Blue Willow Read Free Page A

her arm. She looked over her shoulder at the dais on the bridge. Stephen saw her and waved from the safety of Richard’s arms. Richard was staring straight ahead, as if lost in thought. “Stay here,” Artemas told Lily, swinging her to face him. “I’ll get them down. I swear it.”
    “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m not one of your people.”
    The floor trembled again, worse this time. Adrenaline shot through Artemas. People around them staggered. Cries of alarm came from some. Lily jerked her arm free and plowed toward the bridge, cupping both hands around her mouth and yelling up, “Get off the—”
    Her voice was lost in the deafening groan of concrete and steel tearing apart. The marble floor shuddered, and the hotel gave a guttural roar, as if in pain. Julia Colebrook shoved the microphone out of her way and latched both hands onto the balcony in front of it. Her eyes were vivid with shock.
    Lily’s voice died in her throat. Her attention was riveted on Richard and Stephen. Richard stumbled as the bridge swayed, Stephen’s expression was a frozen mask of terror, stabbing her, making her reach out to him uselessly. Richard pulled their son’s head into the crook of one shoulder and covered it with a hand. Richard’s face was brutal with concentration as he tried to keep his balance. People were shrieking and shoving at each other on the bridge and the balcony, which began to sag on both sides. Frank tumbled to his knees, his hands flailing for a hold.
    “Richard! Stephen!” She screamed their names repeatedly as she staggered up the first few steps of the staircase, falling, losing one of her shoes, being knocked back by people rushing down from the bridge. Fierce hands lifted her. Artemas.
    He circled her waist with one arm, lifted her half off her feet, and dragged her back to the lobby floor. “We’ll never get up there in time! Come on!” He wound a hand in the back of her dress and pulled her, staggering, after him. They reached the floor in front of the bridge’s collapsing center. “Julia, jump,” Artemas yelled.
    Lily held her arms up. “Richard! Throw Stephen to me! Throw him!”
    But the bridge folded in the center like an overburdened paper plate, piling people together in a terrible heap of struggling bodies. A woman in a glittering silver gown tumbled over the balustrade and plunged to the lobby floor dozens of feet below, landing with a sickening thud. Richard and Stephen were being pressed against the sinking balustrade along the bridge’s front, the crowd mashing them horribly. Stephen’s small arms tightened around his father’s neck, and he screamed for Lily.
    “Throw him!” she cried, trying to get under the bridge’s railing, stopped only by Artemas’s grip on her dress. “Julia!” he called again, his deep voice resonating with authority and frustration.
    The bridge collapsed, ripping down the balconies of the floor above it, pulling them inward on top of itself, swallowing the crowd trapped on its surface.
    Artemas jerked Lily backward as chunks of marble fell in front of them. She sprawled with him on the hard floor, her hands winding into his shirt. Together they twisted, staring back at the bridge.
    He saw his sister try to cover her head as she was enveloped in jagged concrete, marble, and steel. He heard Lily’s blood-freezing scream of horror and felt her hands convulse into fists against his chest, as Richard and Stephen disappeared into the same hell.
•     •     •
    The rattle of jackhammers. The growl of a crane’s engine. Shouts. Sirens. Dust. Blood. Paramedics rushed from the dead to the injured. A dozen bodies lay in a corner of the lobby, covered in blankets. Frank Stockman’s body was among them.
    Julia’s body lay in one of her sibling’s arms.
    Artemas stood over them, drained of hope, filthy, his fingers raw and bleeding from digging into the jagged debris. She was strange, a horrible and pitiful remnant of herself. A trickle of