“How do you know about the murder?”
There was a tiny shift of his balance, but his expression didn’t change. “I’ve spoken to Shane. He witnessed you being taken away by our over- enthusiastic detective. Lucky for your young man, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor.”
“Is he okay?”
“Well, I’m fairly sure our definitions of that word vary consid- erably, dear Claire, but he seemed to be breathing and ambulatory, though understandably angry.”
She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of the ugly, blocky shock collar around his neck. “Does it hurt?”
“This?” He touched the shock collar, eyebrows raised. “I’m out of range. It does chafe a bit, if that doesn’t make me seem pa- thetic.”
“Do you want me to— take it off?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll need it later, and if you break the seal it will sound a very noisy alert and activate an explosive that would remove both my head and your hands, which I think we can both agree would be undesirable.”
“Wait, what? Explosives? ”
“Don’t worry, they won’t go off unless they’re triggered by someone trying to remove it without the appropriate tools. Be- sides, I must go back tonight before they miss me, which means the collar must be intact. Oh, and my head. They’d notice.”
“But—”
“We are in the middle of a prison break! Come on, now, don’t dally. Do you have any baggage?”
“It’s a prison, Myrnin, not a hotel.”
“Well, modern prisons are so much nicer these days, one never knows,” he said, and marched out of the cell and down the corri- dor, stepping over the fallen policewoman with his oversized flip- flops dangling precariously. “Come on, then.”
She hesitated for a second, because as bad as her situation was, she wasn’t sure that going with Myrnin wouldn’t end up worse . . .
but there wasn’t much choice, really.
She stepped outside the cell, and became a fugitive.
Myrnin led her to the stairs, bypassing the elevator. As they jogged up, he said, “I’ve cut the power to the building, by the way.
Oh, come now, move along— your somewhat strange little friend is anxiously waiting.”
“My— wait, who?”
He shrugged. “The ghost girl. She seems to find me quite alarming, and she was hardly able to manifest herself at all to ex- plain to me where to find you. I think she’s afraid I’ll try to bite her. I believe she may have, you know, mental issues.” He made an unmistakable circle at his temple, and Claire just stared at him in dumb amazement. That isn’t just pot, me t ket le, she thought. That’s the whole chef’s rack. “Oh, and I also knocked out several people on several different floors, including Mayor Ramos and her assistant. I thought that might nicely confuse the issues while we make our clever escape.”
“About that. Exactly what is the plan for our clever escape?”
“Front door,” he said cheerfully.
Of course.
There wasn’t any chance of talking him out of it, sadly, and she had no choice but to follow close behind him as he shoved open the fire exit door at the top of the stairs, with a fine disregard for whether there might be an ambush waiting beyond. There wasn’t.
There were, however, two armed police officers standing outside the front doors, but Myrnin hit them with the force of a neon- colored hurricane and left them unconscious in his wake. “See?”
he said as he marched on in his flip- flops. “Successful plan. And I’m being extreme humane. You really can’t fault me.”
A car was idling at the curb, and through the open passenger- side window, she saw Miranda’s pale, anxious face; the girl was gesturing frantically. Next to her, painted an eerie shade of green from the dashboard light’s glow, Claire glimpsed Jenna— the psy- chic who’d become Miranda’s foster mother, in a way, and from whom Miranda pulled the power to stay alive and together outside the boundaries of the Glass House. She looked tense and very worried.
As she should have been.
Sirens howled, and behind them, the lights suddenly flared on inside City Hall. Their grace period was officially over— and they were too far from the safety of Jenna’s car.