Zoe shoved about half her muffin into her mouth. “But what if she isn’t telling the truth?”
I opened my mouth.
“Hear me out, Evie. We don’t know. Neither do you, and what Luc does is too much of a risk.”
“I know that.” Irritation pricked at my skin.
“Here’s the thing. She could have been knee deep in all things Daedalus and had a change of heart. Or she could’ve had nothing to do with the horrible experiments. We just don’t know.”
Zoe had a point. “I get it, but I have to believe her. She’s done nothing to show me that what she has told me is a lie. And why would it be? Why would she take me in, heal me—”
“And give you false memories of the real Evie?” Her voice was low, but her words clapped through me like thunder. “Why did she do that?”
Ice replaced the heat, drenching my veins. That was a question I’d asked myself way too often, even after I was given an answer. “I think … she just missed the real Evie.”
Zoe was quiet for a long moment. “I can understand that … to a point. I do, don’t get me wrong. But you had a life before you met her. You had friends—friends who were your family. People who loved and missed you. Why did she not heal you and give you back your life by letting Luc in four years ago?”
I thought I might vomit.
What Zoe was saying was something that crept into my mind late at night, but it was something I almost couldn’t afford to entertain.
“Why did she make that deal?” Zoe continued, rolling up her napkin. “I’m not trying to upset you, but I just never understood why she insisted you become someone else.”
The sharp slice across my chest felt too real as I lifted a hand, dragging my fingers through my hair.
“It’s not the only thing I don’t understand.”
“There’s more?” A shaky laugh left me.
Zoe stared at me for a long moment. “Where were you between the time Luc took you to Sylvia and when you enrolled in school?”
I blinked. “What? What do you mean?”
Her brows lifted. “Luc never asked you? Talked about it?”
“No. I mean, he told me that he took me to them and that he made the deal, but I didn’t have a time line of events or anything.”
Her jaw worked as she looked away. “Luc took you to Sylvia in June, about a month or so after the invasion ended, and no one saw you again until you started school that following November. It was the first day schools were open after the invasion.”
My brows pinched. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted her hands. “Do you remember that summer? I mean, beyond vague recollections?”
I started to say yes, but was that true? Memories after the invasion were brief and vague. I remembered … staying inside a lot, holed up with books and … watching the television when it started running again. The harder I thought about those memories, though, the thinner they became. Holes appeared, large gaps of time where I couldn’t exactly say what I’d been doing. Just glimpses of sitting in front of a window or on the couch with a book and the feeling of … waiting.
Before I found out who I was, I’d remembered enough that I didn’t question the vagueness of my memories, but now?
Now I knew too much to not question.
“I don’t remember anything that feels … concrete.” I lifted my gaze to Zoe’s. “Are you saying I was just missing during that time?”
“I don’t know if missing is the right word, but Luc had eyes on that house from the beginning. He didn’t see you. That’s not saying that you weren’t there or that you didn’t leave, but it’s strange.” She sat back, crossing her arms. “Her choices were just … strange.”
Suddenly, I thought about what Mom had said to me before she’d shown me the missing photos of the real Evie.
I just wish I’d made different choices so that you could have made different ones.
I’d thought she’d been talking about Luc.
But what if she was talking about something entirely different? And if Luc had eyes on that house those months between when he took me there and when I went to school, why in the hell hadn’t he brought this up?
What did he know?
16
When I left Zoe, I didn’t go home. I just … I couldn’t at that moment, so I drove out to Centennial Lake and did something I hadn’t done in a while.
With my camera in hand, I started snapping pictures of all the reds and golds of autumn. My camera was sort of my shield, and it was once again in front of me, keeping a barrier between the world and me and forming a barrier within myself. I needed that, because what Zoe said was tattooing my skin, drilling into my bones.
Why did Mom give me Evie’s life?
I spent most of the afternoon there, leaving just as dusk crept across the sky. Getting out there, doing something that I loved, helped calm the itchy restlessness. I didn’t have a better understanding of everything or sudden clarity, but I felt more like me than I had for weeks.
Whoever me was.
When I got home, Mom wasn’t there, and I ended up standing in the kitchen, dragging my fingers along the cool granite of the kitchen island, feeling like I should be doing something … else. Something more.
Something with a purpose.
Like going out there and searching for the still-missing, possibly zombified Sarah, but where would I even begin to look? If Luc, Grayson, and Dawson couldn’t find her, why would I be able to?
Skin too tight and itchy, I turned slowly in the kitchen. Mom had finally gotten new candles to replace the damaged ones. They were positioned in the center—thick, white pillars on distressed gray wooden candleholders. The downstairs finally looked like it had before Micah showed up.
I picked up my phone from where I’d left it on the counter and opened up my text messages. My finger hovered over the last text Luc had sent Friday afternoon, which had been another weird rant about how raccoons don’t get enough love.
My fingers flew over the keyboard, typing out the words Why did she give me Evie’s life?
I didn’t hit send.
Because I wasn’t sure what was worse—Luc not knowing or … Luc knowing exactly why.
Sighing, I deleted the text and then headed into the living room, picking up the camera from the back of the couch. I made my way to my bedroom, placing my phone on the nightstand beside Diesel. My history textbook lay open on my bed. Knowing that I had an exam coming up, I should have been studying, but I was too restless for that.
Instead, I sat down and clicked on my camera. I hadn’t looked at any of the pictures I’d taken in the last several weeks, not even the ones of Luc, and what was better than mindlessly clicking through pictures?
At this moment, there was nothing.
Scrolling back to the pictures I’d taken of Luc, I realized immediately that I’d been right when I’d taken the photos. All those striking lines of his face had communicated through the lens.
The black-and-white photograph of him was my favorite. There was something about the monochromatic colors that gave it a raw, brutal edge. The corners of my lips turned up as I kept thumbing through the photos. It had been ages since I’d uploaded them or even looked at them on the camera, but I was still surprised when I came upon the pictures I’d taken the day my classmate Colleen had been found dead in a school bathroom.
Goodness, I’d forgotten I’d taken them.
I continued flipping through them as a knot of emotion swelled in my throat. Seeing these pictures was like being back in that moment, swallowed up by confusion and fear. The faces in the photos were blurs to me as I blinked rapidly to clear my vision. The images of their shadows on the pavement hit me hard.
That was how I felt.
I was the shadow and not the person.
God.
That was a depressing thought and a bit overdramatic.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I exhaled roughly. I needed to get my life together. Seriou
sly. I was alive. It could be way worse. Like, I could be dead.
I started to flip past the pictures of that day when something weird caught my attention. “What the hell?” I whispered.
The last picture was of a small group. One of them was Andy. God. My chest twisted. There was an unreal quality about seeing a picture of someone days before they died and thinking about how they had no idea their days were numbered, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was who was standing next to him.
April Collins, and there was something wrong with her picture.
Frowning, I zoomed in. It was like there were two Aprils. One was normal—well, as normal as April could be. Tall. Slender. Long blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail. And then one standing directly behind her like a shadowy overlay. I flipped back through the pictures and saw nothing like that in any other photos I’d taken that day, and that was beyond weird.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a picture like this of her. Clicking back to the picture I’d snapped of her in the park, I stared down at the picture of April by the swings, with her little sister.
Same thing. It looked like a shadow stood behind her.
“So weird,” I muttered, flipping back to the picture at school. I remembered that I had taken another photograph of her, when she’d been protesting in the parking lot.
Hurrying through the photos, I found the picture. There was April, hair pulled back, face twisted, as I’d caught her in the middle of yelling something. The anger practically vibrated through the photograph. Her anger wasn’t the only thing I’d captured.
The weird shadow, almost like an overlay, was also visible.
This was freaking bizarre.
I thought about what I’d seen outside of Coop’s party, right before I’d found Andy’s ruined body, and what I’d seen when Lore appeared outside the club. Arum were like shadows—shadows that burned, a darkness that was threaded with light. Everyone else was convinced I’d seen Micah the night I’d found Andy or had mistaken what I’d seen, but …
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Is April an … Arum?”
I swallowed a rather nervous laugh. I knew it sounded ridiculous, but April hated the Luxen. And she was kind of evil incarnate.
I blew a strand of hair out of my face as I stared at the weird image of April. There were a lot of holes in my theory, though. If April was an Arum, wouldn’t Zoe sense that? The other Luxen? Also, I’d thought Emery had said that Arum didn’t often mingle with the human populace, that they kept their distance.
But if it wasn’t just some random, weird photo fail, then what could this be?
* * *
An idea sparked somewhere between English and chem the next morning, while I was doing my best not to stress over the whole argument with Luc or obsess over what Zoe had said. Which meant I was in a super-weird mood, but a somewhat productive one.
I needed another picture of April, one preferably taken inside to see if there was that weird overlay effect, and I knew exactly where to find one.
Yearbooks.
I had no idea if I’d actually bought one last year, but the school library had a metric crap ton of them.
At lunch, I made a detour. Making my way into the cold and musky-scented library, I headed to the left, near the main desk, to where all the annual yearbooks were kept.
In the back of my mind, I knew my sudden obsession with April had more to do with me than with her. That tiny, annoying voice in the back of my head told me that I was focusing on her because it was so much easier than focusing on everything else.
But whatever.
Thumbing through the glossy pictures, I quickly found where April’s picture would’ve been squeezed in between Janelle Cole and Denny Collinsworth.
There was no picture of April in our junior year.
Closing the yearbook, I shoved it back in place and then picked up the one from our sophomore year. A few seconds later, I was staring down at a picture of April, taken almost two years ago, and it was definitely her. Her name was under the picture. Her blond hair was pulled back extremely tightly, and the familiar red lips curved into a wide smile.
That photograph of April was normal. No weird shadow effect. Then I checked our freshman year and found another normal one.
Two normal photographs and then a missing one. Did that mean anything? I really had no idea, but I knew enough about photography to know that the weird effect only happening on pictures of April was super-bizarre.
Instead of heading to the cafeteria, I found a seat by the windows that overlooked the quad and pulled my camera out of my backpack. The low hum of the computers and overhead lights was broken only by the occasional sneeze or laugh. There was something relaxing about the stillness of the library, and after getting only about two hours of sleep the night before, it was probably a good thing that I was sitting there and not with my friends.
Not that I was avoiding them, but I needed, I don’t know, silence.
Finding a bag of chips stowed away in my backpack, I munched on them as I turned on my camera and started flipping through the photos from the lake. I hadn’t looked at them the day before.
They were pretty good, I thought. Not that it took a lot of talent to take pictures of trees. The pictures of Luc, though? They were amazing. I wanted to print them out and frame them, but yeah, that seemed creepy. I kept thumbing through my photos and found myself all the way back to the first weird picture of April.
Slinking down in my seat, I popped another chip in my mouth as I stared at it. All three pictures were taken outside. The only two indoor pictures of April were from over a year ago. Did that mean anything? Maybe. Probably not. Another chip went into my mouth as I thought about how April had always reacted rather strongly to the idea of her picture being taken, even when we were on friendlier terms. The girl had reacted a bit excessively in the parking lot. Like she had some—
“Yo.”
Jumping at the sound of Heidi’s voice, I almost dropped the camera as I looked up and saw her braided crimson hair. “Hey.”
She lifted her brows. “Is that all you have to say to me?”
“Um.” I looked around. “Good afternoon?” I paused. “Would you like a chip?”
She shot me a bland look as she dropped into the seat beside me. “What are you doing in here?”
“I was looking at something.” I shrugged. “And I’m not really hungry.”
“That’s BS. First off, you’re always hungry.”
That was actually true, but I muttered, “Geez. Thanks.”
“You never hang out in the library during lunch.” She propped her chin onto her palm. “I’m worried about you.”
“Why? You shouldn’t be.”
“I shouldn’t be?” The look on her face said I should know better. “Things got really weird Saturday night and then a little ugly. And I know you’ve been through a lot lately, especially with the whole Micah thing.”
I opened my mouth but closed it. She might know about Micah, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. “You shouldn’t be worried.”
“Really? You and Luc still mad at each other?”
I shook my head, sighing as I fiddled with the camera. “Everything is fine with Luc.” Not exactly true. “I’m just being a little antisocial right now.”
“It’s okay to be a little antisocial every once in a while.” She paused. “Luc said some strange stuff Saturday night about your mom.”
Crap.
I’d forgotten that she’d borne witness to some of that.
Looking away, I struggled to not have an impressive amount of word vomit and tell her everything—that I wasn’t Evie Dasher, that I had feelings for Luc, and there was a good chance the only woman I knew as my mother hadn’t been entirely honest with me, and that I … felt useless.
And as I sat there, I had that sudden sense of clarity that I’d been hoping would come the day before at the lake. I’d felt this way long before I’d learned the truth and before Lu
c came back into my life. Like I was going through the motions every day, existing but not really living, restless and without direction.
Could it have been because I’d been shoved into someone else’s life?
Well, duh. Now it sort of seemed obvious.
Either way, Heidi deserved to know the truth. “It’s a really long story.”
“We got time.”
“I don’t think we got enough time for all of it, but Mom … I found out she isn’t my birth mom,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“Did she adopt you or something?”
“Kind of?”
She was frowning when I glanced over at her. “Are you not telling me what’s going on because I didn’t tell you Emery was a Luxen?”
“No. No, not at all. It’s just … it’s really kind of messed up, but … I’m not … I don’t know how to say this.” My hands tightened on my camera. “Okay. I’m not Evelyn Dasher.”
Even though I didn’t look over at her, I could tell she was staring at me. “Come again?”
Drawing in a deep breath, I told her the … truth. That I used to be called Nadia Holliday and that I had lived with Luc until I’d gotten sick. It took almost all of lunch for me to explain to her what the Andromeda serum was and how I became Evie.
By the time I was done, Heidi was staring at me, her mouth gaping. “Holy shit, Evie—I mean, Nadia. What am I supposed to call you?”
“Evie. I guess. I mean, Nadia feels weird. I’m not her—well, I am, but I’m Evie.”
“Yeah. You’re Evie.” She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
I laughed under my breath. “Welcome to the club.”
“It’s crazy,” she said, her gaze flicking over me as if she were looking for some sign that I wasn’t who she thought I was. “What the Daedalus was able to do, you know? Some of the stuff is nothing short of miraculous. They were able to save your life, but then they did all these horrible things. It’s just … it’s a lot.”
It was. “I’ve been thinking about it. Like, I think everything has a good and bad side, and the Daedalus was no different. They probably saved a lot of lives, but none of that makes up for the terrible things they did. Maybe that was why Mom worked for them, because of the good she was doing—they were doing at one point.”
The Burning Shadow Page 18