Dream Dark (2 page)

“Martha, leave the boy alone. Maybe he real y is under the weather,” Link’s dad said between bites.

Big mistake.

Mrs. Lincoln dropped her fork on the edge of her china plate with a clatter.

“Excuse me? Did you say somethin’, Clayton?

Because I thought I heard you underminin’
my
authority while you’re sittin’ there eatin’ the breakfast
I
cooked for you.”

Link’s dad swal owed hard. “I was just sayin’—”

“I think it would be best if you didn’t say anything at al ,” she snapped.

Mr. Lincoln knew when he wasn’t going to win a battle. He’d given up and started waving the white flag at his wife as soon as their son was born.

“Not a word,” Mrs. Lincoln repeated.

“I expect I can do that.” Mr. Lincoln sighed at his

“I expect I can do that.” Mr. Lincoln sighed at his fork.

Link’s mom picked out the crispiest pieces of bacon from the serving platter and turned her attention back to Link, who had been pushing the food around on his plate while she wasn’t looking.

“Now that you mention it, you’ve been actin’ peculiar ever since you came home last night.”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Mention it.”

“Don’t you sass me. I was the one who said spending time with questionable folks only gets you a big fat question mark next to your own name.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Link stared down at the pile of white slush. His mom was no Amma in the kitchen. Amma would no more sit down to a plate of Mrs. Lincoln’s biscuits ’n’ gravy than she would bring home store-bought biscuits.

“Aren’t I always sayin’ that, dear?” She turned to Link’s dad, but she didn’t give him a second to respond. “I’m here to tel you, there’s no question mark by my good name. The Lincolns have kept the family name spit shine around these parts for generations.”

Link looked up in time to see gravy dribbling down his mother’s chin. His stomach lurched. He shoved his chair back from the table, then sprinted out of the room and up the stairs.

“Wesley Lincoln!” she cal ed after him.

“Mom, I think I’m gonna be—”

The sound of dry heaving floated down the stairs.

Link’s parents looked at each other. “That boy probably caught some kinda nasty virus,” Mrs.

Lincoln said. “I’m gonna cal over to Doc Asher’s and see if he can squeeze Wesley in today.”

Mr. Lincoln put down his fork, hesitating. But I guess al the browbeating had taken its tol , and he couldn’t resist. “Maybe it was somethin’ he ate.”

The look his wife shot him was so charged, it could’ve knocked a whole flock of pigeons off a telephone wire. Without saying a word, she grabbed every dish she could off the table and carried them over to the sink. It was al Mr. Lincoln could do to hold on to his half-eaten biscuit.

“I’l tel you one thing. People in this house should start listenin’ to me. If Mary Beth Sutton had listened when I told her that husband a hers was as crazy as a wolf starvin’ in a henhouse, she wouldn’t be in the fix she is now. Sissy Honeycutt told
me
that
she
heard from Loretta Snow that Mary Beth told
her
he took their son Waylon’s pickup and drove it al the way to Memphis. And they’d just gone and put new tires on it.”

Link’s mom kept talking as fast as she could. She had to. Otherwise, she would have to think about the fact that either something was wrong with her only son or something was wrong with her only biscuits ’n’

gravy recipe.

It would be hard for her to decide which was worse.

CHAPTER 2

The Birds, the Bees & Mötley Crüe

Up in Link’s room, everything was al wrong.

I mean, it always looked wrong because his mom hadn’t let him change anything in it since third grade.

She said the wal paper had at least ten good years left in it, and every good Baptist knew that vanity was the Devil’s business, anyway. The Star Wars border around his ceiling was stil there, Darth Vader peeling around the edges, right above the cross with Noah’s ark and the animals marching over it. His basketbal trophies, going al the way back to elementary school, were lined up above his Field Day ribbons.

And in case there was any doubt, a church camp poster read: GOD WANTS YOU!

Only Link had changed YOU to YOUTUBE in pencil, light enough that his mom couldn’t see it if she wasn’t wearing her good reading glasses, the ones she saved for the packages wrapped in brown paper that Marian sent from the library. Link liked to hide the glasses because he said it made his life a whole lot easier if his mom could only see half of what he did. Since I had delivered some of those packages with Liv, and knew that Mrs. Lincoln was reading romance novels, I hoped she never found her glasses. And this from a woman who made us turn off the television if the animals got too frisky on the Discovery Channel.

Link’s CDs were in a box under his bed, next to his comic book col ection and some back issues of
Hot Rod
magazine. But tonight even his favorite comic,
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
, and his favorite CD,
The Best of Heavy Metal Power
Ballads
, couldn’t distract the most distractible guy in town.

Al he could think about was his mom’s gravy and how it had smel ed like roadkil on a plate. It was time to pul out the big guns. The one girl who could keep his mind off anything—except her.

Ridley. His candy-striped pink and blond bad girl with a heart of gold. Or, at least, gold plate. Not that Link would want it any other way. In his eyes—and in hers—she was perfect.

He thought about Lena’s Claiming, which he had started thinking of as Hel Night. It had felt like someone tore a hole right through him when Ridley disappeared and he thought she was dead. And then like someone had duct-taped it closed again when he saw her alive just a few minutes later. She’d jumped into his arms and hugged him like she was a regular girl—for about two minutes. Those were an awesome two minutes, the best two minutes of his life.

But standing in front of the bathroom mirror now, Link knew something was different. He just couldn’t nail down exactly what. His spiky blond hair was stil spiked, his lopsided grin stil lopsided, his blue eyes stil blue. But they looked darker somehow. Maybe his mom had switched lightbulbs again, to save energy, or the whales, or whatever her friends at the Daughters of the American Revolution decided they were going to save this week. Usual y his soul.

The longer Link stared in the mirror looking for al the things that were wrong with him, the more he noticed the things that were different. Maybe even right. It seemed impossible, but from what he could see in the mirror, the baby face the girls teased him about was almost gone, replaced by the kind of jaw that could take a serious punch. He felt like his skin had been stretched over someone else’s face—a guy who was older, better looking, and bigger.

Because he was definitely bigger.

He tried to stand up straight, but he’d been slouching for so long that his body almost couldn’t remember how. He’d grown at least an inch in about two hours. Was that even possible? Link wasn’t sure, but he knew that when he tried to fal asleep last night, he had felt his bones cracking and groaning, like they were literal y stretching under his skin. And his skin tingled, his nerve endings more sensitive than when he’d skinned his knees break-dancing on the blacktop. Then there was his arm—

the pain that seemed to disappear overnight.

Link was looking good today, roadkil , puke, and

Link was looking good today, roadkil , puke, and al . The extra height was worth a little bone stretching, or whatever was happening. Especial y since he wasn’t just getting tal er. He felt like he was getting stronger, too. He glanced at the door, then flexed his biceps in the mirror. Yeah, he had some hard-core guns.

“Don’t make me fire these puppies,” he said to his image in the mirror.

It was sort of like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

He felt like himself. He stil rocked out to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. He stil couldn’t stop thinking about Ridley and becoming a famous drummer. But the body he was in didn’t feel like his body. It felt borrowed—or stolen. Crazy as that sounded.

Link splashed some water on his face with one hand. He was going to give
Power Ballads
another shot. He grabbed his iPod and flopped down onto his bed. When his back hit the mattress, he heard the sharp crack of wood splintering underneath him

—and half his bed crashed to the floor. His heart sped up, but he cranked Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home,” listening to the words he’d heard a hundred times before, hoping they would drown out his mom’s voice hol ering from downstairs.

The pee was warm and yel ow and, wel , it was pee.

A few hours later, Link was staring into the specimen container as if it could explain everything. He was pretty sure it couldn’t, but at least he hoped it would get his mom off his back. She was convinced his sudden physical changes were the result of steroids.

Link shook his head. “Kinda like Mountain Dew in the mornin’, after you let it sit by your bed al night long.”

Since he didn’t know what to make of his new physique any more than the rest of the stuff that was happening to him, Link gave up and screwed the lid on the container. He wrote his name on the sticker right where the nurse, Wanda Beezer, told him to. He stil hadn’t seen Doc Asher, but Link knew why he was there. His mom had made that clear, and it had nothing to do with the sling on his arm.

There was no way in H-E-double-hockey sticks you could ditch out on his mom’s cooking and puke two minutes later without ending up in the doctor’s office. Not unless you had a doctor’s note excusing you from eating in the first place.

If only she hadn’t served the white gravy. Anything but that. Maybe he could’ve choked down pancakes.

He shuddered at the thought, and the smel . Maybe not.

What was wrong with him?

He’d been trying to convince his mom he was fine, but he hadn’t been able to convince himself.

Maybe she was right. Not about the drugs, but maybe about the Devil. He didn’t know what was going on in his head—or his body—but none of it was normal. Not that the things going on in Link’s head were al that normal to begin with.

Stil , this was abnormal y abnormal.

“Are you takin’ drugs, Wesley?” his mom had demanded after she charged into his room right before lunch. “Gettin’ yourself al hopped up on the marijuana?” The way she said it, you’d think she was proposing to someone.
Marriage-you-wanna?

Link didn’t wanna. He didn’t want anything.

“No, ma’am. You want to go through my drawers again?” That would make twice in one day, but it was worth it to get her off his back. “No dirty magazines.

No Harry Potter movies. I promise.” She hadn’t thought his response was funny. He was just hoping she wouldn’t find his Iron Maiden CDs. That would be worse than marijuana.

She had her hands on her hips, which was never a good sign. “Al I know is you’re not eatin’, but you’re bigger than Bobby Watkins. So if it’s not the marijuana, you must be takin’ steroids like those footbal players they’re always talkin’ about on TV.”