The Reaping of Norah Bentley (30 page)

Eli’s eyes hardened, and the curves of his face suddenly seemed sharper in the pale lamplight as he calmly finished: “Me, right? He wants to protect you from me.”

“…I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But you have a point,” he said. His hands slipped out of mine, and he walked over and leaned against my car, lifted his head to stare at the starless sky.

“No I don’t,” I called helplessly after him. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just some raving idiot.”

He curled his fingers into a fist and knocked it lightly against the side of my car, the sound like a metronome keeping rhythm when he said, “He knows what I am. So he knows my job is. Why wouldn’t he be worried?” His voice got a little disgusted, his knocking a little harder, towards the end.

I shook my head, went over to him and picked up his hands again. “He doesn’t know
you
, though,” I said. “He doesn’t know how you saved me.”

“Saved you?” His smile was crooked, humorless. “And for what? I’ve only made things harder for you. It probably would have been better if I’d never—”

“Don’t.”

He slowly lowered his gaze. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence. Don’t start talking like that.” He looked surprised by the sudden command in my voice. I was a little surprised myself. “Forget about what happened tonight,” I said, my voice shaking a little. “This whole stupid mess—I don’t care about it, or what happens now. I don’t care about what Sam or Luke or anybody else thinks. No matter what I...”

I loved him. Why was that so hard to say, when it was so overwhelmingly easy to feel?

He was watching me speechlessly, waiting for me to finish. That adoring look was in his eyes, the one I should have been used to by now, but that somehow still made me blush, still gave me butterflies even though they were the last thing I should have been feeling right now.

“I don’t care,” I finished lamely. “I mean, I’m glad you saved me.”

The sound of my voice breaking seemed to snap him out of his stupor.

“Me too,” he said.

His hands dropped mine and traveled up to my face, held it still while he kissed my forehead, my nose, and finally, my lips. His mouth lingered over mine, and the longer we stood there, the more the world around me started to blur. And I wondered if maybe he was thinking the same thing as me right then: that if we stayed close enough, the world outside of us would stay blurry like that. An uncertainty, sure, but not one we had to dwell on. It was sort of like we were staring off into the distant ocean. We couldn’t exactly see what was on the other side, but that was just part of what made it so amazing.

That’s what I told myself. It’s the only way I could bear to explain why he was pressing so close to me, holding on to me like he might never get another chance to, and why his kisses grew steadily more desperate, more urgent as the seconds passed. It was the only thing that kept me from panicking when he pulled away and said,

“Maybe you should go, actually.” His voice was all wrong. I don’t know how else to describe it.

“I don’t know. Now that I think about it I—”

“You’re going to have to talk to him eventually.”

“…Maybe it can wait.”

“If you don’t go, he’ll probably show up here anyway.” He attempted to smile, but it looked even more off than his voice sounded. “And I really don’t want to have to kill him,” he said. “So it’s probably better if you go.”

“I can stay.”

He stepped away from the car, and his hands fell back around my waist. “Let’s make a deal,” he said. “You go talk to Luke. I’m going to go talk to Sam, and we’ll meet back here in about an hour.”

“Why do you need to talk to Sam? Can’t we leave him out of this?”

“I don’t think so, Norah.”

“Well I want to go talk to him with you, then.” Seeing Sam again was actually on my top ten list of things I never wanted to do, right above ‘drinking arsenic’ and right below ‘spending the day bonding with my step-mother’. The
last
thing I wanted to do right then, though, was leave Eli’s side. But he just shook his head.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“But I—” He stopped me with a gentle kiss, pulled back just as quick, and before I could figure out how to speak again he said,

“Just for an hour.”

“…One hour,” I repeated. Reasonable. But I didn’t like the feel of the words on my tongue, or the way they settled, so heavy and dry, in the back of my throat.

“One hour.”

“And you’ll be here, waiting.”

“Yes.” His eyes were unyielding, full of that calm stubbornness I was beginning to think I could never win against.

“…Okay,” I said. He kissed me one last time and tried to take a step back, but I grabbed his hands and held him still. “But you have to promise me,” I said.

“I promise,” he said. “I’ll be right here.” But his eyes were on the trees, the streetlights, the sky. Anything but my face.

#

I left because I had to. Because he was being stubborn. Because I wanted to prove I trusted him when he said he’d wait there for me.

I had a million reasons to give myself, but the truth was that I wasn’t really sure why I got in my car and drove away from him. The person in my rearview mirror didn’t look like me anymore. I didn’t know who she was, but the whole time I was driving to meet Luke, I felt like I needed to convince her that I still knew what I was doing.

“This is the only way,” I told her. Like it was so obvious. Couldn’t she see that? “Talking to Luke is going to clear everything up and make it all okay again. I’ll have my best friend back. And then I’m going to go back and find Eli waiting for me, and he’s going to tell me that Sam decided he had better things to do than worry about us, and that he wishes us the best.”

By the time I pulled into Lakewood Park, the girl in the mirror still looked more than a little doubtful.

“Oh, shut up,” I mumbled. I grabbed my keys and jumped out of the car, eager to get away from her knowing eyes.

Luke wasn’t here yet, but I wasn’t worried. He would be— I trusted that much. In the meantime, I folded my hands into the warm pocket of Eli’s hoodie and wandered up and down the sidewalk across the street from the park. The light rain had picked up while I was driving over here, but it had already stopped again. A thick fog had followed in its wake, drifting like civil war ghosts through the streets, wrapping itself around the streetlamps and dimming their light.

I’d been wandering for five minutes, ten minutes—I don’t really know—when something moved off to my right. I jerked around, but there was nothing to see except an empty bench. There was nothing to hear, either; the fog was a silencing shroud draped over the city, and the only sound penetrating it was the beating of my own heart as it got faster and faster. I moved toward the light of the nearest lamppost, wrapped an arm around its sturdy iron base and leaned against it.

It seemed incredibly cold all of a sudden. Each slow, calming breath I tried to take came out in a wisp of fog that joined the mass of it floating around me. I tried to concentrate on each little breath cloud, tried not to think about what might be lurking in the rest of the fog. When that didn’t work, I thought of Eli, of that easy, comforting smile that I would be seeing again soon. And then I could breathe again.

Until the dogs started barking.

Somewhere in the distance, who knows how far away; it didn’t matter though, because the fog right there around me started to take shape all of a sudden, to darken and swirl and twist into gigantic versions of that familiar dog. Except now their eyes were burning with color—two bright, fiery red coals that looked terrifyingly solid against their misty bodies.

But they weren’t solid. They couldn’t be.

These things are real. But they can’t touch you, can’t hurt you.

The memory of Eli’s voice didn’t do it justice, didn’t comfort me nearly as much as I needed it to. I closed my eyes. That just made things worse though, because then the other sounds came: the screaming, the crying, the bells—sounds that were
definitely
real. And definitely getting louder.

I started to crumple, my knees desperate for the support of solid ground. My hands flew to my face and my fingers curled against it, wanting to scratch and claw away my sight, my hearing.

I felt a hand on my arm. Silence came, deep and wonderful. Then I opened my eyes, and that same silence promptly became suffocating.

“Hello again.” Sam’s whisper of a voice seemed unbearably loud in what was left of the fog dissipating around us.

I jerked my arm out of his grasp, stumbled a few steps backward. “…If you’re looking for the bus stop,” I said, after I’d managed to slow my breathing, “I’m afraid you’ve still got a long way to go.”

His lips curved cold and handsome on his regal face. “Funny girl,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

Before he could answer, I heard voices in the distance; not screams or cries, but normal, human, voices. They sounded like they were coming this way. My head snapped up, my eyes searching, hopeful that maybe—

“There are people coming,” Sam confirmed. “So you probably shouldn’t speak to me, or start screaming for help or anything foolish like that. Unless, of course, you
want
them to think you’ve lost your mind.”

My heart sank. “…They can’t see you,” I said quietly.

“As well they shouldn’t be able to, seeing as how
they’re
not supposed to be dead. That may not make a difference to you and your little boyfriend, but it does to me.”

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“What did I say about talking?” His hand was on my arm again, and even through the sleeve of my sweatshirt I could feel the chill of his touch sinking into me, lodging somewhere deep inside my chest. “Why don’t we go for a walk?” he said. He started across the road, dragging me by the arm and not paying any attention to the rusty Dodge truck barreling down it, even when the driver honked his horn and rolled down his window just so he could shake his fist at us.

It seemed like there were people everywhere all of a sudden; not just that truck but at least five or six more coming down the road on either side. More people than I’d ever seen this late on a weeknight in Sutton, rushing up and down the sidewalks, talking and laughing with their brightly colored umbrellas swinging by their sides. All these people. And none of them could help me.

Sam waited until we’d reached the cover of the mossy trees before he spoke again, in a voice of practiced civility:

“So you know why I’m here, then.” He glanced over at me, but I looked away, couldn’t bring myself to answer. “Your time was officially up several weeks ago,” he said. “You know that. Well, now it is officially
officially
up. What Eli has done, the exposure he’s risked by revealing himself in this manner—”

“He didn’t hurt anything,” I said, my gaze snapping back to him, terrified. “I mean, the only people who saw him…there were only like two or three people who actually
talked
to him…”

“Which is two or three too many,” he said darkly. “From a business perspective, I would be mad to not put a stop to this. Your little romance is starting to put a damper on my otherwise spotless reputation.”

“Business perspective?” Had he really just used those words? It wasn’t fear that was shaking me all of a sudden. It was anger. Quiet, seething anger that threatened to overwhelm me, that actually made me have to stop and steady my balance. “That’s all this is to you, isn’t it? You don’t see a person’s life,” I said through clenched teeth. “I’m just a name on a list to you.”

Sam turned back to me, a condescending little smile on his lips. “You’re more like a little checkbox on a list, next to a name I’d rather not bother to remember,” he said.

“That’s wrong.”

“That’s the way the world works, darling.”

“For you, maybe.”

“And I happen to be the one in charge here. How terribly unfortunate for you.”

I shook my head and started to back away, but his every step was equal to at least two of mine. Not like I would’ve been able to run away, anyway. I’d already tried that once. “Naivety is a luxury of the human condition, I suppose,” he said. “It’s the only way
I
can make sense of it, anyway. How even with these things surrounding you—” he waved his hand in front of him, like a maestro conducting an orchestra, and two more black dogs instantly materialized from the night air “—you could still think the two of you could possibly live happily ever after.”

One of the dogs padded on silent feet to block my path away from Sam, a cold wind drifting off of it as it passed. It bared its teeth but made no sound, and somehow the continued silence just made it even more terrible; I turned away from it and found my face inches from Sam’s chest.

“…So what if I do think that?” I looked up at him only because I didn’t want to look back at the dog. “Maybe I’m right,” I said.

His laughter was as condescending as his smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Seeing as how tonight is the last night one of you will spend on earth. Either you or him—I’d prefer you—but either way, I would imagine your relationship is going to get rather one-sided in the future.”