Free Poor Little Dead Girls by Lizzie Friend Page A

anonymous Keating address, just a jumble of letters and numbers, and the subject line was a single word: Fate. Even stranger was the cryptic message inside.
    We are all at the mercy of fate.
    Soon you will know yours.
    -Z
    Sadie’s eyebrows slid toward the ceiling. If this was some kind of motivational message from the school, they really needed to work on their delivery. She was tempted to be creeped out, but she was just too tired and happy to care. It was probably a virus anyway, like one of those scams that e-mails everyone you’ve ever met an ad for generic Viagra and penis enlargement pills. She shut the laptop and lay back on the bed.
    She hugged the covers close around her body, closed her eyes, and imagined herself back on the beach with Jeremy. She curled herself tighter into a ball and buried her face in her pillow, holding the image in her mind. Finally, she drifted off to sleep, the faint smell of salt still lingering in her nostrils.

    When something woke her hours later, she assumed it was the twins. They had a habit of disappearing right after lights out and then showing up back in bed right around dawn, smelling like smoke and sweaty cologne. She blinked into the darkness and lay still, listening for their slurred whispers and sloppily stifled giggles, but all she heard was the sound of her own breathing and the slow creak of weight moving across old wooden floors.
    She stopped blinking and opened her eyes wide, waiting for her pupils to dilate. The room was quiet again, and she told herself she had imagined it. She was still a little freaked out about what had happened in the woods, and she knew she was probably half asleep and dreaming. She closed her eyes and willed her body to unclench, focusing on letting each of her limbs sink fully into the soft mattress. She took a deep breath and tried to let her mind go blank.
    Before she could exhale, the blankets and sheets were ripped off of her body. She opened her mouth to scream, but a heavy hand clamped down across her jaw, forcing her head back into the pillow. She tried to kick, squirm — anything to get the hands off of her — but they only pressed harder. As she struggled, a single thought ran through her head: Soon you will know your fate. She tasted something sharp and metallic just before the dark closed in.

    At first, all she felt was cold. She was sitting on something hard — a bench, maybe — and her hands were tied behind her back. She was blindfolded and gagged, and some kind of strap was wound tightly across her rib cage. She could feel a rigid cuff wrapped around her upper arm, and the air around her smelled old and stale, like each breath she drew in hadn’t been moved in a long time.
    She squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to wake up. Stuff like this only happened on detective shows and in cheesy CIA movies, and she was pretty sure some hot, muscle-y actor wasn’t about to burst in with a SWAT team and rescue her. Some hysterical part of her almost wanted to laugh, but the rest was so terrified she could barely breathe.
    She felt a puff of air on her neck, and she stiffened. She told herself it was the wind and repeated the word in her head, over and over, as if she could will it to be true. Then she heard the voice, just inches from her right ear.
    “Just relax,” it purred. It was male and patronizing. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
    In her mind she was screaming.
    She had seen enough low-budget horror movies to know those words usually led straight to death by chainsaw or pickaxe. The screams trickled out as pathetic whimpers, strangled by the wad of coarse cloth pressing against her tongue.
    The voice began again. “At least, it’s less messy that way.” It laughed, and she screamed again in frustration.
    “Just answer the questions, and you’ll get to go home.”
    She stopped.
    “Much better. I’m going to take your gag and blindfold off. Promise you won’t scream?” The voice waited. She paused, trembling.