The bitter-sweet aroma of fresh coffee with lots of milk and sugar was drifting through the house on Newton Street at dawn that morning. Adam was at the kitchen table with his hands around a steaming mug and puzzling over some impossible crossword clue in yesterdays paper when Katie tried to sneak through the front door. She headed straight for the kitchen where the smell was coming from, craving the sweet heat, although she had never drunk coffee and was not about to start. A caffeine buzz really wasn’t a good idea. When she saw Adam already sat down, Katie turned to tiptoe away.
“Katie,” he said, clicked his pen shut and closed the paper over it.
Uh oh. She instantly feared trouble. Sneaking home at dawn was bound to have gotten her into the mother of all rows with her parents. But Adam wasn’t her dad, was he? For the foreseeable future, he’s the next best thing.
She pivoted and looked at him sitting there so calm and relaxed. He stared at her without moving, just smiling slightly. It made her feel ashamed in some deep and wordless way. So much so that head down, shoulders limp seemed like the best response. “I know I’m really late back.” Or really early, depending on how you looked at it. “But I spent all night at the hospital and I just needed to clear my head and –“
“Stop. You’re old enough to make your own choices. Sit.” She did. “Don’t be sorry for testing the limits. You’ve probably got more freedom now than you’ve ever had. I only want you to be safe.
“I need food. Reddy Brek good for you?”
“I… fine. With honey, please.” Honey was one of the few non-processed items they always kept in the cupboards. Strangely, most of them liked it on or in something or other.
“On or in?” he asked just as the thought popped into her brain. Freaky timing. Katie expected nothing less of the residents of this town. Adam stood up and reached up to the top cupboard where they kept the cereals. Katie watched him potter around the kitchen, clattering crockery and measuring milk like a professional chef. His perfect muscles stretched, popped, retracted and curved under his muscle shirt. Nothing ghostly about those. Katie looked down at herself, aware that her hair was frizzy from the storm and her dress was still damp and streaked with dirt. She ran fingers through her hair and scraped it back into her scrunchie, noting the pulled-to-the-limit feel of the elastic and vowing to find a new one some place. Then she grabbed a shirt off the ironing pile and putting it over her dress to cover the worst of the grime. It smelled of jasmine and fresh air. “Surprise me.”
“Looks better on you than me.” Katie felt herself blush and was glad that Adam had turned back to the cooker. “I don’t have the legs for it.”
When the porridge-like cereal slid onto the table and Katie dug in, she realised that she was suddenly hungrier than she could ever remember being. Some toast and a yoghurt the previous morning, a hastily eaten oat and grain bar at the medical centre about mid-afternoon and that was her total intake over the last 24 hours. “It’s good,” she spat around mouthfuls. “You should be on emergency food support or something.”
“The EFS. Nice idea but not a real thing.”
“Invent it.” Funny how a hot sweet meal opposite a gorgeous, funny, older guy– and shouldn’t she just stop thinking of Adam that way? - could make all her troubles seem that much further away. They had always managed to make each other laugh when things had been getting too dark, too serious. “Honestly, Reddy Brek could stop world hunger. Sweeten the politicians up, that’s for damn sure.”
“You like politics?”
She shrugged. The name of the current Prime Minister was about the extent of her political knowledge. Dad used to flick the Parliament Channel on the TV and she half listened to some of the debates but it all seemed a bit like a dog chasing its’ own tail to her. But it affected her life even though she was too young to have a say about it. “More a grudging acknowledgement.”
Adam nodded. Then he shovelled in his last spoonful of oats, pushed his dish to one side and went back to his crossword. His knuckles were white from gripping the pen too tight and his paper was rustling manically in his trembling hands. The paper went down and was laid out on the table but the movements were careful and measured. It was hard for him, Katie realised. His charge had tried to take her own life. Dina had lived in this creaky old house all of last year and it was clear that everyone was so strongly bonded. It must be like losing a sister, maybe even a daughter, for him.
Katie swallowed the last of her breakfast and glanced down, trying to read upside down. “Silhouette.”
He looked up sharply. He had not been really mulling over the clues. “What?”
“7 across. A shadow or phantom. A shapely darkness against light. Silhouette.”
“Oh, right.”
He wrote the letters in the blank spaces, concentrating on each stroke of the pen much harder than he normally would. Lessening his fine motor control would give way to the spider scrawl clogging up the last few pages and he couldn’t let Katie see that. She expected him to be strong, hard, a father figure. On impulse, Katie reached across the tale and clamped her hand over his forearm. No words passed between them. They just sat there, at either end of the table, Adam drawing warmth and comfort from the touch of another and thinking that Katie was doing the same. She allowed her hand o slide over his arm and down to his thick, tanned wrist where she felt blindly for a pulse. There was a pulse in the wrist, Katie often checked her own after a run, and she felt it jack hammering under her fingers. Whether or not that fact should have surprised her was a far off ambition. “Oh. You’re…”
“Terrified.” Adam pulled his hand away, looking confused. “I’m meant to keep you all safe.”
“Shouldn’t you call her parents?”
“Her dad’s in America.”
“Still. I’m sure he’d fly over if he thought his daughter was dying.”
“I know you mean well, Katie, but you don’t know what it’s like. I was put in charge of you lot. In loco parentis. I can’t let him know I cocked it up in case… They’ll never trust us again.”
“I trust you. Because you’re alive and you’re sweet and you let me do things my way. And that’s why Dina trusts you too.”
Without warning Adam shot out of his chair and wrapped her in a bear hug. For once, Katie had had nearly enough of being hugged and touched for one day – yesterday too, in fact – and having her friends feel crappy and depressed. She felt crappy and depressed too, but it felt so wrong to be robbing them of any hope they had left to warm herself. But being hugged by Adam… it fit. He was strong and solid and she could feel in his embrace that he wished he could wave a magic wand and fix everything. “It’s too soon. Too soon.” He kept repeating the words and Katie stroked the shaggy blond hair touching his shoulder blades until he was quiet. It was like cuddling a walking, talking teddy bear; she took as much of the comforting I’ll protect you like a glass baby from him as she gave.
“Am I interrupting something?” said a voice from the doorway. “Not that I care but it’d be nice to know.” Katie turned her head towards the doorway, knowing who it was. It was a good idea to keep Leo where she could see him. He crossed his arm and leant against the door jamb. “I don’t mind watching. Considering this is virtually incest, I reckon you might need a witness.”
Katie looked at him – stared him out actually. There were a lot of things she was not in the mood for and Leo and his attitude problem was one of them. It was fast climbing to the top of the list too. “Did you want something?”
“A million in the bank and my name up in lights.”
“Sorry, they don’t pay or praise morons. Let’s rephrase… you came to tell us something?”
“The phone went while you two were lost in each others eyes.” Leo over-acted a swooning pose that just made Katie want to slap him until he cried. ”It was Jaye. Dina’s in a coma. Looks bad.” Understatement. When was a coma ever not ba
d? “My job is done, I’m going back to bed. You two can go back to… whatever.”
“Wait. How long were you there?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t like to interrupt.”
“Perv. Don’t you care that our friend might be dying? I mean, she’s in a coma and while you spend your day hibernating and stinking up that oppressive little hovel up there, Dina might drop dead or anything. God, you defy explanation.”
He shrugged again. “She’ll come back.”
“But she won’t Leo, she won’t?” Katie could hear her voice rising again, getting angry, the rims of her eyes starting to burn with the tears she didn’t think she had left. “Don’t you get it, you dumb little boy? She won’t come back.” She buried her messy head in her hands and clawed at her hair, looking, she knew, like the broken and crazy girl she was desperate not to turn into. The boys shared a quick look over her bent head – at five foot six it would have been close to impossible standing upright – and Katie had the sinking feeling she knew what the look was about. They were asking each other, without words, if she actually knew anything and what they could say for the best. Katie realised that she didn’t want any of them to know how much she knew. It’s too dangerous. It’s just not worth it. “You can’t do anything to fix me, okay. I’ve had a lot going on and I’m not even that good friends with Dina but I can’t help it.”
Adam nodded, seeming like he understood. “Like a sister. You don’t always like them that much but seeing them hurt is like hurting yourself.” It sounded like the voice of experience. Adam never spoke about his family – not that there had really been time for a heart to heart; how many sisters did he have then? “Careless of me, of all of us in fact, to let things go this far. Damn it! I should’ve seen this coming.”
“Adam.” Katie saw the little red light flickering on the cooker and busied herself turning dials into a perfectly symmetrical OFF line, making it a much bigger job than it was. Mostly, she was playing for time as she fumbled for the right words. Okay, she had absolutely no words to say to him. He sat at the table staring at the sun turning the sky ever lighter shades of blue and pushing his cuticles as far back as they would go. What could she possibly say to Adam right now that she wanted to? What she wanted was to tell him everything that was pinballing round her head, let someone else deal with all this crap for a while and then just take over when she felt grown up enough. But, if Jack had been right about how much trouble she was in then she couldn’t dump anyone with it. Her friends couldn’t be involved. Suddenly, Katie was glad her voice had deserted her – that had been the hardest sentence she had ever even thought, let alone spoken. The dirty dishes were still on the table and Adam silently brought them to the sink and they started washing them together, hoping for silence and not getting it.
“Oh, this was pushed under the door last night.” Leo slid a sheet of creased yellow paper across the table. Katie spared a glance at it over her shoulder. It was covered with a photocopy of the academy grounds and surrounding areas with hand drawn arrows and barely legible words – the race route. “Thank you very much Leo. No problem, bitch. Bitch.”
Adam tossed the dishcloth back into the dirty water and whirled on the younger man, a moment of anger that was gone as quickly as it arrived. “What’ve you got against Katie? Against all of us actually. Life is tough. Everyone’s on a knife edge. Being horrible does not make this go away.”
“Cool it, man. This is between me and her, okay?”
“Not okay.” He was holding one of the wet dishes so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. The trio stood, two to one, in the kitchen. Tall, but feeling very small, Katie chewed the inside of her cheek and tried to turn invisible. Confrontation was not her favourite thing in the world and this one had the whiff of violence around it. Far away came the crash and smash of something fragile shattering. Katie reached out to the side for Adam’s arm and noted that he was no longer holding the plate. “Leave-“ her hand came back with streaks of blood on it. She stared at it for a moment, wondering why, after all the blood she had spilled recently, this was making her feel faint. Fantastic. Bloodophobia – Lainy would know the proper word for it – another freakism to add to her long list of oddities. She opened the cupboard under the sink, found a roll of paper towels and shoved them at Adam, doing her best not to look. It was a shallow cut to a finger because he had tried to pick up the pieces. Grabbing a few sheets of kitchen roll and pressing them to his hand, Adam hared off down the hall and slammed his downstairs bedroom door, looking both guilty and haunted. “Okay, thanks for that little show. Forgive me if I don’t call for an encore.”
“Yeah, I scripted the whole performance.”
“Seriously wouldn’t put it past you.” She pulled the plug on the dirty water and shook bubbles off her hands before turning back to Leo. “I think you and I have a little problem.”
“Problem? I haven’t got a problem except you.”
“Me? What the hell, Leo?”
“You spend every night either parading around like the world’s out to get you or crying and then pretending you weren’t.”
“I cannot help that. I’ve had the year from hell and there is no delete button on my life.” Unfortunately. “I’ve seen things I need to bleach from my eyeballs. I know things I’m way too young to think about. I’ve been put through worse than you would wish on your worst enemy.”
“I read the letter. I did the research.” Leo suddenly softened his angry stance. “It sucks. I know. Believe me.”
Katie found that she did. It was quite a shocking realisation to be honest. “I know it was you.”
“Huh?”
“It might shatter your dumb little fantasies but I’m not at stupid or naïve as I look. I know it was you. Last week.”
“Yeah well… You were there weren’t you?” He shrugged.
“Oh, I’m so glad you aren’t in danger of developing a human streak. I was just there. Anyway, whatever. That’s not the problem I was talking about.” There was a moment of quiet. Katie opened a cupboard to put some mugs away, decided to line them up on the sideboard instead.
“The silence is boring, not intriguing. Spit it out.” You could always rely on Leo to get right to the point of things – dismissing the traditional small talk and coded ways of saying things. No sugar coating for him.
“Okay, here goes. You know what’s going on in this town, right? I mean, you must’ve noticed how weird it feels just standing here. Like there’s something here with us – dark and strong. I’m not sure what it is but it’s everywhere apparently.”
“Are you on crack or something? I have no idea what you’re babbling about.”
“It’s okay. I figured it all out.”
Leo maintained his bewildered face and the cogs were practically visible whirring around his mind. He flicked his eyes to the door, remembering the conversation everyone in the house but Katie had had on Monday night, wishing Adam would come charging through the door to field this one. It didn’t seem likely.
“The only bad thing about this place is –“
“Stop it!” His attitude was getting on her nerves now but the steel trap behind his eyes had melted to expose a relentless denial rather than hatred. “You know. I know. But I won’t tell anyone because…” the next part of the sentence was the hardest to say. “If they know I know, they’ll make Jack wipe my memory.” She reached over and touched his shoulder, just lightly. Leo looked younger than her, despite the fact he was two years older, lost and confused. Then –
Saved!
The front door slammed opened with a jangle of keys and Lainy and Jaye clomped down to the kitchen. Both girls looked tired, stressed out, but not overly sad. In fact Jaye looked downright cheerful, a grin plastered on her face even if her eyes didn’t quite match.
Lainy looked Katie up and down. “Long night?”
“And getting longer.?
?? She followed the woman’s eyes to the pieces of shattered plate still on the floor. Cleaning up was on the list of things to do. Not really very high up but it was most definitely there. “Adam dropped it. He’s in your room. He’s hurt.”
“Something happened while we were over the hospital. You’d better tell me what.”
“Umm….” Katie began, stalling for time.
“I surprised him when he was drying up.”
Katie glanced at Leo, caught somewhere between grateful and relieved. That’s two you owe him.
“Yeah, I was asleep and they woke me up. I came down to shut ‘em up.”
“Making a guy bleed obviously works then.”
Lainy grabbed a pack of sticking plasters from a drawer and trudged off down to her room. It didn’t look as though she was particularly bothered by being called to nurse duty again. Probably used to it.
Katie looked from Leo to Jaye and back again. She didn’t want to leave the two alone in case relations devolved into swearing and violence again. The fact Jaye could avoid getting injured, and that Leo had to know that, should have helped matters – but it didn’t. The tension in the house was sky high already.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you the other day.”
“I’m sorry I punched you in the face.”
This joint apology was unexpected to say the least.
“But you understand why I said it, right? I find it hard to believe in anything or anyone who could this to me and the people I care about.”
“It doesn’t give you the right to shout your gob off whenever your in a mood.”
“Never said it did.” Jaye walked over to give Katie a hug, wrapped her arms around her shoulders, thinking better of touching the grime streaked skin, and whispered, “you look like crap.”
“Thanks for the compliment.” She unwrapped the pale arm and stood once more, standing four or five inches above the other girl. Being tall wasn’t always a good thing. Jaye had to look up at her and Katie felt almost guilty for it. “You okay?” Which was a stupid question. Of course Jaye wasn’t okay. None of them were okay.
“As well as can be expected, I guess.” There was cold coffee in the pot and Jaye poured herself a cup of blackish liquid thick enough to chew. She drank it without milk or sugar, not wanting to tarnish the intense caffeine hit. It looked disgusting. “Things happen, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but this is Dina we’re talking about. She’s your best friend. Not just some random thing that happened.”
“Northwood is nothing if not random.” There was something they could all agree on. “I know how this sounds but she’ll be fine. It’s not just some blind denial of the truth or cliché that she’s stronger than this. Whatever happens to her now, she’ll just have to be fine with it because she chose this route.”
“No, she chose to die because she couldn’t face being here any longer,” said Leo, earning a warning glare from Katie. “So you called an ambulance and kept her here. I’m sure she thanks you.”
“Don’t listen to him, Jaye. He’s just pissed off about us disturbing his beauty sleep.”
“He planning to sleep until the next century?” The joke got much more laughter than it really deserved but it lightened the mood. That was the main thing. “Did I interrupt something in here? Please say yes. We really need an illicit love affair round here. And the possibilities…”
“Oh, hell no.” Katie stopped her thoughts before they went to any really dangerous places. “We’ve just both had a bad day and decided that, if we can’t be friends, we can at least not be openly hostile to each other.”
“This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Leo rolled his eyes. “If you’re gonna get sappy on me, I’m off.”
“Stay. Stay, stay, stay.” Jaye grabbed his shoulders and hauled him back with unnatural ease. Her muscles weren’t bulging. Her tendons weren’t pressing against her skin. They were right. A human – living, breathing – would have been using all their strength to hold some-one like that. Leo was only a little taller than Katie and was not a big guy; not a skinny as Dina but hardly a muscle man of Adams standards. Still, she could see him trying to pull away, push himself out of her grip. But he didn’t manage an inch. He reached up, put a hand over Jaye’s and squeezed with a jerk of his head towards Katie. It was as though she suddenly remembered that this display of inhuman ability was inappropriate in front of the young audience because she let go of him and put her hands together in a praying position, pleading with him to sit down with them. A look of white hot rage flared across his face and then was gone. Had Jaye forgotten her apology and what the apology was about already? If another fight was coming, Katie wanted to be far far away when it came.
But nothing happened.
Perhaps the two had already put the whole religion thing behind them. Stranger things had happened. Were, in fact happening, right now.
“So, are we all friends now?”
“Can we just say there are no current plans for warfare and leave it at that.” Katie slid onto a chair and covered her face with her hands, peeping through her fingers. While Jaye had been trying to stop Leo leaving she had slipped the cold coffee into the microwave and had removed it using a folded tea towel and fingertips, it was so hot. But now Jaye was sitting with her hands wrapped around the jelly bean patterned mug and slurping the bitter muck as if it had no temperature at all. “Better?”
“Not really. Cold coffee really doesn’t give you the same buzz.”
Leo jumped when Katie reached across to him but was too – stunned? – surprised to pull his hand away. She brushed the back of his fingers against the ceramic . Leo yelped and pulled back, blowing on his singed fingers. “What d’you that for, bit – oh.”
Jaye put the mug down quickly and flexed her hands. They did look red and over-heated. “My brain – it lost the ability to function somewhere.” No argument. The brain differentiated between extremes of hot and cold. It was interesting to put that theory to the test.
“Have you slept at all?”
There was silence. Jaye, pure caffeine now rushing through her system, didn’t look as if she needed sleep as much as a change of clothes and a good cry.
“You gotta rest, otherwise you’ll be no good to her.” The compassionate streak in Leo was well hidden but it shone through every so often. Katie thought she could probably learn to like the nice version of him. “You have to –“ the word pray was about to trip off his tongue, Katie practically saw it form, “ –think of her and how she feels now. Hold her hand. Talk to her. She’ll know you’re there.” The words were soft and gentle and wholly unexpected. Silence crashed into the room. The heavy shutters fell on his face like he had said something he never meant to.
In the hush, Katie felt that tingly darkness creep around her. She tried to ignore it but couldn’t stop herself wondering what it was. It had been seeping through the town all this while and Katie had felt it since her arrival without even knowing what it was. Perhaps believing there was something so deeply wrong here had made it so much easier for her to buy these stories about ghosts and ghosts in waiting. Having been told that at night, in the middle of a storm,, by a dying girl and a wild west cowboy, screamed nightmare or bad bedtime story. Only she hadn’t been asleep and the story didn’t have a happy ending. Anyone else would have buried themselves in denial, anyone with a molecule of sense that is, but Katie was running on Reddy Brek and sense sounded like something she could only aspire to.
“Is she..?”
Jaye nodded. It didn’t look good but the longer Dina clung on to life then the longer Jaye still had hope. And without hope, what was the point in anything? “Still unconscious. I just needed a break from her bedside, watching people shoving needles into her skin, sticking her with patches and wires. And all that happens is… nothing. It just carries on beeping. There should at least be something, right?
Just to say hey, I’m still here.” Her slack face was lifeless, her eyes unseeing, as she grabbed the coffee pot, refilled her mug and sat back down. The false cheer of thirty minutes ago seemed to be in a war with exhaustion and it was losing. A lot. Every move Jaye made looked clumsy and mechanical. “They just keep saying Dina lost a lot of blood and she’s just making more. I don’t believe that.”
Katie wasn’t sure she trusted that diagnosis either. “Doctors really aren’t wrong very often.” She felt as though she should say it but the words seemed hollow. The hospital had got it terribly wrong when they had stripped her and photographed her and generally made her feel guilty that she’d been raped. And then they had sent her home with a leaflet for Victim Support, telling her she was fine. So, yeah. They didn’t get things wrong a lot, but when they did, they screwed it up in some style.
“It’s not just blood loss any more. She lost something else too – her soul, chi, energy, whatever the,” she fired a glance at Leo who was listening intently but working hard on his detached and bored mask, “heck you want to call it.”
Katie covered Jaye’s hand with her own as it trembled on the mug. “I’m so sorry hon. I had no idea Jack was going to do that.”
“You’re sorry?”
“If I’d known…” What would she have done if she’d known? Could she have done anything at all? “I heard everything. Saw everything. I didn’t know, Jaye, I didn’t know. What Jack did – I’m not sure I can even forgive him myself for what he did to Dina. He as good as killed her.”
Leo shot out of his chair and slammed a box of tissues down between them. Obviously not good with crying girls either. Surprising how many men had emotional issues. “Don’t blame yourself, Katie. It’s not like he gave you the choice.”
Jaye frowned and shifted in her chair, getting up. “I’m first in the shower. We so need another bathroom in this place.” And she was gone, clomping up the stairs in the heavy platforms she must have been wearing since yesterday. They had to be killing her feet by now. It made Katie glad she spent half her life in flats and trainers.
“So.”
Katie reached out for the darkness that drifted, unseen, through the room, tried to catch hold of it and beg it to take her back into that hellish world where Jack died over and over again, just so she could prove to herself it was real. The night before had taken on a dreamlike blurriness. But the invisible black mist kept slipping through her fingers. Its not meant for you. Not yet. And she knew Jack had put those words in her head. It scared her, the way he could do that.
“Quit that! It’s freaking me out.” It wasn’t until then that Katie realised she had been physically reaching for the dark energy, trying to grab it with her hand fingers as well as her mind ones. “What you doing anyway?”
“Good question. I can’t believe you can’t feel it. Maybe it’s just because I know it’s there.”
“You’re parents know you babble like a whack job?”
“It’s one of my more endearing features,” she shot back. She felt like a crazy person at that moment – fully functioning but not mentally there. “Okay.” Katie pulled an ice cold Diet Coke from the fridge and ran the dripping can over her head. Her face was sweating and red with – not quite heat but something close to it, although the chill of the still-early morning was making her button the shirt over her dress and curl herself into as tight and warm a ball as possible on the uncomfortable kitchen chair.
“You look different.” Leo pointed to the tiny cut over her head and Katie frowned, taking a few seconds to even remember it was there. The night had been long and her brain was on the edge of overload. “Something got you.”
Yeah, it really had. “That’s what we need to talk about. I –“
Her speech was stopped in its tracks by Lainy blowing through the room to get water, biscuits and a quick glance in the mirror as she tried to smooth her mussed up hair. She glanced at them with a cheeky grin she tried (and failed) to hold in. there was a question in her face but no time to voice it as Adam shouted, “Lainy! Getting bored here!”
Katie returned a silent question of her own but Lainy just shook her head and scampered back out. “Too young.”
Katie decided that yes, she was indeed too young. The amount of things she was too young for had been growing rapidly lately but there was no time to consider the mall. Plus, if she did, she would only get depressed about it. “I’ve just been having these weird dreams lately. You were in one of them. I thought you were trying to kill me.”
“You know what they say. You die in a dream, you die for a real.”
“I’m starting to believe that. I got hurt in a dream and…” she gestured to the cut by her eye. The inch long gash on her arm would have been a better example but rolling up the shirt sleeve seemed like too much work. “You know you came here to die, right.”
“What?”
“This place. College is gonna kill us.”
“No more caffeine for you.” He moved to pluck the can from her fingers. Katie slapped his hand away and he slapped back, but his heart wasn’t in it. His face mirrored the haunted, lifeless look of most of the housemates. “You mean it. How? When?”
“I don’t know and I’m not even sure I want to know. I need to think about this. But, it’s not over when we die.”
“Sure. The afterlife, Heaven.”
“No. Well, not quite. I don’t know that either.” She drained her can, crumpled it and aimed it at the bin. It hit the window, skittered across the sideboard and landed on the floor a few inches from the bin. She’d always had terrible aim. The terrified look she could see on Leo out the corner of her eye made her heart sink. He hadn’t known anything about what she had told him. But she couldn’t stop herself talking now. There was one more thing she had to say. “But I could get killed before I find that out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN