“Well, the girls adore you,” I said.
“Please,” she retorted, rolling her eyes.
“Um, two of them are inside right now, baking cupcakes for your anniversary party, while you’ve been MIA for at least fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.”
Krista bit her lip. “I bet Lauren is separating the sprinkles by color and driving Bea bonkers.”
“Probably.” I laughed. We both stared out over the ocean. “I think you just have to find your thing, your place, how you’re going to fit in for the long run,” I said, thinking of Tristan, of my odd new relationship with Joaquin, and of the very slowly blossoming friendship with Krista. “We all do. But it’s going to take time.”
“And we have nothing but that,” Krista muttered.
A soft knock sounded behind us, and I glanced back at the mayor’s office windows. Two clear blue eyes stared out at me through parted wooden slats. I caught my breath. The mayor held my gaze for a long, long moment before snapping the blinds shut.
I turned back to Krista, an awful feeling spreading through my gut that my time might be running out.
Joaquin was silent as he walked me home from Krista’s later that afternoon, beadily eyeing the Lifers at the center of town like he was my own personal bodyguard. He’d shown up out of nowhere as we’d finished the last batch of strawberry-scented cupcakes and had ever so casually offered to escort me back to Magnolia Street. Now I knew why. He thought I needed protection.
I wasn’t sure if that made me feel safer, or a lot more terrified.
“So…” I said finally, as we reached the far side of the square and the ever-present shadows on Freesia Lane. “How about those Yankees?”
“What?” Joaquin snapped.
I blushed, hard. “Sorry. It’s just something…my dad always says that when there’s an awkward pause in conversation. It’s like a thing.”
“Oh.” It was his turn to blush. “I guess I’m a little tense.”
We started down the hill, passing by the tall, imposing Victorian houses, their eaves decorated with intricate carvings, their porches lined with pretty potted flowers—although some of these had begun to wither and brown. The overgrown park at the center of the lane was as deserted as ever, and I averted my eyes from the eerily creaking swing.
“Did you see Tristan at all today?” he asked suddenly.
I shook my head, my heart skipping a beat. Every time a door had closed or a floorboard settled inside Krista’s house, I’d been sure it was the mayor coming for my head, but it was always nothing. Apparently, wherever he and Nadia were, they were having a good time together.
“Krista said something about him going surfing with Nadia,” I replied.
Joaquin rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Tristan and Nadia are like… What two elements explode when they’re mixed together?”
“Well, there’s oxygen and phosphorus.… There’s—”
“Then they’re like that,” he interjected, gazing at the ocean in the distance. “If they’d spent any kind of time together, we’d know, because the island would have been obliterated.”
I smirked, feeling a little better. Joaquin, after all, knew Tristan better than anyone.
“He’s probably just off on one of his thinks.”
“His thinks?” I asked.
We emerged onto Magnolia and turned toward my house. Overhead, the sky was just beginning to darken, the lowering sun shading the clouds violet and pink. Joaquin sighed.
“Every once in a while Tristan… He just disappears,” Joaquin explained, glancing down at a dying sunflower that drooped all the way to the sidewalk. He stepped over it with a wide stride, like it might suddenly come to life and bite him. “Doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going. Just vanishes for a day or two, and when he gets back he won’t talk about it. One time I finally got him to tell me what he’d been up to, and he said, ‘I was thinking.’ That was it. So now we call them his thinks.”
Something inside of me sank. All along, Tristan had been bent on protecting me. Postponing telling me the truth about my new existence, making sure I didn’t hear about things dying for the first time ever, not telling me about Jessica and Oblivion. But now, when I really needed protection, it was Joaquin walking me home from the mayor’s, not him. He was off alone somewhere, thinking. But I supposed it was better than the alternative.
“Well, here we are,” Joaquin said as we arrived at my front gate. “Home sweet home.”
“Yeah.” I paused with my hand on the latch. “Thanks, Joaquin,” I said, looking him in the eye. “I appreciate you going out of your way.”
“Eh, I was gonna go for an evening swim anyway,” he said, shrugging me off. Then he smiled. “I’ll come down and get you for the meeting tonight.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, even as my blood ran cold, remembering the looks on the faces of Nadia’s crew that afternoon.
“Just for now,” he said. “Until we figure it all out. Which we will do.”
I nodded, trying to feel as confident as he seemed. “Okay.”
I went to push the gate open, but he didn’t move. When I looked up at him, I could have sworn he caught his breath. “You sure you’re all right?”
My palms began to itch, and there was a slight hitch in my pulse, but I ignored it. This was Joaquin. He was a player. He’d screwed over my sister. And I was with Tristan. Wherever he was. I heard a loud caw and saw them coming, five dark splotches against the purple sky. The crows swooped in and landed on the apex of our roof, one, two, three, four, five. Overhead, the seagull circled and bleated, but it was clearly outnumbered. It finally turned and soared out to sea.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll see you later.”
I shoved the gate open, forcing him to take a step back, and strode inside without a second glance. As soon as I inhaled the familiar, musty scent of the house, I started to relax. I was home. I was safe.
Then I spotted Darcy at the kitchen table, and my heart froze. Maybe I wasn’t so safe.
“Hey, Darcy,” I said casually, hoping that if I acted like nothing was wrong, she’d follow suit.
But Darcy just made a grunting, scoffing sound in the back of her throat and pushed her chair back.
“Darcy,” I implored her.
“Leave me alone,” she said, one foot already on the bottom step.
My pulse started to race in that sickly way it did whenever Darcy was mad at me, but there was no way I was going to let a misunderstanding about a guy get between us. Not again. Not now, when Nadia was busy turning everyone on this island against me. I caught up with Darcy just as she was about to slam the door to her room. I flattened my hand against it and stopped her, jamming my wrist.
“Darcy, if this is about Fisher, there’s nothing going on,” I said.
She groaned again and walked farther into her room, tossing a book onto the bed. It flapped closed, and I saw the ancient silver writing, faded, on the cloth cover. Wuthering Heights. Impressive.
“Did you or did you not sneak out of the house to have breakfast with both the guys I like?” Darcy demanded.
I paled. She’d seen Joaquin, too? “It’s not like I—”
“Answer the question!” she fumed.
“Okay, yes,” I stated. “Yes. I did. But do you really think I’m going to go after Joaquin? Or Fisher?”
She flopped down on her window seat, turning her palms up atop her thighs.
“No, I don’t think you’re interested in either one of them. Not really,” she said. “But do you have any idea how this feels? It’s like you’re trying to hurt me. You. My own sister.”
She drew her legs up, facing away from me with forced casualness, as if she were fine and not vibrating with 5,000 megahertz of anger and sorrow. My chest heaved, desperate to just tell her the truth. Desperate to fix things between us however possible.
But I couldn’t. Because if I told her the truth
, I would damn her to the Shadowlands. I so wished she’d just perform a selfless act already, so this would all be a done deal. What I wouldn’t give to slap a Lifer bracelet on her wrist and tell her everything. But all I could do was keep my mouth shut and hope that it would happen. And soon.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, quietly. “I guess I’ll just go.”
“Fine,” she spat. “Go!”
I turned on my heel but paused at the door, my fingers curling around the beveled trim.
“But, Darcy, there is one thing you should know,” I said, looking halfway over my shoulder.
She sighed. “What?”
“I would never intentionally do anything to hurt you,” I said. “Never.”
Then I slipped into the hallway, closing the door behind me.
I stared at the Scrabble board in the center of the kitchen table, but the letters might as well have been hieroglyphics. My vision blurred in and out. Nothing made sense. Darcy hated me. Joaquin, quite possibly, liked me. But worst of all was Nadia. Clearly, she was determined to turn the town, and especially the mayor, against me. And now she might even be working on Tristan. What if she convinced him? What if she and her angry mob stopped glowering from safe distances and came after me?
“Bam!” my father shouted suddenly, nearly knocking me off my chair. “Quixotic! Q on a triple-letter, X on a triple-word; that’s one hundred and eighty-eight points! Read it and weep.”
I stared at him, trying to pull myself into his present. A present where he was alive and well, devouring ice cream, playing Scrabble with his daughter, and kicking her sorry ass. He licked a drop of chocolate sauce off his lip and smiled.
“Sorry,” he said when he saw my face. “That was a tad over the top. But you gotta admit…”
He gestured at the board, waiting for me to give him his props.
“Yes, Dad. You are a genius,” I said in a jokingly toneless voice. “Get over yourself.”
I looked down at the makeshift score sheet he’d drawn out for us, two columns labeled R for Rory and D for Dad, and it reminded me of the tally I’d found down at the cave. I wondered what Pete had done with it, where it was now, whether the mayor had seen it.
“Do you want to take a break?” my father asked. “I’m not really sure your head is in this tonight.”
A survey of the board proved him right. My words were stellar little pieces of brilliance like dog, from, and mat. With one word he’d pretty much annihilated my score.
“I guess not,” I told him, leaning back in my chair, feeling impossibly heavy. Outside the window screens, the waves sloshed against the shore, the low tide marking a steady, low rhythm.
“Everything okay, Rory?” my dad asked, his brow creasing with concern. “You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
Not the other world. Just this one, I thought. I gazed across the kitchen table at him, hesitating. Over the past few years I had barely spoken to my father, other than to inform him when I’d be home, that I had a doctor’s appointment, that I needed money for a haircut. It had been forever since my dad had offered to talk.
“Have you ever felt like you could trust someone one day and felt completely opposite the next?” I asked, toying with my tiles on their wooden rack.
He narrowed his brown eyes. “Is this about a boy?”
“Dad!” I said, blushing slightly. “Just answer the question.”
He leaned back as well, mimicking my pose, and thought. “Yes. Yes, I have,” he said at last.
“And? What did you do?” I asked.
“Well, Rory, things aren’t always exactly what they seem,” he said. “So I gave the person a chance to explain and then decided whether or not it was enough for me to trust them again.”
“And? Was it?” I asked hopefully.
He frowned and picked up his spoon, swirling it in the melted remains of his sundae.
“In my case, no,” he said, causing my heart to drop. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be the same for you.”
“I know,” I replied.
I balled my hands into fists on the table, stacked them one on top of the other, and brought my chin down on top of them. The seven playable letters in front of me spelled out SPITBLA. My father sighed, gazing out the window to his right.
“Your mother was always so much better at these things,” he said wistfully.
“You’re doing fine, Dad,” I assured him, just as Darcy padded into the room on bare feet, her pajama pants sitting low on her hips. She dumped her own sundae dish into the sink without looking at us.
“Yeah?” my dad asked.
I gave him a small but genuine smile. “Yeah. You’re great.”
He sighed and nodded, as if pondering whether or not he could trust me. Then he sat up straight and dropped his spoon back into his dish.
“Fog’s coming in again.”
I stood up, knocking my chair back, my eyeballs suddenly throbbing. The thick gray mist already covered all the windows, blocking our view of the house next door, squelching all the light. I went to the back door to look out, but all I could see was the swirling cloud. It had moved in faster than I’d ever seen before. My mouth went dry as unadulterated panic seized my heart.
This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not when we hadn’t told everyone yet—not when we hadn’t come up with a plan.
Darcy stepped up next to my dad, who was now on his feet. “Could it be any creepier?”
A sudden crash, like metal trash cans colliding, made all three of us jump. It was followed by a quick, but very real, shout of pain.
“What was that?” my father said, already reaching for the door.
I grabbed his arm and squeezed. “No, Dad! Don’t!”
He ignored me. He yanked open the door, and a few fingers of fog licked at his shoes. Darcy and I looked at each other, and I could tell she was as terrified as I was.
“Hello?” my dad called out. “Is someone out there? Are you all right?”
The reply was a soft, mewling whimper. Like a hurt kitten. Except I’d never seen a cat or kitten on this island.
“Girls, I’ll be right back,” my dad said, fumbling for a flashlight from the nearest drawer. “You stay here.”
“Dad, no. You’re not gonna be able to help. You can’t see anything,” I protested.
“Seriously, Dad,” Darcy added. “You can’t—”
“Just stay here,” he repeated. And then he vanished.
For a long moment we stood there on the threshold between crisp kitchen air and moist, warm mist. I heard my father barrel down the steps, shouting out, but after that, nothing. The mewling sound had stopped, and all I could hear was the incessant, menacing hiss of the fog, the pounding of my own heart, the sound of Darcy’s broken breath.
“Where is he?” Darcy’s voice was shrill.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said automatically.
“What if Steven Nell’s out there?”
I froze. “What?”
“What if he followed us?” Darcy asked, her eyes desperate. “What if he’s just been watching us? Waiting for a chance to lure one of us out? What if he’s out there right now, stalking Dad?”
“Darcy, he’s not,” I said, trying for a soothing voice, wishing I could tell her why I knew this to be true. “Trust me. There’s no way he—”
“Dad!” Darcy shouted into the swirling mist. There was no reply. “Dad! Answer me!”
Nothing. I looked at Darcy. Darcy looked at me. Then something changed in her face. Something hardened. “Screw this.”
Before I could even blink, she’d turned and dived into the fog. “Dad!” Already, her voice sounded distant. “Daddy! Where are you?”
I cursed under my breath and followed, my heart slamming against my ribs as I groped for the stairs and the handrail.
“Darcy!” I cried. “Dad!”
Someone laughed. The exact same laugh I’d heard coming through the phone line in Aaron’s roo
m. A mocking voice echoed back my plea: “Dad!”
I stumbled down the steps, clinging to the railing for dear life. I misjudged how far I’d come, and where I’d thought there’d be one more step, there was nothing. My stomach swooped as I tipped forward and fell face-first into the sand. Pain radiated through my skull and down my spine, and zipped up my arms. Another laugh, but farther away this time.
“Dad!” I shouted, scrambling to my knees.
“Rory?” he sounded impossibly far off, his voice a mere croak.
“Dad? Are you hurt?” I asked, whirling around, blind. “Where’s Darcy?”
A dry finger grazed my cheek. I reached up and slapped at it, my skin burning from the violence of my own hand.
“Stop it!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Stop screwing with me! Where’s my family?”
Another sound behind me. “What are you—?” my dad said.
There was the unmistakable sound of a punch hitting home. A cry of pain. “Dad?” I cried, terrified, desperate. I felt around in front of me blindly, looking for someone, anyone, in the mist.
There was a struggle. A tear. A crack. I whirled toward the sound, catching my breath again and again. Nothing but gray.
“Get off him!” Darcy shouted.
Another crack.
“Darcy!?” I wailed.
I turned and my foot jammed into something hard. I flew forward again, my arms flying out to brace myself. I flipped over and scrambled back on my hands like a crab, but it wasn’t a body that had tripped me. Just a large piece of driftwood, rotted and riddled with holes. I started to crawl, tears now streaming down my face.
“Dad? Darcy?” I whispered. “Where are you?”
Silence. No laughter, no mocking, no cries. My fingers groped in the darkness, growing colder as they dug into the frigid sand, finding nothing but seaweed, shells, smaller shards of wood. The longer I searched, the more sure I was that someone had taken my family. That I was never going to see them again. The fog seemed to drag on for hours.
Whoever they are, fight them, I begged silently. Don’t let them take you to the Shadowlands.