forgoes the pretense of starting at her own desk, and just sits at Nico’s.
She sees the new graffiti and is only mildly surprised. Recklessly she dives into that world, no resistance this time. She drinks in the words, running her fingers over them, hearing Nico’s voice calling to her. She rests her cheek on the desk, facing away from Jacian. Her throat catches when she hears
Nico’s voice lingering over the short phrases.
Save me. I’m alive.
Say yes. I need you.
Come back.
“I’m back,” she whispers. “I’m here.” Not caring. Never caring again. “Yes, Nico.” Slowly she feels something fill her body, fill the emptiness inside.
Throughout the morning Nico’s voice grows stronger, more desperate. Over and over he begs Kendall to save him, to come to him, and she can’t pull herself away. Not that she wants to. She is forever in that moment just before sleep, that sweet hovering of a moment where nothing else matters. Sounds, urges, all is deep background noise. This, she realizes. . this is truly where her brain doesn’t rule her world.
As Kendall floats to the sound of Nico’s voice for hours, something changes. His voice, it grows increasingly urgent, deeper, darker — like it’s inside her. Part of her now. Over time she realizes that the voice doesn’t really even sound like Nico at all anymore. And another layer chimes in, like in a round, chanting, Thirty-five, one hundred. Thirty-five, one hundred. But really, it doesn’t matter anymore in this floating world. She is trapped here. And she doesn’t mind.
Then the words change.
Beneath her cheek, swirling in whispers through her body. The words become cold and restless.
Strong. Powerful.
Come to me.
Tonight.
Tell no one!
Only you can save me.
Thirty-five, one hundred. Kendall shudders in her surreal state. It’s as if all the warmth is sucked from the room. Still, she is caught there, alone except for the new, strange voice. She’s trapped by the mesmerizing feeling, the seductive timbre. She floats, shivering, the cold coming from within, and she is unable to snap out of it on her own. Unable to care enough to try. She is one with the voice.
She knows how it will be. She can see it now. There are pictures flashing behind her eyes — gravel road, long grasses, tangled vines, a fence — hints of where she must go. She accepts it. Accepts her fate as the one who must sacrifice something so that she can save Nico.
And they shall have her. Their way. It is the right way.
When Kendall shakes her at the end of the school day, she rises, sluggish, to her feet, takes her things.
“Are you okay?” Marlena asks.
Jacian fails at his attempt to ignore Kendall completely.
“I’m just so tired,” Kendall says, slurring her words. And she is. It feels like she hasn’t slept in a week.
Yet she is aware enough to know that she has only one task on which to focus. One goal before it’s all over. One rule — that she must return tonight to save him. And tell no one.
Or Nico will die.
At her request Jacian and Marlena drop Kendall off at home. She trudges up to her bedroom and collapses onto the bed to daydream about seeing Nico again.
She pictures it, as if the desk is inside her, feeding her still. The back of her school, where she can enter through the always unlocked cellar door. And the place where Nico is — dark and spooky, fog rolling.
Massive trees and overgrown brush too thick to pass through. An iron gate, rusty underneath miles of coiled, creeping vines.
Before dark, before her parents get home from working, Kendall pulls herself out of bed and makes her way to the tool barn to collect the things she knows she’ll need. She selects a flashlight, a shovel, and a hedge clipper and returns with them to her bedroom. She packs the items into a canvas sack and puts it under her bed.
She feels weak for lack of eating; too weak to try to find something to make her feel better. So she stays upstairs to dream about what will happen when she reunites with Nico. Soon. When her mother comes to check on her, Kendall says she’s not feeling well.
She puts on her pajamas and pretends to turn in.
Come to me rings in her ears.
She doesn’t sleep.
At eleven p.m., her parents sound asleep, Kendall rises from her bed. She picks up the sack. At the front window she stops. Lingers and says a last good-bye toward Nico’s house. “See you soon,” she whispers. And then, quietly, she sneaks out of the house. Locking the door behind her. Putting on her boots outside on the step.
A cold wind slaps her face and she can smell snow. The wind is a shock to her system, almost enough to make her brain kick into worry drive. Something nags at her, walking so freely, alone, like she’s not supposed to be doing this, but she pushes the thought aside. She is going to save Nico now. This is her purpose. She says it under her breath as she walks, heel to toe, heel to toe. “Going to save Nico now.
Going to save Nico now.” Her eyes are on her boots as she trudges and trips in the dark.
Yet she walks determinedly through the field, staying off the road so she’s not discovered. Tell no one.
Twenty minutes later she lifts open the cellar door in the gravel behind the school. She steps down onto cracked concrete, her hair brushing low-hanging cobwebs, and walks past the storage room, where giant looming shadows of extra, unused desks taunt her. She climbs the interior steps that lead back up to the main level, and enters the classroom. She wipes a web from her face and stops in front of Nico’s desk.
She shivers uncontrollably in her nightgown. For a split second she hesitates, her brain suddenly whirring about the time when she broke down while playing soccer with Jacian, after the last time she sat at Nico’s desk. What if she’s making a mistake?
“No!” she shouts in the dark room, shoving the memory aside. She has to save Nico — she has to. She brushes her fingers over the desk, teasingly, around the space where the graffiti changes, before she places her hand over it, absorbing its medicine. In the dark she can’t read what it says, but the whispers tell her everything.
Harsh and wild, full of venom, the voice demands. The graffiti sears, electrocutes her fingers.
Find me before they kill me!
Deep in the woods beyond Cryer’s Pass.
Hurry! Save my soul!
Kendall gasps and whips her hand away, her fingers still burning. “Nico,” she says to the harsh voice, “why are you talking to me like that?”
But there is no answer.
And he is in danger.
Kendall knows she must go.
She stumbles back downstairs, out the cellar door, and down the road. All of Cryer’s Cross is asleep.
Her nightgown whips around her body, the wind piercing through the thin fabric. Her feet are cold, bare inside her boots, and she begins to run, guided by newfound instinct, the voice inside her buzzing approval. She holds her bag of tools close to her chest. When she passes Hector’s ranch, she turns to cut the corner, out of sight of his house, and then she heads down the path she took on horseback with
Jacian. She follows the path for a short way until it branches, and then she takes the other branch and runs, runs as fast as she can, stumbling, teeth chattering, skin burning and itching from the wind. Her legs ache, unaccustomed to running in her boots.
After what seems like an hour at a solid jog, Kendall reaches Cryer’s Pass, a road for quads and horses that winds up the ridge. Her side aches. Instead of taking the pass, she turns abruptly into the woods, still running, jumping over bushes and roots and vines until she trips and goes sprawling, landing on her bag. The hedge clippers pierce through the canvas and gouge a hole in her upper arm. She sits a moment, stunned, catching her breath, but there’s no time to look at it, no time to stop the bleeding.
