Authors: Mandy Hubbard
I land, hard, on the dampened, muddy earth below, the wind slamming from my lungs. I lie there, my mouth open like a fish gasping for air, the rain blinding me.
I’m alive.
I’m really alive.
When I finally regain my breath, I wipe my eyes free of the rain and look up at the roof, expecting to see Daemon staring down at me.
But he’s not there. I blink, searching the darkness for his face, but he’s gone. I climb to my feet, still cradling my arm and gasping for air as I tear across the lawn and into the dark shadows of the woods, just as the door to the house slams open.
I’m not far into the tree line before I realize I’m no match for him. He’s crashing through the brush with the speed of a raging bull. My foot slips in the mud and I go down, slamming to the ground just as I hear his strange laughter behind me.
My fingers touch something soft, hidden in the fallen leaves.
Heart hammering out of control, I push the leaves aside, and a scream dies in my throat. I cover my mouth with my hands and stare, gagging.
Two glassy, lifeless eyes stare back at me, deeply sunken, emotionless. His face is pale, waxy.
Dead.
It’s his uncle, half-buried in the dampened earth under a big cedar tree.
He killed his uncle.
This whole time, he wasn’t away on business, he was dead and rotting. The horror building in my chest, threatening to suffocate me, nearly makes me break down in sobs, but I can’t. There’s no time.
I climb to my feet, nausea swelling as I take off again, desperate, frantic for a savior, a safety net, something.
Anything.
The rain drips down my face, into my eyes, making it hard
to see where I’m going. I leap over a tree root, the panic overwhelming me. My shoulder is numb now, completely devoid of pain.
He’s getting closer with every second. He curses as a tree branch snaps, and I realize he’s closing in on me. I push faster, my feet slipping as the rain deafens the sound of my muddy footsteps.
I’ll never make it to the road, to another house. He lives so far away from anything. I have to hide or outsmart him or…
Or he’ll kill me.
Lightning cracks across the sky, for the first time in many minutes, and then the thunder rumbles, slow and quiet at first, and then building until it drowns out everything else. I force my screaming muscles to move faster and faster as I careen through the trees like a bat out of hell.
Too late, I realize what I’ve done. Ahead and below, the Green River rages. There’s a cliff. It must be two hundred feet tall, towering over the valley.
A beautiful vantage point for him to catch up, corner me.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
I skid to a stop, whirl around, rethink my plan. There’s gotta be something. Some way out of here, somewhere to hide.
I turn again and peer over the ledge, and that’s when I see it. A thin, tiny trail leading down to a series of rock ledges. I could climb down there. Hide. The trail is almost completely concealed.
But the idea of climbing down sends panic streaking up and
down my limbs, and all I picture is my mom tumbling to her death.
It occurs to me then that Logan never discovered my number one fear: falling. Just like my mom.
I’m still staring down when I hear Daemon’s voice drifting through the brush, cursing as he thrashes through.
I have no other choice. I slip behind the fern, edging down the path, my toes perilously close to the ledge. It’s skinny, maybe eighteen inches wide. I have to step sideways, my back sliding along the rocks, as I make it to the first landing.
I can’t hear anything now, save the rain pounding the ground all around me, and I wait only a moment to heave a deep breath before following the next part of the trail. My left foot—the foot I lead with—slides slightly on the trail, and with a gasp, I look down.
Trees and rocks and the river, all so far away the trees look more like sticks. I would die if I fell down there. I would die, just like my mother.
I tear my gaze away and look back at the path, concentrating on sliding one foot and then the other, scooting to the narrow rock ledge.
And then the trail widens and I’m there, on the final landing.
I collapse onto the ground.
I did it.
I really did it.
For a moment, I think,
Logan is going to be so proud of me
. But then reality hits—there is no Logan, not really. I curl up, sliding back against the rock, trying to make myself invisible.
Then I close my eyes as I listen for Daemon, praying he didn’t see me come down here. If he finds me, it’s all over. I’m dead. There’s nowhere to go from here.
The rain is streaming down the cliffside, forming a tiny river as it pools around me. I shiver, curling tighter, and then I hear it. The sound of clothing brushing along the cliffside. I snap my eyes open and see Daemon edging toward me.
Shit. I scramble to my feet and look around, but there are no more trails, nothing but a ten-foot-wide landing a dozen feet below, and then two hundred feet more to the flooding river.
Daemon steps onto the landing just a half-dozen feet way from me, smiling, his hair plastered to his face and his eyes dark. He’s lost his mask somewhere. Tears swim in my vision, mingling with the raindrops sliding down my skin. It can’t be this way.
It can’t end like this.
A
sole bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, the second since I ran from the house. It makes odd shadows in the cliff side, its light filtering through what branches hang over the edge from the trees towering above us. It turns his face into harsh angles.
And then it dawns on me. “It’s the lightning,” I say through the tears burning in my throat.
“Huh?”
“Logan…Trent told me it was storming when you went off the road with your mother. The lightning must trigger your switch. Every time I’ve seen you…”
I think back to the day he scared me in the basement, the day I followed him down the darkened roads.
It was storming.
Maybe that means if I can keep him calm, keep him from doing anything drastic, until the storm lets up, Logan…Trent will come back. I think. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t
work that way. But the storm has been lessening. The end of it has to be near.
I swallow. “The lightning triggers your…” I repeat, “your switch.”
“It started that way,” he says, grinning. “It had to be a full lightning storm for him to be so lost in memories I could slip in, take over. But I’d get so weak from being in control, he’d come back just as soon as the storm ended. But I’m getting better. Sometimes I can last a whole day in control or even take control when a storm is far off in the distance. It’s harder, but I can do it.”
His voice has such a note of pride in it I think I might be sick. “It was me up at Evan’s Creek, you know. That was the first time I controlled him without a full thunderstorm right in our area. Pity it didn’t last longer. You just
had
to go and smack my arm. It was just enough to break my concentration, and Trent regained control.”
Horror washes over me. I step back, closer to the edge of the ravine. Far below me, the Green River rages, frothy and cold. If it’s even possible to survive a fall this far, I’d die from the river. I need to stall. Just keep him talking until the storm is over.
“Tell me what really happened in Cedar Cove. Don’t I deserve to know?”
“You’re going to die, and
that’s
your final wish? To know what I did six months ago?” He laughs. “Hell, I’ll give you this one. Rather nice story, I think, much better than what Trent made up. But the story about
you
will top it.”
I wince and fight the urge to step back again, to where the ground is unstable, held together with the strength of tree roots and ferns.
“See, there was this girl who thought she was too good for me. I asked her out, before my mom’s accident. She turned me down, but a month later, she’s hooking up with Trent. We’re fucking twins, and she still chooses him over me.
“Fast forward a few months, and I’m stuck in his body. Logan went to prom with her, and they took a limo. See, this was when I still needed the lightning to trigger my switch. It started storming, and I guess he had no way of getting home before I took over.” He grins widely, his white teeth flashing in the darkness reminding me of a wolf. “Of course, I couldn’t disappoint her, so I went to the after-party. Decided I’d have my fun with her, but I got caught, and things got ugly. A football player thought he’d defend her virtue or some bullshit.”
He laughs. “Turns out football players aren’t good fighters. Even two on one, I had the upper hand. Course, there was a whole team to back them up. Nearly got us locked up for that one, but they couldn’t prove I’d drugged her, and the other guy swung first. So I lay low for a bit, let Trent handle things while the dust settled.”
“And you moved here.”
“Yep. And then ‘Logan,’” Daemon says, making quotes, “meets you, and you fall for him, and the two of you go to a dance. Are you sensing a trend yet?” He steps forward, so only a dozen feet separate us. I glance around, desperate for some kind of answer, for some way to get out of this.
“Why’d you kill your uncle?”
“He caught me with the stop signs. He got in the way of what I was doing,” Daemon says. “My only regret is not being able to see Trent’s face when he realized what I’d done. Should have written it on a mirror, or something, so I could witness it. Man, that musta been pretty spectacular.”
My chest aches for Logan…for Trent. For everything he’s done to try to live a normal life.
Daemon sighs, this happy, drawn-out sigh that makes my skin crawl. My stomach spasms and I think I might lose my lunch. This is it. This is what it comes down to.
Another bolt of lightning. I count in my head,
One Mississippi, two Mississippi
…I’m all the way to eight before the thunder arrives. It’s almost over. Logan might come back. I might live through this.
But a dark look passes over Daemon’s features. He lowers his body a bit, and for a second I think he’s going to crouch.
But he’s not.
He’s pushing off, racing at me. He’s going to throw me off the cliff.
My pulse thunders in my ears, and I do the only thing I can think of. I drop to my knees, curl over.
His shins slam into me, and I grab the dripping fern near my hands as Daemon’s body flies over me, over the cliff.
Just a second later, I hear a sickening thump. I crawl to the edge of the cliff and look down.
Ten feet below me, his body sits, twisted on a hard rock ledge, one leg dangling down toward the hundred-plus-foot
drop. A trickle of blood drips down the rock, into the dark abyss below.
I sit back and slump into the ground, the relief and sorrow so swift I feel like a puddle on the ground.
It’s over.
It’s really over.
Six months later…
I
’m sitting on a bench near the student library, a novel in my hands, but I can’t seem to concentrate. I’ve been staring at the same page for five minutes.
He should be here by now. I wonder what’s keeping him.
I turn the page, but it’s useless because I don’t remember the last page I read, or the page before that, or the page before that.
I sigh, snap it shut, and look out across the courtyard, blinking away the glare from the bright white pages in the sunshine.
My cell rings, and I recognize the personalized ring tone. Smiling, I flip it open.
“Hey Dad,” I say.
“Hey,” he says. “So I’m at the grocery store, and I can’t remember what kind of sauce you said he likes.”
In the background, an overhead speaker comes to life. I wait for it to finish, chuckling under my breath. My dad attempting to cook dinner for us is amusing on so many levels. “Bolognese.”
He says something under his breath, but I can’t make it out. “They make that in jars, right?”
“Yeah. It should be with the other sauces.”
“Okay. See you when you get home.”
“Great. Love you,” I say.
“Love you too.”
I snap my phone shut, slipping it back into my pocket. It’s the third time this week my dad has called my cell. Six months ago I would have bet money he didn’t even have my number programmed into his phone. But when he nearly lost me that rainy night…
Things changed. He finally got the wake-up call he needed.
I shove my discarded book into my backpack and then pull my binder out, flipping to the last divider where a vinyl pouch can be found. I unzip the pouch and pull out a handful of printouts.