Dr. Gilliam looked like she was halfway toward a big laugh before she realized I was serious. I decided to hurry on before she had a chance to tell me exactly how impossible my idea was.
“As long as I’m within Aleric’s reach, there’s a chance he’s going to get to me eventually. That would suck for me and for everyone who cares about me, but what’s even worse is that I know he’ll convince me to open more gates. He won’t be happy until the Night Makers have taken the entire city. I can’t let him catch me, and the best way to avoid that is to get me out of the city where he can’t follow.”
Dr. Gilliam was looking at me as if she were mentally measuring me for a straitjacket. I guess I couldn’t blame her. Breaking out of the quarantine zone when it was being guarded by the military sounded like the longest of long shots. Not to mention that it would be both dangerous and highly illegal. After all I’d already put Luke and his mom through, I was now asking them to break the law for me. Again.
“That sounds good in theory,” she said, which was a more positive response than I’d expected. “But even if we could manage it, I’m not sure it would work.”
“Why not?”
“The magic obviously has a strong affinity for your blood, right?”
“Um, yeah,” I admitted uncomfortably.
“So I’m not sure that it wouldn’t follow you if you left the city.”
I felt as if someone had just used a vacuum cleaner to suck all the breath out of my lungs. I’d always assumed the magic was attached—for lack of a better word—to the city itself. That after having accidentally contributed to its arrival with a single drop of my blood, my role in what had happened to the city was over—as long as I didn’t open more gates for the Night Makers, at least. But if it was me the magic was attached to …
“May I use your laptop?” I asked Dr. Gilliam, then dove for the computer without waiting for permission. Dr. Gilliam said something that I couldn’t hear over the rushing of the blood in my ears. I quickly got on the Internet and searched for a map of the quarantine zone, having never before put any thought into where its borders lay, how far the nightmare stretched.
All of Center City was within the quarantine, but there was a fingerlike extension to the northwest, covering parts of Montgomery County.
Montgomery County. Where my school was located.
I’d first met Aleric just outside the gates of my school, after the night magic had turned a pile of spilled trash into a man-shaped monster that had chased me.
Could it possibly be a coincidence that the magic was tied to my blood and it extended beyond the city limits only in the one direction I routinely traveled?
“I had noticed that before,” Dr. Gilliam said quietly, standing behind my chair as I stared at the map. “Maybe it’s past the point of spreading now that it’s taken root so solidly and the changes are … stable. But it’s also possible that your mom’s almost right about this being an illness, and that you’re Patient Zero.”
“Possible isn’t certain,” I said. I really wanted to cling to the hope that there was a way out of this.
“No, but do we really want to test the theory? Think of how terrible the consequences would be if the magic spread.”
No, thank you. That was not something I wanted to think about.
“So then what do we do?” I asked in a small voice. In only a few hours, I had built escaping the city into this grand plan, this shining hope that there was a way to end at least some of the hell we were going through. I did not want to slide back into the darkness, but I could feel my grip on that hope slipping.
Dr. Gilliam put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “I don’t know, Becket. For now, we just keep on keeping on.”
I closed my eyes, not at all sure I could pull it off.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dr. Gilliam found a lawyer for me. A friend of a friend who was willing to talk things over with me and come to my aid should the worst happen. I put his number into my phone, but he told me to carry his card around with me at all times because I might not have access to that phone if I got arrested. He seemed to think that was unlikely based on the evidence the police had, but I hadn’t told him just how likely it was that other evidence would surface. One thing he told me unequivocally: unless I had an ironclad alibi that would exonerate me completely, I was to say nothing to the police without him present.
For the next couple of days, our lives went on in what I was thinking of as the new normal. I’d always hated the term in the past, but I didn’t know what else to call it when “normal” meant being on the run and staying in a different hotel room every night.
So far, at least, our constant hotel-hopping seemed to have kept Aleric off our tail. He’d said he’d give me time to “think things over,” but if he were able to track me down every day, I was sure he’d have called to let me know. He’d just gotten lucky when he found me on the day Sam came by to ask questions.
But as Aleric pointed out, he didn’t need to find my hotel room to make trouble, as we found out the hard way when a couple of detectives I didn’t know showed up on our doorstep. Luckily for me, Dr. Gilliam wasn’t at work yet because she was working the night shift, and she was the one who answered the door while I held on to Bob’s collar to help remind him that stay meant stay. His training had slipped a bit since my dad’s death, but he didn’t struggle against my hold. I saw the detectives glance at him nervously anyway as he greeted them with flattened ears, bared teeth, and a deep, rumbling growl.
“I’m Detective Franklin,” the older of the two cops said, “And this is Detective Woods. We’d like to talk to Becket Walker for a little bit. Mind if we come in?”
Dr. Gilliam remained firmly parked in the doorway.
“I’m sure Becket would like to consult her attorney before answering any questions,” she said smoothly. I was really glad she did, because my tongue appeared to be attached to the roof of my mouth with Krazy Glue.
Detective Franklin gave Dr. Gilliam a shifty-eyed look. “We just want to ask her a few questions. Nothing official.”
Dr. Gilliam pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “That’s fine. I’ll just give the attorney I hired for her a call. And of course I’ll have to call her mother. I know a lot has changed in the last couple of months, but I doubt you’re allowed to question a minor without a parent or legal guardian present.”
Both detectives scowled, though they couldn’t have been surprised. They might not know me personally, but they certainly knew who I was, and I doubted they expected the late police commissioner’s daughter to be completely ignorant of her rights. They were there to intimidate me—and it worked.
They grumbled at Dr. Gilliam a bit and gave me looks that said I was digging the hole deeper by not cooperating. Which might have bothered me, if it weren’t for the fact that cooperating would turn the hole into a bottomless pit. They might have a hard time getting a conviction because Piper was Nightstruck at the time I shot her, but being convicted was the least of my worries. I hoped their claim that they were here unofficially meant that Aleric hadn’t persuaded Piper to talk. Or manufactured any new evidence.
“All right,” Detective Franklin said with a big sigh that told us we were being a major pain in his ass. “If it’s not possible for us to speak with Miss Walker, then you’ll do.” He glanced at his watch. “We promise to have you back well before sundown. We’ll keep you for an hour or two, tops.”
“Me?” Dr. Gilliam asked, clearly startled.
Internally, I groaned. Of course the police were going to want to question Dr. Gilliam and Luke, considering I’d been staying at their house on the night of the shooting.
“If you can provide an alibi for Miss Walker, then we can put this whole business to rest,” Detective Franklin said with false cheer. Obviously he knew Dr. Gilliam couldn’t alibi me. If she could, one or both of us would have mentioned it by now, and I probably would have told Sam that in the first place.
As usual, Dr. G
illiam stayed calm under pressure, and she recovered from her initial surprise quickly. “I don’t see why I’d have to go to the police station to do that,” she said. “I’ll tell you now that as far as I know, Becket was in her room all night on the night Miss Grant was shot.”
I learned in that moment that Dr. Gilliam is a pretty good liar. She sounded natural and unrehearsed, giving away nothing in her voice or face. I, on the other hand, probably gave away everything, because no matter how hard I tried to hide my reaction, my cheeks heated in a guilty blush. I was caught between a feeling of intense gratitude that Dr. Gilliam would lie to the police for me, and a crushing guilt that she would have to. I was not her daughter, not her family, and she shouldn’t have to put so much on the line for me.
“That’s great,” Detective Franklin said, again with the false cheer. “Now if you’ll just come down to the station and sign a quick affidavit to that effect…”
“I’d be happy to,” Dr. Gilliam answered, “but it will have to wait until tomorrow. We’ll be changing hotel rooms tonight, and I still have to pack and make the reservations.”
“Just why are you staying in a hotel, anyway?” the detective asked. “We haven’t seen any reports of damage to your house. You wouldn’t be trying to avoid the police, now, would you?”
Dr. Gilliam rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m trying to avoid the police by staying in hotels under my own name. And going in to work my shifts at the hospital, where of course there are no police around at all.”
Franklin’s face flushed, and I gathered he didn’t much appreciate the disrespect. However, it was hard to argue Dr. Gilliam’s logic—though it was probably equally hard from his point of view to come up with another explanation for our odd behavior.
“We’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning then, shall we?” Detective Franklin asked.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Gilliam said, conveniently not mentioning that she was working the night shift tonight and would be sound asleep bright and early tomorrow morning.
Grudgingly, Detective Franklin accepted her promise and left, but I doubted we’d seen the last of him.
“You shouldn’t have lied for me,” I told Dr. Gilliam when I was certain the detectives were out of earshot.
Dr. Gilliam shrugged. “It’s not against the law to lie to the police.”
“I know, but it tends to piss them off. And if you sign an affidavit…”
“We’ll cross that bridge if and when we have to. For now, I just wanted to get rid of them. I think we both need to have another talk with your attorney. And you and I have to revisit the idea of telling your mother the truth, because it’s only a matter of time before the police contact her. If they haven’t already.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Gilliam was right about that. I might have hoped the police department would cut me some slack because I was the late police commissioner’s daughter and because life in the city had become so crazy. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that they would try to question me based only on Aleric’s anonymous call. If Piper had named me as the shooter, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get out of this interview so easily, but I felt certain Aleric had done something to make the police look more closely at me as the possible shooter.
Reluctantly, I dug out Sam’s card and gave him a call. I felt bad calling him for help after I’d treated him like the enemy, but he and my dad really had been close. Maybe if I acted pathetic enough, Sam’s compassion would get the best of him and he’d let me know if the police had any further evidence.
It made me feel somewhat dirty—and question once again whether being Nightstruck had left any lingering effects—to manipulate someone the way I was planning to manipulate Sam if I could, but I needed to know how close I was to being arrested.
Sam, of course, was still full of questions, none of which I could answer, but I came up with something plausible and vague to try to satisfy his curiosity.
“One of the Nightstruck has it in for me,” I told him. “That’s why the Gilliams and I keep changing hotel rooms. We want to make it hard for him to find me. I think he’s the one who called in the so-called anonymous tip, and I think if he can find a way to implicate me, he’ll do it.”
Sam thought that over for a moment. “Why didn’t you say so from the start?”
“Because the police have enough trouble dealing with the Nightstruck already. You can’t afford to go chasing after this guy when there are packs of them roaming the streets at night breaking into houses and killing people. But detectives came by the hotel today and wanted to take me to the station for questioning and then wanted to take Dr. Gilliam in. I’m worried that this guy might have planted some other kind of ‘evidence.’”
Sam’s hesitation could have meant he was trying to decide which question to ask next, but I suspected it was more about trying to decide what to tell me. He’d known me—albeit not super well—since I was a little girl, and surely he didn’t believe I’d actually shot somebody.
“I think I may be in real trouble, Sam,” I said, and it wasn’t hard to sound pathetic and scared. “I don’t know what the Nightstruck are capable of, but I don’t think it’s hard to imagine them being able to use magic to manufacture something that makes me look guilty.”
“I don’t know, Becket. That sounds a little subtle for them. They’re more into murder and mayhem than frame jobs.”
I shivered involuntarily. “Not the guy who’s after me. Trust me, he’s plenty subtle.”
Sam made a noncommittal noise. “How’d you get on this guy’s radar, anyway?”
“I’m not sure.” I lied convincingly, or at least I hoped so. “It has something to do with Piper. She was obsessed with me when she was Nightstruck, and I guess she got this guy interested in me. Please, Sam. Can you tell me if some other evidence has conveniently sprung up out of nowhere to convince the police I shot Piper?”
“You know I can’t share information like that with you.”
Which was almost as good as a yes, because he probably would have said so if the answer were no. “I know you’re not supposed to. But you know me. You know I didn’t shoot anyone. And with my dad … gone … I’m all alone here. My mom’s still in Boston. Dr. Gilliam’s been great, but she’s not family.” I put a hitch in my voice that wasn’t entirely phony. I was playing shamelessly on Sam’s loyalty to my dad, but I was willing to do whatever it took to keep from being blindsided. “You said you would be my friend,” I finished in a small, forlorn voice.
There was a long silence as Sam thought it over. I found myself holding my breath and forced myself to breathe. The silence felt weighty and oppressive, and I was almost scared for Sam to break it, scared of what he was going to say.
“My advice to you as a friend,” he finally said, “is to come in and give us a statement about what happened that night. Even if you were to admit to being the shooter, it wouldn’t have to be the end of the world. Your friend was Nightstruck, so no one’s going to have trouble believing you did it in self-defense.”
Shit. I’d been banking on him not believing I was the shooter, but he sounded like he was already convinced of my guilt.
“You see, Becket,” he continued, “if you admit you shot her in self-defense, it’s not hard to believe the charges would be dropped. But if you keep denying it and, hypothetically speaking, another anonymous tip would happen to lead us to a gun and its ballistics should happen to match those of the gun that shot Miss Grant and that gun should happen to be registered to your father … Well, it might look bad.”
My stomach turned over. I’d known the gun was a possible vulnerability, and now that fear had been justified.
“If hypothetically speaking that gun had been found, then why would I not hypothetically be under arrest already?”
“Because anonymous witnesses can’t testify in court, the evidence is circumstantial, and most importantly the victim has already positively identified a shooter who isn’t you. The state i
sn’t convinced they have enough to win a conviction against the late police commissioner’s daughter on what they have, so they’re not willing to arrest you.”
The “yet” was silent, but we both knew it was there.
“You can talk to me if you’re not comfortable with Detective Franklin,” Sam offered, still hoping that I’d see the writing on the wall and let the police have their interview.
“Thanks, Sam. I’ll think about it.”
We both knew what that meant, and I could almost hear Sam’s disappointment over the phone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
With great reluctance, I accepted the reality that there would be no keeping my mom out of this. I hadn’t talked to her since our big blowup, though she had called several times. She hadn’t left any voice mails, which was either because she knew you couldn’t make up for a fight in a voice mail or because she just didn’t know what to say to me. But since the police were clearly going to contact her—if they hadn’t already—it was time to end the radio silence. Much though I dreaded the conversation.
I called in the evening, when Dr. Gilliam was at work. Luke retreated into the adjoining room to give me privacy. For about fifteen minutes I stared at the cell phone Dr. Gilliam had given me before I finally scraped up the willpower to make the call.
I knew the police had been in touch with her already when the first thing she said after a perfunctory greeting was that I should call her back on the landline. My mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that she thought my cell phone might be monitored, and I cursed myself for not having thought of it. Who knows what I might have naively blurted out if the police hadn’t already alerted my mom?
Dutifully, I called my mom back on the old-fashioned corded phone by the bed. I thought we might have to go through some awkward and painful attempt at reconciliation first, but my mom got straight to business.
“Tell me everything,” she demanded. “I promise you I won’t judge you, but I have to know all the facts so that I can come up with the best plan to keep you out of jail.”