Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (7 page)

The girl watched me. Everyone else was turned toward the screen, because the opening credits had started to play. My hips were moving and my yellow skirt was swinging and River glanced over at me, yo-yo in hand. The boys were still staring up at him like he was the greatest person ever—except my auburn-haired kid,who still looked serious. 

I gave the girl her hula hoop and thanked her for letting me use it. She laughed, and ran back to the boys. 

River came back and sat down next to me, and started fiddling with something in his hands, just as I spotted Luke making out with Maddy off to the side underneath an oak tree. He had a flask in one hand and was groping her back with the other. 

Oh, Luke. You are such a disappointment,
I thought. And then realized that was a stupid thing to say, even in my head. 

“Here,” River whispered, because the movie had started. He grabbed my hand, turned it over, palm up, and set something on it.“It’s a bookmark, for your Hawthorne.” 

I looked down. “No, it’s not,” I whispered back. “It’s a twenty-dollar bill folded into the shape of an elephant.” River smiled. “Origami is cool.” 

I nodded. “It is cool. But most people fold paper, not twenties.” 

River shrugged. “I didn’t have any paper. Look, Violet, if you ever run out of groceries or something,and I’m not around, you can just unfold that and use it. All right?” 

“All right,” I whispered, because I wasn’t too proud. I put the bookmark in my skirt pocket. 

River nodded at me, and then he bent his knees up, threw one arm around them, and leaned back, ready to pay attention to the movie. He was so flexible and graceful, damn it. I was still haunted by all those boys in my junior high gym class with knees too big for the white legs sticking out of their shorts, their thigh muscles so tight already at fourteen that they moved like someone had taken them apart and put them back together wrong. 

River was different from those boys. River made my insides slither and slide in that good way. River was . . . something entirely new. 

T
he kids ran off sometime during the middle of the movie. Back home to bed, I supposed. I got so caught up in Bogart’s sad eyes and Bergman’s pert little nose and the fresh night air and the never-gets-old novelty of watching a movie underneath the night sky that I was kind of stunned when River got to his feet at the first
“Here’s looking at you, kid
.
”
 

He leaned his head down, so his lips were at my ear. “I’m going to go stretch my legs,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” 

What seventeen-year-old needed to stretch his legs during a two-hour movie?
I thought, watching him go. 

And he didn’t come back right away. He was gone for almost a half hour. Tick tock. Tick tock. The minutes dripped by. And then, just like that, he was at my side again for the last
“Here’s looking at you, kid
.
”
He didn’t tell me where he’d been, or why, but he did grab my hand. And he held it through the last scene of the film, which was all right with me. 

The movie ended and there was no sign of Luke or Maddy. All around us people were drifting into the dark, repeating classic
Casablanca
lines to each other. River and I were the last ones left. 

“So where is this town’s cemetery?” River asked me. 

“Why?”I packed the last of the night’s supper back in the picnic basket and threw it over my arm. 

“I want to see it. I like cemeteries.” 

“Me too.But I think it’s illegal to be in them after sunset.” 

River didn’t say anything, just slid the basket handle down my arm and took it from me. 

“Okay,” I said, caving, just like that. I didn’t care that much about breaking cemetery laws, so it was pretty easy to persuade me.“It’s sort of on the way home, anyway.” 

Echo had a gorgeous cemetery. It was big and old, with tall, ancient trees and a couple of mausoleums, one of them belonging to the ex-illustrious White family. I never visited it,although I should have,since Freddie was buried there. The cemetery spread itself out over a hill facing the sea,and had a view that rivaled Citizen Kane’s.It was the kind of place someone like Edgar Allan Poe would want to rot away in . . .drippy green leaves and twinkling starry silence. 

The cemetery was surrounded by a wrought iron fence, which I thought would be locked. It wasn’t.The gate was wide open. We went inside, and River set the picnic basket down beside the first headstone he saw.Then he reached forward and took my hand. His fingers wove between my own, and mine tingled where River’s wrapped around them. 

“I like you,Violet,” he said, in a low voice. 

“You don’t even know me,” I said back. 

River looked at me, and he was wearing his sly, crooked half smile that was becoming very familiar. “Yes, I do. I can learn all I need to know about a person in two minutes. And we’ve had hours.” He paused. “You’re careful. Thoughtful. Perceptive. More honest than most. You hate recklessness, but are impulsive yourself, when it suits you. You hate your brother, and you love him more than anything in the world. You wish your parents would come home,but you’ve learned to live without them. You like peace, but are capable of toecurling violence, if pushed far enough.” 

River paused, again, and his hand squeezed mine. So hard, it almost hurt. “But the thing I’m really into—the part that makes you different—is that you don’t want anything from me. At all.” 

“I don’t?” 

“No. And I find it . . . relaxing.” 

I had no response to that. I supposed I should have gotten nervous, what with River knowing so much about me already.But I didn’t.I just took it in,and tried to figure out how to enjoy it. 

We walked up a hill and came to stop by the Glenship mausoleum. It was covered in ivy and so old that a person expected the stones to fall apart any second and drop a pile of bones on the ground. The moon disappeared behind a cloud and everything went pitch-black.I couldn’t see anything, not even River. I felt him next to me, though. Heard him breathing. Felt his heat . . . 

Something hard slammed into my back. I choked, and choked again, fell, rolled over, and suddenly there were shadows on top of me, all over me, everywhere, moving and grabbing at me— 

“River,”
I cried out. Cold hands gripped the skin of my legs, and hard palms pressed on my stomach. “What are they? They’re all over me,
God—”
 

“Its all right, Vi, it’s all right.They’re just kids. It’s just a bunch of kids.” 

I stopped writhing underneath the hands and went still. I held my breath and opened my eyes. Above me the clouds separated. The moon shone through, and I saw three boys. Their faces were white. And grim. They glared at me, streaks of pale moonlight sweeping across their cheeks. They looked somber and gruesome and not like kids at all. 

I felt a scream building in the back of my throat, one I didn’t want to release.I wasn’t a screamer,I refused to be a screamer, that was for Sunshine and other girls, I was not going to— 

Another white face popped out of the dark and bent over me. I recognized it. It belonged to one of the yo-yo boys from the park. The one I kind of knew. A makeshift wooden stake had replaced the yo-yo in his hand. Two twigs were tied together to form a cross, the ends sharpened into thick, splintered points. 

I looked at the points, and shuddered. 

“Please don’t stab me,”I said,looking into the boy’s blue eyes, knowing that I was being scared stupid by a group of children and a couple of twigs, but not caring at all because, ah hell,I was still pretty terrified.There was something about their faces, their grim, shadowed faces, that made my skin shrink. I tried again to get away; I writhed and thrashed, but the hard hands of the other boys held me tight. 

“Let her go,” the serious boy said. He shook his head with impatience,and his hair went flying.He stood,arms crossed and legs apart, like a
Seven Samurai
warrior. “I
told
you, the Devil has red eyes that glow in the dark. Did you check her eyes? Are they red?” 

Three boys searched my face, and frowned. 

“Right,”the yo-yo boy said.“Her eyes aren’t red. So let her go.” 

I took a deep breath as the boy sitting on my stomach slid off. The boys on my legs got to their feet and glided away into the dark.I sat up,rubbed some dirt off my face, and looked at River. Two boys were pointing stakes at his throat, but pulled them back as I watched. River stood up and came to me. 

“Are you hurt?” he whispered. 

I shook my head and brushed grass from my skirt. I’d scraped up my leg, and small beads of blood were popping out of the skin on my left knee, but other than that I was fine. River grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet. 

The boy with coppery hair stared at us. “I’m Jack,” he said, after a moment. His eyes were wide and unblinking. He looked at me.“I’ve seen you before, in the café.You’re Violet White, and your brother’s Luke, and you live in the big mansion on the cliff. Your family used to be rich, but now you’re not.”He shrugged.“You bought me coffee once, when I didn’t have enough money.” 

I nodded, remembering. “Yeah, I did.” Jack came into the café one day with twenty-nine cents in change, and tried to get an espresso. But I was standing right there, and bought him a con panna,since he didn’t have enough money for either, anyway. 

“You shouldn’t be in here,”Jack said.His voice was low and serious,like his face.“We’re on patrol.The Devil stole Charlie’s sister earlier.She was playing right beside us,and then the Devil came and took her hand, and they disappeared. And now she’s just . . .
gone
.” 

His voice choked up a bit when he said that. I glanced at River, but his face was blank. 

Jack cleared his throat. “I think he’ll be back before dawn, to steal another kid. The Devil sleeps all day, like a vampire. That’s why we have stakes. If he sleeps like a vampire, he can be killed like a vampire. Stake through the heart.” 

As Jack talked,the boys who attacked us began to form a semicircle around River and me, slinking in from the shadows like hungry wolves. 

“Maybe we should stab him, just to make sure,” said a short, thin boy with black curly hair and a stake pointed at River. “See if he bleeds. I’ve heard that the Devil doesn’t bleed. So, one way or another, we’ll know.” 

“Quiet, Charlie. I’m handling this.” Jack gestured to two boys. “Danny, Ross, and me all saw him. Isobel was playing with her hula hoop right here in front of the mausoleum and he swooped down and . . .and took her.”Jack paused, looked up at the sky. “He had red eyes and he was dressed like in olden days and he looked like a normal guy, except for the red eyes and his Thanksgiving clothes and the snake stick. But I knew he was the Devil.” 

“Thanksgiving clothes? Snake stick?” I asked.“What?” 

Jack squinted at me, trying to decide if I believed him or not. “He wore old clothes like they did at Thanksgiving, with a hat and a cape. And he had a stick. Like a cane, but it was taller.” 

“Like a walking stick?”This from River. 

“Yeah, a walking stick. It was carved into a snake. He just swooped down from the sky and . . .and took Isobel.I thought the Devil would come up from underground, like, you know, like from hell, but he came from the sky, like an angel.”Jack paused,and clenched his pale,freckled fists at his sides.“Then he disappeared. We’re going to wait here until the Devil comes back. And when he comes back, we’re going to kill him.” 

“Yes,” the other boys said. “Kill him.” 

It was some kind of game. Some kids’ game that had gone too far. I looked at their serious faces, the stakes gripped in each hand, the unnatural way each boy was silent and unmoving, as boys never are. I wondered about the little girl. Isobel. Had she gone home without telling her brother, and the game spun off from there? Or had someone really taken her? 

River came up behind me. He slid an arm around my waist and tugged me back into him. “Let’s get going,” he whispered in my ear. “Leave the boys to their game. They’re just having fun.They’ll be fine.” 

The skin of my neck tickled where River’s breath brushed by me. I ignored it. I slid back out of his arms and knelt down by Jack, who was on his knees now, using a knife to sharpen the end of another twig.“I hope you find your devil. Be careful, okay? It’s getting late. You might want to go home soon. Your parents might get worried about you.” 

“I’ve got to make a bunch more stakes,”he said,without looking up. “We have more kids coming to help. Isaac’s been getting them, waking everyone up. I told Charlie he could be the one to stab the Devil,if . . .if his sister is dead. I said that he could be the one . . .” 

His voice trailed off as he got caught up in what he was doing. River pulled on my waist, and we began to move away toward the gate. I threw one last glance over my shoulder at Jack, kneeling on the ground. There had been no glint of mischief, no pride over the creation of his game, no antsy joy at being out so late. He’d been as serious as a young soldier about to go to war. It was unsettling. Odd. I wondered if I should tell someone what was going on.Try to find some parents, or call the cops— 

“Violet.” 

I stopped walking and looked at River. 

“They’re going to be all right. It’s just a game.” 

I didn’t answer. 

River leaned his hips into mine and my back pressed against the wrought iron gate.His fingers curled over the back of my head, and my thoughts . . . ceased. 

He kissed me. My lips met his and I just. Stopped. Thinking.I didn’t think about the fact that River was still a stranger. I didn’t think about the tunnel, or Jack, or the Devil, or anything. My lips melted into my heart, which melted into my legs, which melted into the earth beneath me. 

Afterward, River walked me home in the moonlight. Neither of us talked. 

And everything was damn near perfect. 

 I slept in the guesthouse. 

I had started the night in my own bed. But I woke up sometime before dawn, and found myself walking barefoot down the cold marble steps of the grand staircase, through the dewy grass by the wrecked greenhouse, to the cottage, to River’s bed.