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Fuck.
“Which way?” I ask when we reach the sidewalk.
Phineas casts a glance at the crowd still waiting in line at the door and then puts a few more yards of distance between himself and them, his nose twitching surreptitiously as he sniffs the air. “Left.”
He starts off immediately. I jog to keep up.
“When we find her,” Huck says. “What will we tell her? Since she ran from us, I mean. She doesn’t seem to want to?—”
Phineas comes to a sudden stop, every inch of him rigid with alarm.
“What is it?” Huck asks. “What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t respond. His eyes widen, his nostrils flaring. A tightly restrained growl tries to escape his lips, and then he takes off.
Dread hits me. There’s only one thing that would make my friend react like that. “Oh, fuck.”
Worry floods Huck’s face when he realizes it too. “Traders.”
I run.
Chapter 5
Creepy Mabel
One heartbeat. Two.
No more hurting people for you.
I flicker fast, disappearing from the sticky ground and reappearing in front of the stupid man with his stupid hat who gave us something that makes the world spin—and not in a fun way. My leg burns and screams, bright blood turning thick and black. It glops down my thigh and calf to pool in my sandal, but I’ll deal with that in a minute.
My fist hits his chest, crunching past the ribs and squishing past the muscle, and he gapes like a fish when his red heart comes back with me.
A gasp sounds to my left, and I flicker away before the cracking noises can follow. Bullets hit the brick wall, but the person who fired them can’t catch me. I dart to one side, then to the other, flickering in and out of view as I move.
He’s just another stupid man in a hat, this time with curly red hair and freckles on his panicked face, but he’s going to be dead all the same.
Except the drug is still in me. And my leg still has a bullet hole ruining everything.
I stumble just before I reach him, my bloody sandal slipping on the dirty concrete. The world wobbles and twists, but I still see him aim the gun at my chest, a relieved grin spreading across his face.
“Gotcha, you?—”
A dark blur slams into him and propels him into the wall. The shot goes wide, and his scream is cut off sharply by crunchy chewing sounds.
I want to grin, but everything is spinning too much.
Two more shapes appear ahead, blurry and dark against the glow of the streetlamps beyond the alley. One is slender and tall, while the other is funny-shaped. Bendy and wobbly.
But everything is swirling so much that maybe the wobbles are just me.
“Is she okay?” The words are a growl swimming through the soup of my mind, but they come from where the crunching sounds had been. The dark blur can speak, I guess.
That’s nice.
“Crunchy-crunchy better not touch me,” I threaten, but I giggle too because I’m not sure it matters what I tell him. It’s not like I can fight back. I can’t even feel my feet, and my hands are thick like clay.
But then, I’m not too worried. The longer they stand there, the more I’m convinced these shadowy things are safe. More than safe, actually. Fun.
