Brighter, a supernatural thriller (30 page)

"I know," said Mason. Now they would all rush in and start smashing his bones with bricks.

"I don't want to, though," said Blair. "Can't we just pretend I dealt with you harshly? Can't you just tell them I tortured you?"

She really did still care about him. Oddly, Mason didn't think he'd really thought that she did anymore. He reached for her, and she was back in his arms. She tilted her face back and looked up at him from beneath her heavily lashed lids. She wanted him to do it, and he wanted to do it to her, so he did. He pressed his lips against hers. It felt...right. Perfect. Like things were back the way they were supposed to be. Blair thrust her tongue between his lips, and he opened his mouth to her. She straddled him on the couch, running her hands up and down his arms, over his chest. His hands started roaming too, cupping her breasts, stroking her back, pulling her hips closer to him. Blair's hands went lower on his chest, down, down. She unzipped his pants, eased her hand inside and stroked him.

Mason threw his head back, closed his eyes.

"Why can't it be like this again?" Blair whispered. "Why can't you just take her? Kill her? She's ruining you."

And then he thought of Ramona. Ramona at eighteen, a freshman in college, acting like she knew so much, when she was really just so adorably innocent. And he couldn't help it. He wished it were Ramona in his arms, her legs wrapped around his body.

He took hold of Blair's wrist, pulled her hand out of his pants. "I don't know why it can't be like this," he said, "but it can't."

* * *

By the time Mason showed up at her apartment, Ramona had already finished making stir-fry, and she and Heather had already eaten. There were some leftovers. Ramona had already stowed them in the refrigerator. Ramona offered them to Mason, but he declined. Instead, he just kind of stood in the middle of the apartment, looking unsure as to why he was there and what he was doing.

"Do you want to sit down?" Ramona asked.

"Okay," said Mason. "Okay, yeah."

Mason, Heather, and Ramona sat down on her couch and chair in the living room portion of her studio apartment. Ramona watched Mason. He was sitting now, but he looked far from relaxed.

"Are you in danger?" Ramona asked. "I mean, after what you did for us, are they after you now?"

"Probably," said Mason. "I just talked to Blair. She and I..." he trailed off. "Well, it's not really important. I think if I shaped up and apologized all would be forgiven, but I don't think I'm going to do that. I... I don't know what I'm doing."

Ramona didn't know what she was doing either. "Listen," she said, "we really weren't trying to attack them or anything. We really are just trying to move out of town."

"We've been having a hard time," said Heather. "And we think that it might have something to do with the library. But we didn't think the library and them were really connected. At least until now, we didn't."

"Blair overreacted," said Mason. "She's been doing a lot of that lately. She's out of control. Everything's out of control. Everything's unraveling." He shook his head. "I know you say you're just trying to move out of town, but I think that you're going to have to take them on if you want to get out. The way things have turned out, I don't think you have a lot of choices."

"What can we really do, though?" asked Ramona. She and Heather weren't powerful. They couldn't do anything. Not really. She didn't think. They were just two girls whose lives had been ripped up and destroyed. Sure Ramona was angry, but she was also realistic. As far as she knew, it was going to be impossible to stop them.

"Well, that's why I came here," said Mason. "I want to help you."

"Why?" asked Heather. "Why aren't you on their side? You're one of them, aren't you?"

Mason nodded. "I'm the king." He stopped. "Or whatever you want to call it. The leader. Or I was. I just...I got tired. I've been...doing this...living...pretending to be human for so long. Sometimes I can't really remember when it started or how. It's so strange to remember that time. I didn't think then. Not in language, exactly. So much of what I've become comes from the people I've..." He hesitated painfully. "...killed."

"You feel guilty about that?" asked Heather.

"Yeah." Mason shrugged. "It's funny, because I never really used to. I never felt guilty or tired. I just had this insatiable drive to survive. And it seems like the longer that I do survive, the more I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of being alive. I'm sick of killing to stay that way. I'm sick of covering my tracks. I'm sick of hiding what I am. I just want to rest. I want to die. And I want to help the two of you stop us. All of us."

Ramona couldn't believe this. Sure Mason was always depressed, even suicidal, but she had never really taken him seriously. And she certainly didn't have any desire to play Doctor Kevorkian for Mason. "Wait. Who said anything about killing anyone?"

"It's the only way to stop it," said Mason. "You have to kill us."

"Can you die?" asked Ramona. "You act like you've been alive forever."

"We can die," said Mason. "We used to be more powerful than we are now. It was a different world then. There was...magic, I guess you'd call it...in everything. In the stones and trees and mountains. And in us. And the world changed. It was like all that magic just started to drain away. I don't know why. But I remember that we were dying then. And we had to do something to keep ourselves alive, so we searched for magic, for power. And we found it here. In what I think people call the vortex. I guess you've noticed—anyone who's ever come to this town has noticed—this place isn't the same as everywhere else. Things in Elston almost hum. There's a stasis about this place. It refuses to change with the world around it. Maybe the change is what makes the power leave. I don't know. But that's why we stayed here.

"We found a way to use the vortex here for our own purposes," Mason continued. "And at the same time, we could use it to blend in here. The vortex is power in and of itself. Like I said, it's a sort of power of sameness. We found that we could trap things in it. Souls. Essences. Spirits. Whatever you want to call them. We could keep them in the vortex after we killed them. Stop them from moving on to wherever spirits move on. The more souls trapped, the more power we had. And we could draw on that power and that trapped essence to appear to be the person we had killed. We could put on their bodies like a suit and take on their personality like putting on accessories."

"And the vortex is under the library, isn't it?" asked Heather.

"Yeah," said Mason. "That's its focus."

"So," said Ramona slowly, "when I had that dream in the basement of the library, it wasn't really a dream, was it?" She remembered the hoards of people crowding into her, dressed in various clothes from different centuries, begging her for her help. That had been trapped spirits she'd seen. And the dream about Mason and Blair. That had been the real Mason and Blair. Their spirits, which were trapped in the vortex beneath the library.

"I knew the dream I had about Rick was a kind of communication," said Heather. "And I guess I can see how the monsters—oh, sorry."

"No, that's okay. I guess that's about right," Mason said.

"Why they can use the vortex to do what they do," Heather finished. "But I still don't see what that has to do with us not being able to leave town."

"The vortex's power is to keep things the same," said Mason. "The more powerful it gets, the better it is at doing that. People leaving changes things. It doesn't like to let people leave."

"I don't know," said Ramona. "In one of the dreams I had, the spirits told me that I wasn't allowed to leave, because they weren't allowed to leave. I think they might trap people because they're trapped."

"Maybe," said Mason.

"Kind of gives a whole new meaning to being stuck in a small town, doesn't it?" said Heather.

Ramona laughed. It did. They were literally stuck here. "So," she said. "We would have to dismantle the vortex to leave. Is that what you're saying?"

Mason nodded. "Yes," he said.

"How do we do that?" asked Heather.

Mason shook his head. "I'm not really sure. Blair says it can be done. She said the magic that held it all together was flimsy."

"I found the passage in that book about it," Heather said. "There's a ritual we can do."

"I don't know," said Ramona. "You really want to go the basement of the library and burn herbs and chant magic words? You really think that's going to work?"

"Can I see the ritual you're talking about?" asked Mason.

"Maybe," said Heather. "I know Ramona just buys everything you say hook, line, and sinker, Mason, but I don't know you very well. And you are one of them. And you say you want to help us. But I don't know if I believe that the reason you want to help us is because you want to die. Sorry, but to me,
that
sounds kind of flimsy."

"You think I'm setting you up?" Mason asked.

Heather shrugged. "The thought's crossed my mind."

"Well," said Mason, "I guess you're right. I do want to die. I do feel guilty being what I am and doing what I do. And I do want all of that to stop. But I also don't want anything to happen to Ramona. If we don't kill them, they will kill both of you. You know too much, and you're too dangerous. So, I feel like I have to help you go on the offensive if I want to help keep her safe."

"Why do you care so much about Ramona?" asked Heather.

Ramona glared at Heather. That had been kind of touching. Maybe Mason just liked her. Was that so impossible to believe? That a guy could just like her?

"I..." Mason trailed off. "We never really were allowed to be really involved with humans. We mostly kept to ourselves, mingling where we could, just to blend in, to keep from looking suspicious. But mostly, when we started dating a human, it was so we could recruit them. Like when Dawn started dating Mason, it was so I could take him. But, like I said, things have been unraveling for a few years. Things just started to go downhill. And Blair and I tried an experiment. We decided to date humans. And that's when I fell for Ramona."

"But you and I never dated," said Ramona.

"We did, actually," said Mason. "But not when I was Mason."

Ramona put her hand over her mouth as certain things started to occur to her. If Ben had been a monster, and she knew he had been, then when he left town, he really just stayed in town. And right after Ben "left town," she'd had that conversation with Mason in the back seat of his car. "You're Ben," she said softly.

Mason nodded. "Yeah."

"Fuck," said Ramona. Suddenly, she was angry. "You left. But you didn't really leave. You were still here, and I thought you were gone. And how could you have...? Why didn't you...?"

"I couldn't." Mason stopped, searching for words. "I was frightened of the way I felt about you. At how much I cared. I needed to break it off. I thought that if I just moved on, it would all go away. If I wasn't dating you, I'd stop caring about you. But it just didn't work. I couldn't stop thinking about you. I was sloppy with Angelica, because I was so excited to be your neighbor, to be close to you."

"Wait," said Ramona. "That was you. When I saw Angelica, after she died, and she was so nice? That was you."

"Yes."

"You killed Angelica?" asked Heather.

"Yes," said Mason.

"But she was...so badly mutilated," said Ramona. "You were so...brutal."

"I think the term monster was already used tonight," said Mason. "It's fairly appropriate. I'm not human, Ramona. I feel these emotions, but I don't really have the same moral makeup as a person does. I have done so many things...things that you would think are unforgivable. Things that would horrify you. When I was Ben, I fell in love with you. And I still love you, but I can't ever be with you. I'm not really part of the world you live in."

Mason was Ben. Her Ben. The boy she'd fallen so deeply in love with. The boy who had hurt her so badly. And he was sitting right across from her. She felt repulsed by him, but she also just wanted to run to him and throw herself into his arms. And he was asking her to kill him. Just when she'd found out she hadn't lost him after all? Ramona didn't know if she could quite handle this. "Mason," she said. "Can you come smoke a cigarette with me on the porch?"

She tried to tell Heather with her eyes that she needed to talk to Mason alone.

"Okay," said Mason, looking a little confused.

They both stood up and walked through her bathroom to the back porch. Once outside, Ramona looked at Mason, who was standing so close to her. It was odd, wasn't it, that she'd had a crush on him for so long and didn't know why she liked him so much? It was odd, that all along, she'd somehow known that there was something between them. She couldn't help herself. She grabbed him and kissed him.

Kissing Mason was not like kissing Ben. Ben had been taller than Mason, had been built differently. And his lips had been fuller. But the way that Mason kissed was the same as the way Ben had kissed. He moved his tongue the same way. He put his hands in the same place, cupping her face with his palms. Ramona wanted to do nothing except kiss Mason forever. But he pulled away.

"This can't happen," he said.

"How can you ask me to kill you?" Ramona demanded.

"You know we could never really be together," said Mason. "You know that, right?"

Ramona guessed she did. But it didn't seem fair. First she'd lost Ben, then she'd lost Garrett, and now she'd found Ben again and was going to lose him again. But she knew that she didn't want to be with someone who couldn't grow old with her. And Mason was right. He had murdered people. Angelica, the real Mason, Rick. And those were just the ones she knew about. There had been hundreds, maybe thousands, of people that Mason had killed in order to assume their identity, and she'd never be able to look past that. But right now, she didn't really think she cared. Right now, she just wanted him. "Couldn't we just..."

"No," said Mason. "Being with you like this destroys my resolve. I want you, and I can't want anything anymore. I don't deserve anything. I only play at being a person. I'm not really one. I can't have what people have."