Shadowed Summer (21 page)

“I know I can, but he’s a boy, so he would know about boys.”

“He knows about himself, and that’s it!” Sliding out of bed, I stalked over to turn up the box fan. Its whine filled my room, white noise that cleared my head like cool water. “I think we’re about done playing magic, Collette.”

Collette answered with a gasp that sounded like a hiccup. “You’re the most jealous thing I’ve ever seen, Iris.”

“Maybe I am, but some stuff was just ours—the spellbook and all that. But it’s not anymore.” Tempering myself, I leaned against the wall. “I’m not saying don’t be my friend.”

“Yes you are, too.”

I slumped against the wall and sighed. “If that’s what you want to think, I can’t stop you.” I wasn’t mad anymore, just tired. “I’ll be here if you want to watch movies or listen to music or talk about anything, but I’m done acting like we have powers. We don’t; we never did.”

“You just want to keep Elijah to yourself.” Collette’s voice sounded thin and wet, like she’d started crying. “You go on ahead and see if I care, because I don’t.”

Emptied of everything, I sat at my desk, curling one arm into a pillow so I could rest my head. “Nobody said you had to. I’m going to bed now, Collette.”

She sniffled, the line going fuzzy, then clear again. After using that moment to calm down, Collette tried to put on her best queen voice. It didn’t work; she didn’t sound chilly or regal or even hard—she just sounded sad. “Well, then good night.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, then hung up the phone. I sat there for a long time, rearranging things on my desk before going back to bed.

When I told Collette I’d talk to her later, I meant it. I didn’t know how to be a person without my best friend; Collette knew me from the inside, all my dumb details and the good ones, too.

I had to believe she’d still like me without our spells and swords. I had to believe we were more than make-believe.

Elijah walked through my bedroom door and started pulling books from the shelves. His hair looked mossy, his skin mint green and mottled, but his mouth was red as an apple.

Pages flapped when he tossed books over his shoulder. Carefully, he pulled the prayer book Daddy had given me for my First Communion from the shelf and sniffed it. I liked to do that, too; it was bound in white leather, and the pages were edged in gold.

Elijah stroked it for a minute, but instead of just dumping it over his shoulder like the rest, he wound up and threw it hard. It turned into a rock and shattered my window. Still, he didn’t seem to enjoy destroying my things; he frowned and thumped the wall, like he expected it to open or something.

Unsure if this was a dream, I didn’t try to move, but I shuddered when he turned to shake out my desk. He only wore half a face; the other side was bone, gray and dirty, barely held together. His bright lips stopped exactly in the middle, and I could see a black tongue filling his mouth.

“Don’t ask me where I’m at,” I said, wrapping the covers around me tight. “You already know.”

His face melted from green to gold again, from half to whole again, a feathered sweep of hair falling into his eyes. When he leaned back, his jersey shirt pulled tight across his shoulders, showing off fine, sculpted muscles beneath. “You already know,” he echoed.

Shivering, I tried to rearrange the blankets to cover me, but I couldn’t get warm. Rocks filled my bed. Breath frosting in the air, I shook my head. “That’s what I said.”

“You already know,” he repeated, and reached to grab something off my desk. He threw my spellbook toward me, and its white pages rose and fell like a bird’s wings before it landed silently in my lap.

The book flipped over and spread itself open. I closed it and frowned when it popped open again. A red drop splattered in the middle of the page, and I reached up to scrub at my nose as the blood smear crawled across the page and formed neat block letters.

You found me where I’m sleeping.

Reading the blood note, I held both hands against my nose, swallowing the iron tang sliding down my throat. I lifted my head to tell Elijah I still didn’t know what he meant by that, but he was gone.

I threw the covers off when an awful flash of heat swept over me. Humid night air choked me as I struggled free from the tangle of sheets around my ankles. Just to make sure I’d been dreaming, I looked up to find my room the way it had been when I fell asleep.

Outside my window, angry clouds blotted out the moon. I felt the static hum of a coming storm in everything I touched, and fighting a low, sick feeling in my stomach, I rolled out of bed. I needed to get the fan out of the window before the rain came.

As I reached for the fan, something loomed behind me, something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. More stupid than brave, I looked over my shoulder and almost lost my legs from under me.

A black pool of blood stained my sheets, and a single rock fell from nowhere. Uneasy, I looked down and saw blood on my legs. I could smell it, a dead, heavy scent that turned my stomach. I backed toward the door, touching myself, trying to find where I’d been cut.

Another rock fell, sounding almost hollow as it rolled off the bed and onto the floor. I didn’t know if it was the storm or something else, but papers rustled on my desk, and as I reached blindly for the doorknob, I watched my drawer work itself open.

I screamed when the drawer exploded out, showering my room with crayons and books and pictures and every other little thing I’d tucked away in there.

My door wouldn’t open. I ducked when my spellbook slammed against the wall beside my head. Struggling for another breath I screamed again. Mrs. Thacker was about the worst babysitter in the world if she couldn’t hear this.

I damned her and the television set blaring downstairs. I damned Daddy for working nights, and Mama for driving in the rain, and Collette for growing up, and Ben for coming between us. I damned them for leaving me all alone with this when it wasn’t a dream.

The storm in my room raged for a second; then suddenly the phone rang and everything stopped. Pens and boxes and books began raining down like hail again as I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling through the mess to get to the phone.

“Collette,” I whispered, panicking when a warm, wet stream trickled from my nose. I swabbed at it, relieved that it was snot instead of blood.

The line crackled with soft static, and then a voice murmured, “Where y’at, Iris?”

I threw the phone and scrambled to my feet. With both hands, I yanked at my bedroom door, but it stuck fast. I tore around, searching for a way to escape, and my gaze landed on the window. I pulled the fan free, pushed my screen out, and slung my leg outside.

My bedroom opened onto nothing. Clinging to the sill, I kept telling myself it wasn’t far to the ground; all I had to do was let go. My fingers didn’t care; they dug in hard, and I dangled there with the wind clawing at me until a bright crack of lightning scared me into letting go.

The ground rushed up under me, shoving the air from my lungs when we collided. Eyes crossing, arms spread out wide, I watched the sky go blurry, then sharp above me.

All I wanted was to go to sleep, but spatters of rain hit my face. Those cold little drops jerked me sensible again, and suddenly I knew.

chapter fifteen

W
ith Daddy’s tire iron in one hand, I staggered through the cemetery. The skies split with sheets of cold rain. I felt like I’d sunk into an ice bath; hard, jolting shivers twisted me off balance.

There weren’t any lights at the graveyard, so I made my way by memory and luck. Bad luck, mostly, because I stumbled into low stones that bit my shins, and I nearly fell into the black iron fence that surrounded one of the family plots. Pushing myself away from that, I shuddered when lightning lit up the spikes I’d barely missed.

The Claibornes’ crypts lay farther in than I thought. The white limestone seemed to glow, collecting the brightness of the lightning and holding on to it when the flashes faded. Circling Cecily, I curved a hand on my brow to hold off the rain and examined the seam that ran between the top of the slab and the crypt.

Finding a slightly chipped spot, I forced Daddy’s tire iron between the crypt and the slab and pushed hard. The muscles in my arms screamed, threatening to snap, but I didn’t stop. Grinding my teeth, I pushed again, the ache radiating into my shoulders, then down my back, but the slab wouldn’t move.

I kept at it anyway; then my hands slipped and I crashed headfirst into the stone. Sliding to my knees in the mud, I rubbed the throbbing goose egg rising on my forehead. The pain jangled around in my head, throbbing until my brain felt too big for my skull.

The stone pulled my hair, yanking strands of it out as I struggled to my feet again. Shaking off the pain, I told myself those little stings meant nothing. I dried my hands on my shirt and shoved the tire iron back into the crack.

Twisting for leverage, I fought the grave as hard as I could. The iron felt dangerous; my hands were cold on the slick metal, and the nub end of the iron pressed into my chest. Even though it was blunt I could imagine impaling myself on it, and I shuddered. But I had to keep going.

The crypt’s soft stone ground each time I pried, sending a nasty, bone-crunching sensation up the metal that made me want to boil my hands in bleach. After another failed push that sent me off my feet again, I sat there for a minute and just stared.

Rain poured down my face, and a strange, warm numbness started through me. It began at my hands and flooded my body with each pulse until I stepped out of my icy skin, hot-blooded and strong

Instead of pushing, I laced my hands together as tight as I could and looped them around the iron. I hung from it, bouncing to use all my weight. Something gave, and for a minute, I thought the iron had bent; if I wasn’t already in trouble, I would have been for destroying Daddy’s tools, but the iron was fine.

Cecily’s slab lifted just a tiny bit, a thin black line that encouraged me to push harder. The gap spread by tiny inches, and I felt like my head might pop from the strain, but I didn’t stop.

I dropped my full weight hard on the iron and pushed the stone just enough to set it askew. As soon as I saw that tiny patch of space, I dropped the tire iron and darted to the other side of the crypt, shoving on one corner, then ducking back around to push the other. The stone rubbed my hands raw, but I couldn’t quit; I was almost there.

A blinding light flashed in my face, and I stopped just long enough to look into it. From the road, I saw the shadow of a car and a man climbing out of it. The police.