The Devil Inside

33: Broken Promises

Calla stared at the ceiling, hands clasped over her chest—gently cradling the tip of a knife against the hollow of her throat and wondering, not for the first time, what death might feel like.

Was it hard and fast and unexpected, like the shock of icy river water? Or was it a steady, inevitable march, leaching from one's body as tar spreads across a stretch of summer pavement? A part of her desperately wanted to know.

Another part of her dreaded the answer.

Whatever the case, she didn't believe in that mumbo-jumbo about the light and the tunnel. Only fools believed in fairytales.

Fools and sadists.

The sound of footsteps dispelled her dark thoughts. Calla sat upright and shoved the knife into the drawer of her nightstand, covering the bone-white handle with a stray sock.

By the time her mother opened the door, Calla was propped against her pillows, pretending to scroll through her phone.

"Calla?" Rosalind slipped into the room, shivering through her robe. She tightened the sash. "It's freezing in here."

Calla nodded toward her window, cracked partially to let in the last remnants of the cold snap that had besieged the town for the last week. "I needed some fresh air."

Her mother made a dissatisfied noise in the back of her throat, moving to sit at the end of the bed. Calla tossed aside her phone, anticipating some sort of grand parental speech. Rosalind had been surprisingly tight-lipped over the last few days, saying nothing of her daughter's near-brush with death. Calla had expected she'd be punished after diving headfirst into a very dangerous situation. It was just the sort of thing her mother was always warning her about.

Keep your head, honey. Don't take unnecessary risks.

Answering what had essentially been a serial killer's dare was the textbook definition of an unnecessary risk. Yet here she sat, notably ungrounded and well fed. She couldn't wrap her head around it.

"Calla..." her mother started. She bit her lip. "Have you decided where you want to go to college?"

"Oh." Calla drew her knees to her chest. "Not yet. Either Cornell or Yale. I haven't heard back about a scholarship, but they're supposed to be finalizing that this week."

"Good." Rosalind tapped her daughter's knee. "That's...good."

That was exceptional, and they both knew it. But Calla held her tongue, unable to gauge her mother's mood.

She glanced over her mother's shoulder—to the door across the hall. The brass knob taunted her. Ask her, it seemed to say. Ask her ask her ask her.

Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to.

"Mom?"

Rosalind didn't look up from her lap. "Hmm?"

"What happened to my brother?"

Her head snapped up. For an uncomfortable length of time, neither said a word. Until Rosalind, knuckles white around the sash of her robe, asked, "Why do you want to know?"

My brother. He was amusing, Stephanie had said, winding her fingers through Vincent's hair as a lover would. And then he wasn't.

Stephanie had killed her brother in the same fashion as the others she'd brutalized. The story had resurfaced as all things did in this town—with a whisper.