“Cut it out!” With her good arm, she shoved the other girl, then shrank back, both hands up, palms out in surrender. “It was an accident, okay? It was an accident.”
Slash was breathing hard, the irritation practically fuming from her pores. She’d retrieved that shotgun, and there was no mistaking from the way Slash’s shoulders tensed that she’d be just as happy reducing Alex’s head to mist. Alex didn’t move, and she thought now that this had been a really dumb—and maybe her last—idea. Then Slash lowered the shotgun a smidge and backed away, the big girl’s upper lip peeling back in a silent snarl.
Okay, so far so good. Her knee complained a little as she clambered to her feet, and she played up the limp. The knee really did hurt. She gathered her supplies thoroughly and slowly, which allowed time for her gaze to sweep the walls—and those photographs.
As it turned out, she’d risked getting plugged for nothing because, in the coming days, Alex would see and study these pictures more than once.
What she didn’t and wouldn’t know for another five minutes, although the lack of smoke chuffing from the guesthouse chimney ought to have been a clue, was that Sharon and Ruby were dead. Judging from the rigor—they were so stiff that it took Slash and Acne and a couple of Leopard’s kids quite a while to jockey the bodies out of the guesthouse—they’d been dead for hours. How Sharon had done it was easy enough to parse. A smoggy chemical reek of vomit and half-digested painkillers and sleepers hung in a cloud, and small drifts of pills the women hadn’t swallowed were scattered over the hardwood. Knowing Sharon, Alex thought the old woman had probably started just as soon as Alex was gone, doling out the pills like M&Ms: one for you, two for me; two for you, four for me. Alex could see it.
After that little debacle, Alex would be ensconced in Daniel’s room. No one tied her to a chair or anything, but they didn’t let her leave for long either, and then it was like that stuff she’d learned way back in elementary school about spiders that cocooned their prey to snack on for a rainy day.
But this was all in her future. Now, by the time she made it downstairs and was threading around morning-after bodies draped over chairs and sprawled on throw rugs, she knew a few things. Big things.
One: Judging from the resemblance, Wolf ’s mother’s name had been Emily. The last time they’d all been at the summerhouse was four years ago this past August. That’s what the photo said. So Wolf would’ve been thirteen or so.
Two: Wolf had grandparents. This wasn’t news. Until now, she’d thought they were Jess and Yeager. But Jess wasn’t in the picture. Instead, Yeager stood with a plump, small woman, with hair done in a platinum sweep, named Audrey. So if Jess was Wolf ’s grandmother, that raised all kinds of interesting questions.
Three: One photograph had not been taken at this lake house. She didn’t know where, exactly, although she spotted what looked like, what? A cave? Or maybe just a cleft in a rock face; she couldn’t be sure. There had been a party, though. She spotted a grill, discarded platters and cups and wrappers; a couple of kids clutched sodas and burgers.
The kids were arranged in the kind of haphazard groupings that signaled pecking order, who was tight with whom, who was on the outs. Later, when there was time, she would count fortyseven kids. Some she recognized as the same faces staring from those white ninja outfits Leopard’s crew was so fascinated with. Others, she didn’t have a clue. All were mugging for the camera, and someone had helpfully penned names in a spidery hand. That was how she learned that, pre-Zap, Spider’s name had been Claire Krueger. Judging from that satisfied little smirk, she’d been on top of the heap even then. But it was the names and faces she knew best that clinched her suspicions about what Rule had been doing, and even why.
Acne was Ben Stiemke. Andrew Born would die within a day, but Alex knew him as Beretta. Slash was Beth Prigge—and pretty in her own right back then: thinner, not as sullen, and, most importantly, smooth-skinned. No scar, nothing slashed. For some reason, Alex’s mind jumped to Wolf and that half moon on his neck where his skin had been flayed open from ear to throat. For the first time, she wondered if maybe the two scars were parts of the same story.
But it was the fourth thing that was, she later thought, the most telling and perhaps damning, because it explained so much.
There were two other kids—two boys—whose faces leapt into a kind of crystalline clarity. They’d shucked their shirts; this was summer, from the looks of all those bare legs and shoulders and midriffs, and probably very hot. The boys’ arms were draped over one another’s necks in that kind of clowning-around headlock guys got off on.
Because his chest was bare, she could see that his skin was smooth. No scars at all. She couldn’t tell a thing about his neck because of that headlock, but she would lay odds that he hadn’t tried filleting his flesh with that knife or, maybe, a dagger of razorsharp glass. Just a hunch.
Back then, Wolf ’s name had been Simon.
Standing a little ways to the right were two very beautiful girls, both doubled over in laughter. Penny, the honey-blonde, was willowy and tall. The other girl was sloe-eyed and small, and her name was Amy? Anna? Amanda? The ink was smeary and she couldn’t tell.
But it was the buddy—Wolf ’s friend, seemingly older by several years—that captured her attention. His hair had been shorter back then, but she would know that boy anywhere, and there was something . . . Her eyes clicked back and forth between the buddy and the pretty honey-blonde, Penny. Yes, the jaw, maybe, or the cut of her cheekbones or the eyes, but something made Alex think: Sister?
Whatever the case, Peter Ernst had known Simon Yeager, very well. From the looks of it, they might have loved one another like brothers.
The evidence was right there in neat black ink: Stiemke, Prigge, Born, Ernst, Yeager. The proof was built out of pyramids of skulls and the bones of the Banned. The story was written in blood. There was no mistake.
These Changed were the children and the grandchildren of Rule.
48
The night they left Rule—eight days after Alex ran and Peter disappeared—was a nightmare and nearly killed them. Even if Lena hadn’t been ill and queasy, she still would have been in trouble almost from the beginning, and knew it. They all were. The snow kept coming, riding a vertical razor of wind. The maps were a waste of time. In the snow, landmarks blurred, and the trail was nothing more than a hope.
Then, four hours out of Rule and too few miles east, Lena’s horse plunged through deep snow and into the well of a fallen spruce. Her skittish mount had been giving her trouble the whole time, rearing and dancing, bucking a few times, and, in general, being a nuisance. Lucky for her, she was hunkered down low and forward, her hands knotted in the animal’s mane and her knees so high she was practically crouching on the saddle when the horse let out a shriek. She couldn’t hear the snap over the churn of the wind but felt the sudden jolt. So she knew. She’d watched the same thing happen on Crusher Karl’s farm. As the horse swooned to the snow, she launched herself from the saddle. If the horse rolled and pinned her, she might not get up again. There was a moment’s dizzying flight, and then she plowed a good two feet into a deep drift. Chris had to brace his feet on either side of the hole to drag her out. By then, the horse was dead and Nathan was holstering his handgun.