Etched in Bone

CHAPTER 24

Thaisday, Messis 23

Jimmy turned off the car’s radio and kept driving. The news was still talking about the weird snowfall that snarled up traffic on Crowfield Avenue in Lakeside. But he’d heard nothing that he needed to be concerned about.

His plan had worked perfectly, as he’d known it would. And he’d been lucky. He’d been a couple of cars back from the delivery entrance when that ITF agent walked out of the delivery area and dashed across the street. By the time he pulled up to the Liaison’s Office, the agent was inside the Stag and Hare.

His luck had held when he pulled in fast and clipped that Wolf, and the scar girl ran outside to help the freak. She didn’t even look at him until he grabbed her arm. Then she tried to fight, so he pulled out a blackjack and gave her a tap on the head. He opened the trunk and dumped her inside, taking a moment to feel her pockets and remove the folding razor. When his back was turned for those few seconds, the Wolf managed to get up on three legs and tried to bite him.

He hit the Wolf over the head with the blackjack, putting everything he had into the blow. Once the Wolf was down, he jumped into the car and pulled out onto Main Street, tires squealing as other drivers hit their brakes and their horns.

He was gone in a couple of minutes, with no one the wiser.

He’d been tempted to take the toll road once he left the city limits, either heading east toward Hubbney or following the shoreline of Lake Etu south and west. But toll roads meant people manning the booths. While there was no reason for anyone to be looking for him—not yet anyway—and no reason to think there was anything suspicious about a dark-skinned man driving an older-model car, the little cha-ching in the trunk might realize why they weren’t moving for that minute and start hollering and drawing attention to herself. Couldn’t have that, so he’d taken one of the roads that had a route sign and was going in the general direction he wanted to go.

He’d been on the road less than an hour when he spotted a rest area and a sign that indicated the next village was another thirty miles away. The rest area looked rustic. The crappers were probably nothing more than seats positioned over holes in the ground, but if there was no one else there, the place would serve just fine.

He pulled into the rest area, then backed up as close as he could to the side of the small building that was designated for women. No other cars around, but he still checked the men’s side as well as the women’s before he opened the trunk.

“You evil human! You hurt Skippy!”

The cha-ching tried to sit up without permission. Jimmy slapped her hard enough to split her lip. The slap wouldn’t have fazed Sandee, not to the point of looking like she’d taken a hard blow to the head. He hauled his prize out of the trunk and hustled into the women’s side of the building. He pushed her down on the dirty floor and pulled the folding razor out of his pocket. He’d heard enough about the scar girls to know you cut them and asked a question. Then they gave you an answer.

But where to cut? He figured he could get a hundred—maybe even two hundred—dollars for a cut, but customers would want fresh skin. He studied the cross-hatching of scars on the top part of her left arm, then looked at the evenly spaced scars on her right arm.

She still seemed dazed from the slap, but when she saw him bring the razor close to her right arm, she started to struggle.

“No, don’t,” she said.

His hand tightened on her arm, a bruising grip. “You do what I tell you from now on.” He made a cut across several of the existing scars. Blood flowed from the wound, running down and pooling where his hand held her arm.

“We’re going to a city on the coast,” he said. “Tell me what roads to take to avoid being found by the fucking cops. Speak!”

Her gray eyes went blank, and her expression as she began to speak . . . He knew what it meant when a woman had that look. The little bitch needed a man, and she needed one bad.

First he had to concentrate on what she was saying. He didn’t need to write this shit down; he’d remember it just fine, but . . .

When she finished speaking, she sighed and stretched out on the floor.

Jimmy dropped the razor and shoved a hand down her pants. Gods! She was hot and wet and just begging for a quick fuck. He reached for his zipper, then froze when he heard car doors slam.

Shit!

He grabbed the razor and almost closed it and put it in his pocket. But he’d dropped it on the floor and he could see bits of dirt on the blade. If he cut her with a dirty razor she could get an infection and be worthless. Did he have time?

Male voices, going into the other side of the building.

He turned on the water in the sink, rinsed off the razor, then dried it with a couple of paper towels before closing it and shoving it into his pocket. He wet a couple more paper towels and wiped the blood off her arm. The cut was still bleeding. Was that normal? He didn’t have bandages or any of that first-aid shit. Maybe he’d look for some when he stopped for gas.

Pressing the wet paper towels against the cut, he hauled her to her feet and walked her to the door. He opened it enough to make sure no one was hanging around outside. Then he pulled her outside and dumped her into the trunk. He slammed the lid down and swore fiercely when the latch didn’t catch. Fucking piece-of-shit car. Yeah, the car’s owner had told him the latch wouldn’t catch sometimes if you slammed the lid down hard, which just proved the owner was a pussy.

He slammed the lid again. This time it caught. He got in the car and was pulling out of the rest area when two young men came out of the other side of the building, laughing and talking. Traveling somewhere. They looked in his direction.

Jimmy pulled out of the rest area too fast and bumped onto the road, heading south and east. He didn’t notice the trunk lid bounce up a couple of inches before something held it down.

Jolted out of a haze of colliding images, Meg saw a strip of daylight and grabbed the trunk lid before it might be noticed. She couldn’t remember anything she’d told Cyrus when he cut her arm, but she had swallowed the blood and the pain and the words when he slapped her and split her lip.

She’d seen only a couple of the images when he cut across the scars of old prophecies and asked his question, but combined with what she’d seen after he slapped her, those images were a start. She had been asking questions of her own ever since her head cleared from the blow Cyrus gave her when he took her from the Liaison’s Office: How could she escape from this man? Where could she hide until Simon found her?

She’d seen an image of a trunk lid partially open and she’d seen . . . Or was it a memory?

Carefully shifting position, Meg took hold of the trunk lid’s catch with her right hand and tucked her left leg toward her belly until she was able to undo the lacing on her sneaker. She used the lacing to secure the trunk lid, leaving just enough space to provide some fresh air and light. Then she lay back, aware that her arm was still leaking blood. Not good. Cyrus must have made the cut a little too deep. But it would clot—eventually. She hoped.

She had to stay awake and aware. If Cyrus stopped the car, she needed to untie the lid and hide the shoelace. No guarantee that the lid wouldn’t latch on its own if the car hit a bump or that Cyrus would be so careless the next time he stopped. But . . .

Yes. She remembered this. A trunk safety release. After Karl Kowalski had read the new Wolf Team story where one of the Wolf Team had been trapped in a car trunk, he told her that all cars made by humans had a safety release, had even shown her the release on his car. So she could get out of this trunk even if the lid was closed. But not while the car was moving. That would be dangerous for anyone, and the cuts and scrapes on skin for someone like her would be devastating, leaving her helpless to the prophecies released with every cut and scrape.

And then there were the other images she’d seen when Cyrus split her lip. Images like snapshots of places she’d never seen. And road signs. STOP! GO BACK! WRONG WAY!

Was she seeing opportunities to escape, along with warnings that those places weren’t the right place?

When she escaped from the Controller, she had followed the visions. There had been other stops, other towns where she could have left the train. But she had remained free because she had kept going until she reached Lakeside and the Lakeside Courtyard—a place that had put her out of the Controller’s reach. Now, like then, she had to make the whole journey, follow all the visions. If she didn’t, she might escape Cyrus but never get back home.

So she would wait. For now she had light and air and the knowledge that, when the time was right, she would escape. There would be more images to mark the trail. Cyrus had taken her razor, but there were other ways to cut skin. She would find them, use them if she had to.

She would escape when the real world matched the vision that didn’t have a warning sign. Then she would run until she reached the place in the woods that held a grave. That was an image Simon would remember from her prophecy dream—and that was the place where Simon would go to find her.