She looked all around her and, with the strangest feeling of déjà vu, she tried to change the subject. “So what have you been up to?”
“I met with Ned about makeup on Monday night and then—”
Em put up her hand. “You met with who?”
“Ned—JD’s friend? The director? I’m going to do hair and makeup for the play!” Gabby smiled proudly.
“Now who’s keeping secrets?” Em asked playfully. “That’s awesome, Gabs. I had no idea.”
“I just decided on Friday,” Gabby said. “I figure it’s something good to put on the old college application, plus I’m good at it. And it won’t take up too much time. I mean, the play is coming up so soon. It basically just means I have to be there on Tuesday night.”
“Very practical,” Em agreed. “So you’ll be spending time with JD, huh?” She tried to sound casual, but Gabby knew her too well.
“Already thought of it,” Gabby said breezily. “I’ll take copious notes on what he does and say good things about you whenever I can. Plus, there is no reason for you to worry about those theater girls. They are cray-cray.”
“What would I do without you?” Em smiled. Here was an unforeseen benefit of telling Gabby about Crow: Out of nowhere, Gabby was rooting for JD.
Em felt a sudden rush of love for her best friend—her loyal Gabby.
Would she lose this, too?
* * *
Em was getting good—too good, maybe?—at following people, at tracking them down. If she couldn’t corner Skylar on their mutual territory, she’d have to go one step further.
After dinner, Em drove straight to Skylar’s house. It had started to rain, and the constant squeak of the windshield wipers was oddly comforting in the otherwise silent car. She’d decided against calling—there was less chance, this way, that Skylar could avoid her.
She was desperate and could think of no better options. Crow had said he’d help her, but what had he done? Nothing yet, other than write a few songs.
Em knew Skylar probably couldn’t do anything either. She was just another victim. One who’d somehow managed to escape the Furies’ long-lasting curse. But then there was Skylar’s aunt Nora.
Nora was knowledgeable about local lore and history. She knew Ascension’s secrets. She knew its ghost stories. Last time Em showed up at Skylar’s house, Nora had acted as though Em had leprosy. For the first time, it hit her that maybe Skylar’s aunt had some intimate knowledge of the Furies—had, in fact, recognized the darkness in Em.
Even though the woman seemed to despise her, Em had to find out what Aunt Nora knew.
The old Victorian house was close to downtown Ascension, and as she drove up Em saw several lights were on. That was a good sign. She parked her car and made a run for it, ducking her head as drops pelted down on her. Once she got onto the covered porch, she wiped the rain off her face and knocked loudly on the door, hoping both that Nora would answer and that she wouldn’t.
But it was Skylar who came to the door. Her wig was askew and it took everything Em had not to reach out and adjust it. Em wondered about the scars on her scalp and shuddered.
Skylar flipped on the outside light, bathing Em in an orange-yellow spotlight. “What are you doing here?” she said.
Em held out a hand, as though to prevent Skylar from closing the door in her face.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I know we haven’t really . . . spoken since your—your accident. But we really, really need to talk.”
“I don’t—” Skylar began to speak, but Em cut her off.
“You know as well as I do that what happened to you wasn’t just random. It was retribution.” There was no time for mincing words—Em had to make sure that Skylar was paying attention.
She was. Skylar’s eyes grew wide and sad. “I was being punished,” she squeaked out.
“Exactly,” Em said. “Karma’s a bitch—or, really, three bitches. Called the Furies.”
Skylar nodded. “The ones you warned me about. I told them I was sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have . . . ” She trailed off, staring anxiously past Em into the front yard.
“Listen, Skylar. I’m sorry too. But they don’t care. None of that matters to them, so I’m hunting down a way to get rid of them. Forever. But I need to speak to your aunt,” Em said, shifting her weight restlessly from one leg to the other. “She knows something. About the Furies. I’m sure of it.” She couldn’t tell her why she was sure of it—then she’d have to admit what was happening to her, what was growing inside her.
“She’s not . . . ” Skylar started to say.
“Look, I know your aunt isn’t crazy about . . . unexpected visitors,” Em jumped in, doing her best to keep her voice steady. “But I’m . . . ” Running out of options, she thought. “I’m pretty sure she knows something important.”
“My aunt’s out of town,” Skylar offered apologetically. “She’s down in . . . Well, she’s gone for a few days, anyway.”
“Where is she?” Em asked, hoping to be invited inside.
“She had to go down South to deal with some family stuff,” Skylar said. “That’s all.”
Em looked down at her feet and tried to conceal her disappointment. Even this, a relatively minor blow, seemed to strike deep into her gut. She was running out of time. She knew this, could feel it, could already sense the change.
“I should have listened to you,” Skylar said in a whisper. “When you told me—about Meg and her cousins, or whoever they were.” Skylar twisted her thin fingers together. “I—I didn’t want to believe you. I wanted a friend, you know?“ She looked up at Em, her eyes wide, pleading, and Em felt a pulse of pity for her.
“I know, Skylar,” she said, and placed a hand on Skylar’s arm. “But those girls weren’t your friends.” She thought of the multiple times she’d attempted to find out more about Skylar’s relationship with the Furies. At the bonfire, at her house, at the hospital . . . rebuffed, every time. Still, there was always the chance that by warning Skylar in advance, Em had saved her from being targeted for the Furies’ continuous wrath.
“I know that . . . now,” Skylar said. Her green eyes were focused on something just past Em, into the now driving rain, and they looked filled with pain. Em could see that the girl standing in front of her was nothing like the mini Gabby of recent past. Her clothes were plain—medium-wash jeans and a gray shirt—and her face had the dull pallor of someone who hadn’t been getting enough sleep or enough sun. Still, Em noticed that without any makeup on, her eyes were big and childlike. She was cute. If it weren’t for the ever so slightly crooked wig and all those angry scars . . .
Em wondered whether they would ever go away—Skylar’s scars and her own, invisible but no less real.
“I’m sorry,” Em said, and it was true. “I should have tried harder.” She felt a sea of hopelessness well up inside of her, threatening to drown her. The days were ticking away. No one would help her. And her fate would be much, much worse than Skylar’s. What was happening to Em . . . it was unthinkable.
It was death.
And it wasn’t fair.
Em was suddenly exhausted. Slightly dizzy, she leaned against the porch railing and closed her eyes.
“It’s okay, Em, I know it wasn’t your fault.” Skylar spoke in a whisper. “If—if you want to talk about it . . . Do you want to come in, even though Nora’s not here?”
Em knew she must look pathetic. Weak. Desperate. Which she was.
“Look, just for a minute or two.” Skylar managed to smile. “We can talk things through. Maybe then we’ll both feel a little better.”
Em seriously doubted it. If it really was true that the evil was slowly taking her, nothing would make her feel better. Still, maybe she’d find some clue at Skylar’s place—something she’d missed before.
She wiped her wet shoes on the doormat and stepped inside. The place was a mess—nothing like the tidy home Em had seen last time she was here. Someone, presumably Skylar, had set up camp in t
he living room, with a sleeping bag laid out on the sofa and a microwave-dinner tray on the coffee table.
As if reading her mind, Skylar moved toward the couch and gathered the sleeping bag in her arms. “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” she said as she hurried out of the room.
“I’ll help,” Em yelled as she took her jacket off in the front hall. She couldn’t stand awkwardly by the door, and she couldn’t just watch as Skylar ran around cleaning. Surveying the room, she figured the best place to start was the coffee table. She began gathering things to take to the kitchen: a microwave dinner tray, a bottle of hot sauce, used silverware, and napkins. Despite her exhaustion, it felt calming to do something so normal. There was a tube of ointment that Em swept up in her cleaning, turning it over to read the label. Wig Adhesive: water-based and waterproof, for the strongest hold that dries clear. Skylar returned and strode straight to Em, grabbing the glue out of her hand.
“I’ll manage,” Skylar said quickly. Her wig had been adjusted and now looked perfect. If Em hadn’t known it was fake already, she’d have been completely fooled. “You sit down and I’ll take all this to the kitchen.”
Em thought to apologize, but nodded instead, handing her the things. She did her best to ease into the couch. Her sense of calm had all but disintegrated.
Rain drummed on the windows.
When Skylar came back and took a seat on the far side of the couch, Em cleared her throat.
“Look, I’m sorry to drag all of this up,” she said. Talking about the Furies still felt crazy, surreal. “But it’s important, okay?”
Skylar nodded, mute.
“The orchid. You were marked.” Her heart was beating very fast, keeping time with the rain still pounding on the windows and door.
Skylar hugged herself. “Marked? What do you mean?”
“You were marked by the Furies. That’s how they indicate their targets,” Em said. She took a deep breath. “It happened to me, too.” Saying it made her feel instantly a little better, as though a fraction of the weight in her chest had been released.
“What are they?” Skylar said in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” Em confessed. “But they’re evil.”
Skylar stared at her, wide-eyed. “How did they find me? How did they find us?”
Em shook her head. “I don’t know that, either. All I know is that those girls—Meg, Ali, and Ty—they’re sick. They seek revenge. They try to make people pay for their mistakes. But it’s worse than that. They don’t stop. They want to make people miserable. Insane. And . . . and they’re willing to kill, too,” she blurted out.
“An eye for an eye . . . ” Skylar said. A clock tick-tocked in the background. Rivulets of water ran down the windows. “They were there when I found that body,” Skylar said suddenly. “That teacher who died.”
She knew it. Mr. Landon.
So the Furies had been involved in his death in some way. Maybe they’d marked him, too. Maybe that explained why she became so furious when she heard Portia and Andy talking about him the other day. “What do you mean?” Em pressed. “What did they say?”
“That’s when I first started to feel like they were . . . off,” Skylar said. “They just showed up at the exact right time and their reactions were so weird. I was freaking out, you know? And they were like, Oh, whatever, there’s a dead body.”
Because they knew about it already, Em thought. Of course.
She could picture it. Ali’s icy smile, Meg’s permagrin, Ty’s sneer. “Did they do other things that seemed ‘off’?” Maybe together, she and Skylar could pinpoint a weakness—a flaw in their strength.
Skylar seemed to shrink back a bit. “Well . . . there was . . . ” Her voice faded.
“Spill it, Skylar,” Em said. She was running out of time.
“Ty always scared me the most,” Skylar said in one breath. “She was just . . . weird. Like, when she dyed her hair—”
Em held out her hand and interrupted. “You were there when she dyed her hair?” About a month ago, Em noticed that Ty had exchanged her fire-red locks for a shade that was much closer to Em’s hair color—deep, dark brown. Almost black.
“She did it upstairs in my bathroom,” Skylar said, and they both reflexively looked toward the stairs. “But the weird thing was that after she did it, there was no, like, evidence of it. No mess. It was like she magically transformed or something.”
Transformed.
Her fingers started tingling. Em had the foreboding sense that Ty’s “magical transformation” was more than just a parlor trick. It was a sign. A signal. A mirror of Em’s own transition.
You’re becoming one of them. Em heard the refrain in her head. It was increasingly clear that Ty was changing too—becoming more like Em.
“Don’t you want answers?” Em said, as much to herself as to Skylar. “Don’t you want to know who they are?”
“I guess so. . . . ” Skylar didn’t sound convinced.
“They messed with you—hurt you, disfigured you—but at least they’ve left you alone since that. For now,” Em added. Skylar took a quick breath. Em knew she was being harsh, cruel even, but Skylar needed to know the truth. “What if they come back?”
Skylar’s eyes practically bugged from her head. “What are you saying?” she whispered.
“Sky, you have to help me,” Em said. “We’ll never be safe unless we get rid of them for good.”
“But how do we do that?” Skylar asked. “I don’t know what to do!”
“Your aunt,” Em said flatly. “She knows things. We need to talk to her. I think she might be able to tell us some things about the Furies. Don’t you see it? Don’t you think she knows something?”
“She’s not here,” Skylar reminded her. “But . . . ” Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling and she bit her lip.
Em pounced. “But what?”
“There are a few things in the attic,” she said. “Like, an old box . . . I dunno. Do you know what you’re looking for?”
She didn’t, of course. She had no clue what she was looking for. But her heart leaped. Because she had a feeling she’d know it when she saw it. Em envisioned a velvet diary with a tiny padlock, or an old-fashioned safe hidden behind an Impressionist painting. Something in which to hide dangerous, black secrets.
“This is crazy,” Skylar added, “but Nora was always really weird around Meg. Like, even worse than she was around you . . . It did almost seem like Nora knew Meg was . . . bad. I guess it’s possible she knew something about all this. It wouldn’t surprise me. . . . ”
Skylar stood and Em followed her into the kitchen, where they got a flashlight from a drawer, and then up two flights of stairs to the third floor, and helped her pull on a string that hung from the ceiling in the hallway. Down came a short, creaky ladder that led up to a drafty attic. Em watched Skylar ascend, then push up a trapdoor and disappear in the darkness. Em followed once it was clear, testing out her weight. The ladder was old but seemed reliable enough. When she got to the top and heaved herself onto the wood floor, the trapdoor sprang down and closed behind it.
“Freaky,” Em said in the darkness.
“Yeah, me and Nora couldn’t find the rod that’s supposed to keep it propped open.”
“So there aren’t there any lights up here?”
“That’s what the flashlight is for,” Skylar said, clicking hers on.
Em found herself squeezing in between headless dress forms and boxes of old clothing. There were hatboxes on every surface, and an empty baby carriage sat in a corner. A row of masks was hung along one wall. The effect was freaky—Em felt like there were a dozen sets of eyes boring into her no matter where she turned. When her shoulder brushed against one of the dress forms, she involuntarily jumped.
“My aunt used to be a costume designer,” Skylar offered as explanation. “That’s why she has all this theater stuff. She’s going to do the costumes for Ned’s play.”
“I heard you were in that,” Em said, reliev
ed to speak about something normal, everyday, even if only for a minute. It helped distract her from the creeping anxiety she felt, and from the weirdness of all those pale masks mounted on the wall.
She was tempted to add that she’d also heard that JD was doing the lights for the show. She felt a fluttering in her chest when she imagined him stringing lights, sleeves rolled up, brow slightly furrowed, as it always was when he worked on his car. She loved that about him—that he knew how to do things with his hands, that he was so smart but also such a guy. Part of her was dying to ask Skylar for any crumb of a detail—what JD wore, what jokes he made onset, if he talked to other girls—but another part of her was too proud to even mention his name, and too afraid that if she did, everything would come out.
Em felt a draft and turned to find its source. There, in the slightly open attic window, she saw a creepy porcelain doll. It was missing half its hair, and in the moonlight, it almost seemed as though the doll was watching her. “Here it is,” Skylar said, pointing to a wooden trunk with the name NORA inscribed on the top. “We were up here earlier this week looking for Greek robes, and Nora freaked when I tried to open the trunk. She practically jumped down my throat.” She added, “It’s locked, though.”
Em dug into her pocket for a bobby pin. “I’ve never done this before,” she said. But I have broken into a school locker using a library card. . . . She was becoming quite the cat burglar.
They kneeled down in front of the trunk.
At first, the pin did nothing. It twisted loosely, uselessly, in the keyhole. Em jabbed and jabbed, licking her lips with concentration, feeling her throat get hot with frustration.
“Here, want me to try?” Skylar asked. Em willingly gave up her tool in exchange for flashlight-holding duties. With pursed lips, Skylar bent down and jiggered with the latch for a few seconds. Then it snapped free. “My mom used to lose her keys a lot,” she said by way of explanation.
The trunk’s heavy lid creaked as they eased it up and open. The stream of light from the flashlight’s bulb illuminated, at the very top of the chest was a gold snake pendant lying on top of a lacy piece of white fabric. Without thinking, she reached out and touched it. Pain shot through her palm, all the way up to her shoulder. She gasped and shrunk backward, hand throbbing, as if from an electric shock.
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