Dear Killer (9 page)

I had dreams of Diana.

Diana, not the Roman goddess of hunting and moonlight, but Diana the harbinger of death, my own personal goddess of the underworld and of letters. Diana, surrounded by bloodstained paper, laughing, beautiful, terrible.

My dreams of Diana were nightmares.

Chapter 10

O
n Sunday morning I went running.

I wasn’t a runner, I never ran—but on Sunday morning I went running. Somehow I felt like I needed to do it or I would itch myself out of my skin. I was restless. I needed to run, to get whatever was in me
out
—so I ran.

I wore those ugly tennis shoes my dad bought me last Christmas and a pair of completely unsuitable denim shorts because I didn’t have anything else. I ran through Chelsea and down to the Thames, and then alongside the Thames for a little bit, feeling the pounding of the cement against my feet, just running, running, running.

I needed to run or I felt like I was going to explode.

The morning air bit into me, and I felt the cold running up and down my skin. I ran until my breath ran out and I was gasping for air and my legs felt like lead. And then I kept running, because I couldn’t stop, not yet. The burning, aching, ripping pain in my tired thighs and the sting of the air on my cheeks somehow relaxed me, soothed me, felt good. I let it all wash over me and wash everything away.

I ran. I ran. I ran.

I ran until I was so tired that I simply collapsed to my knees on the sidewalk, unable to run a second longer. I forced myself to stretch so I wouldn’t be sore the next day—or at least I wouldn’t be too sore—and then I hailed a cab to take me back home as the sun rose in the sky and everything else came awake.

School on Monday was terrible—and yet, somehow, exhilarating.

The moment I walked into school, I couldn’t escape the gazes of the other students. Their eyes followed me in the hallways, glanced at me in class when their minds wandered. They were all interested. Of course, I felt awful about it. I had drawn attention to myself. I was a delinquent. That was dangerous. So very dangerous. But somehow, despite that, the touch of their eyes and their whispering mouths excited me. So this was what Maggie felt. I couldn’t understand how she hated it so, how she could not feel this same exhilaration. It was wonderful, having them watch me.

I walked into homeroom to find Maggie missing. Michael sat in the front of the classroom. He turned to meet my eyes as I walked in. He was smiling.

“Good morning, Kit,” he said with fake kindness in his voice.

“Good morning, Michael,” I replied cordially, and ignored him. He was trying to provoke me again. I wouldn’t let him. I looked around the room once more—but I was right. Maggie wasn’t there. I looked at Michael and put my hands on my hips. He just smiled.

“Where’s Maggie?”

“Why should I know?”

“Because you’re a bastard, and you’re harassing her, that’s why.”

He laughed. “I don’t have a clue, honestly.”

“Stop playing games,” I hissed.

Yet again, everyone was listening. They had stopped what they were doing and they were all listening to us, wondering if we would deteriorate into physical violence again.

“I really don’t know where she is,” he said lightly.

“Look, you have no excuse to be psychotic, even if she did dump your sorry arse,” I said, making sure I was loud enough for everyone to hear me clearly. There was a collective, gossipy, giggling gasp from the room, and chattering broke out as I smiled arrogantly at Michael.

“Hit him again,” someone whispered, goading me on, like the person in the cafeteria before. And honestly, I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

So I just smiled at him. He smiled back.

“She won’t be coming to school today, I don’t think,” he said. And for a moment, the mask he seemed to be wearing slipped—he looked almost upset, but the turmoil was mixed disturbingly with fury—and he looked as if he wanted to kill me. Honestly and truly. But then he smiled again, forcing the expression away.

The end-of-homeroom bell rang. Everyone jumped. I narrowed my eyes. Smiling benignly, Michael headed toward the door, brushing past me.

I couldn’t resist.

Venom in my voice, I whispered to him.

“I warned you.”

I was in the girls’ bathroom, on my cell phone, trying in vain to call Maggie. She wasn’t responding. I had already tried five times and left three messages. It was morning break, right between my second and third classes, and there wasn’t the faintest trace of her.

Once again I got her voice mail and hung up.

“Shit,” I muttered.

He had threatened her, I was sure of that. But I wanted to know if he had actually followed through on that threat, or whether she was just too afraid to come to school. I hoped she was just afraid. She belonged to me. She was not his to take.

I leaned back against the tiled wall and realized that I had two options.

One. The safest path. I could do nothing. I could ignore Michael, let him carry on being a bastard and have nothing to do with him. I could go on with my life and kill Maggie when the time was right. Her death was my responsibility, and it still had to occur, of course. I had decided to play this game, and I would play it to the end. Once I chose a victim, I never gave up or flaked out, even if my opinions about the writer changed. Nothing was right, nothing was wrong—that was the rule. That was who I was, and without my conviction I was nothing. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t protect her in the meantime.

Two. I could kill Michael.

I knew that my mother would choose option one—but I was not my mother. I didn’t play it safe like her. I killed more freely.

But I was already in danger. I couldn’t kill now; it truly wasn’t safe for me.

But he was so irritating—

But I didn’t have a letter for him—

My thoughts were a mess. I didn’t know what to do. I breathed in and held the breath for a long while before letting it slowly slip away through my lips.

In my hand, my phone began to ring.

Sharply, I lifted it up and looked to see who was calling—it was Maggie.

I answered quickly.

“Maggie,” I said. There was a short silence.

“Kit.” She sounded as if she hadn’t slept for a while, and also as if she didn’t know precisely why she was calling me.

“Maggie, are you all right?”

“What?”

“Michael threatened you again, didn’t he?”

Another silence.

“Yes.”

“What? Maggie, when?” I asked urgently.

“Saturday. Saturday night.”

“You told me before that you changed your phone number. How did he get your new one?”

“He didn’t.”

“What?”

“He came to my house.”

I pushed off the wall and nearly toppled over forward. I spread my feet apart and shouted into the phone, indignant and stunned.

“What?”

“He just showed up on Saturday, and my parents weren’t home, so he just came to my house . . . he threatened to hurt me if I came back to school and didn’t agree to . . . be with him.”

“Maggie, did he hurt you?”

Silence.

“Maggie,
did he hurt you
?”

“No, no, he didn’t touch me.”

“Maggie, is that the truth?”

“Yes, it’s the truth,” she said softly.

Perhaps he actually hadn’t touched her this time—but if that was the case, she was hiding something else. She had always been hiding something. I had always felt it.

I wanted to understand. I needed to. I realized that now.

“Is this the only time you’ve been this afraid of him?” I asked, feeling somehow that this was the right question to ask.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, on the other end of the phone, Maggie burst into tears.

I stood dumbly next to the wall like a limp marionette. I didn’t have anything to say. What could I do? Should I tell her not to cry—should I tell her that it would be all right? It occurred to me that I had never seen anyone but my mother cry before. I suddenly felt like a child.

“Um,” I muttered helplessly as she sobbed into the phone, “what’s wrong?”

“He really didn’t touch me this time, I swear, but before, at the end of the last school year, it was different.”

“Yes?” I prompted faintly, as her voice petered out into choked sobbing.

“He used to be so
nice
,” she said through the tears. I heard her hand brush against the phone as she wiped water away from her eyes, and she went on unbidden, as if she had to get the words out to purge the emotions that went along with them. I listened without saying a word. She spoke in a tumbling stream, like a rock rolling down a hill.

“He used to be so wonderful. So bright. He used to laugh, we used to really be friends, and it was
all
wonderful. But then as time went on I began to see things about him. At first I thought I could fix them. He’s so alone, Kit. He’s so lonely. I thought that if I could just stay with him I could make it better. But then—” She paused here for a moment, as her tears momentarily thickened. “As time went on, I started to realize that his darkness went a lot deeper than I thought at first. He was dangerous. It was just in little ways, weird ways that I saw it at first—he used to mess with spiders, torturing them until he killed them—that sort of thing. You know. But then this one day he told me—he told me that the world was made out of dust, and that the world was so heavy and pointless—and he
meant
it, Kit. The fact that he truly meant it was the scary part.”

“Maggie,” I breathed sadly. “Maggie, Maggie.”

“I went home right after he said that. I just left him. Ran. I couldn’t stay with him any longer. I realized then—he’s literally psychotic, Kit. Literally. Detached from reality. I didn’t want anything to do with him. But I guess that he must have followed me home, because when I got home and went inside, he knocked on the door; and when I came to answer it, he just forced his way in. And my parents weren’t there, I was alone. He was so angry—I was terrified.” Her tears were fading now, turning into steely resignation, acceptance of an unfortunate fate.

“He pushed me against a wall. He broke a vase. Roses all over the hallway. He told me—he said I was disgusting for just going home and leaving him. He gave me bruises on my wrist, shoved his knee into my stomach. He told me that I was part of the darkness he hated. He told me that there was no lightness in the world at all, and that I didn’t deserve the life that was in my bones, and that the only real thing in the world was pain. He asked me to love him, to understand—I kept saying no, no, but he wouldn’t listen. He left eventually, but . . . it was like something had broken within him. You can see it, can’t you, sometimes, when you look at him? That sort of on-the-edge feeling . . .”

Maggie took a deep breath.

“And after all that I had to leave my friends, of course. Michael was their ringleader, and I couldn’t be around them as long as he was there.”

“Oh God, Maggie . . . ,” I said, not sure what else there was to say. She didn’t really hear me, she just kept going on—and the words just kept coming, like she had no way of stopping herself now that she had begun.

“When he came to my house this Saturday, I didn’t let him in. He snapped in the same way as the first time. He just stood at the front door and kept slamming himself against it and shouting at me, telling me to love him, like he was going to break—break the door down. And I kept telling him to go, and my parents weren’t home again, and he wouldn’t listen, he never listens . . . I didn’t let him hurt me this time, but I’m so scared.”

“Maggie, Maggie.”

“And before you ask, because I know you’ll want to ask, I haven’t told anyone about this except for you. I can’t. I’m so afraid. What if he hears about it and comes to hurt me again, even madder than before? There’s no way out. I’m stuck. Please don’t tell anyone, please.” She paused. “I’m fine,” she murmured, as if she were trying to convince herself, the last remnants of tears disappearing from her voice. “You don’t have to worry.”

“You . . . do you . . . do you think he’d really hurt you if you came back to school?”

Darkness sank over me.

The silence hung in the air—I realized that this answer could change everything. It could change me. It could turn me into something I never planned to be. A murderer who decides her own justice, who kills without letters. But I would do it to protect my prey.

“Yes, I think so,” she gasped softly.

“Maggie,” I murmured. “Oh, Maggie.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Not like this.”

“I’ll . . . be fine.”

“Not like this. You can’t come to school like this.”

“I’ll be fine.”

I paused, clenching the phone to my ear, biting my lip until it bled, eyes narrowed and chest hollow.

“Not like this,” I whispered, and hung up.

After the phone call and before my next class, I went to the empty philosophy room and put a note inside Michael’s desk to wait for him. After that I went out and wandered the empty hallways until the bell rang. I couldn’t make myself stay still.

When we went to philosophy, I was restless. Gone was the early morning’s excitement. The gazes that I had earlier enjoyed now felt dirty and cruel. I tapped my foot against the floor, and I watched Michael.

I had positioned the note on the inside of his desk so that he would quickly see it as soon as he sat down. And he did see it. As Dr. Marcell began to speak, to say things I wasn’t paying attention to, I watched Michael reach into his desk and quietly unfold his note.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine it. The tight lips, the twitching left eyebrow, the manicured fury in his pretty eyes.

I stared at the back of his head too long. Dr. Marcell noticed. She didn’t say anything, but I felt her eyes on me, staring. She kept talking, but somehow I felt her words were angled at me. There was something strange in them. A curiosity, perhaps? Not suspicion, not yet.

I looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back, uncertain, and her eyes moved on.

The class passed more slowly than usual. I didn’t speak. Not that day. That day I was too jumpy to speak. And I was not jumpy often. I was usually calm and collected, even in the worst situations. But the thought of my impending betrayal of my own morals left me edgy.

I didn’t have a choice. He was in my way. No one was allowed to hurt my victims except me, and Michael was far too violent toward Maggie for comfort.