Читать книгу Elegy - Tara Hudson, Tara Hudson - Страница 14

Chapter NINE

No amount of reassurance from Joshua could dispel the leaden ball of guilt in my stomach. Almost three pitchers of coffee and nine Mayhew Bakery day-old pastries didn’t do the trick, either, although they had officially proved that I was a nervous eater. During our drive from High Bridge to the Mayhews’ house, I’d felt strangely calm. Impassive, even. Now, I just felt overstuffed with food and foreboding.

I pushed my half-eaten, stale palmier away in disgust and looked around the kitchen. Across from me, Jillian and Scott had fallen asleep on each other’s shoulders, slumped awkwardly in their dining chairs. On this side of the room, Joshua leaned with me against the counter of the kitchen island. He still watched me warily, as though he thought I might try to blow up his parents’ house, too.

I raked one hand through the ends of my hair. “I’m not going to do anything crazy again, Joshua. I promise.”

“I know, Amelia,” he said, keeping his voice low. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“You’re not worried that I tried to detonate a weapon of mass destruction tonight?”

Joshua shook his head. “Even if I don’t like how you did it, I don’t blame you for trying. And I don’t think this is your fault, either. It’s not like you invented demons and made them evil.”

In response, I held my hands up in a pose of surrender. “But does that matter? Will that matter to the person who dies tonight?” Then I peeked at the kitchen clock. “Or this early morning, I guess?”

I dropped my palms to the countertop in defeat. As he’d done since we arrived home, Joshua placed his own hand comfort-close to mine. I stretched my fingers toward his, aching to tangle both sets together.

“I don’t know the answer to that, any better than you do,” he said softly, running his thumb across the granite counter, near the length of my wrist. “All we can do is wait out the night, and then spend the next six days coming up with a better plan.”

I laughed mirthlessly. “You mean: a ‘better than last-minute, ineffective demolition’ plan.”

He smiled sadly but said nothing. Frowning again, I looked away from him and motioned to the view outside the wide kitchen window, just behind Jillian’s and Scott’s slumped forms.

“Well, fortunately or not, we don’t have much longer to wait out the night.”

Through the newly leafing branches in the front yard, we could see the first traces of sunlight. Without taking his eyes off the window, Joshua walked over to another counter and removed a fresh pot of coffee from the maker. Once he’d poured it into our mugs, we waited in silence, drinking and watching dawn break over the Mayhews’ front garden.

Only when the sunrise shifted fully into early morning did Joshua set down his cup and stretch his arms high above his head. Then he settled back against the countertop with a wide yawn.

“Well,” he said, stifling the last bit of his yawn, “the demons haven’t attacked the house, and we haven’t gotten a tragic phone call from one of my friends. So . . . no news is good news.”

“Maybe,” I murmured. I took another long sip of coffee and kept my eyes trained on the brightening sky. As I watched the colors shift from pink and peach to pale blue and gold, I let myself hope. Just for a few, indulgent minutes.

Maybe Joshua was right. Maybe the demons were bluffing. After all, Eli had told me that demons weren’t omniscient. They didn’t innately know the identity of everyone I’d ever met; the demons merely targeted those unlucky people who happened to be in my proximity. A simple glance around the kitchen showed me that all my companions from last night were very much alive, if thoroughly exhausted. And Joshua had already checked on his parents—more than a few times, actually. So it looked like I could claim the night as a victory.

With one important exception.

Although my mother hadn’t been anywhere near our ill-fated grenade attack, I couldn’t help but worry about her. She was the only other person I’d visited lately, which made her a possible victim. Not a likely one . . . but still. I’d feel much better after a quick, invisible peek in her living-room window.

I laced my fingers and reached my arms forward, across the island, in an attempt to stretch away some of my cramped tension. Then I turned back to Joshua.

“Feel like driving me to my mom’s house again?” I asked him. “Just for a quick check?”

In response, he pulled his car keys out of his pocket and began twirling the ring around his index finger. Seeing the exhausted lines around Joshua’s faint smile, I briefly considered plucking the keys from his hand and giving the whole driving thing a try. But I doubted a wrecked pickup truck would help anyone, especially Joshua. I kept my hands to myself and followed him outside, stifling my own yawns as I climbed into his truck.

On the drive to my mother’s house, Joshua and I agreed that music was a necessity: the louder, the better. We rolled down the windows to let in the cool morning air. As I drummed my fingers against the outside truck door in time to my new favorite song, I felt a twinge of guilt about blasting guitar riffs at seven a.m. on a Sunday. One look at the purplish shadows under Joshua’s eyes made my guilt vanish. On impulse, I started to sing as loudly as possible to keep him awake. Joshua took a surprised, sidelong glance at me, so I added an air guitar, just for effect.

I thought he would laugh, or at least beg me to stop singing. Instead, he joined me, belting out the lyrics in a painful, off-key pitch. While he wailed, he shot me another sidewise glance, smiling a little during a particularly screechy chorus of “baby, baby, bab-eeee.” The performance continued long after I’d dissolved into a fit of tired, giggly snorts.

When we pulled onto my mother’s street, however, my laughter died.

I could see a faint, shifting light in her front window, a sure sign that she’d woken up early to watch the Sunday-morning newscast—a ritual to which she’d strictly adhered for as long as I could remember. That glow, and her brown sedan parked out front, meant that she’d spent the night in the relative safety of her house.

But inexplicably, my stomach began to sour with fear. I pressed one hand to my abdomen, willing myself to breathe normally as Joshua parked the truck a few hundred feet back from my mother’s driveway.

He turned toward me in the cab, his eyes suddenly serious. “I’m coming with you this time,” he said.

Just yesterday, I’d asked him to wait in the car. Although I’d appreciated his support, I didn’t think my mother could take the added stress of meeting her undead daughter’s living boyfriend. But this morning, I wasn’t sure I could make the trip across my mother’s tiny yard all by myself.

Watching the flicker of light in her window, I nodded and, without thinking, reached out to give Joshua’s hand a grateful squeeze. Immediately, my hand slapped against the steering wheel. I looked down to see my hand shimmering, transparent, above his.

“Perfect timing,” I growled, and yanked my hand back.

Joshua sighed, pulled his own hand from the steering wheel, and ran his fingers through the air beside my cheek. An uncomfortable jumble of desire, anger, and fear shot its way through me and came to life as a blush on my cheeks.

“One thing at a time,” Joshua reminded me gently.

“You’re right,” I whispered, shaking my head at myself. “It’s just that I’m . . . I’m just . . .”

When I trailed off, he laughed softly but without humor. “I know. Trust me, Amelia: I know.”

He dropped his fingers and let them hover, a millimeter from the delicate spot above my collarbone. Then, with another heavy sigh, he pulled away and got out of the truck. I waited, fighting the urge to shriek with frustration—about Joshua, about the demons, about what I might view through my mother’s window. After a few embattled seconds, I climbed out of the truck too.

I trudged behind Joshua, dragging my feet through the thick, dewy grass of my mother’s lawn. The yard really needed a good mow, but if I had to guess, my parents’ mower had died sometime after me and my father. I made a mental note to drag Joshua over here, while my mother was still at work, for a day of covert yard cleanup.

If she’s still alive to need it. If any of you are.

The cold, slithery voice in my head was my own, but I jerked back as though I’d been slapped. Shut up, I silently told the other voice. I don’t need your input.

Unaware of my nasty inner dialogue, Joshua glanced over his shoulder to give me a small, close-lipped smile as we stepped together onto my mother’s porch.

You okay? he mouthed.

I just set my lips into a grim line and moved to peer in the front window, praying that my mother had left the curtains parted at least an inch or two.

To my eternal gratitude, she had. Even better, she was sitting on the couch just to the side of them. From that position, I could easily see her profile as she faced the TV.

I gusted out an enormous breath of relief and began to count off each indication that my mother was alive and well: the flick of her ponytail as she moved her head quickly from side to side; the tight clench and unclench of her hands to her closed lips; the almost violent lift and fall of her shoulders. . . .

I stopped counting. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

My mother’s entire body moved as though someone had attached puppet strings to it—she was jerking and shaking on the couch.

Is she having a seizure?

At that thought, I didn’t care if I alerted her to my presence; I practically threw myself against the window to get a better look inside. From that vantage point, I could see that, aside from the heavy crisscross of tears across her cheek, she seemed perfectly healthy. Alert, upright, and in relative control of her limbs. But as she pressed her fingers to her lips and shook her head again, I frowned harder.

TV, I realized. She’s crying about something on TV.

My gaze trailed upward to the program that had affected her so strongly. When I saw what my mother was watching, I froze.

It wasn’t a sad movie, as I’d hoped. Not even a particularly moving commercial. The news played out across her small, outdated screen, just like I’d expected it would. And right now, the news featured a very familiar face.

At first, I desperately hoped that she was just a newscaster. That she only appeared on the screen because she was giving a report on a violent car crash, as the headlines indicated. After a few more seconds, however, it became clear that the blond woman on the TV wasn’t smiling prettily from a newsroom. The picture was a head shot, the kind of photo that reporters place on camera when they can no longer show the real thing. When the person in the picture no longer exists to interview.

As if to confirm my fears, the headline beneath the photo shifted. Previously, it had read:

VIOLENT MIDNIGHT CAR CRASH

Now, in two lines of garish, breaking-news red, the banner proclaimed:

FORMER WILBURTON RESIDENT SERENA TAYLOR, 32,

DEAD IN CRASH AT HIGH BRIDGE

I didn’t have the chance to catch any more of the story because the sourness in my stomach finally rose to the surface. I dove to the edge of the porch, just in time to be violently ill off the side of it. Then, without a backward glance at my mother or even at Joshua, I ran away from that house as fast as I could.