Dangerous Boy Read online

  DANGEROUS

  BOY

  DANGEROUS

  BOY

  MANDY HUBBARD

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Dangerous Boy

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2012 Mandy Hubbard

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57501-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Super Agent Zoe,

  for being made of awesome.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  He stares straight at me with that intense smile of his, and my heart lodges in my throat. “Your time is nearly up, Harper.”

  But it’s not. It can’t be. I scramble to my feet and lunge past him, tearing through the doorway and into the hallway. I race down the stairs so fast I trip over my own feet, grabbing at the banister to save myself. But as I yank myself to a stop, my body swings around and my shoulder slams into the wall. Tears, instant, well in my eyes as my breath disappears.

  I turn back to the stairs and rush down the last few, to the first landing, but he’s on me, grabbing my hair and yanking me back. I elbow him hard in the gut, and he grunts, releasing me as he stumbles down a few steps and doubles over. “You bitch,” he grinds out.

  He’s blocking the stairs. When he stands again, anger blazing in his eyes, I whirl around and run back up the steps. I hit the top step, skidding on an area rug, barely saving myself.

  I cross the empty bedroom, putting my foot through the windowsill just as he darkens the doorway. My dress rides up as I duck under the windowpane.

  I’m only halfway out when he grabs my ankle, yanking hard. I scream and pull away, desperate. I lean back and kick violently, and my toe catches him on the chin. He curses and lets me go, and I fall onto the roof.

  My heart, already scrambling, turns into a thunderous roar as I skid on a leaf, tumbling down the slope of the rainslickened, moss-covered rooftop. There’s no way to stop myself. I grab at anything in sight as I roll toward the edge, catching myself on an attic vent near the gutters, but it’s not enough to stop my body’s movement. My legs swing out over the edge and dangle toward the ground as rain slides past me, pours over the edge of the rotten soffits. The darkened clouds make it hard to see anything but the light blazing from his bedroom window.

  I blink, trying to see through the raindrops, searching the roofline for his shadow.

  “You’re gonna regret that,” he says, spitting the words as he steps into view, looming high above me. I must have split his lip, because blood trickles down his chin, making him look all the more sinister. He’s on the roof above me, stepping slowly down toward the gutter. The muscles in my left arm tremble as my grip slides, until I’m hanging on with scarcely more than a fingertip.

  I wonder if this is how my mom felt before she died. If she hung on desperately, hoping someone would come in time to save her. If she knew, as her fingers slid, that she was about to die.

  I glance over my shoulder. There are no shrubs here, just too-long grass at least a dozen feet below. He takes another step toward me as the lightning flashes, and then my fingers slip, and I’m falling.

  I land, hard, on the dampened, muddy earth below, the wind slamming from my lungs. I lie there, my mouth open like a fish gasping for air, the rain blinding me.

  I’m alive.

  I’m really alive.

  When I finally regain my breath, I wipe my eyes free of the rain and look up at the roof, expecting to see him staring down at me.

  But he’s not there. I blink, searching the darkness for his face, but he’s gone. I climb to my feet, still cradling my arm and gasping for air as I tear across the lawn and into the dark shadows of the woods, right when the door to the house slams open.

  I’m not far into the tree line before I realize I’m no match for him. He’s crashing through the brush with the speed of a raging bull. My foot slips in the mud and I go down, slamming to the ground just as I hear his strange laughter behind me.

  My fingers touch something soft, hidden in the fallen leaves.

  Heart hammering out of control, I push the leaves aside, and a scream dies in my throat. I cover my mouth with my hands and stare, gagging.

  Two glassy, lifeless eyes stare back at me, deeply sunken, emotionless. His face is pale, waxy.

  Dead.

  It’s his uncle, half-buried in the dampened earth under a big cedar tree.

  He killed his uncle.

  This whole time, he wasn’t away on business, he was dead and rotting. The horror building in my chest, threatening to suffocate me, nearly makes me break down in sobs, but I can’t. There’s no time.

  I climb to my feet, nausea swelling as I take off again, desperate, frantic for a savior, a safety net, something.

  Anything.

  The rain drips down my face, into my eyes, making it hard to see where I’m going. I leap over a tree root, the panic overwhelming me. My shoulder is numb now, completely devoid of pain.

  He’s getting closer with every second. He curses as a tree branch snaps, and I realize he’s closing in on me. I push faster, my feet slipping as the rain deafens the sound of my muddy footsteps. />
  I’ll never make it to the road, to another house. He lives so far away from anything. I have to hide or outsmart him or…

  Or he’ll kill me.

  Lightning cracks across the sky, for the first time in many minutes, and then the thunder rumbles, slow and quiet at first, and then building until it drowns out everything else. I force my screaming muscles to move faster and faster as I careen through the trees like a bat out of hell.

  Too late, I realize what I’ve done. Ahead and below, the Green River rages. There’s a cliff. It must be two hundred feet tall, towering over the valley.

  A beautiful vantage point for him to catch up, corner me.

  He steps out of the tree line just a half-dozen feet away from me, smiling, his hair plastered to his face and his eyes dark. Tears swim in my vision, mingling with the raindrops sliding down my skin. It can’t be this way.

  It can’t end like this.

  CHAPTER ONE

  One month earlier…

  I stare out the windshield of the Jeep, watching two Holstein calves grazing in the field beyond the barbwire fence. One of them has a spot that looks like Mickey Mouse, and I can’t stop gawking at it.

  “Earth to Harper,” comes the voice beside me.

  I twist around and meet the dark brown eyes of Logan, my almost-boyfriend. We’ve been dating a few weeks now, but I’m not sure if we’re exclusive. I’m afraid to ask because it seems too good to be true. Girls like me don’t get boys like him. “Sorry, I was spacing out.”

  He fake pouts and I giggle, but the laughter dies in my throat when he leans toward me, his dark brown hair sliding onto his forehead. My eyes slip closed as our lips meet and his fingers tangle in my hair.

  I lose all sense of time until someone—not Logan—clears their throat and I jerk away.

  “Ew,” says a familiar voice. I turn and see my cousin Adam standing beside my door, smirking. I want to reach out and knock his ballcap off his head, like I used to when we were kids. When he wore caps every day, because he’s always hated his more-red-than-brown hair.

  I twist around and look through the back window of the Jeep, realizing Allie is standing there on the sidewalk, waiting.

  “Oh, shut up,” I say, but I’m grinning now, even as heat rises to my cheeks. Logan and I share a look—a look that tells me he’s not at all embarrassed, which somehow makes me feel better—and then we unbuckle our seatbelts and slide out of the Jeep. I join Adam and his girlfriend—my best friend—Allie, who looks so unbelievably pleased I can’t believe it doesn’t hurt to smile so wide. Allie’s been trying to hook me up with half the guys in a twenty-mile radius. She can’t believe I’m dating the one guy she’d never met before our first date. Logan joins me on the sidewalk, playfully knocking shoulders with me.

  “Moo,” comes a familiar voice behind me.

  The four of us turn to see Bick walking across the drive with that lazy, crooked smile of his, hands shoved deep into an old Carhartt jacket. Technically his name is Victor, but everyone calls him Bick. Partly because it rhymes with Vick, but mostly because he’s the only guy at Enumclaw High School who can grow a full-fledged beard, and once Adam realized Bic was a razor, the name stuck.

  “Moo yourself,” I say, even though it probably doesn’t make sense.

  “Jealous of my mad skills, DQ?” he asks, his grin widening.

  “You know it,” I say. “Cattle calls are just so impossible to master.”

  “DQ?” Logan asks, interlacing his fingers with mine casually; warm butterflies swirl in my stomach. I wish we were alone right now.

  “Dairy Queen,” Allie supplies.

  “Technically it’s Dairy Princess,” I mutter, even though I know resistance is futile.

  “Yeah, didn’t Harper tell you she was Dairy Princess last year?” Adam asks, turning toward the double doors behind him. He holds one open, and Allie slips by.

  Logan looks down at me, and I blush, following Allie through the door. “No, she neglected to tell me that,” he says. I can feel his eyes on me, but I resist meeting his gaze.

  “Harper, I’m disappointed. This is first date material,” Bick says, following Adam through the door, until we’re all inside Frankie’s Pizza.

  “I guess it didn’t come up,” I say, inhaling the warm, delicious scent of tomato, cheese, and garlic. The place is packed with people from school. No surprise there. There’s not exactly much else to do in Enumclaw, Washington. Except run for Dairy Princess—which is pretty much like a pageant with cow trivia thrown in for good measure—and come up with stupid nicknames for your friends.

  We ignore the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign and plunk down at the last available booth near the windows. Bick borrows a spare seat from another table and sits at the end. Last summer, before Logan moved here from Cedar Cove, Oregon, to start his junior year, Bick would have been sitting next to me, not in a spare chair at the end of the table.

  I try not to notice how awkward it is, because Bick’s not the sort of guy you give your sympathy to. He’d just mistake it for pity, and he doesn’t do pity.

  “I really don’t feel like going to school tomorrow,” Adam sighs.

  “When do you ever?” I ask, kicking his foot under the table. He glares and kicks me back, like the big brother I never wanted.

  “Hey. Some of us weren’t born geniuses,” Bick says, reaching over to pluck a menu out of the rack on the table, and then studying it as if he doesn’t have the whole thing memorized already.

  I roll my eyes. “An IQ of one-thirty-nine does not make me a genius.”

  “We know, we know. You’re short one point,” Allie says, her blonde curls bouncing as she shakes her head.

  “Don’t give me that! It was your idea for us to take the tests.”

  “You have an IQ of one-thirty-nine?” Logan asks, squeezing my knee under the table. “That’s amazing.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I say, looking out the window as a few orange leaves swirl in the autumn breeze before descending to the cold sidewalks. It’s not like I’m some brainiac or something. I get good grades because I have a lot of time to study. When your best friend constantly ditches you to hang out with her boyfriend—who happens to be your cousin, the other person you normally hang out with—and your dad is too busy to notice you, there’s not much else to do. “We did tests in August, a few weeks before I met you,” I say, turning back to look at Logan again. “Allie still has some left over. You should take one,” I say, grinning up at him. “You know, if you think you’re an actual genius, and not just an almost-genius.”

  “Challenge accepted,” he says.

  I allow myself a small smirk. I knew he would agree. Logan’s like that, never one to back down.

  The waitress walks up, hands us each a glass of water and a wrapped straw. But before she can scamper away, Adam yanks the menu out of Bick’s hand, putting it back into the table rack, and orders our usual two pizzas and a round of Cokes.

  “You guys really like pepperoni, huh?” says Logan.

  “Pepperoni, sausage, meatballs…really anything that combines meat with cheese,” answers Bick, patting his stomach.

  Allie rolls her eyes. “Um, right. Anyway…we still going to go to the haunted maze this weekend? I have to go to an out of town race with my parents on Saturday and Sunday, but Friday’s free.”

  I immediately cringe. Somehow I’d hoped my friends would magically forget about our tradition.

  “What haunted maze?” Logan asks, leaning forward. He rests his chin on my shoulder, so that his breath tickles my ear.

  I try to act casual, ignoring the warm tingles sweeping down my back.

  “There’s this insanely creepy one in Buckley every year. Right off the highway,” Adam says. He twists the paper at the end of his straw and then blows the wrapper off.

  It sails across the table and narrowly misses Bick. He grabs it in midair and tosses it back onto the table. I dart a look at Logan, but he doesn’t seem to mind their childish antics.

&
nbsp; “I wanna go. I’m not sure if I have to milk, but I’ll check,” Bick says.

  I nod. Bick and I both live on dairy farms. I have some basic chores, but my dad never makes me do the actual milkings. Right now I kind of wish I had the same excuse. “Have fun with that.”

  “You know it, DQ,” he says, grinning.

  “Count me in,” Logan says, picking up his own straw. He shoots the wrapper at me, and it somehow slips into my shirt.

  When he gives me a mischievous, flirty smile, I know he did it on purpose, and I shake my head, fighting the heat rising in my cheeks. “Don’t even think about it,” I say, batting his hand away and fishing the paper out of my top.