Read What We Saw at Night for Free Online

don’t want to leave you alone,” she whispered.
    I could barely hear her over my thumping heart. What the hell were we doing?
    “I know you think that I don’t give a damn if I live or die,” she added. “And maybe I don’t. But I would never, not ever, willingly hurt you.” She hugged me briefly. “So you go ahead, Bear.”
    The moon burst from behind a mound of cloud and I didn’t give myself time to think. It’s just a jump , I said to myself. Then I was in the air, my back arched, my body poised to drop and barrel-roll. As I did, I expelled the air from my lungs.
    My eyes bulged as Juliet landed, softly as a gull, several feet past me.
    Parkour is not competitive. I would have been jealous otherwise. On the other hand, Juliet had saved me and bested me. I was jealous.
    “Down,” she said.
    We lined up at the edge. I could feel my heart pounding again. We would need to drop and hang from the edge ofthe roof and then swing, building up enough momentum to let go with one arm and grab the rail of the balcony below, about five feet to the right. After that, we’d grab the railing with our other hand and “muscle up” onto the balcony before the next drop—to another balcony, about five feet to the left.
    The balcony of the penthouse apartment was long, with room to spare for the three of us.
    Rob swung down first. But he shook his head in the shadows.
    “It’s harder than it looks,” he hissed. “I can give you a hand.” Obviously, Juliet wouldn’t allow that. Her biceps were like little apples under her jersey. She copied his exact moves and scrambled up the railing onto the balcony beside him. When my turn came, I gave myself a boost by taking a few steps and swinging myself two-handed. I’d planned to grab the railing of the balcony with my free hand and pull up, but I ended up hurtling myself over the rail and into my friends’ arms.
    At that moment, the sky above the lake split open.
    Two crippled fingers of lightning reached down for the black water. Only a few seconds passed before a deafening thunderclap. The air sizzled with the smell of sulfur. I winced. That stink is probably why the ancients believed lightning and thunder were harbingers of all things demonic. Why not? My idea of Hell could easily include being exposed on a balcony as a Lake Superior tsunami kicks in.
    We crouched together.
    “Let’s see if there’s a fire escape,” Rob said. “And get the hell out of here.”
    We looked back toward the town. Another blast of lightning blotted out what few lights there were above OxfordStreet. To my shock, I realized I was high enough up to spot my house on Trinity. If the thunder woke my mother, she would be up roaming and accelerating into hysterics after realizing I wasn’t there.
    I leaned over the balcony, looking for a way down that didn’t involve becoming a human lightning rod, when the lights in the penthouse came on.
    Rob pulled me back. Juliet scrambled into the shadows beside us.
    All I could see was white. One massive room: white walls, white carpeting, white woodwork. Except … right in the middle of the floor, next to the sliding doors, a young woman with dark hair—probably not much older than we were—was on her back. She wore only a bra. A man with his back turned to us was leaning over her. He seemed to be kissing her, then slapping her, then trying to pull her up.
    Rob swore, softly, under his breath.
    We stared for an instance in horrified silence as the man lowered his face to hers. He had short-cropped dark hair, darker than Rob’s, with a wide white streak of platinum blond down the back in what appeared to be a dyed slash of a lightning bolt.
    Rob pointed to the fire escape: a sleek ladder that descended straight from the far side of the balcony. The glass doors were floor to ceiling but he pointed and guided me toward it. We dropped to the balcony floor and crawled past a potted pine to get to the edge of it. I was already ten steps down when I heard