I'd Rather Not Be Dead

by Andrea Brokaw

  Gritting my teeth, I watch them both get in the truck, Finn opening the door for her and then walking around to let himself in, looking up at me apologetically as he rounds the truck. I hold my hand up and wave to him. It probably isn't his fault she's going with him. Probably.

  Juliet's fully awake now and she's busy trying to wake up her brother when I go over to open her door. Excited, she runs out to me, climbing my arm and nuzzling against my face like she does for Finn.

  Not wanting to make too much noise lest Finn's mom hear me, I don't turn on any of the appliances but sit quietly in the floor with the ferrets playing on and around me while I grab some blank paper and a pencil. I start with my usual caricature style, quickly sketching out an image of the wild fuzzies, then one of Finn and me with them, Juliet perched fearlessly on his head and timid Romeo wrapped around my feet. Then I try a more serious study, a realistic portrait of Finn.

  The effort's somewhat hampered by thoughts of him with Bobbi. About the tiny little skirt she's wearing and how it's barely more than a glorified belt. I think about an hour and a half of sultry looks and licked lips, of a cardigan that slides a little more undone every mile. I think of her putting her hand on his arm while he's trapped there, driving. Then maybe the hand moves to his leg...

  Getting out a fresh piece of paper, I do a quick rendition of my sister as a scantily-clad demon and me driving her pitchfork into her stomach. It makes me feel more guilty than anything though, so I crumple it into a tight ball and shove it down in the depths of Finn's trashcan. The other caricatures I leave on his computer desk, little presents for him to find when he gets back.

  I take the work in progress and sit under the window, biting my tongue as I think about what I need to do with it. The shading's all wrong. And... Well, I'm just not capturing him.

  It might be easier if it weren't so dark in here.

  My eyes glance at the clock. It's too early to be dark. Something more sinister than my jealousy over Bobbi makes itself known as I look out the window. Sure enough, an unnatural fog has rolled in, thick and fearsome.

  The Spirit is coming. And my Place of Power is somewhere I can't go.

  Juliet paws at my leg and I pick her up, cuddling her close as I wait for the fog to reach me. There was a slight hope she could replace Finn and keep the badness away, but it keeps right on coming while I cling to the ferret and tremble at the cold overcoming me. My limbs tingle, my mind seems to split apart into a buzzing horde of separate molecules.

  There's a clap of thunder.

  The dungeon at the center of the mountain surrounds me, empty now save for me and two men sitting on the edge of the stage. And Juliet, who makes a pitiful whimpering sound and shakes as she huddles against me. Fray smiles at the ferret but somehow the smile fails to comfort her. Or me.

  The Shadow Lord sits beside my friend, his face still hidden from my sight.

  “You let your Place of Power leave, luv,” Fray chides me. “We didn't think we had to lock him in the house too.”

  Lock? My jaw drops. “It was you?”

  He shrugs and jerks his head toward The Shadow Lord. So, what, he's The Lord's henchman all of a sudden? “Sorry, luv, but if you kept avoiding him, things were never going to work out in time.”

  “What things?” If it weren't for the poor freaked out ferret clinging to me, I'd go over to the stage and punch Fray right in his maddening grin. He stood there on Finn's porch and said he wasn't the one who locked me up!

  “Did I?” he asks.

  I open my mouth to yell at him that, yes, he did. But then I realize that no, he didn't. Finn asked him point blank if he was behind the imprisonment and the bastard changed the subject. There's a growl deep in my throat. Words cannot express how much I want to clobber him right now.

  “You don't belong here,” The Shadow Lord proclaims, the deep words seeming to ring in the hall. “Not yet. Finn can save you, if you trust him. You didn't before.”

  I stare at the hooded man, so many questions struggling for attention in my brain that I can't get a hold of just one to ask.

  “The danger has passed,” The Lord states, raising his hand.

  Thunder. And now Fray, Juliet, and I are standing in Cris's room. The other me is there, tears running down her face, “You're an ass, Crispin Smith.”

  “That's your type, isn't it?” Cris snarls at her while Juliet presses her face even closer against my neck. “Where did you two go?”

  “You're right,” the other me tells him, suddenly calm. “Cooper Finnegan is a conceited jerk, a self-centered, narrow-minded, self-righteous hypocrite. He's shallow and two-faced and repulsive.” She steps up to Cris, looks him straight in the eye, and says, “And he's still a better person than you are.”

  His anger is instant, frightening. Snarling, he pulls his fist back like he's going to hit her. But he turns, slams his hand into his bed frame instead.

  She leaves as he's trying to get his hand out of the hole he's made without hurting it further.

  “Shit,” he groans.

  “Interesting,” Fray declares, jumping onto the bed and lounging back against the headboard with his feet crossed near Cris. “He wanted to hurt you, but he attacked his furniture instead.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Too numb to think of anything more than inanely noting that Cris's bed supports Fray just fine even though it never existed for me, I pet Juliet and watch Cris as he goes to his dresser to pull out a little bottle. He dumps some pills into his hand, stares at them, then puts most of them back, only swallowing two. I can't read the label but I don't think they're prescribed to him.

  “You're a fucking idiot,” he growls at his reflection, turning away from it with a look of disgust. Sitting on the edge of the bed and making Fray move his legs to keep their bodies from intersecting, he leans over his lap, burying his face in his hands.

  “Why are we here?” I ask Fray, far too depressed about Cris's misery to feel any satisfaction about it, even if he was cheating on me while lusting after my sister. What right did he have to yell at me about walking home with Finn?

  “The Lord wanted us to see this, I guess.” Fray sounds uncertain and he sighs when I give him a questioning look. “He won't tell me exactly what's going to happen. He just gives me hints, like Finn being the only one who can save you and us needing to make sure he'd want to and you having trust him to do whatever it is he's going to do. I have no idea what that thing is.”

  Fray's posture is still relaxed, but his tone is rife with frustration.

  “But I can be saved?” I'd resigned myself to being dead but the prospect of living again... The idea that I could be the girl sitting next to Finn in his truck, that I could be the one with my hand on his leg... “How?”

  “I don't know, luv.”

  Even though he's obviously been keeping secrets from me, a fact which hurts more than a little, I believe him.

  Cris falls to his side, curls up on the bed, whimpers softly.

  Fray moves again, getting up and walking to the window.

  “Can we go now?” I ask, wanting to leave before Cris makes me cry.

  “I think there's more,” my companion tells me, jerking his chin to the window.

  “If it's the sweater-set girl, I don't want to see her.”

  “No.” Fray creeps closer to the glass. “Not a girl at all. A boy. One you know.”

  Half-expecting it to somehow be Finn, I go to the window.

  “Ricky Woodman?” I ask the universe. Is the Crusade for Christ doing a witnessing drive? I thought they were all at some revival.

  Cris ignores the door but his dad answers it, letting Ricky in and even leading him back to Cris's room. Slightly stoned on whatever those pills where, Cris is slow to sit up and his eyes don't quite focus on his visitor. He doesn't show any signs of surprise, but I don't know if that's because he expected Ricky or on account of the drugs. “Hey, man,” he mumbles as his dad goes back down the hall. He holds out his hand.

  Ricky, his eye
s moving constantly, licks his lips and fumbles for his wallet. He takes out a twenty, which shakes as he holds it out.

  “That all you want?” Cris asks, taking the money and shoving it in his pocket.

  “That's like four pills, right?” Ricky asks.

  “Yeah. Four.” Sliding open a drawer in the nightstand, Cris takes out a bottle. The four pills he shakes out into his hand look identical to the ones he took a minute ago. He dumps them into a little bag and tosses the bottle back where he got it.

  “This is the same stuff as before?”

  “Yep. Same supplier and everything.” Cris holds out the baggy, smirking at Ricky's obvious nervousness.

  I've never asked him about his business, never asked why he does something likely to get him into massive trouble. Didn't have to, I know the answer. It's because he gets off on the idea of being needed. Ricky Woodman wouldn't have any use for Cris if it weren't for these pills.

  “Thanks.” Ricky seems to forget it's socially polite to say goodbye to people, turning and virtually running away without another word.

  Cris shuts the door, downs two more pills from the dresser stash, and crashes back onto the bed, going so far as to literally pull the covers up over his head.

  I'm not hanging around to see if anything else happens. Pressing my face into Juliet's fur so I can pretend I'm not crying, I think about Finn's house and I tug on the universe.

  Fray appears next to me on the porch, right as Finn's truck pulls into the driveway.

  Finn frowns at the sight of us there, then his face goes carefully blank. Bobbi's next to him, her makeup a mess. Lines of black run down her cheeks, a side effect of wearing non-waterproof mascara and then crying. Crying a lot from the looks of it.

  Juliet clucks in what might be relief and leaps over to Finn the second he's close enough. “Long story,” I say, hoping he can't tell I'm upset about something, but fairly certain he can.

  “Is that a ferret?” Bobbi asks, obviously seeing Juliet. I wonder about that. No one at Cris's house saw her.

  “She was in Shadow at Cris's,” Fray tells me thoughtfully.

  Too bad he's too busy thinking about whatever he's thinking about to think about the fact that he really shouldn't have told Finn where we just arrived from. I was definitely going to tell him about seeing The Shadow Lord again and then skip forward to being on the porch.

  “Yeah,” Finn answers Bobbi, his posture tense. “Her name's Juliet. I have no idea why she's out here.” The last is spoken with a quiet anger orders of magnitude more frightening than Cris's loud and violent temper.

  He unlocks the door and stalks into the house. “There's a bathroom right over there,” he tells Bobbi, pointing toward the closest one. He manages to make his voice sound kind, although his eyes are burning with brown. “You want some tea or anything?”

  “Please,” she sniffles with an attempt at smiling that falls far, far short.

  Finn goes straight for the kitchen, waiting only until the door into it swings shut to turn to me with a demanding glare.

  Fray edges around us to sit at the table and pretend nothing interesting is happening.

  “Why was Juliet in Shadow?” Finn asks. I give him points for asking that rather than asking what he wants to ask, which is what either of us were doing at Cris's.

  “The Spirit came.”

  The anger flees immediately, replaced by a pale terror. Without a word he puts the ferret on the floor and wraps his arms around me.

  “I was holding her when The Shadow Lord brought me into The Mountain to escape it,” I go on, hugging him back and pressing my cheek against his shoulder. “That must have been when it happened.”

  “I didn't think that was possible.” Finn runs a hand up and down my back.

  “All Shadow Walkers can do it,” Fray says. “That's why they're called 'Walkers.' They just don't generally like to.”

  The guys' eyes meet and I get the impression Finn's asking something he doesn't want me to hear.

  “If you spent too much time here, you'd die of it,” Fray replies. “With no guarantees of being here when you're dead.”

  My arms tighten around Finn for a second, understanding that if he was certain he'd be with me, he'd be willing to die for it. As if I'd every allow that.

  “You promised my sister tea,” I remind him.

  Pulling back, he puts his hands on my shoulders and looks down into my eyes. “I'm not that easily distracted. The Shadow Lord took you to The Mountain, and...”

  Taking a breath, I move away, going to the cabinets and opening them in search of a mug and tea. “He was keeping me safe. Apparently he's been setting things up for you to save me.”

  He's staring at my back with enough force that I don't have to look at him to know it.

  “We don't know how,” I say.

  He opens a door I just shut and pulls out two boxes of tea. “Earl Grey or chamomile?”

  “Chamomile,” I answer for Bobbi. “With honey.”

  Nodding, he takes out a teabag, laying it on the counter as he puts the rest away. He takes a mug from the next cabinet I was going to look in and fills it with water, placing it in the microwave. “And then?”

  “Then The Shadow Lord zapped us to Chris's.” I shrug and wave my hands to my side. “I don't know why.”

  Jaw tight, he grunts.

  “The other me was there. Arguing about you.”

  He raises his eyebrows skeptically.

  “He was not happy about that walk last night.” I fold my arms and meet his eyes dead on. “But he doesn't kill me.”

  “He's the reason you were crying when I got here.”

  Guess I didn't manage to cover that up. “Sort of. He's just so miserable...”

  “The poor dear,” Finn grumbles, not a hint of sympathy in him.

  “Indeed,” Fray says from where he's busy leaning toothpicks against the sides of the empty vase sitting in the middle of the table. “My heart nearly broke watching such a sweet innocent fall into such despair.”

  I decide it's best to ignore both of them. “After she left, Ricky Woodman turned up wanting pills.”

  “What kind?” Finn asks swiftly.

  “They never said, other than the same stuff he bought before.” I lean against the counter and look at the floor tiles. “I think they were what Cris was taking earlier. Some of kind of sedative.”

  Finn frowns unhappily at the answer and I wonder what he thinks was going on. My assumption was Ricky's just as miserable as everyone else and wants something to escape his stress with. Finn's mind seems to be somewhere else though.

  The microwave beeps, reminding me to ask, “Since we're sounding all accusatory anyway, why are you back here? And why is my sister with you?”

  He smiles faintly. “Yeah, alright. My turn.” Opening the microwave door, he plops the teabag into the water and sets the mug on the counter. He takes a deep breath.

  “I'm not going to like the answer, am I?” I ask.

  “Don't know.” He leans against the counter next to me, our shoulders less than a millimeter apart. “Are you more pissed your sister threw herself at me or happy I wasn't even tempted to do anything other than throw her off?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Give me a second.”

  We smile at each other.

  “So, you shot her down and made her cry?” I ask.

  “In a nutshell.” He sighs and looks down at his feet. “And she couldn't stand the thought of seeing all of her friends just then and I wanted to come back anyway, so I called and told everyone she was sick and I was driving her back home.”

  “And now she's cleaning up in your bathroom.”

  He gives me a hard-to-read look. “Ironically enough, she begged me not to take her to your house because she didn't want you seeing her like that.”

  Thrown, I just stare for a few moments. “She was worried about me seeing her?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugs, not
seeming to understand either.

  There are footsteps approaching, then the door opens and Bobbi, freshly washed and looking heartbroken in a distressingly pretty way, comes into the room. Finn grabs the honey jar and puts it next to her mug, then gets her a spoon. She takes it with new tears starting up, making him look away uncomfortably.

  “I need to put Juliet away,” he says, scooping up the ferret and starting for the stairs.

  I don't think he meant for Bobbi to follow him, but she does, and when he parts his lips to tell her not to, he closes them again. She's a tragic figure and she's already faced massive rejection, what harm could letting her tag along do? So all of us traipse up the stairs in one gaggley line.

  Finn puts Juliet on the floor in his room and she sprints for her cage, diving straight into her hammock as if trying to escape everything that's happened to her today. Can't blame the poor fuzzy. I'm tempted to do the exact same thing, just tunnel under Finn's blankets and stay there until all the nastiness goes away.

  “Come on, Romeo.” Finn ushers the other ferret over from where he was patting the milk crate with his claws to hear the clicking sound. The little weasel rushes to his sister's side as soon as he smells her, licking her in a display of ferrety affection.

  Meanwhile, Bobbi's staring at Finn's desk, at the pictures I left on it. At the one with me smiling at Finn, little hearts in my eyes. Even if I hadn't signed it, she's seen enough of my drawings to recognize the artist. Her hand's shaking enough for tea to lap over the sides of her mug but she doesn't seem to notice the heat hitting her skin. “Drew,” she states in a dead voice. “Drew.” The second intonation of my name is louder. “Drew!” she finally bellows.

  She spins, spraying tea across the room. “Answer me one question, Cooper Finnegan.”

  I have a new understanding of the phrase 'Like a deer in headlights' as he asks, “What?”

  “Is my sister the reason you said those things to me?”

  His response is quick. “No.”

  But neither of us believe him.

  She hurls the mug.

  Finn dodges it, cursing as tea hits him. Fray laughs as the mug passes through him to shatter against the wall. He's still laughing as Bobbi runs away, her footsteps loud on the stairs. The front door slams with enough force to make the windows rattle.