Dream Dark (8 page)

I wish we could catch yours.
That’s what I wanted to say. Mrs. Lincoln stuffed in a dusty brown Coke

to say. Mrs. Lincoln stuffed in a dusty brown Coke bottle. I wasn’t sure any bottle tree could handle that.

Right now, I just wanted to catch a breeze. The heat rol ed over me as I leaned against my old wooden bed frame. It was thick and suffocating, a blanket you couldn’t kick off. The relentless South Carolina sun usual y let up a little by September, but not this year.

I rubbed the lump on my forehead and stumbled to the shower. I turned on the cold water. I let it run for a minute, but it stil came out warm.

Five in a row. I had fal en out of bed five straight mornings, and I was afraid to tel Amma about the nightmares. Who knew what she would hang on our old crepe myrtle next? After everything that happened this summer, Amma had closed in on me like a mother hawk protecting her nest. Every time I stepped out of the house, I could almost feel her shadowing me like my own personal Sheer, a ghost I couldn’t escape.

And I couldn’t stand it. I needed to believe that sometimes a nightmare was just a nightmare.

I smel ed the bacon frying, and turned up the water. It final y went cold. It wasn’t until I was drying off that I noticed the window had closed without me.

“Hurry up, Sleepin’ Beauty. I’m ready to hit the books.” I heard Link before I saw him, but I almost wouldn’t have recognized his voice. It was deeper, and he sounded more like a man and less like a guy who specialized in banging on the drums and writing bad songs.

“Yeah, you’re ready to hit something, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the books.” I slid into the chair next to his spot at our chipped kitchen table. Link had bulked up so much that it looked like he was sitting in one of those tiny plastic chairs from elementary school.

“Since when do you show up on time for school?”

At the stove, Amma sniffed, one hand on her hip, the other pushing at scrambled eggs with the One-Eyed Menace, her wooden spoon of justice.

“Morning, Amma.” I could tel I was about to get an earful, from the way she had one hip cocked up higher than the other. Kind of like a loaded pistol.

“Feels more like afternoon to me. ’Bout time you decided to join us.” Standing at a hot stove on an even hotter day, she didn’t break a sweat. It would take more than the weather to force Amma to budge an inch out of her way of doing things. The look in her eye reminded me of that as she sent a whole henhouse’s worth of eggs tumbling across my blue and white Dragonware plate. The bigger the breakfast, the bigger the day, in Amma’s mind. At this rate, by the time I graduated I’d be one giant biscuit floating in a bathtub ful of pancake batter. A dozen scrambled eggs on my plate meant there was no denying it. It real y was the first day of school.

You wouldn’t expect me to be itching to get back to Jackson High. Last year, with the exception of Link, my so-cal ed friends had treated me like crap.

But the truth was, I couldn’t wait for a reason to get out of my house.

“You eat up, Ethan Wate.” Toast flew onto the plate, chased by bacon and sealed with a healthy glop of butter and grits. Amma had put out a placemat for Link, but there was no plate on it. Not even a glass. She knew Link wouldn’t be eating her eggs, or anything else she whipped up in our kitchen.

But not even Amma could tel us what he was capable of now. No one knew, least of al Link. If John Breed was some kind of Caster-Incubus hybrid, Link was one generation removed. As far as Macon could tel , Link was the Incubus equivalent of some distant Southern cousin you ran into every couple of years at a wedding or a funeral and cal ed the wrong name.

Link stretched his arms behind his head, relaxed.

The wooden chair creaked under his weight. “It’s been a long summer, Wate. I’m ready to get back in the game.”

I swal owed a spoonful of grits and had to fight the urge to spit them out. They tasted weird, dry. Amma had never made a bad batch of grits in her life.

Maybe it was the heat. “Why don’t you ask Ridley how she feels about that, and get back to me?”

He winced, and I could tel the subject had already come up. “It’s our junior year, and I’m the only Linkubus at Jackson. I got al the charm and none a the harm. Al the muscle and none a the—”

“What? You have a rhyme for muscle? Hustle?

Bustle?” I would’ve laughed, but I was having a hard time getting my grits down.

“You know what I mean.” I did. It was a little more than ironic. His on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lena’s cousin Ridley, had been a Siren—able to get any guy, anywhere, to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. Until Sarafine took Ridley’s powers, and she became a Mortal just days before Link became part Incubus. Not long after that bite, we could al see the transformation beginning, right in front of our eyes.

Link’s ridiculously greasy spiked hair became ridiculously cool greasy spiked hair. He packed on the muscle, popping out biceps like the inflatable water wings his mother used to make him wear long after he knew how to swim. He looked more like a guy in an actual rock band than a guy who dreamed about being in one.

“I wouldn’t mess with Ridley. She may not be a Siren anymore, but she’s stil trouble.” I scooped grits and eggs onto my toast, slapped bacon in the middle, and rol ed it al up together.

Link looked at me like he wanted to puke. Food didn’t have the same appeal now that he was part Incubus. “Dude, I’m not messin’ with Ridley. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid.”

I was starting to have my doubts. I shrugged and stuffed half my breakfast sandwich into my mouth. It tasted wrong, too. Guess I undershot on the bacon.

Before I could say another word, a hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I jumped. For a second, I was back at the top of the water tower in my dream, bracing for an attack. But it was only Amma, ready for her usual first day of school lecture. At least, that’s what I thought. I should’ve noticed the red string tied around her wrist. A new charm always meant the clouds were rol ing in.

“Don’t know what you boys are thinkin’, sitting here like today’s just another day. It’s not over—not the moon or this heat or that business with Abraham Ravenwood. You two are actin’ like done is done, Ravenwood. You two are actin’ like done is done, the lights are on and it’s time to leave the picture show.” She lowered her voice. “Wel , you’re as wrong as walkin’ barefoot in church. Things have consequences, and we haven’t seen the half a them.”

I knew about consequences. They were everywhere I looked, no matter how hard I tried not to see them.

“Ma’am?” Link should have known to keep his mouth shut when Amma was going dark.

She clenched Link’s shirt tighter, creating fresh cracks in the Black Sabbath iron-on decal. “Stick close to my boy. There’s trouble runnin’ through you now, and I’m ten kinds a sorry ’bout that. But it’s the kind a trouble that may keep you fools from gettin’

into any more. You hear me, Wesley Jefferson Lincoln?”

Link nodded, scared. “Yes, ma’am.”

I looked up at Amma from my side of the table.

She hadn’t relaxed her grip on Link, and she wasn’t about to let go of me anytime soon. “Amma, don’t get yourself al worked up. It’s just the first day of school. Compared to what we’ve been through, this is nothing. It’s not like there are any Vexes or Incubuses or Demons at Jackson High.”

Link cleared his throat. “Wel , that isn’t exactly true.” He tried to smile, but Amma twisted his shirt even harder, until he rose up from the seat of his chair. “Ow!”

“You think this is funny?” Link was smart enough to keep his mouth shut this time. Amma turned to me. “I was there when you lost your first tooth in that apple, and your wheels in the Pinewood Derby. I’ve cut up shoe boxes for dioramas and iced hundreds a birthday cupcakes. Never said a word when your water col ection up and evaporated like I said it would.”

“No, ma’am.” It was true. Amma was the constant in my life. She was there when my mom died, almost a year and a half ago, and when my dad lost himself because of it.

She let go of my shirt as suddenly as she had taken it, smoothed her apron, and lowered her voice.

Whatever had brought on this particular storm had passed. Maybe it was the heat. It was getting to al of us.

Amma looked out the window, past Link and me.

“I’ve been here, Ethan Wate. And I wil be, long as you are. Long as you need me. Not a minute less.

Not a minute more.”

What was that supposed to mean? Amma had never talked to me that way before—like there would ever be a time when I wasn’t here or I wouldn’t need her.

“I know, Amma.”

“You look me in the eye and tel me you’re not as scared as I am, five miles down.” Her voice was low, nearly a whisper.

“We made it back in one piece. That’s what matters. We can figure everything else out.”

“It’s not that simple.” Amma was stil talking as quietly as if we were in the front pew at church. “Pay attention. Has anything, even one thing, felt the same since we got back to Gatlin?”

Link spoke up, scratching his head. “Ma’am, if it’s Ethan and Lena you’re worried about, I promise you as long as I’m around, with my superstrength and al , nothin’s gonna happen to them.” He flexed his arm proudly.

Amma snorted. “Wesley Lincoln. Don’t you know?

The kind a things I’m talkin’ about, you could no more keep from happenin’ than you could keep the sky from fal in’.”

I took a swig of my chocolate milk and almost spit it out al over the table. It tasted too sweet, sugar coating my throat like cough syrup. It was like my eggs, which had tasted more like cotton, and the grits more like sand.

Everything was off today, everything and everyone.

“What’s wrong with the milk, Amma?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Ethan Wate.

What’s wrong with your mouth?”

I wish I knew.

By the time we were out the door and in the Beater, I turned back for one last look at Wate’s Landing. I don’t know why. She was standing in the window, between the curtains, watching me drive window, between the curtains, watching me drive away. And if I didn’t know better, and I didn’t know Amma, I would have sworn she was crying.

9.7

Mortal Girls

As we drove down Dove Street, it was hard to believe our town had ever been anything but brown.

The grass looked like burnt toast before you scraped off the black parts. The Beater was about the only thing that hadn’t changed. Link was actual y driving the speed limit for once, even if it was only because he wanted to check out what was left of our neighbors’ front yards.

“Man, look at Mrs. Asher’s azaleas. Sun’s so hot, they turned black.” Link was right about the heat.

According to the
Farmers’ Almanac
, and the Sisters, who were Gatlin’s walking almanac, it hadn’t been this hot in Gatlin County since 1942. But the sun wasn’t what had kil ed Mrs. Asher’s azaleas.

“They aren’t burnt. They’re covered in lubbers.”

Link hung out the window to get a better look. “No way.”

The grasshoppers had shown up in droves three weeks after Lena Claimed herself, and two weeks after the worst heat wave in seventy years hit. Lubber grasshoppers weren’t your run-of-the-mil green grasshoppers, like the ones Amma found in the kitchen every now and then. Lubbers were black, with an angry slash of yel ow running down their backs, and they traveled in swarms. They were like locusts, devouring every inch of green in town, including the General’s Green. General Jubal A.