The Boys Are Back in Town (28 page)

It chilled and saddened her and in the back of her mind there was, omnipresent, the unique perspective afforded to her by her own secret. Will and Brian—the Elder Will and Brian—had more than ten years on their younger counterparts. What was it like for them, she wondered, remembering these days? Remembering this loss? With the numb, hollow feeling at her center, she could not imagine what it would feel like to put a decade's distance between herself and her grief. But she wished she could do it in an instant, that she could move forward away from this day with the same effortless magic they had used to return to it.

Will and Brian,
she thought.
What the hell happened to you two?

All of these grim curiosities churned in Ashleigh's mind as she walked home from the high school. She had been working with the Homecoming Committee on the main float for Saturday's game, but though their effort was just as diligent, the spirit had been leeched from them. The students working on the float still gossiped and flirted and laughed, but all of it seemed muted to Ashleigh. Though mostly unspoken, the awareness of Mike Lebo's fate lingered. A wake would be held Tuesday night; Wednesday, the school would allow students to skip their morning classes and attend Mike's funeral. As though anyone would be in the mood for calculus after that.

Her mother had tried to get her to stay home, to distract herself with music or bad television, but Ashleigh had insisted on going to the Homecoming Committee meeting. The people working on the float were expecting her, they were counting on her, and she had felt like being surrounded by people. Now she wished she had listened. Smiles and conversation were not at all what she wanted. Which was why when Lolly and Pix offered her a ride home, she declined. It was only a couple of miles to her house. She could walk it easily.

Alone in the dark with only the October breeze and the golden moonlight for company, she quickened her pace as she moved down Market Street toward Kennedy Middle School. What happened to Mike had her worried. Her father's cracked windshield worried her even more. If she needed any more proof of the incredible identity of her nocturnal visitors, she had it. They had known Mike would die, had known where and how.

And they had not been able to prevent it.

Now, when Ashleigh remembered the conversation she'd had through her bedroom window with Will as he clung in the trees, she could only focus on the expression on his face. His eyes had been troubled as he looked at her. She'd caught that several times. It had not bothered her overmuch at the time, but now, as she approached the silent shape of the school with its dark-eye windows, there was something far too ominous about it.

It had, of course, occurred to her that fate had something sinister in store for her as well. The shadowy figure she had seen in the woods on Saturday night had not been her imagination. But Elder Will and Elder Brian hadn't been able to save Mike. If there was anything for her to fear, she was going to have to fend for herself.

Forcibly she turned her mind from such thoughts and focused on more trivial things. When she got home she would call Eric and ask him about his trip. She would do all she could to avoid talking to him about Mike Lebo's death, but he was going to be devastated. She could picture Eric's face in her mind, his strong features, those brown eyes, and she missed him all the more.

Ashleigh sighed. So much for thinking about other things.

The autumn wind kicked up, whistling along Market Street and ruffling her hair, whipping it across her face. Ashleigh pushed it out of her eyes and shivered, zipping her brown, soft leather jacket up to her throat. She picked up her pace even further, hurrying now, just wanting to be home.

As she walked across the school parking lot a strange feeling crept over her, a cold, familiar feeling, but one she had not felt in a very long time. As a child she had stared at her closet door, slightly ajar, and imagined terrible things therein. When the wind blew, the branches of the trees had scraped her bedroom window like the dagger-fingers of some ravenous ghoul.

Ashleigh stared straight ahead, her cheeks flushing and the back of her neck growing warm. She felt childish, her mind overwrought with terrible imaginings because of Mike's death and things Will had said to her. But if her bizarre meeting with Elder Will on Saturday night had taught her anything, it was that sometimes there really were cruel things in the darkness.

So she told herself that perhaps her suddenly erratic heartbeat and trembling hands were not silly at all but instinct.

The school loomed up on her left and she rushed past it at a clip that was barely slow enough to qualify as a walk. As she left the parking lot behind, like Lot's wife she could no longer withstand the temptation to turn, to look back.

A dark car was rolling slowly down Market Street toward her, headlights off.

Ashleigh ran.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she whispered to herself, chanting the mantra over and over. Her legs pumped, her shoes crunching the frosted grass. She listened for the engine, her ears attuned to the slightest change in the ambient sound around her. Bats screeched as they flew overhead. The wind rustled the branches and blew fallen autumn leaves across the ground in whirls and eddies that performed an elegant dance. The world around her took no notice of the terror that now rose up inside her.

There came no roar of an approaching engine, no sudden burst of brilliance from the headlights. The car was not pursuing her. Her mind clicked through possibilities, and Ashleigh wondered if she could dare to hope that the driver of that vehicle meant her no harm. But no way was she slowing down. Her breath was coming ragged and fear seemed to choke her. Ashleigh ran past the school and started across Robinson Field.

Branches snapped as something moved through the trees off to her right, on the near side of the field perhaps thirty feet from her. Ashleigh glanced over, throat constricting further, eyes wide as she watched a dark figure burst from the woods that surrounded Robinson Field and start toward her.

That dark silhouette, erupting from the trees, erased all other thoughts or concerns from her mind. Homecoming, Mike's funeral, her grief, magic . . . it was all erased in that instant. The only image left in her head was of the shadowy figure in her backyard on Saturday night.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Then she began to scream. But even as Ashleigh sprinted across the grass, turning away from the dark man, she knew he had chosen his attack carefully. Not even the janitorial staff would be in the middle school this late at night. The lights were all out. The field was broad, and there were woods separating it from the surrounding neighborhoods.

He had her. Her only chance was to outrun him, to sprint the length of the school and come back around the other side, to race back up Market Street toward the main road, where there would be houses and other cars.

Ashleigh bit her lip as she ran. Her eyes burned but she refused to let the tears come. In the past twelve hours she had been forced to think about her own death for the first time in her life. If Mike Lebo could be so violently deleted from the world, then she could be, too. Hopes and dreams slipped through her mind as though they were slipping from her grasp. Graduation gown. Wedding dress. Maternity dress.

She never expected the shadow to have a voice.

“Slow down, Ashleigh,” he said, his tone raspy and insinuating.

And too close.

Ashleigh snapped her head around and saw that he was almost upon her. How had he moved so fast? Panic surged through her as though she had been electrocuted. A single tear escaped, even as she began to stumble, halfway twisted around like that.

She caught herself, the momentum of her stumbling throwing her forward, but she let it carry her faster, used it. Her arms and legs pumped and she bent into it, sprinting so hard every muscle ached. But it was a foolish effort, for she knew that he was too fast. Supernaturally fast. Swift as the shadows themselves.

“Ashleigh, why run? I only want to talk to you. I just want to touch you.”

Revulsion curdled her stomach, and she knew that she had to do whatever was necessary to keep the dark man's hands off of her. If he even was a man—with that voice and that inhuman speed she could not be sure.

Ashleigh ran across first base on the baseball diamond in Robinson Field. Grim determination filled her as she spotted the twenty-foot-high chain-link backstop. She poured every last ounce of effort into her run and raced to the backstop. He kept talking, but she ignored him now, refusing to listen, believing that there was something in those slithering words that could trap her, could slow her down.

At the backstop she dashed to the right, just behind it, and she grabbed the fence, her fingers linking into the metal latticework. Ashleigh scrambled upward as fast as she was able, refusing to look back, refusing to look down, knowing that he was there, that he was coming, and her chest hurt and she missed Eric and Will and her father, her silly, grumpy old man of a father. Hand over hand she climbed and all she could think of was how much she was going to miss, how the world would continue to turn without her on it, and there would be a whole life she would never see.

Halfway up, just as her fingers closed on another snatch of chain link, she felt his hand clamp on her ankle.

Ashleigh Wheeler did not scream. Her lower lip quaked but she reached upward again, trying to pull free. But his grip was too strong. Then, abruptly, he let her go and the fence started to shudder and rattle as he climbed up after her.

There was nowhere else to go. Ashleigh kept climbing.

Over the thunder of her heart beating in her ears she almost did not hear the roar of the car engine. At the last minute she gripped the metal lattice and turned to see the car charging across Robinson Field, tearing up the lawn and trailing a storm of fallen leaves behind it.

The car skidded to a halt as it reached the backstop, its front end striking the chain link hard enough to knock the dark man off of the fence. Ashleigh's feet came loose but she held on with both hands, dangling there, scrabbling for better purchase.

Handsome, older Will James jumped out of the passenger side and leaped over the hood of the old green Buick, sliding across the metal and jumping down on the other side. The moonlight was just bright enough to show her that Brian was behind the wheel. He put the car in reverse and the tires churned dirt and grass.

The dark man was already up on his feet and running for the trees. He had come from the woods on one side of the field, and now he wanted to escape through the trees on the other side. Will came around the backstop, faster than Ashleigh would have thought him capable of. He managed to grab hold of the dark man's arm.

The blow came too fast for Ashleigh to see. Her attacker's black-gloved fists were barely visible in the nighttime shadows. Will's head rocked back from the punch, but he did not release his grip.

“I don't think so, asshole,” Will snapped. “This stops now.”

With one hand, Will kept a grip on the dark man's sleeve and with the other he clutched the attacker's throat.

“Not tonight, Will,” rasped the dark man, his voice muffled through the black fabric that covered his face. “‘. . . Promises to keep . . .'”

The dark man slammed his skull against Will's in a savage head butt that echoed up to Ashleigh. She winced at the sound and gaped in alarm as she saw Will stagger backward into the backstop.

“‘. . . Miles to go before I sleep.'”

The dark man might have gone after him but the Buick's engine roared and Brian drove around the backstop, headed for him. Ashleigh held her breath, thinking Brian would just run the man down, and not caring at all if he did. But then the dark man ran, sprinting across the short span that separated the backstop from the trees.

Before he even reached the woods, with the Buick bouncing over the rutted terrain after him, the dark man simply disappeared in a swirl of dark smoke that twisted upward and was swept away by the wind.

The Buick rolled to a stop only feet from the trees. Brian sat unmoving behind the wheel. Ashleigh stared in dread and terror and only tore her eyes away from the place where the dark man had been when the chain link beneath her hands shook with the chink of metal. She looked down and saw Will kicking the backstop.

“Fuck!” he screamed. “Fucking hell!”

Her arms aching from holding on so tightly, Ashleigh began to climb down. She had only just reached the ground, with Will reaching up to help her, when she heard other footfalls on the cold ground, and her head whipped up to see two thin figures running full-tilt across the field toward her, the same way she had come and the same way the car had come.

“Get the hell away from her or I swear to God I'll kill you!” shouted a familiar voice.

Beside her, Will stiffened. The Buick's engine died and Brian climbed out of the car. As the new arrivals ran toward them, Brian joined Will and Ashleigh.

“We were trying to avoid this,” Brian said.

“Too late for that.”

And Will was right.

“Ashleigh, you okay?” asked Will James. The younger Will James. Her best friend. But all the menace and urgency had gone from him.

Young Will and Young Brian both slowed as they approached, staring in disbelief at the men they would one day become. Ashleigh had been afraid the time travelers would never come back, and she had known that whoever or whatever had killed Mike Lebo might still be out there, stalking them all. She'd had no one to confide in save the only two people in Eastborough who might believe her. And they had, of course. Magic had already tainted them, destroyed their friendship, thrown a shadow over their lives.

But this was something they had never imagined.

“Ashleigh?” Elder Will ventured.

“I told them,” she confirmed.

“Holy shit,” Young Brian muttered, staring at his older self in amazement. Ashleigh didn't blame him. Elder Brian was handsome, fit, and confident, all of the things he wasn't.

“Come on,” Elder Brian replied. “I was a little more eloquent than that.”