Page 72 of Half the Summer's Night

She disappears into the public bathroom.

“Got you,” I whisper, and I take off running. I’m laser-focused on that presence. It makes the public bathroom seem to glow like a beacon. I slam up to the door of the women’s restroom and find that the padlock there is shattered, the chainthat the city strings through the door handle at night coiled on the ground.

I swing the door open and step inside. The light flickers, sallow and fluorescent.

I can feel her. Not just sense her, butfeelher, the way I feel Abi. I can hear her heart beating and count her quickened breaths.

I stomp into the corridor of stalls, moving slow and cautious. There’s no way out. No windows save for a skylight, sealed shut and too small for anyone to shimmy through, regardless.

My boots stomp over the concrete floor, echoing against the walls. I shove open the first stall, the door banging against the frame. Empty.

The second. Empty.

I know she’s in here. I can feel her as acutely as I can feel my own heartbeat. But what I don’t feel, remotely, is fear.

I’m just about to shove open the third bathroom stall when my quarry leaps out, a blur of dark clothes and red hair. She manages to skirt around me, moving much faster than I expect. But I whip around and grab her before she can make it to the exit.

I slam her up against the cinderblock, and she looks up at me, and?—

Grins. Shegrins,like this is all a fucking game.

“Hey, Rowan,” she says.

My blood freezes in my veins, and her grin gets even bigger. Then she shoots her arm out, slamming her fist into my side. Pain blooms through my midsection, and I stumble back, clutching at my belly. She laughs and saunters backward, not even trying to run.

I peer up at her through my killing face, my thoughts a whirl of confusion.

“Who are you?” I rasp. “Why have you been stalking Abilene Snow?”

She shakes her head. “I haven’t. I don’t have any interest in your little girlfriend.”

That word,girlfriend, blooms strangely in my chest. But then the woman says,

“I’ve been stalkingyou.”

For the first time in a long time, I feel something like fear.This is it,I think. I’ve been caught. She’s a police officer. An FBI agent. All the boogeymen Uncle Nash raised me to fear.

I take a step backward, suddenly aware that our positions are flipped, that she’s blocking the entrance, and I have no way out.

The woman puts her hands on her hips and looks at me appraisingly.

“Who are you?” I ask again. “What do you want?”

A smile dances across her lips. “Don’t be so nervous,” she says coyly as she saunters up to me. “My name’s Charlotte Careta, and I’m someone like you.”

I stare at her. And I know, immediately, what she means.

She’s a killer. But more than that, she’s not… normal. The way I’m not normal. That’s why the presence felt different.

“And you and I,” she continues, “have an awful lot to talk about.”

27

ABI

He’s gone when I wake up. But the window’s open, the sea wind making the curtains billow inward. I slide out of bed and go over to look out at the yard below, the grass damp with dew.

How did he do that? Climb down from the window? It’s not like there’s a lattice. The wall is smooth, with nothing to hold on to.