the space where he had been for a while, my mind drifting over a million things, but never able to focus entirely on one.
Then, quietly and without the slightest question as to what the hell I thought I was doing, I snuck down to the basement, walked over to the cement steps that led out the exterior bulkhead doors, and walked into town.
Alone.
* * *
I barely noticed where I was on the three blocks into town. I was on autopilot, my body moving while my mind wandered around elsewhere, thinking about Tobias, Millie, Peach. It was as though my brain was in a jumble, too distracted to recognize what the body it was attached to was doing. I didn't regain consciousness of my surroundings until I made it to the town square, and saw her, sitting on one of the benches, just ... watching. She looked so harmless sitting there, like a benevolent matron, surveying the activity at Grace and Addie's antique shop, the opposite corner where a crew was working to fix the damage done by Frankie Biggs ... and she was watching CCB's.
She didn't look up, but I knew she knew I was there. My mind seemed to snap back into place, and I had an instinct to run but what good would it have done? There she was, maybe ten yards from me, just a few blocks from my house. In daylight, the time when I was supposedly strong, and she was supposedly weak. I realized then that it didn't matter what I did; this woman was in charge, and we both knew it.
So, I went and sat down next to her.
"I see you're recovering nicely," she said after a few moments, still not looking at me.
"What do you want?"
"Well, I think you know what I want," she said. "Now we got all our cards on the table, what are we going to do about it?"
I sighed. "I don't know."
She nodded. "Well, I have an idea about what we might do." And finally, she looked at me. "You want to hear it?"
"I'm all ears."
She leaned a little bit closer. "I have played this game before, and I have won. And the secret to winning is really pretty simple. I find out what it is you love more than anything, and I use that to get your compliance."
Tobias, I thought, with a catch in my breath, but then, as though reading my mind, she shook her head a bit and said, "Bigger than just a man, baby. I'm talking about this whole stinking, fetid town, and every sad soul in it."
She met my eye and I blinked, trying to wrap my mind around what she was saying, exactly.
"Don't worry. I'm not ready for any serious destruction yet. It's going to be a few days. But once I get my full strength back, I'm going to call for you, as I did just now. And if, somehow, you work up the strength to defy me, I'm going to take something in this town." She shrugged. "Or someone. Depends on my mood." She pointed to Grace and Addie's antique store. "I'll burn that place to the ground." Her finger moved in time with a busload of kids from the local elementary school. "I'll send that bus plummeting off an overpass." Then she looked at me. "I'll sneak into your precious Betty's apartment and choke the life out of her with her own apron strings." A cold smile broke over Davina's face. "And I can do it all without leaving the comfort of my bedroom. Isn't that amazing? No one will know what's happening to this town. Well, no one except you, and no one except me."
My heart clunked around in my chest, in response to the chunk of ice that had settled inside me. "So what is it you want from me?"
"You know what I want," she said, her voice going light. "Your magic."
"I'm not going to give you that. I'll die."
"Well, probably, but better you than a busload of kids, right? Honestly, baby, I never had you pegged for such a selfish type." She tsked and shook her head. "Very unattractive quality, that."
I sat in silence for a while, and then I said, "Cain's going to kill you."
She chuckled. "Cain's going to try. But here's the raw truth, just between us girls. He doesn't have it in him. If he did, he would have done it the night I killed your sister."
I gripped the edge of the bench in