The Heavens Rise Read Online Free Page A

man would have craved the sound of her screams, and those did not figure into this little fantasy of his. In fact, he was immensely proud of the cleanliness of this vision, of its lack of common violence, of his own ability to be perfectly content with just this focused display of pure physical dominance and its flowing, unstoppable result.
    •   •   •
    He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him.
    In the days that followed, before he made a decision that changed everything, she vanished wherever he appeared, out a side door in the locker room, into the warren of rooms behind the theater during lunch.The injustice of this began to bore into him more deeply than her rejection of him out in the swamp. It was as if she’d sensed the bloody fantasy that had coursed through him as she’d run for her car and was determined to let him simmer in it. Not just simmer. Drown altogether.
    He blamed her for the deep throbbing ache in his jaw that alerted him to the fact that he’d been gritting his teeth for an hour. He blamed her for the sickness that had come over him later that night, even though he knew those disgusting little crawly things in the pool were probably to blame. (The chills and the nausea had gripped him while he was still in the car on the way home with his father. Of course, his dad hadn’t pressed for an explanation; he lived in such terror that his only son would turn out to be a bone smoker, Marshall could talk his way out of anything with even the vaguest story implying he’d been alone with a member of the opposite sex.)
    And then came the final and most crushing blow.
    They were back together. Nikki and Anthem, Cannon’s most perfect couple. After all the work Marshall had done, trust had been restored. How was it even possible? As he lay awake at night, seething with rage, those footsteps up the oyster-shell driveway toward Elysium’s darkened pool seemed like the last few seconds before an Olympic diver hit the water at a contorted angle, the chance of a medal rippling out away from him as he plunged under the surface. But the moment he couldn’t wash from his mind was the last words Nikki had said to him before fear had gripped her entirely.
    Watch out for snakes.
    •   •   •
    The Delongpre residence was a two-story Greek Revival on Prytania Street, just a block from Lafayette Cemetery. The second-floor porch was big enough for a swing, and a high wrought-iron fence protected the front yard. But the driveway, an expanse of red brick, was open and exposed to the street, and that’s where the family’s hunter-green FordExplorer sat with its cargo door half open, the dome light sending a soft spill of light over its leather cream-colored seats.
    Half a block away, Marshall sat behind the wheel of his father’s BMW, watching Millie and Nikki Delongpre load their overnight bags and groceries.
    In the locker room at school, he had overheard talk of a party, a birthday party for Nikki’s mother. But it wouldn’t just be a celebration of Millie Delongpre’s forty-seventh. It was also the first social occasion Anthem and Nikki would be attending together following their reunion, their official coming-out-after-coming-apart party. So far, there had been no sign of the man of the hour, no glimpse of Anthem Landry’s cherry-red F-150 pickup truck. Maybe he was meeting them tomorrow. At almost nine o’clock, the Delongpres were certainly getting a late start.
    The party would be held at Elysium the following evening, and when Marshall imagined the place with lanterns strung from its cypress branches, when he thought of well-dressed guests standing and chatting in the same spot where he hurled Nikki into the pool, he was filled with a silent, focusing rage that distracted him from the stapled-shut grocery bag shifting on the passenger-side floor of his father’s BMW.
    If he waited in the car any longer, he would lose his opportunity.
    He could still hear Nikki’s parents calling