The Devil Inside

9: Trouble In Paradise

Calla stepped outside to a pleasant surprise: the relentless heat had finally abadated.

It's about time. October had fallen hard and fast, bringing with it the hope of cool air and blue skies. And finally—finally—the town had gotten its wish.

Calla took a deep breath. She wasn't sure what had driven her outside. Cooper wasn't due for another twenty minutes.

Maybe it was the dream, she mused.

Calla rarely dreamt. When she slept, she slept soundly. But last night had been different. She'd been plagued by strange images—some of them memories, others fantastical nonsense that her imagination had conjured. Rachel had been there, laughing on her bed. Except her bed was different from the one she'd known; this bed was outfitted with dinosaur-themed sheets.

And then the dream had shifted. Rachel evaporated in a puff of smoke. Calla stood alone in the woods—the same place she'd visited in her dreams at the hospital. Blood smeared the base of the tree to her left. Cory was nowhere to be found, though his voice still managed to fill her head with poison.

My love for her is so great, that if all the leaves on the trees were tongues, they would not be able to express it.

Calla had woken then, the words of a dead boy ringing in her head. Something about the dream had unnerved her. It reminded her of the empty room.

Calla shook off the remnants of the dream and walked to the old oak tree at the back of their property, navigating its tangled roots with ease. She sat, rough bark biting at her skin, her clothes. Her eyes wandered to the spot where she'd once half-buried the mangled body of Cooper's black cat.

What had he called it? Mr. Cat? Mr. Kitty? She snorted at the absurdity of it.

She'd been just a child back then, sweaty with nerves as she washed the blood off the kitchen knife in the sink. Her heart had been racing—not with dread, but with exhilaration. She'd done something terrible. She knew she'd done something terrible, something that her mother would have never forgiven her for.

And she'd gotten away with it.

Only the boy next door had ever known the truth of it—that the little girl who lived down the road was not a little girl at all, but a beast with black eyes and a black heart, if even she had one.

A wolf in sheep's clothing. He'd been right about her from the first.

Calla leaned back against the trunk of the oak tree, speculative. She hadn't enjoyed the cat's squirming—she remembered that much. And the noises...she'd never known something could be so loud. She'd felt a wild rush of panic in that moment, her hands buried in the cat's fur. What if her mother caught her? What then?

But mingled with that panic had been a cold, clinical sort of fascination. All of it warring within her at barely seven years old.

One thing had been absolutely certain. As she stood there at the kitchen sink, watching the blood disappear down the drain, she'd felt alive. The entire ordeal had lasted less than ten minutes, but it had chased away the growing emptiness inside her. An emptiness born of suffocation, because she could not be what she was. She had built a wall—had donned a mask—to survive in the world.

That burden was far too much to bear, too much to ask of a child. And it was exactly what had driven her to take that knife.

She'd never known what sort of darkness lived inside her. Not then, and not now. She only knew that it was there. Waiting. Watching.

Her constant companion.

The laughing boy—the one with the golden curls—popped into her head then. Another memory, hovering just beyond her reach. Just like the cat, darting away from her sticky fingers.