The Boys Are Back in Town (23 page)

He lowered his voice even further so that it was barely audible, even to his own ears.

“And so was Ashleigh.”

When Will looked up and saw the stricken expression on Brian's face, the pain in his eyes, he could almost force himself to believe his old friend had nothing to do with the terrors that were to come in the days ahead. Brian said nothing, just sucked air in through gritted teeth as though he had been cut or stung. Then Brian shook his head and met his gaze again, as if defying Will to accuse him of such heinous acts.

“There's more,” Brian said.

Will flinched and felt his throat constrict. “What do you mean, more?”

“First tell me what happened to Ashleigh and Tess.”

As quickly as he could, Will sketched out the sequence of events from the football game: his seeing Tess in the parade and Caitlyn in the crowd, only to have his memories and reality twisted a short time later when Ashleigh revealed what had happened to Tess.

Brian frowned. “But Caitlyn was Homecoming Queen. Are you saying . . .” He put a hand to his head. “Shit.” He nodded. “Right. Two versions of that. It was Tess, originally. So she dropped out because she was . . . was raped.”

Will stared at him, studying that face and those eyes in which he saw the echo of his own trepidation. “You said there was more. What did you mean?”

“You did the spell Saturday night. I was around until Monday, remember? I stuck around forty-eight hours longer in our present than you did. In that time, something else changed. Another ripple from t
he past . . .” He glanced around, unnerved. “From here. Another ripple from here that altered my memories but somehow hasn't reached you yet.”

Will's throat was dry and tight. “What? What else happens?”

“Do you remember Bonnie Winter?”

Something tugged at the back of Will's mind, a memory, and then images crashed inside his head. As if it were a virus that passed from Brian to Will, the new memories raced through him.

Bonnie Winter.

A cool, crisp autumn morning—the Monday after Homecoming—and they arrive at school. Walking through the parking lot they see her, in the shade of the building beneath a towering oak tree. Gold and brown and red leaves blow in the breeze, rustling as they dance around the corpse of Bonnie Winter, her naked flesh gray with death, eyes eternally wide. Her limbs are hideously contorted and a single ant crawls across the gentle slope of dead skin just above her pubic mound.

His chest hurt, all the air in his lungs rushing out as he sat down on the cold ground.

“Jesus, no,” he whispered.

Graduation day, Bonnie Winter had kissed him and handed him a note. On it, in her unique, barely legible scrawl, she had written:
Will, now that we're graduating I can finally tell you I've had a crush on you for four years. You're a cutie. Great to know you. Good luck!

But a dead hand could not have scrawled those words. Dead lips could not have kissed him, red tresses gleaming in the sunlight on graduation day.

He stared up at Brian's bruised features and did not know if he could believe the sympathy he saw there.
Bonnie. Jesus.
The memory of her corpse made his stomach convulse but he forced the image from his head.

“You still think it's me?” Brian asked.

Will stared at him. “I know it isn't me. If it isn't you, I don't have the first clue where to start. You understand why I can't trust you?”

Brian nodded. “Isn't it interesting, though, that I trust you? What does that say?”

Eyes narrowed once again, Will at last climbed to his feet, glaring down at Brian. “Both of us dirtied our hands with magic, Brian. It tainted us. We promised to stay away from it. The difference is, I kept that promise.”

Brian scowled. “By using magic! By casting a spell so you could hide from the truth. You're telling me that's somehow more noble than just dealing with it, the way I did?”

This time Will could not meet his eyes. “Maybe not. Guess that depends on exactly what you've done with it since then. Maybe you just liked it too much.” He looked up. “So if I'm not ready to believe that the only obvious suspect in goddamn magical time-travel rapes and murders is completely fucking benevolent, maybe you should just cut me some slack.”

Once more Brian smiled, and Will did not like that smile at all.

“Touché.”

Will wrinkled his nose. “Since when did you talk like that? Is that music-industry-asshole talk? Nobody says touché except in the movies.”

“Not even on cop shows?”

Will rolled his eyes.

“So, now what?” Brian asked, rising to his feet, the moon once again illuminating his battered features.

“Now?” Will replied. He stepped between two bushes and gazed at Ashleigh's bedroom window. “Now? For a start, we keep Lebo alive.”

A
SHLEIGH KNEW
what she had heard.

Voices. Shouting. A scuffle, possibly a fight. If she had been alone in the house, or if she hadn't been used to boys showing up in her backyard, she would have been anxious, even frightened. Instead, she was curious and more than a little suspicious that some mischief was afoot. Her boyfriend, Eric, was far too laconic to be playing some practical joke on her.

Will was another story. Fooling around in her backyard was just his style, particularly if he was hanging out with Danny, or with Mike Lebo and Nicky Acosta. Nick would've done anything to get a glimpse of Ashleigh in the tank top and panties she always wore to bed. Will, on the other hand, had seen her dressed like that a hundred times and never seemed to notice.

Of course, if the boys had had a few beers, it wouldn't be hard for Nick to talk Will into leading them all on a covert mission up the tree outside Ashleigh's window. She wasn't a flashy girl like Caitlyn or flirtatious in the way that Pix and Lolly were, but she wasn't above relishing the idea that the boys might want to have a peek at her.

Not that she would let them.

Before she turned her bedroom light back on, Ashleigh slipped into a pair of sweatpants. Now she lay on the bed reading
Dune,
but her mind was not entirely focused on the sand worms of Arrakis. Even as her eyes followed the words on the page, her ears were attuned to sounds outside her window. The breeze rustled the leaves, and though the house was only a few decades old it popped and creaked from time to time, so it was difficult for her to discern what sounds might be coming from outside. Still, she felt certain that after that first round of scuffling and voices, she had heard other, quieter sounds, from farther away.

A tiny smirk appeared at the corner of her mouth and she reached up to push a stray lock of brown hair away from her face. This was why she wore her hair in a ponytail when she was reading.

Boys and beer,
she thought,
are a hilarious combination.

With a glance at her window, Ashleigh settled further into her bed, the book propped on her chest. Though it was early autumn yet, her parents had already put the heat on in the house and it was nice to have the cool breeze coming in through the window. As she read about intergalactic politics and sand and spice, the words began to blur on the page and her eyelids fluttered. Her chin nodded drowsily, and several times she snapped her eyes open and tried to focus on the page again. When she had read the same paragraph half a dozen times, she surrendered and slipped her marker into the book and set it down on her nightstand.

“Ashleigh?”

The voice was like the whisper of the wind. The first time he spoke she was not even certain she had really heard it. Perhaps, she thought, it had been the rustling of the leaves outside the window.

But then she heard her name called again, ever so softly, and she shivered, a sour twist to her lips. All of the amusement she had felt only a short time earlier left her. It had to be Will, or Eric, or maybe one of the other guys. But that whisper gave her no familiar voice to latch on to, and there was something dark and insinuating about the way he called to her. There was none of the urgency Will or Eric would have had, yet a great sense of caution.

With some trepidation she clicked off the lamp at her bedside. Though she knew she was wearing her sweatpants she still glanced down self-consciously to reassure herself, the same way her mother always checked that the front door was locked before they left, and then checked once or twice more, as if once wasn't enough.

Ashleigh went to the window and peered out into the darkness of her backyard. The moon was not full, yet it was bright enough to cast the trees and bushes in ominous silhouettes. Nothing moved in the dark, and her heart drummed a staccato rhythm as a strange dread enveloped her. There was something wrong here. Though it wasn't the sort of thing she shared with her friends, she had always had a sense about such things.

And yet . . .

At the edge of the Wheelers' property was a stretch of woods that ran behind all of the homes on this side of the street. As she surveyed the yard, there came the snap of a branch and the rustle of underbrush from those woods. An animal, she was sure, but when she peered into the woods there was a shadow darker than all the others, a silhouette that was not a tree or a bush. It was human.

She felt it watching her.

The silhouette moved, darting abruptly behind a pine tree. Ashleigh uttered a small gasp and flinched as the lurker disappeared.

She heard her name called again, and was startled to realize that it came from directly below the window. Startled and relieved. Her eyes ticked back and forth between the woods on the other side of the yard and the few trees just outside her window. One hand had flown up to cover her mouth when she had glimpsed the silhouette in the woods. Now she lowered it and pressed her forehead against the screen, trying to peer downward to get a glimpse of whoever was down there.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

“It's Will.”

Ashleigh shuddered. “It doesn't sound like Will.”

There was a pause. “I . . . something's happened, Ash. Something . . . pretty unbelievable. I need your help.”

His whispers were rasped and his voice low and grim, but now that he had spoken further she thought it might be Will after all. Ashleigh glanced at the door to her bedroom, careful to keep her voice low so that her parents would not hear her.

“Are you sick? You don't . . . you don't sound like yourself.”

Another pause. “I don't look like myself, either.”

Barely aware she was doing it, Ashleigh slid her hands up her arms and hugged herself, a chill spreading through her body. Something unpleasant fluttered in her stomach. Her gaze ticked toward the woods, but the silhouette still had not returned and she had to wonder if she had seen anything there at all. It might have just been a tree branch swaying in the breeze. The alternative was far too unsettling to consider. If there was a lurker, he was likely still there, spying on her window.

“What . . . what's that mean, Will? You're scaring me.”

“I don't mean to.”

“Why didn't you just climb the tree like you used to?”

No answer, though she could hear him now, moving around at the base of the tree out there. She pressed her face against the screen again, trying to get a glimpse of him. And then she knew.

“It's because of what you just said, wasn't it? You look different?”

“Yes.”

Fear raced through her then. Fear for him. “Oh, my God, Will. What happened?”

“I'll be OK. But I do need your help,” he replied, his whispers floating up to her. “Ashleigh, listen. If I . . . if I didn't look like me . . . I know it sounds freaky, but if I didn't look like me, what's the one question you could ask me so I could prove it was me?”

The question unnerved her but her mind began to work at it immediately. What was it that no one else would know but Will? He had read portions of her diary, but there wasn't much that was secret inside it, really. Will knew so much about her, when she first got her period, when she had first experimented sexually with Eric . . . hell, he knew what she had gotten for her birthday every year for her entire life. An image floated across her mind, a glass Coke bottle spinning on a wooden picnic table behind Connie Laurent's house.

“Ashleigh?” that strangely familiar voice rasped.

“Have you ever kissed me?” she asked, peering down into the darkness beneath the trees.

Seconds passed. During that time she realized it was a stupid question. There was a fifty-fifty chance he would guess the right answer, whether it was Will or not.

“I don't look like me.”What the hell does that mean?

“No. Not in the way that you mean. I've kissed you, but just, y'know, as friends.”

“Did we ever come close?”

This time there was no hesitation. “Yes. Playing spin the bottle at Connie Laurent's. We went behind the fence, but we didn't kiss. It just would've been too weird.”

A prickling sensation spread across the back of her neck and Ashleigh found that rather than relief, she felt only more anxious and hesitant. His voice was just wrong. It was Will, but not Will; even whispered, she could tell that.

“Will . . . I mean,
you
could have told someone.”

“I didn't, Ashleigh. Not ever. It wasn't anybody else's business.”

“I'm . . . I'm afraid, Will. If you are Will. I think I should close the window now.”

“No!” he called, his voice rising from a whisper though not quite a shout. “Sorry. Shit,” he whispered. “Ashleigh, please, ask me something else.”

Her eyes closed and she rested her forehead against the window frame. She hugged herself again, and she could feel the gooseflesh on her arms. Will was her best friend, even now. What would be so private that—

“I've got it,” she said.

“Ask me.”

Ashleigh opened her eyes. She peered into the darkness below, and through the trees and the leaves for the first time she thought she saw a figure. In the night she could not tell, but he seemed too tall to be Will.

“I don't look like me.”

“My ninth birthday. What did you get me?”

His sigh was audible even on the second floor. “Jesus, Ash, I don't remember. It was a . . . it was a long time ago. But . . . your ninth birthday? I remember you cried that day. You cried a lot.”