“Tourist knockoff,” Jack said.
“You’re in Park City, are you not? Why would a town focused on a tourist trade of American Indian artifacts have a bracelet with ancient Egyptian roots?”
“Because tourists don’t know the difference.”
“Maybe,” Professor Spears conceded. “But I’d still like to talk to the shop owner. Perhaps he received inspiration from something else in his possession, and maybe he doesn’t know what he has. Museum artifacts are found this way all the time. Someone buys a house and finds something in the attic, or buried in the backyard.” He paused, waiting for an answer.
I narrowed my eyes at Jack, and he raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
I answered. “I got the bracelet from a friend, so I’ll have to ask her.”
“One last question, if you have a moment…” Jack said.
“Shoot.”
“How do you kill an Akh ghost?”
There was a pause on the phone line. “Uh, are you serious?”
“It’s for a paper.” Jack sounded so convincing, even I believed him for a second. “Theoretically, how would it happen?”
“Joyce, what kind of assignments are you handing out these days?”
We both looked at Mrs. Stone. She leaned toward the phone as if it were a microphone. “It’s extra credit. Trust me, Jack needs it.” She winked at Jack.
“Well, as the image shows, the Akh ghost existence is based on a perfect balance, this exact configuration of the five elements. If one of them were to throw the others out of balance … if the Akh ghost no longer had access, say, to other people’s kas. Other people’s energy.”
I felt my shoulders sag. There was no way we could prevent Cole from Feeding off others.
Jack must’ve thought the same thing, because he asked, “What about the heart? Why is it separate but in the middle?”
“Because it’s not part of the being, but it’s nearby.”
“Can they live without it?”
I jerked my head at Jack, but he was staring intently at the phone.
The line crackled, as if Dr. Spears had breathed deeply into the receiver. “I guess not. But you must find out where the heart beats first. Hypothetically.”
We were all quiet for a moment. Mrs. Stone looked at Jack and he nodded. She leaned forward again and said, “Thank you again, professor.”
“Of course, Joyce. And, kids, if you find out where exactly the bracelet comes from, please do let me know.”
We hung up the phone. We were going after Cole’s heart.
THIRTY-ONE
NOW
Jack’s car. Thirty-six hours left.
We walked out of the school and straight to Jack’s car. He turned on the engine and the heat. I looked back at the school, aware that I probably wouldn’t set foot inside it again.
“What do you think, Becks?” Jack said.
I turned away from the building. “Cole always tells me he has a heart, but it’s not inside him. I’ve even listened to his chest. There’s nothing there.”
“If it’s not inside him, it’s gotta be near him. We just have to figure out where it is. Professor Spears was right about the life force stuff. We have to assume he’s right about the heart, too, which means it’s valuable to Cole. So valuable that he would protect it with everything he has.”
“Maybe it’s locked away in a vault or something? Like in an urn.” I could only imagine a shrunken actual heart, but perhaps I was being too literal.
“But the band moves around so much,” Jack countered. “I’d guess it would be in something portable. Not as fragile as an urn.”
“Wait,” I said. Something portable. Something valuable. Something he protects and keeps with him always. Something as important to him as my own hands were to me. “His guitar.” I got excited thinking about it.
“His guitar.” Jack repeated the words, as if trying them out.
“He takes it everywhere. And once, when I touched it, he freaked out.” I remembered the day in my bedroom when I’d clawed at the strings. “I should’ve seen it before. He uses music to stir the emotions and circulate the life force of the audience, just before he steals energy. It’s like an actual heart; the center of the circulatory system. Pumping the nourishment. I watched him do it. It’s his guitar…” I stopped talking. Jack was staring at my arm, his eyes wide.
“What?” I demanded.
“The fingers. I can see them moving.”
I looked down at the mark, which was visible beneath the thin cotton of my shirt. It was halfway between my elbow and my wrist. I didn’t see it at first, but as I stared, I saw the line creeping.
“Mary said it would speed up,” I said.
Jack was quiet for a moment, staring at it. Then his arms were around me and he crushed me into him. “I can’t lose you again, Becks.”
“You’re not going to.”
This time, though, I actually believed it might be possible.
Jack drove us to Grounds&Ink. His left leg never stopped bouncing. When we found a booth, he ordered two coffees.
“Make them decaf,” I said to the waitress.
Jack nodded. When the server left, he said, “We’ve got to figure out a way to separate Cole from his guitar.” The words spilled out of his mouth and ran together.
“Do you think it’s just a matter of getting it away from him?” I asked.
“We find it, steal it, and then smash it.”
I laughed a desperate sound. “So all we have to do is find Cole, get close enough to him that we can steal his guitar— without him knowing it—and then smash it. And we have twenty-four hours.” I tilted my head back and looked at the ceiling.
“I know how we can get close to him,” Jack said quietly.
“How?”
“We give him the one thing he wants.” He was staring at his hand as he flicked his ring finger with his thumb.
“Me.”
He nodded, still not looking at me. “And then I think I know someone who would love to smash a guitar.”
We left the coffee shop and Jack drove me to my house. We had decided to wait until the next morning to go to Cole’s place. It was my idea, in case we failed. I couldn’t stand the thought of waiting those last few hours for the Tunnels. If our plan didn’t work, I wanted the Tunnels to get me that very instant.
Jack pulled over in front of my house. My dad’s car was in the driveway. He and Tommy were home from the Silver Lodge.
“Um … where will you…” I bit my lip.
“I’ll be in your room. Don’t lock the window.” He touched his lips and then touched my hand.
I nodded and got out of the car. My father, Tommy, and I ate a simple dinner that night. French toast. Breakfast for dinner. Just what the mayor needed after a tiring campaign. When I first got to the Everneath, I sometimes pictured what I would say to my dad and Tommy if I had the chance. But imagining the scene was very different from living it.
Tonight I had nothing to say. No wisdom to impart. No tearful good-byes. I had once had the words, but now they fell through me, as if I were a defunct sieve. Just one more ordinary dinner, in our ordinary kitchen, under ordinary circumstances. As if nothing were different.
I realized then that my Return had been painful. More painful than I ever could have imagined, with birthdays of Tommy’s that I’d never get to see, and the inauguration of my dad that I wouldn’t be able to attend, and good-byes I’d never be able to say.
But it’d been beautiful, too. The moments I could cling to, like the touch of Tommy’s golden hair beneath my fingers, and the sound of my dad’s voice as he talked to my mom when he thought no one else was listening.
When we were done, I hurried and did the dishes, and then I hugged Tommy and said good night.
“You never hug,” Tommy said.
I kissed the top of his head, scruffed up his hair. If this worked, I would do everything I could to make life normal for my little brother. I headed down the hall to my roo
m, opened the door, and shut it behind me.
Jack was lying on his back on my bed, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Without a word, I laid down next to him, facing him. He turned to look at me.
We were quiet for a moment. I studied his face—the bend of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips. Softly, I touched the post in his eyebrow.
His eyes crinkled in response.
“When did you get it?” I asked.
“A month after you left,” he said, “my mom told me to forget you. That you were gone, and you were never coming back, and that I was better off without you.” His lip quirked up in a half smile. “I knew she would hate it.”
I smiled, then leaned in and kissed his eyebrow.
His eyes flicked to my arm. The mark crept along, unstoppable, and as I watched it, the weight of all the things I couldn’t change came crashing down on me. This was the last night. Our last night. The last time I would feel his calloused hands on my skin. I looked at his beautiful face, and I couldn’t bear it.
Every breath I took meant another grain of sand in my hourglass disappeared, and I only had a few left. I tried not breathing. I was losing it, and I turned away.
Jack put his arm around my waist and pulled me tight against him, so my back was cradled against his chest. He knew exactly what I was feeling. He breathed slowly, deliberately near my ear, willing my own breathing to mirror his.
“Do you want to know the first time I ever saw you?” he said with his lips at my ear.
I knew the story, but I nodded anyway, frantically.
“Your family had just moved in. You were … how old were you, Becks?”
I shrugged, and he ran his fingers over my head, calming me. He knew the answer.
“You were eleven,” he said. “I was twelve. I remember Joey Velasquez talking about the pretty new girl in the neighborhood. Actually his exact words were ‘the hot chick.’ But I didn’t think a thing about it until I saw you at the baseball field. We were having practice at the park and your family showed up for a picnic. You had so much dark hair, and it was hiding your face. Remember?”
I nodded. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
He ignored me. “I had to see if Joey was right, about the hot chick part, and I kept trying to get a good look at your face, but you never looked over our way. I hit home run after home run trying to get your attention, but you couldn’t be bothered with my record-shattering, superhuman performance.”
I smiled, and breathed in slowly. I’d heard this story so many times before. The familiarity of it enveloped me with warmth. “So what did you do?” I asked, fully aware of the answer.
“I did the only thing I could think of. I went up to bat, lined my feet up in the direction of your head, and swung away.”
“Hitting the foulest foul ball anyone had ever seen,” I continued the story.
I felt him chuckle next to me. “Yep. I figured in order to return the ball, you’d have to get really close to me, because…” He waited for me to fill in the blank.
“Because someone made the mistake of assuming I would throw like a girl,” I said softly.
He pressed his lips against my head before he went on. “Which, of course, was stupid of me to think. You stood right where you were and chucked the ball farther than I’d ever seen a girl, or even any guy, chuck it.”
“It was all those years of Bonnet Ball my parents forced on me.”
“The entire team went nuts. You gave a little tiny shrug, like it was no big deal, and sat back down with your family. Completely ignoring me again. So my plan totally backfired. Not only did you get the attention of every boy on the field— which was not my intention—but I got reamed by the coach, who couldn’t understand why I suddenly decided to stand perpendicular to home plate.”
It’d worked. My breathing was slow again. I turned against his body, so I was facing him, and wrapped my arms around his back and tangled my legs up with his.
I’d spent a hundred years with Cole, in a similar position, but this was nothing like it. There were no outside forces keeping us together. No otherworldly powers interfering with this simple act.
No. Jack wanted me close because he wanted me. Separating from him now would be worse than anything I’d felt before. Separating from him now would make me bleed, and I would never stop.
I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t have to.
We stayed like that for hours—my head on his stomach— trying so hard not to fall asleep. As if we could stop time.
THIRTY-TWO
NOW
My house. Hours left.
In the morning, Jack left to go pick up Will, and I went to my kitchen and took out a pen and two pieces of paper. My dad and Tommy deserved letters this time. They were the closest thing I had to a real good-bye. In the letters, I tried to explain that I was gone, and that I wasn’t coming back. I tried to express my love. I tried to make it all okay. I tried.
When I was finished, I folded up the letters and placed them under the milk carton. Except for the rare dinner of French toast, the only time my family ever drank milk was at breakfast, so I was pretty sure my dad wouldn’t discover the letters until tomorrow morning at the earliest. If I made it back, I could get them before they were ever read.
Jack was back on my porch within the hour. “Sorry, it took me a little while to find Will.”
“Is he sober?” I asked.
He nodded. “Mostly. Enough to drive his own car. You ready?”
I glanced behind me, toward the empty house and the letters to my family, and then I turned back to Jack. “Yes.”
Jack took my hand and pulled me toward his car. I looked up at him as we walked. The sun was behind his head, burning through his hair, and I had the feeling that the way he looked right then would be the picture in my head forever. “Jack, do me a favor?” I said.
“Anything, Becks.”
“Don’t let go of my hand. And if the Tunnels come for me, don’t let go until the last moment.”
“If the Tunnels come for you, I’ll hold on, and they won’t be able to take you.”
I smiled at the sentiment, even though I knew that no one would be able to hold on.
Jack and I drove toward the condo in a new state of mind. We’d both been stripped of all the evasiveness, all the lies, everything we’d ever kept from each other. Layer by layer, we had given up our defenses and our excuses and our demands for whys and hows, and what was left were two broken beings. Clinging to one last shred of hope. Tethered to each other.
I couldn’t speak as to what occupied Jack’s mind on that drive, but I knew what I was hoping for. That Jack would be able to recover. That he would heal. That those who loved him would soon repair the broken sheathing around his raw soul, and that his memories of me, while tender, wouldn’t define him. I couldn’t tell him this, because then he would know the doubt in my mind, and now wasn’t the time for doubt.
First, I hoped we would succeed in destroying Cole’s guitar. The other things were a silent prayer, kept close to my heart, for just in case.
As we got closer to Cole’s condo, Jack and I went over our plan again. It wasn’t very complex. I would let Cole believe I’d chosen him over the Tunnels, and then when we found the guitar, we’d make a break for it and toss it off the balcony and into the cement courtyard. Or smash it against the floor. But tossing it sounded better, because then nobody would be near enough to fight us.
We didn’t talk about my dad, or Tommy, or Jules. We didn’t talk about failing. We didn’t talk about how the mark was about a finger-width’s distance from my wrist line.
I remembered the bend in the road that would reveal the massive condo on the hillside closest to the resort ski lift. I’d made this drive almost exactly one year ago. That time, there’d been an early spring, and the road was clear. Now it was covered with a couple of inches of packed snow.
Jack parked as close to the door as possible, and we climbed the stairs. Outside the front do
or, I looked at Jack and he nodded. I knocked. Maxwell opened it, and I shoved my way past him.
“Where’s Cole?” I said. Before he could answer, I raised my voice. “Cole! Get down here.”
“Nik?”
I looked up in the direction the voice came from. Cole was leaning on the second-floor railing that looked over the spacious living room. I couldn’t see his guitar.
I held up my arm. “I’m out of time, Cole.”
“I know. I’d almost given up.” He looked from me to Jack, and his forehead creased with pain for a flash, and then it was gone. Replaced by a calm expression, his eyes suddenly dark. “I hope you didn’t come here to ask for my help. You know I have no power over the balance of the Everneath.” He glanced at Jack. “Sorry, bro. Even with your biceps, we can’t fight the force of nature.”
Jack’s mouth tightened, but he held back his response.
“Cole, look at me,” I said. Cole hesitated for a moment and then swung his gaze back to me, and I met his stare. “I’m going with you.”
He froze. Didn’t move for a full thirty seconds. Maxwell and Gavin appeared from the back room, silently watching.
Cole stood up straight. “I’m not buying it.” He turned around.
“Wait!” Jack called. Cole stopped. “It was my idea.”
Cole turned to face us slowly.
“I convinced her to go with you. She’s going away anyway. Better to rule hell than serve it.”
I stepped forward and raised my arm, showing my wrist. “Cole, please come talk to us.”
He narrowed his eyes, skeptical, and I thought it was over then and there. But then he said, “Be right there.”
He turned back and disappeared down the hall that would lead to the stairs. I looked up at Jack. He whispered, “Let’s hope he brings the guitar.”
But when Cole descended the last flight of stairs, his hands were in his pockets. No guitar strap over his shoulder. I tried not to let even a hint of disappointment show in my face. We had a backup plan.
Cole followed us outside to the balcony of the condo, and we made sure that his back was to the front door. The air outside stirred with a rush of unseasonably warm air. I looked at my wrist. The marks had stopped moving. I pulled my sleeve forward to cover it and stared at Cole’s face. I had to focus extra hard on watching Cole, so my eyes wouldn’t flick one bit when Will made his move.
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