Sing Sweet Nightingale (12 page)

Scooting my chair a little farther away from him, I grip my nightingale tighter and—

“Don’t do that.”

His voice is so quiet I can barely make out the words, but when I glance up, he’s staring straight at me.

“The breathing? And the thing with the bird? I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do that.” My mouth drops open. Hudson shrugs. “The glow is giving me a headache.”

My stomach clenches, and I’m breathing like I just sprinted a mile. He goes back to eating like nothing happened, but his words replay in my head. Did he say
glow
? But…he can’t possibly see it. No one can see it. No one but me.

“Hudson, Horace was telling me you’re an artist?” my mother asks.

Hudson tenses, looking at Horace before smiling a little and facing my mother. “It’s a hobby more than anything.”

“What mediums do you prefer?” she asks.

They go back and forth, discussing music and art as my father and Horace dissect my father’s work on our house and a few other projects he’s done around the county. In this group, I am most definitely a fifth, highly unnecessary wheel, but the longer they talk, the easier it is to convince myself I didn’t hear Hudson right. There’s no way he can see my nightingale’s glow. He’s just an overgrown boy with freaky eyes.

I sigh and push the rest of the salad around my plate with my fork. Tonight, I can’t bring myself to even
pretend
to enjoy this food. Hudson shifts closer, and I barely bite back a hiss as the tingling in my arm grows sharper. I drop my fork, then clench and relax my hand, trying to get blood flow back.

The conversation pauses as my parents retreat to the kitchen to pick up the next course. They bring back a platter of chicken breasts and a bowl of vegetables and pick up their sentences exactly where they left off moments ago.

“I’ve taught music for years now. Mari used to play herself,” my mother says, her voice heavy and thick. “But you know how it goes. I can’t get her to sit down at the piano anymore.”

She smiles as though she doesn’t care, but she stabs the next chicken breast a little too hard. Hudson glances at me. I scoot farther away.

Hudson manages to charm both of my parents by demonstrating a decent grasp of both art and architecture, and by the end of the meal, my father is more smitten with Horace than he was at the beginning.

And the needle-sharp tingling in my arm is spreading into my chest and down into my right leg. I’m ready to crawl out of my skin.

“Of course, of course,” my father says as we all carry our plates into the kitchen. “I think that’s a major concern as well. Have you done much with solar power?”

Their conversation continues, but the words are lost as the needles turn into knives poking into my back. The sensation is spreading faster now, stretching out from the right side of my body and engulfing me entirely. And the feedback I thought I heard at a distance earlier climbs in volume, like the PA system is now somewhere inside the house. I wince, look around, and almost gasp.

Hudson is standing inches behind me.

Dropping my plate on the counter with a clatter, I leave. My mother’s mouth moves as I pass, but I don’t hear what she says.

I nearly run from the room, clutching my nightingale and trying to breathe. Even my
lungs
are prickling. Breathing makes it worse. My entire body is shaking before I reach the stairs. The feeling doesn’t start to die until my foot lands on the first step.

Before I reach the second, a hand grabs my arm.

My heart stops, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from screaming. My hands come up, ready to push him away. It’s Hudson. It has to be Hudson!

Then my vision focuses, and I’m looking into my mother’s eyes.

“Mari? Honey, are you okay? You look pale, sweetie. Why did you run away like that?” Her hand comes up to my face like she’s checking my temperature, her lips pursed. “We were going to play Scrabble. I know your father was hoping you’d play.”

I take a long, slow breath, noticing that the prickles are dying down. Whatever they were. It might be stupid to consider it, but the sensation didn’t start until Hudson showed up. And it’s a lot worse when he’s nearby. I promised my father I’d be as normal as possible, but can I sit through another couple of hours with Hudson? If my muscles keep jumping like this, my control is going to snap and I’ll start screaming like a banshee.

The tingling grows worse, and I glance over my mother’s shoulder. Hudson stands in the kitchen with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, watching me. His black, long-sleeved button-down is as dark as his eyes, and though he’s a foot or so from the doorway, he fills the frame.

I’m about to shake my head and go upstairs, if only to get myself as far from Hudson as possible, when my focus shifts. It slides past the size, the eyes, and the scary, and I see the way his lip curls as he watches me. Like he’s laughing at me. My jaw clenches, and he raises one eyebrow.

I wish I had something other than my nightingale to throw at him. It’s like he knows what’s happening to me and knows I can’t handle it. In that one mocking lift of his eyebrow, he’s challenging me to stay.

Orane may beat me, but I refuse to let some overgrown
boy
do it.

Lifting my chin, I step down from the staircase and turn toward the living room.

I hear my parents and Horace talking over the
clink
and
clang
of dishes. Because I’m listening to them, I miss Hudson’s quiet footsteps. I notice the last one a split second before the tingle returns, raising goosebumps on the back of my neck.

Gritting my teeth, I ignore him.

“That is some Scrabble board.”

His voice is low, somewhere between baritone and bass. It presses against me like a weight. As he gets closer, that feedback noise gets louder. The high-pitched whine of a mic held way too close to a speaker. It sends shudders down my spine, but I force my shoulders back. He won’t make me run.

I jump as his hand crosses the board, reaching for a tile. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows now, and I stare at the bare skin, my heart pounding and the whine forgotten.

What
happened
to him? There are so many scars and discolored patches of skin on his arm I can’t count them. I also can’t stop staring as he shakes his wrist to untangle the bead bracelets on his arm and lifts the tile closer to his face. At least, I think he’s looking at the tile. With those eyes, it’s impossible to tell where he’s looking.

“Good work,” he says, putting the tile back in the bag. “Handmade?”

I nod and glance toward the kitchen.

“Your dad?”

I nod again.

“Cool.” He sits forward, his elbows resting on his knees. I rub at my ear. It doesn’t make the feedback go away.

He reaches forward again, examining a detail on my father’s board, and my curiosity overwhelms caution. Eyebrows furrowed, I point to his arm and sign, “
What happened?
” It’s habit to sign now, but it’s probably useless in this case. I doubt he knows Signing Exact English.

Hudson stares at me. It lasts so long that I shift under the weight of his eyes, but I refuse to look away. When Hudson finally blinks, he shakes his head.

“I don’t know you well enough to tell that story.” He leans back in the chair and rolls his sleeves down. When he’s a few feet away, the feedback fades into an aggravating background noise. The tingling doesn’t lessen at all.

A minute passes, and Hudson doesn’t say a word. I barely have time to hope we’ll sit in silence until everyone joins us before he looks at me and says, “Your friend K.T. says hi, by the way.”

What? Who is K.T.?

He’s watching me again, scrutinizing me.

Hudson huffs something that might be a laugh and looks away. I push to my knees and grab some Scrabble tiles, ready to start throwing them at him. Why does it seem like everything he says to me is some kind of insult I’m too stupid to follow? It’s like he’s speaking another language and I can only translate half the words. And I don’t like the ones I understand.

Before I release the tiles, my mother’s voice gets louder.

“And he made it himself when we got tired of playing by the board’s limitations,” she says to Horace.

She explains our house rules, and we all pick our tiles. The game progresses quickly, and the board starts filling. They keep talking over my head, but after four years of pulling myself out of conversations, I’m so used to it I barely notice.

Hudson looks at me and puts down two letters to create a three-letter, triple-score word.

Vow.

My hand lifts to my throat as the other grips my nightingale. I watch Hudson out of the corner of my eye. He smiles and tallies the score. He’s facing Horace, but I can feel his eyes on me. The tingling gets worse when he’s focused on me.

Coincidence
, I tell myself.
Just a coincidence
.

But it’s a little
too
coincidental. First mentioning a glow, and now a vow? But he
can’t
possibly know about my promise. It’s impossible. Orane broke the rules to let me into Paradise. No other human has been through those portals in hundreds of years.

It’s a word on a Scrabble board. I’m reading too much into it.
I’m
the one with a habit of leaving messages in this game.

Breathing in fours, I draw energy out of the nightingale and hold on to that thought. He doesn’t know. He can’t know.

Less than five minutes later, he plays another word that sets my head spinning.

Paradise.

I want to knock the entire board over and run upstairs.

He shouldn’t know. How can he know? Orane said—

Oh, no. What if one of the others broke the rules? I’ve never met any of the others, but Orane isn’t alone.

I want to drag Hudson into another room and demand an explanation, but I can’t risk exposing information he might not have.

Wait
, I tell myself.
Wait until tonight. Tell Orane, and he’ll know what to do
.

The game continues, and I eventually calm down. I’m slowly adapting to the prickling running up and down my body, and the strange whine is nearly background noise now. Awful background noise, but whatever.

Then Hudson plays another word.

Songbird.

My hand locks around my nightingale to keep myself from hitting him between the eyes with it.

Something clatters to the floor next to me, and I look down as Hudson bends to scoop up a fallen O tile.

“Told you to stop playing with that bird,” he mutters, his voice a quiet rumble under my parents’ chatter. He’s so close his breath flutters against my cheek. I flinch as the whine gets louder and the pinpricks get sharper, more insistent, pounding against my skin until it’s as bad as rolling on a bed of nails. Either he doesn’t notice, doesn’t know, or doesn’t care. He whispers across the inches, “Too much of anything isn’t good for you.”

I nearly scream.

I want to pound my fists against his chest and yell that he has no idea what he’s talking about. I want to demand he leave my house and never come back. I want to grab him by the collar and insist he tell me everything he
thinks
he knows about Paradise.

I
want
to do all of that, but the beak of my nightingale is biting into my palm. That tangible reminder of Orane’s world holds me back from the edge. Barely.

Backing away and pushing Hudson as far out of my mind as I can, I stare at the tiles in front of me, only looking up when I have to make a play. For the first time in a couple of years, I lose. By a lot. But I don’t care. I survived the game and refused to let Hudson run me off with his impossibly black eyes and cryptic words. I’m still here.

I may not have won the game everyone else was playing, but I won the one that matters.

As soon as my parents get up to show Horace and Hudson out, I step away. I stay in the room, though, hovering on the edges and refusing to retreat.

“You send over that design, and we’ll see if we can’t get the old house livable again,” Horace says as he shakes my father’s hand.

My father is practically glowing. “Of course. I’ll bring it over Monday.”

They say goodbye, and my mother hugs Hudson.
Hugs
him! I have to press my hands against my sides to keep from pulling her away.

At last, they’re gone. My parents are too busy celebrating my father’s possible contract to notice me disappear.

It’s not until the electric tingle fades and I’m beginning to calm down that something occurs to me.

Hudson never saw what was in my hand. I closed my fist around the nightingale as soon as I came downstairs and didn’t put it down once.

I stare at the small glass nightingale perched on the palm of my hand.

Isn’t it bad enough he seemed to know about Paradise? How the hell did he know this was a bird?

Nine

Hudson

Friday, August 29 – 9:53 PM

“You got your work cut out for you with that one,” Horace says once we’re in the car.

I drop my head onto the steering wheel and take a long breath. My hands are shaking, and my eyes are dotted with spots of orange—the afterimage of that crazy light surrounding her. Sitting up, I shake myself out, rolling my neck and flexing my hands. Jesus, I’ve been wanting to do that all night.

“If you keep twitchin’ like that, I’m gonna think you’re developing a tic.”

“Standing next to her is like holding onto a live wire,” I mutter as I pull away from the curb. At the end of the street, I stop. I grab a few of the amethyst geodes and malachite stones from the back, stuffing the smaller pieces into my pockets.

“Keep going. I’ll meet you at the house,” I tell Horace.

“You get caught, and I’m gonna have a helluva time explaining this!” he calls after me.

Yeah
, I think.
Me too
.

Staying in the shadows, I head back to the Teagans’ house. The heat of the day is finally dying off, and the breeze whispering through the trees is almost cool. I freeze when a dog starts barking, but it’s coming from a few houses down. He’s not barking at me.

Through the front window, I see Dana and Frank cleaning up the wine glasses and the Scrabble game. Mariella isn’t with them. I inch around the side of the house and check the upstairs windows. All are dark but one.