Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,11
He struggled, kicking and flailing, but it was like being bound with steel bars, the grip so strong it squeezed the breath right out of him. He tried to scream again, but there wasn’t enough air in his lungs. The arms squeezed more tightly, and he felt what he was sure was a rib breaking.
This was no dream, no matter how impossible it seemed.
Keeping a crushing grip on Jimmy, the statue loped back to the fountain. Though every motion hurt, Jimmy kept struggling, the will to live stronger than any pain. He let out a startled little bleat when the statue let go.
Jimmy landed in the ice-cold water, on his hands and knees. He came down so hard his teeth sliced into his cheek, and blood trickled from his lips, staining the water. He managed one full breath before the metal hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved his face into the water. His nose made solid contact with the concrete floor of the fountain, and more blood stained the water.
The icy water sent shards of pain whipping through his body, and the chill stole what little air he’d managed to suck in. He tried to hold his breath, but the hand stayed clamped around his neck, holding him down as he thrashed and struggled and suffered. Until, eventually, he was perfectly still.
* * *
When Piper comes up with a cover story, she doesn’t mess around. Her parents have friends in high places—including, it turns out, an old college buddy of her dad, who works in the Princeton admissions office. Princeton was far from my first-choice college—it was too close to home, for one thing—but it was on my list, and it was a place my dad would dearly like to see me go. I have the grades to get me there, and the SAT scores to boot, but so do thousands of other people who don’t get in. Which meant a chance to schmooze with someone who might help me get into Princeton was an opportunity my dad couldn’t let me pass up, even if I was grounded.
“My mom invited Dr. Schiff and his wife for dinner on Saturday night,” Piper told me on Thursday morning, when we passed in the hall at school. “I asked if I could invite you, and she said it was fine.”
I looked at her skeptically. “Dinner with your parents and a couple of their friends doesn’t sound like the kind of Saturday night outing you were talking about.” Actually, it sounded a bit like my vision of hell. I find Piper’s parents kind of snobby, and socializing with them and a guy who’d be studying my every word to see if I was Princeton worthy would be torture. He’d probably run back Monday morning and put me on some kind of Do Not Admit list.
“Oh, we won’t be joining them for dinner,” Piper assured me. “We can beg off at the last minute. My mom won’t mind. My dad’ll probably be irritated, but he’ll get over it.”
It sounded awfully rude to me—both to Piper’s parents and to Dr. Schiff. But Piper and her folks didn’t live by the same kind of rules I did, and if she didn’t think her parents would mind, then who was I to question it?
Piper must have seen the acceptance in my eyes—either that or she had just assumed I would accept. “Good. It’s settled then. I’ll have my mom call your dad so it sounds all legit.”
“And what will I tell my dad when he gives me the third degree afterward?” He’d probably want a line-by-line report of what I’d talked about with Dr. Schiff, as well as a careful analysis of how I thought the evening went. Dad really wanted me to get into an Ivy League school.
“Make something up,” Piper said easily. “I’ll introduce you to Dr. Schiff before we leave, so at least you’ll have met the guy. It’s not like your dad is going to call up my folks and ask them to verify your story.”
Piper talked about all this like it was no big deal, and for her, it probably wasn’t. Obviously she did this kind of thing all the time, and if her folks knew about it, they apparently didn’t care—or had given up on trying to stop her. For me, it was a different story. I’m not some kind of goody-goody, and I’d gotten in trouble with my dad—and my mom, when she was still living