Lost King Piper Lennox (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📖

I emerge into the living room, I notice two things.

First, it’s silent. For all the signs of a struggle, I can’t hear one, even when I hold my erratic, heavy breath to listen.

Second: the shelf in the living room is pitched at a bizarre angle, the industrial pipe frame ripped from its brackets drilled into the wall. Each wooden plank slants off its base like a slide.

Scattered at my feet are the skulls.

Birds. Rabbits. Coyotes. Animals I can’t even recognize, jawbones dislocated, their wire connections twisted and bent. The smallest skulls are crushed into dust.

The sight of them like this sickens me worse than the whole versions ever did. It doesn’t feel like a display anymore. It feels like a graveyard, robbed and ruined.

Suddenly, I hear them.

Callum is shouting. Theo’s answers, low and wary, float from somewhere behind me.

I turn around. My eyes focus on the glass wall and shift past my own reflection, past the blazing lights and crushed skulls, to the figures out on the deck.

Callum stands on one side of the pool; Theo, the other. His back is to me. His hands are up, moving slowly as he talks.

I approach the opened section of the door, so relieved they aren’t fighting, so relieved Theo is okay, that I don’t think. I just move.

The air’s gone still. There’s no moonlight, just a void stretched around us. The deck is bathed in the ethereal green glow from the pool lights.

I look at Callum. Drunk, drugged, blacked out in rage: I can’t tell what he is, but I know it’s something from the sideways stagger of his feet, and the heavy-lidded scowl on his face.

In his hand is a gun.

“Call!” Without thinking, I run closer.

Callum’s hand swings to me. The sight of the gun pointed in my direction makes me freeze, right beside Theo.

“Go inside, Ruby,” Theo says, voice low. He glances at me when I turn, but doesn’t move; his hands stay up near his shoulders. “Now.”

“No.” I’m panting so hard I’m dizzy, but the word comes out clear. “I’m not leaving you.”

At last, common sense strikes. I guide my shaking hand to my pocket and get out my cell.

“Don’t,” Theo grits out. “He’s already fired it once, in the house. He’ll do it again.”

“Better listen to him, Ru,” Callum calls. That sick grin plays on his face. In the green glow, he looks ghoulish. The gun angles back to Theo. “Tell her where to put it.”

I take this opportunity to really look at Theo for the first time. His shirt is torn at the collar. Already, his knuckles are bruised. His left eye is swollen, and there’s blood splattered underneath his nose. When he sways on his feet, it makes me wonder if he knows it’s there.

His eyes slide to me. “Drop it in the pool,” he says.

I look down past our feet, aligned on the coping. At the bottom of the pool, I see Theo’s phone, rippled and warped.

“Now,” Callum barks, taking aim again.

I drop the phone into the water. All three of us watch it sink.

“Okay,” I breathe, hands up and out like Theo’s, “no phones. No cops. See? This doesn’t have to turn into a—a thing.”

For his awkward footsteps and slurred speech, Callum’s arm holds shockingly steady. The gun stays aimed at Theo, perfectly on-point, while Call strides to our side of the pool.

When he reaches us, those glazed eyes flash. The smile strengthens.

“Well,” he says, sweeping his stare back to Theo, “maybe I want it to.”

39

I taste nothing but blood.

It’s all I smell, too. It drips down my nose into the back of my throat, competing with the bile my stomach’s churning out.

The fear didn’t hit when Callum jumped me in the foyer. Even the sight of the gun didn’t do it, because I was more shocked than scared.

But now that Ruby’s here…I’ve never been so afraid in my life.

Stop staring at the gun. It pisses him off. He prefers eye contact. That warning shot he fired at the living room ceiling made that real fucking clear.

I pry my eyes up to his.

“Let her go inside.” My head’s swimming, that coppery smell getting to me, but I refuse to show it. “Your problem’s with me, right? So let Ruby go, put the gun down, and we’ll settle this like men.”

“Oh, my problem’s with her, too. And I’m gonna settle this shit however I want.”

He steps close. The gun brushes my chest.

Behind me, I hear Ruby stifle a panicked cry. His finger is on the trigger, and I already know the thing’s loaded. It’s not just pissing him off we need to worry about. One slip or stumble, and it could fire.

“Don’t fucking move,” Callum growls, when a deck board pops; Ruby freezes and puts her hands back up. “You take one step away from me and he’s dead.”

“Call, why are you doing this?” Her voice breaks. “Look, what—whatever you’re feeling about me right now, just don’t—”

“If I were you, I’d shut my mouth before it digs me into even more trouble than it already has.”

Ruby steps up beside me again. I hold my breath and whisper at her not to move. She doesn’t listen.

“What do you want, then, Call?” Her hands lower to her sides. “Tell me. We’ll make it happen.”

“You know what I want?” He tilts his head, stare sliding between us. “I want what you didn’t give me in the beginning, babe. I want in.”

“In?” she asks, reeling with confusion.

Then, slowly, she looks at me.

“No,” she says, turning back to him. Her lip trembles from fear, but I see her chin angle higher.

His