The Gathering Dark (32 page)

“I really, really want to tell you,” Keira said. “But it’s complicated. Listen, this is serious. I’m in trouble. Can I come over when you get home from school and borrow some clothes?” She thought about Walker buying her shoes . . . she’d still need those. Susan wore a six and a half.

“Don’t tell me you’re running away. Not because of a few lying texts and our school’s lame gossip obsession.” Susan sounded horrified.

“No, it’s not like that,” Keira insisted. “So, can I come over? Please? I need your help. I need you to trust me. Please.”

“Of course,” Susan sighed. “I’ll help you. But I want to know what’s going on. If there’s an explanation for all this, you know I’m behind you a hundred percent, but everything’s
weird
, Keira. I’m not okay with that.”

“I know. I understand, I really do.” Keira leaned her cheek against the cool glass of the car window. Susan was going to help her. It was a start.

“Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”

The phone went dead in Keira’s hand.

Susan wasn’t okay with things being weird. So how the hell was Keira supposed to tell her about Darkside? Everything about Keira’s life was weird now. Everything. And she couldn’t see any way that things would ever be normal again. She sat in the car, her chest tight, trying very, very hard not to cry.

Chapter Forty-One

W
ALKER PULLED UP IN
front of Susan’s house.

“I can buy you some clothes,” he said. Again. “Your pride is awesome and all, but in a life-and-death situation, it really doesn’t matter.”

Keira shook her head. He didn’t get it.

“It’s more than that. I can’t abandon Susan. First of all, I already asked her to lie for me about where I’ve been staying. And secondly”—she stared up at Susan’s bedroom window—“she’s my
best friend
. I trust her. I’m not going to walk away from her. She deserves an explanation, and not just ‘I have a new boyfriend and some stuff’s going on and I can’t tell you anything
else about it.’ I don’t know if she can deal with the truth, but I have to try to tell her. It’s the only way I can live with myself.”

She looked over at Walker.

Walker ran his hands over the sides of his jeans again and again. If she hadn’t been able to see that his eyes were dry, Keira would’ve sworn he was about to cry.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded. Not a single thing she’d said should have made him look so distraught.

“You called me your
boyfriend
.” He sounded horrified.

Keira felt stung. Her skin throbbed with it. After everything they’d been through—he didn’t want to be her boyfriend? Was he really so used to this bizarre life that their relationship didn’t mean anything to him?

Feeling painfully uncertain, Keira unbuckled her seat belt and reached for the door.

“After last night?” She could feel herself blushing. “If you’re not my boyfriend, then fine, whatever. I was just illustrating a point.” Keira angrily swung open the door, but before she could step out of the car, Walker caught her wrist.

Time itself seemed to slow. Her indrawn breath lasted for a tiny eternity.

“Keira, stop. I don’t think I
am
your boyfriend,” Walker said.

The world dropped out from under Keira. She hung there, waiting for the fall. “You . . . ” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“After everything we’ve been through, the way I feel when I look at you, when I think about losing you—” Walker shook his head. “I don’t know
what
we are. I don’t know that there’s even a word for it. Not in either of our worlds. But I do know that it’s a hell of a lot more than
boyfriend.
”

The words tumbled over Keira, cracking open the air around her like an unexpected and very loud chord. Her head rang with it, filling her with its own rhythm and color and light.

She stared at Walker. She couldn’t voice the feeling spilling through her. It was something she could have played on the piano, maybe. Something she could have made him feel with notes and sounds. But without a piano all she could do was hope that he could see the joy in her eyes.

“Okay,” she whispered.

Walker brought her hand up to his mouth and turned it over, exposing the inside of her wrist. He pressed his lips against the road map of blue veins visible beneath her translucent skin. The kiss was a risk, throwing into view a hilly, forested section of Darkside that was studded with rocks. Keira closed her eyes against the vision, trying to focus on the smooth door handle in her palm and the scent of the Maine air flowing into the car. Trying not to slip into Darkside. When she opened her eyes, she saw only the car, Walker, and Susan’s house.

“Go on in,” he said, releasing her hand. “I’ll wait here.”

Feeling light-headed, Keira swung herself out of the car, her new shoes chafing against her sockless feet. As she trudged
up the familiar front path to Susan’s house, she tried to clear her head, to get rid of all the chaos, so that she could be the same Keira she’d always been. The sort of Keira that Susan was expecting.

And then the door was in front of her and there was nothing to do but lift her hand and knock. Keira’d done it a thousand times before, but now it seemed like the hardest thing in the world. Still, she’d never been one to back down from a challenge.

She took a deep breath and rapped on the door.

•  •  •

Susan opened the door. The pinched expression on her face evaporated into surprise when she saw Keira’s disheveled hair and filthy clothes.
Those
hadn’t gone back to their original state when she’d crossed back and forth from Darkside.

Keira watched her best friend take in her ripped sleeve. Verifying Keira’s story.

“Can I come in?” Keira asked.

Susan glanced behind Keira, her gaze riveted on Walker’s sleek car, waiting at the curb. “I can’t believe you ditched school to be with him. That’s not like you at all! Is he just going to lurk out there?”

“You skipped last week to hang out with Smith,” Keira said simply. “And he’s not lurking. He’s my ride.”

“I know. Sorry. I’m just really freaked out. Smith won’t answer my texts, you’re acting weird
and
you asked me to lie
to your parents. You’ve never done that before. I want to know what’s going on.”

Smith wasn’t answering Susan’s texts? Worry nibbled at her as Keira sagged against the door frame. “Susan, I’m sorry. I never meant to put you in this position. Please, let me come in and explain? And maybe change out of these clothes?”

Susan wrinkled her nose. “Those clothes need to be burned. What have you been doing, exactly?”

Keira paused, sorting through the lies she could tell. None of them seemed believable. Besides, she was going to ask Susan to give her clothes, to cover for her, and more than that, she was asking Susan to trust her. To understand. A lie wasn’t going to earn her any of that. Not even a good lie.

There was only one way to solve this—only one way that Susan would understand why she’d done all the inexplicable things she’d done. After all her insistence that she could trust Susan, it was time to act like she actually did.

She had to tell her best friend the truth.

Keira looked Susan straight in the eye. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll tell you everything.”

Susan glanced at the kitchen, where her mother was pointedly banging around pots and pans. “Fair enough.”

The two of them trudged up the stairs and Susan pointed to a pile of clothes on the bed.

“That’s all the stuff that’s a little bit too long for me. Help yourself.”

Keira felt her chin quiver as she stared at the neatly washed and ironed fabric, smelling like the floral detergent Mrs. Kim loved. It didn’t seem like anything to get upset over, but the sight of something so simple and familiar made her realize how far from normal her life had become.

Keira pulled a pair of black yoga pants and a long-sleeved shirt out of the pile. She shucked off her filthy jeans and T-shirt and slid into the clean clothes with a groan of relief.

Susan handed her a hairbrush. “You look like you got caught in a hurricane,” she said. “So? You were going to tell me what was going on? Since apparently Jeremy’s story that you slept together isn’t true?”

Keira froze halfway through pulling the ponytail out of her hair. “He said
what
?”

Susan winced. “He texted Tommy that he’d ‘done you’ ”—she added air quotes with her fingers—“but that it, um . . . ” She trailed off, squirming uncomfortably in the chair.

“It what?” Keira asked, biting off the end of each word.

“He said it was like humping a dead fish.” Pink bloomed in Susan’s cheeks. “And then Tommy sent the text to me and—well, pretty much to everyone, actually.”

“God. What a lying asshole.” Keira smacked the hairbrush against her thigh. “After everything that happened this morning, the last thing I want to deal with is Jeremy Reynolds’s crap. You don’t believe him, right? I don’t care what everyone else thinks, as long as you know the truth.”

Susan hesitated. “I don’t think you slept with him. Especially not since I know you spent last night with Walker.”

Keira’s jaw clenched. “We did spend the night together, but we didn’t . . . you know . . . ”

Susan looked at Keira like she wanted to believe her, but she couldn’t quite do it.

“Sure. Okay. I still don’t get why you were at Jeremy’s, though. What’s really going on?”

Keira sighed and yanked the brush through her hair. She wanted to tell Susan. She was
going
to tell Susan.

The only trouble was figuring out where to start.

“Okay, when I met Walker a couple weeks ago?”

“Yeah?” Susan said, perching on the little wooden chair at her desk.

Keira winced as the brush caught in a knot of hair. She pulled the bristles out and started working at it more slowly.

“Well, the more time we spent together, the more I noticed that there were all these strange things happening.”

Susan stopped bouncing her knee. “What sort of strange things?”

“I started seeing stuff. Like, weird things where they shouldn’t be. Black marks on Walker’s skin that would move and disappear. Stuff like that.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I thought I was losing my mind from all the stress from my parents’ fighting and my practice not going well. I thought I was starting to crack.”

“And are you still seeing these strange things?” Susan asked, frowning.

Keira put the brush down on the bed. She felt better, in clean clothes and with neat hair. More in control. “Yeah. There’s another world out there, Susan. All around us. Everywhere. It’s made of something called dark matter, and pretty much no one can touch it or see it. But I can. And so can Walker.”

Keira watched as Susan went from shock to panic to anger faster than a piano string vibrates.

“That is ridiculous. I can’t believe you would make up something like that, just to avoid telling me the truth.”

“I’m not making it up!” Keira insisted.

“Then you were right before and you’re insane.”

I have to show her. I didn’t believe Walker until he showed me.

“I’ll prove it to you. I can cross over. Watch.”

Keira squinted, looking for Darkside. It shimmered into view and Keira caught her breath, her fingers curling tight around Susan’s bedspread.

Oh, shit.

She’d forgotten that Susan’s bedroom was on the second floor. Keira was sitting a good twenty feet above a cluster of Darkside rocks. They grinned up at her like a mouthful of teeth, waiting to chew her up and spit her out. There was no way she could cross over. Besides, the rip would draw the guards right to Susan’s house. She should have thought of that earlier.

“Damn it. I can’t cross here. There’s a huge drop; I’d break my
neck. You have to believe me,” Keira begged. “It’s a real thing—dark matter—you can look it up!” But Keira knew that wouldn’t be the same. Susan wasn’t the least bit convinced and Keira knew it.

Susan shook her head. “If you’d told me that you’d fallen in love and lost your head,
that
I’d believe. If your parents’ problems had gotten to you, I could have bought it. But
this
? Come on, Keira. Just—” She stood up so fast that the chair wobbled.

“Just take the clothes and go. I’ll lie for you. I’ll help you. I’m not going to stop being your friend because you’re in a tough spot.” The hurt rang in her words, a painful counterpoint. “But I’m not going to listen to you feed me some ridiculous story that you and Walker have cooked up so that you can run away together to New York or something.” She swept the clothes on the bed into a ball and shoved them into Keira’s arms.

“Susan, it’s not a story. I’m trying to tell you the
truth.
”

A tear sparkled at the corner of Susan’s eye.

“Come downstairs with me,” Keira begged. “We’ll go across the street, somewhere you can see what I’m talking about. I swear, I’m not making this up.”

“Just go,” Susan whispered. “Call me if you’re ever actually ready to talk.”

Tears blurred Keira’s vision as she clutched the wad of fabric to her chest. Susan turned away from her. Keira slunk out of the room, her head low. She crept down the stairs, half crushed by Susan’s reaction and half worried that she’d change her mind and decide Keira wasn’t worth helping.

She let herself out the front door and ran across the street to the car.

In the middle of the damp blacktop, Keira came to a complete stop. Walker wasn’t in the car. He was leaning against it. And he wasn’t alone.

Chapter Forty-Two

S
MITH’S EYES WERE RED-RIMMED
and wild, so full of anger that Keira could barely bring herself to step closer. She glanced back up at Susan’s window, wondering if she’d seen her ex-fling standing with Walker, but the blinds were closed.

“She was right all along—this is all my fault. I never should have gotten mixed up in any of this!” Smith spat.

Walker put out a placating hand. “Smith, you didn’t mean for this to happen. I know you’re upset about your mother—”