Soulless (Book #2 of Hunted)

Crayons

The door suddenly slammed open nearly smacking me in the face. My eyes feel upon an extremely distraught looking Phoebe.

"Get in here!" she growled grabbing a handful of my shirt and yanking me into the house.

"Come in and join us, Keegan," I shouted back over my shoulder as Phoebe dragged me down the hallway by the front of my shirt. He came into the house, shut the front door and followed us.

Phoebe led me into the kitchen and stopped in front of the basement before letting me go.

"He has been driving me up a freaking wall ever since you left!" she exclaimed jabbing her thumb in the direction of the empty basement entrance.

"What's he been doing?" I asked immediately fearing the worst. She shook her head exasperatedly.

"Talking!" she cried. "Nonstop! To me, to the walls, to the air, I don't even know it's just blah blah blah." She made a mouth with her hand. "And most of the time he wasn't even saying anything! He was just talking constantly. I don't even think half of it was in English! And he hasn't even moved an inch from where he was when you left. The only thing that's been moving is his mouth!" She inhaled deeply and stuck her hands on her hips. I waited a moment just to make sure her little tangent was over.

"So how come I don't hear him now?" I asked slowly watching Keegan edge towards the basement out of the corner of my eye. Phoebe sighed.

"I finally got him to shut up about half an hour before you got here when he asked for paper and crayons." I made a confused face at her. Crayons? Had I heard her right?

"Yeah," she said nodding. "Not a pen, not a pencil, he asked for a box of crayons and he's been quiet ever since." I stared at her for a moment not really believing that she was serious and then I started down the basement steps.

Keegan was standing at the bottom of the steps with his arms crossed over his chest. He was staring at Zane intently with an inscrutable expression on his face. Zane was sitting Indian style on the cold stone floor hunched over the brand new sketch book that I bought for the art class I hoped to get next school year and scribbling furiously with a half-dead black Crayola crayon; the chains loosely binding him jingled madly with each twitch of his hand.

"Zane," I said quietly. His hand paused for about half a second and he readjusted his grip on the crayon before he continued with his frenzied scrawling; that was the only sign that he heard me.

"Do you have any charcoal pencils?" he suddenly asked without looking up from the sketchbook. I stared at him, trying to will him to look at me, trying to will him to be my Zane...to be better again.

"No, sorry," I replied. He sighed sadly and turned to a new page in the sketchbook.

"It's okay. I just thought they might look better if I used charcoal instead of a crayon. They barely look human cuz it's so waxy," he mumbled disappointedly. He drew a long, sweeping line across the paper and when he reached the edge, he kept going drawing black on the cement floor and after a moment the already short crayon snapped in half. He let out a quiet cry of shock and dropped the broken pieces of crayon as if they had burned him. He muttered something that didn't sound like English and closed the sketchbook only to open it back up to the first page.