Struck by Jennifer Bosworth

prices.”
    My chest felt tight. “I can pay a little extra.” I shoved the remaining seventeen dollars at him, but he kept on shaking his head.
    “You know how many desperate people there are in this city? People who need what only I can provide, and will do whatever it takes to get it? I’m afraid prices have doubled, dearest. Two hundred per bottle.”
    The walls of the tent seemed to be collapsing around me. “I … I can’t pay that much. You said I was one of your favorite customers. Can’t you cut me a deal this time or something?”
    “Spoken like a true addict,” he said, his eyes laughing and cruel. He was enjoying this.
    “I’m not an—”
    “You know what I tell addicts like you, the ones who come to me and turn out their pockets and it’s still not enough, and they ask me, ‘Isn’t there anything I can do?’ I tell them … yes. Yes, there is.”
    The Dealer’s eyes lowered from my face and scanned down my body. My hand inched toward the pepper spray in my pocket, but froze when Rosemary snarled a warning.
    “She likes you,” the Dealer said. He reached out and curled a hand behind my neck. His pupils were enormous black marbles. “I like you.”
    Fear gripped my heart until I thought it would burst. “Never mind,” I said. “I don’t need the pills. I’ll … I’ll just go.”
    The Dealer’s smile dropped off his face. “No,” he said. “I’m going to give you what you came for. What you really need.”
    My hand raced for the pepper spray and lost.
    I didn’t have time to scream. It wouldn’t have done any good even if I had. This was Tentville. The residents were used to screams.
    The Dealer lunged on top of me, pressing me into a pile of pillows until I thought I would disappear, that we would both sink below the surface of them, sucked under like we were in water.
    I struggled, fought, scratched, kicked, snarled, swore, but the Dealer had nearly fifty pounds on me, and whatever drug was pumping through his system had made him strong. I tried to scream, but he clamped a hand over my mouth. I bit down hard and tasted blood and tried to spit, but I couldn’t because his hand was still on my mouth, and his other hand was pulling at my shirt and working at the zipper of my pants.
    The taste of blood in my mouth became the taste of copper wires humming out the flavor of electricity.
    The heat inside me came crackling to life, and for once I didn’t try to calm it. I let it rage.
    “What’s this?” the Dealer said, sounding mystified. I felt his hand on my bare stomach. So he’d seen the lightning scars. I should have cared, but I didn’t, because the fire in me had taken over and was traveling through my arms, and it was hard to care about anything when you were about to explode.
    “You got some kind of disease?” the Dealer said, suddenly repulsed.
    “Yeah,” I said, my voice faint to my own ears. “You want some?”
    He sat up, his face twisted with fury. “You weren’t gonna tell me, you little whore?”
    He hauled back to hit me. Before the blow could land, there was a sound like a baseball bat hitting a grapefruit, and the Dealer grunted, and his eyes bulged. Droplets of blood flew like splattered paint, and he fell flat on top of me. Smothering me. I shoved at his limp body, but he was dead weight and I could barely budge him.
    And then someone grabbed the Dealer and rolled him off me. It was so dark I couldn’t make out who stood over me. An image flashed behind my eyes. There was something familiar about the silhouette, but I couldn’t place it. The guy looming over me had something clutched in his hand, but in the memory trying to climb to the surface of my mind, there had been something else in his hand. Something shiny and—
    “Mia,” the silhouette panted. “Are you all right?”
    “Jeremy?” My mind went blank with surprise, and the recollection I’d been struggling to capture said goodbye.
    “Are you all right?” he demanded.
    “Yeah. Yeah,