Of Starlight (17 page)

“We forgot knives!” Megan hurried off to my kitchen, leaving me alone with our arsenal, and a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. We couldn’t kill someone like this. What was I thinking?

Megan came back and dumped a bundle of kitchen knives on the pile. The clatter startled me. “Do your parents have a gun?” she asked next.

I shook my head, then added, “No.”

“You could probably kill her with a knife, although you’d have to stab her in the heart. It would be hard to aim. We could make one invisible.”

“I can’t do this,” I moaned, sliding to my knees and dragging my fingers through my hair. “I can’t stab someone.”

“I bet you can if she’s trying to stab you first.” Megan had chosen to remain visible. Ashley wasn’t after her, she’d argued, though it probably had more to do with the symbols ticking off on her skin. “You could always try to choke her.”

“I can’t do this,” I repeated, fingers still knotted in my hair.

“It’s you or her, Leona.”

“Okay . . . I can do this, I can do this.” I took a deep, shuddering breath and stood up, my knees wobbly, and moved to the other pile. The stuff for booby traps—thumb tacks, nails, fishing line, garbage bags, sewing needles, Sarah’s apparatus, dental floss, duct tape and scissors.

“What if she brings a gun?” said Megan.

“Then we’re dead.” I nudged aside the fishing line with my toe, uncovering a container of sleigh bells from our Christmas decorations. “We’ll put up tripwire around the house—along the driveway, across the side yard, through the garden—bells attached to fishing line. She won’t be able to see them at night. That way we’ll at least hear her . . . but how do we kill her?”

“Stab her in the throat,” offered Megan, now rummaging through our supplies.

I thought of the other booby traps I’d learned about as a kid.

A bucket balanced over a door, so when she opened it . . .

Yeah, not unless I got a bucket of acid strong enough to dissolve flesh. The thought made me shudder. “How the hell do we kill her?” I muttered.

“We could hit her with a car,” said Megan. “Like we did last time.”

“She’d just jump to the side,” I said, thinking aloud. “Maybe if we could lay some kind of trap . . . use one of us as bait . . . then we’d just have to get her in the right spot—and we’d know when she’s there because we have Sarah’s Apparatus—then
bam
, she’s dead.”

“Yeah, fine, but what’s the trap?” said Megan.

I dragged my hands down my face and sighed. “I don’t know.”

“We should probably set something up soon,” said Megan, glancing uneasily at the windows, “before it’s completely dark outside.”

“First let’s do another pass through the house.” I grabbed the fireplace poker and handed the baseball bat to Megan, who crept up to the door. My grip on the poker tightened. Standing clear, she mouthed, “Three . . . two . . . one—”

She yanked the door open.

I lunged and thrust the poker out into the dark hallway, skewering empty air. I moved up the hallway, swinging it in widening circles. Megan covered my back, jabbing at the corners with her bat. We spread out in the foyer, yanking our weapons around and around.

“Foyer’s clear,” said Megan.

“Front door?” I called, moving into the living room to repeat the process.

The handle rattled behind me. “Locked.”

I zigzagged through the room, plunging the poker into obvious hiding spots first—behind the couch, under the card table, between the bookshelf and the entertainment center—then spread out to the less obvious ones—crouching in the fireplace, lying flat against the wall, even standing in the middle of the room. My poker struck nothing invisible. No one here.

Thankfully, the old hardwood floor creaked, so there was no way she was getting out undetected during our search. Next I checked the windows, and Megan finished the search behind me. “All clear,” she announced.

“Windows shut and locked,” I said.

“Living room’s clear,” she said loudly, even though I was right next to her. “You know, I feel like I’m talking to myself.”

“I’m not taking it off,” I said.

“Great. Do what it wants, Leona.”

“Like I have any other choice,” I said.

“I’m just saying,” she said, leading the way into the dining room.

“Wait,” I said, hurrying back to my bedroom. “Guard the doorway. I want to close off this room so she can’t creep in here while we’re checking the other rooms.”

“She’s not even in the house,” she muttered.

“Megan, I thought she wasn’t in my car and then she ambushed me and nearly killed me, so shut up, okay? Just guard the door.” I gathered fishing line, duct tape, and bells from my bedroom and carried them back into the foyer.

Megan watched the pile come to a rest at her feet. I threaded a dozen bells onto the fishing line, nudged Megan out of the way, and began taping the line in a crisscross pattern across the doorway. Reassuringly, the bells jingled nonstop.

“She could just take that down, you know,” said Megan.

“Not without us hearing,” I said.

I pushed on the fishing line to test it, and the bells chimed faintly. Satisfied she couldn’t enter—or exit—the living room unheard, I had just begun to wind the spare line back around the spool when a loud
ding-dong
rang through the foyer, freezing my blood. The spool fell from my hand, clanging on the hardwood.

The doorbell.

There was someone at the door.

We were standing in the foyer, not three feet away from it.

I tried to catch Megan’s eye, but she couldn’t see me. She was staring at the front door with a look of pure terror. “What do we do?” she whispered.

Fear clouded my thoughts, thickening with each nervous thump of my heart. Would she ring the doorbell? We wouldn’t see her through the peephole. It was a trick. She was trying to get us to open the door so she could slip inside.

“Look!” Megan groped around for my arm, caught it, and pointed to the narrow windows on either side of the door, partially covered in gauzy drapes. As I stared, a shadow slid across the drapes, cast by the porch light. Someone was moving out there.

Someone visible.

If we could see them, then they could see us. They could definitely hear us. I didn’t dare move. “Turn off the lights,” I hissed in Megan’s ear.

Slowly, Megan reached for the light switch, and the foyer light clicked off, leaving us in darkness. Now the only light came from the two yellow strips spilling in from the side windows. Another shadow flicked across.

“Look through the peephole,” I whispered.

“I’m not looking through the peephole,” she hissed. “You look through the peephole.”

“You’re closer.” I gave her a gentle push.

She whacked my hand away, but continued forward. Silhouetted against the glare from outside, her throat moved up and down in a swallow as she positioned her eye at the peephole.

Silence. She blinked and adjusted her view.

Then she screamed.

Chapter 17

Megan flinched away
from the door and bumped into me. “Oh Jesus!”

“What?” I said.

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” she stammered, backing down the hall, face ashen.

“What? What is it?”

She pointed a trembling finger. “There’s . . . there’s a zombie . . .” She shook her head, unable to say more, and took another terrified step backward. A shadow moved across the side window again, and an icy talon drew down my spine.

I scowled and moved toward the peephole. “What are you smoking?”

“Leona . . . Leona? Where are you?” Panic crept into her voice as she felt around for me in the hallway.

“I’m right here,” I hissed, lining my eye up with the peephole.

“It’s going to hear us,” she whimpered.

“Shh!”

A yellow circle danced into view. The front porch. The light winked as a frail figure moved back and forth in front of the lamp. I felt my eyebrows pinch together, and all at once the details snapped into focus—leathery skin stretched over a skeletal face, eyeholes caving in to nothingness, jaw bent hideously to the side, black lips bared from rotting teeth.

The image hit me like a jolt of electricity, cutting off my breath as a tingling fear spread to my fingertips. But I didn’t flinch like Megan. I forced myself to keep looking until I figured it out. I knew what this was.

I knew, because I had seen this thing before.

“Oh God,” I breathed.

“Is it still there?” said Megan, cowering behind me and clutching my invisible shoulders.

I pulled away from the peephole, my mouth dry. “It’s not a zombie,” I said. “It’s . . . it’s . . .” I swallowed the stickiness in my throat. “It’s
her
.”

“Her?” said Megan.

“Don’t let anything in. I’m going to look.” I turned the latch, retracting the deadbolt.

“Are you
crazy?
” She grabbed the latch to stop it from moving.

“Stop, I need to see.” Fingers sweaty on the handle, I tugged open the door against her resistance and peeked out.

The sharp smell of chemicals and old rot swirled inside, and I had to squeeze my nose. A human corpse hung from the lamp, swinging gently back and forth, a noose tied around its neck.

I’d seen this corpse before.

Condensed moisture glistened on the blackened skin and slid down in rivulets, dripping off the toes into a coffee-colored puddle on the porch.

“It’s frozen,” I noted.

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” Megan muttered behind me.

A tag had been tied to the big toe.

I caught the tag in my fingers and tilted it up to the light, and my scalp prickled.

Name
Lacroix, Ashley

Case No.
030-2599

This was the girl we’d murdered. This was the corpse we’d dumped in Rattlesnake Canyon at the beginning of the summer, to which I’d led Emory two weeks ago.

Someone had hung it by a noose on my front porch.

“It’s a taunt,” I said. “She’s taunting us. She stole her body from the police station and brought it here to taunt us.”

“But we were
standing right here the whole time,” said Megan, once we’d retreated back into the foyer. “When did she have time to hang a freaking corpse?”

“She’s taunting us.” I chewed my fingernails, nervous and agitated. “She’s proving she can sneak up on us any time she wants, to scare us.”

“But we were five feet away. I didn’t hear anything!”

“She did it right under our noses,” I whispered. “She could have been out there watching us, listening in . . .” I looked up, alarmed. “Megan, if she heard us . . . if she heard about our plan . . .”

“But it’s
her
,” said Megan, once we’d retreated back into the foyer. “It’s
her
body.”

“It’s not her,” I said. “That’s the point. She’s playing mind games with us. She’s saying, ‘look, here’s the girl you killed, and the police have a case on her, and you’re dead.’”

“Timeout. If that’s Ashley’s body out there,” Megan thrust a finger out at the porch, “then whose body is it using? If it’s not Ashley, it’s not even using her body, then what exactly is out there trying to kill us?”

“I don’t know, Megan. Something evil that obviously doesn’t like us. Maybe its body is made out of dark matter.”

“Jesus, we have to kill it,” she muttered.

“What do you think we’re trying to do?”

For a split-second, headlights blazed through the side windows, casting a shadow of Ashley’s corpse onto the wall before the car moved on down the street. I peeked out the side windows again and cringed at the sight. “We have to move it.”

“Make her move it,” said Megan. “I’m not cleaning that up.”

“Someone’s going to see it,” I said. “The police are going to realize there’s a body missing from the morgue and they’re going to come looking for it, and then it’s
really
going to look suspicious when we’re the ones who have it.”

“How’d she steal a freaking body?”

“She’s invisible.”

“Fuck,” said Megan. “I forgot.”

“Pay attention for two seconds, okay?” I ran back to my bedroom and came back with the black garbage bags. I yanked out two of them and slipped outside, and Megan followed with the duct tape.

We were risking our cover, but we couldn’t just leave a dead body hanging from my porch. Nose wrinkled against the smell, I opened a trash bag and dragged it up around Ashley’s legs. “Quick, tape it off, tape it off!”

Megan fumbled with the tape and dropped it. The roll skittered down the porch steps and rolled onto the grass.

I heard her swallow. “Uh . . .”

“Go get it!” I hissed, scanning the dark street.

She darted onto the grass and snatched up the roll, throwing a fearful glance toward a cluster of dark bushes before she rushed back. She bit at the tape roll and peeled off a two-foot strip, which immediately stuck to itself and tangled into a useless knot.

“You hold the bag.” I grabbed the tape from her and ripped off another strip, dragging it around the black material.

“Ah!” Megan recoiled “Her leg touched me. Ew, ew, ew, she was
squishy
.” She dragged her fingers frantically up and down her jeans.

I ignored her and finished wrapping the lower half of Ashley’s body, working with teeth gritted in feverish determination. I was going to hell for sure. I dragged another bag over her top half—ripping it as I forced it around the rope—and dragged the roll of tape around and around her torso to seal all the holes. Standing on tiptoe, I untied the rope. 

The body bag thudded on the porch and slumped in half. Huffing from our efforts, Megan and I just stared at it.

“We’re idiots,” she said. “Now we have to dump her body
again
. If we had just called the police—”

“Shut up,” I said, looping my arms under the top half of the bag. “Grab her feet.”

She shook her head. “I’m not doing this again.”

“We’ll call the police in the morning. Megan, we have to hurry, she’s out here with us!” I nudged the door open with my shoulder blade.

Megan folded her arms across her chest. “No. I’m not going to hide evidence again. I’m not going to do this with you, Leona . . . it’s
wrong
.”

I stared at her, my heart thumping painfully. Her words made me feel hollow, and without warning, my eyes began to sting. I let my half of the bag fall back down and turned away as hot tears ran down my cheeks. “I don’t know what happened to me,” I choked out. “I . . . I thought I was good.”

While Megan braved
the night and strung up a perimeter of bells and fishing line around the house, I tinkered with the apparatus in my bedroom, trying to get the beam to shine across the doorway. My sinuses were still sore from crying.

We’d left Ashley’s body on the porch. It just looked like a big package now anyhow. I tried not to think about it.

The apparatus lay dismantled in front of me, no longer functioning. I’d pried off a section of two-by-four fixed with two mirrors, and now in addition to the red blob hovering on the wall, a tiny dot of laser light jiggled under my bed. Out of curiosity, I swept my invisible hand through the beam. The dot didn’t move. The blob didn’t move.

Yep, I’d successfully broken it.

I sat back and studied the wreckage, picking at my fingernail. I’d found it was easier to open a seam in the dark matter at my fingernails rather than at my nose—in fact, recently it had become almost impossible to peel off from my nose—and now as I absently scratched my thumbnail, I could feel a tiny gap open and reclose, scarcely the size of a pin. Even that gap seemed smaller and smaller each time, but that was probably my imagination.

It was almost midnight. I’d been wearing dark matter for six hours.

How much longer would I have to keep it on?

I shuddered and got back to work on the apparatus. In the corner of the room, I stood the two-by-four on end and angled it so the beam shined across my door, making a red dot on the opposite wall. Next I busied myself at the site of the dot. Using duct tape, I taped the detached two-by-four to the wall, positioning it so the dot hit one of the mirrors exactly.

The laser beam bounced back across the room, missing the apparatus by two inches. To fix it, I nudged the two-by-four and stuffed crumpled tape under the edge, easing the dot onto its target. As it lined up with the other beam, the projected light began to morph and take on squiggly lines.

I backed away carefully, and when the delicately balanced contraption didn’t tumble to the floor, I let out my breath. I swept my hand through the doorway.

Now projected on the ceiling, the blob became a mess of fuzzy, swirling lines. I took my hand out, and the movement stopped.

Done.

Rather than execute a single plan—which would obviously fail—we’d decided to do a bunch of things. Since it had proved finicky, Sarah’s apparatus would be a last resort. If things went downhill and we had to hole up in my bedroom, we might really need it.

The tripwires would give us warning the next time Ashley came by. Hopefully by then my house would be a fortress of booby traps.

We would be waiting for her.

“All done,” announced Megan, tromping up the hallway and poking her head into the room, causing the blob to flicker. “Leona, you in here?”

“Yeah, here. Did you get the tripwires all around the house?”

“Leona?”

“I’m right here,” I said, louder.

She pulled her head out of the doorway and shouted down the hall. “Leona!”

“Megan, I’m right here!” I called, not five feet from where she stood. What the hell? Was she
deaf?
I went to grab her arm.

Before I could, she started around the house, barging into every room. “Leona, where the hell are you?”

“Oh my God, will you quit it?” I said, chasing after her. “I’m right here you dumb bitch!”

She circled the house, feeling in front of her. “Leona?” A note of fear slipped into her voice. “Leona, where are you?”

I cupped my hands over my mouth and screamed into her ear, “Megan, I’m right here!”

She turned around slowly, and her eyes peered through me. “Leona?”

“Yes, it’s—”

“Is that you?”

“I’m standing right in front—”

“I can feel you in here, this isn’t funny.” Her eyes darted to the corners of the den.

A cold feeling swept across my skin. She couldn’t hear me. She really couldn’t hear me. I reached for her arm.

Only my hand closed on empty air. I reached farther out, desperate to grasp onto her. Nothing there. Just empty space where my best friend should have been. I was up to my armpit, reaching
through
her.

I couldn’t touch her.

Then the strangest thing happened. She stepped toward me, and right when I thought we would collide, her body passed through mine like it wasn’t even there. I felt a split-second of warmth deep down inside me—in a place that had no earthly right to feel anything—before she continued on her way, oblivious.

I was disappearing completely.

On the edge of panic, I closed my eyes and struggled to calm my frantic breaths, focusing on the rise and fall of wind in my lungs, the sensation of itchy carpet under my feet, and the feeling of cool air on my naked skin.
I’m still here . . . I’m still here . . .

“Megan,” I said softly. “I’m here.”

She whipped around and let out a huge sigh of relief, clutching her chest. “Phew, I thought she’d picked you off.” She felt around and caught my hand—which was real again, thank God. “I’m putting you on a leash, Leona.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I croaked through my parched throat. “I . . . uh . . . I must have gotten distracted.”

My skin felt tight and constricting.

I’d been wearing dark matter for too long.

“Maybe she’s not
coming,” said Megan, yawning as she checked her cell phone. “It’s almost four a.m.”

For ten hours I’d been wearing dark matter.

“She’s waiting for us to fall asleep,” I said bitterly, fighting a shiver. “She’s doing this on purpose. She knows we can’t stay awake forever.”

“We could nap in shifts,” Megan suggested.

“If she’s staying up, I’m staying up,” I growled. “She’s not going to win like this.”

“Leona, she doesn’t sleep,” said Megan.

I grumbled a reply. With every passing hour, I sank deeper into despair. We sat in the foyer, waiting for the monster. Two cups of coffee sat in front of us, only a sip left in mine. Long since cold.

What if Megan was right? What if she didn’t come?

All our efforts would be in vain.

She knew we had laid traps for her. Of course she wouldn’t come. She wasn’t stupid.

By delaying her attack, she was forcing me to wear dark matter for another day, forcing me to endure the wait as it slowly consumed my body and made me into a ghost. In fact, what if she
never
came? Why bother? My paranoia was already eating me alive.

The waiting was the worst part.

Jail. That’s what was waiting for me after this. Several years in jail. Emory would finally see me for the criminal I was. He would be there at my trial—on the prosecution’s side—refusing to meet my imploring gaze.

The ache in my heart grew to a painful throb.

At least the prison bars would protect me. Or would they?

If Ashley could break into a morgue to steal a body, she could probably break into a jail. A shiver slid through my body, and I focused on holding my jaw still so my teeth didn’t chatter.

It was a cold October night, and I didn’t have any clothes on. We’d also turned off the furnace in case the venting heat cloaked the sound of bells, and now the cold was slipping into my bones.

I couldn’t go on like this, knowing there was an invisible creature out there hunting me, watching my every move, stalking me like prey. One way or another, this had to end tonight. Either with her death, or mine. I hardly cared which anymore.