Page 498 of Flirting with Darkness

“Are you going to tag me back?” I asked.

He stared at me a beat longer, his eyes dark and eerie in that oddly soft, blurred face. My heart raced with a real desire to run, and then he leapt toward me.

But I stood frozen, rooted in fear. I couldn’t move. He was inhumanly fast; one second, he was still by the swing set, and the next he was at my side. He stopped by my side and pushed my arm.

“That’s it?” he asked. “That doesn’t seem very exciting.”

I still couldn’t move.

He raised his hand toward his handsome but odd face. “What is it?” he asked, touching his head as if he expected something different. He looked relieved. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” The words came out a whisper. “Now I tag you back.”

He flashed away in seconds. I blinked, and he was at the edge of the forest; then he was gone, into the deep woods. I stared at the shifting shadows of the trees, at the way they rustled as if they were alive.

He wanted me to follow him away.

Somehow, I knew the eerie woods was his world, not mine; that nothing for me was safe in there, not even him. Especially not him.

I stood rooted there for long seconds.

Then suddenly, my eyes picked him out of the shadows. He’d been hidden there, just watching me with those eerie eyes. “You aren’t chasing me.”

“Not in there.” My voice came out a whisper, but he seemed to hear me. A smile played around his lips, but he didn’t say whatever he was thinking.

His head cocked to one side, as if he was listening.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

And I was afraid, and I wanted to see him again, all at the same time.

2

The next time he came, we played tag. I kept expecting him to try to lead me into the woods, but we played only in the yard. It felt normal—like playing with any other kid—and he didn’t move with that inhuman speed. I thought it was just my imagination.

Then my feet slipped on the wet grass. He caught me with a hand on my arm, holding me up. He’d been halfway across the yard, laughing at me with those sharp little teeth, just a moment before.

I stared up at him. The moment hung between us, and then a raindrop hit me in the eye, and I doubled over, and he was back to laughing at me.

He came every time it rained. Sometimes it went so long between visits that I thought he was just a dream, or a nightmare. I was never entirely sure.

And yet, every time I heard the patter of rain on the roof, or the wind blew up as I walked home from school, my heart quickened with excitement, and I hurried out into the yard. He was an intriguing nightmare.

One day, he spread his coat on the ground, and we collapsed into the grass beneath one of the trees.

“What do you look like, really?” I asked. “You never let me see who you really are.”

“You never let me see who you really are either,” he pointed out.

The truth of his words opened a roiling pit in my stomach. I licked my lips. “Do you want to see my room?”

He tilted his head curiously, the way he did sometimes, the way that didn’t seem quite human either. “Are you inviting me inside your house?”

I stared at him, wondering if I’d asked him in a weird way. “I guess.”

“Yes or no, Bethany. Are you inviting me in?”

He sounded so grown sometimes, so demanding and adult. It made me want to smack him. He didn’t scare me anymore.

---