by Laure Eve
‘Hey,’ I tried, and then I forgot what else I meant to say because my head was so heavy, and I leaned back, feeling sleepy.
I must have been a lot more tired than I’d thought.
I heard Summer saying, ‘I’m sorry.’
CHAPTER 32
For a while, I thought I was dreaming.
The room was dark and close, but I recognised it. It was the spare bedroom on the second floor, the one I used to stay in. The rag rug on the floor. The little chest of drawers. The white walls. The bowl of devil stones on the bedside table.
I was dreaming about the Grace house again. This happened sometimes, especially nowadays.
But then my head gave a sharp throb, and my whole body felt like it was rolling, rolling. I stared at the twists in the rug, knotted flaps of colour, waiting until everything made sense.
There was a smell lying heavy on the air. Flowers – that was why. Two vases of them perched on the chest of drawers. Another jam jar rammed with thick stems on the windowsill. Scattered loose all over the floor. I turned my head and it seemed to slosh gently. Looking down the length of me I could see that the same flowers had been placed all around my body, resting up against my hip and side.
This was more than a little weird.
Something dark caught my eye – something at the foot of the bed. I sat up, heart rate spiking, head surging, and I saw her. Summer, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, arms between her thighs, hands locked together, watching me.
I tried to make my brain work. This felt like something a stalker would do from some dark drama, like those grim crime shows on TV my mother always watched. But Summer didn’t need to stalk me. I was all hers. Hadn’t breakfast proved that? Despite everything telling me no, hadn’t I let her in again?
‘How do you feel?’ she said. I tried to analyse her voice. All I could hear was concern.
‘Kind of like I’ve been punched in the face.’ My voice was startlingly slurry round the edges.
‘I’m really sorry about that. I might have overdone it a bit. We tried to measure right, but I wasn’t sure how much coffee there was in your cup. And the flowers, you know.’ She gestured.
What? No, I didn’t know. What was she talking about?
She was looking at me, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I couldn’t read her. It struck me suddenly that maybe I’d always found her emotions easy to tell because she didn’t see any reason to hide them from me. Not me, her best friend.
Now she did.
She was becoming a stranger, a loping, frightening stranger girl with black-ringed eyes. So fast. It was happening so fast. I felt thick and sick in the throat, and maybe it wasn’t just because of whatever it was they slipped me in my coffee. She opened her mouth, but the door rattled, her eyes dropped, and Fenrin walked in.
He glanced at Summer, and then his gaze settled on me.
‘What the hell is going on?’ I said. It seemed to take me years to get the sentence out.
Neither of them answered. There was movement behind Fenrin, and in slipped Thalia.
There they stood, all three of them, looking at me silently.
Cut her in half and you’d see ‘Grace’ the whole way through, Marcus had said. Like rock candy.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a reunion, you could have just asked.’
‘We did,’ said Fenrin, seriously. ‘You said no.’
‘I said not yet.’ I tailed off as I realised what game they had been playing with me at breakfast. Asking me to the house had been a test. The drug in my coffee was a last resort.
They all seemed to be waiting for something. What? For me to scream and rage at them? To ask them in a wobbling voice why they were doing this?
‘What did you use?’ I said to Summer. ‘To knock me out?’
‘Thalia’s sleeping pills,’ she replied, to the wall. ‘Sure you’re all right?’
I ignored this. ‘Are we going to have a party, then?’ I said. ‘It’s probably a bit cold this time of year for the cove. We could do a bonfire, though, like that time in the woods.’
‘The fact that you can joke right now,’ said Thalia, her doe eyes dark, ‘just proves my point.’ She glanced at Summer, who wasn’t doing much of anything.
I imagined myself rising up from the bed, striding over to Summer and hitting her across the face. A nice big cuff that sounded like a gunshot. A cuff that neatly demonstrated her betrayal while the audience back home silently cheered me on.
‘And what point is that, Thalia?’ I said, drawing her name out.
‘Are you hearing this?’ Thalia said to Summer, her voice rising. I wasn’t the only one trying to get her attention. ‘She acts like nothing’s happened. She doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t care. I told you. Don’t you get it now?’
‘Sure,’ said Summer mechanically. She was picking at her nails. It looked deliberate to me, a forced air of apathy.
‘Sure is not going to cut it. I need to know where your loyalties lie. We both do.’
Summer finally looked up, irritation lacing her voice. ‘For god’s sake, Thalia, I’m the one who got her here. I did all the work. What do you think?’
Silence descended. I wanted to open the crack further, make some quip that would whip Thalia into a meltdown, because she looked like she was close. But my heart was hurting, distracting me.
I miss you. You’re my best friend. Last night had been an act. A perfect plan to get me to trust Summer enough so they could kidnap me without raising any alarms. She wasn’t my best friend. None of them were. It was all a lie.
I wanted to wait for the perfect moment. One beautiful, perfect moment where I could hurt them the absolute most. I wanted to find their one big weakness, nail them to the wall with it and watch them bleed.
If only I could clear this fuzzy thickness in my head first. If only I could think properly.
‘I think,’ said Fenrin slowly, as if he were tasting the words, ‘that you should tell her why she’s here.’
I was half expecting Summer to bite back. But then she shrugged, shook it off. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it done.’ She turned away from her slouch against the wall and looked at me.
‘It’s the winter solstice tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘The festival of rebirth.’
I felt my skin fur up in response to her words, but I held her gaze, trying to be unreadable stone like her.
‘So it’s the perfect time to bring Wolf back.’
Except I wasn’t expecting that. My pulse stuttered.
‘What?’ I said stupidly.
She sighed. ‘You heard.’
‘You’re going to bring him back from being dead?’
‘No,’ said Thalia. She was calm now, her arms folded. ‘You are.’
I snorted a long, disbelieving piggy snort. They were prepared for my faithlessness, though; none of them even blinked.
‘This is ludicrous, right?’ I said. ‘Summer. You know this is totally ludicrous.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Thalia. ‘You killed him. So you can be the one to bring him back.’
I didn’t just hear that.
This wasn’t funny. This wasn’t real.
I needed to say something. Be shocked, and then angry. That was what innocent people were, weren’t they? Shocked at the suggestion; angry that they could be thought of as capable of that. But the only thing I seemed to really want to do was laugh, hard and sharp until my belly hurt, laugh at them and me and this ridiculous, ridiculous situation.
‘Thalia,’ I spat out, finally. My throat convulsed with a giggle. ‘You are officially off the rock.’
‘Oh,’ Thalia said quietly. ‘Did you think we wouldn’t work it out?’
‘Work out what, exactly?’
‘Your secret.’
Those two words, and all they might imply, made me want to throw up, or kill her, maybe. Maybe both.
‘What secret?’ I asked.
But she didn’t want to say, and no one rushed to fil
l it in for her.
I shook my head. ‘You’re insane. Wolf died in an accident. He was swept out to sea.’
She sneered. ‘Well, it wasn’t like we were expecting you to just confess.’ Her gaze fell on Fenrin, who was utterly silent, impassive, his arms folded. His eyes were on the far wall. Summer was watching me intently.
‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘What is wrong with you all? So you’re telling me you think I killed Wolf? If you’ve known that all this time, why the hell would you wait so long to do something about it? I’d have kidnapped me and drugged me up ages ago.’
‘Well, let me tell you the rest,’ said Thalia. ‘If you refuse to bring him back, we’re going to do it ourselves, with old magic. All we have to do is make a sacrifice. One life in exchange for the other.’
My bones turned to ice because they knew what was coming.
She tipped her head. ‘You know. Yours for his.’
CHAPTER 33
Those fucking flowers.
They stank, maybe even more than when I’d first arrived. The smell filled up my lungs like soup. Made it hard to breathe. When you were concentrating on breathing, you couldn’t think too well.
There was always someone outside the door to the bedroom, and they kept it locked. I could hear them shuffling, whispering to one another like they were outside a sickroom and not a prison. I tried the window, but it had been sealed shut somehow.
I’d been here a few hours already, and it was nearly nightfall. I wondered if my mother would notice that I hadn’t come home. I doubted it. They had my phone – all they had to do was send her a reassuring message that looked like it was from me. I was out with friends. I’d be home late – maybe not even until tomorrow. Don’t worry. And she wouldn’t because she knew I wasn’t with the Graces – the Graces were out of my life.
The buzzing silence crowded into my ears, and my mind ran a mile a minute but nowhere useful, just turning in circles and circles until I was dizzy. The white flowers were ghosts in the dusk light, and I imagined them crawling across the floor, up the bed, floating along my skin, laying themselves carefully on my mouth until I stopped breathing. The thick flesh petals rubbed up against one another, nestling against the floorboards as that smell rolled off them in waves.
I could hear them whispering outside the door again.
‘Hey,’ I called.
The whispering stopped.
‘Hey,’ I called again, desperate for them to acknowledge me. ‘I’m hungry. Hello?’
Silence.
A clicking as the door was unlocked and opened inward with a cautious slowness. I was sitting on the bed, my knees drawn up. I peered over their rounded tops and tried to look weak.
Fenrin came in, and his eyes found me, and my heart dropped.
We stared at each other for a moment too long. He shut the door behind him, and I heard a click as someone turned the key on the outside. I watched him look carefully around the room. Why? Checking for the booby traps I’d made from all the useful materials in here?
‘We’ll get you something,’ he said, hovering by the door. ‘What do you want?’
I gave him my best stare of contempt. ‘If you’re really going to kill me tomorrow, why bother feeding me?’
He shrugged. ‘Summer insists.’
The sound of her name hurt.
‘Why aren’t you trying to escape?’ he asked me. ‘You could wait behind the door, try to get out when we open it. You might even make it.’
‘I don’t want to leave,’ I snapped. ‘God, this is crazy. If you’d just asked me, I would have said yes, you know. We could have talked it out. You could have said, “Hey, we’re thinking of trying to resurrect Wolf, want to come?” Not all this ridiculous cloak-and-dagger shit. What do you think I’m going to do to you?’
He didn’t answer, but neither did he come closer, as if whatever he thought I had was catching. What did they see when they looked at me now? I’d spent the last hour scanning every memory I had of us together. What had I done, what had I said, to lead them here?
The floating aftermath of the pills had worn off; I felt shaken, small, and angry scared. But there was no way I was going to let him know that. I could play games, too.
‘Fen,’ I said.
He was sharp all over, like just being in the same room as me stung his skin.
‘I don’t want to dance around any more, River.’ His voice was quiet. ‘It’s time for truth, now.’
Secrets and eggs.
‘Because you guys are so big with truths, right?’ I threw back at him.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What?’
He shrugged. ‘What do you want to know? We’ll trade. One of my secrets for one of yours. And we get to pick each other’s secret.’
I was caught. This felt like a game that I didn’t yet know the rules to.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I have a question.’
He leaned against the wall nearest the door. He still wouldn’t come close to me. Was I so disgusting to him?
‘Wolf,’ I said, and I was rewarded with a tiny flinch across his eyes, the fleeting flash of a fish underwater, at the sound of that name in my mouth. ‘You were in love with him, weren’t you?’
He was silent.
I put my legs down and crossed them at the ankles, leaning back against the pillow propped behind me. ‘I thought this was truth time,’ I said.
I watched him steel himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice was impressively matter-of-fact. ‘I was in love with him.’
The admission did something to me, a wave of embarrassment and shame all the way down to my toes. Wolf had loved him, too. He’d admitted as much to me in the garden, that he was in love with one of them. I’d just guessed the wrong one.
‘Marcus told me something once,’ I said. ‘That the Graces go in for arranged marriages.’
Fenrin cocked his head.
‘Promised,’ he replied. ‘That’s the word. It’s not a marriage. It’s not legally binding.’
‘That’s …’ I searched for a suitable word. ‘Really fucking weird, Fen.’
He was silent.
I stared at him, the angles of his face. That snarled expression it had worn when I saw him underneath Wolf in the sand. Like nothing else on earth existed for him right then except the body he touched and the soul it belonged to.
‘So let me make a guess,’ I said. Something I’d worked out long ago, but I wanted to see it hit home. ‘Wolf was promised to Thalia.’
‘How clever you are.’
‘Fen – that’s crazy. So … what? One day someone says, “Right, now you guys are together”? No choices?’
‘I’m not discussing this with you.’
I felt a surge of irritation. Apparently, I was now only worthy enough for a certain amount of truth in one go. ‘Fine. I mean, I’ve never seen two people less interested in each other. They acted more like cousins than promised, but … whatever. Everyone knew you and Wolf were in love, but that’s cool, for the sake of tradition, we’ll just all ignore it? So when Thalia and Wolf got together, that would be it for you two, would it? No more little trips to the beach? No frolicking in the sand?’
Fenrin’s face turned hard, statue-like.
‘Frolicking in the sand,’ he repeated, but there was no question in his voice.
I waited, puzzled.
He laughed to himself. It was not a sound of amusement. ‘There was actually only one time we frolicked in the sand, as you put it. Just that one time.’
I knew which time he meant.
He tilted his head up, as if he wanted to contemplate the ceiling for a while. ‘Do you know what I remember from that day?’
‘You said you didn’t remember anything. Another lie?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve never lied to you.’
I opened my mouth in outrage, ready to give him times and dates. But nothing came.
‘Everything I had to go through,’ he said, his body closed and tight. �
�The police questions, the suspicion. My own doubt. What happened, why couldn’t I remember. It was torture. If I knew, then I could have moved on. I could have somehow, eventually, been okay with Wolf gone. But I didn’t know. We tried everything, every charm, every spell and trick, to get my memory back. Nothing did it. But not long after your confession, I woke up from a dream. The dream was of the day he died. And suddenly, I remembered everything.’
Now, finally, he looked full at me.
‘It was like something had been stopping me from remembering until then. I knew exactly what had happened. Because I saw you there in the cove. I saw what you did.’
Hiding was a type of behaviour the Graces were all particularly good at. He’d been hiding earlier, but he wasn’t now. The expression on his face I was never going to forget – like he wanted to stab me and feel my flesh give under the weight of his arm.
‘I guess part of it was my fault,’ he said. ‘I handled it badly that day in the grove. I should have told you I didn’t like you that way, but you just completely took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought about you like that, you know?’
He paused.
‘I don’t think I believe that you can really bring Wolf back,’ he said, finally. ‘Even if you had the power to kill him. But it doesn’t matter. In fact, I think what I want is for you to fail. Because then you die instead, and we get him back anyway.’
My insides shrivelled in fright.
‘Fenrin, listen to me,’ I said, fighting panic. ‘Whatever it is you think you saw … Wolf’s death was an accident. You of all people can’t possibly believe that I can bring someone back from the dead!’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. But if it doesn’t work, if it really doesn’t bring him back … well.’ His eyes were far away. ‘Your life for his. It’s the right way of things. The old way of things.’ His gaze fell on me. ‘Vengeance,’ he finished. ‘An eye for an eye.’