Bryce took a step forward. For a moment, he forgot all the possible repercussions of striking a Daughter of Arkham, then he stopped himself. He might have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t about to add woman-beater to that list.
“Guess that beats getting your mom to buy you a date, huh?” he sneered. He shoved past Ophelia, and it felt good, that tiny sliver of violence. He longed to do more, but he wouldn’t. No matter what she said, it was just words. Lies. She was trying to provoke him.
He didn’t think about getting his car. He didn’t want or need it. He just wanted to walk the anger off. He left the house and headed down the hills and into town, past the green, and to the creek. As he walked, late afternoon turned to night, and the air developed a slight chill. He was hungry, but couldn’t imagine going home. It felt like Coffin Manor belonged to Ophelia, his mother, and all the other Daughters of Arkham. He was only a tenant there until his marriage, when he could be disposed of.
He turned north at the creek, preferring not to cross the bridge to Brookside. The sound of the shushing creek filled his head, swirling around his hopeless jumble of thoughts and feelings. He didn’t know what to do with his anger about what Ophelia had said, or his affection for Abby, or the enduring mystery of the missing fathers and the horror of the empty grave.
He almost ran right into Eleazar Grant.
His friend-maybe former friend, these things were in so much flux-was standing in the middle of the large park with his hands crossed over his chest. He was a bit taller than Bryce, but his shadow seemed much, much larger. It loomed out behind him like an eclipse.
“Hey, Laze. What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you.”
“What?”
Bryce heard rustling, and saw other boys come out from behind trees and bushes. He was surrounded and every one of these boys had death in their eyes. He knew some of them; they were upperclassmen. All Arkham natives. He never knew Laze had so many friends. He had certainly never mentioned them.
Bryce spread his arms and tried to look everywhere at once. His pulse was racing and he could feel his heart thundering in his chest as adrenaline pounded through his veins. He had never been in an actual fight with a single opponent, let alone six.
Eleazar wasn’t the first to charge. That was someone behind him. Bryce heard him coming, whirled, and took a wild swing at nothing. Whoever the boy was, he rammed a shoulder into Bryce’s stomach, driving all the wind out of him. Bryce wrapped his arms around his attacker and started pounding desperately on his back. He brought up his knee and felt a satisfying crack as it connected with the boy’s jaw.
The second and third boys charged in and body tackled Bryce to the grass. Someone’s boot caught him in the temple and there was nothing but screaming in his eyes and ringing in his ears. He struggled to get up but they drove him back into the grass with blows to his ribs and head.
Bryce turtled up, doing his best to protect his face as the group rained down hateful punishment on him. He couldn’t make them out anymore. They were crushing, smashing feet, stamping him into the earth. At first, he felt every individual hit, but pretty soon it was like one colossal hammer was crushing down on him over and over and over again. He barely had any conscious thoughts, other than a brief flash of, Why?
And then there were stars.
He thought at first that he must have been punted in the head again and he was seeing what a concussion looked like from the inside. Stars exploded on acrid white smoke, rebounding and scorching his eyes. There was a whistle and a pop, like a tiny train crashing directly into his ear. He winced and rolled away, expecting to be met with a foot.
He had a brief glimpse of Eleazar backing away, trying to clear his vision, and then a small shadow leapt over Bryce’s prone body to throw a full body tackle at Eleazar. It cut him down at the knees.
Eleazar collapsed with a shriek as something popped and tore. The shadow was a boy. He rolled off Laze and then straddled his chest, driving elbow after elbow across his nose and jaw. Laze jolted violently with each blow. There was one more crunch and then he stopped moving.
Bryce heard the boys cursing, trying to zero in on the new attacker, before more whistling train shrieks and booms burned white hot flashes and stars into the night sky. Bryce blinked. He saw the staggering shadows of the boys scorched onto his retinas, their arms flung up over their faces as more stars exploded amongst them. One of the boys recovered enough to make a move toward Bryce, but before he took two steps, hands snatched his face from behind, hooked fingers into his eyes and dragged him to the ground in a gurgling heap.
Two swift and sure kicks to the upperclassman’s head left him as silent and still as Eleazar. The small, shadowy figure advanced on Bryce.
Oh, Jesus. Bryce rolled away and brought up an arm to defend himself, but then the world lurched under him and he almost vomited. Something gripped his arm and hauled him to his feet. Bryce swayed for a moment, steadied again by those hands. He realized he was looking at the top of the stranger’s head, so he adjusted his gaze finally got a clear look thanks to another bedlam of the fireworks going off behind him.
Nate Baxter.
Nate’s glasses kept lighting up with the glare from the explosions; it was impossible to see his eyes. Bryce could hear the mewling whimpers of Eleazar and the other boy Nate had tried to cripple (or maybe had crippled) and the shouts of their friends regrouping.
“Come on!” Nate shouted at him.
They ran. Bryce didn’t bother looking where. Once they had distance, if they ever did, then maybe he’d would have an opinion on precisely where they went. He looked over at Nate and saw the other boy was carrying a pack, partly unzipped. Roman candles stuck out of it like an archer’s quiver.
Bryce looked behind him as they ran from the park onto the street. His attackers had faded away as suddenly as they’d appeared. No one was following.
They ran another block anyway, just to be sure. Only then did he put a hand on Nate’s arm. They stopped. Bryce’s breath was on fire. Nate stood beside him, looking left and right, keeping vigil while Bryce recovered. The little bastard didn’t even seem to be out of breath.
“What the hell is going on?” Bryce finally managed.
66
An Alliance
They walked up the path toward the house. Bryce opened the door and waved Nate in. The smaller boy hesitated, but went through the door and right into Marianne Coffin. She had a tumbler full of lighter fluid, judging by the smell.
“Bryce. What are you doing with the gardener’s boy?”
Hearing her refer to Nate like that annoyed Bryce almost as much as the shame he felt that Nate could see his mother in one of her states. “I wanted some company that wasn’t a junkie alcoholic.”
“Bryce!”
“Mom!” he said, mimicking her tone.
He led Nate away, up towards his room. Would she be there when he got back? Maybe. Or maybe she had been the one to sic Eleazar and his friends on him. There was no connection between them that Bryce could see, but he didn’t entirely trust his powers of perception.
Bryce threw himself onto the bed and winced as his bruises lit up. Nate looked around, selected a chair and sat, propping his arsenal between his feet.
“So what the hell do you want?” It came out harsher than Bryce wanted it to, but he didn’t know how to react to Nate. Why had he saved him?
“Uh… I think the phrase you’re looking for is, ‘Thank you.’”
“You’re not stupid, Baxter so don’t play with me right now.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why were you following me?”
“I wasn’t. I was on my way over here when I saw you head into the park. I wanted to talk to you about something, but I couldn’t do it in school.” Nate was wearing a t-shirt with a dust bunny on it and the words CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE. Bryce couldn’t believe this was the same kid that had dragged someone to the ground by their face and beat th
em unconscious.
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Because you would say something smart ass, insult me and then leave.”
“Good point.”
“Then I saw them jump you and I thought I might as well stop them.”
“Six upperclassmen and you might as well stop them? It’s just that easy? “
Nate shrugged. “It’s not that hard. Rowing and squash doesn’t really set you up to win a street fight.”
“Neither does AP Biology. Where’d you learn to do that?” Bryce waited but Nate just rubbed at his knuckles and didn’t answer.
“I thought you didn’t like me.”
Nate shrugged again. “I don’t. But Abby does.”
Bryce didn’t know how to parse that response. He didn’t think he had ever cared about someone that much. He didn’t even know anyone who ever cared about anyone that much.
“Does she know about your… you know…” Bryce made a sort of snarly face and clawed hands.
Nate shook his head. “She doesn’t need to. It’s not something I advertise.”
Bryce leaned back on his headboard. “You should consider it. You’d take a lot less crap from people if they knew.”
Nate rubbed at his knuckles again. “They don’t give scholarships to half-spic gardener’s boys who beat up New England royalty.” Nate looked up and the soft, shy facade that Bryce was used to seeing vanished for a second. It gave him a glimpse at the stony rage beneath the surface. “And they sure don’t hire his father to trim their hedges.”
Bryce was silent as he considered the full, cold weight of those words. Being rescued by Nate Baxter was embarrassing enough. Being shamed by him was almost too much to stand. He winced as he forced himself up out of the bed and hobbled a few steps to stand over the smaller boy. Nate looked up as Bryce held out his hand to him.
“Thank you for saving my ass, Baxter.”
Nate furrowed his brow and stared at Bryce’s hand for a second before giving it a firm shake.
“Don’t be too grateful. I waited like twenty seconds before jumping in.”
Bryce burst out laughing and Nate smiled. His smile widened when Bryce winced and clutched at his ribs as the laughter aggravated his injuries. He limped back over the bed and had to step over Nate’s backpack. The Roman candles were still sticking out the top.
“So, you just carry holiday explosives around with you?”
“I do now. Thought they might come in handy sometime.” The way Nate said it gave Bryce pause.
“The Daughters?”
Nate nodded. “Among other things.”
“What do you know?” Bryce asked.
Nate regarded him for a long moment, then pulled his notebook out of his bag. He walked Bryce through the story of his own investigation and told him about the secret passage from Harwich Hall to the old church. He shivered as he recounted the presence in the woods, the Snake Handlers who used to worship there, and the Great Arkham Fire. He explained the clues in the Thaw diary that indicated that their ancestors had been close friends, along with two other guys. Then Nate told him that of the four men who were like brothers, only three of them hanged. The only survivor had been Bryce Quincy Coffin the First.
And that was when the Coffin family fortune had been born.
Bryce wasn’t even surprised. Of course his family’s wealth had been built on betrayal. Of course his ancestor-his cowardly, venal great-grandfather-had sold out his best friends for money. Bryce shook his head.
“He died about a year later.”
“Let me guess. After marrying a Daughter and knocking her up, right?”
Nate was surprised. “How did you know that?”
“Like, zoinks, Scoob. You’re not the only kid detective in town. Grab that notebook on the desk, will you?”
Nate obliged and started flipping through it as Bryce outlined his investigation and the disturbing trend he saw underneath it all. He capped it off with the exhumation of Drew Marks’s empty grave. Nate’s eyes bugged out of his skull at that one. “I guess we’ve been on the same side.”
Nate nodded. “What do we do next?”
“Abby.”
Nate’s posture stiffened.
Bryce went on, “We need to know who the father of her baby is.”
“Why?”
“Because whoever knocked her up is going to marry her, and then he’s going to disappear, and he’s one more empty grave.”
67
Shifting Tides
They fetched Nate’s bike and drove to Abby’s. She was confused by their sudden alliance, but she listened as they outlined what they had been doing. They asked Abby about the night of the carnival. She only had a few memories of the evening. The first was running through the woods, with the vague sense of something following her.
“The Woodsman?” Nate asked, using the name he had given to the presence he had felt by the old church. Bryce didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but they both seemed to.
“Maybe?”
Then Abby told them about the visions she had in the funhouse and the memories of being by the sea, and of someone talking to her in a low, reasonable voice. She could not remember any words, or even if they had been in English.
“And we don’t know how this relates to the Crows,” Abby finished.
“I’m sorry, the what?” Bryce asked.
Abby explained, and Bryce did his best to keep a neutral expression. Monsters. Monsters that looked like people. A few months ago, he might have left right then. He would have assumed she and Nate shared some kind of mutual delusion. Now? The idea was insane, and maybe they weren’t seeing things quite right, but there was definitely something strange in Arkham. Maybe “monster” meant something else? Bryce filed it away. He would concentrate on the parts he knew were real: the dead and missing fathers, the link to the past, and the strange night of the carnival.
Next, it was Nate’s turn. He remembered being in the woods as well, and of someone very large following him. He remembered walking over beetles the size of golf balls. They’d had strange designs on their shells. When he’d researched them later, he hadn’t been able to find out what they were. He wasn’t sure they’d ever been described by science. Then he remembered being in water, but in a place that echoed strangely.
Bryce was the last to take up the thread, finally coming clean about what he had seen. After the carnival, they’d gone to Fisherman’s Lodge for more drinking. Then his next memories were awful. He remembered being wet and shivering, though it was too dark to see where. He had the sensation of something, a bear or a coyote maybe-
“The Woodsman,” Nate said.
“Sure why not. Or maybe Sasquatch or Slender Man.”
Nate narrowed his eyes but didn’t say anything. Bryce regretted the comment but old habits died hard. He wished he’d never spoken up, because then he could have avoided the next memory, the one that really disturbed him. He told them of being on the shore, eating whatever he could find in the salt water. The only thing he left out was the dead seagull. Though the memory stopped before he ate it, he knew had done it.
“The real question is,” Abby said, “what does any of this have to do with the missing fathers, the old church, your ancestors, and… and my baby?”
Bryce didn’t have an answer. Neither did Nate. Bryce knew then that the three of them were going to need to stay close together. They couldn’t trust anyone else.
68
Mean Girls
As the school year came to a close at Arkham Academy, three girls determined who was cool and who was not: Sindy, Ophelia, and Charity. Though Sindy was a year younger than both Ophelia and Charity, it didn’t seem to matter to anyone. If anything, they revered her. It was like Hester Thorndike had put something in the water.
Sindy had wanted all this from the beginning. She’d imagined Abby by her side, along with one other girl to round out a good power trio, but you couldn’t rule a school alongside The Raving Lunatic of Whorewich Hal
l. Abby had clung to Nate and they’d somehow found a way to drag Bryce down with them, too.
School had become a very different place. Sindy and her friends were now the ruling body of Arkham Academy, served by their three sycophantic creature-bodyguard-servants. They held court with Bryce’s former inner circle, and none of them seemed to mind that Sindy had replaced Bryce. Hunter Hanshaw smoked too much weed to do anything more than burn out; Ben Knowles didn’t care what was happening so long as there was a girl near his lap; Delilah wasn’t a Daughter and had no apparent interest in climbing the social ladder. Everyone just included Bryce when they made snide remarks about Abby and her trashy friend, Nate Baxter.
Sindy never had more power than she had at that time, and yet, she was trapped.
She entered the cafeteria with her entourage in tow. Charity and Ophelia flanked her, followed by their three servants. She could only see through Eleazar’s mask. The other two, Ophelia’s Finster and Charity’s Edsel, looked as human as anyone else. She often wondered what they looked like beneath the illusion. Her skin crawled just thinking about it.
Bryce and Nate were sitting in the furthest corner of the cafeteria again, huddled over their notebooks. They were probably talking about Abby’s pregnancy and Bryce’s missing fathers mystery. There were days Sindy wanted to solve the latter for them, and there were days when the thought of doing that turned her stomach.
All because of the Daughters of Arkham.
On the outside, Sindy’s face was a haughty mask. She was above the school, as beautiful and serene as she was cold. On the inside, she was struggling for breath, uncertain she wanted to rattle her cage.
She took her regular seat at the popular table. Delilah, Ben and Hunter were already there. Charity took out her phone and stared into it with pouted lips. She flipped her hair and then snapped a selfie. Sindy saw Delilah roll her eyes as she sipped her soda.
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