Chosen Read online

  Ben dropped the other end of the lamp with a thunk and headed toward the window in the sea of people waiting their turn to get out. When he stepped around the couch, he realized his mistake in looking down at the girl who hadn’t been able to keep the demon out of her long enough to not slit her own throat; she lay there in a pool of blood beside the hearth, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling while her mouth had frozen in the most terrifying grin he thought he’d ever seen. Coughing in the haze of smoke, he turned away and headed toward the window.

  He heard sirens now, blazing down BU’s Greek Street like he’d heard them so many nights from the dorm rooms his freshman year. Now—he hoped—the ambulances and firetrucks were coming to this house. But he had no idea if they’d be able to do anything at all.

  With an odd twinge of irony, Ben realized he was actually the last person to reach the window now, seeing as if through slowed time April’s frown of concern as she shouted something he could no longer hear; hands waved him forward, reaching through the shattered glass to pull him, to help him out. He tried not to think about how familiar this was—the terror of being so close to freedom he could almost taste it; of having watched others die at their own hands but not by choice; of Ian’s screams as he was ripped by an unseen force through the rotting ceiling of the abandoned house right before Peter shoved Ben through the second-story window before squeezing out himself; of landing with a shocked, painful thud in the overgrown bushes below before realizing the two of them had made it out and their friends had not.

  He almost didn’t realize it when he stood on the rocks below the window ledge, outside, in the fresh air, under the crisp, November night sky. But he was blasted back into reality by another ripping uproar of something bursting into flame and destruction in the fraternity house’s basement. Glass shattered, flames snatched at anything within reach, and he thought he heard a roar of furious frustration amidst the last explosion.

  He’d done it. Ben Robinson had escaped a demon’s clutches twice now, had managed to get everyone out of the house safely—almost everyone. The dead girl inside would be eaten in seconds by the ravenously spreading fire, no matter how quickly the firemen now worked to put out the flames. Against the red, raging glow he stood, barely registering the flicker of white, yellow, and red lights behind him or the stomp of rubber boots as the professionals set to work saving what they could of the Phi Kappa Alpha house. All he could think about now was that it was real; the whole thing was real. Everything he’d been trying to block out and forget over the last eleven years now came crashing back with the undeniable certainty that he wasn’t insane, that it hadn’t been his fault, that demons existed and other people now had been through the same thing.

  That the voices might actually mean something.

  As if in direct response to that thought, the first of them in two years spoke again, though fainter this time, as if it were being pulled away from him by an unseen hand before being flung away into nothingness. ‘Just take the win, Ben,’ it said. ‘This isn’t the last time. There are others…’

  3

  When he felt the gentle hand on his shoulder, he literally jumped. Nothing felt gentle anymore, and after tonight, he didn’t think it ever would again. “Sorry,” he heard April say from close behind him. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Ben chose to ignore that unwitting stab at his mental stability on her part and turned slowly to face her. “Good thinking with the big rock,” he said, then cursed himself for being such a failure when it came to verbally expressing himself. What he’d tried to say was thank you.

  April gave him a weak smile, her gaze flickering briefly toward the smashed-in window at the front of the now charred, smoking house. The fire still burned somewhere below what remained, but the danger was contained.

  Who was he kidding? The fire was contained. The danger could move from body to body. The danger could trap them all against their will. The danger was unseen and unheard unless it chose otherwise. Firefighters couldn’t contain this.

  “I heard pounding on the front door,” April said slowly, as if she were trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together from behind a blindfold. “And nobody was coming out. I just… threw the rock.”

  “Well I don’t think any of us would have gotten out if you hadn’t done that. Thank you.” There it was; he finally said it, and it didn’t sound half bad. Then he realized how close she stood to him, how big her blue eyes were staring up into his. And whatever else he’d meant to say disappeared.

  “What happened in there?”

  Ben had to turn away from her then. He couldn’t tell her what had really happened; he couldn’t tell anyone. He’d been down that road before, eleven years ago, and the reactions he’d received had made him question reality and his own sanity every single day for what was now more than the last half of his life. Maybe people would believe a twenty-three-year-old man, despite the fact that he’d spent his college career searching for, collecting, and studying everything there was to know about demons, demonology, exorcisms, sacred rites, the afterlife—you name it, he’d read it. But no one was going to believe an almost-college graduate majoring in angelology who had nearly been convicted of murdering four of his childhood friends, not to mention the history of schizophrenia—clearly now misdiagnosed. No matter how many people he’d helped out of this burning frat house, he was as unreliable a witness as they came. And he didn’t want to drag April down with him. If anyone could be called a hero tonight, it was her.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered instead. That was the safest thing to say—for both of them.

  “Ben?”

  It surprised him how quickly he turned his head to look at her again. What was he hoping for? That she’d tell him she knew everything, that she believed in demons too, that she didn’t think he was crazy and it was okay, he didn’t have to hide that part of himself from her? The desperation of it almost made him laugh.

  “Are you okay?” She asked it like she really wanted to know—like he’d been the only person affected by the overwhelmingly crappy turn the night had taken. The concern behind her eyes almost broke him, because he realized he wanted more than anything right now just to tell her everything.

  “Yeah,” he said quickly. “You?”

  April frowned at him, then glanced back at the smoldering frat house. “I don’t know. They’re saying they think everyone got out in time, so I guess it’s over. But… something feels wrong.”

  “Hmm.” It was a much easier response than to say she was right. Something was definitely wrong, and Ben knew what it was.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He said, “Yeah,” but his head shook a little on its own, like his body wouldn’t give him this one simple thing—to be a halfway decent liar.

  “Okay…” A little shiver moved through her, and she rubbed her arms covered only by relatively thin sleeves beneath her down vest. Ben felt stupid for not offering her his jacket, but he only had a hoodie, and the brief image of having to peel it off to give to her was too awkward to bear. “Well, my housemate’s sitting in one of the ambulances,” April added, nodding down the street toward the line of three emergency vehicles there for the victims of the as yet unexplained housefire. “They said they’re going to take her and a few others to the hospital to check them for smoke inhalation. So… I think I’ll go with her for a little bit…”

  “Yeah,” Ben said quickly, nodding but somehow unable to look her in the eye again. “Yeah, I hope she’s okay.”

  “Me too.” April did a little dance there in the street, apparently trying to warm herself, and glanced back at the ambulances. She took one step away from Ben, then stopped and turned back. “So, tonight sucked,” she said with a half-smile, taking the pressure off him for what had been his MO of really bad jokes. “But that’s not your fault.” Ben tried to smile through the shame of hearing that. Maybe it wasn’t his fault; maybe it was. “The first part was good, though. Can I… call you? Or something? Try
hanging out again without a house burning down?”

  Ben couldn’t help the heavy, choked laugh that burst out of him, more out of nerves than actual amusement. Was she seriously asking him out after all this? “Yeah,” he said, feeling like a broken record. “No parties, maybe?”

  April wrinkled her nose when she smiled, shifted toward him on one foot, then leaned back again. “Yeah, okay. See you later.”

  “See ya.” Ben gave her a little nod, which might have been to reassure himself that she actually wanted to see him again more than it was to tell her goodbye. But it seemed enough for her. April turned slowly and headed down the street toward the waiting ambulances. She glanced back once to smile at him again, and it was enough to convince Ben that whole conversation hadn’t just happened inside his head like so many others.

  He watched her until she disappeared behind the row of emergency vehicles, then swept his gaze over the destroyed Phi Kappa Alpha house and paused. Now felt like the perfect time for the voices to come screaming out at him—not that he wanted them to, but that they always seemed to pick the best times for ruining what few moments of actual confidence he managed to find. But apparently, the voice that had picked tonight of all nights after two years of silence was done—for now.

  Ben turned away from the slowly filtering crowd of people who might or might not have made it out of the house if he hadn’t been there. He’d parked his 2002 Honda Civic in front of the quieter houses a few blocks down and didn’t mind the walk in the cold night air before having to get behind the wheel. When he took his phone out of his back pocket, the clock on the front screen read 11:37 p.m., which was late enough for him to want to be tired. But of course he wasn’t. So he called Peter.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. You asleep?”

  “Nope. Playing Halo. What’s up?”

  “Uh, Pete…” Ben took a deep breath and let it puff quickly out of him. “It happened again.” He’d expected the long, silent pause on the other end of the line, but the crash of the Xbox controller slamming against a wall and clattering to the floor was so loud, he had to pull the phone away from his ear.

  “Guess I’ll see you when you get here.” Peter sounded like he was growling, and Ben imagined him waiting to end the call so his friend could reach for his emergency inhaler in privacy.

  “Yeah. Fifteen minutes.”

  Peter didn’t say anything else before ending the call, but Ben didn’t really expect him to. He probably would have done the same thing.

  * * *

  When Ben knocked on the front door to Peter’s apartment twenty minutes later, his friend didn’t even bother to get up. “It’s open.”

  Slowly, Ben pushed open the door and stepped inside, not knowing what he expected to find. At least the videogame controller was the only thing Peter had decided to chuck around; it lay in one piece on the floor in front of the TV stand, but everything else was still neatly in place and kept together. Anyone else walking into the apartment just after midnight would have probably called this a normal Friday night for Peter Mackey, other than the fact that he slumped on the couch, his arms resting limply next to his thighs, and stared at the game image frozen on his TV screen.

  Ben didn’t really know what to do; this was another first for them. Just one of so, so many. They hadn’t talked about what happened the night their twelve-year-old lives became one endless nightmare—not since they’d both been accepted to BU and decided in a two-minute conversation that, if they were going to make it through college, they had to leave that crap behind them and try to move on, to at least act like it never happened, as far as the rest of the world was concerned. He didn’t know if Peter thought about it as much as he did, if he had nightmares, if he waited for the other shoe to drop. Now, after eleven years, it had, and Peter looked like Ben had just told him someone else they knew and cared about was dead. Yeah, the guy was an adult living on his own and working his way through school, but the wide-eyed, blank stare of disbelief and hopelessness hadn’t changed one bit. At least he hadn’t been there tonight to actually see it happen all over again. At least he didn’t have to lie to April and pretend that his past hadn’t quite literally come back to haunt him. At least he wasn’t hearing voices again after two years; Peter never had.

  His friend raised a half-empty beer bottle to his lips, took a long drink, then lifted it weakly toward Ben without looking at him. “Want one?” He looked paler than normal in his gray sweatpants and red-and-white BU t-shirt, but that made sense tonight.

  Right now, Ben wished he drank; he really did. But the years of over-medication and sluggish responses made his stomach turn at the thought of it. “No, I’m good.” They both knew that was a lie, but what else was he supposed to say?

  When Peter didn’t move or say anything else, Ben joined him on the couch, sitting as far away as he could against the other armrest but not too far. It wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to walk into his best friend’s house and tell him straight up that he’d relived another version of the worst day of their lives, only this time, Peter hadn’t been there, and nobody blamed either of them for it. And they hadn’t had to watch their best friends die the kind of gruesome deaths they’d only seen in horror movies and videogames. But there wasn’t anywhere else Ben could have gone, and they both knew Peter would rather know about what had happened than be left clueless and in the dark, even if it left him almost catatonic like this.

  “What happened?” Peter finally asked after draining the last of his beer.

  “Fire,” Ben said. “In a frat house.”

  Peter’s whole body turned stiffly on the couch so he could eye Ben with a flicker of surprise. Neither one of them went to frat parties—or any parties, for the most part, despite having been invited to their fair share.

  Ben shrugged. “That party I told you about. A girl asked me to meet her there.”

  Peter just raised his eyebrows and shifted back to face the TV. “Great.” He stuck the empty beer bottle between the couch cushion and the armrest. “Did anybody…” He swallowed. “Die?”

  Closing his eyes, Ben dropped his head against the back of the couch and let out a heavy sigh. “One for sure. Probably two.” The possessed girl who’d slit her own throat couldn’t have possibly survived that, and the guy who’d set his date’s hair on fire and started the whole mess in the first place had most likely bashed his head in hard enough to at least have lasting brain damage, if not permanent failure. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything left of the girl’s body in the living room, whether or not the fire had gotten to her. Even burned bodies left some kind evidence behind afterward; no one had found a thing of Nico, Max, Henry, and Ian eleven years ago. And that house was still standing.

  Ben wanted to throw something too. The tense silence between him and the guy he’d known since he was eight was even more awkward than the few strained seconds of it with April. But she didn’t know what Peter knew. If Ben played his cards right, maybe she never would.

  When he couldn’t take it anymore, he muttered, “The voices came back.”

  Finally, Peter acted like he wasn’t alone in his own apartment talking to a memory. He whirled to look at Ben—actually look at him—and his eyes grew wide as they searched his friend’s tired, weary gaze. At least, that was what Ben felt he looked like. “Dude…”

  Ben shrugged and blinked away from Peter’s brown eyes. “Well, just one, actually. One voice.”

  “After how long?”

  “Two years, give or take.” Like he was counting. Ben couldn’t even fool himself; of course he’d been counting. Two years, three months, and seventeen days.

  “I thought it was longer than that.” Peter sniffed and wiped under his nose with the back of his forearm.

  “No, man. We just never talked about it,” Ben replied. And that had probably been what had kept them friends this long through almost all of college, judging by the way talking about it now seemed to close Peter off again. They hadn’t fought
about it, but that was what it felt like.

  “Was it trying to… you know… mess with you?”

  Ben frowned at his friend, wondering why this conversation felt so much like getting the sex talk from his parents when he was ten. At the time, he’d thought that had been the most humiliating, traumatic thing he’d ever have to go through in life. Being ten was so simple, looking back on it now. The next few years after that should have been too, but simplicity and childhood went hand in hand, and those things had been stripped from both of them way sooner than they should have. “I don’t think so,” Ben said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded.

  “You don’t think so.” Peter raised an eyebrow.

  Ben wanted to tell him it sounded crazy, but if there was anyone on the planet who didn’t need to be led on with that kind of preemptive excuse, it was Peter. “No. I mean, at first I thought it was just trying to screw up the night. With April. But I think it was trying to warn me. Like… to help get everyone else out before it was too late.” For a minute, he thought Peter was going to pass out, even after a lifetime of his friend constantly looking like he had the flu.

  “Did it work?”

  “A whole house full of drunk college kids didn’t get burned alive, so that counts for something.” He didn’t mean for it to come out as one of his timelessly awful jokes, but that was how it sounded. The corner of Peter’s mouth twitched up into a reluctant smirk, and then Ben snorted; he couldn’t help it. Sometimes the only thing to do in the worst situations ever was to find a little bit of humor, even if it was forced and even if it dealt with demons and people getting killed. “I don’t know about the voices, though,” he continued, realizing how much not bringing it up for so long made him want to spill everything now. Peter didn’t stop him. “I thought they were gone, right? I mean, the pills didn’t work, so I stopped taking them like halfway through high school. Didn’t make a difference. Then they just… went away. And then tonight, it was just one. Not like”—he wiggled his fingers by his temple and rolled his eyes—“screaming at me all the time. Just one. Saying I could do something about what was gonna happen.”