33
The Devil, The Devil
When Logan woke up, she was fairly certain she was dead.
Slowly, pieces of the world around her came together like a mosaic in the back of her skull. The surface she lay on was too narrow to be a bed, the walls too close. She rocked up and down, each bump searing her muscles. Outside, trees blurred into a mass of green and black.
She was in a car.
She was in the back seat of Paris’s car.
Logan pushed herself up and rubbed her eyes. The seat under her head was damp with lake water. She was being taken to either the police station or the hospital, but either way, she was being taken by the father of the boy who’d just tried to kill her. It was possible that John and Paul had been arrested, too, but something told her they’d probably been released with a slap on the wrist and nothing else. Even attempted murder was a forgivable offense in this hell town.
“Logan,” Paris said from the front seat. “How’re you holding up?”
Logan stabilized herself, dizzied by the force of sitting up. Wet hair clung to the back of her neck. She brushed fingertips along her cheek and it throbbed at the touch, swollen and crusted with blood. “I, uh…” She trailed off. “Where am I?”
“On your way to the hospital. You got pretty scratched up back there.” Paris didn’t look back at her. “It’s a long drive into the city. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions on the way in.”
Logan blinked out the front windshield. The road was narrower than the highway she remembered. The trees closed in like a tunnel, headlights cutting through the filmy dark. She’d driven into the city with Brandon once and it hadn’t looked like this. “Sure, I guess. How long was I out?”
“Only about fifteen minutes. Are you feeling okay?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” she lied. She wasn’t okay, but she hadn’t been in a long time. “Did you arrest the guys who did it?”
Paris gave her a thin-lipped smile through the rearview mirror. “John’s at home. He’ll be getting a talk when I get back.”
Logan swallowed. “Like, a parent talk or a police talk?”
“You’re funny,” Paris said.
Logan was no expert on the law, but she was fairly certain she’d just been the victim of a verifiable crime. The kind that people went to prison for on TV. Instead of arresting everyone involved, Paris had just sent them all home. All but her. Paris hadn’t called an ambulance. She shrank into the back seat and clutched the seatbelt.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” Paris said. “From the beginning.”
“Okay.” Logan cleared her throat. “Me and Ashley were at the lake, just talking. Then John and Paul showed up and—”
Paris shook his head. “Before that. John says he saw you two at the graveyard. What were you doing there?”
Logan narrowed her eyes.
“There were shovels against the fence. I found one of the graves partially dug up. Did you two find anything?”
Logan peered into the front seat. Paris’s knuckles were a sickly yellow with bruising, and red welts like claw marks tracked all the way up his forearm. On his ring finger, a puckered indent was purple where a wedding ring should have been. He kept his eyes trained forward on the road, but his stare was miles long. She shook off the swelling sense of dread that curdled in her chest and focused on breathing. “We weren’t at the graveyard.”
“Huh.” Paris turned the cruiser along the curve of the road. It skidded off of pavement and onto gravel. “Do you know what prompted the attack?”
“No.”