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  I had pretty much figured that out on my own. There was no other reason they would have suddenly decided to arrest me now, and I’d always known it was a risk.

  “But then you changed your mind and decided to become my getaway driver?” That still didn’t make any sense. She might have known I was about to be arrested, but that didn’t explain how she’d been at the hotel. She couldn’t possibly have known where I was. And yet obviously, she had.

  “There were a few more steps in between,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “I felt really bad about it almost as soon as I hung up the phone, but I figured it was too late. That’s when I did this.” She held up her arms to display the bandages. “I changed my mind again while I was cutting, so that’s why I’m not, like, dead or anything.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I said, surprised to discover I actually meant it. No matter how many mixed feelings I had about Piper, I didn’t want her dead.

  She cocked her head at me. “Are you?”

  I sighed and finally sat down on the couch, though I kept a respectful distance between us and made sure my coat draped in such a way that I could get to the gun if I had to. “Yeah, I am. Though that may change when you finish your story. I don’t know how you found me, and I can’t think of an innocent explanation.” I glanced at the blood on her clothes. “And I don’t know how you got out of the house and why you’ve got blood on you.”

  “I already explained about the blood,” she said, not making any particular effort to mask the fact that she was lying, that the blood was not hers. “As for being at the hotel, well, no, I don’t suppose there’s an innocent explanation. I’m sure you know Aleric was planning to break you out of jail, but when I called and told him I was free, he came up with an easier plan.”

  I groaned. “You mean the plan where I stupidly get in the car with you and you take me straight to him?”

  “Yeah, well, that was his idea.” She grimaced. “Okay, it was my idea, too. But like I said, I change my mind every two-point-five seconds. Once you got in the car…” She shrugged and hunched her bony shoulders. “I don’t want you to get hurt, and I don’t want Aleric to get you. At least I don’t most of the time.”

  I touched the comforting weight of the gun in my pocket. I’d seen no sign that Piper was armed, but I didn’t know what she was capable of, what dangerous and unpleasant skills she had picked up when she was Nightstruck. And again, there was the issue of that blood on her clothes. Just the fact that she wouldn’t talk about it told me she’d done something terrible.

  “So what’s to stop you from changing your mind again and handing me over to Aleric?” I asked. I would have pressed her some more about the blood, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know the answer.

  Piper swallowed hard and finally met my gaze with those hollow eyes of hers. “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  I didn’t get it at first. I patted the pocket with the gun. “Yeah, I have a gun, but—”

  I cut myself off as I realized she wasn’t just talking about me being armed and therefore hard to kidnap.

  I guess it shouldn’t have shocked me. She’d already admitted to having slit her wrists, after all. But shock me it did, and all I could do was stare at her with my mouth hanging stupidly open. She raised her chin and continued to meet my gaze, her eyes showing fear and despair and anger and hope all at once.

  “I didn’t mean to imply you should commit suicide the last time we talked,” she said. “I swear I didn’t. But after I said it, I started thinking maybe it was advice for me instead of you.”

  I tried to remember the Piper of before, that laughing, vivacious girl who always found a way to make a bad situation seem better. I remembered tearful phone calls from the dreadful months when my parents’ marriage was imploding before my eyes, calls that invariably ended with me laughing, my heart lighter. I remembered the beauty of which I’d always been just a tad bit jealous, and I remembered her carefree spirit and her love of life.

  Today, she looked almost like an extra in some zombie movie, with her dull, listless hair, her corpse-white skin that clung too closely to the contours of her bones, and the bleak expression in her hollowed eyes.

  I felt a pang of yearning so strong it brought tears to my eyes. God, how I wanted my best friend back! How I missed the easy camaraderie and the feeling that there was always someone who had my back. I’d known from the moment my dad died that I could never have any of that back again, but when I found out she’d survived the gunshot wound, I’d had hopes that she could become herself again. Even if we couldn’t be friends, I would have been comforted by the knowledge that she was out there, that the friend I had once been so close to still existed.

  I wanted to believe that she could still come back, that somehow lots of time away from Aleric and the night—and lots of meds and hours with the shrink—could still restore her. But as I looked at her now, that hope was impossible to find.

  “The way I see it,” she said, “there are two choices. Either you let me live and I eventually change my mind and betray you to Aleric, or you shoot me and put an end to things. I should have died the first time anyway. It would have been easier for everyone involved.”

  “Easier isn’t always better,” I countered.

  “But this time it is.” She sat up a little straighter, her stare becoming more intense and focused, like she was willing me to do what she wanted. “Most of the time, I hate your guts, Becks. Take advantage of this little window where I don’t. Put me out of everyone’s misery, including my own.”

  Suddenly, I could see exactly how this was all going to play out. If I didn’t do it, if I didn’t shoot her, Piper was going to force my hand. She was either going to try to put in a call to Aleric, or she might even attack me, force me to defend myself. If she did either of those, I’d be forced to shoot her.

  I’d shot Piper once in a blaze of mindless fury, and it was the act I regretted more than anything else I’d ever done. Even more than I regretted watching Stuart get brutalized and killed before my eyes, since that was something I never would have done if I’d been in my right mind. But shooting Piper had been an act of hatred, and it had put the huge dent in my soul that had finally made me vulnerable to being Nightstruck.

  I refused to shoot her again, even in an act of pity. But if I said that out loud, she was going to take the choice away from me. So I lied, slipping my hand into my coat pocket and pulling out the gun.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  I pointed the gun at Piper, and she recoiled, her whole body going tense as her eyes went wide. I thought she was going to climb over the arm of the couch to get away from me, but she stopped herself, panting, her hands digging into the cushions like claws. There was a wild mixture of terror and hope on her face.

  “Do it,” she whispered, then squeezed her eyes shut.

  I hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to get out of this, so I stalled for time.

  “Not here,” I said. “I may want to … to sleep on this couch.”

  Piper opened her eyes and looked around. I thought for sure she’d see through me in a heartbeat. Did she really think I was the type of person who’d be putting thought into the potential inconvenience her dead body might cause me? But then she wasn’t exactly thinking like a normal human being right then.

  “How about the laundry room?” she suggested. Her voice shook, and her hands hadn’t released their death grip on the couch. She watched the barrel of my gun like a rabbit might watch a circling hawk. “Y-you can j-just close the door a-and forget I’m even there.”

  Oh yeah, that was likely to happen. But maybe once I got her into the laundry room, I could figure out some way to lock her in so I wouldn’t have to worry about what she’d do if I turned my back.

  “All right,” I agreed. “Show me where. And move slowly. I’m not a hundred percent convinced this isn’t still all some part of an elaborate setup.”

  Even in her terror, Piper m
anaged to roll her eyes at me. “How can me asking you to kill me possibly be a setup?”

  I shrugged one shoulder while making sure to hold the gun perfectly steady. “I don’t know, but I’ve already been set up at least twice today. If it happens again, I’ll have to consider that I may be the stupidest person on the planet. So cue the paranoia, and don’t make any sudden moves.”

  “Fine, fine.” Annoyance seemed to have dulled some of the fear. I hoped that annoyance wasn’t severe enough to make her change her mind and do something drastic.

  She rose slowly from the sofa, her hands up. I followed at a cautious distance as she moved toward the hallway.

  “Grab the lantern,” I ordered. I’d have felt safer if both her hands were empty—the lantern was probably heavy enough to be a dangerous weapon—but we would need the light, and I preferred to keep my two-handed shooting grip.

  Piper did as she was told, turning her back on me and leading me down a hallway and into a basement laundry room. I carefully checked out the door as I walked through, hoping there would be a nice, sturdy lock, but of course there wasn’t.

  The laundry room itself was as chaotic as the rooms above, with overflowing hampers against one wall and a clothesline draped with sheets and towels crossing from one side to another. Why the former residents dried their sheets on an indoor clothesline when they had a dryer was beyond me.

  Piper came to a stop just short of the line of sheets. Still moving slowly, she put the lantern down then stood up and raised her hands again. She kept her back to me, though the rigid tension in her shoulders said it cost her.

  “Maybe it’ll be easier like this,” she said. “If you don’t have to look me in the eye. If you don’t have to remember what I once was.”

  I realized with a rush of relief that she had just given me the opening I needed. I sucked in a deep, dramatic breath and moved in closer to her, until the barrel of my gun just brushed the back of her head. She gasped and jerked, but didn’t try to get away or tell me she’d changed her mind.

  I’d never in my life actually hit anyone—at least not since I was old enough to remember. Certainly I’d never conked anyone on the back of the head with the butt of a gun. I had no idea how hard I had to do it to knock her out—nor did I know how hard I’d have to hit to kill her.

  Figuring I was much more likely to hit too soft than too hard, I pulled back my hand and brought it down as hard as I could make myself on the back of Piper’s head. The sound of the impact—and Piper’s pained groan—made me wince, but she collapsed to the floor in a heap.

  Because I was fresh out of trust and innocence, I held the gun at the ready while I bent down to check on her. She appeared to be out cold, but she was breathing. Still operating on suspicion overload, I kept a careful eye on her while I dumped the sheets and towels off the clothesline, then unhooked it and used it to tie Piper’s hands behind her back, trying to find the perfect balance between tying them tight enough to hold her and loose enough not to cut off circulation to her hands. I then patted her down and confiscated her phone so that she couldn’t call Aleric even if she somehow got her hands free.

  She was starting to come to by then. I feared when she reached full consciousness, she was going to be furious with me and that maybe having her hands tied wasn’t going to be enough to protect me from her wrath. While she moaned and stirred, I quickly untied her boots and pulled the laces out, using them to secure her ankles. The bindings weren’t exactly foolproof, but I hoped they’d be enough to hold her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Piper was beyond furious when she woke up, to the point that there was no reasoning with her. She thrashed around so hard I worried she would reopen the wounds on her wrists. She screamed at me incoherently, alternately begging me to kill her and threatening to kill me. I couldn’t even begin to calm her, so I did the only thing that made sense: I left her alone in the basement, closed the door, and returned to the living room to try to figure out what to do next.

  I wasn’t exactly bursting with ideas. With the police after me during the day and Aleric after me during the night, I didn’t know where to go. Nor did I know what to do with Piper. I tried calling her house, thinking I could at least let her parents know she was safe—and maybe work out how to get her back to them—but all I got was an answering machine. The sound of that beep made me shiver and wonder again how she’d managed to get out. No one went out at night these days except police and emergency maintenance workers. I’d have expected the Grants to be hovering over their phone.

  If they were alive, that is.

  I shoved that thought aside. They had to be alive. Piper was pretty messed up right now, but she wasn’t Nightstruck, so surely she wouldn’t have killed her own parents. They were probably out looking for her or staying with family or friends for comfort and support.

  Wherever they were, they wouldn’t be helping me solve the problem of Piper anytime soon. More than anything, I wanted to get away from her, to put some distance between myself and the threat her mercurial moods posed. And I wanted to get out of the house Aleric probably knew she’d liked to hang out in—if only I could think of somewhere safe to go and some safe way to get there.

  I risked peeking out the front window to see if it looked like I could get out of the house without being seen. Unfortunately, the street was lined with parking meters, or at least things that were parking meters during the day. At night they were heads on sticks. The heads looked dead, but I knew from my days of being Nightstruck that they were capable of opening their eyes—and of reporting what they saw to Aleric. I bit my lip and hoped like hell they weren’t reporting the presence of Piper’s car even now.

  I sat back down on the couch—in the dark, because I’d left the lantern downstairs with Piper—and did battle with my own despair. I had never felt so utterly alone in my life, and if I allowed myself to think about what my mom had done, how she’d brought the police with her instead of warning me or protecting me, I’d probably succumb to an epic crying jag. I’m sure in her own mind, she was doing what was best for me, but that did nothing to lessen my sense of betrayal.

  Thinking of my mom reminded me that there had likely been interested observers in the square when she and the police had arrived. Aleric and his minions might not have known my mom on sight, but thanks to Piper, they probably knew she was coming. We look enough alike that under the circumstances I had to assume someone in the square would guess her identity. And that meant they knew exactly where she was. The hotel was well-guarded at night, but Aleric could probably muster a freaking platoon of Nightstruck to storm the place. And there was nothing I could do to help her, especially when she refused to believe I was at the center of everything.

  I was angry and hurt at what she’d done, but she was the only parent I had left, and I couldn’t bear to lose her. I pulled out my phone to warn her even though she wouldn’t listen and I doubted she could protect herself anyway. I’d taken the battery out earlier as a precaution, but I seriously doubted I’d have to worry about the cops tracking my signal at this hour. My finger hovered over her name, but my hand seemed to have a will of its own. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, but the idea of hearing her voice right now, of hearing her justify herself and tell me she’d brought the police for my own good, made my stomach churn.

  I decided to call Luke instead. I told myself it was because I wanted to make sure he’d made it to his hotel okay. It had been dangerously close to Transition when the cops had arrived, and it was possible they’d detained him for questioning. But really what I wanted was to hear the familiar and comforting sound of his voice.

  The call was answered on the second ring, but not by Luke. My blood turned to pure ice when Aleric’s voice said, “Hello, Becket.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t speak. I could hardly remember how to breathe.

  “You’ve been making things very difficult for me,” Aleric said in an incongruously cheerful voice. “I’m rather an
noyed with you right now.”

  My hands started to shake with a combination of rage and fear, and I managed to squeeze a few words out of my throat. “What have you done with Luke?”

  “Nothing yet. Well, he’s a little banged up from when we grabbed him, but other than that he’s in reasonably good shape. Still worth saving.”

  I put my hand in my pocket and touched the gun like it was some kind of talisman. I wanted to shoot Aleric dead, and I wouldn’t feel a bit bad about it afterward. Unfortunately, I’d already established that bullets went right through him, so shooting him dead wasn’t an option.

  “Let him go,” I said, just because the words needed to be said, not because I had any hope he’d do it.

  “I’d be happy to. He’s really not my type, you know?” He laughed at his own bad imitation of a joke. If he was trying to get under my skin, it was working. “All you have to do is come get him.”

  It was no surprise what he wanted in return for Luke, and if I thought he might honor an agreement, I’d have given serious thought into turning myself over to him. However …

  “I know you too well, Aleric,” I said. I was pleased to find that my voice came out a whole lot firmer than I felt. My hands were still shaking, but at least I was hiding some of my distress. It wasn’t much as victories go, but it was all I had. “It’s not in your nature to honor agreements.”

  He laughed. “True enough. Not unless it’s to my benefit to do so. But it’s not so much you I want—if you’ll recall, I’ve already had you, and I regret to inform you that you’re not all that.”

  My face went hot at the reminder, and my stomach twisted uncomfortably. In an intellectual way, I could admit that Luke was right and I wasn’t responsible for the decisions I’d made while I was Nightstruck, but it still didn’t feel that way. The thought of just touching Aleric made me feel dirty.