by Norah Wilson
“It’s... it’s still out there,” Brooke said.
Maryanne dared another look out the window. The dark emptiness that was a piece of Alex still there. It floated away from the window, shot close to the glass, then drifted far away once again. Only to repeat this dance several times until it settled near the window. Two black hands splayed close to the lower half of the glass, making it appear like a dark eternity in the shape of fingers and palms. From its posture—no, her posture; no matter how weird this was, that was part of Alex out there—she seemed to be peering in at them.
“She wants back in!” Maryanne said.
“Are you freakin’ nuts? Whatever that thing is—”
“That thing is Alex!”
Brooke shuddered. “And just how do you propose we get her back in? Break the glass?” No sooner had she said it and Brooke was moving toward the stained glass.
“No!” Maryanne’s voice rose. “She went out through the window, through the glass—”
Brooke stopped in her tracks. “So it might be her only way back in.”
On the floor, Alex moaned. Again it was a deep-in-her-throat moan, as if forced with the greatest of effort.
“The diary!” Maryanne said. “Let’s read it.”
“God, Maryanne, don’t you think that can wait?” Brooke huffed out a sound of disbelief. “And you thought I was being such a bitch when—”
“For answers, Brooke.” Maryanne knelt and retrieved the diary from Alex’s hoodie pocket. “The answers have got to be in here.” She sat back on her heels as she flipped through the pages. Her eyes moved quickly as she scanned the words, searching desperately for answers. “There’s got to be something about how Connie got back to her body. Wait! I think I’ve got it. Listen to this.”
When I cast back in, it’s like I bring part of the night with me. The exhilaration I feel out there in the darkness, in that other state, stays with me. Not nearly long enough, but for a little while at least, it’s as if—
There was a barely audible whoosh of sound, and Maryanne looked up to see Alex’s cast-out part streak toward them in a shocking blur of speed, slamming back into her body. Before Maryanne could expel the sharp breath she’d inhaled, Alex threw an arm out and seized her around the waist. The two of them flew across the attic like they’d been flung by some unseen hand. When they came to a stop, Alex leapt atop Maryanne, straddling her chest, her hands closing around Maryanne’s throat.
“That’s Connie’s diary!” Alex snarled. “You stay the hell out of it!”
Maryanne felt the squeezing pressure around her throat as Alex’s hands tightened. She clawed at Alex, trying to pry her off. Stunned, she looked up into Alex’s wild eyes. In that fiery intensity, Maryanne sensed a struggle for control. It was almost as if Alex was trying to hold back the ferociousness that had flown them across the room when the cast-out piece had fused with her again. She hadn’t meant to knock them flying, Maryanne realized. She wasn’t trying to hurt her now. And yet Alex could so easily strangle her... Do it!
The thought—sprung straight from the darkest reaches of her mind—shocked Maryanne. More shocking still, she found herself mentally repeating the words like a mantra. Like a prayer. Do it! Do it!
Her mind flashed back home, to poor little Jason, that horrible night.
Her hands fell away from Alex’s.
Do it! Dammit, just do it!
Brooke’s face appeared above them. “Geez, you guys, could you possibly make any more noise? Do you want to wake the whole—” Her low, urgent rant broke off as she saw what was happening. “Alex!” Brooke seized Alex’s arm and tried to pull her off Maryanne, to no effect. Then she braced her feet flat on the floor as she hauled for all she was worth, but it was as if Alex were a supercharged magnet that couldn’t be budged.
“Alex!” Brooke’s voice was low but urgent. “Let go!” she gritted. “You have to let her go!”
All at once, Alex’s grip loosened on Maryanne’s throat. Her arms went slack, and she succumbed to Brooke’s pull. The two of them tumbled to the floor.
Alex sat there panting, her back curved, and her shoulders shaking. Yet she leaned forward and picked Connie’s diary off the floor where it lay beside Maryanne.
Maryanne raised herself up slowly on her elbows, then sat up beside Alex.
“Did I hurt you?” Alex asked, thickly.
“No,” Maryanne lied. But she held a hand to her throat, which was probably already bruising, as she looked toward the window. Night sky. Stars and moon. No empty black silhouettes. She turned her head slowly back to Alex. She took a breath, and within the dark of the attic looked as deeply as she could into her eyes.
“Can you see it in me?” Alex whispered. “Can you see... ?”
“The cast-out part?” Maryanne finished.
“Cast,” Alex murmured. “That’s what Connie calls it in her diary.”
It was Brooke who fetched the candle. She handed it to Maryanne, then sat down. Maryanne lifted the candle close to Alex to examine her face. Alex stared back. Eagerly, Brooke watched.
“Your eyes... ” Maryanne moved the candle slowly left then right, and she watched as Alex’s pupils followed the flickering fire. She bit down on her lip as she settled the candle on the floor. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your focus. But your pupils... ”
“My God, they’re huge!” Brooke said. “It’s like the iris is completely gone. You look like some kind of deranged junkie axe murderer. Like you just escaped from a home for the criminally insane. Like you’re some alien—”
Maryanne tensed, expecting Alex to go off on Brooke as she rambled on, but Alex just rubbed her forehead.
“Gee, Brooke. Don’t hold back.”
Phew! Whatever surge of emotion had come in with the cast-out Alex... er, Alex’s cast... seemed to have dissipated now. Maryanne sagged. Realizing she still held the candle, she put it down on the floor between them.
It occurred to her then that she should be feeling more. More anxiety, more terror. For God’s sake, she’d just watched a piece of Alex leave her body! Leave it and exit through a stained glass window into the night, where it twisted and danced in mid-air until it shot back into her friend’s body, infusing her briefly with a terrible, wonderful wildness and violence.
And as for Maryanne’s own reaction to be being strangled... Maybe shock was setting in. Maybe this was the adrenaline let-down her mother had talked so much about it.
Maybe it was dark fascination.
Maybe she wanted to die.
Brooke’s voice cut into Maryanne’s morbid turn of thought.
“Alex, what happened?”
“I’m... I’m not really sure. I was just tapping the window, repeating Connie’s words.”
“Right,” Brooke said. “Let me out. Let me out.”
“No, it was ‘I want out.’ Those were the words. And then suddenly, I just... was out.”
“Did you feel yourself go?”
Alex hesitated, as if carefully choosing her words. “It wasn’t like I felt myself going from my body, so much as I realized myself suddenly gone. All of a sudden I just was outside looking in, and at the same time I was on the floor in my body staring at my dark cast.” Alex raised a hand and rubbed the back of her head. “Man, I cracked my head good when I hit the floor. It sort of distracted me for a second out there.”
“Holy shit,” Brooke breathed. “You could feel your body? What was happening?”
“Yeah, I could feel you, Brooke, and then you, Maryanne, taking my pulse. I could feel my heart jacking like crazy. But I couldn’t pull away when you grabbed my arm. I couldn’t talk or move. It was like I was completely conscious, but paralyzed.”
“Until I started reading Connie’s diary,” Maryanne said.
Alex looked at her sharply. “Did you hear me yell at you through the window?”
“No.” Maryanne shook her head.
“I called out to the both of you, just once.” She wet her lips. “I said, �
��I want in.’ And then... then I shot back in. Right through the glass.”
Maryanne sucked in a sharp breath. The window. If they’d broken it, would Alex have been able to get back? Or would she have been left trapped alive in her paralyzed body?
Maryanne looked closely again into Alex’s eyes. There was a pale circle of color now around the dark center. Her pupils were slowly returning to normal. From her breathing, she suspected Alex’s heart rate was normalizing too.
Alex stood first, raising the candle with her. She tucked Connie Harvell’s old diary back into her hoodie pocket. But this time, she tucked it deeper somehow. And judging by the bulge of her tense hand through the hoodie material, Maryanne knew she held it with more passion than ever. More possession. That diary wasn’t leaving Alex Robbins’s person anytime soon.
“You... you going to be okay, Alex?” Maryanne asked.
Brooke seemed to be waiting intently for the answer too.
Alex shrugged. “It’s strange. It’s... scary. And I don’t know how, but a real part of me left my body tonight. Just like what happened with Connie Harvell. The part of me in here on the floor was helpless. Scared. Couldn’t even cry out. I was voiceless, here. But the part of me out there... ” Alex looked to the window, past the sad Madonna who stood amongst the thorns. “I wasn’t so scared out there at all. You know?”
They all gazed toward the window for a moment. Alex was the first to turn away. Maryanne turned away too. But as she did, for the most fleeting of moments, she thought she glimpsed something. Something so pitch black against the star-filled sky, it looked empty. Maryanne blinked and looked again, but the sky beyond the window looked just as it should, velvety black and studded with stars.
She turned to follow Alex, who carried the candle, until she noticed Brooke still stood there, feet rooted to the floor, eyes on the window.
“Brooke?” Maryanne called. “You okay? Did you see something?”
The other girl shook her head. “No. I didn’t see anything. Let’s go.”
Chapter 7
Miss Gun-to-a-Knife-Fight
Brooke
Brooke cracked the seal on her third—and unfortunately last—sample-sized vodka of the night, and tossed it back. It burned all the way down, but it didn’t burn hard enough. Not hot enough.
She tossed the empty mini-bottle at the trash barrel—maybe a twelve-foot shot from the swing where she sat—but it hit the rim and bounced away. Hell with it. Let it lie there.
That weirdness last night. It had scared the crap out of her, but at the same time, she wanted to do it. Wanted to try it herself. To “cast out” as Connie Harvell evidently called it in her diary. Or so Alex said. It’s not like anyone was getting their hands on that diary any time soon. But whatever it was called, Brooke wanted to do it.
What would it feel like to be out of your body? To fly free? To become one with the night, the darkness... A masculine laugh followed by a chorus of feminine giggles broke into her thoughts. Great. Just what she didn’t want—company. She pushed off the swing and headed for the deep shadows beyond the pool of light cast by the sentinel lights illuminating the elementary school playground.
She’d barely made the shadows when a group of teenagers burst into the circle of light. But their destination was a picnic table behind the backstop of the child-sized baseball diamond. Brooke was already headed for the street when the guy spoke, freezing her in her tracks.
Seth Walker.
With the vodka still burning in her belly, she turned back. Seth climbed up to sit on top of the picnic table, and oh, God, he looked good. Then a petite, black-haired girl whom Brooke didn’t know clambered up to sit beside him. To remove any doubt that they were together, he slung an arm carelessly around her. The other kids—and they weren’t all girls as she’d originally thought—took seats on the bench. She recognized the tall guy as Seth’s brother, Bryce. And the girl with Bryce was Emalee Sorenson, though they didn’t really look like a couple. The other skanks she didn’t know.
Brooke’s instant reaction was to go over there and tear Seth’s arm off at the shoulder socket, then use the bloody limb to beat the crap out of the girl he was with. She had to take six or seven deep breaths before she breathed away the last of the red haze of fury fogging her vision.
Then, just as she had herself under control, laughter rippled through the group again. The sound hooked her right in the gut. Last year, she’d been the one beside Seth, holding court with these losers, or other ones like them. The Walkers were an important family in Mansbridge. They had money and old-town ties. Anger boiled inside. That was her place by Seth’s side. Now more than ever, and especially after that first weekend back.
No, forget about that weekend. Seth obviously had.
Fists squeezed at her sides, she made her decision.
No one saw her approach. Briefly, she thought about drifting quietly into the light until someone noticed her. As much as it would please her to hear Seth shriek like a girl in front of his friends, there was no way she was coming off as a stalker. He meant nothing to her. Nothing.
Well, eventually he’d mean nothing.
Besides, she had a better idea.
“Seth?” she said, injecting her voice with surprise. “Omigod, Seth, is that you?”
Seth froze at the sound of her voice, and she strode into the circle of light.
“Uhhhh... Brooke. Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
Yeah, for about five weeks, you piece of crap. “Yeah, funny thing about that, especially since I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Um... yeah... well... I been kinda busy.”
“So I can see,” she said, letting her gaze drift ominously over the petite girl at his side. “I have something I really need to tell you, but I didn’t want to leave a message on your parents’ machine. I mean, the last thing you want your parents to hear about is that HPV infection. I know I’m certainly not planning on telling my mother.”
“What?” He squawked. “HP what?”
“HPV. Human Papillomavirus. Did you know that condoms don’t necessarily prevent transmission? I mean, if condoms worked, I wouldn’t have it, right?” She spread her hands and gave a what’s-a-girl-gonna-do shrug.
“You lying bitch!” Seth roared. “I don’t have HP... whatever you said.”
The girl beside him shrank away. She didn’t exactly shrug out from under his arm, but close enough.
He snatched his arm away and fisted his hands. “Melissa, I swear she’s lying. I don’t have anything.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t necessarily know,” Brooke said, the soul of understanding. “It doesn’t always manifest with nasty warts or anything. I mean, you could be a carrier and not even know it. I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for that pap test the other day. You should get checked, too.”
He leapt off the picnic table. “There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Okay. Suit yourself. But I think you should know that certain strains of HPV can cause cancer.”
A pause. “Cancer?”
“Yeah. You know,” she said in a stage whisper as she pointed south, “down there. Cervical cancer in women, penile cancer in men.”
Seth made a strangled sound.
“Hey, don’t sweat it. Chances are your immune system will clear it in a few months. Or years. Of course, if it is the cancer-causing kind, I wouldn’t recommend the wait-and-see approach.” She turned to the others apologetically. “Sorry you had to witness this.” She turned back to Seth. “See you around.”
With that, she walked away.
Anger and betrayal still churned in her gut, but at least she had the satisfaction of hearing a tearful Melissa going off on Seth about trying to get her in bed while he had an HPV infection. With the sweet music of hysterical accusations and gruff denials echoing in her ears, Brooke was practically smiling when she hit the sidewalk.
Well, her teeth were bared, anyway.
She had a sudden vision—a half bottle of
Tanqueray tucked down one of her high leather boots in the wardrobe back at Harvell. She’d stolen it from her mother’s bar, though Lord knew why. She hated gin. It tasted like a freaking pine tree. But it would do. She picked up the pace.
She was practically jogging when she heard the disturbance. She was tempted to ignore it and keep going, except it occurred to her it might be Seth coming after her. She didn’t imagine he’d have anything good to say, but she’d be damned if she’d run from him. But when she stopped and wheeled, she knew instantly the sounds were coming from the wrong direction. She also recognized one of the voices—Maryanne Hemlock’s. And Maryanne wasn’t in a good way. From the sounds of things, she was about to take a roughing up from some of the locals.
Brooke stood there, weighing her choices. Stay or go?
Back at Harvell, a half quart of gin waited. Though she didn’t have anything suitable to mix it with... And on the other side of those bushes, stood the chance to vent some of this fury that was eating at her insides.
Of course, if she did that, Maryanne would read more into it. Like, for instance, that Brooke gave a crap about her. Not that she disliked Maryanne. But she didn’t especially like her, either. Hell, she barely knew her. Of course, she didn’t like very many people she did know, and trusted even fewer.
“Oww! Stop it! That hurt!” That from Maryanne.
Hoots of laughter. “It was meant to hurt, loser.”
“Yeah, loser,” another female voice chimed in. “Outcast. Freak! Reject!”
“Even your own family doesn’t want you,” the first voice said. “That’s why they sent you here.”
“Shut up about my family!”
Brooke had heard enough. With those words resonating in her head—outcast, freak, reject—she rounded the tall hedge that separated the sidewalk from the convenience store parking lot. Maryanne stood there surrounded by three girls. She clutched her earth-friendly cloth shopping bag containing her purchases protectively to her chest. But her hair, which she wore perpetually in a ponytail, hung wildly about her face. That must have been the “ouch” she’d heard, the elastic being yanked from her hair.