The Billionaire's Obsession: Catching His Savior

The Greyhound bus hissed to a stop at the edge of Silver Creek, Ohio, and Jessie Compton stepped into the rain. She didn't bother pulling up her hood. The water was already seeping through the worn canvas of her sneakers, turning the cardboard in the soles to pulp.

She walked past the shuttered auto plant, past the liquor store with its neon sign flickering OPEN, past the Methodist church where Brenda made her sit in the back pew every Sunday. The trailer park was three blocks down, past the drainage ditch that flooded every spring.

Her trailer sat at the end of the row, number 47, the aluminum siding dented from where Ricky had backed his truck into it last summer. Two cardboard boxes sat in the mud in front of the door. The flaps were open. Rain had already turned the bottom layer of clothes into a sodden mass.

Jessie stopped. She looked at the boxes. She looked at the door.

The lock was new. Brass, shiny, utterly wrong. The old lock had been silver, scratched, the key sticky with peanut butter from Ricky's fingers.

She tried the handle anyway. It didn't turn.

"Open the door."

Her voice was flat. She didn't shout. She'd learned early that shouting gave them satisfaction.

The blinds in the window twitched. She saw Vince's face in the gap, the jowls, the cigarette dangling from his lip. He mouthed something at her, grinning. She read the words on his lips: "Get lost."

Jessie raised her fist and hammered on the metal door. The sound was huge in the rain, hollow and desperate. She hit it again, feeling the vibration shudder up her arm. Her palm stung. She kept hitting it.

The blinds opened wider. Brenda appeared beside Vince, her hair in curlers, her mouth moving fast. She held something up to the glass. Bills. Fives and tens, crumpled, the kind she kept in a coffee can under the sink.

Jessie stopped pounding. She understood. The bed. Her mother's bed, the only thing of value in that tin can of a home. They'd sold it. They'd sold it for grocery money and lottery tickets and whatever else kept them floating between welfare checks.

"Where's the doll."

It wasn't a question. Jessie spoke through the glass, her breath fogging the surface. She knew they could hear her. The trailer was too small for secrets.

Ricky squeezed between them, seventeen years old and soft in the middle from Brenda's casseroles. He reached into his pocket-his front pocket, his jeans too tight, the gesture obscene-and pulled out the ceramic doll. Her mother's doll. The one with the painted blue eyes and the real lace collar that had survived three foster homes and the fire that took the Comptons' house.

Ricky held it by the head. He waggled it at her, his tongue poking through the gap where he'd lost a tooth to Vince's fist.

Jessie's vision narrowed. She felt the heat start in her chest, the familiar warning sign. Her fingers curled into fists. She took one step forward and drove her knuckles into the window glass. The frame shook. The glass held, but she saw Vince flinch. She saw Brenda's hand fly to her throat.

"Call the cops," Vince yelled, his voice muffled but clear enough. "You hear me? I call the cops, they see your record, you're gone. Juvenile detention till you're twenty-one."

Brenda reached for the phone on the wall. The rotary phone, beige, the cord tangled. She held the receiver like a weapon, her finger hovering over the 9.

Jessie felt her skin start to steam. She looked down at her hands. The rain was hitting her forearms and evaporating immediately, leaving trails of white mist. Her heart was hammering, not from anger-from chemistry. From the thing in her blood that she didn't understand, only feared.

She couldn't be here when the police came. She couldn't be anywhere near a hospital. The last time, when she was fourteen and the fever hit 108, they'd kept her for three days. Tests. Needles. Questions she couldn't answer.

She stepped back from the window. She looked at Vince, at Brenda, at Ricky with the doll still dangling from his fingers. She memorized their faces. Not for revenge. For inventory. For the day when she could afford to care.

Then she turned and walked away.

The rain hit her shoulders and turned to steam. She walked past the boxes in the mud, past the clothes she'd collected from thrift stores and church donations, past the life she'd tried to build in this rusted coffin of a town. She didn't look back.

At the corner, she ducked behind the abandoned gas station. Her hands were shaking now, the spasms starting in her fingers. Her vision blurred at the edges, the world tilting. Her legs buckled. She caught herself on the brick wall, feeling the rough surface scrape her palm.

Jessie slid down the wall until she was sitting in the wet gravel. She reached into her bra-her only safe place-and pulled out the metal cylinder. No label. No markings. Just black steel, cold against her burning skin.

She twisted the cap. One pill left. Dark red, almost black, the size of her thumbnail. She didn't have water. She didn't need it. She'd learned to swallow dry.

The pill caught in her throat. She forced it down with a swallow that felt like swallowing glass. It burned all the way to her stomach.

Then the real burning started.

Jessie arched her back, her heels digging into the gravel. Her vision went red at the edges, then black, then red again. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears, too fast, too loud, a drum solo that wouldn't end. Her skin felt like paper held over a flame.

She needed cold. She needed it now.

She crawled to her feet, using the wall to pull herself up. Behind the gas station, a chain-link fence separated the commercial district from the woods. The Black Pines. Fifty acres of state forest that nobody visited because the trails were overgrown and the cell service was dead.

Jessie climbed the fence. Her fingers left smears of condensation on the metal. She dropped to the other side and stumbled into the trees.

Branches whipped her face. She didn't feel them. She felt only the fire in her veins, the pressure building behind her eyes, the certainty that if she didn't find cold, she would ignite.

She found a trunk, ancient, the bark thick with moss. She dug her fingers into it and felt the wood char under her touch. Five black lines, smoking. She held on. She breathed.

Then she heard it.

Metal on metal. A soft clink, rhythmic. And breathing. Heavy, labored, wrong.

Jessie turned her head. Through the trees, through the rain, she saw something pale in the darkness. Something large. Something still.

She let go of the tree and moved toward it, one hand pressed to her chest, feeling her heart try to escape her ribs. She moved like a wounded animal, all instinct, no thought.

The pale thing was a man.