The Killing Jar

  Blake, who made me feel good about myself, made me feel like I deserved to feel good.

  He stretched his fingers on the steering wheel, like a racecar driver about to jam the pedal to the floor. “Any particular destination in mind?”

  “No destination. Let’s just keep moving forward.” I leaned back in my seat and let my head loll toward Blake. The glow of the dashboard gauges created a rim light that traced his profile. “This is probably going to sound dramatic, but everything seems different now.”

  “Maybe it is.” His smile faded and he looked at me for a moment, nodding seriously.

  Heat crept into my cheeks and gathered in my stomach. My will to resist Blake was weakening, and I wasn’t sure I cared anymore.

  Ahead, I saw the turnoff to the long drive that cut through several hundred yards of forest before reaching my house. An unfamiliar brown Bronco was parked on the side of the road next to our mailbox.

  “Whose truck is this?” Blake asked, slowing into a turn and then pulling up next to the SUV.

  Both of us peered into the cab, but saw no one inside.

  I shrugged. “Maybe the driver broke down and didn’t have a cell phone to call a tow truck.”

  “Who doesn’t have a cell phone?” Blake asked. He’d moved to the midsize Oregon town of Rushing from a pristine Connecticut suburb, where I imagined no one ever abandoned a broken-down SUV next to his mailbox, or if they did it would be promptly hauled away.

  Blake accelerated slowly and continued down the gravel driveway to my house.

  “What happened to driving all night?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.

  Blake glanced over at me. “You were serious about that?”

  “Nah,” I lied, and forced a laugh. “You know me. Spontaneity is my mortal enemy. Pull over here, okay? I don’t want my mom to hear your car and wake up.” I was supposed to be home by midnight. It was almost two.

  Frowning, Blake slowed and steered onto the shoulder, under a canopy of trees. He was probably counting the number of points he’d lose with my mom for keeping me out past curfew, respectable young man that he was.

  “Relax,” I told him. “I’ll sneak in through the basement window so she won’t hear the front door. I have a whole system.”

  “You do this often?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this because my order has a code and everything, but I’m a vampire slayer, which involves a lot of late-night outings.”

  I was relieved when he chuckled and let the subject drop. I didn’t want to tell him what I really did at night when I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to admit how often I snuck out and went to the place where I’d buried Clint Eastwood and her kittens. I brought my guitar, sat with my back against a nearby tree, and I played to the pile of smooth stones and sang so softly I was almost silent. I did it because sometimes it was too much temptation to be in a house at night with two helpless, sleeping people—two people who could provide the same thing Jason Dunn had provided, a way to be free from myself for a little while.

  So I played music instead, because it was the only thing that kept me grounded. Kept me under control.

  “You went away,” Blake said.

  I blinked and focused on him, realizing I’d been staring out the window in silence for a long moment. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  He smiled in that shy way he had, that made me feel like I was the bold one. “I’m going to remember tonight for the rest of my life,” he said, and then laughed and lowered his eyes. “Now that sounds dramatic.”

  “Then I guess I like dramatic.” I found myself leaning toward Blake across the console. I heard the knocking of my own heartbeat. Or maybe it was Blake’s I was hearing. Or both, beating perfectly in sync.

  He looked at me, his eyes the color of newly minted pennies. The cedar and honey smell of his cologne in my lungs made me feel off-kilter, half-dreaming, like I’d inhaled some kind of intoxicating hallucinogen.

  Blake began to lean toward me, too, but I froze as the rational voice in my head spoke up, reminding me about my rule, which was for his own good as much as mine. Blake was the best friend I’d ever had, and taking things to the next level meant I would risk losing him. But could I really exist in this state of limbo with him forever, both of us wanting more and me always saying no? Wouldn’t that end the friendship just as surely?

  “I better go.” I took a deep breath and opened the car door.

  The grumble of the engine died. I glanced back at Blake.

  “I’ll walk you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to,” I told him, but I didn’t mean it. Part of not wanting the night to end was not wanting to say goodnight to Blake, even though he technically lived next door to me. In our neck of the woods, which mostly consisted of actual woods, “next door” meant our houses were separated by a couple hundred yards of forest. Not that I minded living so many miles from town proper. Surrounded by trees, with a river running through our backyard and the mountains looming, I felt isolated from civilization, and I figured I was better off that way. Easier to stay away from people when you lived like a witch in the woods.

  “There’s no way I’m going to let you wander off in the dark, especially with that mystery truck parked by your mailbox,” Blake said.

  “Then who’s going to walk you back to your car?”

  He thumped his fist against his chest. “I am man. I walk the world alone without fear.”

  I turned my face away so Blake wouldn’t see me smile. Blake was almost as skinny as I was, despite his addiction to any and all kinds of cookies. His favorite joke was to buy a box of cookies and then check the ingredient list and say, “Hmm. Interesting. These cookies contain one hundred percent of my daily requirement for cookies.” When he found out my mom owned a bakery, I thought he might do a backflip.

  “What about my guitar?” I asked, gesturing toward the trunk.

  “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “Good excuse for me to show up at your house unannounced.”

  I hesitated. I hadn’t spent a night without my guitar since my mom gave it to me. But if I trusted anyone with it, it was Blake.

  “When have you ever needed an excuse before?” I asked, batting my eyelashes at him.

  He feigned shock. “Careful or I’ll revoke your oatmeal raisin surprise cookie privileges.”

  “You never told me what the surprise was.”

  “The raisins,” he said, as though this should have been obvious.

  “You refer to them as oatmeal raisin cookies. That kind of ruins the surprise.”

  “The surprise is that most people hate raisins in oatmeal cookies, but in these you actually like them.”

  “You’re so weird.”

  “But you like weird.”

  “That’s right. I do.”

  I smiled.

  He smiled.

  I swallowed.

  He cleared his throat. “Well, I guess that’s enough witty banter for now.”

  We both laughed, breaking the tension, and started up the road, our shoes crunching on the gravel. Mom had been meaning to get the drive paved for as long as we’d lived in our house, just like she’d always meant to finish the basement, but she’d never quite gotten around to either task. Erin’s medical bills exceeded what her insurance covered, so there was rarely much extra money lying around at the end of every month. Not that any of the treatments or medications or studies had helped Erin, nor had they answered any of the questions we had about her condition, but Mom couldn’t sit back and do nothing.

  A breeze moved through the trees and caught my hair, lifting it and chilling the skin of my neck. The moon overhead appeared to have been sliced cleanly in half. The cool air was sharp with the scent of pine trees, a smell that reminded most people of Christmas, but not me. I’d heard a person’s sense of smell was closely linked with memory, and the tang of pine trees often sent me back to my time lost in the forest after killing Jason, bombard
ing me with fractured snippets of recollection. Of charging through trees, my blood surging with rapturous, sparkling, effervescent energy; the forest bending and warping around me, trunks twisting and bowing over me, and the sunlight pouring down through the cracks like a waterfall of liquid light. Of night, when the stars began to fall like snow and the moon was close enough to touch like a reflection in a pond. Even now I woke from surreal, kaleidoscopic dreams that felt like dreams within dreams, memories of what it had felt like to be lost in the woods and lost to myself; and I wanted it again, so badly I could hardly draw breath and had to take a dozen hits on my asthma inhaler to make my lungs open up for plain old air.

  For two days I had lived that intoxicating dream while search parties scoured the woods, looking for me. They had even tried to search Eclipse, the bohemian commune situated in an isolated valley nestled on the other side of the Cross Pine Mountains. The people at Eclipse lived in seclusion, only driving into town when they had to buy supplies they couldn’t grow or make themselves. The search party had nearly come to blows with the Eclipse people, who’d refused to let them in. But before a warrant could be acquired, I had woken from my dream and returned home to the terrible reality of what I had done.

  I lied to everyone but my mom, told them I’d seen Jason drop dead, and I’d been so scared I ran away. Ran and ran until I was lost.

  And everyone believed me, with the exception of Thomas Dunn, Jason’s dad. He told anyone who would listen that I was a demon who had drained the life right out of his son. He ranted and raved about the evil child next door until they locked him up. I wondered sometimes if it would help Mr. Dunn to know that his precious Jason wasn’t the golden boy he remembered. That he was as much a monster as I was.

  Blake was unusually quiet as we walked. Normally he never shut up. Blake was a chatterer, the kind of person who always broke an awkward silence, even if it was with the most random statement that popped into his head. Did you know mosquitoes are completely unnecessary to the ecological balance of nature? Did you know that about seven babies are born every second? Did you know the lead guitar player for Queen has a PhD in astrophysics?

  I glanced over at him as we walked, wondering how much he’d heard about Jason Dunn’s death. He had to know something. People still talked about it. How could they not? Rushing had a population of only twenty thousand people. Jason’s death was the most interesting thing that had ever happened here.

  We reached the place where the woods met my front lawn, and I turned to Blake, feeling as though I were standing under a spotlight. His brows were drawn together and tilted in an expression of worried concentration. There were things I wanted to say, but they scattered like a pile of fall leaves kicked by a sharp wind, and all that was left was what I wanted to do.

  Before I could stop myself, I stepped toward Blake, putting my mouth so near to his that I was breathing him in. We weren’t touching, weren’t kissing. We paused in “before,” balanced on a tightrope between what we were and what we would become if either of us moved.

  “Kenna…” he said, sounding excited, and worried. Whatever concerns he had, I didn’t give him a chance to speak them, because then my own concerns would rear their ugly heads.

  I brushed my lips against his, feeling the energy buzzing beneath his skin, but I was careful not to want it. Not to open myself to it. After a brief moment of hesitation, his mouth sighed open and overlapped mine. He tasted like brown sugar and cinnamon.

  His kiss was just like him: considerate, gentlemanly, sweet. It frustrated the hell out of me. After so much time spent keeping him—keeping all guys, all people—at a safe distance, I was finally ready to let one of them in. I wanted more than a polite kiss.

  I made my lips softer but kissed him harder. He responded, arms wrapping me, fingers burrowing into my hair. A sublime sense of vertigo, a magnetic gravity overcame me. I was falling and standing at the same time. Our kiss became less considerate, more impatient and eager, and there it was: the ferocity under the sweetness. The rogue under the clean-cut boy next door. Blake’s teeth nipped at my bottom lip. His tongue skimmed mine. A low groan purred in his throat. My temperature rose until it felt like a fever, a delicious sickness, the kind that could wipe out an entire population. My fingertips, calloused and always slightly numb from infinite hours spent playing guitar, dug into his back. But I was careful. I kept a grip on the old, greedy need that lived inside me.

  Distantly I heard a noise like a cry, but I ignored it. Kept kissing him. Desperate now. Starved for this. Starved for him as much as I’d been starved for the light I’d taken from Jason Dunn.

  The cry came again, and Blake pulled back so suddenly he left me reeling, swaying on my feet.

  “What was that?” he said.

  I heard it again, though I still wasn’t sure what it was. My skin prickled in primal warning. It sounded like someone, a person, crying out in despair or pain. But there were birds that made that sort of sound—birds and other creatures, like mountain lions with their furious shrieks. This close to the forest, plenty of animals confused our property with theirs, some of them more dangerous than others.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Blake said decisively.

  Blake walked me to the basement window, which was on the opposite end of the house from my mom’s bedroom. Reading the disappointment on my face, he cupped my cheek with one hand in a gesture I’d only seen men use in movies. My skin thrilled and yearned for more. I felt the glowing life inside him, but what I craved at that moment was him. Just Blake. His mouth and his arms and his touch and his warmth. I didn’t want to take anything from inside of him. I only wanted to stay next to him, to bask in the closeness of him.

  “Nothing changes,” he said.

  “Or everything does,” I pointed out.

  “For someone who wears as much gray as you do, you have a tendency to only think in black and white.”

  I started to deny this, but his lips shut me up and his soft, summer-warm mouth made me forget all about the cry until it came again.

  “Good night,” he whispered. “Get your ass inside where it’s safe.”

  “My ass would be safer with you. Just come in with me and sneak out when it’s light.”

  He considered this for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m out past curfew, too, remember? And I can’t exactly call my parents at two in the morning and tell them I’m spending the night at your house. They’re cool, but not that cool.”

  He kissed me one more time, and started jogging back in the direction from which we’d come.

  Feeling unmoored, I slid the basement window open and lowered myself inside, then stood there a moment in the dark, leaning against the cold wall. The unfinished basement consisted of concrete floors and framed-in rooms, but only one had drywall and doors.

  My stomach was giddy, lodged somewhere between my lungs.

  Me and Blake. Blake and me. It was amazing how life could change on a dime if you made a choice. If you let yourself have what you wanted.

  The cry came again. It clawed through my thoughts, reeled me back to reality.

  It was louder now. Much louder.

  It was coming from inside the house.

  SO MUCH BLOOD

  For an instant I stood paralyzed. That sound had not come from a bird, or any other animal. It came from somewhere in the basement. But all the bedrooms were on the first floor. Why would my mom or Erin be in the basement at this time of night?

  A more important question: Why would either of them make that sound? That desperate, wordless plea of suffering. Someone in terrible pain. Someone who needed help.

  I heard something else then, and it made my heart beat so hard I thought it might crack my ribs. Heavy footfalls from above. Clomping. Stomping. Neither my mom nor Erin could make that much noise walking around if they tried. That meant there was someone else in the house. Someone big. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be here.

  The mystery truck parked at the end of the drive.

/>   Cell phone.

  Police.

  My brain merged these three elements and a plan was born. Call the freaking cops. Don’t wait to find out if it’s all a misunderstanding. Do it now.

  I forced my joints to bend and reached into my bag, fumbling for my phone. My fingers found my inhaler and moved on. My lungs were tight, my airways cinching closed, but this was no time for an asthma attack.

  Upstairs someone stomped around the kitchen, making no effort to be quiet. What did that mean? Oh God, what did that mean? My mom … Erin … one of them had made the sound. The cry.

  A sob welled in my throat, and I smothered it with one hand while the other, shaking uncontrollably, dialed 9-1-1.

  Keep it together, I commanded myself as I waited for the ringing to begin. Stay calm, make sense, be coherent for the operator.

  My eyes were hot and tight with the pressure of tears, and every sound made my nerves snap.

  “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” a woman’s voice answered. She sounded brusque. Alert.

  I opened my mouth and heard a thin wheeze of a response, “There’s someone in my house. I think he—” Say it. “I think he might have done something to my family. I think he … hurt them.”

  Saying the words aloud made me shake even harder, but the operator was all business. “I’m going to send officers out to you right away, miss. Tell me your address.”

  For a moment my mind went blank. What was my address? What the hell was my address!

  The answer landed in my head and I blurted it out, too loud. I went still. Listened. No movement upstairs.

  A creak from above. A cupboard door opening. He was looking through our kitchen cupboards.

  “Miss?” the operator was saying. “Miss, officers are en route. Are you in a safe place?”

  “He—he doesn’t know I’m here,” I said.

  “Okay, that’s good. Stay where you are.”

  The cry came again, and this time I pinpointed its origin: the north end of the basement, where the only semifinished room was located. Mom used the room for storage. It was the only one with walls and a door.