TWELVE

Caitlyn stood in darkness, a prisoner in a long, narrow closet with a high ceiling. She was alone, prepared for the actions she had decided to take when the door finally opened.

The night before, Razor had taken her down a hallway in the basement of one of the downtown skyscrapers, getting access through a side door beside the loading dock.

He had unlocked the bolt on the outside of the door and led her inside the room with exaggerated politeness that Caitlyn guessed was the result of the awkwardness of the two of them entering such a confined area.

Although she was curious as to how he’d gotten the code to the security pad that let them into this building, or how he was able to maintain a secret room inside it, she’d informed him she was not in a mood for conversation. Just in a mood for food. Razor had obliged, giving her bottled water and fresh fruit and cold chicken from a small cooler.

He’d watched in silence as she ate. Then Razor had set up the bed by pulling it like a shelf from the wall and promised she would be safe. Now he was gone.

It was obvious this was where he lived. On one of the long walls was the mattress shelf that folded upward when unused. When out, it filled half the width of the closet. On the wall opposite the mattress shelf, a few pairs of pants and shirts on hooks. At the far end, away from the door, with the small refrigerator tucked into the corner, other shelves had been built across the width of the wall, holding locked rectangular boxes. The lowest shelf served as a desk with a small chair tucked beneath it beside the refrigerator. Candle holders, with white candles burned halfway down, had been screwed in three places on the walls. Not much else. Just earlier, in Razor’s absence, she’d explored the small space and found some books on magic. Under the mattress, there were small unmarked vials. With hypodermic needles nearby. And a short length of surgical tubing.

Upon first stepping inside this cubbyhole, Caitlyn hadn’t asked about the full-length mirror on the wall opposite the bed shelf. Anyone who called himself fast, sharp, and dangerous obviously had enough vanity to demand the mirror.

With Razor on the floor, Caitlyn had spent the night on the mattress shelf, huddled beneath blankets. All through her childhood in Appalachia, she’d been safe and secure in her solitude with Jordan. As she remembered it, she had spent this innocence on a broad plateau between the past and the future, where little happened on either side to affect their lives. After Mason Lee had begun pursuit, though, she’d been thrust off that plateau into a life where nothing, not even survival, was certain from one hour to the next. Not even her father’s love for her.

After her escape from Appalachia, in the weeks of living in the city, miserable as it had been, she’d at least found the plateau of routine again. Predictability. The safety of boredom.

Until the night before, when she’d been forced to leap from the top of a building. Once again, the present had become a knife’s edge, where the past on one side seemed beyond existence and the future on the other consisted only of the danger that might arrive in the next hour, the next minute. The next opening of a door.

Like now, waiting and waiting for the outer bolt to scrape, a warning that someone was about to enter. She couldn’t even be certain it might be Razor. For all she knew, he’d locked her inside and sent someone else to take her, for any of a number of possible reasons, none of them good.