He turned on the water in the sink, rinsed off the razor, then dried it with a couple of paper towels before closing it and shoving it into his pocket. He wet a couple more paper towels and wiped the blood off her arm. The cut was still bleeding. Was that normal? He didn’t have bandages or any of that first-aid shit. Maybe he’d look for some when he stopped for gas.
Pressing the wet paper towels against the cut, he hauled her to her feet and walked her to the door. He opened it enough to make sure no one was hanging around outside. Then he pulled her outside and dumped her into the trunk. He slammed the lid down and swore fiercely when the latch didn’t catch. Fucking piece-of-shit car. Yeah, the car’s owner had told him the latch wouldn’t catch sometimes if you slammed the lid down hard, which just proved the owner was a pussy.
He slammed the lid again. This time it caught. He got in the car and was pulling out of the rest area when two young men came out of the other side of the building, laughing and talking. Traveling somewhere. They looked in his direction.
Jimmy pulled out of the rest area too fast and bumped onto the road, heading south and east. He didn’t notice the trunk lid bounce up a couple of inches before something held it down.
? ? ?
Jolted out of a haze of colliding images, Meg saw a strip of daylight and grabbed the trunk lid before it might be noticed. She couldn’t remember anything she’d told Cyrus when he cut her arm, but she had swallowed the blood and the pain and the words when he slapped her and split her lip.
She’d seen only a couple of the images when he cut across the scars of old prophecies and asked his question, but combined with what she’d seen after he slapped her, those images were a start. She had been asking questions of her own ever since her head cleared from the blow Cyrus gave her when he took her from the Liaison’s Office: How could she escape from this man? Where could she hide until Simon found her?
She’d seen an image of a trunk lid partially open and she’d seen . . . Or was it a memory?
Carefully shifting position, Meg took hold of the trunk lid’s catch with her right hand and tucked her left leg toward her belly until she was able to undo the lacing on her sneaker. She used the lacing to secure the trunk lid, leaving just enough space to provide some fresh air and light. Then she lay back, aware that her arm was still leaking blood. Not good. Cyrus must have made the cut a little too deep. But it would clot—eventually. She hoped.
She had to stay awake and aware. If Cyrus stopped the car, she needed to untie the lid and hide the shoelace. No guarantee that the lid wouldn’t latch on its own if the car hit a bump or that Cyrus would be so careless the next time he stopped. But . . .
Yes. She remembered this. A trunk safety release. After Karl Kowalski had read the new Wolf Team story where one of the Wolf Team had been trapped in a car trunk, he told her that all cars made by humans had a safety release, had even shown her the release on his car. So she could get out of this trunk even if the lid was closed. But not while the car was moving. That would be dangerous for anyone, and the cuts and scrapes on skin for someone like her would be devastating, leaving her helpless to the prophecies released with every cut and scrape.
And then there were the other images she’d seen when Cyrus split her lip. Images like snapshots of places she’d never seen. And road signs. STOP! GO BACK! WRONG WAY!
Was she seeing opportunities to escape, along with warnings that those places weren’t the right place?
When she escaped from the Controller, she had followed the visions. There had been other stops, other towns where she could have left the train. But she had remained free because she had kept going until she reached Lakeside and the Lakeside Courtyard—a place that had put her out of the Controller’s reach. Now, like then, she had to make the whole journey, follow all the visions. If she didn’t, she might escape Cyrus but never get back home.
So she would wait. For now she had light and air and the knowledge that, when the time was right, she would escape. There would be more images to mark the trail. Cyrus had taken her razor, but there were other ways to cut skin. She would find them, use them if she had to.
She would escape when the real world matched the vision that didn’t have a warning sign. Then she would run until she reached the place in the woods that held a grave. That was an image Simon would remember from her prophecy dream—and that was the place where Simon would go to find her.
CHAPTER 25
Thaisday, Messis 23
The police set up roadblocks at every road leading out of Lakeside, but everyone already knew it was too late. With the chaos and blocked traffic on Crowfield Avenue, there had been time for Cyrus Montgomery to get Meg Corbyn out of the city. Officers from each precinct had been assigned to the manhunt, and patrol captains were sending in their findings to Captain Burke as well as Police Commissioner Alvarez.
Nobody had expected any luck at the bus and train stations, but the police checked them anyway, talked to the ticket sellers, showed Cyrus’s photo around.
They tried hard to find Meg Corbyn, but the minutes ticked by into an hour—and then two.
? ? ?
While waiting for any news from the police, Vlad, Blair, Nathan, and Officer Debany went through Cyrus Montgomery’s apartment, first looking for any clue that would tell them where he might be heading and then looking for whatever drugs Sandee might have ingested before her clash with Leetha. They found her stash of pills hidden beneath the tampons in what looked like an unopened box. They found some money in the fridge’s freezer box, hidden in a small, hollowed-out loaf of something labeled cranberry-artichoke bread—an unappealing combination that explained why no one had been hungry enough to thaw out the loaf and discover the money.
After checking the apartment a second time, Debany said, “I think we’ve found everything there is to find.”
“Then it’s time to pack up their possessions,” Vlad said. “Miss Twyla offered to help with that.”
Debany frowned. “Pack? But I had understood that you weren’t pressing charges against Sandee.”
“We’re not. But we are evicting her for breaking our no-drugs rule.” Vlad smiled, showing a hint of fang. “If she ever comes within sight of the Courtyard again, the Sanguinati won’t bother to bite. We’ll just snap her bones, one by one, until we get to her neck.”
Debany went white.
“But that is unlikely to happen because either you will arrest her for the drugs you just found and she will go to jail, or she will be on the first train out of Lakeside tomorrow morning.”
Debany swallowed hard. “Alone?”
“Alone. As for that Clarence, you may hold him accountable according to your laws for his part in Meg’s abduction, or we will hold him accountable according to ours. Either way, he isn’t coming back here.”
“What about Frances?” Debany asked.
“For now, Eve Denby is looking after Frances and Lizzy since we all feel that it is easier to protect the children if they’re all in one place.”