Page 58 of Star Struck

‘Can you move him?’ Jack put a hand on my arm.

I screwed up my eyes and tried for levity. ‘It’s Felix. He weighs the same as a small dog.’

‘Are you sure?’ Somehow his eyes were darker than the darkness. ‘Because I need to find out where that smell is coming from.’ He helped me move another lump of box-beam from Felix’s back. ‘If we can smell it, that means there’s more.’

Felix took a harsh-sounding breath. ‘Go. Find it. We will . . . manage.’ Jack gave me a long look and moved off through the darkness, still sniffing, and vanished. ‘Now. Your turn to . . . disappear.’

‘I am not leaving you.’

‘You would have done. Before.’

His words hit me like another explosion. I had been the sort of person who’d leave a friend. The sort of person who lied and deceived herself just to keep from hurting. That had been me. ‘Not now.’ I hauled another beam off his back. Thankfully the diner seemed to have been built on the cheap, all box-beams and boarding rather than solid wood. But this did mean that it was burning a real treat behind us. ‘Whatever happened changed all of me. But it’s all right, you don’t have to believe me, after all, why would you? Just let me do this one thing. Let me get you out of here.’

‘Bravery? That’s . . . new, too.’

I freed the last beam and pulled him to his feet with my arms around his waist. ‘It doesn’t matter now what you think of me, Felix. Truly. I know I can never turn back time. All I can do is remake my life and try not to make the same mistakes again.’ I leaned him against me, taking his weight. ‘Knowing I killed them.’

Felix sagged in my grasp. ‘Still just words,’ he murmured, and with a small sigh he passed out, dropping back to the floor again.

I tried to get purchase for another lifting hold, carrying on my rambling theorising, while the smell of burning paint scorched the back of my throat. The adrenaline was beginning to wear off, leaving me free to feel the soreness in my arms and along my spine where my skin had been flayed through the torn dress as I’d been blown along the sandy ground. I tried to get another grip on Felix but my hands wouldn’t obey, closing uselessly and feebly around his coat but unable to find enough force to grab him as shock paralysed my muscles and ordered me to freeze. Stay still. Wait for rescue. I gave a choked kind of sob as pain and weakness hit me together but I wouldn’t . . . would not give up. Would not let this fire win.

The fire had taken full hold in the kitchen now. We had to get all the way across the ruined diner and out into the desert before it overtook us, and, at the rate it was moving, we had to get there fast. A whoosh, and I felt my hair begin to frazzle. ‘Eighteen months it’s taken me to grow that back.’ I tried again to clutch at the fur coat. ‘Come on, Fe, wake up and help.’ The heat had begun to gnaw into my bones now, insistent, unignorable. The metal holes on the dress bodice were heating up like little buttons of pain across my cleavage, and I could smell the scorching material. ‘Fe!’

But his head was lolling and his skin was grey. I couldn’t carry him, I couldn’t drag him, and I could feel my skin starting to blister on the back of my neck as the fire ate its way across the floor towards us. Despite the heat I was starting to shiver and my breath wouldn’t catch properly; it felt as though I was only breathing with the top third of my lungs and somewhere behind where the bar used to stand, I could hear an ominous ‘tick tick’ noise, as though metal was heating up and not liking it very much.

‘Fe, we have to get out of here,’ I whispered to the inert form slumped at my feet. ‘We have to.’ But he didn’t so much as groan or flicker an eyelash, even when a sudden spurt of flame flicked quickly over the top of both of us, retreating but leaving a smell of singed nylon and burning hair. It stung briefly over the backs of my hands and the pain made me clench tight, despite the sagging weakness in my wrists. The clench brought a handful of Felix’s coat closer to me and I grabbed it with everything I had, arms into holes where the fabric had split, fingers into pelt, I even pushed a foot through a torn hemline. The pain spurred me on enough to move back, dragging Felix along the floor by his coat like a cat dragging a kitten; one step, two steps with the back of his head bumping along the wrecked floor, and we were away from the flames, three steps and he started to slide along on the rollers formed by the broken chairs and tables. I pulled him, using my bodyweight, bent double, dragging him behind me by the tattered material of his coat. Another step and I had to stop, coughing and gasping until I thought I was going to be sick. We were away from the fire now, but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with us; maybe I could get Felix conscious enough to help . . . I collapsed forward. If I could only catch my breath . . .

And then Jack was there beside me. He seized Felix round the waist and tugged him upright.

‘Great. Show up now and do the hero bit.’ I coughed again, raising only my head. I was totally exhausted.

‘I’ve found the cause of all this. We’d better get out . . .’

Suddenly the ‘tick tick’ was louder. Jack grabbed my arm, my injured arm and pulled me to my feet, then began to run. He ran through the wrecked diner, jumped down through the blown-out glass doors, hit the dirt outside, pulling Felix and me behind him, and accelerated for a few strides, then dived onto the sand, dropping Fe and throwing his own body over mine. I just had time to say ‘ow, you’re really heavy,’ before all words were drowned out by the second, louder, explosion of the night.

Chapter Twenty-Four

When I came back to myself I found I was walking. There was no sign of the motel on any horizon and my feet were bleeding, the dress was torn along the grain of the velvet across my shoulders and back and my arm was stiff and sore. The only light I could see was speckled on distant clouds from the town we’d passed through on our way to the motel. How long ago? Felt like months.

I stopped. How long had I been moving? What had happened after Jack had pulled Felix and me out of the building? I shook my head, feeling the crispy little curls drag at the back of my neck, and all I could remember was noise and panic. People moving around, paramedics arriving. Nothing else, nothing about how I’d come to leave the scene or where I’d thought I was going.

There was a faint golden wire lying behind some distant hills; either a distant town or dawn was coming up. As my eyes traced the far horizon I felt the familiar fluttering wings of panic start to beat alongside my heart. That breaking, bursting feeling that left no space for air or sense, the feeling that told me I was going to die, suffocated by my own fear as it rose up my throat and tightened my windpipe. Where the hell was I?

I picked a direction and ran. It was like running through a dream, with the softness of velvet periodically soothing my feet as the dress trailed beneath me and alternated with the rocky viciousness of the desert floor. I think I might have shouted too, calling for help as I ran, my throat and lungs thundering with my breath and my heart a white-hot cable searing through my chest.

A sudden misstep and the ground opened underneath me. I fell in a whirling mass of velvet and scraped skull, landing at the bottom of a small gulley, with my vision blurred and my head ringing. My hands clawed out once, reaching towards a sky that seemed tiny and then a glossy kind of blackness crawled in behind my eyes and I stopped registering anything at all.

The next thing I knew was footsteps crunching on the sand above me. A voice said ‘Oh God,’ and a figure jumped down to land alongside me, pushing fingers to my throat, groping for a pulse. Another exhaled ‘Oh God,’ and something was being forced under my head, cushioning it from a rock I’d only just realised was there. ‘Oh my God, Skye, never do this to me again.’

‘Wha . . . ?’ My voice was almost non-existent.

‘Take it easy.’ The silhouetted shape, backlit by the lightening sky, crouched down beside me. ‘You’ll be okay. Here, have some water.’

My parched throat wouldn’t allow more than the merest swallow, but my thirst forced me to gulp, and I ended up spitting and gagging to avoid drowning. ‘Jack?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did you find me?’

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