Faithless

Chapter 12

Leaving Avery's house was a sudden drop back into reality. Darren was dead, people were torn up about it, and it wouldn't be long before I saw the police making their rounds to ask for information out of the town. I wasn't sure what they knew. I figured it was best to wait until I knew for sure what information they had before I actually gave them any answers.

"I like that girl," Krieth said as I was walking away from Avery's house.

"Avery," I said quietly. "That's her name."

"I don't care."

I sighed. "Yeah, of course you don't. Anyway, did you learn anything at Darren's house?"

Krieth sat on my shoulder. "The boy's father and the other policemen were there. The story they have so far is that he went to school normally, left with someone they aren't sure of—due to his claims of being out with friends—returns home behaving strangely, thanks to you, and is killed in the night. His body was discovered in the morning by his father. Those are the things they know for sure. At the moment, they're trying to figure out who he was with prior to arriving home and if anyone saw him in the hours between the end of school and him arriving home. It doesn't seem like you left anything behind."

"That's the important part. But if someone did see me with Darren, we need to have something to say."

"Can't you just tell them what you told him?"

I shook my head. "I don't feel like it's enough. I would be asked to explain in further detail, since I would have been the last person anyone saw him with outside of school. If they think that he was behaving strangely, then something must've happened even before he arrived at home." I pulled a hand through my hair. "Goddamnit."

"What exactly is stopping you from abandoning this human world altogether? Then you wouldn't have to worry about such trivial things."

"I wouldn't expect you to get it," I said. "But I'm not leaving anytime soon."

"Of course not."

I stuck my key in the lock of my front door and pushed it open after I unlocked it. The house still held a strained silence even after the couple of hours I'd been gone. Usually Dahlia would have greeted me by now, or I would have even heard the sound of Daisy's cartoons on the television. As I stood in front of the door, listening for any sort of activity in the house, the stairs finally creaked as Dahlia slowly descended them. In her hands was one of my sketchbooks, open to a page that was near the middle.

My breath caught in my throat. "You're not supposed to—"

"I'm calling Dr. Kelley," she said, looking up at me with an absent gaze. "You're going to see him today." She handed me my sketchbook and turned to walk in the other room where the landline phone was.

"Dahlia, I really don't need—"

"I've made up my mind. You're going to see him whether you like it or not."

I looked down at the open sketchbook in my hands and the page it was opened to. When I had gotten home the night before, I stayed up late drawing to get my mind off of Avery. I didn't really pay much attention to what I'd been drawing, since it didn't serve as a very good distraction. So in pristine charcoal, I'd drawn a boy getting his eyes eaten out by crows.

I shut the sketchbook in my hands and ran up to my bedroom, not bothering to take off my shoes. I dropped the book on my desk. I hadn't even thought about what would happen if the police did see my drawings. Drawings of crows and crows eating dead bodies after crime scenes of two mutilated teenagers covered in crow feathers. So in a panic, I grabbed all the loose sheets of paper lying on my desk and shoved them under my mattress.