Page 19 of Freaks
Made absolutely no sense.
My heart skipped and slipped and tripped and back flipped, and then…
It stuttered to a dead stop.
I didn’t hear the shouting from further up the field. I didn’t see the figure come charging out of the night toward me. I saw nothing, not even the darkness as it engulfed me, folding me into its soft embrace.
Later, in the tiny, ill-equipped hospital close to the camp that I’d been rushed to, my father had told me I’d stumbled right into an electric fence. I’d played chicken with my friends before, grabbing hold of charged fences to see who could hold on the longest, but I’d experienced nothing like the lightning bolt of pure power that had forced its way inside my body in that field, though. Turned out the field I’d been trudging through was home to a highly-strung bull; the farmer who owned the bull had amped up the voltage to insanely high levels—levels high enough to deter an eighteen-hundred-pound bull…and to stop a nine-year-old boy’s heart dead in his chest. I wouldn’t have survived if the farmer hadn’t been out feeding the animals that night.
Now, at the age of thirty-seven, I still remembered both the sensation of drowning and the sensation of being electrocuted, but the experiences had somehow melded together into one, horrific event. I knew what the panic felt like as your synapses fired like crazy below the water. I knew what it felt like to be unable to move, your muscles rigid and taut, straining as your heart labored to beat.
Iknewwhat Zeth Mayfair was feeling right now. I held onto the plastic grips of the jumper cables, watching smoke rise off the edge of the copper tub in my bathroom as he flailed and thrashed, his body locked up, and water sloshed out onto the floor.
I took a step back, aware of the spreading pool that was forming around the tub. Zeth had been right: the soles of my boots were rubber, but it really wouldn’t take much. If a stream of water hit me, I’d be fucked.
I counted in my head.
Five…
…six…
…seven…
…eight…
My heart was the slow, rhythmic beat of a lazy metronome.
“Fix.”
I looked up, almost surprised that Sera was still standing there in the doorway. Her eyes were alight with worry.
“Fix, I don’t think…I don’t think this is the best way. Please stop,” she whispered.
Distancing myself from what I was doing often helped get the job done. Made things clinical. A series of tasks that needed completing. Sera, on the other hand, hadn’t developed that skill. I prayed she didn’t have to as I looked down at Mayfair, still bucking and thrashing, and I slammed back into my body, back into the reality of the situation. Ripping the jumper cables from the battery, I grimaced down at the guy in the tub, watching as his body relaxed and his head slipped below the surface of the water.
The fucker deserved to drown for what he’d been planning to do to Sera. He’d caused nothing but trouble since the second I’d laid eyes on him in The Barrows less than twenty-four hours ago. Letting the fucker drown would have been the easiest, smartest thing to do, but…
Sera had asked me to stop.
That was the end of it.
And we still needed him. A cruel voice in the back of my head insisted otherwise, that I’d be able to figure this out on my own, that wedidn’tneed him, and his death was justified. That fucking voice had been niggling at me for years, trying to lead me down many a dangerous path, but I’d always managed to ignore it with relative ease. Today, though… Shit, today, that voice was practically all I could fucking hear.
Fisting the front of Zeth’s t-shirt, I reluctantly dragged him upward out of the water, grabbed him by the arm, hooked him partially over my shoulder, and then I heaved him out of the tub and dumped his limp body onto the tiles at my feet. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth,” I said. “I won’t kill him, but there’s no way I’m fucking resuscitating him.”
Sera rolled her eyes. Stepping into the room, she seemed relieved as she skirted around the tub, studying the huge form on the ground. “He doesn’t need mouth to mouth. Look. He’s still breathing.”
“Bummer. I was hoping he’d have the decency to die anyway.”
Sera nearly jumped out of her skin when Zeth’s body bowed, his boots scrambling against the tiles as he regained consciousness. He drew in a strangled, gurgling breath, and then proceeded to cough and choke as he spat up a lungful of bathwater. He was pale, the blood absent from his face as he turned furious brown eyes on me.
“Thought you had more backbone,” he wheezed. “Couldn’t follow through, Father?”
I ignored his hacking and sputtering, along with his frustrating use of that damned name, and I crouched down beside his head. I would unfasten his restraints soon, because I had to. Because Sera would be upset with me if I didn’t. In the meantime...
Zeth’s eyes sparked with rage. I saw the death he was planning for me, shining out of his bottomless pupils, and it didn’t look like fun. “Don’t expect me to thank you for stopping,” he growled.
I looked around the bathroom, sighing heavily. The place was a fucking mess. This entire situation was a fucking mess; cleaning any of it up was going to be a fucking nightmare. “I don’t care if you thank me or not, asshole,” I said. “If it were up to me, I would have let you die. It’s Sera you should be thanking.” I looked up at her, feeling the weight of her gaze on my shoulders, her judgement more precious and terrifying than my father’s ever was. “I call her my angel, because she brings me back from the edge. She reminds me I’m notentirelylost. That there might be a way back for me, one day, when all of this bullshit is over. She spoke up for you just now. I’ve no idea why, but turns out she was your guardian angel today, too.”
