Jet was trying to tell me something, say soothing words that would make everything okay again.
But nothing would be okay again.
And then everything went to nothing but darkness.
The relief was instantaneous. I knew I hadn’t blacked out, I could still feel Jet’s warm arms and hands clutching me to his chest. They never vanished so I had to be present.
“Just hold on a little further. Okay, Ever? Just a little bit further and we’ll be there. Everything will be okay,” Jet whispered into my hair. He spoke the words so softly I wondered if I was wrong, that I had to be dreaming for him to be so perfect.
Movement again. Jet was still walking as he held me. I wanted to tell him I could walk myself, that I didn’t need him. But I couldn’t. I had to let him help me because I wasn’t capable of helping myself. The spirits had taken everything out of me and I didn’t have that much to give in the first place.
“Almost there, Ever. Hold on.”
I wanted to say that I was alright, that I would hold onto him for as long as he needed me to. But I didn’t. My mouth remained clamped shut like anything could fly out if I opened it.
Something flat and hard was underneath me, my head laid back to rest on something softer. I was on a bed but I didn’t need to open my eyes to know that. Everything smelled like Jet. I was lying on his bed, in his room.
He had carried me to the underground.
Where the spirits couldn’t follow.
My eyelids were glued shut, I couldn’t open them even if I tried. I lay there like a corpse, waiting for the spark of energy to return enough so I could at least move.
“What happened to her?” A female voice. Perry.
“I don’t know. She started screaming and then fell over,” Jet replied. I really wanted to point out that I didn’t just fall over, that my legs couldn’t possibly hold me up when I held the weight of the dead on my shoulders.
“And you’re just going to let her sleep?”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
Perry let out a frustrated sigh. I would put money on her eyes rolling right about now, too. “She’s probably faking it to get attention.”
“She’s not faking it.”
“How do you know? You can’t see her for who she really is.”
“Just get out,” Jet said. The edge of the bed creaked as it took his weight.
“You’re blind, Jet. I wish you’d open up your eyes and see what is going on. She is fooling you with her little girl lost routine. All she’s doing is using you, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
“Perry! I know exactly who she is. Ever thought you are the one who is being blind?”
“Every pretty face. You fall for every pretty face. It’s sickening.”
“I can’t deal with this right now. Just get out. Please.” He sounded tired, like he’d had the same discussion too many times and understood it would always end the same.
“But, Jet-”
“Perry. Get out! I mean it!”
Footsteps.
The door slammed.
I let the darkness swallow me whole again.
I wasn’t sure how long I was out. It could have been minutes but I suspected it was more like hours. Jet wasn’t sitting at the end of the bed anymore. His warmth skimmed the side of my body, one arm under my neck and the other draped over my ribs.
My eyes dared to open. It was barely light in the room, the only beam coming from a solar lantern stowed in the corner. It had a bluish hue, making the whole room feel unnatural and alien.
Jet was sound asleep. His head rested on the coat we were using as a pillow. His long eyelashes that would make any girl jealous batted in a silent symphony that only he could hear.
He was beautiful.
There was no other way to describe the sleeping boy. He wasn’t the leader or responsible for so much when asleep. He was just an eighteen year old boy, needing rest like everyone else.
He had pulled a blanket over us but it was too hot in the room. I carefully shifted it down, trying not to wake Jet. When he was awake, sometimes I wanted to get so far away from him that it physically hurt.
But when he was asleep?
It felt like lying next to an angel.
The blanket fell to the floor and he didn’t stir awake. My body urged me to lie back down again and let sleep take me off to a sweet utopia for a few more hours.
But then I remembered the pain and the hurt and the agony that had torn through me before. I was certain that was how the spirits felt all the time.
How could I sleep when I knew that?
I shot upright, determined to get back out there and track down the answers I needed to kill Kostucha. I could not let them suffer any more than they were.
They were right, one extra day was too many.
“What are you doing?” Jet’s sleepy voice stopped me as he sat up.
My shoes. Where did he put my shoes?
“I have to go back to the library. Or see Kalinda. I need to do something, anything.”
Jet moved out of the bed and stood in front of the door so fast it was like a blur. I had never seen anyone move that quickly before. “No, you’re sleeping.”
I tried reaching for the doorknob but he shifted so I couldn’t reach it without pushing him out of the way first. “Let me go.”
“Tell me what happened,” he demanded.
He was trying to distract me, I could tell every time he did that. Every part of me screamed to get moving but the quickest way to do that was going to be with his cooperation.
So I told him.
I explained the spirits and the darkness and the pain. I didn’t leave out any detail, even though I had to be responsible for putting the frown on his face and the wrinkle on his forehead.
When I was finished, his stance on the door was still holding strong. “I understand why you have to help them, but not tonight. Get some sleep first or you’ll be no good to anyone.”
“I don’t need to sleep. I need to help them,” I insisted.
“Everly, it’s midnight. Please just get a few hours and then we’ll both go and work this thing out.”
Midnight? I must have been out for a couple of hours, at least.
“No, I need to go now.”
He rolled his eyes and stubbornly held onto the doorknob. “A few hours. You are no good to the dead if you are one of them.”
I wanted to keep arguing, to throw him from the door and barge through like I owned the place. But all my limbs were so heavy they could hardly move as it was.
Even though it meant hating myself just a little bit more, I threw myself onto the bed and laid down. Jet hesitated, unsure whether I was merely faking compliance.
I kind of was.
But he was onto me. He locked the door, the noise making a clicking sound that bounced off the walls. He took the key out of the deadbolt and slipped it into his pocket.
I wasn’t beyond going on a fishing mission when he fell asleep.
He stood by the bed and waved at me to move over. He wasn’t going to take the wall side. If I wanted to sneak out, I was going to have to go over the top of him. Which would probably wake him up.
Which was kind of the point.
I shifted over begrudgingly and he immediately laid down at my side. I curled into him, resting my head on his chest like I had done so many times before.
His heart beat under my ear, a steady thump thump thump. It was dependable. Predictable. Safe. His arm around my waist, his hand holding my shoulder, reiterated the point.
It wasn’t long before I drifted into a sleep that was all consuming. If I dreamed, they didn’t linger in my mind when I woke. All I could think about was the spirits and the pain they suffered.
It was inconceivably mean permitting them to go on like they were. Nobody should have to endure that kind of torture, living or dead.
Jet was already awake. For some time, judging by his change of clothes. He pas
sed me half of his protein bar. “Sleep okay?”
“Well enough,” I replied, wiping the sleep from my eyes. I devoured the protein bar like there was no tomorrow. The spirits must have taken more out of me than I realized.
“So where do we start today?” Jet asked, his head titling to one side as he waited for the answer.
He wasn’t going to abandon me.
How long would it take for me to believe that?
“Something must have happened to make the spirits act like they did yesterday. I need to go to the bottom of the tunnels.”
“Down to Hell?”
“Yep. Something has changed and I need to work out what it was.”
Jet nodded and handed me one of his shirts. “I’ll wait outside and then we’ll go.”
The moment the door closed I peeled out of my own shirt and replaced it with Jet’s. It felt clean, the scent of Jet lingering on the fabric. The shirt was too big so I had to tuck it into my jeans. Still, it was a million times better than my own dirty shirt.
We took the trek down the long corridors of the tunnels, through the cavern, and then even deeper. It grew colder and then started warming up again once we were close to Hell.
There were no battle scars from the showdown we’d had with Kostucha only seven weeks earlier. The ground wasn’t scorched with the fire we burned and the wall was still solid even though the demon had been cast through it.
All the evil was hidden.
The devil liked it that way.
My hand lingered over the wall of the tunnel. It was surreal to believe Hell was just on the other side. For millenniums people thought Hell was some figurative place high in the sky. Far beyond the clouds and invisible to the human eye.
I knew better.
Hell was in the center of the earth. It bubbled with pain and thrived off agony. While we walked aboveground, living our ordinary lives, the souls of the damned were tortured with all the evils imaginable.
It was stupid being afraid to touch the wall. Like it might somehow pull me through and swallow me for the rest of eternity. It was just a wall. It couldn’t hurt me. I was already resolved with the knowledge I would be going to Hell one day.
But maybe…
My fingers shook as they hovered just above the brown clay of the wall. I could feel the heat radiating from within. No, not just heat.
Power.
Energy.
Pain.
It was all there just mere millimeters from my fingertips. I pulled my hand away. I didn’t need to touch the wall to know what secrets it kept.
“Can you see anything?” Jet asked, startling me in the silence. My heart kicked up a few notches from the fright.
“Nothing.” I shook my head. I was so certain I would find something different down here. If the portal to Hell was wide open and gaping I wouldn’t have been surprised.
This nothingness surprised me much more.
“So what happened?”
I wished I had the answers for him. For the spirits. For myself. “I don’t know.”
“What did they say?” I could barely see his face in the shadows of the flashlight. He was holding it between us, illuminating the wall instead of us.
The memory of their pain and agony washed over me, sending a new wave of nausea rushing through me. The words to describe it wouldn’t come.
“They said we need to hurry,” I finally answered, biting back the bile rising in my throat.
I pushed past him and returned down the long tunnel way. Jet followed, the flashlight beam hovering just in front of me the whole way. It danced like there was invisible music playing somewhere in the darkness.
When we were in the cavern, I broke away.
Sprinting in a jog, I needed some time to think. Jet let me go, sensing it was something I needed to do.
Alone.
Chapter Twelve
They were waiting for me.
Hundreds of spirits paced outside the tunnel entrance. They were eagerly anticipating my return, ready to pounce the moment I stepped out into the daylight.
They couldn’t see me hiding. It was cowardly of me to avoid them. I had every intention of speaking with them. Once I worked out how. I knew without a doubt they would overwhelm me the moment they realized I was there.
I stood there for too long.
The urge to do something was about to outvote the sensibilities in waiting.
“What are you doing?” Jet. Always lingering. Always giving me a heart attack.
“Working out what to do,” I said honestly.
“I might be able to help if you tell me what’s going on.”
“There are spirits out there, way too many for me to handle. I need to talk with them but they might…” Hurt me? It didn’t sound right. They didn’t intend to hurt me, they never did. “They might get too much.”
“Can they hear me when I speak?”
“They can hear everything.”
“Alright then.” Before I could stop him, Jet stepped out. The sun’s rays embraced him, casting him in a brilliant white glow as he stood in the middle of all the dead people.
I peeked out, drawing a few gazes my way. My breath was lodged in my lungs as I waited to see what Jet was going to do. They couldn’t hurt him, but still…
He held up his arms, opening them wide as if he was addressing a grand audience. “Everly wants to talk to you but you can’t hurt her. If she comes out, you have to remain calm and leave her alone. Do you understand?”
Jet looked at me for some guidance. At least the spirits had stopped to listen to him. Those closest nodded in assent. I gave a small shrug, still not convinced.
The ghosts of the city didn’t have anything to lose.
He continued, yelling into the empty space where he could see none of them. “I need you to promise. You seriously hurt her yesterday and she’s not going to be able to help if she’s one of you. Understand?”
“We understand,” the spirit closest to me said solemnly.
I nodded, both at him and at Jet. My first step was shaky, tentative, unsure. The next was better. The third took me right out into the open.
They surged toward me and I flinched.
Thankfully, they stopped.
“Everly! We didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“We just wanted to talk.”
“You have to know.”
Jet returned to my side. “Everything good?”
“Yeah, they’re just talking,” I replied. He didn’t move, just remained standing with his hand resting on the small of my back – letting me know he was there… for me. I turned my attention back to the dead. “Tell me what’s going on. What happened yesterday?”
“The pain got worse. It’s so bad now.”
“It’s worse than bad. It’s excruciating.”
“I can’t handle it.”
“None of us can.”
“We just want it to stop.”
“I’d kill myself if I wasn’t already dead.”
“It never ends. The pain is always there.”
They went on and on. Their misery was echoed a thousand times by everyone there. From what I could gather, none of them knew why the pain had become so much worse. All they knew was that it had. And they wanted me to do something about it.
My mind went straight to my sister. Would she be feeling that intense pain right now? If she wasn’t one of the lucky ones to cross over when the gateway was open she would be. Unless Kostucha had already taken her…
I couldn’t follow that thought through.
Otherwise I would crumple again.
There were no answers I could offer the spirits. No solutions that I could promise. In the end, there was only one thing I could say. “I’m trying to fix this.”
My five measly words weren’t enough for them. I didn’t expect them to be. The only thing the meeting did was give them the comfort that their message was delivered. I had listened to them so they could leave me alone while I got to work.
&n
bsp; And I fully intended to do nothing but work.
I talked Jet into taking me to pay Kalinda a visit. She’d had two days to look at the book I had given her. Surely she should have something by now.
If not her, then her dead grandparents.
We took the Crain again, the contraption clinking and banging its way across the railway tracks. The same suspicious glances were cast our way in Kalinda’s neighborhood. Nobody trusted anyone around here.
I didn’t blame them.
Kalinda ushered us straight inside when Jet knocked on her door. Just like the last time, she largely ignored me while looking at Jet like he was the greatest thing on Earth.
I really wanted to roll my eyes at her.
Her grandparents were waiting too, instantly rushing over when they saw us. They had an extra hunch to their shoulders, like the sky was pressing down on them. They didn’t complain about the extra pain.
“Have you looked at the book?” Jet asked softly. Good thing he was doing the talking, I wouldn’t have been so patient. Crazy or not.
Kalinda cocked her head to one side as if she could hear music playing and it was distracting her. “I looked at it. The words were all screaming. They were mean.”
“What did it say?”
“It said horrible things. The world is not supposed to have such horrible things in it. I didn’t want to read it.”
Someone hold me back.
Because I was on my last nerve.
Jet persisted. “What kind of horrible things? Tell me what you read, Kalinda. It will be okay once you tell me. I can take all those horrible words away from you. They won’t hurt you anymore.”
She smiled.
Then giggled.
Like she was some kind of circus clown.
“The books said the devil walks amongst us,” Kalinda said, her eyes wide open like this should have been some huge revelation.
Her grandfather waved at me, catching my attention. He pointed to the kitchen just beyond the living room. “I’m going to grab some water,” I said, excusing myself.
I had to step around the new piles of old magazines Kalinda had accumulated in only the last two days. She should have spent that time reading, not squirreling. God only knew where she managed to find so much paperwork.
We Are Always Forever Page 12
