Dark Before Dawn Read online

  I blinked away a tear.

  “Thank you for understanding. I wish I could—”

  “Sshh,” he interrupted. “Don’t apologize. One way or the other, we’ll get through this, too. I love you, Hope.”

  My heart surged, never tiring of hearing the words.

  “I love you,” I whispered back as he walked out the door, leaving me to wonder how I could be so crazy as to make him wait.

  four

  LUCAS

  I saw them before they saw me. They moved like a swarm through the suburban Atlanta mall, aimless in their wandering, searching voraciously for affirmation amidst the bright lights and shiny shop windows.

  They were at that age when knees and elbows seem to protrude just a little bit too much, when baby fat suddenly melts away, leaving them poised at the moment when awkwardness turns into grace. They know it, though they aren’t quite sure exactly what is happening, aren’t yet sure of themselves, and they try out their new power awkwardly, like newborn fawns trying to walk. They flip their hair and steal glances in the plate-glass storefronts, comparing themselves to one another to assure themselves that they are normal. No, they are better than normal—they are pretty, prettier than the girls walking beside them.

  There is always one around whom the swarm swirls: one girl who does not go through this crisis of confidence, one girl whose worth doesn’t come from looking at the awkwardness of another child. There was one such child in this group of thirteen-year-olds. The others jockeyed for position around her.

  I was not interested in her. Not yet, anyway.

  It was the one at the fringe who caught my eye today. I had been watching for months now. Her body’s lines were not the lean graceful ones of her peers. They were soft and doughy, the growth spurt for which I was sure she longed not yet having materialized. The others moved like gazelles or colts, frisky and playful; she moved deliberately, her limbs heavy, afraid of doing the wrong thing. She had tried to dress like them, but she’d missed the little things—her tank top was too short, baring a bit of pudgy tummy, baby fat that would earn her the disdain of the others. Poor thing. She tried to be like them, but she was not one of them. She was there, I thought, under the grace of the queen bee, but for the moment, the queen had forgotten about her as she giggled and gossiped with other friends, sucking hard on the straws of the smoothies and frappuccinos they carried like emblems.

  This one on the edge—the hanger-on, the vulnerable one—was the one I wanted. It would be like culling her from the herd.

  I watched as they circled back to the food court. They nursed their drinks, none daring to order more food. The misfit snuck furtive looks at the pizza stall.

  I smiled. Even if her stomach was full, her mind still remembered what it was like to be hungry. In this food court, a false cornucopia of plenty, she was reminded of want. In the final days of my exile, before I could again take physical form, I watched her in her shiny, clean foster home, hovering in the corners, my movements just a flicker of shadow and air that she never sensed. I saw how, when she thought everyone was asleep, she snuck into the kitchen and shoved her face full of whatever she could find—handfuls of crunchy cereal, snatched straight from the box; pillowy mouthfuls of snowy white bread, eaten so fast she nearly choked on the crusts—fearful that the next day, it would all be taken away from her again.

  I smiled because I knew that her memories and her fear would betray her, and she would be mine.

  I nodded, and my Fallen comrades fell in around me. We were just a few; too many of us would attract attention. But as long as the girls outnumbered us, as long as we looked a little baby-faced ourselves—too young to be a real threat, as the anxious mothers would rationalize—as long as we spent our money here, spreading it liberally among the purveyors of the artificiality that passes for American culture, we faded into the background, passing unnoticed.

  With what should I tempt her? What should be the modern-day, mall-culture equivalent of the apple that tempted Eve?

  An ice cream cone. I thought that would do it.

  We sidled up next to the girls, where they had perched themselves next to the fountain at the mall, a prime site for watching and for being seen. The mother of one of the girls had dutifully agreed to chaperone them at the mall. She was seated a discreet distance apart, whiling away her time on the bench by checking her phone. She darted us a glance, once, sized us up as safe teenagers, and went back to her texting. Neighborhood gossip? Berating a misbehaving child? No, wait—she was twirling an errant lock of hair around her finger, her three-inch heel dangling from her foot. The way she touched her face, the fleeting smile—I’d bet on harmless flirting with the stay-at-home dad from down the block. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. She was not like Hope and Rorie’s mother: no keen eye of observation, no watchful alertness, ready to strike at any potential threat. She was fully absorbed in her phone, too caught up in her tiny world’s intrigue to notice anything we did.

  And so we continued insinuating ourselves into the girls’ midst. We joked with them, easily, letting slip ever so casually that we’d all dropped out of school to work in the music industry.

  “I bet you can sing like an angel.” I smiled, knowingly, at the awkward one, watching her unbelieving expression as I offered her the cone. She stared at the perfect swirls of vanilla, concentrating hard to keep herself from blushing as she listened to what I told her. I leaned in close, so close that I could feel the heat of her burning cheeks as I whispered in her ear.

  “I bet you sing like an angel because you look like one,” I told her. “You’re the prettiest one here.”

  She stammered something incomprehensible, holding the cone stiffly out as if she didn’t know what to do with it. I smiled indulgently.

  “Don’t let it melt. I’d hate to see that creamy goodness go to waste,” I said, trailing my finger over the place where the melting ice cream dripped over the edge of the cone and onto her hand. When I licked the ice cream off my finger, her mouth dropped open slightly. Even I wanted to groan at how over the top it was. But it seemed to be working.

  I fought off the grimace that rippled across my face as the pain overwhelmed me—I mustn’t scare the girl. But the pain pleased me. If God was displeased, I must be doing something right. It might be twisted reasoning, but it was the only reasoning my brain knew after millennia of punishment. I welcomed it, a comforting constant after the surprise of my early release from the incarceration that I suffered following my failed attack on Heaven’s Gate.

  An early release. Even as I’d reveled in the freedom, unfurling my wings to ride the wind currents with abandon, I’d wondered if it was a trick, a trap of some sort. For months I’d hung back, gathering my forces about me and grilling them for news, looking for signs, trying to discern His will. But they had nothing: no insights to help me understand the mind of my enemy, not even evidence that God’s army was aware that He had released me.

  And before long, the lure of revenge had proved too strong, drawing me back to meddle in the lives of these pathetic humans.

  It stung my pride, to be sure, but it would be typical for God, in His hubris, to dismiss me as harmless. Or perhaps He simply needed the oppositional force of my hatred to justify His existence. It wasn’t for me to decipher His ways; I’d never understood His logic. After all, it was His complete rejection of the facts about His abomination, mankind, that had gotten us into this mess to begin with. All I knew was that it was my duty to oppose His failure in the best way I could. I hoarded every jab of pain to my heart like a treasure—His displeasure my reward, the agony of it simply a signpost along the journey, an encouragement and blessing in its own way.

  Even when it meant singling out a pathetic little creature like this girl for my attention, it served a higher purpose, and so I embraced it.

  “My name is Luke,” I continued. “What’s yours?”

  “Macey,” she finally managed to blurt.

  Some of the other girls were snickerin
g at her, but she didn’t notice them. Her attention was entirely on me. I grinned, rewarding her for telling me her name.

  “I hope to see you here again, Macey.”

  The other girl, the queen bee, barged through the cluster of girls to grab Macey roughly by the shoulder. She shot me a venomous glare, asserting her authority, before she addressed her friend.

  “Come on, Macey. We need to go.”

  Was the queen bee impatient? Embarrassed? Afraid?

  I noticed the slight lift of her chin, the way she wrapped an arm around Macey.

  No, she was none of these things. She was protective. She didn’t want Macey’s feelings hurt by the other girls. And she didn’t want Macey’s hopes to be raised, and then dashed, by me.

  Or maybe, just maybe, she was incredulous that anyone but she could merit my attention.

  I let a wicked grin spread across my face. Jealousy was such a fascinating emotion. A little dash of it, especially when I hadn’t planned on it, always added depth to my little misadventures, for underneath jealousy I always found a tiny bit of shame. It made someone’s downfall that much more rewarding to orchestrate.

  “It’s time to go,” the queen insisted, shooting me a warning look before dragging Macey away through the sea of food court tables and chairs.

  The girls fell in behind them, the queen having spoken. Macey looked back at me over her shoulder and I winked. She flushed a deeper red and looked away. But before she disappeared, I caught her looking my way once more, the expression on her face as full of longing as the nights I watched her standing before the fluorescent glow of the open refrigerator, poised on the edge of doing what she knew, rationally, she shouldn’t do.

  The bait was set.

  This was shaping up to be more interesting than I’d anticipated. In the meantime, I could be patient. I had waited over twelve years to get to this point, after all. And at the end of my wait, it would not be these two silly girls I would destroy. It would be Hope and Michael.

  five

  The final bell had rung, disgorging a swirling torrent of bodies into the wide halls of the prestigious Buckhead school. Rorie moved deliberately through the crush, the eye of her own storm, people parting to make way for her entire group of chattering girls as she scanned the streams moving about her. The banter swirled about her, but today she didn’t engage, didn’t even seem to care. She had a few minutes before basketball practice. A few precious minutes to make sure her girls were all in order. And today—after the incident at the mall last week—there was one girl in particular she wanted to keep an eye on.

  She spotted Macey down the hall and spun out of the group, her kilted skirt twirling about her.

  “Rorie, where are you going?”

  Rorie looked back over her shoulder. Her friend Melissa stood at the edge of the crowd, her arms hugging her books to her chest, one eyebrow arched in silent accusation.

  Rorie smiled. “I’ll catch up with you at practice. I just need a minute to talk to someone.”

  “Someone?” Melissa demanded, tilting her head. “Don’t you mean your pet, Macey?”

  A snicker rippled through the girls, who had gathered themselves into a small knot to watch the exchange between Melissa and Rorie.

  “Don’t call her that,” Rorie stated quietly. “She’s my friend. You could stand to be nice to her once in a while, you know.”

  “What for? Honestly, Rorie, you’re wasting your time.”

  “Was it a waste when I stopped people from gossiping about you being a bed wetter in fifth grade?” Rorie shot back.

  Melissa blanched as a twitter of amusement went up around her. She clutched her books so tightly that her knuckles turned white, embarrassed into silence.

  Rorie smiled a treacly sweet smile and fluttered her fingers in a wave, dismissing Melissa and with her the crowd, knowing that her own meanness would be the subject of a flurry of posts and chats and then be forgotten, washed away by the next wave of gossip.

  “Love you!” she called above the noise of the busy hall, reminding them that while she was in charge, it was they, themselves, who wanted it that way. They wanted to bask in the sunshine of her approval. She had a vague but growing sense of the gravitational pull she exercised on the tiny universe of which she was the center, and a sense of responsibility to exercise that power wisely.

  They called Macey Rorie’s project. Sometimes it infuriated Rorie. Was she the only one of them who saw Macey as a real person, she wondered? Was she the only one who was amazed at Macey’s courage, having to make her way into a new family, a new school, while her real family disintegrated before her eyes?

  Of course, the others didn’t know that. None of them were supposed to know anything about it. But sometimes, Rorie knew, staying on the teachers’ good sides paid off, like when she got excused from French class to work in the attendance office. Sometimes, if you worked on it, you could put yourself in the right place to hear the things that adults wanted to keep from you. Real world things. Rorie liked the important feeling she got, knowing things that the others didn’t know.

  “Macey!” Rorie grabbed her friend by the shoulder. Macey turned, startled, a fearful expression on her face until she realized who it was. Then she allowed herself a shy smile.

  “Hi, Rorie. Don’t you have practice?” Rorie noticed that Macey’s free hand was hanging behind her back. Macey was hiding something.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?” Macey said, pretending she didn’t understand and blushing furiously.

  “Is that your phone?” Rorie demanded. “Are you talking to that boy from the mall? Here, let me see!” Rorie, ever used to getting her way, reached around and pulled the phone from Macey’s hand, holding it above her head as if taunting her.

  “No, Rorie. Please …” Macey’s whining died out as Rorie began to read, turning her back on the red-faced Macey to walk down the hall.

  “You are! You’re texting him. You shouldn’t have given him your number, Macey. He’s got to be in high school. Or at least old enough to be—”

  And then, still reading the message, Rorie stopped short.

  “You can’t be serious.” Rorie turned around to confront her friend. “Macey, you can’t meet him downtown. That’s dangerous. You don’t know anything about him.”

  “Do too!” the other girl yelped, snatching the phone back from Rorie. “I know he likes me.”

  “Honey, lots of people like you,” Rorie soothed. “You have lots of friends.”

  “No, I don’t,” Macey insisted, shaking her head. “You have lots of friends. Friends who barely tolerate me. He could be my friend. My friend, Rorie.” Her eyes drifted behind Rorie.

  Rorie looked over her shoulder, following Macey’s gaze, to see her other friends huddled by their lockers, watching and laughing, barely bothering to hide their amusement. Melissa stood slightly apart, stony-faced, still smarting from the embarrassment Rorie had just inflicted upon her.

  Rorie mouthed, contrite, I’m sorry. Melissa drew her eyebrows together sharply, tilting her head as if weighing Rorie’s apology. And then, shrugging, she turned to the other girls, gathering them up and herding them toward the locker room. Melissa shot one last glance over her shoulder from the edge of the drifting pack of girls as they left. Rorie beamed at her, mouthing back, thank you.

  Macey muttered something under her breath as she fumbled with her phone. Rorie turned back to her.

  “What? What did you say, Macey?”

  She didn’t look up. “I said, maybe he could even be, be my boyfriend.”

  Rorie sighed. She could see how badly Macey needed this. She needed to feel wanted and accepted for herself. If Rorie couldn’t make that happen here, at school—at least not yet—the least she could do was be supportive of Macey.

  But something about the situation still didn’t feel right to her.

  “Don’t you think he’s a little old for you, Macey?”

  “He’s not that much older,” Macey cou
ntered. “Not even six years. That’s nothing.”

  She was right, Rorie guessed. Six years wasn’t that much.

  Yet Rorie heard her mother’s voice in her head. For adults, maybe, six years wasn’t much. But at this age? Six years was a whole ocean of time and experience, the difference between taking the school bus and being behind the wheel. It was the gap between PG and R, between Disney Channel and horror movies, between mooning over holding hands and, well, other things.

  Rorie felt herself blushing at the thought of it.

  Rebelliously, she squashed the suspicions that her mother’s cautious nature had implanted in her brain, almost as strong as the imprint of her DNA. After all, Rorie’s mother had been apprehensive about Michael for a long time, too, infecting Rorie with her fear that there was something not quite as it seemed in his long absences—with his shrugging, off-handed explanations that they were “top secret”—and in his patient interest in her sister, Hope.

  But Rorie had known better, deep in her heart. She’d known it from the instant she’d met Michael. He’d plopped down onto the floor next to her and taken her tiny, pale hand in his calloused, sun-worn grasp, letting himself be led into an afternoon of playing with her dolls, not even blinking an eye when she’d forced a pink-swathed Barbie onto him and chosen the grizzled GI Joe for herself. She’d known then, even if she had been too young to articulate it, that Michael was genuine.

  No, Rorie wouldn’t let her mother’s mistrust of the world color her own views. After all, look how things had turned out with Michael and Hope. Surely it could be just as good with Macey and—what was his name?—Luke.

  Rorie turned to Macey and forced a grin, wanting to cheer her on. She wound her arm through Macey’s and leaned in, conspiratorially, to talk as they began to walk toward the locker room.

  “He’d better be taking you somewhere good.”

  Macey beamed, squeezing Rorie’s arm excitedly. “Karaoke. I’m going to sing ‘Popular’—you know the one, from Wicked?”