Chapter 9
Peter drops down next to me and pulls off his shirt. Taking his bloody sword off of his belt, he begins to cut strips out of the fabric. I watch him, leaning back on my hands and trying to ignore the pain.
He winds the clothe strips around each of my legs and ties them off. Soon I have two makeshift dark green and bloody casts knotted multiple times lining my legs.
He glances at my face, at the bloody scrape, and then down at my legs. "You're losing a lot of blood and these aren't going to stop it." He gestures at the green fabric. "We need to find this thing fast."
He doesn't say what I know, that if we don't this very well may be my final resting place.
I look at his arms and chest, at all of the scrapes that cover him. "Should we do something for you?" I ask. I think about cutting the attached slip out of my dress for fabric, but I wait until he answers.
He glances down, assessing the damage inflicted. "No, these are shallow. I don't think they were prepared for me to be armed."
He grimaces. I look away.
"So the first one was your want and this one was mine."
"Acceptance, you want to be accepted by the guys." He looks at me like now he knows my inner, darkest secrets. A little smug and searching, that is to say.
But I wonder if that's really what it was. Peter had missed all of the kissing after all.
With his help, I stand.
"Alright, from now on we get in, we look, and then we get out, okay?" Peter says. "And we DO NOT split up."
I nod, only three more, I could do that.
Walking feels like I've been mummified, and I know running is going to be practically impossible from here on out. Peter has to wait for me to make it to the door and his face pretty much says if he could abandon me here and have a clear conscious he would.
"We're dead." He mumbles, but I pretend I don't hear it.
He twists the door open and I skid back a couple steps.
"Well, we can pass this one up." I tell him.
It's open air, clearly one of Peter's wants. He leans out a little and looks down. "No trees," he mumbles.
"Peter!" I shout in my best 'I am your mother' voice. "It's open air so it's obviously not in there, let's go."
He glances back at me. I notice his eyes catch on the blood seeping through what used to be his shirt. "Yeah," he agrees, but he doesn't move. He seems to register this. "Okay," he says again and softly closes the door.
I'm already at the next one. He shuffles up beside me and I throw open the door.
A girl. She's probably 10 maybe a year or so older with brown frizzy hair. She wears an old-fashioned kid dress and stockings. Her eyes are a sharp brown and freckles cover every inch of her skin.
Laughing, probably at us, she turns and begins running down what appears to be a never ending hallway behind her. The white walls and white floor makes me feel like I'm in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Nothing prepares me though, for Peter. I supposed I should have been ready, seeing as how I knew with one glance that this was nothing I wanted.
"Wendy!" He shouts, jerking me into awareness of the situation. And before I know it, he jumps through the doorway and promptly becomes a 12-year-old.
Freckle faced-with gangly arms and legs, he hadn't quite grown into himself yet. He chased her down the hallway and all I could do was watch, knowing I would never catch up to him in time.
Slowly Wendy began to grow, with every step she got taller, gained weight, gained curves. Her frizzy hair settled into pretty curls down her back. Peter was a step behind but growing just as fast. Transforming back into the Peter I knew today, 17-year-old Peter.
It happened too fast for me to shout, to call out a warning. Wendy seemed to have stopped growing, leveling off as a young woman. Peter, following close, was back to himself.
He took a step, into a future he'd never experienced, and the floor dropped out. One minute he was there, a flash of flailing arms, and then he was gone.
And Wendy, 18-year-old Wendy, looked down at the floor that had replaced the hole and laughed. Laughed like the villains in so many cartoons.
I slammed the door. Now it was just me.
I didn't think I'd feel anything. He was, after all, the guy I had planned to ditch without a second thought.
But it felt like he was stolen from me. It was my right to ditch him, to know that his misery was inflicted by me. But him leaving me like this left me cheated. This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
I feel it now, anger. And with it, determination.
I step away from the door and hobble over to the last one. Never mind the fact that I had already found and given up Josh's voice. I needed to do this. I needed to win.
I push it open and take a deep breath, stepping into my bedroom.
My bedroom. Home to so many wishes-upon-stars and midnight reading sessions when everyone else was tucked away and asleep.
I want to go home.
It seems even more accurate when I think that this is one of the reasons I even began talking to the mermaids. They know, and now they're using it against me.
"Get in, and get out" Peter had said. I cautiously open the door and, seeing no immediate danger, step out into the hall.
"What are you doing here?" Janie's voice comes out of nowhere. I glance around searching for her typical pissed look (the ultimate resting bitch face) and cocked hip. All I see is my brother Hale standing in his pajama pants down at the end of the hall in the entrance to our parents' bedroom.
He blinks and scrubs a palm across his left eye. "Daphne?" Janie's voice. Coming out of my little brother Hale's mouth.
He starts walking towards me, lurching in a sleep-walker's parade. I take a couple steps backward, away from him, and then jump the railing to the stairs on my right. It takes a few minutes, what with my immobile legs, but eventually I swing them up and over. I land hard and immediately lose balance and fall on my butt, sliding down a couple steps. My brother's halting steps stop and then he turns like he's on hinges and begins making his way towards the stairs. I stand as if I'm on roller skates, and hobble down the last steps.
"Daphne, wait!" My neighbor Steph's voice coming from my other brother, Mark, Hale's twin, in the dining room. He begins walking towards me in that same staggering way.
I twist around the railing and shuffle towards the front door. Pulling on the door, pushing past the screen, I move as fast as I can into the street. That's when they come.
Erupting from every door, wobbling in from both ends of the street they begin to corner me. The haunt me with their screams.
"Daphne, don't leave me!" Ethan's voice coming from Mrs. Castova.
"Where are you going?" Ally's voice from 3-year-old Tommy.
"Get off my lawn, young lady!" Mr. Depepa's voice coming from my dad.
"Please don't leave again." I freeze. My mother's voice. I search the crowd closing in on me. The slow pace makes it that much more agonizing.
"Just stay," There. Cary, my rival from school, has my mother's voice.
I want to cry out. I want to give up.
The sky loses its peaceful nighttime sheen and slowly gets greyer and greener, resembling the sky before a tornado. The air is too still. Like swimming in water the same temperature as your skin, I can't feel the elements around me. Not a leaf on the many trees lining our suburban street moves.
"What's going on?"
I whip around. Scan the faces now at least a driveway away.
"What are you doing?" Peter's voice rings out again.
"Peter!" I scream. Is he here? How did he get out of the floor?
"No," I hear his voice call calmly.
"Peter!" I scream one more time, the voice-swapped now only a few feet away.
This time I catch it. "What?" It comes out of Clark, my 26-year-old next door neighbor.
I grab at my hair, grunt in frustration.
"Daphne?"
Music. Safety and goodness.
"Daphne, come over here quick." I spot him in the crowd, see him stretch out a hand. I grab on, thankful for the sunlight in the looming darkness. Like Peter, he tugs me through the gap he managed to create in the crowd and pulls me several driveways away from the group. Their hands brush me in a futile attempt to grab me as we pass them.
I stop, balancing on my stiff legs. It's Josh. And he has his own voice.
"Daphne, are you ok? What's going on?" He grips my elbows and searches my eyes.
I'm speechless. His voice. Right here, in front of me.
"Daphne!" He shouts. I blink.
"Look, Josh, I don't have time to explain," My brain is speeding, coming up with a plan as the words leave my mouth. "We need to get back into my house and up to my bedroom, it's the only way out."
He nods, looking past me to what I know is an oncoming surge of voice-swapped. "Which house is yours?"
I sigh with relief, he didn't question me. "Blue door."
He nods again, rubs a hand across his chin. Glances at me, or more specifically, my legs.
The fabric is black with blood, no longer distinguishable as green in any spot. He steps to my side and, before I'm ready, lifts me into his arms.
And then he's running.
Their eyes gleam at us, arms stretching out, ready to take me. Josh runs through the yards, avoiding the majority who are in the street, but there are still plenty to keep him busy.
With his arms holding me, he only has his legs.
A couple of my neighbors are closest, their friendly smiles turned to sneers. Josh lunges, taking a few seconds with each to kick them in the side of the knee, toppling them and possibly breaking their legs.
The mass of people gets thicker the closer we get to my house but Josh doesn't stop. I rock back and forth with his upper body as his kicks, finding purchase in my neighbor's knees, faces, guts. I get to hear the sound of Janie's leg snap as he not only kicks it but lands on it. The sound reverberates inside me, sounding too close to a pencil breaking for my comfort.
My mother gets a friendly foot to the face, my father one in the gut. We are on my driveway when Hale sinks his teeth into Josh's leg.
He throws me and I fly straight into my porch, my shoulder popping as it slams into the concrete slab. I hear his scream, deep and primal and the sound of bone on bone.
I can't see. They've closed in on me and pull at my arms, dragging me up to their mouths.
I don't see the first person to bite, but I feel it on my shoulder. My bone is right there, so I'm not much more than skin and the teeth can't sink in deep. But the sound. The sound and the pain. Like ripping fabric with a feeling of a thousand knives and flames my skin is stripped away, eaten.
Another bite, this one on my upper arm, but they don't get to pull me apart. Josh's hand is wrapped around the lady's hair, ripping her off of me. In seconds he has my attackers crawling, and that's all the time he needs to grab me back up and limp through the door left open.
"Up the stairs," I gasp. Black clouds my vision, I'm almost gone. The pain, make it stop. I'll trade everything to make it end. "Right," I call at the top and then we are in my room.
He runs over and sets me on my bed, then retreats to slam and lock the door. I'm sitting, but my head lolls on my neck. I'm unconnected, pieces of a puzzle not yet put together. My visions clears a little and I notice my entire arm is red. This makes me laugh, why red?
"Daphne, Daphne, look at me. How do we get out of here?" Josh kneels in front of me, his throat open and exposed.
Josh. There was something I needed to do to Josh. Josh and his throat. I reach out and I feel it. There, it clears my vision the rest of the way, and with it my head.
My fingertips tingle with it, the power.
"Daphne?" He pleads. I plunge my fingers through the skin and grab onto the throbbing, glowing sphere of his voice. He chokes as I pull it out, grapping at his throat and falling back onto his heels.
It glows through the cracks in my fingers, sunlight twisting in glass. I don't give Josh a second to recover. I can't walk so I crawl. Pressure on my legs and my shoulder threatens the blackness to overwhelm me again. I pant, telling myself just a few seconds longer. I crawl through the door, kicking it closed behind me. I lay down, let the blood flow out, let the pain cloak me, let the darkness carry me away.
