by Gregory Ashe
Three of them.
By the time I looked back at the first one, he had crossed half the distance between us, and he carried a buck knife as long as his forearm. My grin tore the corners of my mouth. This was going to be so much fun. I settled in, ready to pull him apart—all three of him—as soon as he was close enough. I was going to enjoy him. I’d go slower this time. I’d coil each thread around my fingers, feeling the pulse of his heart wild and erratic, and I’d let myself have a taste, just a taste, of his terror. It would be sweet, it would be sweeter than anything in my whole life, but I’d only let myself taste. And a part of me, deep down, was screaming, but it didn’t matter. I would twine the fiber of his existence around my hand and drink deep of his terror, drink until it filled me, drink until—
I was standing on the other side. That was the only explanation for how I survived, for how I managed to keep my sight. In this projection of my psyche, I watched as a lightning bolt struck from a clear night sky.
EVEN WITHOUT PHYSICAL EYES to damage, I still lost sight for a moment. The flare from the lightning whited out everything. It didn’t lift the hairs on my arms; at least, not on the other side. But behind the lightning, energy thrummed. Real energy, something more powerful than the lightning. A version of the same energy that had carried me here, into the other side. A version, but not the same. And that seemed important. It was like tasting two vanilla ice creams. They could be very, very similar. But they weren’t the same. And that was important, that was—
Exhaustion hit me so hard and so suddenly that I never even had a chance at keeping myself on the other side. My physical body dragged me back, and the hypersaturated, hypertextured vision of the other side vanished.
Croaking, I gasped for air. My next breath was nitrogen and ozone, all the oxygen fried out of the world. I gasped again, and again, and then air, real air, rushed into my lungs, and I propped myself on my hands and threw up. My arms trembled. My fingers slipped along the cool grass. I had to fight to keep my head up. I had to fight to drag my knees up under me. And that was it, that was as far as I could go. I didn’t have any more fight left.
Not until I remembered Austin. And then I managed to crawl. My eye throbbed from the punch Emmett had landed earlier, and it was already starting to swell. Squinting through the puffy folds of flesh, I tried to orient myself.
The lightning had ripped open a hole in the ground. Krystal was gone. No smoking, severed leg. No burnt-sole sneaker. Nothing. And I thought of how her spirit had flaked into ash and blown away. How much of her had been left for the lightning?
There was no sign, either, of the Crow boy. No sign of Kyle or Leo. My ears were ringing, I realized, but the sound was so high and so persistent that it had passed until now for background static. Dirt stained my knuckles, and small lumps of clay clung to the dusting of blond hair on my arms. When I crawled forward another pace, dust rolled between my shoulder blades and curved along my spine. So much fucking dirt. The lightning had blown a metric ton of it into the sky.
But the lightning hadn’t knocked out the lights, and they still spilled their milky enamel along the lawn. I found the edge of the driveway and crawled. Grass tickled between my fingers. I couldn’t think about that. I’d never look at grass the same way again. Not grass, not weeds, not creepers, not brambles.
When I got to the length of vine, dead and limp, I couldn’t go any farther. Not for ten seconds. Maybe twenty. And then I made myself think of the time I had fallen off a horse and Austin had caught me, and the way his arms had felt around me, and the smell of his shirt and the way a patch of skin on his chest, visible at the collar, pebbled when he held me. I hadn’t known, back then, what I knew now. And that was enough for me to force myself to slide one knee gingerly over the vine, to wait for it to lash around my wrist or ankle or throat. Nothing. It was dead. Krystal was dead. I had shredded her spirit, the same way I had shredded Mr. Big Empty. I had dragged her from one side to the other and left less than nothing of her spirit.
I gagged, but there was nothing left to bring up. I kept going.
Austin lay there, exactly as before. He looked so small and helpless. Maybe people looked somehow bigger because when they were alive, there was something filling them up: air, water, light, life. I touched his chin, tilted his head, and withdrew my hand. His head lolled back. Heavy. Dead weight.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Emmett stumbled out of the darkness. Weeds had scratched red tallies along his wrists, up his arms, in the hollow of his throat. The death of a thousand cuts. Fuck, it looked like it hurt. But his face still held the same luminous intensity that had transfixed me earlier. No matter what everyone else saw—the kids who laughed with him at lunch, the girls who fainted when he walked past, the boys who trailed in his steps trying to be like him—this was the real Emmett: hurt to the point of breaking, frightened to the edge of rational thought, and yet holding everything together through sheer force of will. And mine. Here, tonight, alone, only the two of us, he was mine. The way he was meant to be.
I crushed out that last string of thoughts as Emmett came closer. He dropped next to me, yelped as his twisted foot shifted, and elbowed me out of the way.
“He was breathing before, tweaker. Start the CPR checklist.”
Shaking my head, I put up my hands. “I don’t know CPR. I never even had a class, I never even—”
“You’re so fucking useless. All those fucking muscles and you can’t do anything. Move.”
I scooted back, and Emmett took my place. Kneeling over Austin, he performed the same routine he had done before, setting two fingers to Austin’s neck and his ear against Austin’s mouth. I watched in a daze. All I could do was watch. In the background, ringing the edge of my mind, the pain was waiting. The physical pain, sure. The cuts and bruises from Krystal’s vines and weeds. The puffy eye Emmett had given me. Even the concussive aftereffects of the lightning bolt—it was all waiting, and in a minute, it would rush in and take me. But for that minute, all I could do was watch, my lips moving silently.
Or I thought they were moving silently until Emmett told me to shut up.
“Quit watching,” Emmett said. He didn’t look at me. “Skeev.”
But his split lip tugged at the corner.
I was about to say something back. I was about to ask what was going on—how he could hold a gun on me, how he could watch while Lawayne touched my back, how he could kneel here, now, and tend to Austin like all he’d ever wanted to do was help. But before I could pull the words together, movement caught my eye, and I looked up the length of the driveway.
Two figures were coming toward us, and it was easy to make out who they were because one of them was on fire. Mr. Spencer wore oxblood loafers, chinos cuffed to show bare ankles, and a paisley shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He probably could have passed for a guy walking off an ad shoot—Gucci, Armani, J. Crew—except for the fact that fire plumed and curtained out around him. His hair trailed embers, and the blond had vanished into a red like copper in a furnace.
At his side, in a t-shirt that said, Conan, what is best in life? and a pair of Chuck Taylors, came Ms. Meehan. She looked tinier than ever next to the enormous, flaming whirlwind that surrounded Mr. Spencer, but she didn’t seem troubled by the heat. As I watched, a line of blue static charge worked its way to the end of her short hair and arced out into the night. Nothing on her face changed; I wasn’t even sure she noticed.
Then Austin groaned faintly, and my eyes snapped back to him.
“Austin.” I didn’t remember shouldering past Emmett. One minute I was flat on my ass, watching everything fall to shit, and the next minute I was pressed up against Austin, drawing him into one arm, my other hand touching his face, his chin, his jaw, his ears, his eyebrows. I had to scrub my arm over my eyes. He just had such fucking beautiful eyebrows. And then I had to scrub my eyes all over again.
“Vie?” he croaked.
“Yeah. Hey. Oh fuck, I’m here, Aus. I’m right here. D
on’t try to talk all right.” I couldn’t stop touching him. His lips. The hollow of his temples. The line of his neck. The vee of chest that showed above his collar. “You’re fine, you’re going to be fine, right? Just don’t try to say anything. Just—just keep breathing, all right? We’re going to get you to the hospital, and we’re going to make sure you’re fine, and all you have to do is keep breathing, all right?”
His head lolled, and he snuggled into the crook of my elbow, and then he paused. In that same horrible, broken voice, he whispered, “Why are you touching my eyebrows?”
“I don’t know. Fuck me, I don’t have any fucking idea.” But I didn’t stop, either.
I wasn’t sure what made me look up, but I did, and my eyes went to Emmett. Some of the control had gone out of his face. Some of the fear. And there was something else there, something like a shadow swallowing all of him except those dark eyes. And they weren’t funhouse eyes. They weren’t darkness. They weren’t that empty void where I didn’t know up from down. They weren’t empty at all, in fact. They held one thing reflected in the firelight that Mr. Spencer threw off. One thing that filled them up completely. Me.
And that scared me so bad that I looked down at Austin again, and I was sure, a moment later, that it had been my imagination, or a trick of the light, or anything but what, for a moment, I thought it had been.
“Where’d they go?” Mr. Spencer’s voice reached me at the same time as the heat he was throwing off. Red and orange light streamed across the asphalt, brighter and brighter, until he stood a few feet away, and I had to put my free arm over my eyes. Even then, the heat was so intense that my skin prickled like the start of a sunburn. “Kaden called us from the car. Where are they?”
“I don’t know.” I jerked a thumb where I’d last seen them. “Everything went white for a while. When I could see again, they were gone.” I swallowed. “Krystal’s dead. The Crow boy, too. That kid, I mean. He was standing—”
“That one isn’t dead.” Ms. Meehan’s voice was crisp, dry, and disappointed.
“I’ll check.” Mr. Spencer jogged toward the edge of Emmett’s property. I could see, now, where a chunk of fencing had been ripped away. In the light cast by Mr. Spencer’s fire, the cement at the base of each post was visible. Someone—Kyle, I guessed—had ripped out an entire section of the fence. Alone. And he’d pulled it out of the ground like me pinching out a staple, all the way down to the cement foundation. I shivered.
Mr. Spencer followed the property line. His feet burned black tracks into the ground, and fire dripped off him, sizzling and leaving pinprick holes in the grass. It was like watching someone who had been doused with jellied gasoline and set on fire decide to jog a mile. Then he disappeared around the side of Emmett’s house, and all I could track was the bubble of orange light bobbing on the other side of the windows.
Sharrika Meehan walked a tight square around the three of us. When Emmett tried to stand, she settled one hand on his shoulder. He sank down again, and she paced the square again, and nobody said anything. I glanced at the gaping hole in Emmett’s lawn. Nothing was left of Krystal. No shoes with smoke wisping off the soles. No fried corpse. Not even the lingering aroma of singed hair. The only smells were the woodsmoke heat of Mr. Spencer’s fire and the lingering whiff of burnt electronics. Ozone, courtesy of my new science teacher.
“I need to leave.” Emmett didn’t look up. I studied him, waiting for a glance, a flick of his eyes, anything, but he didn’t look at me. For the first time that night, he didn’t look at me. He’d looked at me down the barrel of a gun. He’d looked at me while Lawayne pawed me, counting every scar out loud. He’d looked at me after he’d brought Austin back to me, and at the thought, my arms tightened reflexively around my boyfriend. He grunted, the sound cracked and warbling, but he nuzzled deeper into my arm. His breathing still sounded good, and that was because of Emmett. I had Austin here, now, in my arms, because of Emmett.
“I need to go,” Emmett said again, his gaze shifting now to Ms. Meehan. “I can’t be here. I’ve probably already fucked up everything.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Ms. Meehan boxed us in again, and this time, her attention was on me. I met her eyes—dark, very large in her small, delicate face. No more electricity climbed her short, stiff hair, but she still carried herself like a woman with a rifle up against her shoulder. Only she didn’t need a rifle. She was the rifle. She was a goddamn ballistic missile.
“What?” I finally said.
“I really need to get out of here,” Emmett said.
Neither of us so much as glanced at Emmett. “You’re cute,” she said to me. “Your grades are shit, but you’re cute, and I bet you’ve ridden that a long way. Grades are more important, though.”
“What the fuck is this? An after-school special? Who the fuck cares about my grades?”
Austin’s hand found my wrist and squeezed once. A warning.
“You’re going to want good grades when you apply to college. You can’t fix the semesters that are already closed, but you can still do well going forward. I pulled some of your testing. You’re smart.”
Smoothing Austin’s hair, I bent over him and tried to ignore her.
“You’re not a genius. You’re not going to be valedictorian.”
“If I go, right now, I’ll still have time. But I’ve got to go.”
“But you’re smart. You’re not going to get into Harvard. But you’re smart enough to get in somewhere.”
“I don’t want to go to Harvard. Will you shut up? I’m trying to listen to his breathing.”
“You’re definitely not going to get into Harvard if you tell your teachers to shut up. You’re not going to get into Wyoming State if you tell your teachers to shut up. You’re going to be lucky if you get into community college if you tell your teachers to shut up.”
“Lady,” I said, my eyes finding hers. There was no emotion in them. Only a detached interest, like I was a beetle she’d trapped under a glass. “If you don’t shut up right fucking now, you’re going to find out exactly how I feel about my teachers.”
A static charge hummed in the air, and the hair on my arms lifted. Austin twitched and tried to stiffen. When he ran his hand up my arm, his touch sparked along my shirt.
“If you want to scare me,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice was, surprised at how easily my arms curled around Austin, surprised at how ready I was—eager, even—to come apart the way I had earlier, to be fully on the other side, and to rip out every stitch of this woman’s soul. “You’re going to have to do better.”
Sharrika Meehan stared at me. I stared back.
“I can get my car,” Emmett said, and then his voice died, and he shrank into himself. So much, a distant part of my mind thought, for that beautiful, furious, defiant Emmett I had seen just a few minutes before. What had changed? But the voice was too small, and I was too angry, and the thought vanished in a heartbeat.
The squeak of sneakers of asphalt broke the tension. Mr. Spencer trotted to a stop next to Ms. Meehan.
“Everything ok?”
I bent over Austin again, my fingers teasing down his hair.
“What happened?”
Ms. Meehan didn’t say anything, but her clothing rustled as she shifted her weight.
“I really need to go,” Emmett said. “Mr. Spencer, you’ve got to let me go. I’ve got to get out of here before—”
“Before I remember,” I said, my head coming up, “that you’re a fucking traitor, that you drew a bead on me, that you would have shot me, that you—”
That you let him do that. That you let him touch me. That you let him count every scar, and you watched, and you knew what it would do to me. Austin was right about that. He was right about you, and damn you for making him right. You knew what he’d do to me, and you let it happen.
I shook off the thought, but it had come on too strongly and too clearly, and I’d lost the t
rain of my words. In the back of my head, the bleak gleam of the table saw began to spin again. Emmett had arranged this. He had wanted it to happen. He had known what it would do to me. And he had watched. The blade spun faster. And faster. It burned white. It shone like water off a high cliff. It was the moon.
Then Austin’s fingers found the cuff on my sleeve, and he slid his hand under the cloth, his grip soft and solid on my arm.
“I want somebody to walk me through what’s going on,” Mr. Spencer said. “Emmett, let’s get inside—”
“No,” Emmett and I said at the same time.
“Lawayne’s still in there,” I said.
“I’ve got to go. Right now. Mr. Spencer, can I just talk to you? Alone? One minute, that’s all I’m asking.”
“No. We’re all going. Mr. Spencer, we’re going to have to take Emmett with us, but we can’t trust him. You’ll have to watch him; Austin’s pretty bad, and I need to get him to the hospital now.”
“One minute. One minute, Mr. Spencer.”
“No fucking way. Jim, get him on his fucking feet, and get him somewhere you can keep him. I’m taking Austin to the hospital right now. Kaden’s got his car—shit.” I shook my head, hearing Kaden’s final scream again, watching the car tumble through the air like a sloppy pitch. “I’ll have to borrow your car. When I know Austin’s stable, I’ll come back, and we can take Emmett somewhere else. Somewhere we can talk.”
I leveled a look at Emmett, waiting for him to shrink, for those funhouse eyes to flit away, for the color to leach out of his cheeks. Instead, though, he squared his shoulders. His eyes came up as far as my chin; not my eyes, but close. And he was looking dangerously resolute again. And dangerously beautiful. And his eyes, if he looked up another inch, just another inch, would swallow me again.
“All right,” Mr. Spencer said.
Ms. Meehan’s head whipped toward him. “Jimmy, there’s no way we’re letting a kid—”
“He’s not a kid. Not anymore. And I trust his judgment.” Fishing his keys out of his pocket, he added, “Car’s up at the road. Kaden’s in the back. He’s probably still moaning, but he’ll be fine. They just need to clean him up.”