by Jus Accardo
“You make it sound so simple,” Cade remarked. He nodded over the edge. “I don’t like it, but as you said, no other choice.”
“Zactly.” I peered over the side of the cliff again. God. It was a long way down. But, at least there was water. If I fell…I’d be screwed. I’d never learned how to swim—not that it mattered much. There was only a 50 percent chance I’d hit the water. Some of those rocks came out pretty far. Just far enough to smash my head like an old Halloween pumpkin on the way down…
I took the hoodie from Cade and tied it around my waist.
Noah pulled off his jacket and handed half to me. Then, wrapping the other half around his wrists and gripping tight, he leaned back. “Just like rock climbing,” he said with a wink. He even smiled. Sort of.
I positioned myself at the edge and gave the jacket a good tug to make sure he had a firm grip. Seemed solid. “Too bad I’ve never been climbing.”
For an instant, there was a spark of sadness in his eyes. But he blinked and it was gone, replaced by the cold, volatile stare I was becoming disturbingly accustomed to. “Let’s get this over with.”
Getting down to the makeshift ledge was easier than I expected. There were more than enough crevices to use as footholds, and Noah’s jacket provided sufficient leverage. When I felt the solid surface beneath me, I kept a tight hold on the jacket and pushed down with one foot to test it. Carefully, I eased more weight until I was standing on my own. Solid. Good. Now all I could hope for was that it stayed that way.
“Okay, Penny, here’s what we’re gonna do.” I shifted so that my back was flat against the cliff and untied the hoodie from around my waist, drawing her attention to the knife.
Whatever you do, don’t look down…
“I’m going to toss this to you and you’re going to catch it with your free hand. Use the blade to cut yourself free, but make sure you hang on tight or you’re going to fall.” No sense in sugarcoating things. She had to know the score. “As soon as you have a good grip, carefully swing your legs so that you sway toward me. I’m going to grab you, and our friends up there will pull us up. Got it?”
She didn’t respond.
“Penny?”
Her lip trembled and her head moved slowly from side to side. Still no response.
The last thing we needed was for her to go into shock. It was time for some tough love. “Suck it up,” I snapped. The sound of my voice echoed off the rocks, then faded into the distance. “You need to soldier up or you’re going to fall. Going to die. Got it?”
For a second I thought maybe I’d made things worse, but after a moment, she nodded. Worked every time.
“Okay.” I grabbed one of the sleeves of my hoodie tight and leaned forward as far as I dared. “We can do this.” It wasn’t clear who I was trying to convince. Her, me, or Cade and Noah up top. They both lingered at the edge, watching silently. This whole thing was a good, solid plan in theory. The problem with theories, though, is that they didn’t always pan out.
One swing. Two swings. Three… It took five tries for her to grab the sleeve of the hoodie, and when she did, there was a moment my heart nearly stopped. The ring on the edge of the knife slipped through the threads and I was sure it would fall to the water below. But it didn’t. With shaking fingers, she managed to fumble the blade free and went to work sawing through the rope.
I held my breath. Each second that ticked by felt like an hour. In order to hang on to the rope while cutting it, she had to rock the blade back and forth across a small piece below her wrist. The movement made the trunk shake, and my heart hammered double-time the entire way.
After several of the longest minutes of my life, the rope snapped and Penny gasped in surprise. “Now! Carefully swing toward me.”
She began gently moving her feet back and forth. I made several attempts to grab her as she swayed near, but it was no good. I was too far away.
“I need to get closer,” I yelled to the top.
A moment later, Noah appeared over the edge. He was on his stomach, leaning over the side. The end of his jacket dropped down. “I’ve got it. Try now.”
I wrapped the sleeve around my hand twice and leaned forward, praying that he had a firm grip. My toes curled over the edge. Sweat broke out on the back of my neck and my pulse hammered. Extending my hand, I wiggled my fingers and said, “Again. Swing toward me again.”
Above my head, small pieces of rubble and bits of dirt shook from the base of the tree. The more she moved, the looser the roots became. The gravity of the situation hit me right then. If the tree trunk pulled loose, there was a good chance it was taking me down with it. The rock I was on was small. There’d be no way for me to avoid it as it fell.
“I can’t reach,” Penny cried.
“Yes you can,” I insisted, even though I wasn’t sure anymore. Every second that ticked by poked more holes in my plan. She had to swing carefully, and it just wasn’t giving her enough momentum. “Listen to me. When I say go, you’re going to kick toward me as hard as you can.”
“But you said—”
“Do it!” I screamed. “Now!”
She kicked back and swung both feet hard in my direction. That time I was able to grab her calves. I didn’t think. Didn’t hesitate. I pulled as hard as I could.
“Hurry!” Noah yelled. “My jacket is ripping.”
The trunk of the tree groaned and buckled.
“You’re almost there, Kori,” Cade called from above.
He was right. Just…a…little bit…more. With one final tug, I pulled her onto the rock. She let go of the rope just in time. The trunk of the tree came free of the rock. I held my breath and pulled her forward, smashing myself against the side of the cliff, hoping that the roots didn’t drag us down too. It sailed overhead, the bulk of it missing us by what felt like inches.
“You guys okay?” Noah appeared over the edge again, followed by Cade. He shimmied as far down as he could and extended both hands.
“Go ahead,” I said to Penny. She was shaking uncontrollably and looked like she was going to pass out at any moment. That, or puke. Neither option was good. “They’ll pull you up.”
With Noah’s help, they lifted her to safety, then dragged me back up. I’d never been so happy to have grass beneath me. For the longest moment I just lay there, face against the wet grass and heart thumping. Once I caught my breath, I sat up.
“A young man did this,” she said, pulling the tips of her sleeves up over her fingers with a shiver. “He just jumped me and…” She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. “I must have passed out. When I woke up, he was tying me to that tree. He wasn’t making any sense. He told me I would die there.” Wrapping both arms around herself, a violent tremor went through her. “He left me there to die.”
I’d never been the touchy-feely type, but I threw my arms around her shoulders and squeezed. “You’re safe now.”
“Noah will take you to the Fort Hannity Military Base,” Cade said. “You’ll be safe there.”
Noah nodded and led her away without question.
As they faded from view, Cade took my hand and gestured to the woods. His lips tilted upward, a smile so bright it could have blotted out the sun itself. “See if we can go two for two?”
Chapter Twelve
We’d caught a lucky break with Penny Bloom. Not only had we found her, but as it turned out, she was the first they’d managed to save since leaving home. Like the other incarnations of me, Cade and Noah were always just a hair too late. Dylan always got there first. Cade was different. Lighter and more alive. He didn’t stand as stiff or scowl as much. Saving Penny Bloom had seemingly breathed new life into him.
I wanted to take Penny’s rescue as a sign that maybe this time would be different. That Dylan’s crazy revenge cycle would be broken. Unfortunately, if our current progress on Miles was any indication, our lucky streak had been short-lived.
When we didn’t find Miles at his home and came up empty-handed on any clue as to
where he might be, we headed back to my place. Cade’s mood fell with each passing moment. Noah still hadn’t gotten back, and I was sure we’d get a call from the commander long before he did. I tried to console myself into thinking he’d be grateful we’d gone out and saved a life. Truthfully, though, he was bound to be pissed. I’d disobeyed the direct order to stay under lock and key.
I rummaged through the fridge, looking for something to munch on while Cade sat at the kitchen table and stewed. He hadn’t said much since we’d gotten back, but I could tell he wanted to. He was happy to have found Penny, but there was an underlying frustration eating away at him. Maybe it was the small victory. They’d succeeded in doing something they never had before—saving Penny. The pressure to keep up the trend seemed to be wearing on him.
I settled on a pint of fudge brownie ice cream, grabbed two spoons, and plopped into the chair across from him. “Talk to me.”
He scowled at the table. “About?”
I deposited one of the spoons in front of him, then slid the ice cream between us. “Anything. Tell me what it’s been like. You bounce from world to world, but technically you don’t really go anywhere. That has to be a head trip… Does it hurt? When you…skip?”
He eyed the box of ice cream for a moment before jabbing it violently with his spoon. Putting the spoon into his mouth, he shook his head slowly. “You get a little dizzy. Feel slightly displaced for a minute or two. No pain though. The whole process is very seamless.”
Seamless?
Yeah. That was exactly the word I would use to describe inter-reality travel…
“Have you ever bumped into yourself?” I scooped up another spoon. “Like, another version of you?”
He frowned and scrunched up his nose just a bit. Like he’d just tasted something foul. “I have. Right out of the gate, in fact. It’s the reason we look ourselves up first thing.”
“And nothing bad happened?”
He cocked his head to the side. With his right brow lifted just slightly above the left, his face took on a sort of whimsical tone. “Bad?”
“Like, you know, paradox inducing?”
He snorted. “You could skip a million times, and in each place, sit down to dinner with yourself, and nothing bad would happen. The world continues to spin.”
“Huh.” I took another spoon of the ice cream. “That’s disappointing.”
His right brow lifted higher and I kind of hated the way, despite the situation we were in, it made me notice him more. Cade was turning out to be more than just a soldier. Normally that’s all I saw these guys as. But Cade…Cade was more than that. “It’s disappointing that we haven’t torn a hole in the fabric of time and space?”
I smiled. “Kind of takes some of the mystery out of it, ya know?”
His lips twitched. “You’re very strange…”
“Careful, soldier boy. On this Earth strange is actually a compliment.”
He set his spoon down and leaned forward just a hair. “Isn’t that a coincidence? Mine too.”
Heat rushed to my cheeks. “Yeah? Well—” The phone started ringing. I leaned to my right and snagged the cordless from the counter without bothering to look at the caller ID. “Hello?”
“I assume my baby brother is right there with you?” Dylan’s smooth voice floated from the other end of the line. “Put me on speaker, will ya, princess?”
I glanced at Cade, who watched me with a curious glare, then pushed the speaker button and set the phone down on the tabletop between us.
“I’m going to go out on a limb,”—Dylan let out an obnoxious hoot—“and assume you went looking for the Tribunal.” He snickered. “My guess is that you didn’t find them.”
This meant he didn’t know we’d rescued Penny Bloom. On the other hand, it also probably meant we weren’t going to find the other two by simply tracking down their addresses.
Cade’s fists balled tight, and he clenched his jaw. For a minute, I really believed he’d stand and flip the table. I’d never seen such anger in someone’s eyes before. Such poison. “Where are they?”
“It wouldn’t be much of a game if I told you, brother.”
“This isn’t a game.” I couldn’t help it. My plan was to keep quiet and let Cade handle it. He knew Dylan better than anyone, after all, but his particular brand of crazy was something I couldn’t stomach. “Whatever it was that happened to you, or to Ava, has nothing to do with anyone here. It has nothing to do with me.”
A few moments of silence ticked by. I actually thought he might have hung up until there was a sharp inhalation of breath. “You don’t know shit about what happened,” he said in a venomous voice. “And it has everything to do with you. It doesn’t matter what world you come from, you’re still Kori. And watching you die kills a little bit more of him each time it happens. I won’t stop until he’s as dead as I am on the inside. As dead as he made me.”
I should have left it there. You don’t poke a rabid dog. But, like always, my temper got the better of me. “As dead as he made you? From what I hear, he saved your ass. They were going to kill you, and he let you go. You repay him by going on a killing spree? If you ask me, that Ava chick dodged a bullet. You’re two slices short of a sandwich.”
He laughed. Well, no. It couldn’t be considered a laugh. There was too much pain in the sound. Too much poison. It was a strangled cry halfway between a howl and a scream. The sound I’d expect a dying animal to make as it struggled to hold tight to this life. “Saved me? Is that what the fucker told you? You poor deluded bitch. I guess it doesn’t matter what reality we’re in, you always fall for his crap. You never see the fact that he’s just like me. Dark and hypocritical.”
I turned to Cade, who refused to look at me. “What—”
“Time is ticking, kiddies. Forget about the Tribunal and find Ava,” Dylan snapped. There was a click, and the line went dead.
“What is he talking about?” Really, it was stupid. I shouldn’t care for so many reasons, the first of which, two innocent people’s lives were on the line. Picking apart the ravings of a madness-tainted loony shouldn’t be the first thing on the agenda.
And, second, Cade was nothing to me. Why did I care what he might or might not have done? He was a part of someone else’s life. She might look like me. Might sound, and on some level, act like me, but she wasn’t me.
Still, for some reason it mattered.
A lot.
“It doesn’t—”
“It does.” I stood and stalked across the room, jerking the table. The pint of ice cream toppled sideways, oozing melted goop across the plastic tablecloth. “It matters. I want to know. What did he mean? What did you do?”
At first his gaze was heavy and volatile. There was a spark of madness in his eyes that reminded me of the twinge in Dylan’s voice. They were brothers, after all. Why not? But it didn’t last. “He’s right. I didn’t save him. I mean, I did, but I backpedaled. I stole the keys and let him out of his cell the night before they were scheduled to carry out his execution. The guilt was too much. I was the one who turned him in. I betrayed my own brother…” Cade shook his head, and some of the tension drained from his body. He slumped in the chair and let his head fall back. “I figured he’d learned his lesson. That he’d accept Ava was gone and move on with his life. Get out of town and start over. That he would forgive me for turning him in…”
“But he didn’t.” I pulled my chair closer and sat across from him.
He shook his head, lips pulling downward. “I should have known better. Ava was his life. She grounded him. Kept him in check. He told me he refused to let her go, but not before he made me suffer.”
“By killing her,” I said softly.
“I never imagined he would take it that far. They were friends. We all grew up together. If I’d thought for even a second that he’d hurt her, I would have killed him myself. Right then and there.” He took a shallow breath. “The next day I got a text from her telling me to hurry over. That she had
some exciting news to share.”
My stomach heaved. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him.
“I found her bleeding out. He’d cuffed her to the pipes in the basement and slit her wrists.”
“Jesus…” It was hard to picture. Myself, cuffed to a pipe and bleeding out in a cold basement. I shuddered.
“Noah called an ambulance, but they were too late. She was already too far gone when we got there.”
“I’m sorry, Cade.” The pain in his voice was like a razor to my heart. It wasn’t me who loved him, this complicated stranger with a beautiful face, but in that moment, all I wanted was to wrap my arms around him. To take away some small fraction of his pain.
“He keeps killing you to get back at me. At your father. I keep trying to stop him, insisting to myself that the driving force behind my actions are to right a wrong I made by freeing him, but he’s right. I’m a hypocrite.”
Not what I’d been expecting. “How so?”
“Because I’m just like him, Kori. I followed him out of vengeance, sure, but it was also because I knew you were still out there. I wanted to see you again.”
This was where things got tough. Admittedly, I felt an attraction to Cade. He was strong and brave. Easy on the eyes to say the least. But I didn’t know him. Not really. And he didn’t know me. The problem was, did he understand that?
“You know that you can’t see me again, right? Until the other day, you’d never seen me before. It doesn’t matter if our DNA is an exact match, or that we like and say the same things. I know this must be a huge mindfuck for you, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to look at me and not see the girl who loved you, but I’m not her.”
