by Melissa Marr
Beard roars up, rising tall on his knees as he swipes at Margie, hand slapping at her busted shoulder, which causes a surge of pain bright and intense to shatter across her mind, shutting her down.
Sally pulls into a ball, pressing her face against Margie’s side, trying to protect them both. Beard huffs, his mouth foaming as he stares at them huddled under his brother’s mangled body.
He holds out his hand. “Give me the gun,” he demands of Calvin, but Calvin doesn’t move. He stares at the two girls. Two broken bodies that moments before had been whole.
He did this. He helped break the world.
Beard spins toward him, his fingers clawed in a fervent fury. “Shoot them, Calvin. Stop acting like any of this means something and just do it!”
Margie’s senses clear bit by bit and she watches as something clicks in Calvin’s eyes. He aims the shotgun at her, and she takes a deep breath, waiting for him to pull the trigger. She always thought she’d be relieved in that moment but instead she feels the most intense regret.
She’s spent too much time scared. She should have gone to West Virginia with Sally. She shouldn’t have locked them in a cabin she knew would one day fail to protect them.
She thinks of all the notebooks filled with her sister’s handwriting. The trips had always been a lie.
Calvin stares at Margie. “You care about me?”
She doesn’t answer, just clenches her jaw as her cheeks burn with her own stupidity for trusting a stranger.
He steps closer to her, urgent. “Would you kill me for her?” He says it like they’re the only two people in the room. As if one brother isn’t dead and the other asking for her and her sister’s murder.
Margie doesn’t have to think before answering. “Yes.”
Calvin pulls the trigger. Outside a few birds scream and scatter into the trees.
“They wouldn’t have,” Calvin finally chokes out. “I’ve never meant enough to them. Ever.” Smoke twines around him, pungent and sweet. “Jeremy was wrong. It should mean something. Killing someone—I need it to still mean something. Or else everything in the world falls apart.”
Next to Margie, Sally rolls to her hands and knees and beats at Beard’s shot-shredded chest, blood splattering her fists and arms, caking her hair. It’s not enough she’s given up the world because of the dead, but to have been asked to give up this place, and the dreams it held, because of the living is too much.
Margie stares at Calvin. He pushes the gun into her hands, guiding the barrel until it’s wedged into the hollow of his collarbone. She doesn’t understand how everything’s changed again. How one minute she was death and then she was life and now she holds death in her hands again.
“I understand,” he says. “I know you’ll never trust me now. I understand that, and maybe that’s the way it goes. My death can mean something too.”
He pushes her finger onto the trigger. Behind her Sally finally sags against the wall, sobbing as her fingers curl on themselves, slick and bright.
Margie climbs to her feet, shoulder screaming as torn muscle protests the movement. Clutching the gun, she walks to the table where the maps are spread out, blood now spattered along the mountains and towns. She tries to wipe it away, but only ends up smearing them red.
She’d wanted to keep her sister safe. She’d wanted to keep a part of the world the way it was, before the change time, for Sally.
But she knows, now, there’s no escape from the monsters. They’ll always be there; you just choose to live with them or not. Sometimes you have to plan for another day—sometimes that’s all you have. “You said you’ve been to West Virginia,” she says. “You’ll show it to us?”
RED RUN
by Kami Garcia
No one drove on Red Run at night. People went fifteen miles out of their way to avoid the narrow stretch of dirt that passed for a road, between the single stoplight towns of Black Grove and Julette. Red Run was buried in the Louisiana backwoods, under the gnarled arms of oaks tall enough to scrape the sky. When Edie’s granddaddy was young, bootleggers used it to run moonshine down to New Orleans. It was easy to hide in the shadows of the trees, so dense they blocked out even the stars. But there was still a risk. If they were caught, the sheriff would hang them from those oaks, leaving their bodies for the gators, which is how the road earned its name.
The days of bootlegging were long gone, but folks had other reasons for steering clear of Red Run after dark. The road was haunted. A ghost had claimed eight lives in the last twenty years—Edie’s brother’s just over a year ago. No one wanted to risk a run-in with the blue-eyed boy. No one except Edie.
She was looking for him.
Tonight she was going to kill a ghost.
Edie didn’t realize how long she had been driving until her favorite Jane’s Addiction song looped for the third time. Edie was beginning to wonder if she was going to find him at all, as she passed the rotted twin pines that marked the halfway point between the two nothing little towns—when she saw him. He was standing in the middle of the road, on the wavering yellow carpet of her headlights. His eyes reflected the light like a frightened animal, but he looked as real as any boy she’d ever seen. Even if he was dead.
She slammed on the brakes instinctively, and dust flew up around the Jeep and into the open windows. When it skidded to a stop, he was standing in front of the bumper, tiny particles of dirt floating in the air around him.
For a second, neither one of them moved. Edie was holding her breath, staring out beyond the headlights at the tall boy whose skin was too pale and eyes too blue.
“I’m okay, if you’re worried,” he called out, squinting into the light.
Edie clutched the vinyl steering wheel, her hands sweaty and hot. She knew she should back up—throw the car into reverse until he was out of sight—but even with her heart thudding in her ears, she couldn’t do it.
He half-smiled awkwardly, brushing the dirt off his jeans. He had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, and curly dark hair that was too long in places and too short in others, like he had cut it himself. “I’m not from around here.”
She already knew that.
He walked toward her dented red Jeep, tentatively. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”
It was a question no one ever asked her. In elementary school, Edie was the kid with the tangled blond braids. The one whose overalls were too big and too worn at the knees. Her parents never paid much attention to her. They were busy working double shifts at the refinery. Her brother was the one who wove her hair into those braids, tangled or not.
“I’m fine.” Edie shook her head, black bobbed hair swinging back and forth against her jaw.
He put his hand on the hood and bent down next to her open window. “Is there any way I could get a ride into town?”
Edie knew the right answer. Just like she knew she shouldn’t be driving on Red Run in the middle of the night. But she hadn’t cared about what was right, or anything at all, for a long time. A year and six days exactly—since the night her brother died. People had called it an accident, as if somehow that made it easier to live with. But everyone knew there were no accidents on Red Run.
That was the night Edie cut her hair with her mother’s craft scissors, the ones with the orange plastic handles. It was also the night she hung out with Wes and Trip behind the Gas & Go for the first time, drinking Easy Jesus and warm Bud Light until her brother’s death felt like a dream she would forget in the morning. The three of them had been in class together since kindergarten, but they didn’t run in the same crowd. When Wes and Trip weren’t smoking behind the school or hanging out in the cemetery, they were holed up in Wes’ garage, building weird junk they never let anyone see. Edie’s mom thought they were building pipe bombs.
But they were building something else.
The blue-eyed boy was still leaning into the window. “So can I get a ride?” He was watching her from under his long, straight lashes. They almost touched his cheeks when he blink
ed.
She leaned back into the sticky seat, trying to create some space between them. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”
Would he admit he was out here to kill her?
“My parents kicked me out, and I’m headed for Baton Rouge. I’ve got family down there.” He watched her, waiting for a reaction.
Was this part of the game?
“Get in,” she said, before she could change her mind.
The boy walked around the car and opened the door. The rusty hinges creaked, and it reminded Edie of the first time Wes opened the garage door and invited her inside.
The garage was humid and dark, palmetto bugs scurrying across the concrete floor for the corners. Two crooked pine tables were outfitted with vises and tools Edie didn’t recognize. Wire and scrap metal littered the floor, attached to homemade-looking machines that resembled leaky car batteries. There were other salvaged and tricked-out contraptions—dials that looked like speedometers, a portable sonar from a boat, and a long needle resting on a spool of paper that reminded her of those lie detectors you saw on television.
“What is all this stuff?”
Wes and Trip glanced at each other before Wes answered, “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
Edie took another swig of Easy Jesus, the liquid burning its way down her throat. She liked the way it felt going down, knowing it would burn through her memories just as fast.
“Cross my heart and hope I die,” she slurred.
“It’s hope to die,” Trip said, kicking an empty beer can out of his way. “You said it wrong.”
Edie stared back at him, her dark eyes glassy. “No, I didn’t.” She tossed the empty bottle at a green plastic trash can in the corner, but she missed and it hit the concrete, shattering. “So are you gonna tell me what you’re doing with all this crap?”
Wes picked up a hunk of metal with long yellow wires dangling from the sides like the legs of a mechanical spider. “You won’t believe us.”
He was right. The only thing she believed in now was Easy Jesus. Remembering every day to forget. “Try me.”
Wes looked her straight in the eye, sober and serious. He flicked a switch on the machine and it whirred to life. “We’re hunting ghosts.”
Edie didn’t have time to think about hanging out with Wes and Trip in the garage. She needed to focus on the things they had taught her.
She was driving slower than usual, her hands glued to the wheel so the blue-eyed boy wouldn’t notice how badly they were shaking. “Where are you from?”
“You know, you really shouldn’t pick up strangers.” His voice was light and teasing, but Edie noticed he didn’t answer the question.
“You shouldn’t get in the car with strangers either,” she countered. “Especially not around here.”
He shifted his body toward her, his white ribbed tank sliding over his skin instead of sticking to it the way Edie’s clung to hers. The cracked leather seat didn’t make a sound. “What do you mean?”
She felt a wave of satisfaction. “You’ve never heard the stories about Red Run? You must live pretty far away.”
“What kind of stories?”
Edie stared out at the wall of trees closing in around them. It wasn’t an easy story to tell, especially if you were sitting a foot from the boy who died at the end of it. “About twenty years ago, someone died out here. He was about your age—”
“How do you know how old I am?” His voice was thick and sweet, all honey and molasses.
“Eighteen?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Good guess. So what happened to him?”
Edie knew the story by heart. “It was graduation night. There was a party in Black Grove and everyone went, even Tommy Hansen. He was quiet and always kept to himself. My mom says he was good-looking, but none of the girls were interested in him because his family was dirt-poor. His dad ran off and his mother worked at the funeral home, dressing the bodies for viewings.”
Edie saw him cringe in the seat beside her, but she kept going. “Tommy worked at the gas station to help out and spent the rest of his time alone, playing a beat-up guitar. He wanted to be a songwriter, and was planning to leave for Nashville that weekend. If the party had been a few days later, he might have made it.”
And her brother would still be alive.
Edie remembered the night her brother died, his body stretched out in the middle of the road. She had stepped too close, and a pool of blood had gathered around the toes of her sneakers. She had stared down at the thick liquid, wondering why they called the road Red Run. The blood was as black as ink.
“Are you going to tell me how that kid Tommy died?” The boy was watching her from under those long eyelashes.
Edie’s heart started racing. “They had a keg in the woods, and everyone was wasted. Especially Katherine Day, the prettiest girl in school. People who remember say that Katherine drank her weight in cheap beer and wandered into the trees to puke. Tommy saw her stumbling around and followed her. This is the part where folks disagree; in one version of the story, Tommy sat with Katherine while she threw up all over her fancy white sundress. In the other version, Katherine forgot about how poor Tommy was—or noticed how good-looking he was—and kissed him. Either way, the end is the same.” Edie paused, measuring his reaction. At this point in the story, people were usually on pins and needles.
But the blue-eyed boy was staring back at her evenly from the passenger seat, as if he already knew the way it ended.
“Don’t you want to know what happened next?”
He smiled, but there was something wrong about it. His eyes were vacant and far away. Was he remembering? He sensed Edie watching him, and the faraway look was gone. “Yeah. How did he go from making out with the prettiest girl in school to getting killed?”
“I didn’t say he was killed.” Edie tried to hide the fear in her voice. She didn’t want him to know she was afraid.
“You said he died, right?”
She didn’t point out that dying and being killed weren’t the same thing. If Edie hadn’t known she was in over her head the minute he got in the car, she knew now. But it was too late. “Katherine was dating a guy on the wrestling team, or maybe it was the football team, I can’t remember. But he caught them together—kissing or talking or whatever they were doing—and dragged Tommy out of the woods with a bunch of his friends.”
The boy’s blue eyes were fixed on her now. “Then what happened?” His voice was so quiet she had trouble hearing him over the crickets calling out in the darkness.
“They beat him to death. Right here on Red Run. Some guy who lived out in the woods saw the whole thing.”
The boy nodded, staring out the window as the white bark of the pines blurred alongside the car. “So that’s why no one drives on this road at night?”
Edie laughed, but the sound was bitter and cold. About as far away from happy as it could be. “This is the Bayou. If you avoided every road where someone died, there wouldn’t be any roads left. Folks don’t drive on Red Run at night because Tommy Hansen’s ghost has killed six people about our age. They say he kills the boys because they remind him of the guys who beat him to death, and the girls because they remind him of Katherine.”
Edie pictured her brother lying in the glow of the police cruiser’s spotlight, bathed in red. She had knelt down in the sticky dirt, pressing her face against his chest. Will’s heart was beating, the rhythm uneven and faint.
“Edie?” She felt his chest rise as he whispered her name.
She cradled his face in her hands, but he was staring blankly beyond her. “I’m here, Will,” she choked. “What happened?”
Will strained to focus on Edie’s tear-stained face. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna be okay.” But his eyes told a different story.
“I should have listened . . .”
Will never finished. But she didn’t need to hear the rest.
Edie could feel the blue-eyed boy watching her. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep
from crying. She had to hold it together a little while longer.
“You really believe a ghost is out here killing people?” He sounded disappointed. “You look smarter than that.”
Edie gripped the steering wheel tighter. He had no idea how smart. “I take it you don’t?”
He looked away. “Ghosts are apparitions. They can’t actually hurt anyone.”
“Sounds like you know a lot about ghosts.”
It was the same thing Edie said the second time she hung out with Wes and Trip in the filthy garage. Wes was adjusting some kind of gadget that looked like a giant calculator, with a meter and a needle where the display would normally have been. “We know enough.”
“Enough for what?” She imagined the two of them wandering around with their oversized calculators, searching for ghosts the way people troll the beach for loose change and jewelry with metal detectors.
“I told you, we hunt ghosts.” Wes tossed the device to Trip, who opened the back with a screwdriver and changed the batteries.
Edie settled into the cushions on the ratty plaid couch. “So you hang out in haunted houses and take pictures, like those guys on TV?”
Trip laughed. “Hardly. Those guys aren’t ghost hunters. They’re glorified photographers. We don’t stand around taking pictures.” Trip tossed the screwdriver onto the rotting workbench. “We send the ghosts back where they belong.”
Wes and Trip weren’t as stupid as Edie had assumed. In fact, if the two of them had ever bothered to enter the science fair, they would’ve won. They knew more about science, physics mainly—energy, electromagnetism, frequency, and matter—than any of the teachers at school. And they were practically engineers, capable of building almost anything with some wires and scrap metal. Wes explained that the human body was made up of electricity—electrical impulses that keep you alive. When a person died, those impulses changed form, resulting in ghosts.
Edie only understood about half of what he was saying. “How do you know? Maybe it just disappears.”