“Wha’s wrong with your hands?” He cocked his head to the side and stared at my stumps. Earlier that night, I’d nudged a pair of maroon gloves over my stumps with my teeth. I glanced down at them. The gloves’ fingers were empty and flat and hung off weirdly.
“Nothing,” I said. He couldn’t have been much older than me, eyebrows thrust up his face, pale breath smoking in the cold. I forced my eyes away. There was only one way out, a steep narrow trail up to the street. It was slippery and precarious in the snow.
I tried brushing by him toward the trail.
“Now stop!” he said. “I jus wanna talk. I don’t have anybody to talk to anymore.”
There was something wrong with him. For one thing, it was freezing, but all he wore was a light, long underwear–type shirt and slouchy jeans. But, something more. Something in the way he cast his eyes around, like a spotlight searching for a missing person in the dark.
He reached his arm out and snatched away one of my gloves. He caught sight of my ruby red stump before I pulled it inside my coat sleeve.
“Don’t—touch me,” I said, deadly quiet.
“Y-you don’t have to run away,” he said excitedly. “I’m just like you. I’m missing something, too.”
I turned my head slightly. “What are you missing?”
“A soul,” he whispered.
I reeled back a couple steps. My heart started working again, double time.
“It got lost,” he continued. “I’m trying to find it.”
“How do you lose your soul?” I asked, curious even as my eyes scanned behind him for an escape route.
“All kindsa ways. But, the number one way that people lose their souls is this.” He took a big gulp of breath. “The Devil takes it.”
“The Devil,” I repeated. When he nodded quickly, I realized that he believed every word he said. My skin began to itch with cold.
I coughed into my elbow. “I need to go.”
“Wait,” he said. “Will you help me?” His voice was small and pleading.
“With what?”
“Help me find my soul?” he implored. “Please, I just need someone to understand.” He grabbed my arm. One of his freezing palms squeezed my stump, and it sent a shiver strong as an electric shock through my gut.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” I pulled my stump away and stumbled backward a step, slipping where the river had turned the ground to ice and landing hard on my back. Above me, he was silhouetted against falling petals of snow and the scissored black outline of the bridge.
He took a step toward me. I swept with my legs at his ankles, and he collapsed onto the frozen ground. I scrambled to my feet and stared down at him.
His eyes were large and they beamed back at me like a torch. I gasped at the color. Green. Vibrant, bottle-glass green. Godly green.
The decision to kick was entirely my own. I could’ve run, if I wanted. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hurt him. I was wearing the boots from Jude’s house. I didn’t know there was steel stuffed down in the toes, though I knew it made the boots sink satisfyingly into his stomach. I thought the strength was all my own. Something like pride bloomed inside my chest. I huffed and my blood was hot and it felt good. Power. Purple blotches at the corners of my eyes. Tongue running over my teeth. Not even feeling the cold.
His name is Philip Lancaster. He is the son of an impressive Seattle software designer. He is a student at the University of Montana. He is a paranoid schizophrenic. I kicked out all the molars in the right side of his face. I broke apart his spleen. He was crying when I was done. His blood colored the toes of my shoes.
It took moments for the high to collapse, for the cold to sink into my exposed face. I gazed down at him, my limbs shaking, my muscles so jumpy they felt pulsed with electricity. The blood on my boots stood out like neon.
I wondered, What would Jude think, if he could see me? I doubled over to eject a pint of acid from my stomach.
Chapter 31
“He doesn’t blame you as much as you’d think,” the doctor tells me.
“Philip?” I ask, flinching at the name.
He nods. “He knows you were scared. He’s back on his medication.”
I shake my head. The memory of that night is a physical object. When I touch it with the soft fingers of my mind, it feels cold and dark and sharp like metal. I feel at the object blindly, trying to memorize the dimensions, figure out its shape.
Philip has the same object in his mind, I’m sure. The same cutting thing inside us, hurting us in different ways.
“You can’t forgive that,” I say. “I know because I never could.”
“Want to hear what he told me?” the doctor asks. “He said he doesn’t always know what’s real and what’s not. His mind tells him lies. He reminded me of you.”
“Why?”
“Philip struggles with what’s real, too. Almost like he has his own Prophet. One inside his own head.”
“Maybe everybody has one,” I say. “How lucky am I that mine’s dead?”
The doctor looks at me with a strange expression. We are hovering right on the edge of what he came here for, the smoke-choked moments when the Prophet breathed his last breath.
“Do you ever think about Constance?”