“Yes?” Lissy gave me another look, marginally less attractive than the first.
“You listen.” At her “whatever” expression, I continued. “Cade was the bad boy. The rebel. He had it rough—no money, big family, dad in jail, that kind of thing.” As I talked, the details became clearer and clearer in my mind. It was weird—I’d seen the past, and I’d read about it in the newspaper, and now I just knew. “Cade had it for Helen,” I said. “Bad.”
“Methinks I sense a love triangle coming on here,” Lissy said.
I nodded. “It wasn’t much of a triangle, not at first, but then Tad, upstanding young man that he was, started fooling around a bit, and Helen…”
Blond ponytail, sickening smile.
“…Helen didn’t like that at all. And so she brought Cade into it. She got her claws into him, and then boom, Cade and Tad were fighting.”
How many times had I seen the fight playing out against the backdrop of my mind?
“Tad started it. He came after Cade.”
“And Cade stabbed him?” Lissy asked.
I couldn’t imagine Cade, my Cade (I blamed Lissy for making me think of him that way), pulling a knife on someone.
“So Tad dies,” Lissy said. “And Helen and Cade disappear. Everyone figures they’ve run off, but really they get stuck in some sort of freaky time loop….”
I waited.
“That’s about all I’ve got,” Lissy said.
I sighed. “We could so use a Truth Seer right now,” I muttered. Had this whole debacle been a movie, Lexie would have popped out of nowhere right about then, but thankfully, my life hadn’t become that predictable—yet.
“But what does Tad have to do with John Davis?” Lissy asked.
I didn’t need to compare the two newspaper articles, but I did anyway. “Same wounds,” I said. “Same high school.” I thought of my visions, and Lissy, with one squinty look at my aura, plucked the thought from my head.
“Cade,” she said. “Whatever he did to Tad, he did to John Davis.”
“And not just John Davis,” I said. “Look at the dates on these papers. October 19, 1957. October 19, 1987.”
It didn’t take us long to find the remaining two boys from my vision. Teddy Call, a basketball hottie with dark hair, blue eyes, and a hell of a left hook, had died on October 19, 1967; Joseph Amity a decade after that.
“Ten-to-one odds says there’s another one from ’97,” Lissy said.
I made the executive decision that we didn’t need to look for the proof. Every decade, on the same day, like clockwork, a popular, good-looking, upstanding young man died.
“He’s the one,” Cade had told me, looking at Brock.
Brock, who hated it when any other guy looked my way.
Brock, whose tongue had taken up temporary residence in my best friend’s mouth.
Brock, who had told me he loved me the day before.
“It’s Brock.” When I said the words out loud, they became real.
“What’s Brock?”
I got the sense that Lissy was deliberately playing dumb.
“He’s the one.” I repeated Cade’s words. “Lissy, think. Once every ten years, the hottest guy in school disappears, leaving behind a super hot girlfriend who sobs when he’s found dead.” I paused. “Who’s the hottest guy at our school?”
“Brock.” If Lissy had been a little more with it, she would have known not to answer so quickly when she was talking to the girlfriend of the guy in question, but at this exact moment, I didn’t care.
“And what’s tomorrow’s date?” I threw out the next question, even though it was the one whose answer I least wanted to hear myself.
“October 19,” Lissy said. “2007.”
So now I knew. I knew the meaning behind Cade’s cryptic warnings. I knew what the fists I’d seen flying meant. I knew that in less than twenty-four hours, my boyfriend was going to become victim number six, unless I could figure out how exactly this was happening, and why Cade was killing these guys when I could tell just by looking at him that it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.
Our library trip had provided me with plenty of information. Great, mystery more or less solved, but the one thing it hadn’t given me was a single clue as to how to stop it.
“You know, right about now, I really could use some direction,” I said out loud, and at that exact moment, my life decided to become a full-out movie drama.
“Direction!”
It was just one word, but despite that fact (or maybe because of it), I knew exactly who I would find standing behind me when I turned around.
“Grams,” Lissy said, sounding about as thrilled as I was.
“Come,” the grandmother in question said, sticking to her one-word commands.
Lissy shrugged. “At this point,” she said, “why not?”
I had at least three dozen answers to that question, but Caroline Nowly stopped me in my tracks.
“There are answers to your questions,” she said, “whatever they may be. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourselves into, dearlings, but there are things you should read.” She paused. “Things you should know. The First Seer does not take visitations lightly, and neither do I.”
I looked at Lissy, and the silent question passed between us. How had her grandmother known about my dreams?
“You made me promise not to tell Lissy,” a cheerful voice said next to me. “You didn’t say anything about not telling Grams.”
I tried to glare at her and failed miserably. It was certifiably impossible to glare at Lexie James.
“I thought that was implied,” I said under my breath. “And I thought I told you to stay out of this.”
“No,” Lexie said, still smiling. “You didn’t. You just stopped talking to me and stopped picking me up from school and whatnot.”
Obviously, from her tone of voice, Lexie hadn’t taken any offense.
“So I figured you were trying to keep me out of it, which meant that it was dangerous, which meant that you needed help, which meant…” Instead of finishing her extraordinarily long run-on sentence, Lexie gestured toward Grams.
“You’re still staying out of it,” I told Lexie, in my best “I rule the school” voice.
Lexie batted her eyelashes angelically. Beside me, Lissy groaned.
“Come,” Grams said for the second time. “It’s time I gave you girls your books.”
I glanced at Lissy first, then at Lexie.
“Our books?”
Our exit from the library was most definitely what I would define as scene causing. Caroline “I Always Wear a Muumuu” Nowly was utterly incapable of stealth. As I drove on autopilot to Lissy’s house (apparently, good old Grams had been preparing for this day), I fiddled with the radio controls, trying not to think about the fact that, though our trip to the library had been as much of a success as I could have hoped for, it had objectively (according to the rules I had outlined) been a dismal failure.
Caroline Nowly, in addition to being the most conspicuous person ever born, was incapable of speaking in anything short of a booming yell. By the time we’d left the library, everyone within a thirty-mile radius had heard me referred to as a dearling. Talk about scenes.
Lexie may have been riding in her grandmother’s car, but she was so totally with Lissy and me in spirit. She’d never stopped smiling, and I knew better than to think that Miss All Sight, All the Time didn’t have a plan of her own.
And now, I was on my way to the James residence to get a book. Like there weren’t enough of those at the library. And yet, despite myself, I was intrigued. My skin hummed as I drove closer and closer to the house, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was standing on the edge of something bigger than big.
Three girls holding hands over an open grave.
The oldest, hair dark like their mother’s, staring off into the distance; the youngest, an almost comically solemn expression on her pixie face. The middle sister’s expression fell somewhe
re between the other two, and somehow, it seemed too big for her face.
She totally needed to practice that look in the mirror.
Pink. Purple. Blue.
I put the car in park, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, and unbuckled my seat belt. It was the unflattering facial expression on the middle sister’s face that clued me in.
I swear, I thought, if that little book tells me that those three girls are Lissy, Lexie, and me, and that the grave was Shannon’s…
I didn’t have time to complete the thought. Brock Phillips, boyfriend extraordinaire /lip-cheater, was standing in the driveway, and all of a sudden, I had much bigger things to worry about.
18
Possession
Possession is nine-tenths of girl law.
“Brock.” Lissy spoke his name before I had the chance, and her eyes did this fluttery thing they always did when she saw his aura. For the record, watching someone who may or may not have been your younger sister in an extremely irritating former life aura-flirting with your questionably unfaithful boyfriend? Not my idea of a good time.
“Hey,” Brock said. The first time he’d met Lissy, he’d turned on the charm, let the good-old-boy smile speak on his behalf. I couldn’t help but think of Fuchsia and wish that my boyfriend were a little less charming. Then again, if he’d been less than the popularity god that he was, would I have dated him in the first place?
“Hey, Lilah,” Brock said. There was something in his voice that I didn’t quite recognize. It wasn’t his puppy-dog tone from the day before, when he’d been trying to make things up to me. It wasn’t his “you’re hot” voice, which he used more to remind other people of that fact than to impart the message onto me. It was different.
“What’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice as light and flirty as I could given the circumstances (and by “circumstances,” I mean the fact that Caroline Nowly, her muumuu, and Lissy’s overexuberant younger sister were quickly approaching).
“I had to see you,” Brock said. For a moment, he looked extraordinarily like a shirtless soap-opera star, despite the fact that he was wearing a shirt. It was a good quality to have in a boyfriend, though I was starting to suspect, not the most important one.
I stepped closer to him, lowering my voice in the hope that maybe, just maybe, Caroline Nowly would let us be and wouldn’t order Brock to “come” or “leave” or, I don’t know, “jump” or “wash” or whatever she wanted him to do.
“You were so mad about the thing with Fuchsia, and some of the guys were talking, and…”
His expression was serious—not good. Neither was the tension in his neck, or (from what I could gather from the expression on Lissy’s face) the movement of his aura.
“Is there another guy?” Brock blurted out.
“What?” I asked, truly shocked. Somehow, he’d arrived at the conclusion that I’d cheated on him? An eye for an eye kind of thing?
“Another guy,” Brock said, and in that moment, the expression on his face went from adorable puppy-dog concern to macho, offended male bravado. I could see the air around him cracking, the cracks jumping onto his skin like sparks from a flame.
This was so not a good sign.
“Lilah, baby, just because of that little thing with me and Fuchsia, you start seeing another guy?” Brock shook his head. “Baby, you can’t do that to me.”
He’d never called me “baby” so much in his life. It was almost as disturbing as the fact that he’d announced his infidelity to our entire audience (aka three generations of Lissy’s family, since her mother had picked this moment to come stand on the lawn).
“You cheated on Lilah?” Lexie asked, her voice aghast as she came to stand next to me.
Lissy gave him a murderous look. “Forget saving him. Maybe he deserves to die,” she muttered.
Lexie looked thoughtful. “No,” she said. “Probably not, but…” She trailed off. “He’s not really going to die, is he?”
The air around Brock was moving, breaking. Shards of this moment were dropping to the ground, and the visual surrounding his body—this time, this place—was slowly peeling away.
“You’re my girl, Lilah. Mine.”
Once upon a time, he’d said those exact words to me, and then our lips had touched for the very first time, and I’d fallen seriously in like with the guy every girl wanted.
The guy who ruled the school, as much as any male could.
The king to what I could only presume would be my eventual homecoming queen.
“Who is he, Lilah? What’s his name? Where did you meet him?”
“Are you deranged?” I asked, my voice low and dangerous. “Seriously, were you totally dropped on your head as a young child? Or, I don’t know, severely electrocuted in the past hour and a half? Because if you’re not suffering from some kind of trauma-induced psychological condition right now, then I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that the little hamsters on the wheel in your brain just died and the wheel stopped spinning.”
When I get riled, sometimes I start talking in metaphors that don’t make much sense. It’s an impulse I’d learned to curb by the time I was ten, but now I was on a roll, and I couldn’t seem to stop myself. All of the control I’d mastered, all of the rules I’d played by, all of the rules I’d forced everyone else to play by, were melting away. And all that was left was me.
And I was, quite honestly, royally pissed off.
“You cheated on me,” I said, and for once, I didn’t care who heard it. “And hello! You did it with my best friend. And then you told me you loved me, like that would make it all better. And now? Now you’re accusing me of being with another guy? What is wrong with you?”
My words fell on completely deaf ears.
“Who is he?”
Blackness broke through the cracks in the air. It surrounded Brock, and wisps of eerie darkness crept toward me, caressing my skin, absorbing my anger until I wasn’t sure why I was yelling.
“Who is he?” Brock asked again, only this time, the eyes looking out at me weren’t Brock’s. Even when he was jealous, even when he was stupid, even when he was jamming his tongue gracelessly down my throat, Brock had never looked at me like that. Pure, raw ownership emanated from his very being. He looked arrogant. Self-assured. Angry.
He looked like Tad Bradford wearing a Brock mask.
“Who. Is. He.”
It was a demand this time, not a question, and the air around me began to crack as well. Memories that weren’t mine—thoughts, desires, emotions that weren’t mine—flooded my body.
Make him pay. Make him pay. Make him pay.
“His name is Cade,” I said, and the instant his name left my mouth, there he was, standing beside me, the air quivering with his presence. I glanced at Brock/Tad, and his jaw tightened in anger.
“Where is he?” he asked. “Everyone knows better than to mess with my girl.”
“She’s not yours.” Lexie’s voice was soft but commanding. “She hasn’t been yours for a very long time.” She hooked her hand through Lissy’s. “She’s ours.”
Brock let out an inhuman growl, and another foreign thought replaced the chorus of “make him pay” playing in my head.
Save Meara. Save Meara. Save Meara.
The feeling—utter helplessness, terror, sadness—crept up my back like a bug with a mind of its own. My heart pounded, even as the first voice broke its way back into my thoughts.
Make him pay. Make him pay. He is yours. Make him pay.
The thoughts battled in my head, emotions that weren’t entirely mine and weren’t entirely not mine warring for control of my body. I thought of Brock with Fuchsia and how he was as much to blame as she was, and I wanted nothing more than to lead Brock straight to Cade. Cade, who had kissed me. Cade, who knew I was out of his league. But then there was Lexie, standing there, claiming me in a way that no one ever had before, and Brock, threatening that, threatening the one person I’d sworn to protect.
&nb
sp; Make him pay. Save Meara. Make him—save her—he is—she is—yours.
A hand on the back of my neck banished the thoughts. The light pressure made my spine tingle in a far less creepy way, and as my entire body warmed to Cade’s touch, my mind calmed.
“Cade.” I whispered his name even as I tried not to, and somewhere inside me, my defenses broke down.
I could feel his lips on mine, the day we’d barely kissed.
I could feel him watching over me as I slept.
I could hear him calling me Princess, see him kneeling beside me in the library.
Brock or Tad or whoever was speaking with my boyfriend’s lips was right. There was someone else, his name was Cade, and standing there, raw and confused and on the cusp of something so dangerous I could feel the air popping with memories of death and loss, I had to admit that there was a distinct possibility that I was in love with him.
Now my life really was a bad movie. There was about a ninety percent chance my boyfriend was possessed, I was quite possibly in love with a ghost (who had somehow killed the possessor of my boyfriend), and I realized that murders featured on the front page of an October 19 newspaper had to have been committed sometime before then.
Say, for instance, October 18. Today.
“You,” Brock growled. At first, I thought he was yelling at Lexie again, or at me, but when I saw his gaze connect with Cade’s, I knew that, for the time being, Lexie was safe. Brock had a new target.
“You can see him?” I asked Brock, and only years of practice keeping my cool in high-pressure situations allowed me to keep my voice steady and even.
“She’s my girl,” Brock told Cade.
Cade’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Princess?” he whispered under his breath, his eyes still on Brock. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was sorry for, because he turned his attention to Brock. “You don’t want to fight me,” he said, and only I heard the pleading tone in his voice.
Brock took a step forward, power and anger clear in his movements. He did want to fight, and his mouth only confirmed the message his body was sending. “You should have left Helen alone.”