Sever (The Ever Series Book 3)

by C. J. Valles

  Unfortunately her idea of a good time after the AP exam is to put us into groups and make us film twenty-minute “movies” based on stuff we read during the year. I wrote the script for our group’s sketch, mostly because I didn’t want to act. Acting, to me, is one level of hell lower than dancing.

  The two books from the year that are stuck in my head—and I don’t want to think too much about why—are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Different time periods and totally different genres, but they’ve continued to haunt me, so my script ended up turning into kind of a paranoid parable revolving around persecution and women’s freedom.

  Josh, my friend who had a short-lived crush on me when I first moved here, is in my English class again. We’re in the same group, and he loves being the center of attention, so he’s all for being one of the lead actors. As soon as I walk into class, I see him sitting in the corner messing absently with his sandy-colored hair and studying the script. When I walk over to where he’s sitting, he looks up.

  “There’s part of the script I don’t think does anything for my character …”

  I smile.

  “If you want to make changes, talk to the director.”

  “But I don’t really know what I want to change, and you’re good at that stuff, Sullivan.”

  I smirk at his flattery.

  “All right. What is it?”

  “The end. It’s too ambiguous. How are people supposed to tell if he’s really the good guy?”

  “They’re not.”

  Josh frowns.

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does,” I agree. “But come on, Josh. These are the kind of roles that actors in Hollywood are dying for.”

  “They are?”

  “It’s more interesting when you can’t tell who the good guy is.”

  “It is?”

  I laugh at the look on his face.

  “Trust me.”

  When the other people in our group come over to start running lines, I sit back. My job is done. As I watch them rehearse, part of me wishes I were a better actor. I wish I could hide my hate behind a smile. I wish I could hide my love by looking away. I wish I could play the frosty, take-no-prisoners heroine and hide my fear.

  But if I could do these things, then I would cease being who I am—and isn’t that what the enemy wants?

  7: Dance With the Devil

  Walking alone through the halls toward the restrooms, I suddenly remember how on edge I felt when Alex first appeared last year. Of course, being afraid of Alex now seems laughable given that evil incarnate just showed up in my Health class. But a little more than a year ago, I would have considered Alex my biggest problem, and now that he’s gone, I guess he still is my biggest problem. Victor may want my body and soul, but Alex wanted something more dangerous. Something I couldn’t give him that he took anyway when he saved me. Stepping into the bathroom, I flinch when I see Audra perched on one of the sinks.

  “It may seem like Victor is all threats, but don’t take any risks. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking he can be bargained with.”

  I swallow and smile crookedly.

  “I won’t.”

  The question that has started to haunt me is: what if I don’t have any choice? I walk into one of the stalls, and by the time I come out Audra is gone. Still, it feels like the entire immortal world is watching me, just waiting for me to mess up and tip the balance. By the time I meet up with Ashley, Taylor, and Lindsay at Ash’s locker, nutrition is almost over.

  “There she is! Thanks for saving me, super-chick!” Taylor says.

  I wince.

  “Yeah, really heroic. I shoved you onto the sidewalk. Did you show off your battle wounds?”

  “Wren, really. If you hadn’t been there …” Taylor protests.

  She puts her foot up on the lockers and rolls up her jeans. I wince at the big, purple bruise on her shin.

  “Gross. Thanks, Taylor. I may skip lunch now,” Lindsay says dramatically before turning to me. “You know what? Senior prom is going to suck after last year. You can thank your boyfriend for that. Him and Audra and Chasen made junior prom epic, and now senior prom is going to suck a big—”

  “I totally forgot!” Taylor squeaks, cutting off Lindsay’s rant. “Wren and I saw Chasen over the weekend. They showed up at the ice cream place right before 23rd almost ate me—and Audra might get back in time for prom! She sent me a text last night.”

  Of course Audra did.

  “So they’re coming with us again?” Ashley asks before turning to Lindsay. “Hell, yeah! I can’t wait to see your boyfriend’s face when you tell him he’s taking Audra to prom again.”

  “As long as I get to take Chasen again,” Lindsay snickers, making her eyebrows go up and down before looking around, even though Audra’s supposed to be across the pond. “Audra would kill me dead if she heard me say that.”

  Not quite. Because I’m pretty sure Audra heard that, and Lindsay’s still breathing. When the bell rings, I trudge off to Econ. I’m doing all right, but it hasn’t been the most thrilling class of my senior year. Mr. Johannsen doubles as the girls’ softball coach, so he spent most of the semester distracted. Even now that the season is over, he still won’t quit wearing shorts, a polo shirt, and a coach’s whistle. When I walk into class, he’s bent over the podium, looking very serious. I’m starting to think he has a gambling problem the way he’s always staring at his tablet. When the bell rings, he looks up, his thoughts taking me by surprise. He was just placing orders for tickets to the soccer game.

  “To the victor go the spoils! Those of you who picked the winning stocks from last week’s assignment get tickets to the game on Friday.”

  Several people around me start whooping, but I feel my face freeze. His word choice is making me a little ill. To the victor go the spoils? Vomit. Reminded of Victor’s presence, I look around, half expecting him to be leering from the seat behind me. Nope. No sign of him. Class drags, though, and I’m thrilled when the bell rings.

  I took an intentionally light load this semester while I’m working at the bookstore. It was pretty crazy over the winter break, but Rita, the general manager, has been good about not working me to death. My goal is to make as much money as I can before the end of the year, but I don’t want to flunk Trig in the process.

  When I get to fourth, Matt’s already at our table. We ended up in Journalism together this year, so we hang out most of the time, which is a lot easier now that we both don’t have a crush on Ever. He just teases me relentlessly.

  Our teacher, Mr. McGowan acts more like a college professor. Or at least that’s how he likes to think of himself. He’s big on autonomy. Translation: we just hang out, work on our assignments when we want to, and talk when we have nothing else to do. He even let me do a column this semester.

  “So?” Matt says coyly. “You never let me see it. … What is Wren Sullivan’s final column of the school year going to be? The Secret to How I Got the Hottest Guy in School?”

  “Shut up!” I laugh, sitting down next to him.

  “Dude. I saw him first, and you stole him away.”

  “Matt? Word of advice. Southern Californians stopped saying dude around the time my mom was born. You’re gonna have to get with the times before you head off to UCLA in the fall.”

  “How would you know? Look at you. You could totally be a Pacific Northwest native … if only everyone here didn’t have an unnatural obsession with tanning salons.”

  “Uh, yeah. What is with that?” I laugh.

  “Personally, I think the vitamin D deficiency makes everyone cra-zy.”

  “Which means I’m just going to get crazier the longer I’m here?”

  “Definitely. And you could have escaped,” Matt chastises. “Didn’t you get into San Diego?”

  I nod. I got into a handful of perfectly good public schools in California. The problem is that I can’t even explain why I don’t want to go back
to California. During the grand total of three weeks in the past year that I’ve spent at my dad’s, I felt like a stranger visiting a foreign land. The first time—when Alex erased my memory and my life was crumbling around me—feeling isolated and alone was normal. But even when I visited my dad last summer, being there still felt wrong. Like I was going back to a chapter of my life that had ended.

  When Matt goes back to working on the cartoon he’s doing for the last issue, I look over Mr. McG’s edits to my column. He still doesn’t like that I use the second person. Plus, I’ve been writing anonymously, which drives him crazy. He thinks I should “reveal” my identity in the last column. When he said that, my answer was simple: no freaking way. If I wanted people to know who I was, I would have taken Drama.

  Getting up, I go over to the layout room where Mr. McG is backseat driving someone, simultaneously worrying his tie with one hand and using the other hand to comb through what little hair he has on the top of his head. I try to think of a politically correct way to tell him that I’d rather bite off my tongue than expose myself as the writer of The Invisible Girl. When he looks over at me impatiently, I figure being blunt is better.

  “What is it, Wren?”

  “I want to take my byline off of the final print. If it needs to have one, I just want it to read: A. Girl.”

  He frowns.

  “Are you sure? Might help you if you apply for the paper when you get to college.”

  I shake my head.

  “That’s okay.”

  I turn around to walk out, and that’s when I see Matt talking to someone at our table. I stop breathing when Victor looks up at me and smiles.

  “I was just having the nicest conversation with your friend Matthew,” he says when I reach them.

  I look at Matt and see the same vacancy in his eyes that I saw in Ashley’s the night Alex took her. Looking back at Victor, I wish I could incinerate him with the power of my hatred.

  “Leave my friends alone.”

  “I can’t do that, you see. Unless, of course, you cooperate.”

  “Cooperate? So you can kill everyone I care about? You’re not very bright for a super villain.”

  “I can offer you immortality.”

  My eyes narrow. If I didn’t take Ever up on his offer, why would I take the same offer from Victor? Then my blood turns to ice. What if Victor doesn’t know about Persephone—that Alistair changed her, and Ever could do the same to me? What would Victor do if he knew his offer wasn’t the only one? Would I be dead already? I smile, but it’s more to hide my terror than anything else.

  “You’re going to have to offer me something better.”

  “Humankind has been seeking immortality for its entire history, and yet you ask for something more?”

  “Yes. Leave my friends and family alone … or I’ll end this for you, and then you’ll just have to wait and see if there’s another human doorstop out there sometime in the next millennium.”

  I don’t have to spell it out. I can see from his expression that he understands my intent. If these immortal psychopaths touch anyone, then I’ll end things on my terms. I will not be manipulated. Not again. I’ll die before I lose my family or my freedom.

  When Victor disappears, Matt looks up at me like he wasn’t just frozen in time. I smile and take out a piece of notebook paper. Sitting down next to him, I start rewriting my column. By the time I’m done, the bell rings. Matt and I walk out, and I head toward my locker before lunch to swap out my Econ book for my Trig book. Opening my locker, I find a note and smile. I like it when I get notes from Ever rather than texts. It feels more personal.

  A day is a very long time.

  When I get to the cafeteria, I see Matt up ahead already paying. I get in line, thinking over the fact that we’ll all be in different places by the start of the next school year. Will I lose touch with everyone like I did when I left Southern California? Will I still be alive by then? Or will I be different? Different, as in not human.

  Looking around for my friends, I notice that the group that is typically raucous and obnoxious through the entire lunch period is eerily silent. Jeff Summers and a bunch of his buddies, plus Emily Michaels and her crew of means girls, are never silent. Far from it. I watch as Matt speeds up to avoid them, but just as he’s about to pass them, Jeff’s leg slices out, catching him at the ankle.

  Running over to help Matt, I’m surprised to see that his tray landed with his food and drink intact. Spinning toward Jeff’s table, I’m about to tell him what a psycho he is when his tray suddenly pops forward and lands in his lap. A second later, the sprinkler above their table goes off. Looking around, I finally spot Chasen on the other end of the room, leaning against the wall.

  That’s right. Pick on my friends at your own peril, you jerks, I think smugly.

  I smile at Chasen, grateful for the instant karma he just doled out. On the other hand, I’m too cynical to think that Jeff and his friends will learn any kind of lesson. Jerks and bullies rarely do—at least in my experience. Either way, it is totally worth it watching them scramble around as the makeup melts from Emily’s painted face.

  I walk with Matt to our table, but when I try to say something, he brushes it off. Within a few minutes, he seems fine, but I don’t go poking around in his head to see if he really is. Right now, I’m just so sick of evil in all of its mortal and immortal forms. Twisting the stem from my apple, I think about all the different things I’ve wished for since I was a little kid. Inter-dimensional peace was never one of them, but freedom from bullies was.

  When the bell rings, I get up and grab my tray, contemplating how difficult it is to imagine that Ever was a victim at any point during his existence. To me, Ever is perfect and invincible. Then I remember Jeff’s sneering assertion last year that Ever was a freak. It makes me wonder if people like Jeff—predators—can sense innate differences in others that they use to torture and alienate people they decide are outsiders.

  I’ve always thought that what I’ve seen in other people’s minds is a curse, something that separates me. And it does. It separates me from the people who will always perceive other people’s differences as bad. But why would I want to be connected to those people? Besides, what separates me from “normal” people also brought me to Ever. And even he said it: what drew him to me was that I was different.

  Scanning the halls as I walk to Trig, I look for signs of impending doom—sinkholes, people with coal-black eyes, inter-dimensional overlords—and shiver. The thought of Victor appearing out of nowhere makes me wonder how I’m going to get through the rest of the day, let alone the last few weeks of my senior year.

  I’m almost to class when an arm grabs me around the waist and pulls me into an empty doorway. Just as I’m about to scream, a hand covers my mouth and someone spins me around. I look up at Ever, half annoyed, half relieved to see him.

  “I couldn’t wait until the end of the day,” he smiles.

  I rise up on my toes and kiss him.

  “Well, could you have waited until you weren’t going to take years off of my life?”

  Ever frowns.

  “Wren, he won’t hurt you. Victor needs you too much.” He pauses, studying me. “Remember, though. There is no deal to be made with him. He is only out to win, and he is crueler than you can imagine.”

  Hearing footsteps, I turn, and when I look back, Ever has already disappeared. I rush the rest of the way to class, remembering back to the beginning of junior year when it felt like my life was ending. I had been sure that I would flunk math, and my parents’ divorce had seemed cataclysmic.

  Now, immortal warfare has given me a fresh perspective. My pain, my decisions, my future—they are all larger than I am as an individual.

  When I get to Trig, I contemplate my existence and the possibilities for the future, however long or short mine is. One possibility is that someone erases my memory, and I live to a ripe, old age. Another is that Victor wins, and something has control over me for eternity.
A third is that I become like Ever and the others. Or, my least favorite option: I die, soon.

  Maybe I was crazy to say no after Ever told me it was possible to become like him. Or maybe I trusted my instincts and was right. I think about all the things I’ve discovered since that moment. At the time, I hadn’t known about Alex’s true intentions, the war for this world, or Victor. All critical information when deciding whether to dispense with my humanity for an eternity with Ever.

  Thinking of Alice’s long, strange fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, I wonder if I’ll ever hit the bottom—or if I’ll just keep falling.

  I spend most of the period trying to stay under Ms. Kwan’s radar. It’s just my luck that my Trig teacher has turned out to be yet another math teacher who thinks everyone should “get it” immediately. The fact that I’m a senior—and struggling—seems to bug her. This is her first year teaching, and I’ve caught her thinking that teaching shouldn’t be so hard.

  I guess everybody has problems. The only difference is other people’s problems don’t necessarily involve immortals. On the other hand, if Victor wins, he is going to be everybody’s problem, whether they know it yet or not.

  8: Work

  I need time to think—and not about Trig, and when the bell finally rings, I put my notebook in my bag and head for my locker. Ever is already waiting for me.

  “Is this going to be the rest of my senior year? Immortals jumping out from behind every corner?”

  “I wish it didn’t have to be this way for you,” he says as we walk to the parking lot. “Of all the things I wish I could give you, freedom from this is highest on the list.”

  The sacrifice in his words makes me angry, which is good. It reminds me that I need to stop complaining if I don’t want Ever to disappear one day because he thinks it’s best for me.

  “That is not what I meant. Hello! Read my mind. I am not sitting around wishing you would disappear. It just feels like I’ve been holding my breath waiting for something bad to happen … and it finally did.”