Everbound: An Everneath Novel

by Ashton, Brodi

  “But where are we?”

  “Deer Valley.”

  It was the small ski resort town just above Park City on the mountain. “Which way do I go?”

  He revved the engine. “When given the choice to go up or down, go down.”

  I ran over to his bike. “You said the band’s here, right? You guys are staying?” Had he lied about coming alone?

  He clicked his bike into gear and looked at me. “If you still want to talk, you know where to find me. Tomorrow night. Do you think you can wait? For one day? Before you do something stupid again?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just took off.

  I started walking, all the while looking over my shoulder as if a tall woman with red hair would suddenly appear.

  Cole said I was safe, I told myself over and over.

  By the time I got home, it was dark. The lights in my dad’s study were on. Apparently I’d only been gone a couple of hours, including the time it took me to walk from Deer Valley to my house. As I climbed the stairs, my knees wobbled and I grabbed on to the railing for support.

  I was exhausted, but I knew I had to face my dad.

  I stopped by the study. My dad looked up from the article he was reading in The Economist. “How’d it go?”

  I thought of what I’d just been through. Traipsed through the Everneath; had my first encounter with the queen; watched a man get blown apart; faced hundreds of Shades intent on doing the same to me, or worse; headed toward the Tunnels until Cole—an immortal—pulled me out and dropped me in Deer Valley.

  How’d it go? “Fine,” I answered. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the graduation ceremony. “I saw Mrs. Caputo. She said she’s been trying to contact me.”

  My dad didn’t deny it. “I wanted to give you some more time.”

  “She’s not going to give up.”

  “I know.” He took off his reading glasses and placed them on his desk. “That’s why I agreed that her detective could interview you tomorrow afternoon. I was going to tell you in the morning, because I didn’t want you to worry about it and lose sleep.”

  “It’s good,” I said, nodding my head and trying to convince myself. I had so many other things to worry about. “It’s time.”

  “Do you want to talk about it first?”

  “No. I’m tired.”

  “Okay, Nikki. Besides, you have nothing to worry about. All you have to do is tell the truth.”

  I smiled at how complicated the truth really was. “No problem. Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night. Get some rest.”

  SIX

  NOW

  The Surface. My bedroom.

  I dream.

  In my dream, I tell Jack of my attempt to find him.

  “It didn’t go quite as expected,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “I almost got caught. By some … Shades.”

  “No,” he says. “Why are you trying?”

  His words slam my heart. “I’ll never stop trying, Jack. You know this.”

  He closes his eyes. “Your hair used to fall in your eyes.”

  The abrupt topic change makes me pause. “What?”

  He opens his eyes and looks into mine, and he is suddenly so aware. So with me. So different from the night before. He holds up his hand, palm toward me, and I mirror with my own. “Your hair used to fall in your eyes. I’d get so frustrated. I’d think, Why does she let it happen? Is it a matter of needing a clip or something? Why doesn’t it bother her like it bothers me? I used to think I hated it. But then there came a time when all I could think about was how much I wanted to push it out of your eyes for you. I convinced myself that you needed me because otherwise your hair would blind you, and that wouldn’t be good for your health.”

  I smile. “I remember the first time you brushed it out of my face. We were hiking the Fiery Furnace with our history class. We stopped on that rock—”

  “The Loveseat,” he interrupts.

  “Yeah, the Loveseat. I was opening the string cheese, and my hair fell in my eyes, and you brushed my hair away and tucked it behind my ear.”

  He glances at my hair. “It was a milestone for me. It took me a year to get up the courage to do it.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I say, surprised that the memory has stuck with him as it has with me.

  He shrugs. “Well, it was either that or buy you a hair clip. And I didn’t have any money.”

  I laugh. He curls his fingers around my hand in a move formed out of habit and then frowns as they only wrap around air. He looks at me with sad eyes.

  “I’m trying not to give up,” he says.

  “Don’t say that.”

  But he doesn’t speak anymore.

  He hasn’t given up. I tell myself over and over, He hasn’t given up. He will never give up. Even if I have to remind him.

  But before I can say it out loud, the sun rises, and he’s gone.

  I jolted awake and fell out of bed. Scrambling to get up, I lurched to my desk. Ransacked it, opening every drawer until I found what I was looking for. A picture of the freshman and sophomore classes on our trip two years ago to Arches National Park. The picture was taken at the base of a rock formation known as the Fiery Furnace because of the way the red sandstone juts into the sky like the spires of a fire.

  I ran my finger over the glass of the frame. There we were, in the far right-hand corner. Me and Jack, his arm slung casually around my neck.

  “You are not giving up, Jack Caputo,” I murmured. And neither am I.

  I set the picture upright on my shelf and thought about last night. Cole was so adamant that it was impossible, but there had to be more to it. He was holding back something. I could feel it.

  I did learn one good thing. Cole wasn’t alone in Park City. The band was here. That meant that he wasn’t going anywhere, at least for now.

  Setting the Fiery Furnace picture upright next to my computer, I ran my finger over the mouse pad and woke up the sleeping screen.

  WHERE ARE THE DEAD ELVISES PLAYING NEXT? the headline of the Looking for the Deads blog read.

  I knew the answer to that one. Park City. Harry O’s on Main Street, most likely. I had to see Cole again. Find out what he was hiding. But I couldn’t go there unprepared. I had to talk to Mrs. Jenkins. She was the only other mortal who knew all about the Everneath, and I’d been talking to her about how to get back there. But we’d been so focused on that first step—finding Cole—that we hadn’t discussed anything else. Maybe she would know what Cole was hiding.

  If anything.

  It was too early to go to Mrs. Jenkins’s house now, so I closed the drawer and went into the kitchen to brew some coffee. Tommy was at the table. He still had school today. Three more days until he was done for the summer.

  I looked over his shoulder. The top of the paper read HELP DOROTHY FIND HER WAY TO THE WIZARD. “Mazes? That’s what the fourth grade considers homework?”

  Tommy pressed his pencil into the paper so he wouldn’t lose his spot and looked up at me. “It’s the last week of school. I have, like, a stack of these to do.” He lowered his head. “And they’re harder than they look.”

  “Start from the end.”

  “Why?”

  I paused, not really sure why. It was just how I’d always done them. “It’s easier that way.”

  He lifted his pencil and placed the point deliberately at the end. “I’ll try,” he said.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the maze. Pencil lines twisted around corners and back on themselves where Tommy had run into a block.

  I’d never understood the educational legitimacy of mazes. They didn’t necessarily test cognitive ability. Wasn’t it really just an exercise in trial and error? Did anyone ever lose points for going the wrong way initially?

  Not in a maze. And yet the exercise of putting pencil to paper and getting to the end of a maze never disappeared. Nobody lost points for going the wrong way at first in a maze. But the
y did in life. Every wrong turn had an effect on the rest of the maze. Every mistake affected the path, didn’t it?

  My wrong turn—choosing to go to the Everneath with Cole—had taken a life.

  No. My choice hadn’t taken a life yet. Jack wasn’t dead yet.

  Mazes. Why was I dwelling on them? Last night Cole had described the Everneath as a maze. I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. There was something there. It was as if seeing Tommy’s maze had caused a flash inside my head. Not a big flash but more like the negative of a photograph. A little seedling deep in my mind, prompting me forward.

  Grabbing the new mythology book that had been sitting on the table all day, I ruffed up Tommy’s hair and then went to my room. I pushed aside the stacks of books next to my computer to make space. Where had I read about a maze before? Or a labyrinth?

  I rifled through the scattered notes on my desk, a compilation of every myth and legend that I thought might have something to do with the Everneath. Cole used to tell me that myths and legends were rooted in truth. The problem was discovering which ones were specific to my case.

  But none of my latest notes mentioned a maze. Leaning back in my chair, I grabbed the new book my dad had given me and skimmed the topics page.

  There was nothing about mazes under the Ms, so I tried L for labyrinth. There I found the reference for “Labyrinth, Minotaur.”

  I smacked my head. Of course I should’ve remembered the story about the Minotaur—the half-man, half-bull creature—who was trapped in the labyrinth. Every nine years, fourteen young Athenians were sent inside the maze as a sacrifice to ward off a plague. This happened until someone, a hero maybe, entered the maze and killed the Minotaur. And then found his way out. Who was it?

  I had picked up the book to thumb through it to the page listed in the index when I heard the garage door open. My dad was home early. He never came home early. Then it hit me.

  “Crap,” I muttered. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Caputo’s detective coming to interview me.

  I threw the book on my bed and closed my eyes. Last night I hadn’t been nervous about facing the detective, but maybe that was because I’d been exhausted and weakened by my encounter with the Shades.

  Today it was daunting.

  You can do this, I told myself.

  A knock sounded at my door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  My dad came in and sat on my bed, and I covered my notes with my books. Why did I even try to hide it? It was stupid, really. My dad knew how much I was obsessed with myths.

  He ignored the books. “You ready to get this over with?”

  “Mrs. Caputo blames me.” I picked at the quilt on top of my bed. “Even if I tell the truth, I don’t think she’d let the detective she hired with her own money give up on what she considers her biggest lead.”

  “From everything I’ve heard, Detective Jackson is a reasonable man. I’ve checked him out. Just because Mrs. Caputo is paying his bills doesn’t mean he can fabricate evidence against an innocent person where there is none.”

  I considered this. Fabricating evidence. A nosy detective. It all seemed so routine for a missing boy. But we were dealing with the extraordinary. An underworld that wasn’t supposed to exist. Immortals who would never die. It seemed a little beyond what an earthly detective could do.

  Detective Jackson smelled like smoke, and he had a wicked comb-over. It swept from the top of one ear and meandered up and over the slope of his head until it ended in a gelled curve behind his other ear. It gave the illusion that his face was on the side of his head.

  I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  “Nikki,” my dad said, nudging my knee.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to answer the question?” Detective Jackson said.

  How long had I been staring at his hair? “Sorry, can you repeat it?”

  “That last night you were with Jack—”

  “March twenty-seventh,” I interrupted.

  “Yes, I know.” He could’ve surprised me. It didn’t seem to matter what he knew. He still asked the same questions over and over. “That night, was he acting different? Strange? Stressed out?”

  Oh boy. That was an understatement. It was the night I was supposed to disappear forever.

  “No,” I said. “We were playing poker in the park, with his brother, Will. Jack was winning a lot.”

  “Poker in the park,” he repeated.

  “Yes.” I’d told him this several times.

  My dad interjected. “The kids did that a lot. It wasn’t—”

  The detective held up his hand. “Please, Mayor. Let her answer.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “We did that all the time. The guys had their own set of poker chips that their grandpa had given them. Red ones. And blue ones. And black ones.” I stopped, realizing that was probably a little too much detail.

  “Right. So, after the poker game you left to go home.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then Will left.” He looked at his notes as if he really had to concentrate to get the next part right. “And he took Jack’s car with him. And drove it home. So Jack was alone, in the park, not a friend in sight, and car-less.”

  I cast my eyes downward. It was closer to the truth than the detective knew. Jack ended up alone that night. Not a friend in sight.

  My dad must have seen the discomfort in my face because he said, “We’ve been over this. Can we move on?”

  “I’d love to move on,” Detective Jackson answered. “To the point where Jack just disappears … ‘runs away’ according to his note … without a car.”

  My dad looked at me. Neither of us said anything.

  “Maybe he took a bus,” my dad said, and I cringed. Wouldn’t there be some sort of paper trail? I stayed quiet.

  “I thought that too. But there was no record of him buying a ticket,” the detective said.

  “There wouldn’t be if he paid cash,” my dad replied.

  Good point, Dad!

  “There was nothing on the security footage either,” the detective countered.

  “Cameras miss people all the time. I’m sure you know this.”

  The detective’s steely demeanor broke for a moment. “We checked bus stops in surrounding cities as well.”

  My dad leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together. It was about to get good. “You mean to tell me you checked every single direction a bus could’ve gone from here? Every stop? Every small town? Everywhere? You must have endless resources.”

  My dad gave Detective Jackson the same stare he’d used on Councilman Fred Graves during their first primary debate, when the councilman had argued against environmental protection in favor of government money.

  The detective tore his gaze away and looked at me. “What do you think, Nikki? Is that what happened? Jack just took a bus and paid using all that extra cash he’d saved working as a delivery boy, and ducked beneath all of the cameras—”

  “We’re done here,” my dad said, cutting him off. “Now you’re asking Nikki to speculate as to Jack’s motives and actions only he could know. We’ve just crossed the line from interview to waste of time.”

  I had to make an effort not to cheer. My dad stood up, and I did the same. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Nikki, go to your room. I’ll show the detective out.”

  Thank you, Dad. My dad came through for me at the most surprising times.

  “I have some errands to run,” I said, and my dad waved me away, keeping his eyes on the detective.

  I ran to my room, gathered up my notes, and headed out the door, hoping Mrs. Jenkins would know what to tell me.

  On the way to Mrs. Jenkins’s house, I called Will. I’d promised to tell him everything, and I hadn’t been very good about keeping that promise over the last twenty-four hours.

  When he answered, I took a deep breath and told him about my trip to the Everneath, my encounter with the queen, and how Cole had said that the Shades would t
rack my energy if I tried it again.

  When I’d finished, he was quiet for a moment. “You went to the Everneath. And came back again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last night. After graduation.”

  “Yeah.”

  He breathed loudly into the phone. “Are you crazy?”

  “I saw Cole, and I had to take my chance.”

  “So, what are we going to do?”

  “I’m on my way to talk to Mrs. Jenkins. Maybe she knows a way to hide my energy. Maybe there’s some trick to avoiding the Shades.”

  I heard what sounded like a door closing in the background. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “You’re talking about going again?”

  I didn’t answer right away, as I turned off the highway and onto the frontage road.

  “Becks, you still there?” Will said.

  “Yes. And yes, I have to go again if we’re going to save Jack.” He was quiet. I rounded the last corner before Mrs. Jenkins’s house. “Look, I’m here. I’ll call you when I’m done, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mrs. Jenkins and I had a strange relationship. It was her daughter, Meredith, who’d given me the ancient bracelet that had led us to the theory about Cole’s heart. Mrs. Jenkins was a member of the group known as the Daughters of Persephone, which was dedicated to finding the next queen of the Everneath. She raised Meredith to be a Forfeit in the Feed in the hopes that the power would fall to her daughter. Meredith was Max’s Forfeit, but she hadn’t survived like I had. She’d emerged from the Feed as an old woman suffering from dementia. After six months on the Surface, the Tunnels had come for her.

  She didn’t have someone like Jack to take her place.

  At the time, Mrs. Jenkins had seemed so unfeeling, but I think Meredith’s fate wore on her mother’s soul. When I lost Jack, I had come to Mrs. Jenkins, searching for a way to get back to the Everneath; but she only told me what I already knew: I would need a piece of Cole.

  Still, we’d talked a few times since then. I was always hoping some spark of intuition would hit her and she’d have answers, but it never happened. I wouldn’t have called us friends. More like two people who shared a similar sense of loss. The Everneath had taken someone I loved, and it had taken someone she didn’t know she loved.