I'd Rather Not Be Dead (26 page)

Avoiding the topic, Finn grabs
the phone. “Hello?” He tries to make his voice sound tired, maybe
even sick.

“Rain, hi!” Holding onto me, he
sits up straighter. “More dreams?”

I lean my head against his and
we share the receiver.

“No,” she sobs. “Just the same
dream over again. And she still doesn't believe me.”

“Did you notice any more
details?” he asks gently. “How bare were the trees?”

She sniffles. “Fewer leaves than
now. A lot fewer.”

“So, we have a while still,”
Finn says, rubbing his hand up and down my arm.

“I guess,” Rain whispers.

“I'll figure something out,” he
tells her, sounding a lot more confident than I know him to be.

“Okay,” she breathes.
“Finn?”

“Yeah?”

“If it makes any
difference...”

We wait for her.

“You know Bobbi's crazy about
you, right?”

Finn's eyes close. “Yeah, I
know.” This time, the weariness in his voice isn't faked.

“Well, she's not the only one of
my sisters who is. Just don't tell the other one I told you
that.”

Smiling, I put my fingers
against the phone. Sweet little Rain. She may be into flaky
spirituality, but she's still one smart girl.

“Alright, I won't tell her.” He
winks at me. “I'll talk to you later, okay?”

“Okay... Bye.”

“Bye, Rain.”

We look at each other as he
hangs up the phone and he laughs. “She figured that out before you
did.”

“Yeah, I had no idea Miss
Whiskers had a thing for you.”

He strikes a cocky pose and
wiggles his eyebrows. “I have that effect on cats.”

Quickly, I brush a kiss across
his lips. “What should we do about your mom?”

Sighing, he shakes his head. “I
don't know.” His expression turns wicked. “I'm willing to bet that
it'll be a long time before she comes back up here though.”

His cell rings, a red-alert sort
of sound.

“But she might call.”
Dispirited, he moves me to my feet and bends to grab the cell phone
off the floor. “Yeah, Mom?” He manages to sound neither annoyed nor
embarrassed. “I don't know... I doubt she's hungry. I think she ate
before she came over here.”

I roll my eyes. Like she's
possibly going to believe I just got here this morning.

He's hemming and hawing now,
trying to get out of going over to Blue Ridge. “I don't really feel
up to it... Yeah, I know...” His voice turns whiny when she clearly
doesn't like him trying to cancel the trip.

“You promised little kids,
Finn,” I whisper.

Glaring at me, he tells him mom,
“I'll be down in a minute.” He hangs up and frowns. “But, I don't
wanna!”

At least he recognizes that he
sounds like a baby. Smiling, I kiss his cheek. “I'll be here when
you get back. Assuming you can convince your mom I left without me
actually having to do it..”

With a chuckle, he goes into the
closet, stepping over Juliet's fence. “I think I can convince her
you ran away in mortification.”

But when he comes out again,
looking more like his old self in a long sleeved Blue Ridge State
t-shirt and jeans, it's obvious he doesn't want to leave. He looks
at me balefully, his hands deep in his pockets and his shoulders
hunched nearly to his ears.

“You promised,” I remind him.
“You wouldn't want the little kiddies shooting up just because you
lied to them, would you?”

Quiet, motionless, he watches
me.

“I'll be fine, Finn.” As my hand
runs through his hair, a wave of tenderness nearly floors me.
“Nothing's going to happen to me. The girl who's going to die is
already dead.”

There are tears in his eyes as
he nods. Clearing his throat, he gathers himself to leave. “I'll be
home tonight, I'm not going to do the full weekend.”

“Alright.”

He stops at the top of the
stairs, turns back to stride across the room and grab me into the
tightest hug of my existence. Laughing, I hug him back. “I'm not
going anywhere, I promise.”

“And I'm coming back,” he says,
like it isn't a given. “Wish you could come with me.”

With a laugh, I push him back so
I can fold my arms and try to give him a look of revulsion. “To an
athletic department event? This is fundamentally an excuse to spend
two days watching one ballgame, isn't it?”

He sighs. “And there's that dose
of reality.” His eyes flicker to the ferret house, where Juliet is
starting to shiver awake. She'll be up soon and won't be happy to
find Finn missing. “There's more to it than that.”

“I know,” I admit. Making a
shooing motion with my hand, I tell him, “Get out of here before
she wakes up. I'll play with them.”

“Okay.” He spends a long time
looking at me before he turns and goes.

My heart sinks as the door
closes and I have to chide myself for letting it. “He'll be back
tonight. If you can't deal with him being gone for a day, what are
you going to do when he's living there?”

Because all that stuff about
maybe not going to college... It was about not wanting to leave me.
And I can't let him do that.

The doorbell rings. The people
Finn's supposed to ride with must be here, although how he thinks
he's getting home early if he carpools in, I don't know. Unable to
resist the temptation, I drift to the front window and look into
the yard. Finn's standing between his truck and an SUV full of
people. The SUV's driver hangs out the window, talking to Finn.
Eventually, the guy nods and ducks back into the car just before
the window begins to slide up and Finn goes to unlock his truck. He
looks up here, smiles when he sees me.

But he stops smiling when one of
the SUV doors opens.

I can't see his expression when
he notices my sister bouncing toward him while the SUV pulls out of
the drive without her. I can't hear her words, though I hear words
like them in my head. She's saying something like, “Oh, Finn! I
just can't stand the thought of you driving there all by
yourself!”

Gritting my teeth, I watch them
both get in the truck, Finn opening the door for her and then
walking around to let himself in, looking up at me apologetically
as he rounds the truck. I hold my hand up and wave to him. It
probably isn't his fault she's going with him. Probably.

Juliet's fully awake now and
she's busy trying to wake up her brother when I go over to open her
door. Excited, she runs out to me, climbing my arm and nuzzling
against my face like she does for Finn.

Not wanting to make too much
noise lest Finn's mom hear me, I don't turn on any of the
appliances but sit quietly in the floor with the ferrets playing on
and around me while I grab some blank paper and a pencil. I start
with my usual caricature style, quickly sketching out an image of
the wild fuzzies, then one of Finn and me with them, Juliet perched
fearlessly on his head and timid Romeo wrapped around my feet. Then
I try a more serious study, a realistic portrait of Finn.

The effort's somewhat hampered
by thoughts of him with Bobbi. About the tiny little skirt she's
wearing and how it's barely more than a glorified belt. I think
about an hour and a half of sultry looks and licked lips, of a
cardigan that slides a little more undone every mile. I think of
her putting her hand on his arm while he's trapped there, driving.
Then maybe the hand moves to his leg...

Getting out a fresh piece of
paper, I do a quick rendition of my sister as a scantily-clad demon
and me driving her pitchfork into her stomach. It makes me feel
more guilty than anything though, so I crumple it into a tight ball
and shove it down in the depths of Finn's trashcan. The other
caricatures I leave on his computer desk, little presents for him
to find when he gets back.

I take the work in progress and
sit under the window, biting my tongue as I think about what I need
to do with it. The shading's all wrong. And... Well, I'm just not
capturing him.

It might be easier if it weren't
so dark in here.

My eyes glance at the clock.
It's too early to be dark. Something more sinister than my jealousy
over Bobbi makes itself known as I look out the window. Sure
enough, an unnatural fog has rolled in, thick and fearsome.

The Spirit is coming. And my
Place of Power is somewhere I can't go.

Juliet paws at my leg and I pick
her up, cuddling her close as I wait for the fog to reach me. There
was a slight hope she could replace Finn and keep the badness away,
but it keeps right on coming while I cling to the ferret and
tremble at the cold overcoming me. My limbs tingle, my mind seems
to split apart into a buzzing horde of separate molecules.

There's a clap of thunder.

The dungeon at the center of the
mountain surrounds me, empty now save for me and two men sitting on
the edge of the stage. And Juliet, who makes a pitiful whimpering
sound and shakes as she huddles against me. Fray smiles at the
ferret but somehow the smile fails to comfort her. Or me.

The Shadow Lord sits beside my
friend, his face still hidden from my sight.

“You let your Place of Power
leave, luv,” Fray chides me. “We didn't think we had to lock him in
the house too.”

Lock? My jaw drops. “It was
you?”

He shrugs and jerks his head
toward The Shadow Lord. So, what, he's The Lord's henchman all of a
sudden? “Sorry, luv, but if you kept avoiding him, things were
never going to work out in time.”

“What things?” If it weren't for
the poor freaked out ferret clinging to me, I'd go over to the
stage and punch Fray right in his maddening grin. He stood there on
Finn's porch and said he wasn't the one who locked me up!

“Did I?” he asks.

I open my mouth to yell at him
that, yes, he did. But then I realize that no, he didn't. Finn
asked him point blank if he was behind the imprisonment and the
bastard changed the subject. There's a growl deep in my throat.
Words cannot express how much I want to clobber him right now.

“You don't belong here,” The
Shadow Lord proclaims, the deep words seeming to ring in the hall.
“Not yet. Finn can save you, if you trust him. You didn't
before.”

I stare at the hooded man, so
many questions struggling for attention in my brain that I can't
get a hold of just one to ask.

“The danger has passed,” The
Lord states, raising his hand.

Thunder. And now Fray, Juliet,
and I are standing in Cris's room. The other me is there, tears
running down her face, “You're an ass, Crispin Smith.”

“That's your type, isn't it?”
Cris snarls at her while Juliet presses her face even closer
against my neck. “Where did you two go?”

“You're right,” the other me
tells him, suddenly calm. “Cooper Finnegan is a conceited jerk, a
self-centered, narrow-minded, self-righteous hypocrite. He's
shallow and two-faced and repulsive.” She steps up to Cris, looks
him straight in the eye, and says, “And he's still a better person
than you are.”

His anger is instant,
frightening. Snarling, he pulls his fist back like he's going to
hit her. But he turns, slams his hand into his bed frame
instead.

She leaves as he's trying to get
his hand out of the hole he's made without hurting it further.

“Shit,” he groans.

“Interesting,” Fray declares,
jumping onto the bed and lounging back against the headboard with
his feet crossed near Cris. “He wanted to hurt you, but he attacked
his furniture instead.”

“Yeah, I know.” Too numb to
think of anything more than inanely noting that Cris's bed supports
Fray just fine even though it never existed for me, I pet Juliet
and watch Cris as he goes to his dresser to pull out a little
bottle. He dumps some pills into his hand, stares at them, then
puts most of them back, only swallowing two. I can't read the label
but I don't think they're prescribed to him.

“You're a fucking idiot,” he
growls at his reflection, turning away from it with a look of
disgust. Sitting on the edge of the bed and making Fray move his
legs to keep their bodies from intersecting, he leans over his lap,
burying his face in his hands.

“Why are we here?” I ask Fray,
far too depressed about Cris's misery to feel any satisfaction
about it, even if he was cheating on me while lusting after my
sister. What right did he have to yell at me about walking home
with Finn?

“The Lord wanted us to see this,
I guess.” Fray sounds uncertain and he sighs when I give him a
questioning look. “He won't tell me exactly what's going to happen.
He just gives me hints, like Finn being the only one who can save
you and us needing to make sure he'd want to and you having trust
him to do whatever it is he's going to do. I have no idea what that
thing is.”

Fray's posture is still relaxed,
but his tone is rife with frustration.

“But I can be saved?” I'd
resigned myself to being dead but the prospect of living again...
The idea that I could be the girl sitting next to Finn in his
truck, that I could be the one with my hand on his leg...
“How?”

“I don't know, luv.”

Even though he's obviously been
keeping secrets from me, a fact which hurts more than a little, I
believe him.

Cris falls to his side, curls up
on the bed, whimpers softly.

Fray moves again, getting up and
walking to the window.

“Can we go now?” I ask, wanting
to leave before Cris makes me cry.

“I think there's more,” my
companion tells me, jerking his chin to the window.

“If it's the sweater-set girl, I
don't want to see her.”

“No.” Fray creeps closer to the
glass. “Not a girl at all. A boy. One you know.”

Half-expecting it to somehow be
Finn, I go to the window.

“Ricky Woodman?” I ask the
universe. Is the Crusade for Christ doing a witnessing drive? I
thought they were all at some revival.

Cris ignores the door but his
dad answers it, letting Ricky in and even leading him back to
Cris's room. Slightly stoned on whatever those pills where, Cris is
slow to sit up and his eyes don't quite focus on his visitor. He
doesn't show any signs of surprise, but I don't know if that's
because he expected Ricky or on account of the drugs. “Hey, man,”
he mumbles as his dad goes back down the hall. He holds out his
hand.