Crush

16

Jonathan drifted up from a deep sleep. Kirsty had relieved him on watch some time ago, and he’d fallen asleep almost immediately. Now his thoughts swam in the misty remnants of dreams, becoming solid and pulling him higher and higher until he opened his eyes. He rolled over on the bed. The fireplace poker jabbed his side, and he bolted up.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

But no one answered.

The room was empty.

Jonathan leaped from the bed. The rolled towel, bound in strips of gray tape, still clung to the door. But the bench no longer sat against it. The piece of furniture was pushed to the wall.

“Oh no,” he whispered. Kirsty?

Jonathan ran to the door and eased it open. Lights burned in the hall. He searched the walls for any dark stains creeping there. But he saw nothing. He opened his mouth to call Kirsty and then thought better of it. She could have gone out to check the house and gotten trapped somewhere by the Reapers. If she heard his voice, she might leave her hideout and walk right into them.

He returned to the bed and retrieved the fireplace poker. In the hall he moved quietly, keeping his eyes alert for any motion.

Halfway down the hall he stopped at Kirsty’s room. With a trembling hand he grasped the handle. It felt cool in his palm. Gently he pushed down and opened the door. Light from the hallway spilled over the threshold. More light poured in through the window.

It was morning.

Jonathan checked the walls and the ceiling, stepped into the room cautiously, and was met with the pungent scent of pine cleanser, though it didn’t look like the room had been cleaned in weeks. Kirsty’s bed sat to the left. The linens were rumpled, and various articles of clothing lay amid the sheets and blankets. Dozens of magazines, empty diet cola cans, and assorted papers littered the floor. Kirsty’s desk stood to the right, next to a closet with folding doors. It too was messy, but something on its surface caught Jonathan’s eye, drew him closer.

His face stared back at him.

Amid the clutter on the desktop sat a pewter goblet the size of a halved softball. A photograph of Jonathan leaned against the cup. He crossed the room slowly, checking over his shoulder with every second step. He leaned the fireplace poker against the desk and lifted the picture.

A thick, foul liquid coated the bottom of the photo. Drops of the liquid dripped from the paper’s edge, splashing the desktop.

It was the shot Kirsty had taken of him at Perky’s the night of her first date with David. She’d taken the picture with her cell phone, but what was the crap staining the lower quarter of it? Jonathan looked into the goblet and found a low pool of the foul fluid inside.

What the hell?

Jonathan put the picture down. Behind the goblet was a low stack of similar photographs. These too were stained, much more so than his own picture. In fact, the damage to these photos was so advanced that the faces in them were barely visible through great smears of charcoal-gray filth. The picture on top was of a woman, but her features were impossible to make out through the dismal muck. The second picture was of a man, but here too, the face was obscured.

The third picture, another man, made Jonathan’s throat close tight. Even if he had not been able to make out the dull, flat features of the guy through the stain, he would have recognized the cheap blue sweater-vest anywhere.

Mr. Weaver.

The letterman jacket and Denver Broncos baseball cap in the next photo were clearly Ox’s.

The next picture he recognized immediately, and he grew furious. It was the same picture he’d found on the school paper’s website. He’d cried looking at it. Emma O’Neil’s heart-shaped face was covered in a slime of dark fluid.

Jonathan dropped the pictures on the desk and backed away.

Kirsty?

It had been Kirsty all along. Jesus, she’d tricked him. She’d trapped him in her home.

Jonathan turned to the open door, expecting to find her there, smiling evilly at him. But the doorway was empty.

His racing thoughts collided, making it difficult to think. He had to get out. But no. If he fled now, she’d just send her Reapers for him. He needed to find something he could use to stop her. No way was he letting her get away with this.

A spell book?

Kirsty had mentioned something like this yesterday. He’d thought it a really weird bit of information for her to have. Was that the source of her power? Did she have such a book?

Jonathan searched the desk. He found a low pile of textbooks, checked each of them to make sure no occult text was hidden beneath a familiar cover. At the bottom of the pile, he found a leather-bound book and snatched it from the desk. He opened to the first page:

The Book of Adrian.

He read bits and pieces, but the book wasn’t filled with mystic spells and incantations. It was a diary. As he thumbed through the pages, a photograph slipped out and drifted to the desk. He snatched it up.

The girl in the photograph was the saddest image Jonathan had ever seen. Her obese body was crammed into a pale yellow summer dress. Stringy hair drooped from her head like oily threads. Her plump cheeks were smeared with rouge. The girl tried to smile for the camera, but she looked like she might burst into tears at any moment. Her suffering was captured as clearly as her homeliness. Jonathan found a note on the back of the photo. It was written in a delicate, elegant print:

Let the transformation begin.

Though barely recognizable, the girl in the photo was Kirsty. Jonathan knew it would be, but he still found the realization startling. Even so, the picture wouldn’t help him, and neither would the journal.

He left the desk and made a slow turn, taking in the entirety of the room. When he came around to face the closet, he was again assaulted by the stench of pine cleanser.

He grasped the handles of the closet and threw them back.

“Oh my God.” He gagged.

A woman lay across the back of the closet. She wore a blue nightdress and one white slipper. The other slipper sat in the middle of the closet floor. Her eyes stared wide—desperately, eternally. Her mouth was twisted open in a final scream. Jonathan took a step back and noticed two small plastic buckets on the closet floor. This was the source of the sickening pine odor. Kirsty had filled the buckets with cleanser to cover the far grosser stench of a dead body.

“She wanted me to stop,” Kirsty said.

Jonathan spun around and found the girl in the doorway. She held two mugs in her hands. Gently she eased the door open farther with her shoulder and walked into the room. Her expression was absolutely blank.

“She said no boy was worth it. But she didn’t know. She didn’t understand. She’d never met you.”

“Me?” Jonathan whispered through a clenching throat. “What in the hell does this have to do with me?”

“I love you, of course,” Kirsty said. She walked past him to the desk and set the mugs down. “I told you, we’re a lot alike. I knew it from the first moment I saw you.”

“We’re nothing alike,” Jonathan said. “I could never…Jesus, you killed all of those people.”

“I did it for us,” Kirsty said. “You needed to find your power before you could accept mine.”

“I don’t accept anything.”

“When I saw you, I felt we were the same. I’ve always had the talent, met other girls and a few women that can wield it, but you’re the first gifted boy I’ve met.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You will,” Kirsty said.

She walked up to him, and Jonathan tried to back away. The contents of Kirsty’s closet kept him from retreating farther. Her hands snaked out, palms sliding up his chest like serpents.

“Your old life is gone, Jonathan. Even David. You don’t have anyone but me.”

Jonathan thought about his best friend and felt sick. He should have known David wasn’t capable of hurting anyone. It was Kirsty. Always Kirsty.

“Just accept it,” she said, her lips spreading into a dreamy smile. “Together we can do anything. We can have anything we want. I could do it on my own, but it would be so much better together. No one can hurt us. You know it’s true. I showed you.”

“Emma never did a thing to me, and she certainly never hurt you.”

“David told me how you felt about her the first time he called. She was a problem. A problem I intend to solve when all of this is done.”

“You’re sick.”

Kirsty’s eyes grew dark. Her smile disappeared to be replaced by a ragged smirk.

“Maybe,” she said, removing her hands from him and stepping away. “But I spent sixteen years playing a sniveling victim. I believed every bitch that called me ugly and said I was nothing. I believed my father when he called me a disgrace, a disappointment. And I believed my mother when she told me I needed to get used to the world’s cruelty. I believed all of that until I discovered the Talent. Once I did, I proved them wrong. And then I saw you. So much like I was a year ago. Unpopular. Unattractive. Unwanted. But under the surface, I saw this well of power you had no idea existed.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Jonathan said. “You have to stop this. You’re killing people.”

“They deserve to die.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Oh, come on, Jonathan. You’re telling me you never thought about killing those assholes? You did think it. I know you did.”

“It doesn’t matter what I thought! Everyone has screwed-up thoughts. Only monsters act on them.”

“Wrong,” Kirsty said. “Gods and goddesses act on them. Monsters are merely their weapons.” She walked to the desk and lifted the stained picture of Jonathan from its surface. She held it over the lip of the pewter goblet. “You want to meet my monsters?”

“Do what you want,” Jonathan said. “Like you said, I’ve got nothing left. God knows, anything’s better than being with you. I’d say your father had the right idea, leaving you.”

“Do you really think he left?” Kirsty asked. “After all of this, do you honestly believe I just let him walk away? The only place he went was to a morgue and then to an oven to roast his damned skin to ashes.”

“Well, it’s got to be better than seeing your ugly face every single day.”

“You son of a bitch!” Kirsty screamed. “No one talks to me like that. NO ONE!”

She dropped the photograph into the goblet and stepped back. She lifted one hand to her chest and recited an incantation.

To Jonathan it sounded like Du-ay. Mor-ay. Duay Tom-ay. Mor-ay. Mor-ay.

Only then could he act. He’d goaded her, wanting her to perform the spell. He still held the picture of Kirsty in his hand. If he could exchange it for the image of himself in the goblet, her Reapers might be fooled into taking her. It was a long shot, but he knew of no other way to bring an end to this nightmare.

Jonathan ran toward the desk. Kirsty looked startled for a moment, but recovered quickly. She flashed out her hand and raked her fingernails down his face. The pain slowed Jonathan, but it wasn’t until she buried her knee in his crotch that he stopped.

He dropped to his knees. Pain like he’d never known exploded through his body, radiating from between his legs with such ugly force, he thought he might vomit. His head blossomed with colors, each one representing a different level of agony. He slumped forward, clutching himself and gasping for breath.

“Idiot,” Kirsty whispered. “You’ve ruined everything.”

Jonathan groaned. His eyes were covered in greasy tears, blurring his vision, but he blinked the moisture away. Behind him he heard Kirsty walking to the other side of the room.

“I loved you,” she said. “And this is how you treat me? I loved YOU!”

He managed to roll over and see the girl standing in the far corner of the room. “You call this love?” Jonathan asked.

“No,” Kirsty muttered. “I call this…over.”

The Reapers appeared in the doorway then. They did not pause, but soared into the room. Three of them pushed through the door and unfolded to their full size. They danced in the air above him like circling manta rays, wearing grins on their transparent faces. One swooped down and grazed his aching body with its cold, wet form. Another repeated the move, only this one connected hard with Jonathan’s shoulder, sending him onto his back.

The third one dropped to the floor. It crept over Jonathan’s head, leaving a moist trail on his hair and skin. He struggled, threw his hands up to pull the phantom off of him, but it was too strong. A moment later his nose and mouth were covered. He beat at it, tore at it with his fingernails, but the phantom was already lifting him off the floor.

Through the film of the shadowy body, Jonathan watched his own hands flail as he rose off of the carpet. The picture of Kirsty, a rectangular blur, flapped in the air, still held firmly between his fingers. His chest heaved for breath, but the ghost’s form filled his nose, his mouth. His pulse thundered like drums in his ears. His heart beat like a speeding train, trying to break through his ribs. Up and up. The phantom lifted him from the floor and dragged him to the ceiling. Another of the Reapers wrapped around his legs.

Together the two monsters carried him around the room. They beat him against the ceiling, then dropped to the floor, skimming over the carpet.

Jonathan’s head grew light. His body began to hitch violently as his lungs struggled to draw breath. White flashes appeared in his vision, playing against the dark field covering his eyes.

In a final attempt to save his own life, Jonathan threw out his hand, reached for anything he could get his fingers on. He was helpless in midair. If he could get on his feet, get some control of any kind…

He felt wood scrape over his chest and arms. He was being lifted by his feet, dangling upside down. He desperately reached out, and the edge of the desk slid into his palm. He held on with all of his might.

The phantoms continued to climb, and a searing agony flared at Jonathan’s shoulder. It felt like his arm would rip out of the socket. But he held on.

Through the shade of the Reaper’s body, he saw the goblet on the desk’s surface. More lights flashed before his eyes, and his torso clenched miserably. He needed air. Needed it right now.

A low ringing filled his ears. His eyes stung from the secretions on the surface of the ghost, but he could see the goblet. He saw his face looking up at him from it.

Jonathan reached down. He dropped Kirsty’s picture in the cup. With his fingers freed of it, he yanked his picture from the foul liquid. He flung it to the floor, and suddenly the grip on his feet was gone and he was falling.

The cowl lifted from his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Jonathan gasped, taking in gulps of sweet air, filling his desperate lungs with oxygen as his mind spun out of control like a broken carnival ride. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, expecting to see the Reapers regrouping above him, but they didn’t appear.

From the far corner of the room, Kirsty began to scream.

But it only lasted for a few seconds before she fell silent.

Jonathan looked in her direction.

The Reapers covered her. They did not lift her from the carpet, the mistake they’d made with Jonathan. No. They covered her like a filmy cocoon, pinning her to the wall. Her face was a mask of terror. Mouth wide. Eyes pushed closed. Unmoving. Shaded darkly by the bodies of her phantoms.