Her eyes flew open, and she bolted upright. “I can’t move!” Tess’s clawed hands shoved at me until recognition sparked in her panicked eyes. “Derrick! I can’t—I can’t—move.”
“Yes, you can,” I assured her, keeping my voice as calm as possible.
Tess drew in a sharp breath and flexed her hand, presumably to make sure she still could. “Your nose.” She realized. “Did I hit you?”
I swiped at it, unsurprised to find my fingers bloody. “It’s fine. I don’t think—” A violent sob ripped through her, so I pulled her into my arms. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re okay.”
“I shouldn’t be,” she wept, shoulders heaving. “Th-there should be bruises, scrapes from that godforsaken”—her voice pitched higher,—“rock.” Her eyes were wild when they met mine. “Why aren’t there any—? Harrison!” She sucked in a sharp breath. “Your mom. You have to call your mom! He’s dying! We have to help him!”
“Okay!” But before I could reach for my phone, it rang. “Mom?” A burst of static shot through the speakers of my “new” phone. I swore, motioned to Tess, and stepped out into the hallway where the reception was better. “Say that again? I can’t understand you.”
Mom had actually come through on her threat to replace my phone with a dumb-phone, but not before she’d seen some stupid meme about taking away my charger instead of my phone so she could watch the hope die in my eyes as the battery ran out. It was a truly sadistic move. Or it would have been, if she’d remembered my car charger. Without an active plan, I couldn’t use my phone as a phone, but as long as I stayed connected to Wi-Fi, it still worked for all the important stuff.
“I know this doesn’t make much sense to you right now,” Mom said slowly, her voice an exercise in patience. “And I promise, I will explain later. But I need you to see if Tess knows where Harrison is. Just ask her, Derrick.”
“Hey, Tess?” I stuck my head in the door to my room. “Do you know where Harrison is?”
“The woods.” The hollow look in her eyes sent shivers up my spine. “Behind his house.”
“Thanks.” I studied her for a moment before stepping into the hallway to relay the information to Mom. When I walked out of earshot, I added, “Mom, can you come home? I think something’s really wrong with—”
“Can’t come home right now, Derrick.” Her voice sounded short. “Harrison went hunting this morning and hasn’t come back. So if there are any other details Tess can share . . . “
“Tess can’t share any details because she wasn’t there. She was here. In bed. I saw her.” Mom had no way of knowing about Tess’s dreams, so why would she think Tess had any idea where Harrison had disappeared to?
“I understand that.” Mom sounded hushed, and the worry in her voice woke me up enough to realize she was telling me way more than she normally would. “And if this was my first phone call, I’d write off her dream as coincidence. But it’s actually my fourth. Tess wasn’t the only one who had that nightmare.”
Mom might have said something else before signing off, but I felt too stunned to notice. Bewildered, I walked back into my room just in time to see Tess pluck my X-ACTO knife off my desk. She angled the blade toward her wrist.
“Tess!” I bolted across the room and slammed her hand down to the desk. The blade fell free from her grip. “What are you doing?”
“Let go of me!” she shrieked, trying to twist free of my grip, her hand still grappling for the thin blade. “I need to see! I need to see!”
“See what?” I demanded, shocked when she shoved me backward with surprising force. Catching my balance, I picked her up by her middle, moving backward and away from the blade. She screamed, kicking, clawing, and twisting to get out of my grip. “Tess, stop! What are you doing? Tess!”
“Get off of me!” she screamed. “Derrick!”
The way she said it . . . I had to let her go. I released her, positioning myself between her and the desk, my hand groping blindly behind me for the knife. “What the hell, Tess?”
Before she could answer, my dumb-phone buzzed with a text from Mom.
“Is he dead?” Tess asked, straightening her nightshirt.
I read over the text. “Yeah . . . they found him. She said it looks like he fell on his hunting knife. He nicked his femoral artery, so when he removed the knife, he . . .” I swallowed hard, watching her closely to see how she would handle this. “Bled out.” I chose not to repeat the last bit of the text.
TELL ME YOU CAN VERIFY TESS WAS HOME THIS MORNING.
I confirmed Mom’s text, my mind racing as I hit each stupid button three times to choose the right letters on the dumb phone. Mom didn’t think Harrison’s death was a hunting accident. And why would she? Too many of the football players were dead.
“He deserved it,” Tess whispered. “They all deserve it.”
The full weight of her statement hit me with a nauseating click as I remembered the dream she’d had when Ryan died.
For a second, all I could hear were the echoes of her panicked shriek demanding I get off of her. I felt like I’d somehow jumped an inch outside of my body and hovered there between heartbeats, connected only by the raised gooseflesh on my arms. “What did you remember?”
Her cringe at the horror in my tone should have mattered to me. I should have stopped pressing, but I couldn’t. I fell into a detached sort of haze where I demanded, cajoled, bullied, and played every card in the book to drag each detail out of her, somehow past caring about how she shrank in on herself more with every word.
“Okay,” I said when Tess finished, my voice reflecting a level of calm I didn’t feel. “But he stopped. I mean, he didn’t—”
“He did plenty. Stopping short of that doesn’t invalidate the rest of it.” She clenched her jaw, glancing up at the ceiling and blinking rapidly. “And who knows what happened after I passed out.”
“The doctors ruled that out.”
“Why are you defending him?” she exploded. “They knew! They all knew. You could see it in their faces. How can you sit here and—?”
“Defend him? I’m going to murder him.” As much as I’d love to beat him to death, I’d need to be subtle if I wanted to get away with it. It should be easy enough right now. Apparently, suicide was contagious. “I’m only pointing out what he didn’t do for your benefit. The doctors said—”
“That doesn’t mean anything!” Frustration danced in her dark eyes. “He wasn’t gentle. He grabbed me, squeezed sometimes hard enough to leave bruises that I don’t have. I lost layers of skin to that rock without ever getting a scrape, walked barefoot on a shore littered with sharp rocks and prickling leaves, and nothing left a mark on me. You said I had skin under my nails and in my teeth, that it looked like I fought back. Well guess what, Derrick!” Tess picked up the taped-together puzzle we’d assembled and flung it at me. “I lost!”
I batted aside the floor puzzle from hell. “We don’t know—”
“Look at this!” Tess snatched the bundle of pages back and thrust the picture so close, my eyes took a second to adjust enough to see the drawn rope biting into her wrist. “That would leave a mark, Derrick. And I don’t have one.”
“So you think, what? You healed? Magically? You said so yourself, this—” I motioned to the pages. “It might not mean anything. It could be a subconscious manifestation of the helplessness you felt when—”
She plucked a pencil from my desk and slammed it into her thigh.
I froze, my chest constricting because I knew, I wasn’t sure how, but I knew she’d angled it exactly right. Exactly like Harrison. She was going to die. I was going to watch her die. When her hand tightened on the pencil, ready to pull, I unfroze. “Don’t! Oh God, Tess. Don’t move.” I rushed to her but stopped when she thrust her free hand out in a stopping motion.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t ev
en come near me, Derrick!”
I backed off, fighting to keep my voice calm. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to touch you, Tess. But look, we need to stabilize that and call 911 and—”
“We’re not calling anyone.” She stood hunched over her thigh, her fingers gripped tight around the pencil.
“Okay, okay, okay! I won’t call anyone. I won’t.” I dropped the dumb phone. “Just don’t. Please, Tess. Please! You’ll bleed to death in seconds.”
“You’re not listening!” Tess glared at me behind a curtain of dark hair. “I’m not going to bleed to death because I’m a fucking super hero.” She laughed, a hysterical edge to her voice. “This whole time.” Her voice rose. “This whole time, I’ve been telling myself whatever happened couldn’t be that bad because I didn’t have a scratch on me. Cuts, bruises, scars—they’re our body’s way of telling stories, Derrick. And mine’s blank! They could have done anything. Anything!”
“They didn’t—”
“And I’ll never know, because I’m magic.”
“You’re not magic, Tess.” Panic cracked at my voice as she sat heavily on the bed. Blood welled around the pencil, dripping down her thigh. “There’s a rational explanation.” Her grip tightened on the pencil, so I talked faster, words tripping over themselves as they poured out of my mouth. “Oh God, Tess. Please. Please don’t do this, you’re not thinking right now. There’s a reason, I swear it’s not magic. I can explain it. Just hear me out.”
“I’m listening.”
She wanted an explanation. Of course, she wanted an explanation. Why did I promise her an explanation? “Y—you gave us a new timeline, so all we need to do is plug the details in, and you’ll see. You’ll see that it all makes sense now.”
Her fingers twitched.
“Just—Just listen to me, Tess. Listen to me! Josh picked you up at six o’clock and drove you to Worthington’s. That’s what? A twenty-minute drive? You stayed there for at most an hour because it was a horrible date. Right? That’s what you said, right Tess?”
Locking gazes with her, I waited until she nodded. Shock. This had to be shock. She’d experienced a horrible, traumatizing flashback, and if I kept her focused, kept her from doing anything drastic long enough to get help, she’d be fine. I just needed to keep talking, which wasn’t easy with my heart in my throat. “Forty-minute drive to the National Forest. We’ll say you got there at eight, for simplicity’s sake. They immediately handed you a drink laced with something—”
“They did a tox screen, Derrick.” Sweat beaded along her forehead, and her gaze went frighteningly flat, but her grip hadn’t relaxed on the pencil one bit. “If I’m not magic, then how come nothing showed up?”
“Alcohol showed up. If you were magic, surely—” She tugged at the pencil. “Wait, wait, wait! I can prove it. Symptoms!” I snapped my fingers, thinking fast as I drew out my phone. Alarm flashed in her eyes, and she rose halfway to her feet. Oh, God, she shouldn’t be moving. “I’m not!” I yelped, showing her the screen. “I’m not calling anyone, see. Just looking up symptoms. Can I do that? Will you let me do that? Because I can explain this, Tess. You want me to explain this, don’t you? Don’t you want to know what they gave you?”
She sat back on the bed with a thump, her eyes never leaving mine. I glanced at the rivulet of blood dripping down her thigh. How much time did I have?
I kept babbling, trying desperately to keep her focus on me. “Uh . . . blurred vision—” My fingers moved over the screen, texting my mom. My hands shook so much the text became an incoherent string of letters. Damn it! Taking a breath, I punched in one letter at a time. “Euphoria, loss of coordination and fine motor control. What else? Think, Tess.”
My insistence must have been compelling because she loosened her grip on the pencil. “I apologized to him. Why would I do that?”
Rage flashed through me, but I buried it, ever conscious of that pencil jutting out of her thigh. “You’re a weepy drunk, remember? You always have been. So we’re looking for something that compounds the effects of alcohol . . .” I hit send and pulled up a search for date rape drugs, scanning the fact sheet fast. “Twilight state, memory loss—Rohypnol! It takes thirty minutes to start seeing side effects and two hours to fully kick in. So think about it—you got there at eight, they’re getting all set up, then they put a drink in your hand and chatted you up until about nine, maybe nine-thirty depending on how long it took for the side effects to become obvious. You laughed too loud and then boom! Josh asked you to go on a walk. You were within two miles of Kinlock Falls, so what? Another forty minutes to walk that far while drunk? He gave you another drink, then you went swimming, and he—” Careful Derrick. “Uh, left. It couldn’t have been later than 10:30 because the moon looked full, right? That’s what you said.” My voice sounded desperate to my own ears. She looked bored, but I was too panicked to stop talking. To change tracks. “There was an eclipse that night, remember? You would have noticed if the moon was covered or red. So you blacked out for an hour, lucky you, because you missed whatever happened at the bonfire, two miles away. You woke up, found their bodies, and maybe even tried to save them. That would explain the blood. Then two hours later you were here when the drugs fully kicked in, so you passed out. It fits!”
“Tox screen.”
“Rope wouldn’t show up on a standard tox screen, and they wouldn’t have reason to order an extra test to check for it because we said you were coherent and walking around.” Her hand relaxed a fraction, and I snuck a glance at my phone, my heart stuttering when a little red exclamation mark popped up beside my text.
It hadn’t sent.
“The bruises and scrapes that aren’t there? What’s your explanation for that, Derrick?” Her voice sounded mocking. Like she’d just dared me to do something exceptionally stupid and was waiting to see how I’d try to weasel my way out of it.
“Feeling like you got bruises, especially in a drug-enhanced or drunken state, doesn’t mean you did. Josh left bruises on you when he grabbed you at school, remember?” Except they’d been gone by the time she met me at the office.
“How did I get home, Derrick?”
“You got home by—” I stumbled, my mind going blank. “You must have—” I didn’t have an explanation. Panic, pure and primal rushed through me as I realized I’d just lost her. “There’s a reason, Tess! A rational explanation. We’re just missing the details. We just have to—”
She yanked the pencil out.
Chapter 31: Tess
Wednesday, September 28th
“NO!” DERRICK CROSSED the space between us, his hand clamping on my thigh. I jerked away, but he slammed me back into place.
“Let go!” I kicked at him, writhing and twisting, but he held on.
“Tess, stop! Stop moving!” He shoved me back and pinned me to the bed.
Blood sprayed through his fingers in time to my pulse. Gasping, I lifted my neck to see. This had to work. It had to.
Derrick seemed to realize I wasn’t going to struggle anymore, because he turned his full attention to my leg, even trying to enlist my help by pressing my hand on top of his. Whenever my limp arm slid down to the bed, he’d shout for me to apply pressure, call 911, or for the love of God, Tess, do something, but his words sounded distant.
Keeping one hand on the wound, he grappled for his phone with blood-soaked fingers. The phone slipped from his grasp. When Derrick reached for the device again, the pressure on my leg eased and the blood pulsed out faster. He jerked back to me, staring at the phone with an absolutely shattered look in his eyes. A strangled whimper broke free from his throat.
Then all at once, the blood stopped.
Derrick went still in disbelief, then, slowly, he moved his hand and swiped away at the blood, revealing unmarred skin.
“Explain that!” I pushed myself up to a sitting position.
He stared at the place the hole had been for a solid minute, before looking up at me with damp eyes. “What is the matter with you?” His hysterical voice echoed off the walls. “What were you thinking? Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” His back hit the wall, and he slid to the ground, staring at his hands in disbelief. “You were dying.” His voice cracked. “And I wasn’t fast enough! I couldn’t do enough. You were dying! Right in front of me!”
“We need to figure out what else I can do.”
He climbed to his feet, shaking his head. “That is not our next step. I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna go wash off. Will you just . . . not do anything drastic until I get back?”
I nodded. Once he left the room, I got to work cleaning up my mess and pretending I couldn’t hear Derrick throwing up in the bathroom. By the time Derrick returned, I’d placed his bedding in the washing machine and was Googling the best way to get blood out of the carpet.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “Why don’t you go shower all that off.”
“Okay.” Feeling numb, I went to do just that.
By the time I joined him in the kitchen, his eyes had lost that wild look, and his hands weren’t shaking anymore. Even his hair looked calmer. Smoother at least.
“So next step.” He closed the refrigerator and opened a soda. “Do you want to tell my mom about what Josh did?”
“Why?” I pulled the remains of the sheriff’s amazing pancakes from the freezer. “I’ve already gone on record saying I don’t remember anything like that happening, and our alibi rules out me being drugged, right?” I waved a pancake at him. “Want some?”
“I don’t know if I can do food yet.” He pulled out a chair and sat at the table. “How are you this calm? A few minutes ago, you were going full-scale crazy. Now you’re making breakfast?”
I shrugged. “Maybe my healing isn’t limited to the physical. Or maybe I’m in shock, and I’ll break down in a few minutes. I don’t know, but we should probably take advantage of this moment.”
Blood and Other Matter Page 19
