CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
He isn’t afraid until the sky turns purple.
“Please,” he says. “I didn’t see anything.”
But in the forest, it’s the trees that seem to decide what gets seen and heard. Tonight, his words are buried.
“I promise I won’t tell.”
He hesitates only for a moment. Then he hears the first footstep.
He’s fast, but they’re faster. Each time his boots hit the ground, leaves crunch behind him, closing the distance between them.
A bramble loops around his ankle, and he goes down hard, smacking his chin, his teeth squeezing the sides of his tongue. Gasping, he crawls to his feet again, launching forward, flailing through low branches and reaching vines. He bursts out of the thicket and into the clearing. Still, the moonlight can’t break through. It’s like the sky has swallowed it.
They’re coming.
He whips around, frantically searching for a place to hide, and dives behind a nearby bulldozer, its massive shovel still entrenched in the soft ground. Crawling underneath the scoop, he tugs his knees to his chest, struggling to hold his breath before he’s had a chance to catch it.
Now he can see a sliver of sky between the bulldozer’s arm and the joint of the scoop, but he doesn’t really need to see. He already knows what will happen.
It starts with the lightning, a silent warning before the rupture. Next comes the thunder, only it’s no ordinary rumble; this thunder splits a hole in the sky.
From the cloudy purple heavens, the crows emerge.
They move like a plague, their black wings billowing. Their cries peal away into the night, their sharp beaks pointed in the same direction, always.
He covers his head, even though he’s protected under the bulldozer. It’s more to deaden the sound.
When the crows finally pass, they leave in their wake a silence thick enough to blanket the entire forest, and this is when he hears the footsteps resume.
Closer. They’re closer now.
He uncovers his ears to hear where they’re coming from, but it seems to him they’re coming from all sides of the clearing. Risking a peek, he peers into the dark, but the machinery makes grotesque silhouettes against the dim light of the purple sky. From where he hides, every crane looks like a gallows, every woodpile a crouching beast. Even the colorful tents laid out across the clearing look sinister, their garish carnival colors muted and transformed in the dark.
The spaces between the trees are what he’s watching, though. Then he sees the first one emerge.
Run!
He keeps to the middle of the clearing, away from the dark places, but he’s exposed. His feet thunder against the soft earth, boots slipping over slick leaves and freshly unpacked dirt. He pumps his arms and pushes away the burning in his chest, the wheezing in his throat. He knows he’s being followed, but he doesn’t dare turn to see how closely.
Now that he’s seen them, there’s no way they’ll let him go.
The clearing seems to stretch for miles, but when he finally reaches the back of it, he has no choice except to dive through the gaping maw of the forest again. He’s forgotten how dense the vegetation is through here.
* * *
At last, he breaks through and runs headlong into a chain-link fence, the tower it guards looming over him like a metal giant. Signs all over the fence warn against trespassing, but if he still had a way in, he would risk it.
He runs along the fence, considering the time it would take to climb it.
The thought of going back in there …
But there’s no time. Footfalls beat the ground behind him in a steady rhythm, and he quickens his sprint around the corner of the fence, bringing him to the back of the building.
Far in the distance, the whistle of the train blares, and he wishes it would stop because he can no longer hear the footfalls.
After another second, though, he understands that it isn’t the train that’s whistling. It’s them … whistling to one another.
“Please don’t!”
But his pleading won’t be heard.
His hands drag along the fence now, groping for any hint of an opening. A fallen loop of barbed wire hooks the skin of his hand, and he pulls back like he’s been bitten, droplets of blood splattering the grass underneath him.
His voice quavers. “Where is the door?”
It’s around the third turn in the fencing, obscured behind a thick knot of overgrowth. He has to beat back the thought of being dragged into the forest, fingers clawing at the ground.
Not again.
“Come on, come on,” he whispers, fumbling with the chain that’s wrapped unsecured around the fence opening.
When he’s loosened it enough to open the gate a crack, he squeezes through, tearing his shirt in the process. He slips through the door just as he hears the crack of a twig close by.
Inside it’s cold and drafty, and even the sound of his breath echoes through the cavernous halls. He already knows there’s no lock inside the door. All he can do is outrun them, so he feels his way along the walls.
“They didn’t see me,” he tries to reassure himself, but he doesn’t believe it.
A nearby rattle alerts him to movement along the chain-link fence outside.
He opens his eyes wider through the dark, but the draft just makes them burn, and he forces his shaking legs to carry him farther into the dark building.
His shin catches the leg of a chair, and he stumbles, throwing the chair to the ground with a crash. He reaches for a lantern on the nearby table and brings out a gentle light.
He sprints now, arms in front of him as he tries to remember the places to hide. There used to be so many.
Just then, his elbow knocks against a doorway.
“Here,” he breathes, then more excited. “Here!”
He feels along the opposite wall, the hiding place coming back to him now. With a hard push, the wall gives way, and then the floor drops out.
The fall is farther than he remembers, and for a moment, his vision goes black. When he tries to stand, his ankle falters under a fiery pain, and before he can catch himself, he cries out.
His voice ricochets, and he looks up at the opening in the floor above. He’s so still, he thinks maybe he’s forgotten how to move.
When no one appears in the opening, his breath slowly returns. Careful not to place too much weight on his ankle, he hobbles in a half circle, preparing to make his way out. He’s safe now.
Then he finishes his turn.
“No … n-n-nooo!” he stammers, trying to back away from them, but his ankle collapses under him, and he falls to his knees, the perfect place from which to beg.
“I didn’t see anything. I swear it. I’ll never tell a soul,” he says, but his voice, where is his voice? It’s barely a whisper.
They’ll let me go. They’ll see I mean it, and they’ll let me go.
But he already knows that’s not true.
“Please,” he manages to say once more before his throat unleashes a rabid scream.
Then the dark overtakes him.
I’m supposed to be excited because I’ll get my own room.
In Germany—in everywhere, really—Mya and I always had to share. This house has space to spare, though, or at least that’s what Mom has said about a dozen times already.
She told us
first when we were packing our bags and filling just a few cardboard boxes in our apartment, taping the tops hurriedly and labeling them with a fat black marker. She told us again while we crammed into our airplane seats, holding our backpacks and a whole lot of unanswered questions. She told us at every rest stop and motel across three more states until we finally made it to Raven Brooks, to a street called Friendly Court, to a big, rickety blue house where Dad grew up, which now belongs to us because Grandma and Grandpa are dead.
“There might even be space for a playroom!” Mom says wistfully as we roll into the driveway. Never mind that Mya and I are a little too old to be “playing” anymore. Mya still has toys, but these days, I’m more into drawing.
It’s possible that Mom is so chatty about all the stuff we have to look forward to in our new home because Dad has been intermittently mute throughout our whole trip. One minute, he’s full of his usual optimism, acting like a grown-up kid; the next minute, he disappears into a place none of us can see. My guess is wherever he keeps drifting off to is the place that answers all the questions about what we left behind in Germany, and how much of it has followed us here.
As we roll up the driveway beside the truck, I see one or two neighbors pop their heads out their front doors before retreating inside like groundhogs. By the time we’ve opened the back of the truck, nearly every house on the block is dotted with one or two neighbors, clutching bathrobes closed and tucking newspapers under their arms. Not a single person comes over to say hello. Not one of them raises a hand to wave.
“Is that my box? That’s my box! Mom, that one’s mine!” Mya squeaks from the driveway as the lone mover needed to move our meager possessions begins lugging boxes from the small truck. The dude looks grumpy, like he can’t believe this is all we have, or maybe that’s just me being defensive. Anyway, I can tell we’re in his way, so I tug on the back of Mya’s shirt.
“Mouse, let’s go pick our rooms,” I say.
“Dibs!” she yells, pushing past me to barrel through the front door.
“You can’t call dibs; you don’t even know what you’re calling dibs on!” I say, chasing after her.
“Dibs on whichever room you want!” she calls over her shoulder, beating me to the front door.
“Hang on, hang on, hang on,” I say, dropping to a squat to examine my ankle.
“What?” Mya crouches next to me to examine whatever it is I’m looking at.
“I think I just … completely owned you,” I say, pushing her over and scrambling to the door.
She springs back up, and as I take my first step inside the house, I feel her foot loop around mine, and she sends me flying across the floor.
Now that we’re both inside the house, looking for our rooms suddenly feels a lot less important.
I trace the outlines of the room we walk straight into, the foyer, more or less an afterthought as the house opens into a small family room, with a worn green sofa and a television stand already positioned. I halfway expect to see someone sitting in it, eating Chinese takeout from a box on a folding snack tray. I brush the shiver from my neck; the thought that the house hasn’t been fully vacated yet isn’t exactly a welcome one.
I turn around and see the kitchen directly behind us, a long table cutting through the middle of it, a pantry tucked into the wall, a hallway set apart from the stairwell that leads upstairs. I follow Mya as she wanders toward the farthest hallway and see that there’s a separate set of stairs leading downward. Without a word, Mya and I both walk down before we consider traveling up.
The first room down the stairs is a laundry room, or at least it should be. The machines are missing, a giant outlet on the wall showing where they should be. On the left are a couple more empty rooms, and on the right, the first door resists, its wood warped against the frame. With a tug, it finally comes loose, and when I feel for a light switch, I find a flashlight in the corner instead, standing on its head. When I click it on, I see that the room isn’t a room but a hallway leading farther into the depths of the house.
I turn to Mya. “You first.”
“No, thanks.”
I take a step into the darkness. The last room on the right is cluttered with furniture. A massive wooden desk takes up the majority of the stuffy room, but additional bookshelves, glass-doored cabinets, and unhung pictures line the walls of the room, not to mention about a half dozen mystery objects hidden under white sheets, because clearly this place needed some additional creep factor.
I’m now at least halfway sure we’ve crashed the wrong house. It’s only the wood carving of a plaque on the wall commemorating Roger A. and Adelle R. Peterson that gives me more confidence this place actually did belong to the grandparents I never met and who Dad hardly ever talks about.
* * *
“Maybe they were spies,” Mya says.
It’s this game we started playing when we got on the plane for America: Guess the grandparent. We’ve speculated everything from ornithologists to ghost hunters. I think we both just assumed that once we arrived at their house, it would become clear what they were and why they’ve always been such a closely kept secret. So far, the only clue into who our dad’s parents were is the picture hanging on the wall above the light switch: a man with a skinny tie and thick-rimmed glasses and a woman with hair wound up into a beehive. They have to be our grandparents. The way the man stands with his hands on the woman’s shoulders looks exactly like how Dad holds Mom … or how he used to hold her.
“They look like they’re in a lab,” I say, staring at the picture.
“Scientists?” Mya said. Strangely, that line of work never occurred to us. What could be so secretive about science?
“Where are you guys?” Mom calls from somewhere above.
Mya and I trot down the hall and up the back stairs to find Mom standing in the living room staring at the same sofa I was just looking at a few minutes before.
“Wait until you see the study,” I say to her, and she looks at me with equal parts humor and scorn.
“Well, I don’t suppose it was the easiest job, getting rid of all of the furniture after …”
After they died. That’s what she wants to say, but like everything since Germany, she’s tiptoeing around whatever she means.
Dad walks through the door behind her, and the three of us turn to see what he’ll do.
It’s hard to say what I’m expecting. After all, this is the house he grew up in. But he didn’t so much as blink when we drove underneath the iron archway welcoming us to the town of Raven Brooks, a place he says he hasn’t been since he first left it after college. And he didn’t say a word when we turned down Friendly Court and rolled up to the blue house alongside the moving truck. If Dad’s going to react to anything, this is his last chance to do it.
Maybe I caught him flinch. It was so tiny, almost a twitch of his jaw. Aside from that, though, Dad hardly lets on that the house should be familiar, that his formative years took place right here in these rooms, between these walls. He’s all business, quietly taking inventory of what furniture remains. When he finds Mya and me staring at him, he sets his face in a smile, ruffling my hair and tugging on Mya’s ponytail before walking back outside to bring in more boxes.
Mom was waiting for something, too; I can tell. Maybe some guidance about how she should be feeling. When she doesn’t get it, she turns to us, remembers her optimism, and says, “Have you picked your rooms yet?”
Mya switches gears a split second faster than me, and she’s up the stairs and down the hall before I can catch her. Luckily, she wants the room with the pink walls. I like pink, but something tells me I’d feel like I was drowning in cough syrup every morning when I woke up. I snag the room facing the street instead, and I like that just fine. There’s a tree that shades part of the room; when I open the window, I can practically touch the closest branch. There’s a bland but cozy-looking turquoise house across the street. And, tucked into the corner of the room, there’s already a desk with a nice fla
t surface for drawing.
I’ve just started imagining what I’ll sketch first when a thin, high whine wafts through the room.
My first thought is of a baby doll. There was this toy shop downstairs from our apartment in Germany that sold old novelties like jack-in-the-boxes and pinwheels. There was a doll with a string in the back of it that cried when you pulled it. Sometimes on warm nights when we had our windows open, I’d swear I could hear that weird doll crying in the distance, even though the shop was closed.
It’s weird how you can forget where you are so fast. But sounds can do that, and this sound brings me right back to our apartment.
Then, as quietly as it drifts toward me, the high whine drifts away, leaving behind a stillness in my new room that unnerves me.
When Mya pokes her head through the doorway, I jump enough to make her notice.
“Cripes, Mya! Wear a bell or something, would you?”
“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t such a …”
She tucks her fists under her armpits and flaps her arms slowly, holding eye contact.
“Oh, you’re dead,” I say, launching after her, and we nearly flatten the mover on the stairs who’s just trying to do his job.
* * *
All day I try to act normal, and I get the sense everyone else is trying, too. Dad cracks jokes about claiming his old room back (the bedroom I chose—complete with bunkbeds); Mya unpacks my lockpick set before my parents can see it and slips it to me behind her back; Mom hums and twirls around the kitchen while she puts coffee mugs into cupboards, retracing the steps to an old dance routine I remember she used to perform at Fernweh Welt, the last amusement park my dad designed.
It’s great that we’re all trying, but if I look too closely at Dad’s eyes, I can see the way he’s looking past me at this house that used to be his and suddenly is again. I can feel Mya’s hand trembling as she palms me my leather case of lockpicks. I can hear Mom’s humming falter the tiniest bit when she sings that old, familiar tune that used to pipe through the speakers of the performance stage.
When I can’t take all the trying anymore, I find myself in the basement—a little escape in this big house—and shut out the effort of it all. I just want to silence the questions piling up in my brain.
Bad Blood Page 1