Nightstruck (2 page)

Even knowing all that, I found my feet reluctant to move me forward. Maybe, if I just called 9-1-1, they'd get here in time to save the poor kid without me having to get any closer.

And if an innocent baby died because I was too chickenshit to help it, how would I ever live with myself? How could I ever look my dad—who'd risked his life countless times as a police officer—in the face? I was already something of a family disappointment, and I couldn't bear to make it worse.

Calling 9-1-1 seemed like a good idea anyway, so I got out my phone and made the call as I continued to force myself forward. Behind me, Bob was still barking and snarling, but the baby's cries had faded to weak-sounding whimpers.

“Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?”

I had reached the edge of the pool of shadow, and I could finally make out the baby's shape, though it was still hard to see. It seemed to be wrapped in a black blanket, as if whoever had left it there had put extra effort into making sure no one would find it and rescue it.

“My name is Becket Walker,” I said, hoping the dispatcher would be extra attentive to a call coming from the commissioner's daughter. “I've found an abandoned baby.”

I squatted in the darkness beside the bundled baby, who was no longer even whimpering. The blanket was tucked so firmly around it that all I could see was a baby-shaped lump. A fold of the blanket was draped over its face. I stammered out the address to the dispatcher, then decided the only sensible, humane thing to do was to pick up the baby and share what body heat I could. The dispatcher was asking me questions and trying to give me instructions, but I wasn't listening.

“Hold on a moment,” I said. I put the phone down on the church steps, then gently picked up the black-wrapped bundle with both hands.

I almost dropped it, because it didn't feel like I expected it to. The body within the blanket felt strangely loose and pliable. My stomach turned over, the sense of wrongness once again coming back full force.

The 9-1-1 dispatcher was still talking to me, but I had no attention to spare. Something within me rebelled at the feeling of that body in my arms, but I fought my revulsion. Maybe the baby had some kind of birth defect and that was why it had been abandoned. That didn't make it any less worth saving.

I cradled the baby against my body with one arm, then reached for the fold of blanket that covered its face. Maybe when I looked into the baby's innocent eyes, I'd finally stop feeling so … weird.

There was a pin sticking out of the section of blanket over the baby's face. Thanks to the pressing darkness, I didn't see it until I pricked my finger on it. I cursed as a drop of blood welled on the tip of my finger. I still couldn't see the baby's face, though I had a vague notion of eyes watching me from the blanket's interior. I reached for the edge of the blanket again, this time being careful to avoid the pin, and brushed it away from the baby's face.

There
was
a face in there somewhere—I could see a pair of green eyes staring out at me—but I couldn't make out a single feature. It was if the baby had somehow absorbed all the light, leaving nothing but a black hole where its face should have been.

My chest tightened, making it hard to breathe, and the air around me suddenly seemed even colder. Once again, I was struck by the sense that something was very, very wrong, though my conscious mind couldn't seem to figure out what.

Maybe it was the expression in those eyes. I'd never seen a baby stare at anyone with such intensity, especially not a baby who'd recently been bawling.

I froze, my hand still hovering near the baby's face, unable to look away, unable to move, as I tried to focus my gaze enough to pick out a nose or lips or chin. The drop of blood on the tip of my finger dripped down onto the baby's face—or at least onto where the baby's face should be.

Something flared in those green eyes, and the baby smiled at me. I let out a little scream and dropped it, scrambling back away from it on my butt. I didn't know what it was, but it was
not
human. That smile had revealed double rows of razor-sharp teeth.

My heart was pounding, and my body was suddenly drenched in sweat. I could hear Bob barking and snarling in the distance, and the dispatcher's voice was an indecipherable hum from my phone on the steps.

The baby—or whatever it was—moved out of the shadow, the black-wrapped bundle undulating like an inchworm. It rose up and looked at me, showing me those malevolent green eyes and the neat little rows of fangs around its smile.

And then the whole thing, baby, blanket, and all, broke apart like it was made of ash, crumbling and then being caught on a sudden burst of wind. The wind carried a cloud of what looked like dust toward me. I ducked and held my breath, but not fast enough to totally avoid the cloud. The wind swirled, then gusted again, blowing the cloud away and dispersing it into the night.

*   *   *

I was still shaking when I finally got home, and though I was freezing, my case of the shakes had nothing to do with the cold. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and curled up on the couch, trying to process what had just happened. Bob seemed as freaked out as I felt, jumping onto the couch beside me and putting his head in my lap. He wasn't allowed on the couch, but house rules were the least of my concerns. Besides, he was a warm body, and he made me feel safe. Well, safer, at least.

What the hell had happened out there?

I shuddered and clutched the blanket more tightly around me. I heard again that first sound, the inhuman wail that had triggered some primal instinct to run. And then the cry of an innocent baby, terrified and alone in the cold.

Had either one of them been real? Had I somehow imagined the whole thing? Because what I thought I saw was impossible.

If I'd been even a little less freaked out, I wouldn't have been surprised when the police showed up on my doorstep. I'd made that 9-1-1 call, and I'd identified myself quite clearly. There was no way telling the dispatcher to “forget it” was going to work.

The patrolmen who stopped by to talk to me were perfectly nice, going out of their way to be polite, no doubt because they knew who I was. I was glad I couldn't read minds, because I don't think I would have liked what I saw in theirs.

Naturally, I couldn't tell them the truth about what had happened. They'd either lock me in a nuthouse or assume I was on drugs. So I told them that what I'd thought was a baby had turned out to be an alley cat. Cats can sound kind of like babies sometimes, right? And it was dark out. I'd called the police before investigating because I thought the baby might need immediate care, and then I hung up on the dispatcher in abject embarrassment when the “baby” had jumped out of a pile of rags and turned out to be a cat.

It made me sound like an airhead, but that was better than psycho or druggie. I don't know if the cops bought it, but they didn't call me a liar. Not to my face, at least.

If only I could make myself believe my own story. But my mind insisted on reliving those last few moments, when the baby had inched out of the shadow and bared those awful teeth at me. And when it had vaporized—for want of a better word—right in front of my eyes.

Which reminded me suddenly that the cloud of … whatever had passed right over my head. I ran a shaking hand through my hair and practically threw up when I saw the oily black streak that was left on my palm. It wasn't much. Not so much a streak as a smudge. And there were probably a million things it could be, other than baby residue. I'd been wearing a hat, after all. But I bolted for the bathroom anyway.

I washed my hair about eighteen times, my skin crawling. The mark came off my hand easily enough, and if there was any more of it in my hair, I didn't see it amid the suds I rinsed off. Yet I felt sure I was tainted somehow. I didn't know what that “baby” had been, couldn't even think of some convenient folkloric label to pin on it, but I was convinced, body and soul, that it had been evil. And I wished I'd listened to my instincts instead of being a Good Samaritan.

My night went from bad to worse a couple hours later, when my dad got home. He'd heard about the 9-1-1 call, of course, and he didn't buy my story of mistaken identity.

“I can't believe you would do something so selfish and childish!” he said. He didn't yell, but with that deep, commanding voice of his, he didn't have to. He glared down at me with steely eyes, so furious his cheeks flushed.

“It was an honest mistake,” I replied, making my eyes go big and wounded. When he and Mom were still together, doe eyes had often worked on him, but ever since the divorce this past summer, he was in a perpetual state of pissed off, and he seemed to like it there.

“Not another word!” he snapped. “You didn't call the police because you saw a damn cat. What was this supposed to be? A protest about me working so late?” His scowl deepened. “Did that friend of yours put you up to this?”

This was just what I needed after my already traumatic, terrifying, and embarrassing night. How could my dad think I would make a crank call to the police? And why would he suddenly drag Piper into this just because he didn't like her?

“No one put me up to anything,” I said, my own pulse quickening with anger. Sure, I'd gotten in trouble a few times lately, and most of the time it had been with Piper by my side, but I'd given Dad no reason to think I'd call 9-1-1 just for shits and giggles. It stung pretty hard to think he gave me that little credit. “This wasn't a prank, and it wasn't some stupid cry for attention. It was an honest mistake, like I said.”

“Don't make it worse by lying.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to look defiant instead of hurt. “So what you're telling me is that you've already decided what happened and why, and you don't give a shit about my side of the story.”

For a fraction of a second I thought I'd scored a point, that Dad finally realized how unfair he was being. His eyes briefly softened, and there was a hint of doubt in them. But he hadn't gotten where he was today by allowing himself to feel uncertain of anything. And getting him to change his mind was like trying to turn the
Titanic.

“You are grounded for two weeks,” he told me. “You will not leave this house except to go to school and run errands. No Internet, and no phone.”

He held out his hand in a silent demand that I hand over my phone. When my dad says I'm grounded, he doesn't fool around. I guess he was used to dealing with scumbags who made taking advantage of loopholes into an art form. I'd be lucky if he didn't periodically toss my room just to make sure I hadn't borrowed a phone from anyone.

“This isn't fair,” I told him with a hitch in my voice. “I've done nothing wrong.” That, at least, was perfectly true.

He just stood there with his hand extended, his face cold and devoid of anything resembling fatherly compassion.

He didn't used to be this way. He'd never exactly been warm and fuzzy, but he'd been fair, and he had a soft side that only my mother, my older sister, and I saw. There had never been any doubt in my mind that he loved me. But he'd been a different man since the divorce went through, harder and angrier and unyielding. I wanted my pre-divorce father back, but I didn't think that was going to happen, at least not until after I graduated high school and left home.

When they'd split up, my parents had let me choose who I wanted to live with, and I'd chosen Dad because Mom was moving to Boston and I didn't want to start a new school for my senior year. Right now, that wasn't looking like the world's greatest decision.

“I should have gone with Mom,” I told him as I slapped my phone into his hand.

 

CHAPTER TWO

There's a part of me that's always been jealous of Piper Grant, even though she's my best friend. For one thing, she's beautiful, whereas the most flattering way I can describe myself is “somewhat attractive,” and that's only on my good days. She's tall and lean, with lustrous red-gold hair that never seems to get frizzy or oily or tangled. As far as I can tell, she's never had a zit in her life, and if we didn't go to an all-girls school, she'd surely have every straight boy in school trailing after her in adoration.

Someone who looked like she did could easily become a bitchy mean girl, but Piper wasn't like that. I'd had enough of bitchy mean girls in middle school, thank you very much. Piper was popular, but she never let it go to her head. She seemed to like just about everyone, and just about everyone liked her right back. Except my dad, who thought she was a spoiled, entitled rich kid who got off on manipulating her “worshipers,” which is what he said I was.

Although Piper and I went to the same school, we weren't in any of the same classes. She wasn't stupid—the Edith Goldman School for Girls doesn't admit stupid people—but she wasn't bound for academic glory, either. I'm in A.P. everything, and she was just scraping by “normal” classes with indifferent grades. We didn't even have the same lunch break, so the only time I got to talk to her was when we passed each other in the hall, or after school.

I'd been thinking all day about what I was going to tell her about last night's nightmare encounter. On the one hand, she was my best friend, and if I couldn't tell
her
the truth about what happened, then I couldn't tell anyone. On the other hand, why should she believe my crazy story when I barely believed it myself?

Every time I passed her in the hall, I expected her to stop and ask me what was wrong. I wasn't
trying
to act all weird, but I'd barely gotten any sleep, and I was so distracted by my own thoughts that twice I almost walked by without seeing her. Two of my teachers had taken me aside and asked if everything was okay, so I knew I was being pretty obvious. But Piper isn't the most observant person I've ever met—my dad would say because she's too self-absorbed to notice other people—and if she thought I was acting funny, she didn't say anything about it.