“Ah, ah, ah.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you if you come out and play.”
“I’m not leaving this place,” I told him. “Not a chance.”
He sighed, a deep, throaty sound. “Wolfe knew you’d say that. But you don’t understand…see, Wolfe has to have the little doll. Not just for his…masters…but for himself.” His eyes looked at me suggestively, leering in a way that would have induced more nausea if I hadn’t been transfixed with fear at his words. “So now Wolfe has to be persuasive. Now Wolfe has to convince the little doll to come out of her dollhouse.”
My voice cracked. “What…what are you going to do?”
“If Wolfe didn’t know better, he would guess that you don’t care about people, since you let all those little toy agents get slaughtered at your house.” He ran his tongue over his incisors. “But Wolfe thinks maybe you just wanted to play so bad that you didn’t think about what would happen to them. But what if Wolfe started playing with others? Would you like that? Would it make you happy or sad to know that other people were getting played with…because of you?” The last bit crossed the realm from suggestive to disgusting as he stood upright and ran a hand down his own chest, raking himself with his claws.
When I said nothing, he continued. “Here’s what will happen. Wolfe is going to go out and find a nice family…and he’s going to play with them. Mommy, Daddy, little kids. And then he’s going to find another. And another. Until the little doll comes out. And if the police try and stop him, well…he’ll play with them too, won’t he? And we’ll just keep going…through this whole rotten city…” His tone turned predatory and savage. “…until the little doll comes out to play.”
His grin was surreal now, like the quality of everything else in the dream, but it was growing and expanding, taking over, and I realized I wanted to be away from it, away from him, away from myself. I snapped awake in the medical unit, not even fading back to consciousness like I had with Reed but experiencing a sudden, brutal awakening as though I had missed a step coming down the stairs and tumbled. My breaths were ragged.
I stared into the dark and thought about what Wolfe had said. It had been real, I was sure of it now. I talked to him in my dreams. I was sure of another thing too. His threat to kill others – he would carry it out. Carry it out – and love every minute of it. I looked around and saw the curtains still drawn, soft breathing of a few wounded agents coming from the other side of it. Wolfe was going to kill until I came out and faced him. He wouldn’t stop until he had me.
And there wasn’t a soul that could stop him.
Eighteen
I heard a click at the far end of the medical unit and started, my eyes darting to the door of Dr. Perugini’s office where she stood silhouetted in the dimness. She stretched her hands above her head and yawned. “I saw you wake up.” She took a long, meandering walk toward me. “Trouble sleeping?”
My hands clutched the sheets, my palms sweaty and sticky. In spite of the warm, comfortable air in the room, I felt a trickle of sweat run down my spine underneath my cloth gown. The bitter taste in my mouth became synonymous with the fear I felt every time I came across Wolfe, and the thudding of my heart was so loud in my ears I was amazed I could hear the doctor. “Yes. Just a…nightmare.”
She nodded and stifled another yawn as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s check your injury.”
“Don’t you mean injuries?” I said it with a bitterness that welled up deep inside; a cutting edge of irony that reflected my inner turmoil at the fact that since I left my house I’d been severely beaten twice. Far worse than any punishment Mother had ever levied.
“No,” Dr. Perugini said with an odd tone, and reached to the end table behind me, clicking on a lamp and coming back with a mirror. She put it in front of me and I looked at the face within.
There were no visible cuts, marks or bruises. My dark hair and pale skin, my big eyes and pointed nose all looked back at me, a contrast to how I had looked only a few hours before. The only sign that something was different were the bags under my eyes. I looked tired.
“So you see,” she said, returning the mirror to the nightstand, “there’s only one wound left.” She lifted my gown to reveal gauze and bandages on my lower abdomen, around my belly button. “He ripped through the skin and pushed through your peritineum, perforating your intestines.” Her brown eyes looked at me, almost as though she were lecturing. “If you were human, it would have taken a surgeon who could work miracles to keep you from dying. All I had to do was give you time to heal yourself.”
She peeled back the medical tape securing the bandage to reveal red, scabby tissue beneath, roughly the size of a quarter. She plucked at the pink, sensitive skin around the edges, eliciting a hiss of pain from me. “Be grateful you’re alive,” she admonished, throwing the bandages in the garbage can and taping a fresh piece of gauze onto the smaller wound, then pushing on my stomach to either side of it. “Any pain here?”
“No.” I looked at her hands as she pushed again and this time I cringed, not entirely from the pain. I watched her gloved hands pressing on my skin and had a remembrance, like a flashback in a TV show.
Mom had been sitting on the sofa, not even changed out of her work clothes yet, her dark hair tucked back in a ponytail. She was pretty, I thought, and all I had to compare her to were the actresses on TV. I got my dark hair from her, but her features had always seemed more chiseled than mine, making her look statuesque. Her complexion was darker than mine; not surprising since she did go outside more than I did. Her eyes were green rather than the cool blue of mine.
Her head was resting on the back of the sofa, her eyes lolling a bit, but she focused on me when I approached her. I had in my hand the calculus book that I had been studying from on the kitchen table, my assigned space for working. If I didn’t work there, I got in trouble. Needless to say, I only worked in my room when Mom wasn’t home.
“Finished your test?” Mom said, looking up at me with indifference. She reached out and took the paper I handed her. She leaned over the end of the couch and pulled the teacher’s edition of the book from her bag. She always took them with her so I couldn’t cheat by looking up the answers. Nor did we have an internet connection for me to cheat with.
She browsed through it. Her dark eyebrow rose at one point as she chewed on the end of her pen. I stood back, in my sweatpants and t-shirt, the heat of nervous anticipation on my cheeks as I waited to hear the result. She reached the bottom of the paper and looked up at me, still impassive.
“Flawless,” she pronounced with a curt nod. “I think you could do a better job of showing your work, however, so keep that in mind next time.” She gave me a half smile, the highest mark of affection offered in our house. “You can watch one hour of television, then we do our evening training session.”
I let out a squeak of happiness at her pronouncement of TV privileges (I was fourteen, what do you want from me?) followed by the slightest sigh of disappointment at the news of an impending workout. That was the end of her half-smile.
“You think I’m too harsh, but you don’t know.” Her eyes narrowed and her lips were a thin line. All traces of prettiness vanished in a hard look that drove terror straight through me. “You don’t know what’s out there.”
Her hand pointed toward the front door and I stifled any word of argument I might have given – something along the lines of, “You’re right, but only because you won’t let me outside…”
She went on. “You can’t ever get soft. You can’t ever get weak. It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with people who want to give nothing but harm to a little girl like you.” She stood up and tossed the TV remote on the couch, never looking away as she brushed past me, taking particular care not to touch, and went into her bedroom.