Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Read online

  The boy with coppery hair stared at us. “I’m Jack,” he said, after a moment. His eyes were wide and unblinking. He looked at me. “I’ve seen you before, in the café. You’re Violet White, and your brother’s Luke, and you live in the big mansion on the cliff. Your family used to be rich, but now you’re not.” He shrugged. “You bought me coffee once, when I didn’t have enough money.”

  I nodded, remembering. “Yeah, I did.” Jack came into the café one day with twenty-nine cents in change, and tried to get an espresso. But I was standing right there, and bought him a con panna, since he didn’t have enough money for either, anyway.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” Jack said. His voice was low and serious, like his face. “We’re on patrol. The Devil stole Charlie’s sister earlier. She was playing right beside us, and then the Devil came and took her hand, and they disappeared. And now she’s just . . . gone.”

  His voice choked up a bit when he said that. I glanced at River, but his face was blank.

  Jack cleared his throat. “I think he’ll be back before dawn, to steal another kid. The Devil sleeps all day, like a vampire. That’s why we have stakes. If he sleeps like a vampire, he can be killed like a vampire. Stake through the heart.”

  As Jack talked, the boys who attacked us began to form a semicircle around River and me, slinking in from the shadows like hungry wolves.

  “Maybe we should stab him, just to make sure,” said a short, thin boy with black curly hair and a stake pointed at River. “See if he bleeds. I’ve heard that the Devil doesn’t bleed. So, one way or another, we’ll know.”

  “Quiet, Charlie. I’m handling this.” Jack gestured to two boys. “Danny, Ross, and me all saw him. Isobel was playing with her hula hoop right here in front of the mausoleum and he swooped down and . . . and took her.” Jack paused, looked up at the sky. “He had red eyes and he was dressed like in olden days and he looked like a normal guy, except for the red eyes and his Thanksgiving clothes and the snake stick. But I knew he was the Devil.”

  “Thanksgiving clothes? Snake stick?” I asked. “What?”

  Jack squinted at me, trying to decide if I believed him or not. “He wore old clothes like they did at Thanksgiving, with a hat and a cape. And he had a stick. Like a cane, but it was taller.”

  “Like a walking stick?” This from River.

  “Yeah, a walking stick. It was carved into a snake. He just swooped down from the sky and . . . and took Isobel. I thought the Devil would come up from underground, like, you know, like from hell, but he came from the sky, like an angel.” Jack paused, and clenched his pale, freckled fists at his sides. “Then he disappeared. We’re going to wait here until the Devil comes back. And when he comes back, we’re going to kill him.”

  “Yes,” the other boys said. “Kill him.”

  It was some kind of game. Some kids’ game that had gone too far. I looked at their serious faces, the stakes gripped in each hand, the unnatural way each boy was silent and unmoving, as boys never are. I wondered about the little girl. Isobel. Had she gone home without telling her brother, and the game spun off from there? Or had someone really taken her?

  River came up behind me. He slid an arm around my waist and tugged me back into him. “Let’s get going,” he whispered in my ear. “Leave the boys to their game. They’re just having fun. They’ll be fine.”

  The skin of my neck tickled where River’s breath brushed by me. I ignored it. I slid back out of his arms and knelt down by Jack, who was on his knees now, using a knife to sharpen the end of another twig. “I hope you find your devil. Be careful, okay? It’s getting late. You might want to go home soon. Your parents might get worried about you.”

  “I’ve got to make a bunch more stakes,” he said, without looking up. “We have more kids coming to help. Isaac’s been getting them, waking everyone up. I told Charlie he could be the one to stab the Devil, if . . . if his sister is dead. I said that he could be the one . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he got caught up in what he was doing. River pulled on my waist, and we began to move away toward the gate. I threw one last glance over my shoulder at Jack, kneeling on the ground. There had been no glint of mischief, no pride over the creation of his game, no antsy joy at being out so late. He’d been as serious as a young soldier about to go to war. It was unsettling. Odd. I wondered if I should tell someone what was going on. Try to find some parents, or call the cops—

  “Violet.”

  I stopped walking and looked at River.

  “They’re going to be all right. It’s just a game.”

  I didn’t answer.

  River leaned his hips into mine and my back pressed against the wrought iron gate. His fingers curled over the back of my head, and my thoughts . . . ceased.

  He kissed me. My lips met his and I just. Stopped. Thinking. I didn’t think about the fact that River was still a stranger. I didn’t think about the tunnel, or Jack, or the Devil, or anything. My lips melted into my heart, which melted into my legs, which melted into the earth beneath me.

  Afterward, River walked me home in the moonlight. Neither of us talked.

  And everything was damn near perfect.

  CHAPTER 9

  I SLEPT IN the guesthouse.

  I had started the night in my own bed. But I woke up sometime before dawn, and found myself walking barefoot down the cold marble steps of the grand staircase, through the dewy grass by the wrecked greenhouse, to the cottage, to River’s bed.

  I don’t know why. I just did it. River said he liked me, and I liked him. He reminded me of . . . me, somehow. Which might sound stupid in the daytime, but at night, when you’re half asleep, it makes perfect sense.

  River was turned onto his side. His sleeping eyes and his straight nose and his crooked mouth were glowing in a shaft of moonlight coming through the windows. I lifted the covers and slipped in beside him. He woke up, long enough to slide over, wrap his arms around me, and bury his face in my neck.

  If he was surprised that I was there, he was too sleepy to show it.

  So I spent the night with his body curled into mine. I fell asleep next to him, and woke up beside him. Twice, in twenty-four hours.

  Morning.

  River was one of those magical people who slept like a woodland creature or someone under a fairy spell. Sweet and pretty and quiet, with glossy eyelids and mouth in a soft pout. Next to him I felt rumpled and tangled and very, very real. I slid out of the bed and went to the window. It was a gray, stormy kind of day outside—stormy gray waves, stormy gray sky. The clouds were dark and fat and mean, and the air smelled of salt and expectation.

  I couldn’t see the horizon through the thick mist. I could barely even see the waves. This might make some people feel trapped, I suppose, but not me. I’d grown up with the sea in my front yard. It felt as comfortable as a white picket fence.

  I stretched, and the ache started up in my knee where I had fallen on it the night before.

  I had played night games as a kid, when my cousins visited. We played Burn the Witch in the trees behind the Citizen, and my heart would race and race until I found a hiding spot. And then there would be the endless, terrified wait until someone found me, screams of “Witch!” and “Burn her!” ringing in the cool night air . . .

  Still.

  I was uneasy about those eerie boys with their stakes, and their strange description of the Devil. And their claims that a little girl disappeared.

  I stretched again, and smoothed out the black silk nightdress I was wearing. One of Freddie’s. I had gotten it out of the dresser a few days ago. It had still smelled like French perfume then, but now it smelled like River.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  I turned around and found Luke staring at me from the doorway of the bedroom.

  River woke up at the sound of my brother’s voice. He yawned, and grinned.r />
  “Nothing happened, Luke,” I said. “Not that it’s any of your business. Don’t you knock? This isn’t your house anymore. River rented it, and you can’t come barging in whenever you feel like it.”

  “I did knock, but no one answered. And you weren’t around this morning, Violet. I was starting to get worried. If my twin sister isn’t in her bed for the first morning in her entire life”— his eyes flicked around the room, resting for a moment on River before cutting back to me—“then I have the right to go looking for her.”

  I kind of smiled at that. “Luke, does this mean you care about me?”

  Luke didn’t smile back. “No.”

  “Good morning,” River said, casual and calm as if he’d been expecting my brother to wake him up all along. Welcomed it, even. “Does anyone want some coffee? I bought some espresso yesterday.”

  Luke nodded his head. “Yeah, yeah, maybe later. But first, I’ve got news. I walked into town this morning because Maddy had an early shift at the café, and hell, the whole place is on fire. A little girl is missing. She disappeared from the cemetery last night. There are cops everywhere and search parties. Even a few reporters up from Portland. It’s crazy.”

  I put my hand on my heart. Isobel. Charlie’s sister. I looked at River. His face was relaxed, his eyes interested, but detached. I turned back to my brother. “A little girl? From the cemetery? Last night, River and I—”

  Luke waved his hand at me. “Shut up, sister. I haven’t even got to the best part. So some boys apparently saw who took the girl. And . . . wait for it . . . these boys are saying that it was the Devil.” Luke laughed. “The Devil. Can you believe it? One of the journalists hanging out in the café was Jason Foster—he was that great runner in high school, Violet, you remember? Went to State and everything. Anyway, now he’s a journalist, and man, was he loving this story. The Devil. What a town we’ve got here. Portland is going to eat this up. Backwards No-Account Echo Kids See Prince of Darkness in Town Cemetery.”

  River stretched, long and slow, like a cat. “It seems that a lot of kids go missing in this town,” he said, very casual and nonchalant, leaning back with his arms tucked behind his head and a smile on his face. “First Blue, and now the Devil?”

  I opened my mouth to tell Luke about Jack, and his gang of stake-wielding boys, when Sunshine appeared in the bedroom doorway, long brown hair swinging over a white jersey dress that hugged her curves in the exact right way.

  “Hey,” she said, looking around at my rumpled nightgown and River, shirtless, still in bed. “No one was at the Citizen, so I came over here. Have you heard what’s going on in town? I went in to buy some almond milk for breakfast and everyone was running around, talking about some girl that’s gone missing and how the cemetery is full of kids with wooden stakes, trying to kill the Devil like he was a vampire. Did I miss the Apocalypse or something?”

  The four of us went into the kitchen, and River made coffee and omelets. He was pretty quiet, his attention focused on frying the eggs, so I was the one who told Luke and Sunshine about our visit to the cemetery the night before. I thought Sunshine might get upset, considering she hallucinated Blue in the tunnel not twenty-four hours earlier, and him being an accused child-stealer, but she seemed to have moved on. She just laughed along with Luke at the idea of Satan in Echo.

  “As if the Devil wouldn’t have a better place to spend his time than our cemetery,” Sunshine said. “He could be roaming the seedy back alleys of Paris, or stealing souls in a New Orleans graveyard, or running around the red-light district in Amsterdam. But no . . . he chooses Echo, the fool.”

  Luke smiled, his eyes taking in the way Sunshine’s second bases bobbed about in her dress when she laughed.

  “Speaking of the City of Lights,” I said, “Luke and I saw An American in Paris in the town square last week. It was—”

  “Stupid,” Luke said.

  “Liar.” I handed him an omelet. “You loved it. It was about a poor painter in Paris, and you were mesmerized. By the way, I saw that your information packet from the Sorbonne arrived in the mail a few days ago. Thinking of applying, brother?”

  Luke pretended not to hear me.

  I smiled, a River-smile, very sly. “Well . . . I don’t know why you’d want to study in Paris anyway, when Italy was the true birthplace of art. Dad always said—”

  “You and the Italian Renaissance, Vi. You’re just like Dad. Both of your styles evolved from raping French Impressionism, no matter what you say about Italy. Mom knows it. I know it. End of discussion.”

  I smiled, not slyly this time. It always pleased me to get Luke talking about art. Seeing that Sorbonne packet in the mail had thrilled me to pieces.

  I took a bite of River’s omelet. It was delicious, salty and buttery, with a kick from a chopped-up onion and a little grated Parmesan.

  I thought Luke might be pissed at River, because he found me in his bed. Last fall, Luke dumped me in the blue guestroom’s closet with the square-jawed, over-confident Sean Fry. Luke and Sunshine laughed and laughed as I banged around, knocking hangers to the floor as I dodged Fry’s fearless lips and expectant arms. But after Luke let me out, when Fry cornered me in the kitchen and tried again, Luke punched him in the face.

  Luke didn’t seem mad at River, though. He liked him, I think. He even asked him how he made the eggs. Luke didn’t have the slightest interest in cooking. He could make a sandwich, and that was about it. So I took it as a good sign.

  After breakfast I went back to Citizen Kane and took a shower in the large second-floor bathroom off Freddie’s master bedroom. The walls were covered, ceiling to floor, in the square emerald-green tiles Freddie had chosen long ago, and the dusty chandelier cast shards of light across the room that made the dust dance.

  I changed into an old cotton dress with flowers on it that Freddie used to do her baking in. It made me feel like she was right next to me, making ginger lemonade and keeping all the bad things away.

  Sunshine talked to me while I got ready. She asked me about River, about being in his bed. I made vague responses, River-style, as my mind ran over all the things that happened the night before.

  River. River. River.

  While I’d gotten dressed, I’d made up my mind to walk into town and help look for Isobel. And I wanted to find Jack, and talk to him too. I was pretty sure no one would be taking him seriously, and I wanted to ask him more about what he saw.

  About the Devil with the red eyes.

  Sunshine had nothing to do and wanted to come with, and the next thing I knew, all four of us were heading toward town.

  Echo was in chaos. Cop cars and people cluttered up the streets around the town square—everyone looked grave and furrowed and defeated in the thick fog that rolled in from the sea. I watched them move around in clumps, hunched under umbrellas even though the rain was mostly still mist.

  The café overflowed with people, and there was a line almost to the door, but Sunshine and Luke went in anyway. River and I stayed outside. River had put on a clean linen shirt and pants, and looked cool and beautiful as a turquoise sea on a hot day, despite the fog. Behind me, I heard snatches of a tense conversation from a group of policemen:

  “The whole thing gives me the creeps, all those kids with stakes . . .”

  “Ideas can be contagious, like the flu . . .”

  “It spread so fast—I think every kid in town is out there.”

  “Any word on the girl?”

  “. . . someone tells a story about a kidnapper and the next thing you know, you’ve got an epidemic on your hands—mass delusion, it’s a documented fact . . .”

  “Blue Hoffman, that story is still going around—”

  “What we’ve got to do is get our hands on the punk who started it all. Trust me, it will all come back to one kid. We get him, this whole thing will crumble.”

  I grabbed Riv
er’s hand. “Jack,” I said. He nodded.

  The cemetery was worse than the center of town. People were lined up outside the fence, thick as mosquitoes on a humid night, and the low buzz of voices made the air feel rigid, like it was wound up too tight. River and I squeezed by a woman with a worried expression and a death-grip on the wrist of a small boy. The boy held a stake of twigs, just like Jack’s, and was pleading for her to let go.

  River and I slid through the open gate of the cemetery, and my heart froze. Children were everywhere. Everywhere. Girls and boys, up trees and behind gravestones, small gray shadows in the fog. All held stakes. And all were ignoring the calls of parents to come home. Adults roamed around the graveyard like dazed sheep, shouting names like Zach, and Ann, and Jamie, and Charlotte, while kids darted in and out of the mist, not listening.

  If the night before, the six boys had been serious, and un-kid-like, and scary, well, it was nothing to observing a whole damn army of kids brandishing stakes like guns. And the fact that all of them were united in the Devil hunt felt eerie and just plain wrong. Kids tend to faction out when they play. Some hit the swings, some the jungle gym, some beat up smaller kids, some pretend they’re fighting dragons in a cave filled with gold. But all the kids were hunting the Devil. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  Goose bumps broke out down my arms. I looked at River. His face was dark. Dark and stormy as the sky. And, worse than the dark, his face looked . . . surprised. His eyes were wide, wider than usual, and a bit . . . lost.

  It was a disconcerting look on him.

  I turned to my left and saw a small girl crouching behind a big headstone. Her black hair was frizzing in the wet mist and her black eyes were shifting left and right, left and right.

  I knelt beside her. “Hey,” I said. “Are you here to kill the Devil?”

  She nodded.