most of tomorrow with his mother.
He could tolerate an afternoon and one dinner with Tom.
He opened the front passenger door for his mother, but before getting in, she took a last look at the old gothic building behind them, and drew her sweater closer around her neck even though the afternoon was warm. She laid a light hand on Ryan’s arm. “What happened to that woman’s grandson?” she asked, her eyes searching his own.
Ryan glanced up at the front door, and for just a moment he remembered the screams he’d thought he heard on Monday night. Then he shrugged off both the memory and his mother’s hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
CHAPTER 36
SOFIA CAPELLI WAS in the science laboratory, finishing her regular Saturday job of cleaning out all the cages where the frogs and rats and rabbits — all the animals that were used for lab experiments — were kept. It never took more than an hour, and Sofia didn’t really mind it, except for the frogs, whose skin always felt slimy. Today, though, even the frogs didn’t bother her. She was actually holding one of them in the palm of her hand, cupping her fingers around it. The frog sat absolutely still, as if it knew that she could kill it in an instant. It stared up at her, and Sofia fixed her eyes on those of the small creature in her hand, and as their gazes held, Sofia suddenly felt as if the frog knew her — knew what was in her mind.
And didn’t just know her.
It hated her, too.
And she knew why.
It had been watching.
For weeks, it — and all the other frogs in the terrarium — had been watching as every day someone came and snatched one of them from its home and took it to a lab table and jabbed a slim blade into the base of its spinal cord before cutting its skin open to examine and toy with the organs inside.
It didn’t hurt them, of course. Or at least that’s what Sister Agnes had said.
But now Sofia knew that the frog in her hand had been watching, and as she gazed down at it she felt its hatred radiating outward like a million tiny needles, jabbing at her as painfully as the blades that had been used on the others of its kind.
Obeying the voice — and not even aware of what she was doing — Sofia closed her fingers, and the frog’s fragile bones snapped under their pressure. Its guts swirled inside its skin, then spewed out through both its mouth and its anus.
The voice inside her sighed contentedly.
Sofia opened her hand and stared at the shapeless mass that now lay where only moments ago a living frog had been, then she dropped it into the wastebasket.
What had she done?
Feeling suddenly nauseated, Sofia turned away from the terrarium, cleaned out the rat cages, then turned her attention to the rabbits. Two fully grown ones, one black and one white, were lying side by side, sleeping as their litter nursed on the white one’s teats. There were six in the litter, one black, one white, the rest in various patterns of both black and white.
Just as Sister Agnes had predicted when she’d first brought in the adult pair.
And now there they were, all nursing contentedly on their mother’s teats.
All of them except one.
The little white one, who was staring through the mesh of the cage, its tiny pink eyes fixed on Sofia.
Sofia opened the cage, grasped the baby rabbit by its ears, and took it out. “Don’t do that,” she whispered as she left the science lab and started back toward her room. “Don’t stare at me that way.”
The tiny rabbit, as if sensing exactly what was to come, trembled in her hands with terror, and its very trembling made the voice in Sofia’s head sigh in anticipation.
† † †
The dark cloud of depression that had gathered over Melody got darker by the moment. The weekend loomed interminably long with Ryan gone, which was ridiculous, considering that only a week ago she hadn’t even known him. And now, here she was, missing him terribly and with nobody even to talk about him with.
Until Tuesday night, she would have talked to Sofia, but after she’d come back from the infirmary, everything about her had changed, and even though she kept insisting she was “just fine,” Melody knew she wasn’t.
She was completely different.
And no longer someone Melody could talk to.
So she’d just do something else — anything to fill the time until tomorrow afternoon when Ryan got back.
She’d do her laundry. And study.
Great.
Sighing heavily, she stood up from the bench and started back to the dorm. The courtyard was almost empty, and the girls’ dormitory was bereft of its weekday babble of a hundred girls all trying to get to different places at the same time. Her footsteps sounded oddly loud as she walked down the hall, but when she got to the door to her room, she paused.
There was another sound, even louder than her own footsteps, and it was coming from inside her room.
It was a squeal.
A squeal as if something were in terrible pain.
† † †
Sofia sat on her desk chair. In her lap was the baby rabbit, staring up at her, its eyes wide, too terrified now even to attempt to escape. Not that it could have even if it hadn’t been paralyzed by fear, for one or the other of Sofia’s hands never let go of it.
Sofia herself was barely aware of what was happening. It was as if she were no longer quite inside her own body, but somewhere else — somewhere in a strange foggy place where she could observe what was happening, could feel the small furry creature in her hands, even feel its heart pounding, but could do nothing about it except watch through the strange mist.
And there was something else, too. Something inside her body and her mind that she could hear and feel, but not control. It was as if something had taken over, controlling her body and her mind, telling her what to do as she herself — the part of her that was the real Sofia — stood aside, reduced to nothing more than an observer.
And now, as she watched, her hands moved from the rabbit’s throat to its foreleg.
She held it in both hands, like a long willow twig.
She pressed her thumbs against the bone, and applied pressure.
But the bone didn’t bend like a willow twig would have. It snapped like a brittle straw at the end of summer.
It snapped, and the rabbit screamed.
She could put it down now, and it wouldn’t run away. How could it, with all four of its legs broken?
But she couldn’t put it down, not yet. The voice — the demon — the
The door behind her opened, and she heard a gasp. Sofia turned to see Melody Hunt staring at her.
