Crow groaned. “You sound like them,” he said. He reached into his pocket for a stick of gum. “I’m trying to quit smoking,” he said, indicating the wrapper in his hand.
“I sound like who?” Em persisted, her heart in her throat.
“Meg, and Ty . . . ” he said.
“How would you know?”
“I know who they are, Em. When they came to town . . . that’s when the visions started again. I’ve met them. I know they’re part of this. I know they’re the bad guys you and Drea were up against.”
“What do you mean? When did you meet them? You’ve spoken to them? What did they say?” She asked the questions in rapid-fire succession. Em felt overwhelmed, heat reaching up and through her skin like she might combust.
“We don’t talk about anything, Em. They just harass me, show up to fuck with me. They don’t answer my questions. They don’t tell me what the visions mean. They’re like puppeteers with an unwilling puppet.”
“How do I know that, Crow? How do I know I can trust you?”
“Can you trust anyone?” Crow answered.
“I want to trust you,” Em said. If Crow had an inside line to the Furies’ hearts of darkness, maybe they simply had to learn to harness his abilities for good rather than for evil. “Did you have any visions last night, or today?”
“I did, actually.” He cleared his throat and looked at her. She nodded at him to continue. “You were looking for something. Frantically. Running all around like crazy. Digging in the mud.”
“Mud?” she repeated.
“You were in a field. . . . There were lots of flowers,” he said. “And then they started overpowering you. Overpowering me. I felt like I was suffocating right there in the jail cell.”
She waited for more, but none seemed to be coming. “Well . . . ? And?”
He stared at her. “It’s not a fairy tale, darling. That’s it.”
“What do you mean, that’s it?” she asked, throwing her head back. It thudded against the wall and she ignored the pain. “What does it mean?”
Crow frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Sometimes I can’t really figure that part out.”
Em forced herself to take a deep breath.
One thing was obvious: Crow didn’t understand his visions. He hadn’t even known what he was until tonight. She tried to read his expression but couldn’t. “I should tell you something else,” she said instead.
“Oh, there’s more good news?”
She grimaced. “Something else happened to me today. Another one of those . . . episodes. I got angry. . . . This kid in class was talking about Mr. Landon—our old English teacher—and then saying all this stuff to make a girl uncomfortable, and I was just like, Please shut up, and then his chair just . . . fell back. He hit his head and started bleeding. It was terrible. It was like I willed it to happen.” She shuddered.
Crow snapped his fingers in front of him, trying to call up some buried information. “Landon, is he the teacher that chick found in the woods? Drea was freaked about that.”
“Skylar?” Skylar. Yes. Of course. Skylar was hunted by the Furies. All of this was connected. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he was.” There was a heavy silence. She looked at the big red numbers on the alarm clock next to Crow’s bed. It was already after midnight and suddenly she felt so weary.
“I should go. . . . ”
“No, don’t,” he said grabbing her hand. He let go of it just as quickly, realizing he’d somehow overstepped a boundary. “I need to ask you what you think . . . about what Drea said about you. Is she right?” He sounded as scared as she was.
Exhaustion was building in her chest and her head. “I’m not sure,” she said—though every instinct inside her screamed the opposite. How could she possibly make him understand? That her time could be running out. That she could feel it looming closer: the darkness that wanted to inhabit her, to swallow her forever.
“You want to try to get some sleep here?” he asked. “I’ll stay on the floor.”
“No. I should get going soon. . . . ” She began to make a mental list of all the pieces she’d collected today. About Crow being a prophet, about Henry Landon possibly being a victim of the Furies, about Skylar. Em had always suspected that Skylar’s aunt knew more about them than she was saying. Em had to find a way to discover what Skylar—and her family—knew. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Em had so many questions. . . .
But she was fighting to keep her eyes open. Crow’s inched closer to her, and he moved his hand up her scalp; he massaged it with his fingers and it felt like lapping waves on the back of her skull, lulling her toward sleep.
“I’m going to try to understand them, Emily,” he was saying. “The visions must be telling us something. I promise to help you, Em, even if it means giving in. Giving in to the darkness.”
She started thinking of a million different responses. Ways to explain that she could see the blackness was already seeping through his blood—that if he went down even deeper, he might never come out. That she was turning bad. Hurting people, just as he’d predicted.
But her thoughts came in abstract wisps. The gears in her brain were revolving slower and slower. . . . She couldn’t fight the exhaustion any longer. She let go, into sleep, like a bottomless well. Her sleep was thick and dreamless. Like falling down into absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Over the next two days, JD found that he couldn’t stop thinking about Ty: her uncanny similarity to Em, the throatiness of her voice, and especially, what she had told him about Chase Singer. The intimate detail—the fact that Chase’s face had been marked with lipstick when he died, which meant (had to mean) that he had been kissed by someone wearing lipstick before he died—stuck in JD’s mind like a celery string between his teeth: annoying and uncomfortable.
JD didn’t hang out with any of Chase’s friends, discounting Em, but he had woodshop with Aaron Johnson, who played football, and they sometimes sat together at lunch talking about old cars and machinery.
During fifth-period lunch on Tuesday, JD blurted out to Aaron: “Hey, weird question: Have you ever heard that Chase Singer had lipstick on him when he died? Like, on his cheek?”
It was strange, given the local media’s blanket coverage of Chase’s death, that JD didn’t remember that striking, if small, description. When he Googled the news reports from a few months ago, there was no mention of any lipstick mark. The only distinguishing marking was the red flower he’d had in his mouth, and even that detail hadn’t come out at first, but had finally been admitted by the police after rumors had spread about it. JD wondered what other secrets had been covered up. And he wondered, too, about that red flower that kept showing up in all the wrong places.
“Nope, never heard that one,” Aaron said.
Tina, Aaron’s girlfriend, was sitting on his other side with a plate of French fries. “He had some trashy girlfriend,” she piped in. “They’d probably been . . . you know.”
“Just before he jumped?” JD shook his head. It didn’t make sense. Would Chase have gotten it on with his girlfriend right before he planned to off himself? “Who was the girl?” This was the type of gossip that a year ago Em would have chided him for not knowing. You can’t ignore their existence and hope they’ll go away, she used to say about her popular group of friends.
“You sound like Tina,” Aaron said, fake-sneering as he finished a bite of his sandwich. “Are you starting a gossip blog or some shit like that?”
“Shut up, babe,” Tina shot back. Then, to JD: “He was with Lindsey for a while. Lindsey Cutler? From Trinity? But he blew her off for some mystery college chick.”
“No one ever hung out with her, as far as I know,” Aaron pointed out. “So they just assume she was trashy.”
“She had a laugh like a ninety-year-old smoker,” Tina said. “That’s what I heard. And she dressed like a Real Housewife. And she was a bitch. She stood Chase up when he tried to take
her to Lumiere de la Mer. Becky and Jamie saw him waiting there for, like, an hour once. It was totally depressing and weird, they said.”
“Becky and Jamie’s little dates at that French place are what’s depressing, if you ask me,” Aaron said, ripping open a bag of potato chips.
“It’s their tradition! Anyway the food is supposed to be really good,” Tina said. “Not that I would know, since someone never takes me out for dinner.” She playfully punched Aaron’s arm.
JD felt himself drifting from the conversation, and began to pack up his stuff. The bell was going to ring soon anyway, and he was perturbed without knowing why. Something Tina had said had caused alarm bells to go off on his head, very faintly . . . but when he tried to focus, to figure out what was upsetting him, he lost it. He was relieved when the bell rang and it was time for rehearsal. “Just curious,” he said. “Freaky shit. See you later, guys. I’m off to class.”
* * *
The staircase that led into the rafters above Ascension’s theater was narrow and dark. After school, JD ascended the steep ladder and pulled himself up on the catwalk. It was second nature to be up there now, balancing on the creaky boards in the dark. He ducked under the heavy metal lights and was careful to avoid the snaking wires zigzagging at his feet. Heights never scared JD, and despite the fact that only a few inches of wood stood between him and the giant open space of the auditorium, he loved being up there.
He was there now investigating what he had to work with in terms of lights for Ned’s show; meanwhile, Ned held rehearsal on the stage. As JD wove his way along the platform, making notes and checking various cables, he could see and hear perfectly what was going on below him. He’d always liked the perspective from up above—the bird’s-eye view.
Skylar was front and center, delivering one of Cassandra’s monologues.
“Oh, misery, misery!” Skylar’s voice punched the air around her, powerful and confident, a complete contrast to her physical presence. “Again comes on me the terrible labor of true prophecy, dizzying prelude.” Her tone was frenzied and she waved her hands in front of her as if to ward off the looming prophecy.
JD found himself rooted to the spot, poised over a hanging light, waiting for her to continue. Wow, he thought. Ned was right. This girl is good.
“For this I declare,” she was saying. “Someone is plotting vengeance.”
JD’s wrench slid from the nut he was tightening. There was the clang of metal on metal.
“Hey, keep it down up there,” Ned yelled up from his seat in the audience. “I thought you knew what you were doing.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m getting paid big bucks,” JD shot back, and gave a few over-the-top, obnoxious clangs for good measure.
“I meant to tell you, Fount—I think I’m going to have to pay you in pizza. . . . ”
JD smirked and turned his headlight toward the next fixture. This one had frayed wires; it needed to be taken downstairs and looked at in the workshop. He got to work, cranking his arm to loosen the bolts and unclamp the light from the pipe it hung from. When it came free, he hoisted it down, his muscles flexing to control the movement. Stage lights were funny beasts: heavy enough to warrant strength, but fragile enough to require delicacy.
Just as he set the light on the board next to him, he felt his phone buzz in his back pocket. He reached around and pulled it out to see a text from Anonymous. It had to be Ty.
Care to be lured away? I’m in the parking lot.
He felt his neck get warm. Technically, he should stay. There was still inventory to finish and all the cleanup backstage. But there was always tomorrow . . . and he needed to bring this light downstairs anyway. He began to make his way carefully back along the ledge, hesitant to admit the truth even to himself: He was drawn to see Ty again. Not because he had a crush on her. It was more like some sort of magnetic curiosity. As if he were playing a video game and needed to see what the next level would hold.
And he wanted to find out how she knew that stuff about Chase. Had she been lying to JD when she’d acted all oblivious about it? He had no idea why she would lie, but he also felt instinctively curious about her, like she held secrets he needed to know more about.
Onstage, Ned was telling the actors to take five. It was the perfect chance to tell Ned he’d be back tomorrow, ready to talk light plot and sound design. JD had almost reached the stairway when he heard Skylar’s voice again. She was in the wings now, backstage, and her tone was hushed and urgent. JD froze—he was probably not supposed to overhear what she was saying. But given the urgent tone of her voice, he couldn’t help but listen.
“No,” she said shrilly. “That’s impossible. They can’t just . . . let her go. Let them all loose. Isn’t that, like, against the law?”
JD held his breath, wondering who she was talking to. Through the grate by his feet, he could see her blond hair, her frantic pacing.
“No. Please,” Skylar said. “Isn’t there another place we can send her? She cannot come stay with us. I can’t . . . You don’t understand. . . . ”
Creeeeaaaak. The floorboard below JD gave a groan, and he winced. Skylar whipped her head from side to side, then looked straight up. Right through the grate. Busted.
She snapped the phone away from her ear as though it were on fire. He quickly made his way to the stairs and intercepted her just as she was about to run back onstage.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t want to interrupt.”
She looked at him like an animal in a cage, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Said nothing. Just stood there, quivering.
“Are you okay?” he asked warily. He knew he was butting in to the private affairs of a girl he barely knew, but she just looked so . . . scared.
“Just mind your own business,” Skylar snapped, brushing by him and throwing her shoulders back as she did.
Fair enough. JD shook his head, grabbed his backpack from the light booth, and headed out to meet Ty. He pushed through the double doors and squinted as the afternoon sun flooded his eyes, which had gotten used to the dim theater lighting. Through half-lowered lids, he saw the silhouette of a girl leaning against the hood of a car—tall, graceful, her hair haloed with light. He was close enough to touch her by the time he could make out Ty’s features.
“I’ve been waiting forever,” she groaned playfully, hopping around to the driver’s-side door. “I’m glad you decided to meet up. Come on, let’s go. I have a surprise for you.”
The car smelled heavy and sweet, like a perfume he couldn’t identify. “Where are we going?” he asked as they passed Ascension’s forests, fields, and buildings in Ty’s maroon Lincoln. The sun was getting lower in the sky; soon the horizon would be a muddy wash of pink and orange and purple. Ty looked like she was dressed for a nightclub, in tight black jeans, a flowing red top, and earrings that dangled as far as her collarbone. He wondered if he’d made a mistake.
“I told you, it’s a surprise,” Ty said in her singsong voice. “But I hope you’re hungry. I packed us a picnic.”
Now that she mentioned it, JD realized he hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. “I could go for something to eat,” he said. But he worried: Was this a date? He wasn’t an idiot—he knew most guys would kill to be him right now. Ty was ridiculously gorgeous and, from what he could tell, perfectly nice—but there was something . . . off about her. He had a gut feeling there was more to Ty than met the eye, and it wasn’t necessarily beautiful.
And then there was Emily Winters. There was always Emily Winters, and would always be.
Ty turned down the industrial road on the edge of town, near the old train yard. He’d passed this place a million times on his way to the highway, but he’d never had any reason to explore further. “What’s down here?” he asked.
“A blast from the past,” Ty said as they rounded the corner and a decrepit brick warehouse came into view. Broken-down train cars lined tracks that were overgrown with husks of dead grass. The entire landscape wa
s brown—rusty metal, muddy ground, dirty bricks. “Ta-da! Isn’t it beautiful? Sometimes I feel like I can still hear the whistle of the trains in the distance.”
JD knew enough local history to know that the freight line hadn’t come through this part of town in decades. He sat for a moment, squinting his eyes, looking at the abandoned building, its broken windows, and graffiti. “It’s, ah, very retro. . . . ” he said. It wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting, but then again, he couldn’t have imagined Ty pulling him out of theater early or packing him a picnic. He cleared his throat. “Looks like a spot that serial killers would take their victims, actually,” he said. “Should I be worried you’re trying to kill me?”
Ty laughed. “I thought it would be the perfect place,” she said as they got out of the car. What she thought it would be perfect for, he wasn’t sure. “It’s different, you know?”
She took his hand in one of hers—naturally, easily, as though they’d been holding hands forever. JD began to sweat. This was definitely a date. Which meant at one point, she might expect him to kiss her. Which meant he should start being nervous approximately now.
She led him toward a low broken window on the side wall of the warehouse. Faded stalks of grass, old cigarette butts, and shards of broken glass formed the carpet below their feet.
“Careful,” JD said, noticing Ty’s strappy sandals. “You’re not exactly dressed for urban adventuring.” He reached over to grab the picnic basket—an ornate wicker thing with a bright red ribbon wrapped around the handle.
“And you are?” She smiled huge, revealing paper-white teeth.
“These pants were probably made when this warehouse was still functional,” JD said in defense of his gray corduroys. “And suspenders are very practical.”
“Whatever you say.” She giggled as she put one leg through the window and then the other, snaking her body carefully to avoid snagging her clothing on any jagged edge. He followed her lead much less gracefully, managing to snap off a piece of the window ledge with his workboot as he jammed his foot through.
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