Free The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart by Lauren DeStefano

they don’t deserve respect.”
    â€œYes, sir,” Marybeth said. She nudged Lionel, and he echoed an uncomfortable “Yes, sir” of his own.
    They turned back into the graveyard, and Lionel whispered, “Did it go to sleep?”
    â€œNo,” Marybeth said. “I can still feel it. Like goose bumps, but on my bones.”
    Lionel was quite angry with the blue creature. It could have killed Marybeth, and more than ever he wanted it gone. He had never been so infuriated by a creature in all his life.
    But even so, the blue creature had hidden behind him for sanctuary, and that was progress.
    Marybeth stopped walking. She squeezed her eyes shut and balled her fists, and whispered, “Be calm, you silly thing.”
    â€œWhat is it?” Lionel asked. He was getting much better at managing conversations, he thought.
    â€œIt doesn’t like it here,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to explain it. It just feels . . . wrong. All wrong.”
    She looked as though she wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She walked to the gate and picked up the library books where they’d left them and said, “Let’s go.”
    Lionel followed her. “Go where? Is it telling you something?”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter. I’m done listening to it today,” Marybeth said. “Let’s just return the books and go home.”

    After they returned from the graveyard, Marybeth was subdued. Lionel invited her with him to feed the squirrels, but she went to her room and closed the door instead.
    At dinner that night, when Mrs. Mannerd laid out the serving dishes, Marybeth didn’t even put any food on her plate. She just sat there, staring at the empty white plate with tired eyes. No one noticed, of course. They never did. No one except for Lionel.
    And no one but Lionel saw the way she went up the stairs after the dishes had been cleared. Slowly, and against the railing as the older ones ran past her.
    After she had brushed her teeth and washed her face, Lionel was waiting for her in the hallway.
    â€œIs it you in there?” he asked.
    â€œYes, it’s me,” she said, and to Lionel’s great relief he knew she was telling the truth. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I don’t know for how much longer.”
    She hugged her arms across her chest. A few weeks ago, Lionel might have compared her to a hatchling whose mother would never return to the nest, leaving her to fend for herself against the predators that lurked when the stars dotted the evening sky. But there was something different to her now. Though she looked the part of a hatchling, when the shadows loomed around her under the darkened sky, she would not be their prey.
    She would be a predator.

CHAPTER
    10
    When Marybeth climbed down from her bunk bed early Monday morning, she was quite awake.
    It had taken more than an hour, but she’d gotten the blue creature to feel calm inside her skin. She hummed to it, a melody that she’d heard the late Ms. Gillingham, Mrs. Mannerd’s spinster sister, hum as she tended to things around the house. Perhaps it belonged to a song she had heard, or perhaps she had made it up. But Marybeth had always liked it. It seemed, to her, the sort of melody that would fill a nursery’s walls as a mother lulled her baby to sleep.
    The blue creature had liked it as well. It was fond of Marybeth. Somehow she knew that. It enjoyed soft voices and gentle melodies. Perhaps that was why it had takento her. There was no other soul so patient and soothing as Marybeth in that red house.
    But fond of her or not, the blue creature had to go. Marybeth did not enjoy hissing at the mailman or running out into traffic when the creature was spooked. But worse than that were the dreams. Strange, haunting visions of a boy with a face made from a mosaic of blue buttons, and an ache in her chest, and a terrible sense of grief.
    The blue creature made Marybeth