt, a spike driven through her temples. The tingling, flushing weirdness on her skin was better outside in the cold air.

“Of course I’m not.” Her throat was raw, and she winced, groping for something to say. The noise wasn’t nearly as overwhelming out here in the parking lot, but in another few minutes that might change. “There’s a party going on here and I want to go home. Can you take me to the train station? Please?” Please?

She tried to look drug-free and vulnerable at the same time, digging in the purse and pulling out a random handful of cash—all she could afford to take dancing with her last night. She’d been grousing to herself over the waste—it was half her grocery bill for the month, dammit. “Look, I can pay and I’m not any trouble, honest. I just want to go home.” Behind her, the noise took on a different quality—a chilling animal howl that ended on a series of guttural broken stops. God, you have no idea how much I just want to go home. Please help me.

The lock on the back door chucked up. “Get in, lady. Don’t stand around.”

She clambered into the cab, slamming the door so hard she was amazed the window didn’t shatter.

“You damn lucky,” the cabbie said as he pulled away, excruciatingly slowly. “I usually tell people get out, they slam the door that hard. This thing’s my livelihood, ya know.”

Jesus Christ, what the hell was that? “I’m sorry,” she managed. Her throat was on fire and her glasses were probably never going to be the same. Two hundred bucks she couldn’t afford for the frames alone. “I guess I’m…I’m sorry.” Werewolves. And what the hell was that? Something came in the window, they were fighting.

More werewolves?

Jesus Christ. I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. And I saw it and heard it all myself. Cold air poured through the driver’s window; it felt so good against her fevered cheeks and sweating hands. She gulped in the smells of exhaust, vinyl, the close muggy smell of other people who’d sat in this very seat.

Real people. Human people.

“Aw, don’t worry about it. What happened to you, lady? You look awful scared.”

Scared seemed too pale a word. So did relieved. She didn’t twist around in the seat to look behind her only with a massive effort of will. If this guy got the idea she was maybe being followed, he might decide not to help at all.

“My ex-husband,” she said, softly. Lying, Sophie? But you’re getting away from kidnapping werewolves, that’s got to be a karmic pass. And besides, she had the terrified-woman look down pat. “He’s a real… He’s—”

After a few moments, he felt around on the seat next to him and produced, of all things, a battered box of Kleenex, held up with one hand over the seat back. “Wipe you face, honey.” He sounded much kinder now. “You leakin’.”

Fifteen hours later, bone-tired, still barefoot, freezing, and so tired even her hair hurt, she locked her apartment door with shaking, weak fingers. The scab on her left palm crackled with pain. The warm scent of the apple-cinnamon candle Lucy had bought her as a housewarming gift on its small table near the door managed to penetrate her running nose.

Christ, I’m a mess. The thought drowned in a flood of relief so strong her knees actually went weak.

Sophie slumped against the door, wishing she had more than two dead bolts and a chain. A mad mental vision of nailing boards over the doorway like a cartoon character danced through her tired skull. Lucy’s little jeweled purse dangled from her fingers.

Nobody knew she’d planned to go out with Luce. But there were her friend’s car keys, big as life and twice as ugly. She should have dropped them off the train somewhere, except Luce had Sophie’s house keys on her ring, and Sophie had left her own keys at home.

Then throw them away. Just get them out of here.

She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, or if it was the kind of irrational impulse that might take hold of a woman after she’d been kidnapped by werewolves, seen vampires—and, oh yeah, witnessed the death of her best and only friend.

The pale gray carpeting was full of pearly morning light, the walls still bare of everything but a single print of van Gogh’s Starry Night, another gift from Lucy. One bedroom, one bath, a living room, and a kitchen barely wide enough for two skinny women to stand in. She’d traded a luxurious house out in the Hammerheath suburb for this little slice of paper-thin walls and baseboard heating in what Mark always called “the blue-collar slum.” But it was all hers, and she paid her rent a month ahead of time by living on ramen and frozen peas—and a generous helping of Lucy’s cooking.

These were, after all, the types of places she’d grown up in. Big apartment blocks with tiny corner stores, trash bins overflowing outside the supers’ doorways, kids playing in the streets, and the sounds of other people carrying on with their lives behind every door. She’d thought Mark was the prince, taking her away from the noise and the stink.

But he’d turned out to be something else entirely. Everybody did. For example, she never would have thought flighty Lucy would be the friend to stick by her through that hell.

And now Lucy was gone. Sitting on a train gave you entirely too much time to think, and the inside of her brain felt moth-eaten and acid-dipped all at once.

Oh, God. She almost slid down the door and collapsed right there on the square of linoleum in front of the door. No welcome mat, even, but then, Sophie never felt particularly welcoming. She didn’t want anyone to know where she lived.

Except Lucy.

God. Oh, God.

Her face crumpled, and she pushed herself away from the door. Her fingers cramped; she mechanically slid the keys back in the little jeweled purse and stuffed both on the counter next to her cheap black vinyl bag, placed precisely next to a stack of textbooks so she could take the ones she needed every morning.

“I have a Child Development final this week,” she said, blankly, to her empty apartment. It was midmorning and the entire building was strangely deserted, for a weekend. Maybe everyone was sleeping, or hungover. Another cab had let her off right in front of the building, and nobody—not even the conductor on the train—had said a word about her feet. She was going to starve a bit next month; she’d had barely enough to pay her way home and her savings were nonexistent.

She dragged herself into the bedroom. The blinds weren’t down; she’d forgotten to pull them Friday night. It was Sunday, and she could sleep in her own bed—she had escaped werewolves and God only knew what else.

And Lucy was dead. And there was a little voice inside Sophie’s head trying to tell her she was forgetting something, that she was the responsible one, and that it should have been her gasping and choking in that alleyway instead of beautiful, burning-bright Lucy.

She was scrubbing her hands on the clothes they’d given her, she realized. Scrubbing and scrubbing, like some mad Lady Macbeth.

With a short sob, she tore the flannel shirt off, stripped herself out of the jeans, and pulled off the thermal shirt. She left everything crumpled in a stinking pile right inside her bedroom door, took three steps to the mattress she called her bed, and managed to crawl under the covers.

At least these sheets and blankets didn’t scrape her skin like sandpaper. And they smelled like comfort.

Like home.

She sobbed for a long time, curled around the one lonely pillow that had seen her tears in the battered women’s shelter, and later, during the endless rounds of divorce hearings. When she fell asleep, it was a slumber so dark and dreamless the fluttering around her bedroom window, under the pale gray sky that promised snow, went unnoticed. She woke only once, as the sky shaded into the cold flat darkness of an early winter night, and fumbled for her alarm clock. With it turned on, she had no more responsibility for the rest of the day, and she immediately fled back into welcome unconsciousness.