After the hullabaloo in the McDonald’s, the truck starting up again seemed like such a tiny thing, I didn’t even remember to be grateful. I was too busy trying not to chuck my biscuits all over the dashboard. My hands shook as Kissy pulled back onto the highway and put the pedal to the floor.
“Hey, Kissy?” I said finally.
“Yeah-huh?” my sister replied.
I wasn’t sure how to phrase this next part diplomatically, so I just spat it right out there. “You killed that guy.”
“Seems like,” Kissy agreed, amiable to the core.
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little, I don’t know”—I searched for the right word. Terrifying? Life-altering? Insane?—“weird?”
“It is what it is, Jess.” Kissy had never been one to dwell on the downside of things. “One second I was there, talking to the boy behind the counter, and the next, you were screaming, and that thing had a knife, and I just—I had to.”
As she spoke, the images flashed in front of my eyes again: my attacker’s dark, reptilian eyes, Kissy’s shining like a pale green spotlight, the curve of the knife, the blood. . . .
I have to kill her. I have to stop this before it starts.
That was what the boy had said, and good money was on the her in question being me.
“He was going to kill me,” I said, trying out the words to see how they’d sound out loud.
“I wasn’t going to let him.” Kissy didn’t waste a second in issuing her reply, the same way she’d never hesitated to chase off playground bullies when I was in the first grade and she was in the third. “It’s you and me, Jess. Always has been. Always will be.”
I nodded, but my breath caught in my throat. She was my sister, and I loved her, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was something else, too, that whatever the ’pulse was, it wasn’t some genetic quirk so much as . . .
Possession. The word snaked its way through my mind, all sneakylike, and as much as I wanted to quell the thought, I couldn’t quite get a handle on it, couldn’t shut it down.
“His eyes were black,” I said, sticking to the facts. “They were black the way yours go green.”
“Yup.” Kissy paused, and for the first time, the expression on her face, determined and sure, faltered. “It’s kind of funny,” she said, in a voice that just about broke my heart. “I always wondered if there was anyone else out there like me, and now I know.”
“That thing was nothing like you.” Until I said the words out loud, I wasn’t sure I believed them, but they came out so fierce and so certain that it settled the matter, right then and there. Whatever Kissy was, whatever had happened to her to make her fight like that, she wasn’t a monster.
She was my sister.
“Love you, Jess.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, unable to keep my eyes from her sunglasses. “I love you too.”
When it came to stopping for gas, Kissy was of the Russian roulette school of thought, walking on the wild side and daring the universe to do her wrong. By the time she finally gave in and pulled into a filling station outside of Dallas, the tank had been on empty for half an hour, and I was half convinced that we were going to end up stuck on the side of the road.
There was a part of me that was hoping, just a little bit, that maybe we would. Kissy’s ’pulses—even the weird ones— had always seemed so benign, but with the sound of snapping bones crackling through my memory, I couldn’t help wondering why we had to go to San Antonio and what Kissy would be compelled to do once we were there.
She killed that boy. She killed him dead.
“I’m going inside to prepay,” Kissy said, her voice cutting into my thoughts. “You want a Coke?”
I nodded.
“What kind?”
I couldn’t help but feel like every decision I made, even the tiny ones, would bring us closer and closer to disaster. “I’ll come with you,” I said, postponing at least this one decision that much longer.
“You’re coming with?” Kissy gave me a look. Even though I couldn’t actually see her eyeballs, I translated her stare to mean, You better not be coming with me because you think I can’t take care of myself.
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I was actually scared that Kissy was going to go snapping necks left and right. I was just being . . . cautious.
“Maybe I should go alone,” I said, knowing that I might as well be poking at an angry bear. “Your picture could be all over the news by now.”