The Waking Dark Read Online Free Page B

Chevrolet that suddenly roared up behind him – oblivious until West shouted, and then too slow, too awkward, to get out of the way. Spinning around to face the oncoming car, Nick shuffled backward and then, as he hadn’t in years, pitched into one of his awkward falls. The car kept coming. The chrome bumper caught him at the waist and lifted him off his feet and carried him like a hood ornament and West ran and ran and no feet had ever been so slow. He ran, and the car slammed Nick into a tree, another cottonwood, sturdy and unyielding. The car backed up and rammed him again, and again, and again, until the bark was bloody and Nick was a broken rag hanging from the dented bumper. With a final gunning of the engine, the driver shot through the windshield and landed on top of him, and only then did the car finally rest. Only then did West reach the bodies, an eternity past too late.
    Nick was in the grass, his limbs jutting at all the wrong angles, metal and glass and gravel embedded in his fair, perfect skin. The driver lay across him, the blood that gushed from his chest splashing on Nick’s face and pooling in the hollow of his neck. It was Paul Caster, West’s assistant coach, a man who’d once led West’s Pee Wee football team to a league championship.
    Neither of the bloody heaps was moving.
    West knelt. He wiped the blood from Nick’s forehead and pressed his lips to the ruined skin. It was still warm, and, in some dim, calm place miles beneath his panic, West supposed it took some time before a person turned into a corpse. He dug into Nick’s pocket and found his phone, mysteriously intact, and used it to call 911. An accident, he reported, though it had not been that. Come quickly, he begged, though there was now no hurry.
    He kissed Nick’s lips, hungry, even now, now more than ever, for more.
    And now the hunger, he realized, would never go away.
    Now there would be only want and need. There would be no Nick.
    West was the one who felt cold.
    He folded the phone into Nick’s limp fingers. And then, because there was nothing left he could do, because Nick was gone, and because he was a coward, he ran away.
     
    No one knew how much Cassandra Porter hated children. Except perhaps the children, who seemed to sense the hostility that leaked from her pores. The timid ones smiled politely and stayed close to their mothers. The bold ones kicked her shins or shouted things like “Not the ugly lady!” – which failed to help their cause.
    It wasn’t an abnormally strong aversion; it wasn’t even hate, precisely, so much as disinterest verging on mild distaste. She could admit that giggling babies and dimpled kindergarteners were cute; she just wanted nothing to do with them. It wasn’t her fault that in the eyes of the child-adoring world, that translated as hate. So she kept it to herself, and no one was the wiser, except the children, who could always tell.
    It made babysitting a bit of a chore.
    Gracie Tuck stood up from the table, her untouched pizza cooling on her plate. “I’m going to my room,” she said.
    “Okay.”
    “No big plans for the night.”
    “I wouldn’t expect so.”
    “Probably I’ll just smoke and drink a little and maybe play with some matches if I get bored.”
    “Don’t burn the house down.”
    Gracie was twelve, a blond waif with an elfin smile, which she deployed now. She was, by far, Cass’s favorite babysitting charge, self-sufficient, jaded beyond her years, and clearly embittered by the fact that her parents still felt she needed a babysitter. Hence the polite fiction that Cass was only there to supervise the baby now miraculously asleep upstairs. As far as Cass could tell, Gracie hated children even more than she did, and seemed to reserve a particular animosity for her baby brother. Or, as Gracie liked to call him, the Accident.
    She wasn’t the type of child most people found adorable, but Cass appreciated her peculiar charms. Usually. Tonight there was something