The Unleashed by Danielle Vega

Author:Danielle Vega [Vega, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

14

Hendricks hesitated outside her front door, one hand grasping the doorknob. She could hear her parents inside, the steady rise and fall of their voices. She knew that, if she went in, they’d have dinner as a family, and Brady would be gurgling happily in his highchair, and her dad would want to talk about the construction on the Steele House lot, and her mom would want to know whether anyone had asked Hendricks to prom, and Brady would smile at her and throw his peas.

She sighed deeply. It was all so normal, so happy, but the idea of sitting through a whole night like that made her feel claustrophobic. And she still had so many unanswered questions swimming in her mind. She took her hand off the doorknob and backed down the stairs. She couldn’t do it. She was still too raw.

Pulling her jacket tighter around her shoulders, she turned and jogged the rest of the way down the stairs. Once she reached the sidewalk, she just started walking.

She wasn’t sure where she was going. Without meaning to, she thought of the walk she’d taken with Eddie around the neighborhood back when they were first becoming friends.

You don’t get it, he’d told her. There’s something rotten here.

Rotten, that was the word he’d used to describe the town. It made Hendricks think of something black and decaying just beneath Drearford’s sidewalks, something crawling up toward the surface, like mold. She suddenly realized how selfish it had been of her to try and get Eddie to come back here, now that he’d finally gotten away. Eddie had hated it here. Did she really expect him to return, for her? Because she missed him? How selfish was that?

If he had turned into that dark, evil thing she’d seen last night, she knew she was to blame.

She shuddered and kept walking. Down block after block. Around corners and across streets. Hendricks stared at her feet, watching her shoes rise and fall over the cracked and dirty pavement. She wondered whether she could just keep walking, out of this town, this life.

But when she finally looked up again, she realized she’d circled back without meaning to, down Eddie’s old block, right up to Eddie’s old house.

She exhaled through her nose. The house looked just like she remembered. The paint had long ago faded, showing weathered gray siding and rusted gutters. Old plastic toys littered the yard, and a car without wheels sat on cinder blocks beside the back shed. A few of the upstairs windows had cardboard taped over the glass. Wherever Eddie had ended up, it had to be better than this.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

The wind blew past, the sound a low moan in the trees. Hendricks closed her eyes and saw flickering candlelight, Eddie’s dark hair. She was back in the cellar at Steele House. She’d just told Eddie about everything that went down at her old school with Grayson, but instead of trying to make it better or convince her that it was all over, he’d just listened.

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