Catacomb (24 page)

“Make it right?” Dan couldn’t catch his breath. Oliver had planned to trade him in—like a bargaining chip! And now he just wanted to apologize?

Dan rolled onto his back, staring blankly up at the ceiling.
And wouldn’t you have done the same thing last summer, if it meant getting out from under the shadow of the warden’s legacy? Even now, what if you could trade one person to escape the nightmares—Brookline, the Scarlets, and now the Bone Artists?

He would. He knew he would. Oliver’s choice, though Dan would never agree with it, at least began to make a horrifying kind of sense. It wasn’t fair or right, but counting a stranger’s worth over his own family’s? It was an impossible situation.

“It’s funny. Finnoway warned me about you, too.” Dan’s voice was raw, but he had to say it.

“Probably meant it in earnest. The man’s a monster, but a monster with a code.” Oliver too sounded hoarse and exhausted. “He had no idea who or what you were until I told him. And then this morning, when you texted me about going to the funeral home. I told him exactly where you were.”

“Well, I made it out alive. That’s something. I can work with that.”

“There’s something else.”

Jordan’s prophetic words leapt to mind.
There always is
.

“Dare I ask?” Dan wasn’t sure how much more he could stand to have dumped in his lap. Oliver had already unloaded plenty.

“We need to get your finger back.” A dark shadow passed over Oliver’s face. His boyish features hardened, a tendon working
in his jaw. “If it doesn’t end up as a talisman, it will end up as something else. Finnoway is too smart. There’s a reason he took what he did.”

There was no stopping Dan’s outraged guffaw. “
Get it back?
How do you foresee us doing that? And anyway, the damage is done. It’s not like a doctor can sew it back on at this point.”

“Think, Dan. Think about Micah.”

“What, you think they’re using Micah’s skeleton to send us the messages? And now they’re going to use my finger bones to, I don’t know, haunt a mitten? The talisman thing is just a legend. A spooky story for kids. Even Finnoway said so.”

“Finnoway sold you a lie, just like I did. That’s what we do.” Oliver vented a bitter chuckle and drank from the rum bottle. “These people will get at you any way they can. They don’t just have your bones, they have a fingerprint, blood, DNA. . . . Even if all the rest of it is just legend, your flesh and blood aren’t. I’ve never seen a talisman made—I’m not that important—but they
are
made and they
do
work. I know that much.”

Dan sighed, thinking of Professor Reyes and her obsession with Maudire’s crystal necklace.
Stranger things
, he mused dryly. “I guess I have to believe you, even if I really,
really
don’t want to.” He dropped his forehead into his left palm. “So how do I get it back?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Oliver muttered, turning away. “But sooner is better than later.”

“I agree. But first, I know two people who are probably very worried about me right about now.”

“W
e have to go to the police with this.”

On the plus side, Jordan was talking to him again, but Dan suspected that had a lot to do with his missing finger. Before leaving Oliver’s he had taken off the bandage and, cringing, discovered that while his stomach dropped out looking at the wound, it was sewn and cleaned, as if professionally done. With no idea what to do with it, Dan rewrapped it and took a few aspirin for the throbbing and tried not to think too hard about the loss. Jordan had taken one look at Dan’s mangled hand and lost his fire for feuding.

Uncle Steve had fared a little better, and he was leaving the hospital as soon as someone came by to take out his IV, discharged with a mandate to rest and take his pain meds. He had gotten off light, the police told Jordan, with just a few scrapes and a bad bump on the back of his head. Dan wondered if this was due to the code Oliver had mentioned Finnoway having.

“Go to the police with what, exactly?” Dan asked. The overhead voices of nurses paging doctors broke in and out of their conversation. Dan tossed his waiting-room candy bar onto the chair next to him and sighed. “I guarantee you Finnoway is smart enough to have gotten rid of any evidence that I was in
that funeral home. Unless he marches down the street waving my finger around, I think we’re screwed.”

He hadn’t yet dropped the bomb that he needed to get his finger back from Finnoway, partly because the words stoppered up his throat with their insanity, and partly because it would only make their situation look more hopeless.

Abby regarded him silently from the bank of chairs directly across from him. Like all of them, she’d clearly spent the night sleeping in a hospital chair. Whatever. They only looked as crazy as they felt.

“We might not be able to prove anything, but going to the police would slow him down, at least,” she finally said. Jordan leaned onto the chair behind her, tapping his foot. “And who knows, maybe there’s a prior conviction we don’t know about.”

“He’s running for city council, Abby. I’m betting all of his skeletons are hidden in better places than a closet,” Dan said, shivering at the accidental choice of words.

“Well, we can’t leave!” Jordan smacked his palms on the back of Abby’s chair, startling her. “This is my home now, Dan. There’s no way I’m going back to my parents.” Jordan realized what he was saying and lowered his voice. “And we’re not leaving here without you, either.”

Dan knew this was meant to inspire him with confidence, but the sentiment only filled him with dread, reminding him just how trapped he was.

“What if we
can
find proof that Finnoway is the one who hurt you, or that he has ties to those criminals—”

“The Bone Artists,” Dan supplied. His hand pulsed—ached—and he shuddered.

“Yes. What if we can prove it?” she asked

Dan avoided her imploring eyes, picking up his candy bar and fiddling with the torn wrapper. “This has been going on for years, Abby. Generations. If we get Finnoway tossed in jail, someone else will just show up to take his place.”

“That’s not a defeatist attitude or anything,” Jordan muttered.

“But it’s the truth.”

Stymied, they sat listening to the hospital pages and the nurse bantering with a drug-addled Steve in the nearby room. Oliver and Sabrina had suggested waiting, trying to bait Finnoway again, but this time together, with Dan in on it. He had no idea if he could trust them that far, or at all. That was the thing about someone lying to you—it was almost impossible to believe them ever again. Dan studied Abby and Jordan, wondering how they managed to have the friendship they did, even in spite of all the secrets and lies that had passed among them over the past twelve months. Seen in that light, maybe trusting Sabrina and Oliver made perfect sense.

More to the point, he didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing. He needed to move quickly.

“All right, we can try to gather some proof,” Dan said softly, closing his eyes and squeezing them. “Where do we start?”

I
t wasn’t exactly home, but after yesterday’s ordeal, Dan felt incredibly lucky to be back in his little shared guest room in Uncle Steve’s apartment. Steve was too doped up from the pain meds to notice the way Dan kept twisting away to conceal his right hand. Instead, he had camped out in the living room with the Xbox, snuggled up in a fuzzy robe and slippers. They had spent the previous night keeping an eye on him, fetching juice or food and generally making sure he was comfortable.

Early morning light crept across the carpet in wide squares. Abby and Jordan sat on the floor of the guest room, fresh notebooks opened to take dictation while Dan went through all the files Maisie Moore had given him. This time he didn’t leave out the connection between Trax Corp. and Brookline, and it appalled his friends every bit as much as he’d known it would. At least he could take pride in the fact that this part of the Bone Artists’ operations had already been shut down thanks to his parents’ lifework.

But his parents had been better investigators than Dan and his friends were. The information in front of them was all so tangled up and circumstantial. He felt incredibly outnumbered, and worse, outwitted. He hated how much time this
was taking, when meanwhile Finnoway was somewhere with his finger, no doubt already making plans to ruin him.

Dan squeezed his eyes shut.
You’ve gone awfully silent, Micah, when I could actually use your help. They took your body, didn’t they? What do I do? How do I get it back?

“What if we look into Finnoway’s background? I’m convinced there’s something there,” Abby said. “We could go look on the computer in Uncle Steve’s office. Or I could just pull him up on my phone.”

“No!” Dan dropped down from the futon, almost batting her phone out of her hands. Instead, he awkwardly wrestled it from her with his left hand. “Don’t you get it? They don’t forgive and they don’t forget. If you get caught poking around in his history it will just get worse, not better.”

“God, I didn’t even think of that,” Jordan said, staring wide-eyed at both of them. “Not to sound incredibly selfish, but I really don’t want a target on my back, either. Or my family’s.”

Dan stayed quiet, not pointing out that it was likely too late for that. He had no idea just how choosy the Bone Artists were. Uncle Steve had already been attacked once. Had he, Abby, and Jordan been added to their debt list of people to eradicate?

What if they went after his mom and dad? The parents who had taken him in after family after family had rejected him in the foster system? Dan couldn’t let that happen. Paul and Sandy had been so good to him. They hadn’t cared about his background. They’d treated him like a kid with a blank slate.

“That’s the whole point,” he said under his breath.

Abby tried to meet his eyes, but he dodged away from her, standing and turning to face the window.

“What’s the whole point, Dan?”

“The Bone Artists are after
me
for what
my
birth parents did. You two aren’t part of that, and you don’t have to be. You can have a blank slate. Jordan is going to need that if he’s going to keep living here.” Dan felt like he had made this speech before, but he couldn’t quite remember. God, which made him realize . . . He went to his bags and fished out his medication. At least the jerks hadn’t stolen that, too.

He tossed back one of the pills, swallowing it dry. Then he stalked out of the room, heedless of how petulant it made him look. He stopped on the landing, hovering his right hand over the bannister while he tried and failed to outpace the thoughts fighting for supremacy in his head. His hand brushed the railing and his wound throbbed. He swore, snatching his hand back and holding it to his chest.

A single footstep creaked on the landing floor, and then the door to the guest room shut. He felt, rather than heard, Abby’s presence at his back. Then her hand skimmed his shoulder and he couldn’t help shivering. He felt cruelly, unaccountably
old
. And that wasn’t fair, he reflected. He was still just a kid in so many ways. In most ways.

“Do you really think they would come after me and Jordan?”

Dan pulled in an unsteady breath. “Yes.”

Her fingers tightened on his shoulder, and at last something other than fear cut to the forefront of his mind. He didn’t want to give Abby up, not now, not next year. If anything, he wanted more of her.

“But you need our help, don’t you?” she said.

“Honestly, I don’t know.” Dan sighed, and he felt her touch
recoil a fraction. “I appreciate that you’re trying to stick by me in this, but I’m worried. . . . If something happens to you, either of you, I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.”

And that would finish me off
. He felt strung together by a weak thread as it was, pushed well beyond exhausted and frayed.

“My parents were just trying to do the right thing,” Dan added in a whisper. “And look what happened to them.”

She leaned into him, gradually, hugging him from behind. He didn’t dare move, afraid to startle her and ruin the moment. This was worth protecting, he thought, whatever that might mean in the end.