“Well. That’s not cryptic at all.”
“Frosty told us about your nightmare. The red flames. Red must represent the dark, the destruction, while white— dynamis—represents light, the purification.”
Light cannot be extinguished by dark, only covered, covered, covered. “Why repeat different words?”
“Another excellent question.”
With no real answer apparently. “This is a lot to take in.” Especially now, when I’m so unsteady. “As fast as my mind is whirling, I’m almost afraid I’ll pop a vessel.”
She takes pity on me and says, “We’ll put this on the back burner for now and move on. Did you see who did this to you?”
“A girl. The one I saw in the cemetery. The one who went to the bathroom after bicycling. Gavin and Love will know who I’m talking about.” My stomach rumbles, and I use what little strength I possess to rub away the hunger pangs. “She has blue-black hair. It’s long, reaches her waist. Her skin is freckled and her face—”
“Yeah. I know who you’re talking about.” Ali adheres a new bandage to my neck. “Tiffany Reynolds.”
I arch a brow in question. “You can’t leave it at that. Tell me everything about her, everything that happened.”
“Okay, so, there’s no area outside this compound without a camera. Bronx checked our security feed and discovered no one had snuck in. We figured this had to be an inside job. We ruled out the kids who were underground with Gavin and Jaclyn. That left eight others. We kept those eight sequestered as we waited for you to recover.”
Smart. I would have done the same.
“Two days ago, we made the announcement you would recover fully and Tiffany sedated the guards—Justin and Gavin—and snuck out. Apparently she’d hidden syringes full of different kinds of drugs all over the house. Anyway, the rest of us were too sick to stop her. In fact, she’s the only one in the house who didn’t get sick, which makes us suspect we didn’t have the flu, after all, that she drugged us.”
“She knew I could identify her as Cemetery Dart Girl. But why shoot me up with mutated zombie toxin in the first place?”
Ali sighs. “We don’t know. We can only guess. Revenge, maybe. She could have worked for Anima once, or known someone who did and lashed out at you to even the score.”
“Why try to kill me specifically, though? Why not go after the rest of you while she had the chance?”
“Believe me, I’ve asked myself those same questions.”
I get more comfortable against the pillows, though my stomach is still rumbling, and look myself over. I’m wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and I’m braless. Under the covers, my legs are bare. I won’t ask who changed my clothes. And I seriously won’t ask who inserted the catheter and got an up-close-and-personal glimpse of my lady bits. Not to mention my scars.
“How did you recruit Tiffany?”
“We took River’s advice and trolled online message boards looking for people who claimed to see ghosts and monsters. There were more than we ever imagined, and once we had names, we were able to do background checks. We approached the ones we liked.”
I wait for more details.
Ali doesn’t disappoint. “Tiffany is seventeen and lives with her mom. Low income. Her dad took off a few years ago. She’s homeschooled and a straight D student. Antisocial most of her life, but never in trouble with the law.”
I want to hate her. But do I have the right? She tried to kill me, and I once tried to kill Ali.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “For what I did to you... I was wrong in every way.”
She studies my face and whispers, “I believe you, and I forgive you.”
That easily? I’m not used to such understanding, and it throws me.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Camilla.”
“Milla,” I counter. The day we met, she’d called me Milla, and I’d nearly snapped her head off. A nickname reserved solely for my friends, I’d said. I could so-o-oo kick my own ass.
She nods. “Milla. There’s something I have to tell you about the vision I had. I promised Kat I wouldn’t talk about it, and I never break my promises, but I shouldn’t keep quiet. Should I? Emma doesn’t think so. But good glory! This is tough. A rock and a very hard place.”
“Just say it,” I tell her. “It’ll be okay, whatever it is.”
She licks her lips. “I’ve only seen bits and pieces of this particular future. A woman aims a gun at Frosty, just like I told you. I don’t see her face, only her hand.”
“Kat already gave me those details.”
“Yes, but—”
A knock sounds at the door, and Frosty sticks his head in the room. “May I come in?”
My heart immediately speeds into a wild gallop. A fact the monitor attached to my chest embarrassingly proclaims. As my cheeks burn, I reach up to smooth my hair into place. When I realize I’m primping for him, I stop and frown.
“Do you have food?” I ask.