Page 600 of Flirting with Darkness

He reached for it, even as the bolt hit him.

As that cold lightning slammed into his flesh and bone, as the pain seemed to wrench his spine in two, throwing fire through every atom, every inch of skin…

Ghost could not stop himself from trying to touch it.

His empty hand reached out, straining past the pain that blinded him, past his father’s rage, which continued to expand outwards as Ghost stretched out his fingers.

His fingers found the clock.

He grabbed it, closing his hand around it tightly…

…and everything around him vanished.

15

BRIGHT LIGHTS

He heard the voices over him before he had yet opened his eyes.

A hangover did not begin to cover how he felt.

He felt as if he’d been drunk for days on cheap wine, perhaps high on a few pipefuls of opium, all followed by a street brawl in which he lost badly, and sustained a high number of hits directly to the face and head.

And the spine.

And the crotch.

His back felt like someone had wrenched it completely out of alignment, then hit one or two of the bones with a very sharp hammer.

He couldn’t even groan, it hurt so badly.

He lay there, grimacing in pain, listening.

He listened to the voices speak over him.

It disturbed him to realize nearly at once that they were speaking about him.

The first voice jarred him down to his feet.

“What the fuck happened to him?” she demanded. “Jesus, Rach…lookat him! What the fuckhappenedto him? Why does he look like this?”

Melodic despite its crudity of language, husky yet clearly feminine.

Ghost couldn’t help but hear the emotion in her words, even in the first utterances he heard from her lips.

American. Clearly American.

Shemustbe American, but the accent for that wasn’t quite right, either.

The second voice, which answered the first, was also feminine, but grimmer in tone, and slightly higher pitched in tenor.

That one sounded British, but also not, or not in any real way he knew.

“I told you… he was found like this.”

“Found like this? By who?”

“Not us. Not you or me.”

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