"Let me hold you," Keith offered, and without waiting for a response put both arms around my waist. I leaned against him, but I didn't feel any warmer; his body was like ice. I turned to look at him, confused, and his eyes were cold and glazed and empty.
"Keith..."
Then he was Brent, and his arms were Brent's, and his eyes were Brent's, and Brent's eyes were alive and hungry, looking for something, like Patrick's had been for so long. But Patrick wasn't there, Patrick was lying in a corner. There was a bullet through his brain.
That didn't surprise me. Of course Patrick was dead. Patrick had found the thing that completed him -- didn't he have to be dead? It was against the rules to live complete.
Patrick's eyes were open even in death, and in them the flames blazed, and it called me to him. I pushed away from Brent (and then he was Keith, looking after me like a lost, rebuked puppy -- abandoned). I knelt beside the corpse and tilted Patrick's head so his dead but impassioned eyes stared into mine, and the warmth of them took my cold away, stopped my shivering.
And the fire roared.
My eyes opened wide to stare up at a ceiling that should have been dark with night. It wasn't. It was orange, a dull, glowing orange.
I screamed.
I don't know if my terror was because of the smoke seeping through my door, the raging light shining through the cracks beside and beneath it, or the blond-haired girl ripping through my bureau.
"Oh, crap," she muttered, and the words seemed ridiculously out of place. She spun around and sent me a dark, hate-filled look. "Where is it?!"
I was frozen, immobile, cowed by her and terrified of the crackling I could hear from the hallway and the flickers painting my walls. Shouldn't I run? Open the windows, Taylor, jump if you have to, a broken leg's better than burning alive. But I didn't move.
"Where-is-the-box," she snapped, her words as rapid as machine gun fire. "I know it's here. Where is it?!"
"In the closet," I half-whimpered, and then I shoved myself up and threw the covers off, glaring, a formidable opponent with a long sports jersey and gold hair shoved back into a ponytail. "Who are you?"
"I wouldn't worry about that if I were you," she spat. "I'd worry about getting out of here."
"No, my parents -- Mom!" I rushed to the door, as if to open it, and then the long cry exploded from my lips: "Dad!"
You'll burn the house down...
"Your father is dead. Your mother isn't here." The girl flung back my closet doors and quickly found the box buried under a pile of clothes. She stared at it for a moment, transfixed, then shook it off and raised her blue eyes to mine. "Get out of here."
I nearly screamed yet again at the sight of her pale face and those horrible, vicious, beautiful eyes -- but I stifled it. Unable to comprehend the death of my father, unable to let it sink in, unable to accept it as true, I retreated to my question once again: "Who are you?"
She snorted. "A dream. Just go."
"No! You did this!"
"I didn't do anything. Now go!" Her calm vanished, and her lips twisted into a snarl. "Go now and I won't kill you! Do you understand what it would do for me to kill you? Do you understand that without you I'm lifeless, that I'm nothing, I have no future? Do you understand that you're my only chance at life?! Go! Go!"
I lunged and grabbed the box. She held on to it with one hand and raked her nails across my face with the other. I screamed again, as if thinking someone would come, save me, save me from everything, but no one came.
I felt an electric current rip through me as my hands met the flat surface of the box, and in shock, I almost dropped it. As my grip loosened, she snatched it back and grabbed both my wrists in one hand. My muscles went weak, and I felt my eyes start to roll up in my head. I saw the concentration on her face.
Suddenly my feeling returned, and the weakness and the electricity were gone. Her hand was still on my wrists, and for a moment I focused on her, seeing the contours in her face that mirrored mine, the mouth that was just a shade larger, the premature furrowing of her brow, the body that was as tall and slim as my own. She was beautiful, and she was me. Her eyes -- mirrors of mine -- glazed, and for a moment I had the strange sensation of some part of her flowing into me. Then she snapped back to reality.
A low growl slid from her throat, an animal growl, a terrifying growl, and the monster that was a girl roared. "GO!"
Coarse brown fur sprouted on her arms and teeth shot down out of her mouth, pressed over her perfect lips. She jumped back, growing, growing, doubling in size and still growing. I covered my face with my hands and whimpered, cowering back against the wall.
The wall was hot.
"Don't you understand anything?" the beast asked, in a low, guttural moan. "You're going to be incinerated! Get out!"
She dropped to all fours and backed up slightly, a lengthening snout turned towards the window, and then she turned her smile on me.
{If you survive, you stupid girl, you're going to be infested,} she said, and her voice was in my mind. {Well, here's a message for whoever gets you. When you see this memory, Yeerk -- know that I am alive. Know that Avenger lives.} Her laugh was insane.
With that, she bolted for the window, slamming through the glass and the wall, hurtling the two-story drop to the ground.
The wall behind me simply exploded. There was heat and pain and a kind of fierce, wild joy, and I remembered nothing else, except that for one glorious moment with the voice inside my skull, I had been complete.