Defy the Dark (12 page)

“Yes, sir.” It's amazing how stuff ain't scary once you know you're never gonna see it again.

 

M
ama's unloading groceries in the kitchen when I get home. For once, I didn't mind doing the rest of the deliveries. It helped pass the time and kept me awake.

Mama's on me as soon as I set foot in the room. “What were you thinking?”

I guess she heard. Figures. Nothing in Stillwater stays quiet for long. “It wasn't nothing, Mama. Delilah's daddy overreacted.”

Mama grabs a dish towel and starts wringing the life out of it. Her knuckles go white with the effort. “Are you messing around with that girl?”

I don't have the energy for this. “Can we save this for when Dad gets home?”

Mama purses her lips like she's upset at the suggestion, but I know she prefers for Daddy to do the yelling. “Fine. But don't you come out of that room until then.”

“Fine,” I say, and head for the stairs. If I know my daddy, he'll be too pissed to deal with me till morning. He'll make me sit up in my room all night without supper and “think on what I done.” I ain't feeling so guilty for leaving anymore.

Now all I got to do is stay awake.

 

N
othing ever changes in Stillwater. Nothing. Every day in this town is exactly the same—hotter than all get-out, and just as boring. I'm up with the sun, but I'm exhausted, and my head hurts, like I hardly got any sleep at all.

I'm craving coffee, even though I can't stand the taste. That's different, but not so much as to be exciting. Mama and Daddy are at the breakfast table when I stumble into the kitchen.

“Morning, Pruitt,” Mama says all chipper like. Daddy just grunts.

“Morning.” I can feel their eyes on me while I fix myself a thermos of coffee. I load up the truck and make my deliveries same as always. And like always, Mrs. Pearson pinches my cheek too hard when she tells me, “Why, Pruitt Reese, you are becoming more like your daddy every day.” I never can figure why everybody in town thinks that's such a good thing.

At least by the time I get to the Stillwater Café, I'm feeling more like myself.

Delilah's at the back door before I'm even halfway out of the truck. “Pruitt?” There's something different about the way she says my name. Like it matters to her whether or not I say something back. If I didn't know better, I'd get my hopes up.

“Hey, Delilah,” I say as I put the gate down on the truck. “Just gimme a second to get unloaded.”

She puts her hand on my arm, giving me a start. “How are you feeling, Pruitt?”

I'm having a hard time breathing right now with her touching me, but I don't think that's what she's asking. I can't think straight enough to come up with anything else, so I tell her the truth. “I'm fine. Just a little tired, is all.”

She nods like I just said something real important. “Me too.”

Delilah will always be beautiful, but she does look a bit tired around the eyes.

“How's your head?” She reaches up and brushes the hair at my temple aside like she's looking for something. I flinch both 'cause I'm surprised and 'cause it stings there like I got punched.

I've imagined this more than once—her coming out to meet my truck, reaching for me, but this is real life and I don't know what to do. She smells like lilacs.

“Pruitt, I need you to do something for me.”

Right now, with her hands on me, standing this close, she could ask me anything and I know I'd do it. “Okay.”

She's got her eyes on mine, and part of me keeps waiting to wake up. She only looks at me like that in my dreams.

Delilah gives my shoulder a squeeze like she knows what I'm thinking. “Meet me out at the ridge at eleven forty-five tonight.”

“Okay.” My voice cracks on the word, but I'm way past caring.

She looks at me like she's looking
into
me. “You really will, won't you? Without even knowing why?”

I can't breathe let alone remember how to say yes. I nod my head and hope she can tell how much I mean it. And then it hits me. “Wait, is this . . .” I take a step back, out of her grasp. “Are you messing with me?” It's the only thing that makes sense, but I never figured Delilah for being mean-spirited.

She smiles when she shakes her head, but it's sad somehow. “I would never do that.” Delilah closes the distance between us. She puts her hand on my chest and I realize my heart is racing. When she lifts her pretty brown eyes to mine, I can feel her breath on my face.

Somewhere nearby a car backfires, and I remember we're right outside the back door of the diner. As much as I don't want this to end, I don't want to get caught, either. Her daddy scares the hell out of me. “Is your daddy around?”

Delilah grins and my heart damn near stops. “We don't have to worry about Daddy.”

Before I can ask why not, she slides her hand to the back of my neck and kisses me. Soft at first, but then she pulls me close and my arms find their way around her waist. It's like our bodies already know how we fit together, and we kiss like it's the one thing that's been missing in our lives.

“Delilah,” her daddy shouts from inside the kitchen. “Did that boy deliver the supplies yet?”

We fly apart, breathless, and Delilah backs toward the door to shout, “He's here now, Daddy.”

I start unloading the truck. Delilah's dad is still talking but I can't hear a thing over the pounding in my chest.

Delilah turns to me. Her cheeks are flushed and I have to grip the handles of the crate to keep from grabbing her and kissing her again. “Promise me something.”

I set my crate down on the dolly and grin at her. “Anything.”

She looks me dead in the eye, as serious as I've ever seen her. “Don't go to sleep today. Not even a nap. Just don't sleep. Okay?”

I can't imagine ever sleeping again. “Okay.”

She grabs my face with her hands. “Promise.”

I put my hands over hers. “I promise.”

She studies my face like she's trying to memorize it and then lets me go. “Good. Remember, eleven forty-five tonight.”

How could I ever forget?

 

W
hen I walk into the clearing, Delilah is there waiting. Her face lights up when she sees me, and I want to pinch myself to make sure this ain't just another one of my dreams.

She runs over to me. “You came!”

After this morning, I can't figure how she'd think I'd be anywhere else. “Of course I did.”

“I've got something to show you.” She takes my hand and leads me over to a cluster of rocks out on the ridge. “Yesterday you asked me to meet you out here. You said something isn't right about Stillwater. That the reason we felt so trapped here is because we were. You said there was a way out.”

“I said that? To you?” The only thing I remember about yesterday is that it was just like today—minus the kissing. I got up. I made my deliveries. I was bored as hell.

Delilah laughs. “I know. Yesterday you sounded as crazy to me as I sound to you right now—until you told me something I've never told anyone. And then I saw this.”

She points at the biggest boulder, and on it I see my own handwriting.

 

DON'T FALL ASLEEP

 

If this is some kind of trick, it's a damn good one.

“You must've fallen asleep yesterday and slept till morning. That's why you don't remember, I think.” Her eyes are shiny in the moonlight. “You could've left, but you waited—” Her voice hitches. “For me.”

There's something familiar about what she's saying; it's right there at the edge of my mind. “I don't—”

“You'll see.” She squeezes my hand and pulls me up to the cliff's edge. “It's starting.”

At first all I notice is the quiet, like somebody turned off the night. Then the black sky beyond the ridge fades away and there's cars and houses and skyscrapers where there should be nothing but empty land. It calls to mind a dream I once had.

“This can't be real,” I say, but somehow, in my gut, I know it is.

“Look.” Delilah points down below us, at a pool of water, and then across it to the shore. “Out there.”

The letters on the rock are faded, but they're still clear enough to read in the moonlight.

 

PRUITT

JUMP!

—MATT

 

“Holy . . .”
Matt.
All them little memory pieces floating around in my mind pull themselves together and I remember. I have a brother. It feels as real as Delilah's hand in mine.

“We have to jump,” she says.

My brain keeps trying to tell me this is crazy, but in my gut it just feels
right
. Me and Delilah, too. It's like we've always been right, we just forgot.

Delilah's grip on my hand tightens. “We don't have much time.”

Even as she says it, the wind kicks up and darkness spills back in, blocking out the lights.

A heavy gust pushes us back from the edge. I wrap my arms around Delilah and hold her tight against my chest until it stops. I could stay standing like this forever but I know that won't get us nowhere but stuck. We have to jump.

Over the ridge, there ain't nothing but empty black space again. “Think it's still out there?”

Delilah laces her fingers through mine. “It has to be.”

I step up to the edge.

“Wait.” Delilah reaches up and kisses me fierce, and I know whatever happens, we can handle it together.

I take a deep breath, and she gives my hand one last squeeze, and then we jump into the dark.

I think maybe I'm supposed to feel scared, but all I feel is free.

Sarah Rees Brennan

I Gave You My Love by the Light of the Moon

T
here was a creepy guy staring at her in the coffee shop.

Berthe, sitting up at the high table by the window with her two best friends, became aware of it in a gradual, nasty way, like when Berthe had gone camping for the first time, years ago, and only realized the ground was damp when the wet had already seeped into her clothes. As soon as she was aware of his stare, she knew it had been going on too long.

She even got up from the table to fetch herself a tiny packet of sugar that she didn't want. She was hoping that he would look at Natalie or Leela, that the stare was just the unpleasant one some guys would give any girl, not personal but something they apparently felt you had brought on yourself by having boobs.

It wasn't. His eyes followed her path to the unwanted sugar and then back. Berthe perched on the edge of her stool, self-conscious and furious, too, that some idiot just looking at her was enough to spoil her fun with her friends.

Being almost six feet tall and a sixteen-year-old girl made you self-conscious enough most days, and today Berthe had the worst cramps she'd ever had in her life.

So someone giving her the stalker eyeballs was the outside of enough. He looked like a college guy, or maybe he was a bit too young, maybe he was one of those high school boys who couldn't wait to get into college where everyone could appreciate his tortured soul. He was wearing a tweedy hipster scarf and black rectangular-framed hipster-boy glasses. His eyes gleamed behind them, pale and intent. In fact, he was pretty pale all over, that particular shade of pale that suggested he was waiting for someone to invent technology that would allow him to get a tan from the light of his laptop screen alone.

Not at all the sort of boy Berthe would have anything in common with, even if he hadn't decided to stare at her like a creeper when she already felt like crap.

Another cramp made Berthe hunch forward, almost tilting off the stool. Her face must have shown some of what she was feeling, because Leela reached over the table and touched her arm.

“Are you all right? You feel hot.”

Natalie, the vivacious creature of the group, all laughs and curls, and the one who usually drew boys' eyes, raised her eyebrows at that and said, “I bet she does. Rawr.”

Leela was too concerned and Berthe was frankly too freaked out to laugh. Berthe didn't feel hot. In fact, the skin at the back of her neck was prickling with cold sweat. She touched her fingertips to her cheek and felt them slide on the clammy surface.

“I just have, you know”—Berthe waved her hand at her midsection even as she lied—“a headache.”

As though it were punishment for her lie, Berthe actually felt a twinge start in her head, a jagged line of pain that went from skull to spine. She put her elbow on the table and put her head down, brow pressed against her palm, until the sharp pain and the slow grind of agony in her stomach eased.

She looked up. Natalie looked serious now, and almost as concerned as Leela. Berthe really didn't like being the center of attention; eyes on her made her feel as if she should be doing something and was too inadequate to know what. Unless she was playing lacrosse.

“I'm just going to go home,” she said abruptly—she didn't want any more fussing, she didn't want to spoil their day—and she got up, holding on to the edge of the table as she did, so that she would look steady. “I just need an Advil and a nap. Call you guys later.”

She left precipitately; if she didn't want one of them coming with her, haste was essential. They would be held up paying for their coffees and discussing whether to go after her, and she'd be long gone.

When Berthe found herself staggering down the steps of the exit and almost reeling into the alleyway beside it, pressing the clammy-cold, prickling-hot skin of her face against the brick wall, she began to rethink her amazing strategy. No matter how awkward she felt about being fussed over, it beat not getting home at all. It was pitch-black outside, the night sky pressing down on her, dense and dark, and she did not think she could walk.

Pain crumpled her insides like tissue and she made a sound horrifyingly like a whine, like the sound of that animal at the campsite weeks ago, the wild snarling thing Berthe had barely seen but whose teeth she could sometimes still feel, as sharp in her memory as they had been in her skin. Berthe wanted to touch the bandage on her arm, but she gritted her teeth and kept her hands flat against the wall, braced. She wasn't going to fall down.

“You can't stay here,” said a voice behind her.

Berthe wanted to spin around, but the voice barely cut through the waves of pain. The most she could do was force her eyes slightly open.

The boy from the coffee shop swam in her vision, his pale face blurring into moonlight and then coalescing into features behind spectacles again. Sweat stung Berthe's eyes. A stalker had her cornered in an alleyway at night, and she could hardly bring herself to mind.

“Oh, give it up,” she said, always bad at being tactful and now not even able to be polite. “Do you have some sort of fetish for girls getting sick on your feet?”

“I implore you not to give me the chance to develop one,” he said. “But you need help.”

His face kept disintegrating with each new wave of pain, nothing but glittering shards of moonlight in her vision. Berthe put her hands to her stomach, clutching at it, and realized her mistake when she almost toppled over sideways.

The boy had hold of her arm suddenly, grip cold and firm and inexorable, like being held up by a piece of machinery. Berthe was vaguely startled that he could hold her up at all, since they were the same height, and he was so skinny.

Berthe was starting to think she did need help. But that didn't mean she had to accept it from him.

“So g-get my friends,” she said, her teeth chattering so hard that she was afraid they would smash like porcelain. “They're in the—you know who I mean, you were staring like a—you're creepy.”

He seemed entirely unaffected by this assessment. Possibly it was not news to him.

He said, as if she had not spoken at all and in relation to nothing, as if he was just plucking random words out of the air: “You don't want to hurt anyone, do you?”

It was strange enough that Berthe opened her eyes all the way, even as another snake of pain uncoiled and struck in her belly. He looked at her, eyes unblinking behind his silly glasses, everything she saw about him at odds with his stone-fast grip.

She saw he was perfectly serious.

“Of c-course I don't want to hurt anyone,” she gasped out.

“Come with me,” the creepy boy from the coffee shop said. “Or you'll kill someone.”

Come with me if you want someone else to live,
Berthe thought, her mind so muddled she could not even remember what movie she was mangling a quote from.

She wouldn't have responded to a threat to herself; she would have screamed and hit out at him, not because she was brave but because that was something life prepared you for, creepy guys threatening you in darkened alleyways. She was not prepared for someone to say that she could be dangerous. She had never hurt anyone in her life and never wanted to. It was not a warning she could ignore.

Berthe staggered, a violent enough lurch so she was almost jarred out of even this boy's grasp. “All right,” she got out, between stiff lips and chattering teeth.

The creep from the coffee shop wasn't just strong, he was fast. Berthe stumbled in the boy's speeding wake, and after a few streets, tilting into swathes of moonlight and then back to shadowy road, he stopped at a door. Berthe leaned her face against it, forehead pressed to peeling gray paint, and the boy fished out a key from the pocket of his skinny jeans and opened the door.

She went sprawling into a tiny coffin of a hall.

“Come on, come on,” the boy muttered, his keys falling to the floor with a clatter and a thud. He hauled her up again, arm an iron bar across her midsection, and pushed her up stairs covered in brown carpeting, worn white with the constant passage of feet. Even the white traces of age on the carpet shimmered in Berthe's eyes like moonlight.

They got up the narrow little stairs and into another tiny hall, then through a door that looked out of place, heavy and dark in the midst of all this cheap flimsiness. The boy towed Berthe inside the door.

There were shutters on the windows, heavy and dark like the doors. There was a single bed in the corner, neatly made.

Sick and staggering, Berthe still felt a panicked fist clutch at the inside of her throat. She remembered what she had allowed herself to forget amid all the pain—that what she was doing was crazy.

“Oh no,” she said weakly, and backed right into the boy. She spun to face him, even though the sudden movement made her stagger and sway. “No—” she repeated, raining down blows on his narrow chest. They landed like kittens on lily pads.

He caught her wrists in that stone grip of his, pushing her firmly into the room and stepping backward over the threshold as he did so.

“Trust me,” he said. “You couldn't pay me to stay in this room with you.”

He slammed the door shut. Berthe did not even feel afraid that she was now trapped in a stranger's bedroom. She was just relieved to be alone with her miserable sickness, not to have to split her focus between current agony and present danger.

She sank down onto the carpet on her hands and knees and arched her back; she felt as if her spine were made of metal and somehow turning molten inside her skin, dissolving and burning at once. She gagged, wrenching pain all the way through her, as if her insides were being torn out. The bite on her arm where the creature from the campsite had sunk its teeth in throbbed as if it might start bleeding again.

Berthe sobbed. She was scared that she would choke up her internal organs, have them laid out ruby red on the carpet before her, her heart bitter in her mouth.

Her fingers clawed on the carpet, tearing it into ragged shreds. Berthe howled her agony and her vision whited out, all moonlight, moonlight, moonlight in the dark.

 

B
erthe woke up aching in a nest of chaos. She lifted her head, her hair a snarled blond veil between her and the world. When she reached her hand to brush it back, her whole body shuddered in protest.

The room she had seen last night was destroyed. The bed was a metal skeleton, scraps of cloth that had been sheets and a mattress hanging on it like mournful ghosts. There was a wardrobe at the other end of the room that she had not even noticed: its door was torn off its hinges. The walls had been beige: now they were carved with deep, gray lines. The boards beneath the torn carpet were savagely scored as well, the floor a mess of splinters and nails.

Berthe was naked. She very urgently did not want to stay naked, curled up and whimpering like an animal.

She climbed gingerly to her feet and went over to the wardrobe with its door ripped off. There were clothes inside, boys' clothes, and weird boys' clothes at that, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and naked people couldn't be fussy about fashion.

There were a lot of button-down shirts that did not fit across her boobs, but she got into a T-shirt that said
ORGAN DONOR, INQUIRE WITHIN
. The fit made it embarrassingly obvious she wasn't wearing a bra.

She went down the stairs barefoot.

It was silent in the house, so silent she thought that perhaps she was alone here, that she could just open the door and go home now without having to face anything.

She pushed open the other door in the little hall, just the same.

Inside was a kitchen-cum-living room, all the blinds drawn. In the dimness she could see clean countertops, a battered sofa, and on a low table, a cup of tea with a cookie lying beside it.

In the darkest corner of the room stood the creep from the coffee shop.

He was still wearing his jacket and his dumb scarf, and he had his hands in his pockets. He looked up as she came in.

“I suppose you have a lot of questions,” he said. He sounded patient, like someone talking to a small child who could not possibly understand anything on her own.

“No,” said Berthe. She was grateful, suddenly, that he put her back up. It pulled her away from the edge of screaming, senseless terror. “I went out camping in the woods, and I was bitten by something that I thought was a wild dog. Last night was the full moon. And I've seen horror movies before. I think I know what's going on.”

She did not know until he just kept looking at her, gaze level and undisturbed, that she had wanted him to come up with another explanation. She'd wanted him to tell her she was crazy.

“What I don't know,” she said, hearing her voice go high and unpleasant, “is how you knew.”

He didn't say a word.

She plunged on. “I mean, do you make a habit of staring like a freak at girls and then, if they seem ill, dragging them into your bedroom on the off chance they're . . .”

“I can tell,” he said. “I could smell you.”

She felt a flash of shame stronger than terror, so ferocious and so unreasonable—that she could care how she smelled, with all this—it made her furious with herself and him.

“And how could you—what were you—” Embarrassment as well as rage throttled her. She could not believe she could not even ask him something important about her own body.

“You'll be able to do it as well,” he said. “Smell things other people can't smell. See things other people can't see. Do things other people can't do.”

“Will I be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?” asked Berthe. Her mouth tasted sour, and her words were all coming out sour, too. She could not seem to care.

She went over to the window and began to fiddle with the pull on the blind so she wouldn't have to keep looking at him.