Exit Light Read online

  The boy stared at her with vivid blue eyes half-hidden by a shock of unruly dark hair. “Why? Why does everything good have to go away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the face of his tears her resolve weakened. Tovah had little experience with children. She’d been the youngest child. She’d never babysat. She’d never had a child of her own.

  “Hey,” she said. “Don’t.”

  The boy sat on a large black rock and put his face in his hands. The knobs of his shoulders punched up through the thin denim of his shirt. His fingernails were bitten down, his fingers dirty in the creases. His sobs rent her. She touched his shoulder tentatively.

  “What’s your name?”

  He shook his head and looked up at her with streaming eyes. She thought he might be about eight years old, and small for his age. His lashes, dark and thick, swept over cheeks as smooth as milk.

  “Only bad things stay!” he cried.

  She took her hand back at the sudden shout. The force of his will was like a thousand tiny plucking hands. Like the skittering touch of an insect, or the unexpected prick of a pin left in a garment.

  Tovah shaped green grass, but the black sand pushed it away. She shaped blue sky, but midnight swallowed it. Things were getting beyond her control. She didn’t want to be caught in this child’s nightmare. She wasn’t a guide.

  “I’m sorry.” She backed up. “You’ll find your ball. If you want to.”

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she would be away from this place and this child. She would be in the club, where she could find something to distract her. Or in the meadow, shaping flowers. Anyplace but here.

  She opened her eyes.

  There wasn’t time to scream; there hadn’t been then, either. One moment she’d been drifting into sleep, the next the shriek of tires on pavement and the blaring of the car horn had flung her eyes wide open. The seat belt had bitten her shoulder. The sound of metal on metal and shattering glass filled her head.

  No time to scream, or block her sight. No time to brace herself before the car slid under the back end of the tractor-trailer and everything went black.

  Black.

  And blue.

  And red and blue.

  Red and blue and yellow. The sound of sirens. Smell of smoke. A vague sensation of pressure against her thigh. No pain. The pain would come later, the angry stinging of a hundred thousand wasps, the burn of molten wax. But for now, no pain.

  She looked to her left at Kevin in the driver’s seat. Blood dripped from a small cut on his forehead. He’d cracked the windshield. His eyes were closed, mouth slack.

  Outside his window, an alien rapped. No, not an alien. A firefighter in a suit, masked, hands made thick by gloves. He had an ax. He swung against the back window. More glass shattered.

  More red and blue, more yellow, the droning blare of a siren and the rumble-mutter of megaphones. A policeman appeared at her side, the door open and gone. A man in white. A woman in a blue jacket.

  Then nothing.

  She knew this was a dream, each detail crisp and clear and unwanted, accurate but not real. Not this time. A dream she could control. Shape. She didn’t need to be here, didn’t need to live through this, no matter what Spider said. She didn’t need this.

  “No,” she said aloud, voice thick, throat raw. “No.”

  “Relax, honey,” said the woman in the blue coat. It had been a jumpsuit back then, now a coat, more proof this wasn’t the waking world. “Relax. We’re going to have to cut you out of there.”

  “No,” Tovah said, struggling. “No! Please—”

  Pain shredded her. The wail of the sirens grew, stabbing her ears. The shriek of metal gave way to the whine of the chainsaw the woman in blue sported instead of her left hand.

  “Just a minute, sweetheart, and we’ll cut you free.”

  “I’m not free!” Tovah screamed. “I’m not free!”

  She wanted Spider. Needed a guide. Anyone. Someone.

  Spider didn’t come. She cried for him as she struggled against the shoulder belt that had locked her tight into the crumpled remains of the car.

  “Don’t worry so much. It’s just a little…prick.”

  The woman’s teeth had become hypodermic needles.

  “You should get out of there.”

  The familiar voice was soothing. Calm. Beneath it, Tovah heard the soft tick-tock of a clock. Behind the scary woman, a figure loomed. She wept with relief.

  “Ben?”

  “I’m here. You can make this go away. You know you can.”

  The woman began to blur and shift. She became a stone angel. The car, however, stayed around Tovah, tighter than the embrace of a lover.

  “I’m trying.”

  “You’re scared. Let it go.”

  “I can’t! I can’t let it go!”

  Tovah struggled in the prison of metal and leather. The stench of smoke burned her throat and nose. All her limbs were leaden. And then, terror so fierce it hurt like a blow leaped up inside her. Not leaden.

  Gone.

  “You can do it.” Ben’s voice smoothed over her. “Shape it away. Shape your exit, Tovah.”

  She could do it. Had done it, dozens of times. She’d forgotten until Ben reminded her.

  The blinking red letters swirled in the air, fixing themselves into solidity.

  EXIT.

  And she pushed herself toward it.

  For fully three seconds after she sat up in bed, the exit light hovered in front of her before she blinked and it dissolved. Sickness roiled in her stomach. Her nightshirt clung to her body.

  Shaking, Tovah sat up and swung her leg over the bed. The other, the stump, stuck out just past the edge of the bed. She rubbed it. It didn’t hurt anymore, and the lumps and runnels of the scar tissue had become as familiar to her as any other part of her body. Nothing to fear, or to hate. She was more than one limb, more even than the sum of all her body. There was more to her than a physical imperfection, always had been more. Always would be.

  She put her face in her hands and wept, anyway, for what had been and what was left.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The witchwoman was hunting a Spider.

  She didn’t have to tell this to the boy; he just knew, the same way he knew where she was and what horrors she committed even when they were hidden from him. The way he knew what the dogman did when he wasn’t looking.

  She hunted the Spider Ben had told her about. A guide. Someone more powerful than she. It infuriated her, and the boy knew this, too.

  The boy had found the Spider, but he kept this discovery shielded from the woman and the dogman as best he could. He wanted to talk to this Spider alone, before they found him.

  They always found him.

  The Spider watched him, and the boy wondered how different he looked through eight eyes instead of two.

  “My mom says if you kill a spider, it’ll rain.”

  The Spider’s head moved a little, from side to side. “Do you like to kill spiders?”

  The boy shook his head. “Billy Morris in my class used to pull the legs off of Daddy Long Legs. But I never did.”

  The Spider said nothing, but though the dogman often said nothing because it couldn’t, and the witchwoman often used her silence as a distraction, the boy didn’t think the Spider meant to harm him.

  “You’re strong, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

  The Spider managed a nod. “Been here a long time. Yes.”

  “So have I.”

  “I know you have, son.”

  Nobody had called him son in a very long time. Not since he’d been with his mom and dad, and not often then. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes, and he didn’t have the power to hold them back.

  “I have a ball,” he said, showing it desperately. “Do you want to play with me?”

  “I wish I could, son. But…”

  “But you’re afraid of me?” The boy immediately knew this to be true, the same way he knew t