“Is she really going to be okay?” I heard Dee ask.
“Yeah, she’ll be fine,” Daemon responded patiently. “You have nothing to worry about. Nothing is happening. Everything was taken care of when I came back here.”
I crept closer to the landing.
“Don’t look like that. Nothing will happen to you.” Daemon sighed with real frustration this time. “Or her, okay?” Another gap of silence followed. “We should’ve expected something like this.”
“Did you?” Dee asked, her voice rising sharply. “Because I was trying not to, I was trying to hope that we could have a friend—a real one—without them getting…”
Their voices lowered, becoming unintelligible. Were they talking about me? They had to be, but that didn’t make sense. I stood in absolute confusion, trying to figure out what they could be talking about.
Daemon’s voice rose, “Who knows, Dee? We will see how it plays out.” He paused and then laughed. “I think you are beating those eggs to death. Here, let me have them.”
I listened a few more moments as they bantered back and forth like normal before I peeled myself away from my spot. Without warning, another stolen conversation quickly resurfaced. The night before, as I coasted in and out of consciousness in the car, I’d overheard both of them whispering worries that I couldn’t comprehend.
I wanted to shrug off the nagging feeling that they were hiding something. I hadn’t forgotten Dee’s weird aversion to me going to the library. Or the strange light I’d seen outside the library that reminded me so much of the light in the woods, when I’d seen the bear and passed out, something that I’d never done before in my life. And then there was the day at the lake, when Daemon had turned into Aquaman.
I walked numbly to my bathroom and flipped on the light, expecting to see my face busted up. I tilted my head to the side, a startled gasp escaping my throat. I knew my cheek had been scraped raw last night. The pain I remembered. And my eye swollen shut. But my eye was only slightly bruised, my cheek pink, as if new skin had already grown. My gaze drifted along my neck. The bruises there were faint, as if the attack had happened days ago and not last night.
“What the heck?” I whispered.
My wounds were almost healed, with the exception of my encased arm…but that too barely ached. Another loose memory poked through, of Daemon leaning over me in the road, his hands warm. Had his hands…? No way. I shook my head.
But as I stared at myself, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was going on here. The twins knew it. Things didn’t add up.
Chapter 11
The Sunday before school was scheduled to start, Dee took me into town to pick up notebooks while she replaced almost everything she used for school with a new item. We only had three more days of vacation and then we had Labor Day. I was already yearning for it. Before we headed home, Dee was hungry as usual, and we stopped at one of her favorite places.
“It’s quite a…quaint restaurant,” I said.
Dee smirked, her sandaled foot continuously tapping. “Quaint? It would be quaint to a big city gal like you, but it’s the place to be here.”
I stole another quick glance around. The Smoke Hole Diner wasn’t bad; it was actually kind of cute in an earthy, down-home way, and I did like the clusters of rocks and stones that jutted out around the table’s edge.
“It’s a lot busier in the evening and after school,” she added between sips. “It’s hard to get a seat then.”
“You come here often?” I found it kind of hard to imagine beautiful Dee hanging out here, eating hot turkey sandwiches and drinking milkshakes.
But there she was, on her second hot turkey sandwich and her third milkshake. Ever since I met Dee, I had been constantly amazed by the amount of food she could consume in one sitting. It was actually a little disturbing.
“Daemon and I come here at least once a week for their lasagna. It is to die for!” Her eyes lit up with a mixture of excitement and longing.
I laughed. “You must love their food, but thanks for inviting me out today. I’m glad to get out of the house since Mom is home. She has been hovering over me every second she’s there.”
“She’s worried.”
I nodded, toying with my straw. “Especially after news broke about the girl who died the same night. Did you know her?”
Dee looked down at her plate, shaking her head. “Not very well. She was in a grade lower than us, but a lot of people knew her. Small town and all. I thought I read they weren’t sure if she was murdered? That it looked like a heart attack.” She paused, her lips pursed as she looked over my shoulder. “Strange.”
“What?” I asked, turning to see what she was looking at and turned back around to face her as fast as I could. It was Daemon.
Dee’s head was cocked to the side, her dark hair falling carelessly around her. “I didn’t know he would be here.”
“Oh, man, it’s he who shall not be named.”
Laughter erupted from Dee, drawing attention from everyone in the diner. “Ah, that was funny.”
I sunk in my seat. After the morning he and his sister made me breakfast, he’d avoided me and that was fine. I had wanted to thank him for sort of saving my life. A proper thank you that didn’t end in insults, but the few times I’d been able to catch him, he stopped only long enough to give me a look that warned me not to even think about approaching him.
Daemon might be the most physically flawless male I’d ever seen—his face was something that any artist would die to get a chance to sit and sketch—no light reflected badly off him. But he could also be the biggest jerk on the planet.