Free Beautiful Dead 02 - Arizona by Eden Maguire

dirge. I don 't know what else I can do!
    Friday evening was Laura and Jim's night at the movies so I had the house to myself. I skipped supper and checked out autism sites one more time. Autism disorder Infantile autism Fragile X syndrome epilepsy. I read that kids born with autism have feeding difficulties and they never
    smile. They can rock back and forth in a chair and stare at their hands al day. This can happen to between three and six babies in every hundred, or
    to 8.7 in every thousand, depending on which site you read. It may be down to rubel a during the first trimester of pregnancy or to wrong levels of serotonin in the brain - who real y knows? Anyway, this was over my head so I skipped these parts.
    What I was interested in were the autistic kids with an outstanding ability - maybe ten per cent of sufferers. They may have amazing rote memory or musical ability, and there's one famous case in the UK where

    the kid could take one glance at a building - their Houses of Parliament or our White House, say - put pencil to paper and reproduce the whole thing from memory. In the end, this kid's artwork got famous. They could be talking about Raven! I thought.
    Mostly though, autism can be pure misery. No smiles, no speech. These kids don't look you in the eye, and because there may be other severe mental health issues they can be on a stack of medication their
    whole lives.
    So what do you do when life deals you a hand like that? I stopped scrol ing with the mouse and tried to imagine how the Taylors had coped after Al yson took him home in Jim's cab. Arizona had talked about
    diagnoses and treatments, hospitals and schools. She'd also said her
    parents didn't want to believe it had happened.
    'I heard the baby wasn't healthy,' Jim had told me. It turned out he
    was right and the parents had fal en into denial, as in: Let's keep the 58
    il ness a secret and then maybe the problem wil go away.
    Was I right? I would ask Arizona next time we met.
    The thought took me away from my laptop to my bedroom window. I stared out at the clear sky. When wil next time be?Not until I'd found the facts behind the myth of Arizona's suicide - Hunter had made that crystal
    clear. I closed my eyes and pictured the overlord's strong, severe features, the faded angel-wing tattoo on his forehead. And I remembered the story Phoenix had told about Hunter being shot through the temple at close range by the man who had just attempted to rape his wife, Marie.
    I'm dying here! I told the mil ions of stars. I need to go up to Foxton Ridge, to find Phoenix and check he 's stil there.
    'Give me one reason why I don't send you back to limbo - and this time for good.' Or words to that effect. It was Hunter again - folding his arms astride the patch of burned ground, his anger close to the surface. Even the memory of it scared me - the way the anger could blaze up and wipe out anyone in its path. Hunter was overlord and he had absolute power to hypnotize, read minds, even, as a total last resort, to cal those lost souls down to beat their wings and travel with him through time to the beginning or end of the world and beyond.

    I trembled at the memory of my own time travel experience to nail
    down Matt Fortune as Jonas's kil er, how I never felt such pain before and came back traumatized and exhausted. Which is why Hunter only did it after every other method had failed.
    Overlord. Ruler of everything: Al -powerful Hunter.
    Through the open window I felt a breath of cool breeze. The white drapes fluttered. When I turned around, Phoenix was standing in the room.
    'Oh, thank God!' I flung myself into his arms, gripping the sleeves of his jacket, my head against his shoulder. *I didn't know - I was scared that ... '
    'Me too.' He held me tight, pressing his lips against the top of my head.
    'So scared,' I breathed. 'I didn't dare come back to Foxton. Is Hunter 59

    stil mad with us?'
    'He's been in a mean mood. He sent me and Lee up to Government Bridge to