Page 44 of White Lights
“First admit you’re glad we’re stuck together.” He turns toward her, leaning close and dropping his voice.
Dez holds her breath and meets his eyes. In the soft glow of a streetlamp, Dez can’t avoid his expression, warm and perversely intimate. He raises a shapely left eyebrow.
She pulls away, trying not to let him see her recover after so mucheye contact. Jesus. She’s never been attracted to a sadist before, but apparently there’s a first for everything.
Tomorrow, she’ll get a grip on her arousal for this man. Tomorrow, she’ll do better at so many things.
A high-pitched whistle pierces the air. Dez starts, looking toward it, across the tri, then up into the sky where something darker than the night trundles toward the ground.
“What is that?” Dez says.
A second later, it hits the snow, making a sound like a plane crashing into a house.
“Oh my god,” she gasps.
They’re maybe a hundred feet away from whatever just fell from the sky. The crash roars in her ears.
She takes a few steps toward it before Rafe’s arms hold her back.
“Dez. Don’t go over there.”
“What?” She stares at him in disbelief. “Why not? Someone could be hurt.” She keeps moving toward whatever crashed, dragging Rafe with her.
“Please,” he says, “you don’t know what’s going on.”
“And you do?”
By then, headlights flash in the distance—a black truck driving onto the tri. Dez sees uniformed workers exiting the cab, hurrying toward something on the ground. Her heart rises in her throat, making it hard to breathe. Someonewashurt.
“Let me go,” she tells Rafe.
“Go back to the Towers until we know what happened. Until we know it’s safe.”
A PA system crackles in the external speakers around the tri. “All first-years,” Dr. Moriah says, sounding prerecorded, “report immediately to your residence halls.”
Rafe looks at Dez and lifts a shoulder as if this proves his point.
“Why don’t you have to go? Why don’t you even seem worried?” Dez asks. The sound the crash made was horrifying, bone-chilling, but Rafe seems more concerned with Dez staying away from whatever happened than he does with the thing itself.
“I am worried.” He holds her gaze. “But you shouldn’t go running toward trouble here. Not if you can help it.”
Dez swallows. “Rafe. Do you know what that sound was?”
He steps close, his hand on her shoulder, speaking into her ear in a soft voice that somehow stills her. “Go back to the Towers, Dez. I’ll find you as soon as I can.”
AT THE TOP OF HERtower, Dez presses her forehead to the cold cast-iron window. It’s dark outside, but she can still see the flashing lights on the tri, the paramedics’ rushed motions as they—
Are they loading someone onto a gurney?
It’s hard to see. It’s started to snow again, hard, the blizzard cloaking the dark scene in virgin powder.
It’s not the best day to have discovered she thinks in images, because right now they’re avalanching her, a rotating montage of horrors, writ large and grotesque.
Mo.
The masked gunman.
His eye.
