Once

Forty Eight

Elle walked slowly back to the kitchen table, lowering herself back into her chair in a kind of daze. Everything was exactly as it had been a minute before. In fact, for a brief bizarre second she found herself wondering whether she might have imagined going to speak to David at the door at all. Perhaps it had just been a particularly lucid daydream.

But it had definitely happened. She'd just stared David Wrexham straight in his dreamy golden eyes and said to him I don't fancy you.

And now she found herself wondering: is that true? Was she angry at David because she didn't fancy him? Or because she did?

She looked down at her hands. Her fingers were shaking slightly, surging with sudden adrenaline. She focused on pressing them flat on the table, forcing them to be still.

How did David do this to her? Why did he have her quaking after a conversation that lasted less than two minutes?

And why was it that every time for the past week her mind hadn't been on magical fairy tale monsters coming to life to kill people, it had instead been firmly fixated on David Bloody Wrexham?

It was undeniable that there was something strange about him. Something intense, something vital, something impossible to ignore.

Something, you might say, almost magical. Yeah, that was it. There was something definitely magical about him.

Elle felt a cold shiver creep up her arms and over her shoulders. She shuddered convulsively, so severely that she dashed her coffee cup to the floor. It shattered to pieces, splashing a huge pool of coffee in every direction.

"Shit," she whispered to herself, grabbing some cloths and the dustpan and brush from under the sink.

She began to brush up the mess, frowning to herself as she did so. What had made her do that? Ten minutes ago she had been so completely calm she felt as if she might drift into a coma any second. Now she was such a bag of nerves she was smashing mugs to pieces.

It was David, she realised. The thought of David was having her leaping out of her skin.

But for the first time it wasn't some trivial girlish wondering whether she might fancy him or not. It was a sudden creeping notion that perhaps something wasn't quite right. As if she'd just noticed something that she hadn't seen before - something that made her shudder with a growing sense of dread.

It wasn't that he was a bad person. It's possible to suddenly notice that about a person, even if you have believed up to that moment that they were perfectly nice and pleasant. They might be the nicest person in the world to you, but then you might see them scream for no reason at a waiter in a restaurant, or kick a dog out of their way. There were more sociopaths in the world than most people would like to admit.

But with David it wasn't like that. She was almost adamantly sure that he wasn't a bad person. There was nothing bad about him. If anything he was too good. Perfect, in fact. And sometimes, too much perfection can be a distinctly creepy thing.

And suddenly strange little things were beginning to come back to her.

Their first walk through the woods on Friday - how she'd thought, even then, how this boy was too perfect to be true. Charming was the word she'd used. A word she didn't remember ever actually using in a conversation before.

On Saturday, he'd been the only one to believe her about what she'd seen in that dream about Marigold Loxley. But now she thought of it, wasn't that strange? Why the hell would he believe one word of it?

On Sunday, he'd been the one with her when she went to see Mr Luzlic. He'd spent the whole time making out like he didn't believe a word of it, trying to trip up Mr Luzlic in everything he said. Why would he have done that, except to try and throw Elle off the scent by making her doubt the one person who could help her?

It had been David with her when she saved Russell from the wolf. When she realised Jax was in danger from the giant.

David who had distracted her with those glowing eyes, and what she had thought at the time was a half-lean in, on the steps of Rose Bryers' house - when at the same moment Bianca Eirwen was being poisoned with an apple only fifty yards away.

David. Every single time it had been David.

And there were other things that were beginning not to add up in the light of this new realisation. Surely - surely he had heard her yesterday, when she called out to him before going down under the stage? He'd only been a few paces ahead, after all.

He'd been late to school on Monday morning. The morning Mr Luzlic disappeared.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but all of this craziness had only started the minute David suddenly arrived in town. Surely that had to be the biggest and most damning coincidence of them all!

Elle, kneeling on the floor, sat back on her feet. Her eyes went glazed and distant. She felt as if she might be sick.

All this time... David...

David had said to her yesterday that he felt a person was behind all this. That it was all being orchestrated by some supervillain mastermind. He'd said it at the exact same moment he'd been talking about red herrings and magic tricks. Misdirection.

Maybe he'd been right. Maybe there was someone behind it after all.