Only Ashes Remain by Rebecca Schaeffer

Author:Rebecca Schaeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Twenty-Four

NITA WAS FINALLY ALONE, and she sank down on the bed for a moment, just to process. She closed her eyes, but the lights from the ceiling made the back of her eyelids pink. She opened them after a moment and pulled out her phone. She needed to know more about the wanted poster on her.

Nita scrolled through the information, but instead of finding more details about herself, she found three stories about girls who’d been murdered or kidnapped today.

They all looked like her.

Her stomach bubbled with nausea, and her hands shook as she tabbed through the stories. Everyone had a doppelgänger, or more than one. In a city as big and diverse as Toronto, there was bound to be a twin or two of Nita’s.

There were. And they were disappearing.

According to the story, the wave of disappearances had started yesterday, shortly after Nita had come to Toronto. One girl was getting off the streetcar when her friends saw a dark sedan pull up and yank her in. One was a college girl who vanished from the bathroom of a coffee shop. And the last was only fourteen, stolen on her way to school.

The last two were taken after Nita had made her statement to the black market.

The hunters hadn’t been discouraged at all. Adair was right.

They might not be able to track her by phone, but they had something better.

The internet.

The whole city was looking for Nita and Gold, tweeting, talking, texting. And the hunters were jumping onto the police search to mount their own.

She hadn’t fixed anything. She’d made everything ten times worse.

She looked down at the pictures of the missing girls, wondering if they’d already been chopped up and dissected for the market, sold as pieces of Nita.

She should have expected this. Any high-end product on the market was bound to attract lower-quality forgeries.

But it still made her shake, to imagine these random girls, alive one day, dead the next because of a conflict in a world they didn’t understand. She could almost hear their screams as the scalpel sank into their flesh, as their bodies were torn apart and put into glass jars.

Nita shivered at the thought of a scalpel, body tingling with a hunger, the cool metal in her hand as she pressed down on flesh. How long had it been since she dissected something?

She choked on her own disgust. Why did this happen every time? Why couldn’t she think of bad things without wanting to do them herself?

She covered her face in her hands. She was so fucked up.

She wanted to dissect someone. She wanted to carve them up, to take them apart piece by piece and see how they worked. She didn’t care who, she just wanted a body to fulfill her craving.

It would be even better if she could dissect something new. Something no one else had ever dissected before.

Like a kelpie.

Nita stilled. Then licked her lips. If Adair tried to hurt her, if he cut his losses and tried to sell her to the black market .

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