Secrets of Skin and Stone

by Wendy Laine

  Danny’s eyes were on me when I looked up. He’d complained that Piper stared, but I felt like he was staring at me in a way I didn’t care for.

  “What?”

  “There is something about this place. Critch says so anyway. He says Watchers are born where Watchers died. That’s how he got the birthright. That’s why he lived here. The birthright lingers, haunts, maybe even taints the soil.”

  A chill ran up my spine, and I abandoned my bag search. “A Watcher died here?”

  “Sure did. A whole family line died in Hidden Creek. Fiends ripped a Watcher to shreds. He’s buried in the cemetery on Old Hill road.” He shrugged. “That sorta violence don’t let up—maybe it makes people crazy—do things they might not normally. And Critch says that Watchers and fiends are drawn to each other.” Danny continued spinning the keys on his keyring as we left the mill and walked toward his truck. “There are things here in Hidden Creek, Gris. Things that won’t go quietly. You’re in over your head. You better watch yourself or Hidden Creek will get you, too.”

  I didn’t like his smile—didn’t trust it.

  Maybe there was something wrong lurking in Hidden Creek. Something dangerous and evil. But it wasn’t Piper.

  It couldn’t be.

  Chapter Four

  Piper

  Gasping, I sat up in bed, clutching the sheets to my chest. Inky darkness hung around me like fog. My nightlight was out. Out of habit, I listened for Jester’s barking before realizing he was hushed forever. He’d bark on nights like this when I’d woken up from a screeching nightmare with the room feeling extra dark. Normally, there was still some light. The room was usually shadowed and dim, not dark.

  I shivered. I missed Jester. Poor dog. Poor dog in the cold ground.

  I swallowed thickly. My fault. My. Fault. I should’ve taken better care of Jester. It’d hit me a million times today. I’d be doing something and the guilt and grief would threaten to drown me. I bit down hard on my lower lip; the pain pushed my grief back. If only it could erase the memory. Or, better yet, bring him back. A great cosmic do-over for Piper Devon.

  But the universe wasn’t granting favors in Hidden Creek, lately, and neither were any deities. If anything, we’d been cursed and forgotten.

  The least I could do for Jester was find out who’d done it. Work through my list of suspects.

  With a shaky exhale, I fumbled on my nightstand for the flashlight I kept there. I swept my hand across the top. What the heck? It was gone. Maybe I’d knocked it off while I was sleeping.

  The night felt like it had eyes, despite the darkness. “Is somebody in my room?” I inched my legs out of bed.

  Was I really expecting somebody to answer?

  Then somebody did, and I realized I would’ve preferred them not to. “Piper?” a raspy snarl asked. Whatever was out there wasn’t human. It sounded like it had teeth. Maybe big, sharp teeth.

  I scrambled backward toward my headboard, swallowing. “Who are you?”

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “I asked you first.”

  There was a snicker, and the voice hissed, “Don‘t you ever answer questions?”

  I scowled in the direction the voice was coming from. “I’ll answer reasonable questions put to me face-to-face by people not afraid to show themselves.” Why was I talking to it? It was a lot harder to pretend something didn’t exist after you’d talked to it. My fingers clutched the sheets.

  “No, you don’t.” The voice sounded…reptilian.

  A shiver whispered up my arms. “Where are you, and who are you?”

  “What’s happening in this town?” it asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your dog. The cattle. The library.”

  It was asking the same questions I’d been asking tonight. “Are you real? Or is this more of my nightmare? Show yourself.”

  “There are things you don’t need to see or know. Tell me about your nightmares, and I’ll hand you the flashlight and be gone.”

  “Fine!” I went still. Somebody else in the house moved in their sleep, and a headboard scraped the wall. I couldn’t get anybody else involved in whatever this was. After it was quiet a bit, I whispered, “In my nightmares, I’m walking in a forest with a wind pushing against me. At first, it doesn’t bother me, even though it’s loud—like a screeching banshee. Then, I look down and it’s as if black waves of wind are stealing pieces of me. I start screaming and wake up.”

  “Have you always had nightmares?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Have you always had these nightmares?”

  “You said you’d give me my flashlight if I told you about my nightmare. I did. Now, give me my flashlight.”

  “You really are something else, Piper Devon.” It was amused, this far-too-real dream-monster. The air stirred as it prowled my room, but it didn’t bump into anything. It smelled less like sulfur than the creatures I usually sensed when I was halfway between nightmares and waking. This one smelled deeper and richer, like a freshly-turned field.

  “You’re different than the others,” I said, mostly to fill the silence.

  “Others? You’ve seen something else?”

  “After the scream, as I’m waking up, I do. The room is cold, but the wind is there. The dark wind. It knocks things over and moves things.”

  “And you’re sure it’s not part of the nightmare?”

  “At first, I thought it was just me. I think it’s real, though, what’s happening. It’s not just happening to me. Some other girls at school have talked about it, but I’m the only one in my family with the nightmares. I keep quiet about them, and shut my door so they don’t bother anybody. Usually my nightmare monsters don’t talk. You’re sorta breaking the rules here.” Now I was lecturing it? Shut up, Piper.

  “I’m not one of them.”

  Whatever that meant. It wasn’t exactly comforting to know there were different sorts of monsters living in my room at night. “Did you kill my dog?”

  “No.” The end of the word trilled as if its tongue was long and thin like a snake’s.

  My hand stopped searching, and I had to know. I had to. “Did I kill my dog?”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?”

  It was mocking me. I swung my legs back into bed, and laying back down, I closed my eyes. It would leave or it would kill me, but there was no way I’d let it make fun of me. I had a funny type of pride, but I did have it. Now, I’d need to ignore this monster. Two. Four. Six. Eight.

  “Shouldn’t you?” it repeated.

  “Go away. I’m pretending you don’t exist, and it’s far more difficult if you’re talking. So, either kill me or go away.” Hopefully, it wouldn’t take me at my word and kill me. That’d be messy at the very least.

  “Damn it, Piper.”

  “Don’t profane.” Why’d I keep saying that?

  “You could make a preacher cuss.”

  “I haven’t yet. Now go away.”

  “I’m on your side.”

  I snorted. Right. I was alone with my guilt and my thoughts and all these regrets that now included Jester. “No, you’re not. Nobody’s on my side,” I whispered.

  “Maybe that’s because you won’t trust anyone.”

  “Trust a person…or a monster?”

  “What if I’m both?” it hissed.

  Something heavy fell at my side, making me jump. Cool metal. The flashlight! I snatched it, and a rush of wind fanned my face as I slid my thumb along the switch. The light illuminated my empty bedroom and the curtains blowing around my window. Pop! The nightlight flooded the room with its pale blue glow.

  Holy crap, what had just happened? Darting the beam of the flashlight around, I searched the corners of my room. Empty. It was gone, whatever it was.

  I was awake, and there’d been something here, something that hid in the shadows and snapped off my lights. I got to my feet and closed the window.

  The room felt darker now than it ever had, and emptie
r, too.

  I grabbed my list of suspects from my desk, took it back to my bed, and added “creature” to the bottom of it. If anybody came across my list, they’d assume it meant animal. If only.

  Hidden Creek—where my nightmares stalked me. I had to get out of this town.

  …

  The ground was soft, but undisturbed. If not for the claw marks around my window frame, I’d have guessed my late-night visitor was a figment of my imagination. I’d decided that a human being had killed Jester, but it was hard to stick by that when a genuine monster had come out of my closet. Well, okay, maybe not my closet. Could monsters even hold knives with their claws? Or maybe it’d been a claw that had done that to Jester.

  I swallowed. I had to stop picturing that. My throat burned like acid, and I fought gagging.

  I’d even gone to church that morning to do a sort of penance for Jester. Sitting there, with half the chapel staring at me, had felt like a punishment—especially when all the dark, ugly thoughts crept in. Thoughts as black as tar and as filthy. I swore I didn’t think of them…they just appeared like waking nightmares. Indecent and vile…and counting only held them off for so long. I wanted to stand up and scream that I didn’t belong in there. Church made my head so crowded.

  It’d made Mama happy at least. And wasn’t I supposed to be miserable? My dog had died. I should be miserable. I hadn’t decided how miserable—it was difficult to quantify it, but I deserved misery. It’d be even that way. Unhappiness and pain. It’d balance the scale.

  “Hey,” a voice said behind me.

  I jumped a foot in the air. Crap. That’d taken almost a year off my life. He moved real quiet for somebody so tall. “Hey yourself. Can’t you make some noise before you scare a person half to death?”

  “Now where’s the fun in that?” Gris asked, stepping forward to stare down at the ground below my window. “What are we looking at?”

  “Nothing, and I don’t talk to strangers.” Shuffling slightly in the soft grass, I stayed focused on the ground in front of me.

  “Your name is Piper. My name is Gris. We’re not strangers anymore.”

  That caused another jolt, but this time it was my stomach jumping around. He knew my name. I glanced up at him. His cheeks looked less hollowed out here in the sun. His eyes were brown, dark brown, and he had crinkles at the edges like he smiled a lot, probably to get what he wanted.

  “I told you, I don’t like charming boys.” I shaded my eyes. The sun hung behind him like a shimmery outline. A devil wearing an angel’s halo—a white, white halo.

  “I wasn’t trying to be charming.” He tipped forward on his feet as if he’d been telling me a dire secret. Clearly, he couldn’t help being charming. “So, what are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.” It wasn’t a lie ‘cause it was nothing I felt like sharing with him. It was near enough the truth.

  He frowned down at the grass under my window and tilted his head.

  I followed his gaze, but it just looked like grass to me. Green, green grass. The stain on the grass near the shed yesterday flashed in my head, but I pushed it away with a wince. “What are you looking at?”

  He crouched down and touched the grass with a finger.

  “What is it?” I eased down beside him, watching his face rather than the ground.

  “What happened to your dog?”

  “Why?” Why did he care what had happened to my dog? “And how do you know my name?”

  His head swung my way, and a grin widened his lips. “Are you completely incapable of answering a question?”

  The words so closely resembled those of my visitor last night it was eerie. “No,” I said, raising my chin an inch. Hah! Gotcha, charm boy.

  “Hmm.” He looked back at the ground. “My cousin told me your name after I described you. He said he went to school with you and once asked you out.”

  Whoever his cousin was, Gris had probably heard an earful about me. Maybe Gris coming here was a joke. “Who’s your cousin?”

  “Danny Porter.”

  I couldn’t stop the grimace. Danny was careless about people’s feelings. He’d made a friend of mine cry. It was enough for me to tell him thanks, but no thanks.

  What few boys there were at my school always acted like they were doing me this huge favor by asking me out. Hidden Creek was a small town, and they didn’t have a lot of options. Dating me wasn’t a huge favor to me; it was simply a poor male-to-female ratio.

  Although, dating Danny would’ve been a favor, but not in the way he saw it. He hadn’t even bothered taking the ACT ‘cause he didn’t wanna go to college. What kind of person would rather be stuck in Hidden Creek for the rest of their life? Apparently, I was strange in this, too—I was gonna blow out of here after graduation. Nobody looked twice at you in the big cities. That was a dream come true. I could fade into the crowds.

  “You don’t look much like Danny,” I said.

  “We‘re not much alike.”

  “But you asked him about me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And he told you?”

  “Yep.”

  I rubbed my shoulder against the itch of a scabbed cut. I felt naked and raw in front of Gris. He knew what they said behind my back, and I didn’t.

  Just as I was fixin’ to stand up and walk away, Gris spoke. “You look tired, Piper. Did you sleep okay?”

  That sure wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. “Why would you ask that?”

  He reached out, and I jumped back, falling to the ground in my rush.

  Gris frowned and held up his hands. “I was just about to say you have shadows under your eyes.” He gestured at my face. He stood up and offered me a hand, which I ignored and got up on my own.

  “I don’t always sleep well.” Thoughts of Jester had kept me up late. I kept turning over and over my list of suspects. “It takes me hours sometimes to get to sleep and when I do, dreams wake me up.” It was a dream last night. It had to be. In the light of day, it was too strange, too unreal. The monster had spoken. Unless they were inside my head, my monsters kept quiet. I brushed the dirt from my butt. Why had I chosen today to wear light-colored cut-offs? I normally prepared for a multitude of possibilities, but it was difficult to account for something as far-fetched as Gris.

  “Dreams? What kind of dreams?”

  “Maybe I dreamed about you,” I said tartly to put him off balance.

  His cheeks went pale. “What?” he blurted out, his mouth hanging open. Recovering, Gris snapped his jaw closed as his face went blank.

  What had his cousin told him about me? I’d been messing with Gris when I’d said that. I cleared my throat. “It was a little like The Wizard of Oz. I was Dorothy and your barn fell on top of you…so you can imagine who you were.”

  It startled a laugh out of him. Still, why had he acted like me dreaming about him would be a fate worse than death?

  “What are you doing here?” I tapped my fingers together. I could usually tell what people thought of me, but I couldn’t make hide nor hair of Gris.

  “I want to figure out what happened to your dog.”

  “He’s dead. That’s what happened. And I don’t need your help figuring out how that came to be.”

  “You said somebody killed him?”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t any of his business.

  “Let me help you, Piper. I swear I can if you’ll let me.” His drawl made his words even softer, and they curled around my heart in a way I didn’t trust.

  “I don’t need your…whatever this is.” I gestured between us. I did just fine without a boy in my life making it all sorts of complicated. I didn’t need him.

  “Friendship,” he said.

  I snorted. It sounded awful, but it was a near gut reaction. Friendship. Not a single boy in town had bothered with that route. Not that I’d buy it if they had. Gris was a smooth one, all right. ‘Course, he was related to Danny which probably meant he was looking for a way to score with the crazy girl—which was
probably how everybody thought of me. I saw it in their eyes sometimes, felt it in their treatment of me. If they could see inside my head, they’d think even worse things, but, for certain, I was crazy.

  My shoulder itched again, but I was ignoring it. If I stopped thinking about it, it’d stop itching. I rolled my shoulder. Stop. Just stop.

  “Show me where you found your dog’s body,” Gris said.

  Fine then, I could do that. I led him past the house toward the shed that held our tractor. We didn’t have much of a field, but my daddy insisted on owning a tractor. Then again, we didn’t do much camping, but we had an RV parked on the other side of the house. My daddy liked to own things, just in case we needed them.

  When I reached the spot behind the shed where a pile of hay had been brushed across the stain, I stopped and pointed. “It isn’t pleasant.”

  “Death usually isn’t.” Gris continued forward and crouched beside the hay like he had beneath my window.

  “Somebody’d split him open. There was blood all across the grass here. I’d just gotten back from taking my ACT, and my mama said she hadn’t seen Jester all morning.”

  “Was he a family dog or your dog?” Gris pulled aside the hay to reveal a red patch of grass.

  I turned away. I was working on disassociation. I could disassociate myself from just about anything. But it was harder when you were faced with something tangible like the grass that was still stained. Jester, you poor, silly dog. They’d probably killed him ‘cause he belonged to me. Maybe I’d said “no” to one too many guys. Maybe they just didn’t like me. I felt the weight of everything that’d gone wrong—that I’d done wrong, but Jester was a debt that I’d never repay.

  “He was my dog. I’ve had him for three years now. I had him, I mean. I used to have him.” There was no way to define his presence in my life now that he was an absence. I inhaled deeply before breathing out through pursed lips. Then, I built up my wall of detachment—brick by brick. My fault. I clenched my fists, my nails biting into my palms. I could do this. The pain in my palms helped.

  “It’s awful that you were the one to find him.”

  “She threw up. She retched in the rosebushes,” I said. Hopefully, Daddy had taken care of cleaning that up too. I hadn’t dared look.