Page 101 of Blade

“I have to pee,” she said, pushing the door open and stumbling out, her skates falling beside her. It was a long way to the ground from the cab of the semi, and by the time she got to her feet and gathered her skates in her hands, he was walking around the front.

“Hey,” he said. “Where you goin’?”

There was nowhere to hide in the bare trees off the side of the road, so she ran. And he chased after her.

Do you like to party?She knew what that meant. What he was going to do when he caught her.

What he had done to Kayla that night in the field.

There was nowhere to go, except deeper into the woods.

And so she ran, with one skate in each hand, the blades cutting into her palms, heart pounding wild in her chest. The sound of thetruck driver weaving through the trees, close behind her. The branches snapping. Click. Click. Click.

It’s enough,she thought. Dawn. Emile. Dr. Westin. She hated them all. Hated herself. But she’d broken free. And there she’d been, in the cab of the truck, thinking she was finally safe. That the damage was done, behind her, and now, finally, someone was bringing her home. Taking her away, to safety.

She felt tired. She just wanted to go home to her father, her brother—even if her mother was no longer there. Maybe she would still feel her inside the walls of the house where she was born.

No more. I have to go home.

She stopped running when she felt him closing in. She slipped her hand inside the boot of the skate, the blade angled to strike, just like in the field. Only this time, there was no retreat.

He caught up to her, grabbing her shoulder, spinning her around. For just a moment, he stumbled to his knees.

And that’s when her body took over.

With all the strength and speed she possessed, she swung her arm and felt the blade pierce his skull with a sickening thud. Rage bursting from her mouth in a primal scream. Rage for Indy, and Jolene, and Kayla, and for the loss of the wide-eyed girl she’d been when she’d walked through the doors of Avery Hall two years ago.

He reached for her leg, stunned, bleeding. It took two hands to pull out the blade, so the next time she was ready.

One arm to strike, two hands to pull the blade free.

Again and again—four strikes for the four Orphans—until the rage finally left her.

Chapter Forty-Two

Ana

Now

There it is—on the back seat of Artis’s car:my dress.

From that night I ran through the woods, down the mountain. Away from Dawn and Emile and Westin because Indy was dead and they were all to blame. The same night I took a ride from a stranger. Desperate to be home.

I left that man in the woods and returned to the cab of the semi. I took his coat from the seat where I’d been sleeping and put it on. I rummaged through the truck, finding a bag for my skates, a pair of boots, and socks.

I shoved the socks into the toes of the boots to make them fit.

Then I climbed into the driver’s seat. Turned the ignition. I could barely see over the steering wheel to the road. I pulled the seat as far up as it would go, my toe just reaching the gas. I slid the gear into drive and began to move.

I drove that truck fifty miles straight ahead until I got to the entrance of the highway and a gas station. It was there I left it in the middle of the parking lot because I didn’t know how to do more than make it go forward. I found a pay phone and called Mio.

Now, I stare at the dress in the bag. Not Grace’s dress with Emile’s blood. But my dress with the blood of that trucker. A man named Jeb Clayton, who wouldn’t be found until six years ago.

“You come across all kinds of things being a criminal lawyer,” Artis says, braking to a stop. “So when these bones were found in the middle of nowhere, north of Denver, in the woods where they were excavating to expand a back road into four lanes, well—I didn’t think anything of it. But then the bones were matched to a missing truck driver. And the cause of death was found to be fractures to his skull—four of them, oddly shaped like a skating blade.”

I run through the rest of that night in my head. Mio came to get me, brought me back to Avery Hall. We went in through the window on the first floor, then up the stairs to the bathroom, where I changed and showered and Mio took everything I was wearing and put it into a garbage bag and put the bag in the dumpster out back.

“Do you want to tell me?” she asked as she scrubbed the blood from my skate in the bathroom sink.