A Dance With Darkness

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “I’m not freaking out or anything. I don’t feel well, that’s all.” She was always so on top of things. She had a plan for everything.

  She looked at me fondly. “You’re my little miracle. I want you to be okay.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You always say that.”

  “I’m worried about your nightmares,” she said sadly.

  “I barely have them anymore,” I lied. I thought it would be better for her to worry less about me than she did. I still had nightmares almost every night, but I was learning to deal with them, since the medication I’d been on was useless.

  “What if this tragedy starts them back up again? I can get you an appointment with Dr. Niles next week.”

  “Bye, Mom,” I said, dismissing her. I hated when she brought up the shrink she and my dad had sent me to for three months. All that guy did was tell me a bunch of crap I already knew and give me drugs that didn’t work. Of course, they thought I’d been fixed. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

  “I didn’t mean to make you angry, Ellie Bean.”

  I exhaled, letting the tension wash from my face, and I looked back up at her. “I know. You just have to trust me when I say I’m going to be fine.”

  She paused a moment before she said anything. “I’ll tell your father to say good-bye to you before he leaves.” Mom disappeared from the kitchen.

  I picked up my cell phone and texted Kate, asking where she was. A few moments later, I received a reply: “B therr so5on! mayb.” I immediately regretted texting Kate while she was driving—for obvious reasons.

  I poked at my breakfast a few more times. My dad walked into the kitchen, adjusting the front of his suit jacket. I looked up at him briefly and gave a small smile. He patted the top of my head awkwardly as he passed by.

  “Sorry about your teacher,” he said. The lines in his face told me that he was sad, but his eyes didn’t match. They were calm and unaffected, his mind elsewhere.

  I was sure he meant what he said, but he never really knew how to show it. I assumed he had learned how to comfort others by imitating someone else—like he saw it on TV somewhere. It never felt natural, never felt as if he really cared.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said sincerely. “Kate’s on her way over.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I don’t think we’ll do much,” I said.

  “Okay, then. Good-bye.”

  “Later.” He probably should have said something like how he hoped I’d be all right and that he loved me, but it would shock me to death if I heard those words come out of him these days. I watched my dad head to the garage and listened to him drive away.

  When Kate arrived, she let herself in the front door. She sat down quietly on a stool next to me, picked up my fork, and took a bite of my pancakes.

  “I can’t believe Mr. Meyer’s dead,” Kate said through a mouthful.

  Thinking about never seeing his kind, smiling face in class again made me really sad. “I can’t believe he’s dead either. Did the news say anything else about it?”

  “They just said he was ‘severely mutilated.’ I have no idea what they mean by that, though. Could be anything. It was probably some psychopath. Detroit is like five minutes away.”

  I took a bite of my breakfast. Immediately, I felt ill. “I think I might sleep a little more. Come with?”

  “Best idea I’ve heard since Landon and Chris decided they’d steal a zebra from the zoo and turn it loose during commencement for our senior prank,” she said. “Do you think they’re really going to do it?”

  “Doubt it.”

  2

  I WAS SMOOTHING MY HAND OVER THE WIDE CLAW marks that ran down the length of the metal door when I heard the roars from somewhere deep within the cavernous textile plant. The angry wails shook the dusty floor beneath my shoes in desolate echoes, announcing the reaper’s presence below. I conjured both my swords out of thin air and stepped silently through the door and into the darkened hall. The air smelled like smoke and brimstone, the unmistakable stench left behind by the demonic and the only thing that linked the mortal world to the Grim. The floor was littered with yellowing paper, and nothing remained of the small industrial windows dotting the walls but jagged broken glass. Sickly pale light from the streetlamps lining the darkened streets outside streaked in through the shattered windows. Trash was piled up against the walls, which were covered with strips of peeling, decomposing paint. I stepped around everything, making no noise, but I knew the reaper could feel me. My silence could not mask the energy rolling from me. Nothing could, and the reaper was hungry for me.

  I stepped into the Grim, passing through the smoky veil and into the world that most humans could not see. Here the reapers dwelled. The remnants of the mortal plane tugged at my arms and clothes like viscous tendrils. A passing police cruiser lit up the ground floor of the factory like blood-red fireworks, the wail of its siren deafening me for a moment. I took a deep breath to regain my composure and stalked toward the closest emergency stairwell. I kicked the door open, and the heavy clunk of steel gave my position away. I held the helves of both my silver sickle-shaped Khopesh swords tightly as I peered over the edge of the metal railing down the shaft to the basement level.

  A dark, massive shape flashed across the floor below. The reaper roared again, making the stairwell shudder.

  I descended quickly, whipping my body around the steel spiral staircase at every turn, determined not to let him escape. My footsteps were light, barely brushing the floor beneath me. With one story to go, I jumped over the railing and landed safely with nothing more than a bend of my knees and a thud of my shoes. I kicked open the stairwell door and froze to peer carefully into the darkness. Unseen claws raked the concrete. He wanted me to know he was there.

  Behind me came a low, throaty rumble. I spun around and caught a glimpse of the reaper, but he vanished deeper into the blackness. I clenched my teeth bitterly, and angelfire erupted from my swords, readying for battle. The flames were the only thing that could truly kill a reaper, and I was the only one who could wield them. They lit up the cavernous basement in white light, but the reaper evaded the glow and stuck to the shadows.

  He was toying with me, luring me. I held the swords ready and followed him anyway.

  The reaper’s power was all around me now, washing over me like a flash flood of smoke from an extinguished flame, heavy, inky, merciless, and without warning. I wheeled around and slashed with both swords. The firelight illuminated the colossal, bearlike shape of the reaper as he reared up, his front legs outstretched, waving paws the size of dinner plates. His eyes were black and empty like a shark’s, and his Goliath jaws dropped to release a roar like an oncoming train straight into my face.

  I ducked into a roll as the reaper swiped his foot-long claws at my head. I jumped to my feet and bounded backward. The reaper heaved toward me and took only a half stride to reach me. He spread his mouth again, revealing a set of enormous teeth that could have belonged to a sabertoothed cat, each fang easily as long as my forearm. He reared over me and his roar thundered once again through the factory. I dropped to my knees and slashed at the reaper’s chest and across his hind legs. He collapsed in a spray of blood but righted himself quickly and leaped into the air, landing thirty feet away from me. His flesh sizzled where the silver blades had sliced and the fire had burned. He wheeled and charged.

  I stepped back onto my right heel and prepared for impact. Instead, the reaper slipped to my left just before he would have collided with me, and he disappeared for a moment. Claws slashed down my back, shredding my body like hamburger meat. I screeched and fell forward. I shuddered and dropped my swords. The pain I expected never came; I felt nothing at all.

  The reaper was distracted by my pooling blood for a moment as I lay unmoving. He paused to taste it and growled a guttural noise of approval with his inhuman mouth before descending on me to finish the job.

  I couldn’t finish my last breath b
efore I died.

  I sat straight up with an enormous gasp of air, feeling as if the life had been taken right out of me. I reached around my back and felt smooth, undamaged skin there and let out a sigh of relief. My nightmares were getting more and more real every time I slept, and I began to worry that I really needed to go back to therapy.

  Beside me, Kate stirred. She sat up with me and frowned. “You okay? Bad dream?”

  I tucked my knees up to my chest and rested my cheek against them. “Yeah.”

  She touched my hair soothingly. “Want to watch a movie?”

  I nodded. Kate never judged me for my nightmares, never treated me like a psycho, and she understood better than anyone else that the meds and therapy didn’t help. She was the only one who listened to me instead of trying to constantly diagnose me. I folded over and curled into a ball while Kate fumbled through the DVD binder on the floor in front of my TV. We went through three fun movies, including one of my favorites, Sixteen Candles, to remind myself that it was my birthday the next day. That movie always made me feel better. Happy movie marathons—and pancakes—had been our bad-day cure since we wore pigtails, and I figured the ritual would follow us to college the next fall. But attempting to make today seem less crappy was useless.

  “What next?” Kate asked, dragging the binder onto my bed. “Clueless?”

  I shook my head. It was after four now, and I was beginning to feel restless. “I don’t feel like watching another movie. Do you want to go do something?”

  “Like what? The mall? We should investigate before Gucci’s fall stuff is picked clean.”

  I scrunched my face. “No, I don’t want to have to straighten my hair and look decent. We could just go get ice cream.”

  Kate brightened a little. “Sounds good. I’m game.”

  I pulled on jeans and a lightweight zip-up hoodie over my tank top. “Should we call Landon to meet us there?”

  Kate gave a quick nod and dialed him up. We let my mom know where we were going, headed outside to Kate’s BMW, and drove to Cold Stone. Landon was waiting for us in the parking lot, talking to a few other people in our circle of friends: Chris, Evan, and Rachel. Chris was on the soccer team with Landon, and they’d been best friends for as long as I could remember. They all stopped talking when Kate and I climbed out of the car.

  “Today’s been so crazy,” Landon said. “How are you guys doing?”

  “Fine, just vegging out,” Kate said, taking my hand and leading me past him.

  We ordered and sat down at the metal tables outside. Landon and the three others joined us. I poked around at my cup of Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some before taking a small bite. In spite of how little I had eaten that day, I wasn’t very hungry. Mr. Meyer’s murder bothered me more than I’d expected it to. I had never known anyone who’d died before, besides my grandfather. He had died peacefully. Something very bad had happened to my teacher.

  The others were rambling away at one another about Mr. Meyer.

  “I heard it was a bear attack,” Evan said through a mouthful. “And Meyer tried to defend himself with a knife.”

  “There aren’t any bears on this side of the state,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe it was someone’s pet cougar,” Landon offered. “I know a guy with an ocelot.”

  “You do not,” Chris scoffed.

  “Yeah I do.”

  Rachel scratched the top of Evan’s head with her fingernails. “What’s an ocelot?”

  “Was it that awful?” Kate asked.

  Chris nodded. “A buddy of mine is doing community service at the morgue for a DUI, and he heard it was messy. Like he was in pieces, man. I don’t think a bar fight would have gotten that far unless the chick it was over was smoking hot. I’d tear a guy up if he got between me and Angelina Jolie.”

  I didn’t like the way they were talking about Mr. Meyer, so I tried to block them and the disturbing mental images out. Cold Stone was busy; since it was past four, the elementary school nearby had let out and now the place was beginning to swarm with screaming, squabbling little kids. I tried my best to ignore them, since fifth-grade boys tended to hit on high school girls. My eyes scanned the area, distantly watching their faces, until I spotted the strange boy from outside school the day before.

  Today he wore a black long-sleeved tee and dark-washed jeans. He was sitting alone at a table about twenty feet away and staring off into space. I knew him. I had to know him from somewhere. When I looked at him, brief images of his face, his eyes, and his smile flashed in my mind. A warm scent struck me that I knew was his, but I wasn’t close enough to catch it. The tenderness overtaking my heart both frightened me and brought me peace. When he noticed that I was staring at him, he looked back and didn’t look away. I tried to block him out, too, but I realized I couldn’t ignore everybody. I turned back to my friends.

  “School should be open tomorrow,” Rachel said.

  Kate licked up a glob of whipped cream. “That sucks.”

  “Do you think we’ll still have to finish this week’s economics paper?” Landon asked.

  Chris shrugged. “Why wouldn’t we? We’re just going to have a sub until they find a full-time replacement.”

  I finished my ice cream quickly, without joining the conversation, and then got up to walk to the trash can on the side of the building to throw my cup away. When I turned around, I nearly bumped into a tall form, and I jumped, startled. Looking up, I found myself standing face-to-face with the boy I’d seen the day before. He was tall, maybe six feet, and broad shouldered—and he was standing much, much too close. His presence wrapped around me—not suffocating, as I would have expected, but peaceful. I didn’t pull away from him. He looked down at me with bright green eyes, saying nothing. Around the collar of his shirt were strange black markings like tattoos. His dark hair was tousled just a little by the September breeze.

  “Um, hi,” I said, drawling in my uneasiness. “Do you … need the trash can?” I felt like an idiot as soon as I said it.

  “Hi,” he said, and gave me a quiet smile, one that amplified the gentle contours of his face, the curve of his lips, the little line beside his right eye that appeared when he smiled—a smile I felt I’d seen a million times before. “No, I don’t need the trash can.”

  “Okay …” I started to walk around him back to my friends.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked.

  Other than having a distinct sense of déjà vu, I was very sure I didn’t know him. “I think I might have seen you yesterday at school.”

  “That’s it?” His expression showed that he felt hurt.

  Yeah, he was really weird. “I’m pretty sure. Are you looking for someone?”

  “No,” he mused. “You’re Elisabeth Monroe, right?”

  “Ellie, yeah. Do you go to my school?”

  “No, sorry. You’re having a party Saturday, aren’t you?”

  Good grief, did the whole world know? “Yeah. How’d you hear about it if you don’t go to my school?”

  “A friend.” He smiled.

  “You okay, Ellie?” Landon had joined us. He looked annoyed, almost hostile. “Who’s this guy?” He stared at the boy up and down.

  The stranger’s smile faded. “Just call me Will.”

  His words triggered something in the back of my mind, just as his smile felt familiar to me. I felt as if I’d heard him say that before.

  “Don’t talk to her, man,” Landon said, taking a step toward Will.

  I put a gentle hand on Landon’s chest. “Landon, chill, he’s not bothering me. I was just throwing my cup away. Let’s go. Nice meeting you, Will.”

  I nodded to Will and led Landon away. “What’s your problem?” I asked him once we were out of earshot.

  “Nothing—don’t worry about it. He shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “I thought you were going to punch that guy.”

  “If he touched you, I would’ve.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Well, he didn’t.”
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  He huffed. “Good.”

  I tried not to laugh. Landon had been my friend since the sixth grade, but he was a boy, and boys made no sense to me.

  My dad actually made it home in time for dinner, to my astonishment, but as soon as we all sat down at the table, I wanted him gone. Dinners recently had mostly been spent with my parents trying to get me to talk. I didn’t need to talk about Mr. Meyer. I wasn’t ten years old and I wasn’t traumatized. I was just sad. That was natural and to be expected. I didn’t need to be babied about it.

  I dreaded school the next morning. It was going to be today all over again times a thousand. Not to mention I still had that math test on my schedule. What a way to spend my birthday.

  My dad’s fist slamming on the table jarred me brutally from my thoughts. I sat up like a shot.

  “That’s not the point.” His voice was frigid and harsh, as if he were holding back an angry yell.

  “It’s not?” my mom asked. “This is the first night you’ve been home all week. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out her nightmares are a result of her lacking a father figure.”

  “That is ridiculous. Don’t give me that psychobabble, Diane.”

  “I’m just trying to find a solution,” Mom said tiredly. “Her teacher was murdered. If anything, that will start the nightmares again. We should take her back to Dr. Niles.”

  It was as if she’d totally forgotten what I had told her that morning. I wanted to chuck my spaghetti into both their faces and scream, Hello! I’m right here! It was almost more comical than enraging when they argued about me as I sat right next to them. When they totally forgot about my presence in a room, they made it obvious that they cared more about fighting with each other than about my mental health.