Brian saw him.
“Will?” his old friend whispered. “Oh, shit, Will, hang on.” Frantically, Brian began to climb down. Which was an incredibly stupid thing for him to do.
“Son of a bitch,” Will muttered as he reached the tree.
He reached up and grabbed the back of Brian's shirt, then yanked him from his perch. Brian's fingers stretched out, hands scrabbling for purchase, but it was too late. He fell from the branches and landed hard on his back on the grass with a grunt as the air was expelled from his lungs. Brian groaned and began to shake his head even as Will attacked him.
“Stop,” Brian rasped thinly, trying to catch his breath. He held up both hands. Will slapped them away, dropped to his knees, and hauled on the front of Brian's shirt.
“Stop?” he hissed. “Did that work when you were raping Ashleigh? What about with Tess?”
His vision seemed to tunnel then, the night deepening around him so that he could see only Brian. Will hit him three times in rapid succession, clutching his shirt with his left fist and striking with his right. Blood and spittle sprayed from Brian's mouth and there were strings of it in his thin goatee.
“Jesus, Will, stop,” Brian wheezed. “It wasn't me. I swear to—”
Will wrapped his hands around Brian's throat and began to choke him. The pleading in Brian's eyes only maddened him further, and he slammed the man's head against the ground again and again, feeling thick corded muscles beneath his fingers and digging deeper into his throat.
A hideous little laugh burst from Will's lips. “Wasn't you? How stupid do you think I am?”
But even as he spoke these words, Will moved ever so slightly, so that the full light of the moon could shine upon Brian's bloodied features. There were multiple bruises there, some of them several days old. A single tear slipped out the side of Brian's right eye and slid, glistening in the moonlight, along his temple to drop into the grass. Without even realizing it, Will began to relax his grip on Brian's throat.
Changing his past had changed him. Will knew that. The violence and heartache that had been wrought upon his memories had tainted him. But how much? he wondered. Just how much?
Teeth gritted in confusion and anguish, he bent over Brian and met his gaze with a primal hatred that unnerved him. “Who else could it have been? I was there, Brian. We were in it together, remember? I saw the look in your eyes when we cursed Dori, and when we promised each other we'd never go near magic or that fucking book again. You had a hard-on for it the way you never did for anything or anyone else.”
Brian nodded frantically, licking blood from his lips. When he spoke it was in gasps. “I did. I . . . I liked it, Will. And I lied. I didn't stop.”
“And now you've gone too far,” Will snarled.
“No,” Brian shook his head. “I swear I—”
Will cracked a backhand across his face that sent a satisfying spike of pain through his own knuckles. Brian shook it off, his trepidation being replaced by anger now. He glared up at Will and spat a wad of bloody saliva into his face.
“Listen to me, you dense son of a bitch!” he roared.
On instinct, Will held him down and turned to look up at Ashleigh's window. A figure moved past the glass. She had to have heard, but with the light on she wouldn't be able to see out into the darkness of her backyard.
The room went dark.
“Shit,” Will snapped. He glared down at Brian, then grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come on.”
The last thing he needed was for Ashleigh to have him arrested.
Will hustled Brian across the Wheelers' backyard toward the line of tall bushes that separated it from his own, back the way he had come. Brian did not fight him. If anything, he moved faster than Will. They slipped through the bushes and Will spun him around.
“Not a sound,” he whispered in the dark.
They stood still, Will listening to the ragged breathing of this man, this guy who had once been his friend, who had lied to him, who had killed and raped and violated every natural law.
Yet there in the darkness, with the scents of October and evergreen in his nostrils, all he could think about were the times they had thrown snowballs or crabapples at passing cars and had to run to hide in bushes or behind houses. How many times had they stood, partially hunched just as they were now, breathing heavily but grinning widely, barely able to catch their breath enough to laugh, waiting in silence for the danger of discovery to pass?
“Hello?”
Ashleigh's voice, a stage whisper, was carrying across the backyards. Will had often used the tree in the back to climb up and see her. They would talk quietly, him hanging in the branches and Ashleigh sitting comfortably in her window seat. He had learned more of her secrets and her hopes and her fears there in that intimate darkness than anywhere else. Later, Eric had visited her up that tree as well, sometimes slipping into her room, and other times Ashleigh had slipped out. But that wasn't the same. Though he had never been able to say exactly why, Eric's visits had spoiled it for Will, and he had for the most part stopped climbing that tree. He could always talk to Ashleigh on the phone or just ring the doorbell.
It just wasn't the same.
Now, as she called out into the darkness, Will was struck by her voice. Sometimes he dreamed they were all kids again, but in his dreams none of the details was ever right. The truth was, though it saddened him, many of the details were lost to him. He had forgotten what Ashleigh's voice had sounded like at seventeen. For a moment, when she spoke, he couldn't breathe. The world went off kilter and his equilibrium shifted; conflicting memories flickered through his mind, colliding with the truth of his presence here.
“Shit.” He sighed. Enough of that. There's no going back now.
“Is anyone out there?” Ashleigh whispered.
Will did not dare try to catch a glimpse of her. His grip on Brian's shirt had loosened, and his fingers were wet with Brian's blood. As his heartbeat slowed and the adrenaline rush subsided, he glanced at his old friend's bruised and bloodied face. Brian stared at him intently, despair etched upon his features.
“Listen,” Brian whispered.
Will's nostrils flared and he tightened his grip, shaking Brian. “Quiet.”
Brian's lips peeled back in a distorted grin, his goatee giving him a devilish air. “Asshole,” he murmured. His right hand came up quickly, fingers curled, contorted. He spoke another word, one Will did not understand.
Will lifted off the grass, pitched forward, but did not hit the ground. Reflexively he let go of Brian and found himself levitating three feet in the air. A shout of alarm and anger came to his lips but he held it back, mindful of Ashleigh, wondering if her window was still open. Wide-eyed, he stared at Brian as doubt seeped into his mind.
“You could've done this anytime?” he asked.
Brian ran a hand through his dark hair, gingerly touched his split lip and winced, pulled his fingers back, and looked at his own blood glistening in the moonlight.
“Not anytime,” he said. “It isn't easy. It makes me tired. And I have to be able to concentrate. You didn't give me much of a chance.”
They spoke in the smallest of whispers and Will's doubts grew. Brian had been willing to take off instead of being discovered by Ashleigh. He had cooperated in remaining quiet. Will stared at him.
“I'm listening.”
A dark, unpleasant chuckle came from Brian's throat. “You don't have a choice.”
With that, he waved his hand through the air and Will collapsed upon the ground with a grunt. Brian poked his head through the bushes and then withdrew, crouching by Will's side.
“She's got her light back on,” he said, wincing from the pain in his face, tracing a finger from his jaw to his left ear, perhaps an aching jaw muscle. Then he let out a short breath and focused on Will again. “I felt it, too. I mean, I'm assuming that's what happened to you. Memories changing. The past . . . changing. It's like someone's overwriting the disk of this week i
n my . . . in our lives.”
“Like shuffling cards,” Will suggested, putting voice to the image that had been with him all along. “Taking the familiar ones and replacing them with a new hand.”
But still his eyes were narrowed with suspicion.
Brian nodded. “I wanted to talk to you at the football game, but there were too many people around. Plus I . . . well, I figured it was you. I mean, who else could it be? So I had to assume it was you, right up until you came into Papillon and fucking attacked me.” He touched the old bruises high on his right cheek. “That was quite a spectacle. I was too confused to try any magic, not that I would've done anything in front of everyone anyway. And I understood why you were doing it.”
An unpleasant smile flickered across his features. “But that's a conversation for later.” Brian sat cross-legged on the grass. The autumn wind carried his whispered words so that it seemed he was speaking directly into Will's ear. “You didn't show up at brunch the day after the debacle at Papillon. Obviously everyone was worried about you. Caitlyn talked to Ashleigh. Danny had been over to your apartment. None of your neighbors had seen you. On Monday, Ashleigh called Caitlyn back and told her you hadn't shown up at work.”
Will's stomach did a queasy flip. “So I don't get back?”
Brian shrugged. “You wouldn't necessarily get back at the same time you left. On the other hand, it's possible you came back here and blew it completely.” He ran his tongue over his swollen, bloody lips. “I knew what was happening. No way to explain it to anyone else, of course. But one look at your face Saturday night, the things you'd said, and then you go missing? I knew you had to have done it. And since you hadn't come back, I thought you might need some help.”
He gestured toward his battered face. “In exchange, I get a tune-up.”
Will couldn't help smiling. “A tune-up? You've been watching too many cop shows.”
“That's what you always say.”
The humor drained out of Will. It was too strange, too awkward to be Brian's friend right now. “I used to. 'Cause it was true.” They sat there in the darkness, hidden from the Wheelers' house by the bushes but in full sight of the Jameses' back porch. The house was quiet, though there was the blue flicker from his parents' television in their bedroom window. Will wondered what time it was.
“I'd done the spell before. Just once,” Brian said, unable to meet Will's eyes. “I wanted to see my grandfather again.”
Will nodded. “That's how you could do the spell without having the book.”
“Once you've done it—”
“It marks you,” Will finished. He glanced down at himself as though he might see the invisible traces left on him by the magic he and Brian had performed years before. It had left scars beneath the skin.
“The spell left me right on my front steps,” Brian said, brow furrowed in contemplation. “I guess it matches you up with the location of your . . . earlier self. Good thing it didn't plunk me down on the couch next to my old self. Not sure I could've dealt with that.”
Will said nothing. He didn't want to think about himself and Caitlyn in the cemetery. There were things he was just going to have to deal with, but he wanted to take them one at a time.
“So you came over here thinking you could get Ashleigh's help. You figured you needed transportation, maybe money, a change of clothes.”
Brian nodded.
“Why Ashleigh?” Will asked. “You guys weren't that tight.”
“I knew you'd come back already. I didn't know what day, but I figured we'd both try to get here before all the terrible shit started happening,” Brian said. “I knew if you needed help, you'd come to Ashleigh. The young me or the young you, we'd have a hell of a time convincing them. We were arrogant little shits. But Ashleigh . . . she had more imagination than she ever let on. And she loved you more than anything. You could convince her. And if you hadn't shown up yet, I figured I could convince her, and if I couldn't, I could tell her you needed her help and at least she'd listen to me before calling the cops.”
They stared at one another. Will lifted his chin and regarded Brian carefully. “You know this doesn't make any sense. This isn't random. We had that damned book. Me and you. Now someone's using the magic in Dark Gifts to tear our lives apart . . . to hurt people from our past . . .” He glanced around. “From here and now. It's got to be connected to us, or connected to that book, or both. Your memories are shifting, but unless you're the guy responsible, you don't know the whole story. You know somebody killed Mike Lebo. But Tess was raped.”
He lowered his voice even further so that it was barely audible, even to his own ears.
“And so was Ashleigh.”
When Will looked up and saw the stricken expression on Brian's face, the pain in his eyes, he could almost force himself to believe his old friend had nothing to do with the terrors that were to come in the days ahead. Brian said nothing, just sucked air in through gritted teeth as though he had been cut or stung. Then Brian shook his head and met his gaze again, as if defying Will to accuse him of such heinous acts.
“There's more,” Brian said.
Will flinched and felt his throat constrict. “What do you mean, more?”
“First tell me what happened to Ashleigh and Tess.”
As quickly as he could, Will sketched out the sequence of events from the football game: his seeing Tess in the parade and Caitlyn in the crowd, only to have his memories and reality twisted a short time later when Ashleigh revealed what had happened to Tess.
Brian frowned. “But Caitlyn was Homecoming Queen. Are you saying . . .” He put a hand to his head. “Shit.” He nodded. “Right. Two versions of that. It was Tess, originally. So she dropped out because she was . . . was raped.”
Will stared at him, studying that face and those eyes in which he saw the echo of his own trepidation. “You said there was more. What did you mean?”
“You did the spell Saturday night. I was around until Monday, remember? I stuck around forty-eight hours longer in our present than you did. In that time, something else changed. Another ripple from t he past . . .” He glanced around, unnerved. “From here. Another ripple from here that altered my memories but somehow hasn't reached you yet.”
Will's throat was dry and tight. “What? What else happens?”
“Do you remember Bonnie Winter?”
Something tugged at the back of Will's mind, a memory, and then images crashed inside his head. As if it were a virus that passed from Brian to Will, the new memories raced through him.
Bonnie Winter.
A cool, crisp autumn morning—the Monday after Homecoming—and they arrive at school. Walking through the parking lot they see her, in the shade of the building beneath a towering oak tree. Gold and brown and red leaves blow in the breeze, rustling as they dance around the corpse of Bonnie Winter, her naked flesh gray with death, eyes eternally wide. Her limbs are hideously contorted and a single ant crawls across the gentle slope of dead skin just above her pubic mound.
His chest hurt, all the air in his lungs rushing out as he sat down on the cold ground.
“Jesus, no,” he whispered.
Graduation day, Bonnie Winter had kissed him and handed him a note. On it, in her unique, barely legible scrawl, she had written: Will, now that we're graduating I can finally tell you I've had a crush on you for four years. You're a cutie. Great to know you. Good luck!
But a dead hand could not have scrawled those words. Dead lips could not have kissed him, red tresses gleaming in the sunlight on graduation day.
He stared up at Brian's bruised features and did not know if he could believe the sympathy he saw there. Bonnie. Jesus. The memory of her corpse made his stomach convulse but he forced the image from his head.
“You still think it's me?” Brian asked.
Will stared at him. “I know it isn't me. If it isn't you, I don't have the first clue where to start. You understand why I can't trust you?”
Brian nodded. “Isn't
it interesting, though, that I trust you? What does that say?”
Eyes narrowed once again, Will at last climbed to his feet, glaring down at Brian. “Both of us dirtied our hands with magic, Brian. It tainted us. We promised to stay away from it. The difference is, I kept that promise.”
Brian scowled. “By using magic! By casting a spell so you could hide from the truth. You're telling me that's somehow more noble than just dealing with it, the way I did?”
This time Will could not meet his eyes. “Maybe not. Guess that depends on exactly what you've done with it since then. Maybe you just liked it too much.” He looked up. “So if I'm not ready to believe that the only obvious suspect in goddamn magical time-travel rapes and murders is completely fucking benevolent, maybe you should just cut me some slack.”
Once more Brian smiled, and Will did not like that smile at all.
“Touché.”
Will wrinkled his nose. “Since when did you talk like that? Is that music-industry-asshole talk? Nobody says touché except in the movies.”
“Not even on cop shows?”
Will rolled his eyes.
“So, now what?” Brian asked, rising to his feet, the moon once again illuminating his battered features.
“Now?” Will replied. He stepped between two bushes and gazed at Ashleigh's bedroom window. “Now? For a start, we keep Lebo alive.”
ASHLEIGH KNEW what she had heard.
Voices. Shouting. A scuffle, possibly a fight. If she had been alone in the house, or if she hadn't been used to boys showing up in her backyard, she would have been anxious, even frightened. Instead, she was curious and more than a little suspicious that some mischief was afoot. Her boyfriend, Eric, was far too laconic to be playing some practical joke on her.
Will was another story. Fooling around in her backyard was just his style, particularly if he was hanging out with Danny, or with Mike Lebo and Nicky Acosta. Nick would've done anything to get a glimpse of Ashleigh in the tank top and panties she always wore to bed. Will, on the other hand, had seen her dressed like that a hundred times and never seemed to notice.
The Boys Are Back in Town Page 20