Deadgirl

adrenaline and telling me to run or die. Run or die.

My eyes shot around the hallway, but I saw nothing. No one but the secretary at the little half-circle desk. For the first time that night, sweat began pouring through my skin despite the icy freeze. I watched my arm in fascination as a drop of sweat crawled halfway down my elbow and then turned to ice.

I was breathing too hard. My nostrils flared, and the urge to run hit me again. Despite my better judgment, I threw open the door and leaped into Kent Miller’s room.

Inside the room there were three people. Kent Miller sat up in the hospital bed, looking groggy but awake. Maria Miller, a thin but very ugly woman, sat at the little chair by his side. A man in white I first mistook for a doctor stood in the corner of the room.

He was tall and thin with a gaunt, stretched out face. He didn’t look over thirty, and yet he surely wasn’t under forty. His smooth face belied his age, and his eyes were so dark they looked black. A white lab coat hung from his frame, and underneath it, a white t-shirt and a pair of white Dickies slacks. It didn’t surprise me to see a pair of white sneakers capping off his legs.

When I looked into his eyes, I felt my blood drain.

The primal, gut-wrenching fear had a source. It was staring me in the eyes, and I knew if I didn’t run I was going to die.

Chapter Nine

Fear the Reaper

My foot pivoted—that’s as far as I got. I grabbed the door and tugged as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.

I spun back toward the man-in-white, who stared at me with those coal-black eyes. He didn’t look happy—I half-expected a maniacal grin to spread across his face. Perhaps a soul-sucking evil laugh. He didn’t move though, except to pull his hands from the pockets of his lab coat. They were long and slender and fine—the hands of a piano player or a surgeon. He folded them together and let them fall to his belt-buckle.

“Good evening, little miss,” he said, in a voice like dark chocolate. “Please, sit.”

I looked around the room, adrenaline scouring my veins. I tugged at the door again, but if anything it was stuck harder. I turned back to him, my hand still gripping the door handle with white-knuckled strength.

I looked at Kent Miller and his wife, Maria. Both of them seemed awake, but neither was talking. Or moving. Their eyes drifted lazily across the room, like they were following the path of an errant butterfly.

“Hello,” I said to them. “Please help! Help!”

They didn’t hear me. They kept following that invisible butterfly with marked disinterest.

I turned back to the man-in-white. “What did you do?”

The man-in-white unfolded from his corner. He took a step forward, and I slid my back against the wall, toward Kent. The man-in-white stopped, an apologetic look on his face.

“Please, please, calm down,” he said in the velvet voice. It was hard not to obey. “There is no need for this.”

The fear, both natural and supernatural, was building, despite his words. He’d hurt Kent and Maria, because of me, and he was going to hurt me, too. He’d been following me in that ugly white car of his with the green tinted windows. I knew it without a shred of doubt. I should have checked the parking lot.

“What did you do?” I screamed at him. I couldn’t help it.

“Nothing,” he said, with what sounded like an embarrassed laugh hiding in his words. “I just fascinated them. It doesn’t hurt.”

Fascinated. I didn’t like the way he said that. Like it was…magical. He said it too casually, too business-like. None of this was new to him. It sounded almost mundane.

“Why…why are you following me?”

I glanced around the room. The door was locked. The windows were a possibility, but they were on the other side of Kent’s bed from me. And I’d have to pass within arm’s reach of the man-in-white. I tucked tighter into the corner, my hands digging around me for something to grab. Something harder than my hand, anyway.

The man-in-white took a step forward.

“I knew you’d come here, eventually,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, eyes scrambling for an escape route. “Why’s that?”

He shrugged, “They always come back. To finish their victims, I mean. Though I don’t really understand why you didn’t just do it during the car crash.”

My body went numb. Whether it was the insidious cold or his words, I wasn’t sure.

“He’s not…he’s not my victim. I didn’t—”

“No, you did,” the man-in-white said. “You did. You took from him those things most precious, and you were going to take more tonight.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. That wasn’t the reason I’d come. I’m not a killer. I’m not a monster, I just—I just wanted to go…

For no reason. No reason at all.

“Yes,” he said, but his eyes looked pained. “You came to take away his essence. His memories, his soul. You are a monster, little miss.”

“No, I’m not.”

I backed even tighter into the corner. I felt my legs buckling, their strength leeched away by the frost. The unending frost that told me to eat. To warm myself. To steal life. To take what wasn’t mine.

He was right.

“Please,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“I know,” the man-in-white said. “I know, little miss. But I can make it go away, do you understand? I can make it all better.”

The room began to brighten. I looked up to the ceiling, but the long florescent tubes hadn’t changed at all. If anything, they dimmed against the brightness. It took me a moment, but I realized it was him. The man-in-white. A glaring radiance, the white light welling up like water through the holes in his clothes. Through his arms, out from his neck, down in little circles around his shoes.

He smiled, and he was a kind of beautiful. His eyes burned brighter.

“You can go home now, little miss,” he said.

A pulse of light rippled from him, hitting me in the chest. Heat flooded through me and receded just as quickly, a kind of warmth I’d never known. The feeling I’d stolen from Kent was a pale shade of the light burning out of the man-in-white. The shudder of warmth slid across my skin, up my spine, across my face.

Then the ice returned. Colder. Abyssal. The black freeze of nothingness. I heard a long loud tone…then a beep.

Incredibly, my phone was ringing. It was so absurd in the face of the man-in-white’s nova.

I tugged my phone out of my pocket and flipped it over. A text message from an unknown number.

Snap the hell out of it.

You aren’t going to Heaven.

Run your little behind off.

I clutched the phone so tight I thought it would explode into parts. I stared into the screen, and another white pulse washed over me. The death-rime etched lines of agony across my bones. There was no warmth in that light. It was a trick.

I looked up at the man-in-white, squinting to see through the blinding glare. His eyes were two black pits. I reached toward the little bedside table, hoping to use it as a club to bash him. Anything to break his concentration, maybe, or to confuse him—

My hand passed right through the table. An icy wind slid up my hand with the motion. I turned back toward him and a grin spread across my face.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said, and I saw his face fall in the white light. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I held my breath, closed my eyes, turned around, and jumped toward the wall next to Kent.