Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,36
them. “If that’s the way you feel—”
“It’s not the way I feel, Zack.” I should have been on the edge of panic, ending things like this. It’s not like I set out to do it the day before, when I was content on the campus, in training, and with my boyfriend. “It’s the way it is. You’re too big a boy to keep holding back; time to grow up. My life is solitary confinement – it’s a prison sentence, and you don’t deserve it, even if you do act like an ass sometimes.”
“That’s it?” I could hear the edge in his voice. “It’s over?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t have an edge in mine. I was just tired. “It’s over. Be safe in Michigan.” I pushed the end button on my phone without waiting for his reply and sagged back onto the bed, taking a deep breath. I felt a burning at the corner of my eyes, and I couldn’t believe what I’d just done.
In a way, I was sorry I hadn’t done it sooner. I mean, I kissed another guy at the bar last night, and almost got carried away. That’s not the strongest sign that things were going well in my relationship with Zack. In fact, it was probably a sign that there were some deep, serious, underlying problems. Well, one anyway. And just because I had to live the rest of my life to less than the fullest didn’t mean he had to.
There was an insistent knocking at my door and I levered myself back up and opened it to find Kat waiting. “Ariadne wants us all on the phone in an hour to make our report.”
“Fine.” I massaged my temples. “You want to come to my room or what?”
She shrugged. “Sure. I think I can have Scott up and moving by then.” She looked down at my attire and made a face. “You might consider showering and changing your clothes. You look—”
I looked down at myself, at what I was wearing. “A little ragged, yeah. I’ll do that. See you in an hour.”
I shut the door and got to work. I rummaged in my overnight bag and found pain relievers and the other drug I was taking. I popped the acetaminophen, then an equal dose of ibuprofen, then got my syringe ready for my morning injection of chloridamide. The injection was critical because if I didn’t take it, the souls of the people I’d absorbed tended to get a little...feisty...in my head. I took a deep breath and plunged the needle into a vein. I was fortunate in that I was a meta; if not for my continuously regenerating vein structure, I’d likely be out of places to inject the drug by now.
The shower brought me back to life, and after I spent a few minutes getting my hair straightened and had changed into a fresh suit, I felt worlds better. The pain was still lingering behind my eyes, but it was in the recesses of my mind rather than front and center. And it didn’t hurt to blink.
An hour later, there was a knock on my door and I opened it to find Kat, who was as sunny in her disposition as ever, and Scott, who wore sunglasses and looked as though he’d had an anvil dropped on his head. He grumbled some sort of greeting as he slouched into the room and flopped in a chair at the table. Kat sat across from him, a small smile seeming to be her only defense against laughing at both of us.
When Kat’s phone rang, I caught a nearly imperceptible twitch at the edge of Scott’s eyebrow. I might not have noticed it but for the fact I felt one myself. “Just a second,” Kat said to whoever was on the phone. She pulled it away from her ear and pushed a button. “You’re on speaker, Ariadne.”
“Get packed and get moving,” came Ariadne’s voice over the phone. “Early this morning a car was reported stolen from a parking lot in Ellsworth, Wisconsin, just across the river from you. We flagged it as a suspect vehicle on a hunch and it was found abandoned an hour ago by a police patrol in a neighborhood in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I’m sending you the address.”
“How do we know that the stolen car is linked to our mystery robber?” The question occurred to me even through the haze in my head.
“We don’t.” Ariadne sounded tense. “But we’ve got nothing else to go on and