The Borderkind Read Online Free Page B

those films.
    Love and tragedy: those were the things she appreciated most in the movies. Some of them had monsters, but all of the monsters were human. She’d never had an interest in the other sort…could not invest any real fear in them, because she did not believe.
    But Collette believed in monsters now.
    One of them had murdered her father and torn his eyes out, and kept her captive even now. From time to time she would look up and see the Sandman looking down at her from one of the windows with those filthy lemon-yellow eyes, face all sharp angles and fingers like daggers. Sometimes his fingers were covered with blood. He had spoken to her shortly after he had first captured her, but never since.
    Now only the Vittora spoke.
    “
Put one foot in front of the other,
” it said in a singsong voice that scraped off of the sound all around the chamber, “
and soon you’ll be walking out the door.
”
    Collette shuddered, eyes moistening. It had plucked the song from her mind, some snippet from one of the Christmas specials she’d loved to watch on television as a little girl. The edge in its voice might have been irony or comfort or mockery, or some combination of all three. Clearly, the Vittora did not think she would be walking out the door, or it would not have appeared. It was the harbinger of her death, and though most of what it said was a nonsense echo of her own thoughts, there was a morbid amusement in its tone that made her want to scream.
    But she would not scream.
    The Vittora was light in the darkness and meant her no harm. It was not tragedy, but the observation of tragedy. It was the ringing phone in the middle of the night, resonating with dread, but still only the messenger.
    Left foot, right foot, she moved in that dreadful circle. Soon she would sleep, but for the moment, she walked just to feel alive.
    As much as possible, Collette tried not to think of home, but her thoughts were often untamable. She missed the glory that was New York City: the corner delis and the busy sidewalks, the fountains and the parks. It was winter at home, must be nearly Christmas now, or Christmas might already have passed. She had wanted to skate at Rockefeller Center on the outdoor ice rink there and smell the roasted chestnuts sold by sidewalk vendors and see her breath in front of her and all of the decorations. Christmas in New York could lift any heart.
    She missed her friends. Terri Ehrlich would be grieving by now, presuming the worst. She missed her job at
Billboard
magazine and the people there—Lydia and Jane and Elissa and the funny guys in the mailroom. She wondered how long she would have to be gone before they would hire someone to replace her at work, and how long before the people who loved her would begin to lose hope that she might still be alive. She’d gone up to Maine for her brother’s wedding, but by now they must all know of her father’s murder, and that someone had taken her.
    How long before most of them simply forgot about her?
    Oliver,
Collette thought.
Oliver will never lose hope.
If the Sandman was to be believed, her brother was still alive, and somewhere here, in this nightmare world.
    That was half the reason she was here, after all, and the reason he had not killed her yet. The Sandman was using her as bait. They thought there was something different about her and Oliver, something special. Whoever
they
were was a mystery for another day. For now, all that mattered to Collette was that whoever had enlisted the Sandman to murder her father and kidnap her from their family home had done so in order to draw Oliver in, and that if Oliver did eventually come for her, they would likely both be executed.
    God, how she wanted him to come and take her away, to save her from this! The idea of seeing him, talking to him, was almost enough to make her weep. But, of course, she could not stand the thought of anything happening to him, and so the other part of her hoped that no matter what they