Shadowed (Fated) (4 page)

He’d promised her that everything was going to be
OK – that he wasn’t going to die.

He’d lied. And now she was alone. She ground her
teeth. There was no point dwelling on what had happened. She couldn’t bring
Lucas back. She couldn’t bring her parents back. But she could get revenge for
their deaths.

Evie squared her shoulders and blinked away the
tears. Then she turned back to Jocelyn.

This was why she’d come to see her, after all.

Evie walked slowly home through the rain, letting it soak through her
clothes until her shirt was stuck to her like a second skin and her hair was
slicked around her neck in ropes.

She felt the sting as the wind picked up and
started whipping the rain in needles against her arms and cheeks. But it felt
good – like all her indecision and stupor were being cleansed away. As
though the rain was sloughing off some of the dead weight of grief and forcing
her mind to focus once again.

Lobo was waiting for her as always by the back
door. He sniffed the air and howled as she sprung up the steps. She always had
the sense that the dog was looking over her shoulder for Lucas and was
eternally disappointed when he failed to appear. At the thought of Lucas she
felt another lurch in her gut. Every time, every single time she thought of him
she felt like she’d been sucker punched.

Would it always be like this? She didn’t want it to
be but she didn’t want it
not
to be
either. The thing that scared her most was forgetting him, forgetting his smile
and his voice, forgetting the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips and the
filigree of scars that had felt as fine to the touch as silver strands. What if
she forgot the exact colour of his eyes and the tiny golden strikes at the
centres? What if she forgot the way it felt when he kissed her – as
though all the world had gone to hell around them but that it didn’t matter?
What if she forgot the way he made her feel?

She already had to some degree. She only recognised
it by its absence. She carried with her a constant unnerving feeling of being
unsafe. Even though she knew the way through was shut and that she was in no
more danger, something inside her stayed tensed in fear. Lucas was the only
thing that had kept that fear at bay.

Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table waiting
for her. She jumped to her feet the moment Evie walked in and headed straight
towards her with a towel in her hands.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked, taking in Evie’s
bedraggled appearance.

‘I’m sorry,’ Evie said. ‘I’m really sorry, mum.’

A movement over her mother’s shoulder caught Evie’s
eye and she looked up. It was Joe. He was standing by the sink, nursing a cup
of coffee.

‘Evie,’ he said, smiling at her, though the
disappointment in his eyes was clear as day.

Evie’s shoulders slumped. Disappointment from every
side. It was getting difficult to manage it all alongside the crushing weight
of Lucas’s absence and still keep moving forward.

‘Your mum’s been worried,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Evie said, her voice cracking. ‘I went
for a walk. I’m sorry. I needed to clear my head.’

‘Well, you’re back now,’ her mother said with a
forced smile. ‘And you’re soaked to the skin. Why don’t you hop upstairs and
run a bath and I’ll bring you up some cocoa.’

Evie swallowed, feeling fresh tears well up.
‘Thanks,’ she said.

She headed for the stairs, passing Joe on the way.
He gave her a warning look, a look that said,
Stop doing this to your mother, I beg you
. Evie looked away, heat
scoring up her neck.

She wasn’t sure if it wasn’t already too late for
that.

Evie glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It was almost four am
and still dark out. She climbed out of bed and started pulling on her clothes.
Grabbing a sweater from the back of her chair she crossed to the door, pausing
before she opened it to listen for the sound of her mum’s breathing. It was
slow and steady. She was fast asleep. Evie tuned into Mrs Lewington at the
other end of the hallway and heard the phlegm-filled rattle that signified the
old lady was also out for the count.

Only then did she inch open her bedroom door and
creep out into the hall, tiptoeing towards the top of the stairs, hoping not to
wake Lobo. She made it to the kitchen and dropped to her knees, a finger
pressed to her lips as Lobo padded his way to the dog flap and peered warily
through at her.

She unlocked the door and stepped out onto the
veranda.

‘Hey boy, good boy,’ she whispered, crouching to
give the dog a pat. She slipped her sneakers on and then, with one last check
that she had the key Jocelyn had given her in her pocket, she started jogging.

She couldn’t risk taking her truck – the
sound of the engine turning over would wake up her mum. But that meant that she
would have to run the two miles into town.

It took her six and a half minutes. She checked her
watch as she turned the corner onto Main Street and couldn’t help but smile to
herself. She was getting faster as well as stronger – all her abilities
improving, not just her hearing. She did a quick calculation. She needed to be
back before six am, before her mother could wake up and notice she wasn’t in
bed, which didn’t leave her much time.

The streets were deserted at this hour. One or two
cars had cruised past her, their headlights alerting her from a distance,
giving her time to duck and hide behind bushes. She didn’t want to be seen. The
rumour mill was already going wild with stories of her misadventures. Being seen
out at the crack of dawn prowling the streets would only create more drama for
the knitting circle to get their needles into.

She had been avoiding this part of town for the
last two months, and when she stepped into the alleyway that ran parallel to
Main Street she remembered why. Waxy yellow lights illuminated the narrow
garbage-strewn entrance and created golden circles every twenty metres or so,
which the shadows lapped at. Evie hesitated, her heartbeat racing even faster
than when she’d been running. She willed herself to calm down and put one foot
in front of the other. There was nothing left here. Shula and the others
weren’t about to leap out from behind the trash containers and attack her. They
were all dead. With her own eyes she’d seen them die and vanish back to
whatever realm they came from.

Taking a deep breath, she slinked past the spot
where Shula’s body had lain and skirted the area where Risper had died. Then
she upped her pace and started sprinting.

The back door to the boutique had a sign on it
warning trespassers that they would be shot. Evie pulled out the key Jocelyn
had given her and inserted it into the lock.

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to find but
a wave of disappointment almost knocked her to her knees the instant she stepped
inside. The room was completely empty. The walls had been stripped bare of
their target boards, the tables dismantled, and all the weapons that Victor had
once stashed there for training purposes were gone. Evie spun in a circle. The
holes in the walls looked like they’d been made by removing picture hooks, and
not by tugging out knives that had embedded themselves in the brickwork during
target practice.

No one would ever be able to guess that this was
the room where Victor had taught her how to kill.

Evie crossed straight to the door on the other side
of the room and opened it a crack. The store gave out onto Main Street and the
large window at the front meant that, if anyone happened to be walking by,
she’d be seen. But it was still early, so she took the risk and darted inside.
The clothing rails hadn’t been touched. All the stock she’d carefully hung
– the designer offerings that Victor had used as a ploy to stop anyone
from coming in while she was training – was still there, hanging
mournfully, gathering dust. She glanced at the rails only quickly. She had no
interest anymore in clothes. She couldn’t believe she ever had. The free
clothes that Victor had given her now felt like blood money – tainted.

She strode towards the cash desk. The till sat
gaping open. It looked like all the takings had been pilfered but Evie knew
that there had never been any takings to begin with. No one in Riverview could
afford a dress that cost more than their monthly paycheck. She pulled out the
drawer beneath the till and her pulse quickened. There was a stash of papers
inside. She snatched them and ducked quickly down behind the counter just as a
car’s headlights swept like a searchlight beam through the store.

She scanned the papers quickly, using the light
from her phone: bills, junk mail, an old copy of
The New Yorker
still in its cellophane wrapper, and at the very
bottom of the pile an envelope with an LA postmark on it. Evie ripped it open.
Inside was some kind of rental agreement with Victor’s name stamped across the
top.

And there, at the very bottom in fine print, was an
address.

It was a Saturday, which meant no school, and which also meant she had
two whole days ahead of her when she wasn’t the focal point of 282 teenagers
and 38 faculty members.

It also meant she had two whole days in which to
figure out her next move.

The Riverview library was small and, Evie guessed,
not a priority for funding if the three ancient, yellowing computers were
anything to go by. She pulled out a chair and switched one computer on and,
while she waited for it to boot up, she rummaged in her bag for the papers
she’d stolen from Victor’s store. Five minutes later she was staring at the
website of a business in LA. It looked like the kind of place people used to redirect
their mail or as a front for an office.

Evie sighed back into her chair. She had been
hoping the address would lead straight to Victor. But it was a start. She would
just have to go there and see if she could find any more information on him. It
didn’t matter if it took her the rest of her life – she was going to find
Victor. And then she was going to do what she should have done two months ago.

While she was waiting for the map to print she
rested her hands on the keyboard and stared at the blinking cursor. She thought
about it for a few seconds and then, before she could lose her nerve, she typed
the words
Bradbury Building Fire
into
the search bar.

Over four million hits came up. She hovered the
cursor over the first one. It was a newspaper article. She clicked on it.

Historic
Landmark Engulfed by Fire

Evie scanned the article. It quoted a fire investigator laying the blame
for the blaze on arsonists. There was a mention of the two policemen who’d
died, though no details of exactly how – nothing that hinted at how their
dismembered bodies had been discovered lying in a swamp of their own blood in
an elevator, nor that their throats had been ripped out by Thirsters.

There was no mention either of the explosion in the
basement or of the piles of ash the police must have found down there, and not
a word about the arrows sunk into the lobby walls where Vero had nailed three
Thirsters. The article wrapped up by saying that the building was closed for
the foreseeable future while repairs were being carried out. The final line
mentioned that no arrests had yet been made.

‘Why are you looking that up?’

Evie spun around in her chair. Kaitlyn Rivers
– Tom’s new girlfriend – and another girl who she recognised from
the year below her in school, were standing behind her. She had been so
engrossed in the story she hadn’t felt them sneak up.

Her fingers clicked the header bar. ‘No reason,’
Evie said as the home page loaded.

‘Ooh, have you heard about that?’ Kaitlyn asked,
pointing suddenly at the screen.

Evie turned back to the computer. The front page of
the paper had appeared. A headline running in bold print across the top
screamed:

Serial killer strikes again.

Evie felt a funny spasm in her gut, like a knife that had been
sticking in there since Lucas died had just been given a further twist. She
scanned the piece.

Police
fear more than one killer at work

‘It’s like so totally scary,’ Kaitlyn was saying to her friend. ‘What
if they come here?’

‘To Riverview?’ her friend asked drolly. ‘Really?’

‘Well, it’s not like we don’t get our fair share of
mental cases,’ Kaitlyn said, jerking her head in Evie’s direction.

Evie stood up abruptly from her seat at the
computer, switched off the screen and snatched the piece of paper with the map
on it from the printer tray.

‘No wonder he broke up with her,’ she heard Kaitlyn
whisper as she strode past them.

Evie shook off her anger as she walked to her
truck. Kaitlyn Rivers was not worth getting upset about. She had other things
– other, far worthier people – to focus her anger on. She threw her
bag into the back of the truck and turned over the engine. She needed to follow
the trail on Victor before it got cold and there was no longer any point in
hanging around in Riverview.