Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Tucholke, April Genevieve

  I wasn’t looking at Brodie as he talked, even though I knew that made him angry. I was looking at the blood that was trickling down River’s forearm. I couldn’t even see Brodie’s teeth marks, from the blood. And River’s eyes were empty now. And the emptiness was uglier in his eyes than it had been in Neely’s and Luke’s.

  River went to the stove, grabbed the teakettle, and filled it with water. He lit the burner and set the kettle on it.

  And then he put his arms to his sides and just stood there, facing the stove. Waiting.

  “What’s he doing?” The benign nature of River’s movements had me more worried than if he was holding a knife. The room was spinning. I rubbed my eyes again, to make the spinning stop. “What the hell is he doing?”

  Brodie lifted his arms into the air and stretched, as if he was getting up from a long nap. “River is going to boil that water, and then pour it over Neely’s head. It’s childish, but I was pressed for time. And it’ll kill two birds with one stone, so to speak—River will learn what I’m made of and show some respect for me, and for what I want to do. He’ll join his glow to my spark. He’ll begin to understand that Neely is just a no-sparking halfwit who can’t stop people from boiling up his face. I may be a bastard mutt from Texas with a mad ma, but River won’t care, not after this.” Brodie paused, and I saw that look again, the one that made his green eyes seem big, and deep, and young. But it only lasted a second. He shook his head, and grinned. “Then there’s the added benefit being that either way, it will allow me to finish playing with you.”

  He came to me. Brodie reached a finger forward and ran it down my body, over my chemise, from my neck, between my breasts, to my belly button. Then he reached down, put his hand into his boot, and pulled out his little knife.

  “You’ve got until the water boils, Violet.” Brodie’s voice was low and old. Old like time. Old like mountains. Old like the seasons. And the oceans. And good. And evil. “You do what I want, and you do it well. Then maybe, maybe, I’ll release River before he melts our brother’s pretty face off.”

  I went quiet and still. Okay, Violet. You just do it. You just do whatever he wants and you save River from hurting Neely. That is your job here and you are just going to do it. No, you can’t start seeing the spots again. You can’t faint, because then you can’t save them. Don’t think about it, just nod your head, NOD YOUR HEAD, VI.

  I nodded.

  Brodie held the knife out. He put it against my belly. I could feel the sharp edge through the thin black silk. I sucked in my breath.

  “Relax,” he ordered.

  I let my breath back out.

  “You sleeping with him? You sleeping with River? Is that what you’re doing?” Brodie’s voice was singsong, gentle, like he was talking to a baby.

  I shook my head, my eyes glued to the silver knife pressed against me.

  “Sophie killed herself, you know. My girlfriend, Sophie. She slit her wrists, right before I left Texas. She was . . . troubled.” Brodie paused. “Sometimes I regret that I had to use the spark on her before she would let us be together. Carnally speaking. Sophie, she was raised a good Catholic and she believed in God and hell and virgins and whores. Nothing worked on her, not even my cutting her, until the spark. Did River have to use the glow on you too? Or did you hop into his bed of your own free will?”

  Don’t you dare try to run, Violet. Don’t you do anything but stand there and take it; don’t you run, don’t you even move, or he will hurt River, and Neely, and Luke, and Jack, as easy as breathing . . .

  Brodie sliced the knife across my belly. It cut through the chemise, and through my skin. It was a shallow cut. It barely even bled at first. Still, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t let myself faint. The blood was pounding in my head, making it hard to hear the water in the kettle. I strained my ears. Nothing. Nothing yet. How long did it take water to boil? What could he do to me before it did?

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  I opened my eyes again.

  Brodie’s mouth was slightly open, and he was taking short inhales through his teeth. His gaze was on my stomach, on the wound spitting out plump circles of red . . .

  Hang on, Vi. The water has to boil soon, and then Brodie will make it all stop. He’s just having fun. He’ll get bored soon, just hang on, don’t faint, it will make him mad, madder than he already is, just hang on. No, that’s not the kettle whistling, it’s just the blood in your ears, hang on, hang on . . .

  “Tell me you love me, Sophie,” Brodie whispered. His eyes were on mine now, and they were bright green and shiny with tears and mad mad mad mad mad. “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” I said. But I was crying and the tears slipped between my lips as I spoke the words, making them sound fake and forced.

  Brodie grabbed my left arm and lifted it away from my body, halfway up in the air. Then he pressed his torso into mine, hard and harder and hardest, hardest, hardest. So hard, I could barely breathe. So hard that the blood on my stomach squeezed out between us and began to trickle down my sides.

  “I’m going to cut you again, Sophie. I’m going to cut you like I mean it. River, you hear that? I’m going to hurt her. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Yet. But I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you how to be mad. I’ll teach you how to cut. You’ll learn to love it. I promise.”

  River didn’t turn around. He just kept staring at the kettle, like it was the only thing in the whole world.

  Brodie’s knife flashed, and this time it went deep. He cut my left wrist, dropped it, and cut my right.

  Blood flowed.

  It was hot and thick and wet and God, it was coming so fast. How could it come so fast? I saw my spots and the room spun and my brain began to drift away from me . . .

  Double, double, boil and bubble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble. I was going mad, straining to hear the kettle and trying not to faint even though the blood was gush and mush and it was turning my skirt a soggy black and how could there be so much blood in me?

  My eyes rolled around in my head and finally landed on River, who was still standing, facing the stove. The water was making that hot, hollow sound. Soon, soon . . .

  “Kiss me, Sophie.”

  Brodie leaned down and put his mouth on mine. I tried to fight back. I pushed him away, but I was feeling so weak all of a sudden, so, so weak . . .

  Brodie put his hands on my shoulders and shook me. “Kiss me like you mean it, Sophie. Or I’m going to kill your brother and then go find that little red-haired brat and make him drink his own blood.”

  I did. So help me God, I did. I put my bleeding arms around him and slid my mouth onto his. My insides recoiled. Bile rose up my throat. But none of it, none of it reached my lips. I kissed Brodie like I was a desert and he the cooling spring rain. Like I was seven years at sea and he the first sight of land.

  I kissed him like he was River.

  Brodie’s eyes closed.

  Then I bent over, reached down to the floor, and grabbed a thin, oily sliver of green glass.

  I screamed as my fingers closed over the shard, from pain, and from joy. The glass sliced into my palm, deep.

  I reached my arm back, swung it forward, and stabbed Brodie in the chest.

  Blood bubbled out of the wound, started dripping down his shirt. Brodie opened his eyes, looked down at the blood, and laughed. His shirt was going red, a sopping red, like Daniel Leap’s, and he laughed and laughed. He wrapped his fingers around the glass shard and yanked it out. It made a sharp ping as it hit the floor. And then the blood really poured. Brodie screamed. He screamed as the kettle screamed.

  And then I saw dark.

  CHAPTER 29

  I WAS SUPPOSED to die.

  I was left to die.

  But, instead, I woke up in the hospital with bandages around my wrists and an IV tucked into my arm. Luke was next to me. He put his ha
nd over mine as soon as my eyes opened.

  “Vi, how are you doing?” he asked, all worried and trying to hide it.

  The doctors thought I tried to kill myself. I was given concerned looks and numbers to call and pamphlets to read, but then they left me alone. For a while. For which I was grateful.

  I lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood. I was almost dead. I was supposed to be dead. But River, he woke up from Brodie’s spark, and then Luke too, and they put me in River’s car and I got blood all over the vintage seats, but I didn’t die. Neely knew what to do and he kept me alive during those last minutes that really mattered.

  Brodie was long gone by then. Long, long gone. To the ends of hell, for all we knew where.

  Sunshine was in a coma for four days.

  Cassie and Sam woke up, rubbed their eyes, and found their daughter unconscious on the living room floor, bleeding from the head. The police figured it was one of the homeless people that jump off the train and cause the only crimes that ever happen in our town. A man broke in to steal something, Sunshine surprised him, and he hit her with a bat he found lying nearby. Then he climbed on the next train out of town and disappeared. That’s what they figured. And everyone was content to believe it.

  I was there when Sunshine woke up in the hospital. I asked her, in a gentle way, what she remembered about the bat that hit her. And the man that held it.

  She turned away from me and curled into a ball.

  “Shut up” was all she said. And then: “The police already asked me all those questions and I told them I don’t remember. So now I’m telling you. I don’t remember, Vi. Now, can you go get me some iced tea?”

  Maybe that was part of Brodie’s spark, the forgetting. Like River’s glow, sometimes. I don’t know. I damn well remembered what Brodie did to me. And maybe Sunshine remembered too. But she never talked to me about what happened to her.

  We passed some boys, a few days after Sunshine got out of the hospital, on our way into town. They wore Little League outfits, and one of them, a skinny kid with red hair, was tossing a bat back and forth between his hands. Sunshine flinched each time the bat smacked his palm, and I saw tears come into her eyes. But I didn’t say anything. And she didn’t say anything. And then we went into the café and soon she was smiling and flirting with Gianni behind the counter, and life moved on, as it does.

  Gianni had stopped talking to me, after the fire. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye when he handed me my coffee. I supposed he was afraid. I supposed I reminded him of the night he went mad . . . the night Neely paid him to keep his mouth shut.

  I wondered if he would come around, eventually. I wondered if Neely and River left, if he’d start looking at me again. I wondered how much I wanted him to.

  The police found the dead boy, when they were searching the railroad tracks for signs of the man who attacked Sunshine. An accident. Boy on tracks, doesn’t hear the train, gets hit, falls down the ditch. What else could it be?

  I kind of thought, in the back of my head, that something would happen. That town meetings would be called and people would gather in basements and swear to seek out answers and track down culprits and attempt to understand Echo’s strange summer of kids with stakes and kidnapping devils and girls beaten with bats and boys dead by the railroad tracks.

  But there was nothing. People moved on, just as Sunshine did.

  I thought, sometimes, that Sunshine seemed . . . different, after Brodie. There was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She stopped sitting out on her porch as much, just drinking tea and doing nothing. She started reading books on the environment, and wilderness survival. She said she wanted to start going camping, just me and her, and I said all right. Once I went down to the beach, to that hidden spot to read, and found her swimming. She was out there in the waves, alone, just her and that tight white swimsuit, and I couldn’t tell if she was swimming toward something, or away from something. Maybe both.

  I liked the new Sunshine. And so did Luke. But I think we both kind of missed the old one too.

  I was watching River pack his vintage leather suitcases. It was a few weeks after Brodie. I had just taken the last bandages off my wrists, and my scars were red and mean-looking, and I hated them. I rubbed the red welts as River threw the last of his clothes into the second case, slammed the lid down, and snapped the four clasps into place. I flinched each time metal hit metal and locked. It was such a definite sound. Such an ending sort of sound.

  River stood up, a suitcase in each hand. He looked just the same as he had the first time I’d seen him. Except for the still-healing bite mark on his forearm. Except for the look in his eyes.

  His eyes weren’t just cocky, and confident, and indifferent, and noticing, like that first day. There was something new there now. Something . . . more. And I wondered if it had anything to do with me.

  I hoped so.

  People said time was relative, and I guess that explained why my life before River felt like a handful of seconds—brief flashes of small events that added up to very little. But my life after River was a three-volume saga. Epic. With quests and villains and murders and unsatisfactory resolutions and people being torn apart.

  “Want some coffee?” River asked.

  Though what he meant was: Want some coffee before I take my bags and get in my car and leave and never come back?

  “Yeah,” I said.

  So he brewed one last batch of espresso in the moka pot, and we sipped it, searing hot, by the kitchen sink.

  And I looked at him, at his long, lean side, while he was sipping and narrowing his eyes. He didn’t look mysterious anymore, or exotic, or full of secrets. He just looked like River.

  And it was enough.

  “You just look like River,” I said.

  And River looked back at me sideways, his cup halfway to his lips. “That’s good,” he said, kind of half laughing, half serious, “because I am River.”

  And then River West William Redding III picked his suitcases back up and I followed him outside. Neely was there, waiting, and Jack, and Luke. The four of us stood in a semicircle around River’s new-old car, its seats still stained with blood.

  River looked at Neely. “You know why I have to do this, right?”

  Neely laughed. “Yeah, I do. Go get a grip on your glow, so we can go after Brodie, and beat the shit out of him. If he’s still alive.”

  “He is,” River said.

  I shook my head. “I stabbed him. In the chest. I saw the blood. I heard him screaming.” I’d said this before. I’d said it so many times, I was starting to chant it like a prayer.

  River didn’t say anything.

  Jack caught my eye. “He ran. While I was still on the ground, after he cut me. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, but I could still see. He left the guesthouse and he was running.”

  Jack was right. We’d talked and talked about this, and it always ended with Jack, seeing Brodie run, and us knowing what that meant. Brodie lived. He was gone and he didn’t leave a trace. And we’d looked. Hard.

  Luke gave River a cool, manly half hug. Then River squatted down and pulled Jack into him. Their hug wasn’t cool and manly. It was just strong, and genuine.

  “I’m going to get this kid some coffee,” Luke said, finally. “Jack, should we see what’s going on in town? Maybe some kids in the square saw a pack of zombies. That sounds about right on schedule.”

  Jack grinned. He detached himself from River, and, without a backward glance, followed Luke down the path into Echo.

  It was just River and Neely and me.

  River ran his hand through his hair and leaned against his car. “Grandpa told me something once. Do you remember when I visited him in the French Alps, Neely? We were sitting together and watching the sun go down behind the peaks. Grandpa was not as sharp as he used to be, and his mind would drift sometimes. Mostly he
would talk about Freddie, and things that happened to them when they were young. But this time, he looked straight at me. You’ve got to abstain, he said. You’ve got to abstain if it starts getting out of control. It’s the only way.”

  There was silence for a little while, as we all thought about that. I listened to the leaves shake in the trees, and the waves hit the rocks below. I listened to my heart cracking, re-forming, growing, because it was no longer small, and shriveled, and starving.

  “If I’m going to go after Brodie,” River continued after a minute or so, “I’ll need to abstain. I’ll need to be alone. Completely alone. Otherwise . . . otherwise I don’t trust myself to do it.”

  “Brodie said you had to go mad, to make the glow obey you.” I slid my hand into River’s and squeezed. “What if your grandpa was wrong? What if stopping does nothing, and Brodie just gets stronger and stronger?”

  River shrugged. “I’ve got to try, Violet. I either stop, or I keep going until I’m as mad as him. Which would you choose?”

  Neely shook his blond hair at that and laughed. “I’d be willing to go mad if it meant I got to kill that little cowboy. I’d kill him so hard—”

  River put his arms around his brother and hugged him. Then he released Neely and grabbed me. We held on tight, as tight as we could, and River put his lips to my ear.

  “I’m going to disappear,” he whispered. “If I screw up, and use the glow, Neely will find me. But if he doesn’t find me, then I’m doing something right. Let me stay hidden. And when I come back, I will be stronger. Better.”

  River’s fingers went into my hair, and he held me even closer. “Brodie thought you would die. What is he going to do when he finds out you didn’t? Maybe he won’t care. But I’m not taking any more risks. Neely is going to stay in the guesthouse. He’ll stay until I get back.”

  I nodded, my cheek moving against his shirt. I didn’t mention that Neely hadn’t been able to stop Brodie from trying to kill me before.

  River kissed my cheek, and my forehead, and my earlobe. Neely was watching, grinning, but River didn’t care and neither did I.