As if in response, my own tingled with a dull roar, like an engine revving in anticipation before you floored it.
Footsteps galloped up behind me just as a van drove past. “Everything okay?” Reese asked, coming to my side.
I blinked, gaping at his old beater truck across the way. The hooded stranger was gone, my runes dying down at the realization.
Chapter 17
Don’t Kill The Magic
Reese hadn’t seen the stranger, but unlike Officers Blake and Stevens, he took my word for it. I knew no one was home before we even pulled up into my driveway. Mom had the lights set up on a timer, and only those select few were turned on.
“You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah,” my voice cracked. “I’m sure I’ll be fine—in there.” In the big, dark, empty house… “Would you mind horribly coming in with me?”
Reese gawped back at me like I’d just declared myself to be the Easter Bunny. “You serious?”
“I know you always go into school early to work on the newspaper, and I know Kelsey would also appreciate not having to come hunt me down for my article later in the day. So I just thought I could maybe give you my flash drive…”
He pulled in his lips, trying not to smile. Why did he always have to make me feel like I was always the butt of some private joke?
“What?”
“After everything that’s happened tonight, that’s what’s on your mind?”
“I kind of have a hard time shutting my brain down,” I admitted. “You don’t have to stay. Just come in…”
“And make sure there’s no boogeymen hiding under your bed?” he finished.
“You are well-equipped,” I said, nodding down.
He looked shocked at first, but then tried his best not to laugh. “Ooookay.”
Uh-oh…
“What? No! That’s not what I meant!” I could feel my cheeks burning with mortification. “I was nodding down at your jacket, not…”
Oh. My. God. Kill me now! Where was a demon when you needed one?
“If you say so.” He patted my arm with a snicker before climbing out.
I was probably redder now than Elmo.
Mortified, I skulked out of the car and into the house. Reese offered to take a walk through the ground floor to make sure the coast was clear as I raided the box of Devil’s Food Donuts sitting on the counter. I was starving. He returned a few minutes later, looking even more uneasy.
“Did you find something?”
He shook his head as I cleared my throat with a healthy swig of Dr. Pepper.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. You have a very…lovely house,” he replied stiffly.
At last, I laughed. “No one’s holding a gun to your head, you know.”
“It’s just…are your folks, like, anal-retentive or something?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not exactly what you’d call welcoming,” he admitted, looking around at the furniture as if it was toxic to the touch. “This place puts a model home to shame. Everything’s so…perfect. Not to mention pricey. Forgive me, but I don’t exactly feel at ease in a room where I’d have to sell a kidney in order to pay for a broken lamp.”
He did have a point. If someone so much as put a drink on the coffee table without a coaster, they’d probably vanish under mysterious circumstances. Mom didn’t even let Dad or me venture into the parlor room out of fear that our footprints would leave impressions in the new luxury carpets she had installed last month. But that was just the way things were. I’d become accustomed to it, so I guess I didn’t think it odd anymore. At least, not until Reese stepped through the door.
“It’s not much of a secret that my mom enjoys being one of the elite in town. Everything you see is a reflection on her, so she wants it to be perfect.”
“Everything, including you?”
As hard as I tried to salvage some kind of comeback, my mind came up dry. Instead, I closed the box of donuts and headed to the other side of the kitchen. Sure, that’s not where I found them, but I needed an excuse to not look at him. He knew the answer.
“Let me go grab my flash drive.” I slinked out and headed up the back staircase to my room. When I returned to the kitchen, I found Reese leaning against the island with a picture in his hands. “Here.”
He took the flash drive, tucking it into his jacket. “Where was this taken?”
I looked at the image. It was the photo I had been using as a bookmark in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which I’d left on the kitchen table this morning. “That was my dorm room back at Stewart’s Landing.”