Needy Little Things(76)

“Deja!” I nudge her shoulder. “Deja, can you hear me? It’s Sariyah.”

I get only a few shallow moans in response.

“Hey.” I give her face a few firm pats. “Dej, it’s me. We need to get out of here.”

She slowly opens her eyes. Blinks a few times. Gasps. “Sariyah?” She reaches out and touches me. “I thought I was dreaming.”

Tears wet my cheeks and I twist open the water. “Here. Drink.”

The recycled plastic crinkles and crunches as she gulps it down.

I feel around for my phone. The air is warm and thick, like a bathroom after a shower. It’s hard to breathe.

“Where is he?” Deja asks, voice small.

“Where is who?” I ask, wanting her to confirm what I already know.

“Jed.”

“I don’t know. That’s why we have to hurry.” I find my phone, but it’s caked with mud and glitches wildly. Refuses to make a call. I shove it into my pocket.

“Can you move? Are you hurt?”

Deja grunts as she rolls onto her stomach and begins to crawl. I move ahead of her.

“Something’s wrong with him,” she mumbles through tears. “He thinks I’m someone else.”

“We can worry about all that later. Let’s get to the main house and call the police.” I grip the edges of the entrance to the crawl space and hoist myself out. I squat down to help Deja, but then there’s a noise. From down the hall. A door opening and closing. Boots across the wood floors.

I look down at Deja and press my finger to my lips. If it were Daddy, he would have called out to me. I would have heard him hollering all the way from the house. The footsteps stop. I grab a wrench and slip into the bedroom, pulling the closet door as close to shut as I can without making a sound.

On a deep inhale, I take one step and glance down the hall to my right. Someone stands there, a massive figure looming in the shadows.

“Sariyah?” He takes a step forward into the light.

Fitz.

I drop the wrench. “Oh my God, Fitz. Call 9–1–1-!”

He whips his phone from his pocket as I dart back to the closet to get Deja. I have her halfway out before I realize I don’t hear Fitz talking. An icy chill spreads across my body.

“Fitz?” I call.

There’s no answer. A song starts up. Something old and jazzy. I look around for the source and spot a Bluetooth speaker on the shelf. Deja’s arms are wrapped tightly around her chest, her lower half still in the crawl space, fresh tears pouring from her eyes. I’ve heard this song before. She played it by accident in the library at school.

“Don’t cry, cry baby,” Fitz sings along.

“Jed, please. Let us go,” Deja begs as he appears in the doorway.

I stay squatted on the floor, looking back and forth between them, trying to piece this together. “His name isn’t Jed,” I whisper.

“I was hoping she’d arrive at that conclusion on her own.” He turns down the music and crouches to my level. “I sent her a whole playlist of Ella Fitzgerald’s classics. Wrote love letters inside of The Great Gatsby. Felt like a whole narcissist, but I figured she’d think it was cute once she got it.”

“Fitz, what are you—why?” I adjust myself, discreetly creeping closer to the toolbox.

“Why? For Crystelle, of course.”

Deja sobs behind me. “My name isn’t Crystelle!”

“I know that!” Fitz bellows, eyes bulging, nostrils flared.

I don’t have time for whatever twisted shit is going on here. I grab the toolbox and flail it, smacking him across the side of his head. Deja screams as a bit of blood spatters the wall and Fitz collapses backward onto the ground. His phone slides across the room, coming to a stop under the windowsill. I scramble for it.

A need begins to form in the back of my mind. Staticky and unstable.

“Ri, watch out!” Deja shouts, right as I reach the phone.

Fitz is on his feet, blood dripping down the side of his face, eyes fixed on me like an angry bull.

“Run!” I shout to Deja as I force the window open and hurl half my body out in one motion. A second later his arms are wrapped around my legs like a vise. I resist, doing all I can to grasp the slick siding on the outside of the house. He yanks. Hard. My chin clips the windowsill on the way back inside and all goes black.





CHAPTER 33





When I come to, I try to sit up but smack my head against something hard. My thoughts jump to the most horrifying, extreme possibility first. That I’m in a box, a coffin, buried alive. But Deja’s hand against my skin makes the image dissolve. Reality isn’t much better. I’m closed in this damn crawl space with her. She removes her hand from me and curls into a tight ball on her side, whimpering softly. Hopelessness in her eyes. Hopelessness she has earned after thinking I was about to save her, only to end up right back at square one. But I’m not hopeless. I’m pissed off. We won’t be rotting away down here without a fight. We won’t be a pair of forgotten missing girls.

I check my pockets for my phone, but it’s gone. “Fitz!” I bang on the crawl space door. “Fitz! Let us out of here.” I whack the door until I’m dripping with sweat and my wrist aches. I collapse onto my back to catch my breath.