The Waking Dark Read Online Free

understood with a blazing clarity that the tests she had set for herself had been nothing but a child’s game.
    She saw her purpose now.
    She saw, even across the burning sanctuary, the reverend’s eyes, which held something she understood and was finally prepared to fight.
    She saw evil.
     
    The street was deserted, but it was daytime, and you could never be too careful. So they would not hold hands. No matter how much West might have wanted to.
    They walked slowly, ostensibly to accommodate Nick’s limp but also, by unstated agreement, to draw out the trip back to town as long as possible. They couldn’t stay in the cornfields forever, lying on their backs and naming the clouds, tall stalks bending in the wind, their linked fingers and tangled legs hidden by waves of golden green. They could, if they dawdled, delay the inevitable return.
    “I found a new one,” Nick said. “
Jupiter
5050
– a bunch of astronauts accidentally travel to the future and end up the main exhibit in some kind of alien zoo.” Their current obsession was bad sci-fi movies from the fifties, the cheesier the better. (Extra points when the special effects involved alien spaceships dangling from visible strings.) “You want to come over and watch Sunday?”
    West didn’t answer.
    “We don’t have to watch the whole thing,” Nick said. “We could just…” He cleared his throat. “My parents are out of town.”
    “Can’t.”
    Nick looked alarmed. “I didn’t mean – I mean, we don’t have to…”
    “It’s not that. I just… can’t.”
    “Oh.”
    “I’m going to that picnic thing,” West said. “With Cass.”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s no big deal,” he said quickly. He didn’t know how this worked. He didn’t even know if he
wanted
it to work.
    No, that was a lie. He wanted it.
    “It’s just a thing.” He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
    “It’s fine,” Nick said. His pace quickened, and West pretended not to notice him wince each time his weight landed on the bad leg. Nick wouldn’t say where the limp had come from. Rather, he said plenty, fantastical explanations about skydiving crashes and circus calamities, until West gave up asking. He knew only that in fifth grade, Nick had been perfect, one of those golden-haloed kids that the others knew instinctively to follow, as if the shine would rub off on them. Maybe too much of it had, because Nick had appeared on the first day of sixth grade with long hair that nearly covered his permanent scowl and a leg that moved like a block of wood. At unpredictable intervals, it gave out beneath him, pitching him into pratfalls that the old Nick would have known how to turn into a joke. The new Nick only lay there, rubbing his leg and scowling harder, as if daring someone to kick him while he was down.
    The limp had improved over the years, but it always marked him as different. West sometimes wondered whether that made the rest of it easier for him, not having a choice.
    “I can tell her I can’t go,” West said, hating himself for how little he wanted to do that. Cass was like armor. As long as he wore her on his arm every few weeks, he was safe. Or, at least, safer – nothing about this was safe. “I will. I’ll just tell her.”
    “I said it’s fine.”
    “It’s obviously not fine.”
    Nick reached for him, then remembered himself, and pulled back just in time. He shook his head.
    “I’m sorry,” West said. “I really am.”
    “It’s a movie. We’ll watch another time.”
    “I know what you want me to do, but… I can’t.”
    “Jeremiah.” This time, checking first to make sure there were no cars in sight, Nick did take his hand. Only briefly, long enough to give it a single, quick squeeze. Nick was the only one who called him Jeremiah. Even his mother had been trained out of the habit. “I don’t want you to do anything. The way things are now, it’s fine. It’s good.”
    “Now is when you say
‘But
…
’
” It stunned West how well he had