The Dark World

by Cara Lynn Shultz

  I fanned my fingers out, running them underneath my pillow as I tried to find whatever scrap of homework had made its way into my bed.

  Stupid homework, taunting me in my dreams.

  But instead, my fingertips found a folded-up piece of paper, with my name written on the front in a neat, but definitely masculine handwriting. I turned on my light and started to read.

  Dear Paige,

  The art of the handwritten letter. It’s pretty much lost, isn’t it? Well, I’m bringing it back, because I don’t have a phone and I’m not going to shout these words after finagling a phone call in a diner. Besides, my handwriting is awesome and everyone should be subjected to it at least once.

  I wanted to tell you that last night was important to me. Significant. Life-altering, if you will. In the story of my life, that’s where you cracked the spine of the book. The mark is there, forever tattooed on my narrative and I couldn’t be happier. You have to understand: I’ve spent a long time being angry. I’ve been fueled by rage and vengeance. It’s why I shut down whenever we get too deep: you and I exist in this perfect bubble. That might sound crazy, but to me, it’s perfect. I don’t want to taint it by bringing anything ugly from my past into it. And last night you reminded me of a life outside of all this ugliness—a life where the words fulfilling and happy and rich mean something. You reminded me what it feels like to have someone care.

  You offered me an out last night, asking me if this thing between us was too much for me. It’s not. But considering everything I’ve just written, I’m wondering if it’s too much for you. At some point, it will be too much for you, and you’ll want nothing to do with me. I know it. And it’s not fair to you. I’m in if you are. And if you’re not, this is your out. I won’t hold a grudge or be mad. I won’t ever stop protecting you. I’ll understand—hell, I’m offering the out. I see the reason for it and I’m sure you’ll take me up on it at some point. But I’m a coward who has to put it in a letter, because I don’t want to hear the words.

  But, if you’re in, please take my hand tomorrow morning, since I’d probably turn 900 shades of red if you mention it to me. And then we can go look for my man card, because clearly I’ve lost it, and am now a pathetic emo boy, asking for reassuring hand squeezes from a beautiful girl when I should be pleading for you to wear yoga pants more often.

  I hope you’re reading this at night, in your bed, so I can tell you to have sweet dreams. If you found this, Mr. Kelly...um...hi.

  Logan

  I reread the letter until I nearly had the words committed to memory. I knew we’d had some kind of emotional breakthrough last night, but I hadn’t realized how significant—or to use his term, life-altering—it was for him.

  It was scary. Scary that I could have that kind of effect on someone. Scary because I was afraid of hurting him. But he had the power to crush me, as well.

  I rolled onto my stomach, burying my face in the crease between two pillows as I clutched the letter in my hand. Logan was the only person who saw me—the real me—stealing my pens and sparking random conversations as an excuse to get to know me.

  I didn’t have to worry about keeping a story straight with Logan. It was refreshing. Freeing. Relaxing—when he wasn’t storming into a classroom to save me from a demon, that is. And at the same time, our connection was intense, developing into a deep friendship that turned into romance at what felt like a breakneck speed, even though I’d known him for nearly three months. If I continued down this path, I knew where it was going to end. It was going to end in the word that was way too soon to even be thinking about. The word Logan all but said in his letter.

  His wonderfully poetic letter. Damn, that boy can write.

  He promised to protect me no matter what, and I believed him. If I decided this was too much, and I needed to pull back from him, he’d understand. He gave me an out.

  I rolled over and covered my face with my pillow—the pillow I’d cried into for two nights, terrified that he’d been taken from me, from this world.

  It’s not going to get easier. Walk away now. Walk away and protect your heart—what little part of it you can salvage.

  The scared part of me found the idea tempting. I was standing on a cliff. Logan hadn’t exactly promised to catch me. But he’d promised to hold my hand on the way down.

  And the next morning, Logan replied with a shy, endearing smile when I squeezed his hand, and I knew I made the right decision to fall.

  Chapter 11

  “CAN I BORROW a pen?”

  I looked to my left where Logan leaned across the aisle, his hand outstretched and his fingers flicking backward in a “gimme” gesture. I reached into my bag, my fist first closing around a boring ballpoint pen before dropping it in favor of the glittery pink one that I had stuck in my notebook.

  This one had a fuchsia plastic flower on the top.

  “Here you go,” I said sweetly, returning his smirk as I dropped the sparkling pen in his palm.

  “Oh, good. Pink flowers. My favorite,” he drawled, turning back to face the front of the classroom where our English teacher, Miss Doyle, was droning on about Shakespeare.

  It had been a month since Aiden attacked me and disappeared. A month since Logan had left me that letter. And my life had been pretty normal for the past four weeks.

  Well, if by normal you meant that my demonslayer boyfriend spent every spare moment teaching me self-defense, sparring with me on my rooftop with our magical swords, and my dead best friend spent most of her free time making out with her brand-new, also-dead boyfriend.

  When it came to my life, normal was a relative term.

  After English we headed to the library to meet up with Dottie and Travis. My last class was a free period, but the school wouldn’t allow students to leave early for some ridiculously archaic insurance reason. The rule was annoying—especially because it was Friday, and I really wanted to go home early with Logan. He had the same free period— actually, he and I had all the same classes now except for gym, which was split up by gender, thanks to another ridiculously archaic rule. After Aiden’s attack, Logan had used his talents to have his class schedule rearranged so it aligned with mine. I teased him about being a stalker, but it was nice having someone to talk to in class. Even nicer when that someone had a way of making me laugh, melt and roll my eyes, all in the same five minutes.

  And, you know, save me from demons—especially considering that we didn’t know what had happened to Aiden, since Logan hadn’t heard from Ajax since I was last at his apartment.

  Rego had also been scarce, not that Logan complained about that.

  We found Dottie and Travis making out behind the last stack in the library, his hands sweeping through her previously shellacked hairdo. Logan cleared his throat loudly, and they gasped, jumping apart.

  “You guys really seem to love getting frisky in the reference section,” I teased, crossing my arms and leaning against the bookshelf.

  “Like you don’t do the same thing when no one is looking,” Travis replied, mirroring my pose and tilting his head to the side. I blushed furiously—not because we did, but because we didn’t. While Dottie and Travis were setting up camp in R-rated territory, Logan and I were barely visitors to PG-13 land, sharing a few steamy kisses on my rooftop in between sparring with swords. Not that I was complaining, but...well, yeah. I guess I was complaining a little.

  “What’s up with your neck?” Logan asked abruptly, gesturing to Travis. I stared, fascinated, as the purple hickey on his throat slowly faded to red, then pale pink, until it disappeared entirely.

  “Is something wrong?” Dottie asked, and then I was gaping at her as her disheveled hair slowly crept back into place.

  “You—your hair is all neat again—and his neck—the hickey,” I stammered, gesturing back and forth between them.

  “Yea
h, I’ve noticed that, too,” Travis admitted, a faint blush creeping across his freckled cheeks, and I wondered just how many hickeys he and Dottie had seen vanish. “Guess we can’t change our appearances for long.”

  “At least I died on a good hair day,” Dottie said flippantly, patting her bangs and grinning. Her uncharacteristically cheeky comment shocked me, but Travis was unfazed, kissing her on the cheek.

  “Damn, Dots. You’re the best,” he said, a love-struck grin on his face. She gazed back at him with an equally adoring look, and I suddenly felt like we were intruding on a very private moment.

  “So...we’ll be over at the usual table,” I muttered, grabbing Logan’s hand and leading him over to the corner spot that we’d come to claim as ours over the past month. After Aiden and Della had accosted me in the hallway, hanging out in the usually empty third-floor bathroom wasn’t much of an option anymore. It was too deserted—and Logan couldn’t exactly explain away his presence in the girls’-only room. The library was usually packed—and now that Logan sat with me, I could talk to Dottie without appearing to talk to myself.

  “So, how long do you think until they forget about us?” Logan asked, his eyes twinkling at me as he stretched back in his usual chair. Always on guard, Logan preferred to sit with his back facing the corner—so he could observe everyone entering the library.

  “They’ve already forgotten, I’m sure.” I gave Logan a knowing wink as I pulled out my books, setting them on the table with a dull thud. I wanted to get some homework done so I wouldn’t have to deal with it after Logan and I sparred on the roof, which usually wiped me out. Thanks to a healthy dose of my signature pout—I practically sprained my face giving my dad doe eyes and a mournful frown—my dad had finally agreed with my mom to extend my after-school curfew to seven-thirty.

  Seven. Freaking. Thirty.

  Yay, I’m almost eighteen and I finally get the curfew of a thirteen-year-old. Go, me.

  “You don’t seem annoyed by it,” Logan observed, picking at the frayed edge of the wood-printed laminate that was peeling off the edge of the table.

  “By what?” I asked, flipping through my notebook.

  “By your best friend getting all wrapped up in her new boyfriend and starting to ditch you. I thought this was the kind of stuff that pissed girls off.”

  “This isn’t exactly the kind of situation that gets played out in a ‘very special episode of an important teen drama,’” I said in a deep imitation of an announcer’s voice, making finger quotes around the words. “I’m not going to tearfully confront Dottie, weeping something like, ‘I want you to be happy! I just want to be important to you, too!’” I bit my knuckle dramatically and looked away with a fake anguished expression on my face.

  “All right, I see what you mean,” Logan said, biting back a smile.

  “I’m happy for her. I’m glad she has a friend.”

  Logan raised his eyebrow as he gave me a pointed look.

  “I think they’re a little more than just friends,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger a few inches apart.

  “Just a little,” I agreed, spreading my palms two feet apart, and Logan laughed—probably thinking of the billions of times we’d caught them sucking face in the library. “But, seriously, I think she’d be just as happy if she and Travis were platonic,” I continued, feeling the need to champion my friend.

  “Dottie was lonely before. Really lonely. She was so sad, so resigned to being miserable and scared and alone. The fact that she’s actually making jokes about her death is so crazy to me,” I said, frowning when I thought about how forlorn Dottie used to be. Now she had company—company she clearly enjoyed, based on her magically disappearing hickeys—and I supported it entirely, even though the smoochfests surprised me at first. I hadn’t expected Dottie to throw herself with such...unrestrained abandon...into another romantic situation considering how the last one turned out. But she’d explained to me how it felt to finally have someone to share her life. Someone to understand how she felt. Someone to make the dark hours in that Dark World a little brighter.

  “All I want is someone to hold me and tell me it’s going to be okay. That’s all anyone wants, I guess. He does that for me. And I actually want to do that for him,” she’d explained to me when I asked her about her seemingly overnight relationship with Travis. I couldn’t find any flaw in her logic. I didn’t know how long they’d be trapped there together, but at least Dottie and Travis had each other now.

  “Hey, guys!” Travis called merrily, causing both of us to jump—Logan literally, since he scrambled to his feet, his hand flying behind his shoulder to grab his sword. The sudden movement caused the students at the table next to us to stare in surprise, and Logan hopped from foot to foot, pretending his leg fell asleep.

  “Chill, dude. I didn’t mean to ruin the moment,” Travis said, his palms raised defensively.

  “Right, because we’re the ones giving each other mouth-to-mouth every chance we get,” Logan retorted, and Travis puffed out his chest in reply.

  “Don’t hate. Besides, can you blame me? My chick’s hot.” he said, throwing his arm around Dottie’s shoulders, causing her to giggle.

  “Get a room,” I teased. The table next to us began whispering again, and I sighed, twirling my bracelet around my wrist as I waited to hear the inevitable “Bellevue Kelly” nickname get dropped.

  “Oh, Pa-ige,” Dottie said, her singsong voice stretching my name out to two syllables. “They’re not whispering about you.”

  She pointed toward the entrance of the library, where Pepper and Matt hovered by the door. It had been a month, but Matt’s very public betrayal—and Pepper’s apparently immediate forgiveness—was still one of the most popular topics of discussion. It sure was at the table next to us, where they talked about Pepper and Matt as if they were characters on TV.

  “I can’t believe she stayed with him!” sniffed a girl from my physics class with shoulder-length blond hair.

  “Yeah, get thome thelf-rethpect!” lisped Tabitha Nakamura, who’d recently added a tongue ring to her catalogue of piercings.

  “You know how the girl Matt cheated with disappeared? Well, I heard it was because Pepper had her jumped by some gang. And Matt’s still in love with the other girl—that’s why he looks like crap,” Shani Robinson added, nodding her head knowledgeably as she repeated what sounded like the plot to another “very special episode of an important teen drama.”

  They weren’t the only ones talking about Pepper and Matt as they made their way to the front desk to return some books. Matt—whose dark hair was still threaded with some strands of white—at least had the decency to look embarrassed, casting wary looks in our direction, but Pepper held her chin aloft, her face emotionless. I found myself begrudgingly respecting her for it. I knew how hard it was to act like the gossip and words didn’t hurt, when, in fact, they chipped away at all your confidence and sense of self until you felt like every day was an act. And then you were merely numb.

  “I feel sorry for Pepper,” I admitted in a hushed voice. “Is that wrong?”

  “Yes,” Logan, Dottie and Travis all replied in unison.

  “What? I feel bad for Matt, too. It’s not his fault that he was hypnotized by a demon,” I maintained, peeling back another piece of the laminate. “Does he even know what happened?”

  “He just thinks it was an uncontrollable attraction,” Logan explained, then clenched his teeth, the muscle in his jaw twitching. “And don’t waste your time feeling sorry for him. You’re not stuck in the locker room with him. He’s loving this. Cheats on his girlfriend who takes him back. He’s the hero of the douchebag brigade at this school.”

  “It still doesn’t excuse what that succubus Della did,” I maintained, and Travis snorted at my comment.

  “Seriously, Paige. You should hear what Matt and some of his
friends have said about you—”

  Logan silenced him with a look, and I felt a creepy chill down my spine. I was used to people talking about me—I was Bellevue Kelly, after all—but something told me this locker room conversation would make me want to gag.

  “I mean, they talk about all the girls,” Travis hastily explained.

  “Not anymore.” Logan’s voice was low and lethal.

  “What did you do?” I turned to face Logan as he slouched low in his chair, glaring across the library. He kept his arms crossed over his chest, and I’m pretty sure he cracked a knuckle.

  “Logan? Why are you doing your best impression of a mafia enforcer right now?” I asked, both amused and confused by the sudden display of testosterone.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replied, sitting up to adopt a less threatening pose. He grabbed my backpack and took out my physics book, idly turning pages.

  “Now, Travis, you’re good at physics, right?” Logan said, not-so-subtly changing the subject. “There’s some stuff I don’t understand with, um—” he looked down at the random chapter he’d flipped to “—electromagnetism.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Logan.

  “What did you do?” I repeated, and he just ignored me, pointing to the physics book with an innocent look on his face.

  Scowling, I returned to my English homework, vowing to find out what Logan had done as he pretended to struggle through an old physics assignment he’d already aced. He rarely attended a normal school, but Logan studied on his own, saying he wanted to know more than just “demonslaying stuff.”

  Twirling a curl around her finger, Dottie mooned over Travis as if he were explaining the wonders of the galaxy. Which I guess he sort of was, but...still. I really hope this works out, because if there’s a way to make hell worse, it’s by throwing a scorned ex into the mix.