The Waking Dark (17 page)

She’d been sort of prettyish, once. Not beautiful, not ugly, but officially “not bad.” Passable enough to score a fake boyfriend and a free pass to the extreme outer fringe of the popular crowd. That was then. Now, after a year of no mirrors, after a week of no showers and a literal bed of filth, she suspected even the sort-of-pretty was gone.

That wasn’t why she couldn’t stand for West to look at her.

The sleeping bag dropped back over her face. Maybe he couldn’t stand it, either.

“Guess she’s not here after all,” West said. “I’ll get the rest of them out of here.”

“Uh… yeah.” Daniel sounded uncertain. “Do that.”

Cass didn’t understand.

“She was a good friend,” West said.

Daniel made a noncommittal noise.

“She was. A good person. I don’t know what she did, but… she was always good. To me, at least.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t have to worry. We won’t be back.”

West didn’t trust them with Cass. Not after that night at the ice cream parlor, and the look in Baz’s eyes as he’d slammed Jason’s head into the ground. Worse, the look in his eyes as he’d watched his putative best friend die. It was the
non
look that bothered West, the emptiness. Anything was permissible, that look said. Anything that Baz deemed fun. And so when it came to Cass, West watched the Watchdogs. He would protect Cass, because she’d protected him. But beyond that, he was out. No more nightly patrols, no more looter hunts. So after the Ghent house, West ignored Baz’s entreaties and insults. He went home.

Broken dishes littered the front entryway and kitchen. He found his mother on her knees, sweeping the porcelain shards into a dustpan. Maddie Thomas lounged on the living-room couch, a bag of frozen ravioli lying across a swollen face.

“What happened? Where’s Dad?”

“Nothing happened,” his mother said, in a curiously flat voice. “Mrs. Thomas and I just had a small disagreement over sugar proportions, didn’t we?”

“Just a small one,” Maddie said wearily.

“Then what’s with all the broken dishes? And with Mrs. Thomas…” He lowered his voice. “Mom, did you… did you
punch
her?”

“And your father, since you asked, went out hunting.”

“At night? What the hell is going on?”

“You won’t use that language in this house,” she said.

“Oh, right. Because we have certain standards of behavior to maintain.”

“Nor will you use that sarcastic tone with me.”

“Mom.” He took her shoulders and raised her to her feet. Amanda West was stout but small, and normally nothing roused her from a bad mood like her oversized son manhandling her into a waltz around the kitchen. But this was more than a bad mood. He looked down at her, thinking how strange it was to have a foot of height on his mother, to look down on the person to whom he was most supposed to look up. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I told you, dear,” she said, still in that same frostily polite tone. “Nothing’s wrong.” She shot a sharp look at Maddie Thomas. “Not now.”

“Nothing’s wrong. You’re punching out the neighbors. Dad’s hunting. In the dark. Where’s Mr. Thomas? Chained up in the basement?”

“Your father took him along.”

“Mr. Thomas doesn’t believe in hunting.”

“Then why ever would he have gone?”

It was an excellent question, one West suddenly didn’t want the answer to.

“Enough, dear. It’s late and I’m tired.”

“But…”

She pressed a finger to his lips. “You don’t see me prying into your dirty little secrets, do you?”

When Johnson West told the story of how he’d courted and won his wife, it always began with the tale of how he’d asked her to the prom. Appalled by the thought of attending the dance on the arm of (in Amanda’s words) “a cross-eyed farm boy,” she’d laughed in his face. Amanda always denied it, and West, unable to imagine his stout, ruddy-cheeked mother as a svelte mean girl, believed her. But there was a nasty note in her laughter now that made him reconsider.

She was his mother, only and always the person who loved him best.

But he was afraid.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, dear,” she said, and he stopped breathing. “Speaking of which, you have a visitor waiting for you in the den.”

She left him alone. It was surreal; it was crazy; it was, just maybe, the end of the world.

And in the den, it was Jason, the kid from the ice cream store. Jason, who called him Jeremiah, though they’d never even met.

“What did you say to my parents?” The rising tide of panic had to be suppressed, could not reveal itself to any stranger, much less this one.

“Pretty much ‘Hello, is Jeremiah here?’”

“That’s it?”

“Other than the part where I told them I was a serial killer waiting here to set you on fire? Pretty much. Then your mom beat that other lady up. And gave me some cookies.”

“You didn’t say anything else?” Everything was jumbled in his head. He couldn’t worry about Jason now, not when his mother might have punched out the neighbor. But on the other hand, how could he worry about recipe tiffs when Jason was here running his mouth off to anyone who would listen? He had to get this guy out of the house.

“I said thank you for the cookies. Though between you and me, they were kind of stale.”

West assured himself that his parents couldn’t know. They believed that the episode from his youth – that’s how they’d referred to it, before they erased it from their communal memory – was behind them. He was already on his second chance. They’d been clear: he wouldn’t get a third.

The whole night was just a misunderstanding, he told himself. His mother did not give people black eyes. His father did not drag people into the woods at midnight, with a gun. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“Where were you all night?” Jason countered. “Out with your lovely friends?”

He was too tired for this. He wanted to climb into bed and wake up six months from now or, better, six years from now. Sleep through the hard part. Why not? Right now he felt like he could sleep through the rest of his life. “What do you want from me?”

“What are you doing with them, Jeremiah?”

The bent wire of tension snapped. “Why do you
keep
calling
me
that
?”

“Why does it bother you?” Jason smirked. “You don’t want to play the question game with me. I can keep it up all night. Ask my older brother.”

“That’s it.” West took a step toward him.

“Big, tough football player’s going to toss me out?” Jason waved his arms in mock terror. “Oh, no, please. Don’t.”

“Get out of my house.
Now.
”

Jason rose to his feet. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll stop. You’ve got to understand, I’ve been playing this conversation in my head for so long, I’ve been so freaking curious about you, and now here you are, in the big slab of flesh, and you’re just…” He shook his head. “From everything he said, I was picturing Superman. But you’re… a little disappointing.”

“Everything who said?” He was afraid he knew.

“Not physically, of course. I see where he was coming from on that. I always have. But everything else? The whole package? You know what they say, lust is blind.”

The door was shut; the den was soundproof. Could his mother hear anyway? Did she need to?

“Shut up and get out,” West said.

“You really don’t know who I am?”

“Jason, whose father owns the ice cream store. And who apparently doesn’t hear very well. I asked you to leave.”

“Jason, Nick Shay’s best friend. Or former best friend. Ex–best friend? I don’t know the official term for it.”

“Nick Shay.” West hoped he looked sufficiently incurious. “The dead kid.”

“Really? ‘The dead kid’? Nice.”

“Look, I’m sorry that your friend died —”

“Ex-friend.”

“Right, I’m sorry—”

“See, we were best friends for years, did everything together. I even watched these stupid sci-fi movies as a favor to him – he was into that kind of stuff, did you know that?”

West shook his head. His mouth was dry. “Why would I know that?”

“Best friends, and then we got in a fight. Seems like a stupid fight now – well, especially
now.
See, he started dating someone that, okay, I didn’t particularly like the sound of, but I’d like to think I can rise above my own preconceptions for the happiness of my friends. This guy, though? This guy was obviously a nightmare, closet case, head case, and Nick wasn’t happy, not really. Any idiot could see that. Well…” Again, that nasty smirk. “Maybe not
any
idiot. So I told him what I thought, and he told me what he thought, and that was the end of it. I take it this story doesn’t seem familiar to you?”

“Should it?” Of course, it made sense that the two of them had been friends. It even made sense that West hadn’t noticed, because he’d turned not noticing what people like Jason and Nick did into an art form. But that was before he and Nick were together. After, he was supposed to know things. Nick was supposed to tell him.

“I thought he’d come crawling back in tears,” Jason said. “I mean, it’s not that I was hoping for it… Well, maybe I was, sort of. I like being right. I thought he’d end up miserable. Not dead.”

“That was an accident,” West snapped. “I mean, I heard.”

“Who said it wasn’t? But you know how it is: Unfinished business. Regrets. Things you wish you could have said. Like maybe I should have been easier on him and on this guy of his.”

“Sounds like it.”

“That’s what I thought, until I figured out that you had no idea who I was.”

“Look, I’m telling you, I barely knew Nick —” It was supposed to be a lie.

“That he never talked about me at all. Never…” Jason gnawed at the edge of his thumbnail. “So either he didn’t care enough about this guy to tell him what was really going on, or… Well, the alternative is obvious, right? Even to an idiot.”

It wasn’t just Jason he’d never said anything about. It was his parents, it was his limp, it was his entire life. West had never questioned it, because it hadn’t seemed important, not as important as the two of them in their secret world, together.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” West said.

“Before, I wanted to see you. Meet you. See what the big deal was. But it didn’t seem like a good idea.”

“And yet here you are.”

“The other night, with your buddies —”

“They’re not my buddies and they’re not going to bother you again.”

“Actually, I think they will, and I’m done asking you to stop them, because you obviously don’t have that in you.”

“Don’t pretend to know anything about me.”

“Yeah, yeah, and don’t tell anyone what I totally don’t know, and don’t say anything to your parents, et cetera. I had all year, Jeremiah. I had more than that. You think if I wanted to ruin your life, I wouldn’t have done it already?”

“Then why are you here?” West asked, suppressing an insane impulse to drop the act and just cop to the truth. Jason already knew the whole story, probably all the dirty details Nick had passed along before the two of them had split; probably they’d sat together watching bad movies on Nick’s ratty couch, talking about West or, worse, not talking about him, talking about whatever esoterica lay between them. Maybe they’d done more than talk. West knew he hadn’t been the first, but he’d never let himself think about the others, about someone else’s hands finding their way to places soft and secret, about Nick pressing his lips to someone else’s skin, fixing them with his goofy, besotted gaze.

What would happen if he asked the question? Just said it:
I
loved
him. Did you?

Wasn’t it worth the risk, if it meant he could set down what he was carrying, if only for the duration of the conversation? Maybe, that night, he would sleep.

“I want to get out of here, do you understand that?” Jason said. “I need to get
out
of this town.”

“Well, yeah, we all do. But I’m sure it’ll only be a couple more days, and then —”

“No, not in a couple of days—
now.
” There was a wild edge to his voice. “But I can’t get out, can I? I’m trapped here. We’re all trapped. We’re all going freaking nuts. So why shouldn’t I? Why should I bother to stay away from you, if I don’t want to? Why shouldn’t I just do whatever the hell I want? Like your buddy Baz. Maybe he’s got the right idea.”

“Last night… I wouldn’t have let anything happen. You know that, right?”

Jason laughed harshly. “You let
everything
happen.”

“I would have stopped it.”

He waved away the excuse. “Doesn’t matter. He’s going to do what he wants. And you know what he wants? He wants me hurt. Bad.”

So Jason didn’t know everything after all. Baz, West was pretty sure, wanted him dead.

“And you know what I want?” Jason said.

“I told you, I’m not going to let him —”

“I don’t want to hurt him. That’s not good enough. What I want? Is to
stop
him. For good. Maybe that’s why I came here, Jeremiah.” His fierce expression mirrored the one he’d worn on the ground, pinned by Baz’s boot, the not-so-helpless prey daring the predator to go further, to cross the line, to give him an excuse. “For Nick’s sake – to warn you. Stay out of my way.”

That night, trying to fall asleep, he listened for Nick’s voice in the wind. It wasn’t there. But something was.

Not a voice.

A touch.

The weight of a hand on his chest.

The brush of lips against his neck.

A mist of breath warming his cheek.

It was like an echo.

Or a reward.

Jule dreamed of the knife.

These days, Jule always dreamed of the knife.

In the dream, it still wore James’s blood. And she knew, with irrefutable dream logic, that it had gotten a taste, and that had awakened its hunger. It wanted more.

In the dream, she knew it wanted her.

It hunted her.