At first, Rachel ignored the dumb fire alarm, still sifting through the clipped newspapers and junk on the table. Most of the headlines were weird, sensational stuff. Lady Lifts Gas Tanker, Disappears. Psychic Solves 20 Year Old Cold Case. Locals Say Man Appears from Thin Air. In addition to studying urban myths, Jason's not-so-friendly friend appeared to be a political nut. He had a ton of clippings from the last election, complete with a whole stack of the VP's pictures. Rachel hadn't even known this lady was the VP before reading the headlines, but Wiles certainly didn't have that problem. Everywhere her name appeared, he had underlined the first part in messy, obsessive strokes: Viola Everdine.

Stalking didn't seem to be his only crime. Under all the papers, she'd already found a hodge-podge of loose cash, watches, wallets, tourist-bait keychains, and other things you get by dipping your hand into people's pockets.

Little Miss Creepy added her wail to alarm's. Rachel spun and stumbled back into the wall. Heart hammering, she cursed herself for being so jumpy. Ana was just a kid. But this kid had a scream that sounded like murder, like sticky red dripping through her hands, like eyes going cold. It chilled Rachel's blood. The kid's black hair framed her face like a widow's veil, and she screamed and screamed.

Rachel flicked her eyes to the bedroom door, expecting Jason to come and calm the black magic down. All she got from that direction was a thump and a scrape, muted beneath Ana and the alarm. Rachel darted over to try the knob; it didn't budge.

As Ana hit a particularly piercing, spine-tingling note, Rachel winced, then steeled herself. Hands out, she crept closer to the kid. "I'm not going to hurt you..."

Ana turned on Rachel, eyes as dark and sparking as black fire. Rachel's breath caught. Gone was the glassy look from yesterday. Gone was the timid, lead-by-the-hand girl. Something else had woken up beneath it. Something unhinged and animalistic. The scream twisted into a song, into notes that sounded like cold knives, like a hundred loaded syringes, like the taste of a metal barrel in your mouth—

Ana's world was red. The alarm blaring made blood pound in her ears—red. The girl with the gun's wild, angry hair—red. Jason's thoughts and heart and temper—red, red, red. It was all red, and he had left her, left her to be hateful, to corner a mouse like a cat, to get blood on his white paws, and it. Was. Wrong.

It was all wrong, so wrong that it was broken and gone and lost and would never be right again. Ana's lungs and chest heaved with the loss of it, the weight of it, the neverending void that the world was falling into.

Keep my face in mind, just that, Dad had said. But he was gone, and Jason had abandoned her, abandoned what was good, and if he had, why shouldn't she? Dad was gone and Jason was gone and there was nothing holding her back.

Ana screamed and sang until her throat was raw. She ran, away from the red, the bad, the wrong. The walls flashed by her and the ground pounded beneath her feet. She ran until her legs were rubber and she didn't know where she was. She crawled, dirt smooshing into her fingernails. Leaves brushed her face, blocking out the red, flashing lights. She curled up in the shelter of a bush, face soaked, legs shaky, head aching. She curled up tighter and tighter, wishing the world away, away, away...

But she didn't have a voice to make the world leave her alone anymore. Her throat ached and croaked. She buried her face in the crook of her arm. The leaves held her as she cried.

"What are you doing, Rachel?"

Jason's voice cut into Rachel's syrupy thoughts. She blinked, blinked again. Before her, the room was empty. The front door was open. The fire alarm blared, but the notes that had clawed their way into Rachel's brain were gone. She heaved a sigh only to discover something round and metal in her mouth.

"What are you doing?" Jason demanded again, ripping her arm down from her head. He wrestled a gun from her limp fingers.

The gun. She blinked at, then down at the hand it had been in. Her heart hammered. She didn't remember pulling out the gun. She hadn't pulled out the gun.

But it had been in her hand. She had pointed it at herself. Swallowed it.

Rachel started shaking, trembling from head to toe in a way she hadn't in a long, long time. Her dad, murdered in front of her. Her shooting Rafe and sewing him back up. She'd shaken like this then. That was it. The horrific, the things no sane person could wrap their mind around. And she was sane. She was sane. She was sane.

Sane people didn't try to blow their brains out.

The gun landed on the couch. Jason came in front of her and took her shoulders. "Ana, Rachel. What happened to Ana?"

A couple scratches cut baby trails of blood across his skin. The muscles in his jaw worked. This close, Rachel could see pricks of stubble against his chin. His hands were warm against her shoulders as they shook.

"You're safe now," he promised. "You're fine. Where did Ana go?"

Her mouth opened to tell him, but all she could think about was her hand holding that gun, her hand pressing it into her own mouth, and... and... why? She didn't know, and that made her shake harder.

Jason squeezed his eyes shut. "Never mind, never mind." Still holding her shoulders, he peered around the apartment. "Sam? You still here?"

There was no answer. A breeze came through one of the windows, the curtain fluttering in its wake.

"Forget it," Jason said. "We gotta get out of here."

When did that window open?

"Rachel, are you listening? We gotta go." The warmth of his hands retreated. He crossed the room to pick back up the gun. He started to take her arm to pull her along, but she shook out of his grasp. She was not his infant sister.

"Keep up," he said and hurried out the door.

The hallway was mostly empty, but as they followed the trickle of people through a red EXIT door, the spiral stairwell was crowded, frightened people jostling to get past slower ones. Someone bumped into Rachel from behind, and she rounded on them, fist raised.

"Hey, hey!" Jason pulled Rachel back at both elbows, and the wide-eyed mom hustled her two children away. Rachel shook him off. "You're safe," he said, and it struck her he'd said the same thing just moments earlier. Like he knew why she was scared, and it wasn't around anymore. Which was kind of freaky since she didn't know why she was scared. She didn't know what had put that gun in her hand. So how on earth did he?

Wading through the stream of people, Jason peered over the edge of the stairwell. People bumped and jostled him, but he still only moved slowly, one step at a time, still searching below him. Rachel ducked through the crowd to catch up and leaned over to look with him. There were just people, some in their nightclothes, some dressed to go out for the night, all circling down four flights of stairs.

She opened her mouth to ask a question when he shoved away from the edge. Head shaking, he padded quicker down the stairs. "She's not there." Then he stopped so fast Rachel ran into him. "What if—"

She grabbed his sleeve before he could do something stupid, like fight his way back upstairs. "She's just a kid. Someone probably took her down." Not that Rachel particularly wanted to see the banshee right now. A sick feeling curled in her gut.

Expression pinched, Jason hurried down another flight. At this landing, there was a window. In the dark, the crowd puddled under streetlights, hemmed in by cars pulled longways across the road. Rachel's eyes narrowed.

"Look." Rachel tugged Jason toward the view.

"You see her?"

She shook her head. "No, but—"

"Then show me later." He slid out of her grasp, hurrying to the next landing. This time, he didn't check to see if she was following, and he almost bowled over a little kid.

"Jason!"

He didn't even pause. But normal people didn't pull into the street the way those cars had, blocking traffic. Cops pulled into streets like that. And six unmarked cars was a lot for an alarm that had been going off for less than a minute, and for a fire that didn't seem to have any smoke.

"Jason!" Rachel vaulted down a few stairs, twisted around an elderly couple, and shoved past a few drunks to reach him on the next landing. He wouldn't stop, so she hooked her arm through his—his bad one, she realized with a wince—and hauled him through the doors to the second floor.

This hall was deserted by now, and the metal door slammed behind her. Jason shoved her off, face screwed up in pain, but moved to go back out.

She jumped in his way. "This is a trap. We can't walk out the front doors."

The fear that had been on his face deepened into pale white horror. "Ana."

"They don't care about her!" He dodged left, and she blocked. "And if they're gonna get her, they've already got her. But they don't want to put her in jail."

"You don't know what they want!" he snarled.

Ice shot through her. Smart would be to let him have it his way, to wash her hands of him. But she'd been scared before, scared like he was now: scared desperate, scared mad.

"Get out of my way, Rachel," he said, voice low and shaking.

Hand balled, she stepped carefully to the side. He surged forward. And right as he went to pass her, her fist slammed into his jaw.

Her knuckles connected at just the right nerve cluster, and his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. He collapsed.

"Can't do anything stupid unconscious," she muttered, grabbing him by the ankles.

A maintenance closet would make as good a hideout as any, and the lock on it looked flimsier than the apartment locks. She fished in Jason's pockets for some kind of card and found his ID. She almost rolled her eyes at his naivety until she saw it was one of the fake ones: Jake Smith, 19.

Unless this was the real one and all the other things had been lies.

She swiped it through the jamb, and the lock clicked open. She dragged Jason in. You owe me some answers, Psycho Boy.

When the detectives figured out Jason hadn't come outside with everyone else, they'd start combing the building. By the time she was done with him, they'd have wasted enough time that there'd be no slipping quietly out the back. Not without a distraction.

She glanced around the room, taking note of anything she could use. Paint cans, vinegar, bleach, Drain-O...

A slow, shaky smile crept over her face. She supposed they really shouldn't have pulled the fire alarm—not if they didn't want flames to go with it.