The Taker Read Free Page A

for the scalpel, her slender hand closing around it. She points it at him, wild eyed, her nostrils pink and flaring.
    “Take it easy,” Luke says, stepping backward off the stool, out of her arm’s reach. “There’s a deputy just down the hall. If I call for him, it’s over, you know? You can’t get both of us with that little knife. So why don’t you put down the scalpel—”
    “Don’t call him,” she says, but her arm is still outstretched. “I need you to listen to me.”
    “I’m listening.” The gurney is between Luke and the door. She can cut her other hand free in the time it takes him to make it across the room.
    “I need your help. I can’t let him arrest me. You have to help me escape.”
    “Escape?” Suddenly, Luke isn’t worried that the young woman with the scalpel will hurt him. He’s feeling embarrassed for having let his guard down, allowing her to get the drop on him. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not going to help you escape.”
    “Listen to me—”
    “You killed someone tonight. You said so yourself.”
    “It wasn’t murder. He wanted to die, I told you that.”
    “And he came here to die because he grew up here, too?”
    “Yes,” she says, a little relieved.
    “Then tell me who he is. Maybe I know him …”
    She shakes her head. “I told you—you don’t know us. Nobody here knows us.”
    “You don’t know that for sure. Maybe some of your relatives …” Luke’s obstinacy comes out when he gets angry.
    “My family hasn’t lived in St. Andrews for a long, long time.” She sounds tired. Then she snaps, “You think you know, do you? Okay—my name is McIlvrae. Do you know that name? And the man in the woods? His name is St. Andrew.”
    “St. Andrew, like the town?” Luke asks.
    “Exactly, like the town,” she replies almost smugly.
    Luke feels funny bubbles percolating behind his eyes. Not recognition, exactly … where has he seen that name, McIlvrae? He knows he has seen it or heard it somewhere, but that knowledge is just out of reach.
    “There hasn’t been a St. Andrew in this town for, oh, at least a hundred years,” Luke says, matter-of-fact, stung at being upbraided by a girlpretending to have been born here, lying about a meaningless fact that won’t do her a bit of good. “Since the Civil War. Or so I’ve been told.”
    She jabs the scalpel at him to get his attention. “Look—it’s not like I’m dangerous. If you help me get away, I’m not going to hurt anyone else.” She speaks to him as though he’s the one being unreasonable. “Let me show you something.”
    Then, with no warning, she points the scalpel at herself and cuts into her chest. A long, broad line that catches her left breast and runs all the way to the rib area under her right breast. Luke is frozen in place for a moment as the line blooms red across her white skin. Blood oozes from the cut, pulpy red tissue starting to peep from the opening.
    “Oh my god!” he says. What the hell is wrong with this girl—is she crazy? Does she have some kind of death wish? He snaps out of his baffled inertia and starts toward the gurney.
    “Stay back!” she says, jabbing the scalpel at him again. “Just watch. Look.”
    She lifts her chest, arms outstretched, as though to give him a better view, but Luke can see fine, only he can’t believe what he is seeing. The two sides of the cut are creeping toward each other like the tendrils of a plant, rejoining, knitting together. The cut has stopped bleeding and is starting to heal. Through it, the girl’s breathing is rough but she betrays no sign of pain.
    Luke can’t be sure his feet are on the floor. He is watching the impossible—the impossible! What is he supposed to think? Has he gone crazy, or is he dreaming, asleep on the couch in the doctors’ lounge? Whatever he’s seen, his mind refuses to accept it and starts to shut down.
    “What the hell—,” he says, barely a whisper. Now he is breathing again, his chest heaving up