You have no idea, kid. I found my voice. “Pretty possible. Yeah.” It took an effort to step away from him. I barked my shin on a box and winced a little. “I’ll go get cleaned up. Spaghetti sounds good.”
“Ragu.” He shrugged. “It was all that was around. You want me to reheat some?”
I know it was all that was around; Dad loved Ragu sauce. With tons of garlic. My heart gave a squeezing twist. “Sure. Thanks.” My stomach grumbled a little, despite being closed up tighter than a bank after hours.
His face eased. He let go of me and tried a tentative smile. “No problem. I was worried about you.”
You know what? So was I. I’m already as good as dead. There’s no way I can fight a sucker. He’s just playing with me. There it was, the stark truth. “Yeah. Me too.” I made it down the hall and up the stairs, stripped out of my wet clothes—my back twingeing every so often, reminding me that I’d wrenched it again—and crawled into some sweats and a T-shirt. The side of my head, where I’d clipped it on the fountain, stung softly. My ribs ached, and I had to wriggle around in the bed gingerly until I found a position that didn’t hurt. I lay still, trying to make the no-pain last as long as possible, hearing Graves humming a little, off-key, downstairs. I stayed awake only long enough to pull the blankets a little higher up and feel a moment’s worth of regret at not eating when he was going to all the trouble.
Then I blinked out.
I don’t often dream of my mother.
When I do, it’s always the same. She is leaning over my crib, her face bigger than the moon and more beautiful than sunlight, or maybe it’s just that way because I’m so young. Her hair tumbles down in glossy ringlets, smelling of her special shampoo, and the silver locket at her throat glimmers.
But there is a shadow in her pretty dark eyes; it matches the darkness over the left half of her face. It’s like the shadow of rain seen through a window, light broken in rivulets.
“Dru,” she says, softly but urgently. “Get up.”
I rub my eyes and yawn. “Mommy?” My voice is muffled. Sometimes it’s the voice of a two-year-old, sometimes it’s older. But always, it’s wondering and quiet, sleepy.
“Come on, Dru.” She puts her hands down and picks me up with a slight oof! as if she can’t believe how much I’ve grown. I’m a big girl now, and I don’t need her to carry me, but I’m so tired I don’t protest. I cuddle into her warmth and feel the hummingbird beat of her heart. “I love you, baby,” she whispers into my hair. She smells of fresh cookies and warm perfume, and it is here the dream starts to fray. Because I hear something like footsteps, or a pulse. It is quiet at first, but it gets louder and more rapid with each beat. “I love you so much.”
“Mommy . . .” I put my head on her shoulder. I know I am heavy, but she is carrying me, and when she sets me down to open a door, I protest only a little.
It is the closet downstairs. Just how I know it’s downstairs I’m not sure. There is something in the floor she pulls up, and some of my stuffed animals have been jammed into the square hole, along with blankets and a pillow from her and Daddy’s bed. She scoops me up again and settles me in the hole, and I begin to feel a faint alarm. “Mommy?”
“We’re going to play the game, Dru. You hide here and wait for Daddy to come home from work.”
This is all wrong. Sometimes I hide in the closet to scare Daddy, but never in the middle of the night. And never in a hole in the floor—a hole I didn’t even know was there. “I don’t wanna,” I say, and try to get up.
“Dru.” She grabs my arm, and it hurts for a second before her grip gentles. “It’s important, baby. This is a special game. Hide in the closet, and when Daddy comes home he’ll find you. Lie down now. Be a good girl.”
I protest, I whine a little. “I don’t wanna.” But I am a good girl. I snuggle down into the hole, because it’s dark and warm and I’m tired, and the shadow on Mommy’s face gets deeper. Only her eyes glitter, glowing summer blue instead of their usual soft laughing brown. She covers me up with a blanket and smiles at me until I close my eyes. Sleep isn’t far behind, but as I go down I hear something and I understand she’s fitted the cover over the hole, and I am in the dark. But it smells like her, and I am so tired.
I hear, very faint and far away, the closet door close, and a scratching. And just before the dream ends, I hear a long, low, chilling laugh, like someone trying to speak with a mouthful of razor blades, and I know my mother is somewhere close, and she is desperate, and something very bad is about to happen.
CHAPTER 19
School started right up again the day after, and the day after that Graves talked me into going. I think he didn’t know what else to do, and I gave in after only a token shouting match.
What the hell, right? I was already dead. All I had to do was wait for the blue-eyed boy to find me again. I mean, Jesus, I was just sixteen, right? Dad’s truck was back in the driveway, but if I blew town I’d just die on some highway, probably at night, seeing something loom in the rearview mirror, or I’d get run off the road and ripped up in a ditch somewhere.
It was only a matter of time.
So, why not? Why not just do what he said?
At least it got me out of the house, where I was only prowling the rooms, getting more and more jumpy, looking at the stain on the living-room carpet, snarling at Graves when he tried to get me to eat. I’d managed to get the engine-block heater on the truck plugged in so it wouldn’t freeze, even though the garage door was still broken and useless. That was about all I could do other than roam through the house like a madwoman, staring at everyday objects as if I’d never see them again.
I spent the nights crouched in the living room with the blinds up, my back against the wall, looking out at the wasteland of snow that was the front yard and jerking myself into wakefulness every time I dozed off. After the first night I figured I’d better put the gun down, and when Graves nagged me about going to school—probably because he thought I was getting a little weird—I told him I would to shut him up.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was sharing a house with someone marked by a sucker. I mean, why rain on his parade? I tried to get him to go back to the mall, somewhere, anywhere away from me. It wasn’t safe around me, but he stubbornly refused, and what could I do? Beat him up? I could, but why expend the effort?
I was so tired. So, so deathly tired. At least during the safe hours of sunlight at school I was surrounded by other people, and I was fairly sure I could sleep.
Bletchley, however, had other ideas. “Are you with us, Miss Anderson?”
I stared at the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. It was a valid question. Was I with them? I didn’t think I’d ever been with them. Not the normal people, at least. Maybe there were one or two of them who had what Gran called “the touch.” Maybe there were even a few of them who’d seen something weird or inexplicable, but they’d probably forgotten it as soon as they—
“Miss Anderson?” Bletchley was delighted. Her egglike eyes swam behind her spectacles, and she picked at the bottom of her sweater—the blue one with knitted roses, this time.
I just kept seeing Dad’s face, half-chewed, the bony twitching of his fingertips. Blood on snow, and feet in heavy boots resting lightly on the unmarred top crust. The streak-headed werwulf snarling, its top lip lifting. And the hiss of the burning dog as it landed in the fountain, sulfur and stink and—
“No,” I said finally. “I don’t think I’m with you, Bletch.”
In front of me, Graves slid down in his seat as if making himself smaller. I almost thought I heard him whisper, shit.
I heartily agreed. But I was too tired to deal with Bletch’s crap. My eyes were full of sand and my entire body hurt.
A ripple went through the classroom. Bletchley stiffened and opened her mouth, but I was awake now. A nice nap ruined, not like first and second period, where I’d just put my head down on the desk and tuned the entire world out.
“As a matter
of fact,” I continued flatly, “I was just wondering why I was sitting here listening to you, when you obviously don’t like anyone under twenty-one very much. It’s like you only think real life starts when you can legally buy a beer or something. But then I realized another thing. You’re scared of us.”
“Miss Anderson—” Bletch began, but the words just kept spilling out. Despite the thin little voice in my head telling me that I shouldn’t be saying the things I was thinking. Even if they were true.
Adults probably listen to that voice a lot. Did Dad ever stop telling me what he was thinking? What hadn’t he told me?
I opened my mouth and had no idea what would come out next. “You probably thought teaching would be easy. A whole classful of helpless little snots for you to bully.” I grabbed for my bag, made it to my feet, and almost knocked the whole desk over. Barked my hip a good one, and it added to the garden of bruises and scrapes all over my body. Pretty soon the sucker-boy would find me and I wouldn’t feel anything ever again. “More every year, and they’re always so easy to push around. Because you’ve got the power, right?”
“Sit down!” she hissed. Bright spots stood out on her withered cheeks, just as if someone had stamped her with one of those ink things they pop on your hand at clubs to prove you’ve paid the door fee.
I wasn’t going to sit down. She probably didn’t think I would, either, but maybe she figured it was worth a try.
“You’ve got all the power, and nobody would listen to us anyway. Because we’re just kids. Who cares about us?” I ducked through my bag strap. It was too heavy, but that was because of what was in it. Graves made a restless movement, his hair and coat rustling.
Bletch inhaled and opened her mouth again to tell me to sit down or shut up. If I gave a damn, it might have even stopped me—that’s what they count on, the hard teachers. They count on the weight of authority to get to you before a protest can even get halfway out of your mouth.
Fury ignited behind my breastbone, a hot glow like coals blooming into something sharp and dangerous. It was the same old crap—someone thinking they can push you around because you’re young, because you’re helpless. You had to just sit there and take it because you were under a certain number, because you weren’t a real person yet; you could be picked up and dropped like a toy, left behind or thrown away—
“I don’t think so,” I continued, right over the top of her. “I think every goddamn kid you ever bullied is going to haunt you one day. And I hope you choke on it!” I didn’t realize I was yelling until I had to fill my lungs with a gasping sound that would have been funny if not for what happened next.
Bletch’s eyes bugged out of her head. She buckled, grabbing at her desk with one claw, the other clutching vainly at her throat, and made a hoarse, inhuman cawing noise.
The first one to start screaming was a pretty little brunette in the front row. I thought her name was Heather; she was wearing, of all things, a cheerleader’s uniform. Why she bothered with umpteen feet of snow on the ground was beyond me. But right now her face was distorted with shock, and she let out a shriek that might have done a train justice. The sound made a few kids jump, and another one—a brunet boy with a thick neck and a jock’s varsity jacket—let out a high-pitched squeal that harmonized oddly.
I finished gasping for air and stared at the teacher, who folded down like a piece of wet laundry let loose from the line. She thudded to her knees, and her face turned a weird plummy color. The bugging of her eyes began to seem natural and inevitable, but a faint alarm sounded in the back of my head. Other kids were screaming now too.
My gaze snapped away to the whiteboard. It was chattering madly against the wall, held on only by brackets. The instant I looked at it, there was a hollow cracking sound, and it fell, slamming onto the floor and actually breaking, a gigantic rip zigzagging horizontally across it.
A sensation like steam escaping through a valve slid through me, a sense of exquisite release.
Bletchley gasped and fell on her side, but regular color started to return to her face. She was breathing now. Someone retched in the back row, and my head snapped aside as if I’d been slapped, my cheek stinging. The air was thick with crawling electricity, suddenly hot as summer and humid like a thunderstorm was approaching.
Graves sat utterly still in the middle of kids who were getting up out of their chairs or screaming. His eyes were green flame, and his earring winked, a single silver star. His mouth was slightly open, as if he’d just had a hell of a good idea and was giving it such deep consideration the rest of his face had declared a vacation.
I turned around, my legs shaking like I’d just finished a hard five-mile run, and made it to the door. A new noise cut through the bedlam—the chimes for class ending, ringing in the middle of the hour. Now that was weird.
I let out a jagged sound that might have been a laugh, and fled.
I was four blocks away and still moving at a pretty good clip when his hand tangled in my coat, getting a good handful of my hair too, and he yanked me backward. I’d’ve gone down in a heap if he hadn’t shoved me upright, but as it was I overcorrected and we both fell over into a small mountain of dirty scudge-snow shoved aside from the street. I wasn’t wearing my gloves or a scarf. Snow burned my hands as I tried to struggle to my feet. My bag got tangled up, and Graves cussed me a blue streak, finishing up with, “—the hell did you do that for?”
“Boy,” he continued, bouncing up off the frozen-solid drift like he was one of those weighted-at-the-bottom dolls, “you sure know how to throw a party. I’ve been bitten, beat up, tied to a bed, James Bonded out, and now you finish off by choking a goddamn teacher!”
I didn’t try to say I hadn’t been touching her. There was no point. I’d been ill-wishing her—hexing, Gran called it, and to those with the touch it wasn’t small potatoes. I was pretty good at untangling hexes and curses, but not so good at throwing them at people, mostly because Gran wouldn’t hear of it. Cain’t hex, cain’t heal, she would always mutter, especially when the men from the county were out assessing property tax. But hexin’s a strong medicine, Dru. You mind me now.
To Gran, “strong medicine” could be good or bad, just like the laxatives she was forever talking about. Good for makin’ the mail move smooth, but too much and you shit yer brains out. Mind me now, Dru.
I’d once set out to ask her how exactly such an operation as the moving of the brain out through the digestive system was accomplished, but I’d lost my nerve.
Graves reached down, grabbed the front of my coat, and yanked hard enough to rip fabric, succeeding in hauling me to my feet again. “You’d better tell me what’s going on. Or I swear to God, I’ll—” He peered down at me. “Jesus Christ. You’re leaking.”
If by “leaking” he meant “sobbing like a girl,” I guess so. I wiped at my nose with my sleeve, snorted out a bray of a laugh, and went back to sobbing. Tears slicked my face, and I shoved him away. “Fuck off! I don’t need you complicating things! I’m dead, goddammit! Don’t you get it? I’m fucking dead!”
He shook dirty snow out of his hair. “You’re not dead. You’re too goddamn annoying to be dead. Now come on. They called 911 for Bletch—I don’t think you want to be here when that starts happening.”
Jesus, why won’t you just leave me alone? I was about to yell again, but sirens started in the distance. It was like a slap of cold water across the face, and I realized I was indeed crying completely and messily, and I was covered in dirty snow, I was pretty sure my socks didn’t match, I was a song of different aches and pains, and I hadn’t washed my hair in two days. I felt greasy and cruddy, my back felt like it was on fire, and the heavy weight in my bag was definitely not my smartest move.
I was being utterly idiotic. The realization woke me up out of whatever stupor I’d been wandering in for days now.
I hitched in a shuddering breath, trying to get some kind of calm back, failed miserably, and didn’t protest when Graves grabbed my arm and started off
down the sidewalk.
“Why can’t I have a normal girlfriend?” he asked the air over his head. “I finally meet someone I like and she turns out to be crazy. Oh, well.”
“Girlfriend?” I half-choked, almost spraying snot out of my nose. Good one, Dru. You didn’t brush your teeth today, either. Sloppy, very sloppy. I was going to break out in a huge way after all this. It was going to be Zit City on the Anderson face. But right now my cheeks were so flaming hot it didn’t matter.
He gave me a sideways glance, and I really saw the guy he was going to be in a few years lurking under his baby face and the wild hair. His cheekbones were going to come out and he was going to be one of those pretty half-Asians. He already had good skin, even if it was reddened by the cold. “Well, jeez, you know.”
Was he blushing? So was I, if the lava flow covering my face and spilling down my throat was any indication. He kept glancing at me, and I couldn’t look away.
For Christ’s sake. The lunacy just would not end.
I wiped at my nose again, wished for a Kleenex. “I don’t—” I began. I don’t date. I don’t have time, even if you are one of the better kids I’ve met. And—
He shrugged, his cheeks going a deeper tomato red that had nothing to do with the snow. The flush spread down his neck, even. We were about even in that department. “It was a joke, Dru. God. Just relax, will you? Come on.” He kept dragging me. Admittedly, I didn’t put up much of a fight. But still . . . “A whole day at school ruined. You’re gonna wreck my GPA.”
“I thought you were going to take your GED anyway.” My lips were numb. My hands were too; I stuffed them in my coat pockets. The sirens whooped and brayed, getting closer.
“I want to get into a college so I don’t have to be poor. GPA still matters,” he informed me in the tone reserved for gormless idiots. “But hey, I’ve been good all year. Might as well take a couple days off. Now, you wanna tell me what’s going on? I’ve been thinking you probably don’t want some stupid kid messing up whatever you’ve got going, but I told you, I’m in it now. I might as well know what I’m facing, right?”