That blank look on his face. He’d forgotten so much—to have it all come crashing back at once, every terrible feeling and thought, must’ve made him lose it.
Or maybe he was always a little bit off, and this was his real personality finally clawing its way to the surface, freed from the cage of spells he’d been given.
He held out an arm, his silver lighter in his fist. With a metal snap, he lit the flame.
I stepped right up to Cal and took the lighter from him.
It wasn’t particularly brave. In the hour since I’d balanced out my hook, I’d almost gotten used to being mostly invisible, and I figured he wouldn’t notice me. Sure enough, he had to blink a couple times before his eyes—his strange, wild eyes—focused on my face.
“You don’t need that, Cal.”
He frowned, those terrible eyes darting all over the room, a bird crashing against windows looking for the sky. “You shouldn’t have spelled me,” he said distantly, as if recalling a dream.
“I’m sorry. I screwed up. I thought being alone was the worst thing that could happen to me, but it wasn’t.”
It didn’t matter that I meant that sincerely, and for Diana and Ari, too, because he didn’t have to listen and neither did they. He shoved me by the shoulders—hard—and ran from one end of the wood shop to the other, jumping nimbly over benches and around hulking pieces of machinery, digging through smoldering piles of scrap and tossing PVC pipe right and left. He was looking for something. Another lighter? I clenched his in my fist along with Ari’s spell in its plastic bag. Maybe my anti-hook spell wouldn’t let him see that I had it.
It wouldn’t be long before he found something that would work just as well, though. I thought about running, but I couldn’t leave them all. I thought about trying to get him to give Echo some money, so we could trigger her mom’s hook and rain hellfire on him like the hook had done to Win, but there was no time. Plus, spells were unpredictable. I remembered hanging out in the ER expecting my hook to kick in and send one of my friends through the doors. They never showed. No one could know how far we had to push before the spell fought back.
Ari shrank against the wall away from Cal as he tore through the room, and Echo stood in front of her protectively. I glanced at the security monitor and saw cops shining flashlights into the closed front door. Cal must’ve doubled around behind me and Echo and locked the door after we came in.
That chilled me more than the darkness in his eyes or the lighter fluid. It said to me that he wasn’t simply unhinged, but that he knew what he was doing, and he didn’t want us to leave or be rescued. He wanted us to burn with him.
As he ran by Markos’s motionless body he knocked over a tin of lighter fluid. It spread quickly, seeping underneath where Markos lay and under the edge of Diana’s cage. She let it soak the knees of her jeans.
He made a noise—a cry of some kind, almost a howl—and flicked the switch on a knee-high box with a rubber pipe running out of it, sitting just outside the cage where Diana was trapped. The pipe ended in a handheld trigger and a thin neck like the stem of a flower, and he clicked it once—twice—before the flower blazed to life. Blue and yellow. Too bright to look at.
I didn’t think. I ran straight at Cal, hugging him around the stomach and trying to tackle him. But he was taller than me, and stronger, and I didn’t want to hurt him—I just wanted to stop him. I managed to push him against the wall, He dropped the welder and it went out before it could touch any of the lighter fluid, but he grabbed a two-by-four leaning there, and as I scratched and kicked and flailed, the two-by-four swung and hit me in the side. I dropped to my knees. Then it caught me right in the chest with a crack.
Couldn’t breathe.
Fell to the ground and gasped for air.
I expected another hit from the two-by-four and welcomed it because I knew it would knock me out, and I wouldn’t have to feel my broken ribs and aching side, and I wouldn’t have to see Cal burn down the store and us in it.
Instead, lighter fluid seeped all around me. Up my nose. Stinging my eyes.
Ari yelled at Cal—yelled for the EMTs, somewhere out in the store—begged him not to do it—told him we would forget, that we would all take a spell with him, go back to the way things were, if that was what he wanted.
He didn’t respond. Nothing in him that could hear her.
Breathing in fumes, lightheaded. The room shimmered.
Turned my head, and Cal picked up the Zippo from where I’d dropped it. Visible again.
Dizzy. Lighter fluid on my clothes, in my hair. Couldn’t get up.
I couldn’t see Ari or Echo. Markos lying next to me, not moving. Diana on the other side of him screaming.
I rested my head in a puddle. Took a breath and my chest crackled. Ribs broken. No air.
I felt empty, floaty, like there was nothing left of me but a paper shell. Wouldn’t hurt to burn to death. A whoosh and then nothing, like a scrap of newsprint.