Rocks Fall Everyone Dies

by Lindsay Ribar

  KATHY DAWSON BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Lindsay Ribar

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN 9780698407589

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ribar, Lindsay, author.

  Title: Rocks fall, everyone dies / Lindsay Ribar.

  Description: New York, NY : Kathy Dawson Books, [2016]

  Summary: “A paranormal suspense novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who can reach inside people and steal their innermost things—fears, memories, scars, even love—and his family’s secret ritual that for centuries has kept the cliff above their small town from collapsing”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015030144 | ISBN 9780525428688 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Supernatural—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | BISAC: juvenile fiction / Fantasy & Magic. | juvenile fiction Love & Romance. | juvenile fiction Social Issues / Values & Virtues.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.R3485 Ro 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030144

  Jacket photo © 2016 by Shutterstock

  Jacket design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  Version_1

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  TITLE PAGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brandy and Theo were about to break up. They just didn’t know it yet.

  They were fighting about this movie they’d seen last week, and Theo was going, “What’s the point? The whole plot was just an excuse for explosions!”

  Brandy responded with, “The explosions are the point,” which I mentally added to the long list of reasons she was basically the hottest girl on the planet.

  Me? I dipped yet another French fry in ketchup, shoved it into my mouth, and watched the action unfold.

  Theo—poor, clueless Theo—just went, “Well, it was stupid,” and took another giant bite of his burger. I’d already finished mine.

  “You always think stuff I like is stupid,” said Brandy. You could practically see the exact moment when she reached the end of her rope. “Always. God. You don’t even try to like my stuff.”

  “I do so try,” replied Theo. “I saw the movie with you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, because you wanted to grope me when the lights went down.” Brandy tossed her hair, and I shoved a handful of fries in my mouth to keep myself from grinning.

  Oh yes. Here it came.

  “I swear, I don’t know why I was ever into you.”

  “Wha … what?” Theo was so totally perplexed by now, I almost felt sorry for him. “You were plenty into me yesterday. Hell, you were into me five minutes ago.”

  It was four minutes ago. I’d been keeping track. But I didn’t say anything, obviously. Just chewed my food in silence, trying not to let on how much I was enjoying this.

  Unfortunately, Brandy’s reply was interrupted by the sudden sound of a Black Keys song blasting into the quiet diner. My cell phone. Aunt Holly’s ringtone.

  “Hello?” I said. Beside me, Theo called Brandy a very rude name.

  “Ma says there’s a fault in the stone,” said Aunt Holly in her usual curt voice. “How soon can you be home?”

  Normally I would have pointed out that the house she shared with Grandma wasn’t technically home for me—but there was no point in arguing semantics with people as easily provoked as her. So I just said, “Fifteen minutes if you make me walk. Five if you pick me up.”

  “God, you’re lazy.” She sighed. “All right, just meet us at the May Day field. Ten minutes.” The line went dead.

  “Guys, I have to go,” I said, grabbing my jacket and easing out of the booth. “The relatives require my presence.”

  “See? That’s another thing,” said Brandy, without even missing a beat. “Look at the relationship Aspen has with his family. They call, he comes running. And vice versa, probably. That’s how it should be! But all I ever hear from you is how much you hate your parents.”

  Brandy, on the other hand, called her father every single night after dinner. She pretended like it was her idea, as opposed to a product of her dad’s all-encompassing paranoia about basically everything, but you could tell it was a pain in her ass.

  Theo sputtered pathetic half words as he sank lower and lower into his seat. I couldn’t blame him. Brandy always looked like a vengeful goddess when she got angry, and this was probably the angriest I’d ever seen her. I was kind of sorry I had to leave.

  But up here, a call from Aunt Holly trumped everything—even something as potentially life-changing as this fight. I slipped a ten onto the table to cover my meal and headed for the door just as the waiter came over, probably to ask Brandy and Theo to lower their voices.

  It was a gorgeous summer upstate New York night, the likes of which you never get down in the city. Instead of air conditioners spitting dirty water onto overheated sidewalks, Three Peaks was all cool mountain air tinged with the remnants of a hot day. Cool enough that I was comfortable in my long-sleeved thermal, warm enough that I didn’t need another layer over it.

  I made a left out of the diner and started walking down Main. Past the Bean Barn coffee shop, past the cutesy boutique clothing stores—closed for the night by this point—and past the single grocery store, which marked the point where the commercial section of town ended and the residential one began. A few minutes later, even the houses grew sparser, until there were only woods. To my left, at least.

  To my right, lawns and well-groomed trees gave way to a wide, flat expanse of grass, so well-maintained that it could’ve been a soccer field, if not for the giant oak tree that stood right in the middle.

  The May Day tree. This was where all the citizens of Three Peaks left little presents once a year, as some kind of … tribute? Payment? Something like that. I’d never been here for an actual May Day party, so I didn’t know what all the gifts were supposed to mean. But I did know that they stayed under the tree until the Quick family—my family—came to get them.

  I’d visited the tree several times over the past few years, always as a precursor to my family’s triad ritual, but this was my first visit of the summer. Anticipation coursed through me.

  When I reached the tree, I ducked under its branches and surveyed the trunk. Or rather, the giant pile of stuff surrounding the trunk. It looked more or less the same as it did every year: a collection of weird little odds and ends left by people who maybe were superstitious, or maybe liked tradition a little too much, or maybe both.

  The first time I saw it, back when I was just a little kid, I thought it looked like a pile of magic.

  Tonight, there was better magic happening at the diner I’d just left. I checked my phone, jus
t to see if either of my friends had texted me—if the breakup had happened already, or if there was still fighting left to be done.

  Nothing yet, though. Well, nothing except a text from Mom. Her second of the day; her tenth of the week. I deleted it without reading it, like I’d been doing for months.

  Footsteps swished in the grass, steadily approaching. I looked up, and there was Aunt Holly coming my way, tall and straight-backed and dressed in what looked like a business suit. Her hair, the same dirty blond as Dad’s, was pulled severely back from her face. I wondered if she’d come right from her office.

  A few strides behind her was Grandma, a little bit shorter and rounder than Aunt Holly, her iron-gray curls making a halo around her smiling face. Hands in the pockets of her slacks, she ambled across the May Day field with the ease of someone forty years younger.

  “Beat you here,” I said as they approached.

  “So you did,” Grandma said, her voice as warm as always. “How was the lake?”

  Theo and Brandy and I had spent every afternoon this past week at the big lake over in Elmview. Theo would play chauffeur in his fancy new car. We’d rent a canoe, paddleboat, something like that, or we’d chill out on the beach and pass around a bottle of whatever I’d picked up with my fake ID. After that, it was back to Three Peaks for burgers at the diner.

  I shrugged. “It was whatever. Same as yesterday, same as the day before.”

  With a snort, Aunt Holly wandered over to the trunk of the May Day tree to inspect the pile, apparently eager to get the ritual started. Or maybe her eagerness was less about getting it started and more about getting it over with, so she could go back to hiding in her room and getting wasted.

  Grandma, though, paid her no mind. She just patted my cheek with one warm hand and said, “It must be nice, having your friends here with you for the season.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool,” I said. It was true, too. I’d always liked spending time with Grandma, and Aunt Holly used to be okay back when my cousin Heather was still around—but this year, with everything so different, it was nice to have Theo and Brandy there as buffers. Even if it meant being a constant third wheel in their relationship.

  Not that that would be a problem anymore. At least I hoped it wouldn’t.

  “You said two, right?” asked Aunt Holly impatiently. She was pacing around the tree, taking in the objects that lay there. A lopsided pottery bowl. A lanyard bracelet. A small plastic ring decorated with a large plastic ruby. A one-eyed teddy bear. Several action figures. A crapload of CDs. Books, pencils, envelopes, shoes, random pieces of paper. “What’s the nature of the fault?”

  Grandma glanced over at her. “Hm,” she said, and closed her eyes. Her hands began moving through the air like a spider’s legs, like she could feel something there that we couldn’t.

  “One throwaway, one gift,” she said at last. “One male, one female. Balance. That one.”

  Eyes still closed, she pointed into the pile, directly at a small plastic Batman that was missing its left arm. Aunt Holly bent and picked it up, cradling it to her chest like a baby.

  “And that one,” added Grandma, pointing to another place in the pile. To a book. This time, it was me who picked it up. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’d never read it.

  Grandma looked back and forth between Aunt Holly and me for a second, then nodded, satisfied. “Come on,” she said, and started across the field again, in the opposite direction from the diner.

  I didn’t ask why she’d chosen the Batman figure and the book. I’d given up asking about that stuff a while ago, because all Grandma would ever say was something like, “The Cliff wants what it wants. It’s my job to find the closest energy match.”

  Which, yeah, made basically no sense at all. But that was fine. As long as the ritual kept working and the Cliff kept standing, I was good.

  My grandmother’s house was truly ridiculous. It had probably started as a shack or something, but since it was first built back in … whenever … so many extra floors and extra wings and other stuff had been added, now it was this crazy sprawling mansion that looked like it fell out of a Guillermo del Toro movie. There were turrets, for god’s sake. Three of them.

  Leaving our shoes by the front door, per Grandma’s rule, the three of us headed for the den. Aunt Holly locked the sliding door behind us. She always did that for the ritual, but it was especially important now that Theo and Brandy could show up at any moment. Neither of them knew what my family did to keep the Cliff standing and the town safe, and I’d been expressly forbidden from telling them.

  As if there was a chance in hell that I’d ever say anything. I mean, come on.

  Grandma started the fire while, across the room, Aunt Holly slid a familiar wooden box out from underneath the love seat. I crept up behind her, ready to fish one of my leaves out.

  “Do you mind?” she snapped, hugging the box closer to her chest, using the expanse of her back to block my view.

  I was all ready to snap right back at her, but before I could, Grandma caught my eye and shook her head. I sighed, bit back my reply, and gave Aunt Holly her space. Normally I’d’ve ignored Grandma and told Aunt Holly not to be such an asshole—but it’d been less than five months since she’d lost Heather. She had the right to be a little bit of an asshole, probably. So I kept my cool. I went back to the fire and let my aunt do the leaf thing on her own.

  In the fireplace, the flames danced like brightly colored ghosts, the logs beneath them crackling. For the first time, though, I noticed something else. Something buried under the logs, burning hotter and hotter as I watched. I squinted, trying to see what it was.

  “Why’s there a rock in there?” I asked.

  Grandma came and stood beside me. “There’s always been a rock in there.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling kind of dumb. “Huh. But why?”

  “It’s a piece of the Cliff,” said Grandma. “When the flames touch it, they forge a connection with the stone and, through it, with the Cliff itself.”

  I nodded, rubbing my neck as the meaning of it sunk in. The rock was a conduit. Another link in the chain, just like me. Cool.

  Finally, Aunt Holly finished her business with the box of leaves. She came back over to join us by the fire, holding three dry leaves in her hand. One long and thin, one small and spiky, one shaped like a fat teardrop.

  “Oak, Ma?” she asked Grandma.

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Grandma, and dug into her pocket. She, too, produced a leaf—only this one was green and freshly picked. An oak leaf from the May Day tree. Aunt Holly reached for it, but Grandma pulled it back. “Maybe our Aspen should go first. It being his first ritual of the year.”

  Shivers erupted in my stomach, but I didn’t let on. I loved doing this. Being part of an ancient tradition. Using my magic for something bigger than myself. And, yeah, let’s face it: showing off just how good I was at this stuff. Because I was very good.

  “Yeah, let me,” I said, reaching for the leaves.

  Aunt Holly’s lips tightened, but she handed over one of the dry leaves: the teardrop-shaped aspen.

  Holding the leaf inches away from the fire, I repeated the words that my family had been taught since basically the beginning of time: “My name is my self, and I give them both freely.” And I let my namesake fall into the fire. As it burned, I let myself imagine the flames connecting me to the stone beneath the logs, then to the Cliff, over a mile away.

  “My name is my self, and I give them both freely,” said Aunt Holly, and fed the spiky holly leaf into the fire. Grandma did the same with the willow leaf.

  When all the leaves had crumbled to ash, Grandma silently gave the oak leaf to the fire, too—and that was when everything changed. The flames rose higher. They turned a thousand different colors at once, then finally settled into an eerie, unnatural shade of blue-green-turquoise. The flames stopped giving off heat, but kept flickering just like a real fire.

  This

 
was

  awesome.

  “The toy first,” said Grandma.

  Aunt Holly held Batman out to me. “You do the reaching,” she said. “I’ll do the sending.”

  Grandma, who could do neither, nodded in agreement. That was fine. I preferred doing the reaching anyway. Sending was boring.

  I took Batman from her and closed my eyes. I always felt things better when I didn’t rely on sight.

  Running my hands over Batman’s torso, legs, and pointy-eared head, feeling the fabric cape between my fingernails, I looked for a place to reach in, beyond the physicality of the object and into the invisible something that would point me in the right direction. Toward the person who’d owned it, and then given it to the May Day tree.

  Only when my finger touched the empty left arm socket did I find the place. I wasn’t just holding an action figure anymore. I was holding a well-loved thing that was most at home in the hands of one specific boy. The figure remembered the boy as he was now, a confident teenager who’d recently convinced himself that he no longer needed his broken childhood toys—and as he’d been years ago, a reckless grade-schooler who knew in his heart that when it came to toys in general, and action figures specifically, broken was just another way of saying favorite. Which was why he hadn’t minded when, during a particularly vicious battle against Wonder Woman, Batman had lost his left arm.

  A sense of lost attachment to his toys? Maybe that was something I could take.

  “Not enough,” said Grandma, startling me a little. “Aspen, this fault will need something stronger—something brighter—in order to heal. Even though the things we take are all just energy by the time they reach the Cliff, that energy comes in different flavors, different strengths—”

  “I know, I know,” I interrupted, but without annoyance. Grandma did that sometimes. Slipped into teacher mode during the triad ritual. I guess it came with the territory of having to teach the ritual’s ins and outs to whoever had time to come visit and help her out.