by Jo Holloway
“Are you all going up to the Treehouse?” Cassidy asked.
“Not us,” Jory said. “Wes and I are on our way to the library.”
Tish’s face folded back into disinterested disgust, and Cara tried not to laugh. The boys stood and left. They must be planning some more research into their special chemistry project.
“Girls’ night, then.” Cassidy hooked her arm to drag her along, but Cara went willingly.
She’d had enough of hanging out with boys all summer. Wasn’t that what she’d been saying? Girls’ night sounded fantastic.
They climbed the stairs to the Treehouse and found a group of chairs halfway between the top of the spiral staircase and the long bar that wrapped across the curved wall. They poured themselves drinks from the soda fountain and sat down. The girls immediately brought up the hot topic around the school. The rumor mill had been in full effect all day.
“I heard he got held back a grade; that’s why he’s only a junior now,” Tish said.
“I think there was a little more to it than that.” Cara took a sip of her drink and scowled. She did not need to be defending Rhys. What was she doing? A little gossiping didn’t usually annoy her so much, either. It wasn’t like they were being mean. Mostly the opposite.
“Oh? I wouldn’t care if he got held back. I’d still totally go for him, even if he wasn’t so loaded.” Gabby giggled.
Cassidy leaned forward and switched to a serious hushed tone. “I don’t know, Gabby. I heard some of the girls from upstairs talking about him. I guess one of them swears she saw a picture of him at a big fancy party this summer looking all steamy with some brunette. No one can find it now, so who knows if it’s true.” She sat back smugly, having shared her juiciest find for the day.
Cara kept her lips to the rim of her glass. She kept drinking. She tilted the glass up and drained the last of it. At least no one could find the picture . . . the one currently saved to her phone. The only thing steamy about it was how mad they’d both been. But with a flare of heat up her neck, she remembered how it had looked from the camera’s perspective. She stood up and walked over to pour herself a new drink.
As she returned to their seats, she caught sight of the lean figure out of the corner of her eye and glanced automatically to the stairs. He reached the top step with Emma right beside him. Emma’s face was much less strained now, and she turned in their direction with Rhys following her. Rhys still wore the flat expression he’d had every time she’d seen him today, and his eyes flicked to her.
She whirled around to take her seat again as they passed. What amazingly bad timing.
“Hey.” It was barely a grunt, but he said hi to her.
Her knees were already bending to sit and she plopped down without responding. He and Emma carried on like nothing had happened.
The girls in front of her stared in silence until Cassidy jolted forward to the edge of her seat. Cara leaned back.
Uh oh.
“That was him, wasn’t it? Did he just say hi to you?”
“Oh, um, maybe. I’m not sure. My uncle knows his dad, so I’ve met him a couple times.” She squirmed in her seat, crossing her leg underneath her so one foot was tucked under the other knee. Her hand smoothed down the front of her shirt and then tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“Um . . . maybe . . . you’re not sure . . . ” Cassidy parroted her words back to her in a hiss. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
One shoulder shrugged up to Cara’s ear. “There’s nothing to tell.”
It wasn’t good enough for gossip purposes, so the girls spent ten more minutes trying to squeeze information out of her, but she avoided giving anything away. She stuck to how her uncle knew Dr. Whalton, and let it sound like she’d just seen Rhys in passing before. There was nothing to tell. She obviously couldn’t talk about the visits to his sister in the hospital, or the planning sessions at his and Jory’s houses. She was careful to avoid the gala too, though no one would ever think she could have been the one in a picture with him.
“I don’t get how you end up hanging out with the best-looking guys here . . .” Tish’s arms had been folded across her chest for the last several minutes, and she sat back with a derisive tchuh.
Cara bit back a retort. Her stomach twisted again at the reminder of her stupid crush, and her eyes darted around the room to see where he and Emma had gone. The stairs blocked her view of the far side of the huge circular room, where intimate loveseats filled what Tish referred to as the make-out corner.
Feeling her dinner churning inside her, Cara was grateful for the excuse when she checked the time and had to leave to meet Kaylee for their training run. She hoped Kaylee had been training as much as she’d said, because she needed a long, hard run.
THEIR FIRST DAY OF classes ended early. The last block would normally be their active electives, but since the freshman class had the elective fair that afternoon to choose what they wanted to do for the fall semester, all the older students got an early day. She’d had math with Wes and Kaylee in the morning, English with Cassidy and Tish before lunch, and finally biology with Jory, where they staked their claims on each other as partners when they found out the class had to do labs this year.
“If we have to dissect anything, you’re it.” She punched him lightly in the shoulder and got a faint version of his usual grin in response.
They took their time walking back across the school campus. Jory got sidetracked by every other sophomore they came across, popular as he was. She chatted with a few people too. Ethan, another of her cross country teammates, stopped to say hello and ask if she’d seen Kaylee. She sent him in the right direction and smiled when he sprinted off with his glasses flashing in the sun. The content smile stuck on her face while she ambled along beside her friend. By the time they finally reached the Lodge, Wes had been waiting for them for half an hour.
“Rhys messaged me. Us. He wants to know if we can meet him over at the manor.”
Jory’s good mood faded back to his new quiet and serious one at the mention of the plan.
“How soon?” she asked Wes.
“Now.”
She checked her dad’s watch. “I have to change and then get Jenner at the stables first.”
“I’ll wait and go with you,” Jory said. “Wes could leave now, meet up with Rhys, and we can run over in a bit. From the stables, it should only be a twenty-minute run. We were going to go running tonight, anyway.”
She noticed he’d stopped referring to Rhys as a root vegetable and peered at him again. But she only shrugged as if she didn’t know exactly how long the run from the stables to the mansion was. “That works for me. Wes?”
“Sure, we’ll start and see you guys there.”
“Don’t get caught,” Jory warned.
When she reached the end of the path through the trees with Jenner and Jory, she was behind and missed the glint in Jory’s eye before he started to sprint across the meadow with a laugh. The run had brought his smile back, and she jolted forward to catch up. Jenner breezed by them both, loping across the open space toward the house with his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. Her feet pushed hard against the dry ground as she gained on Jory, but he was already slowing as his shoes hit the cobblestone of the driveway. Puffing, she pulled up beside him.
Cara put her hands on her knees, gasping, and sweat trickled down her brow. She straightened up and punched her friend in the arm again.
“I’m out of practice. I forgot about you and your sprints.” She laughed.
“You like it,” Jory said, grinning back.
She thought someone swore quietly, but she might not have heard right because it was followed immediately by a cough from Wes. He rounded the corner of the long garage, following behind Rhys, whose face looked as grumpy and serious as it had at school yesterday.
Cara pushed her damp hair back from her face and quickly redid her ponytail. “Sorry we’re late. So what are we doing?”
“Back h
ere, I’ll show you.” Rhys led the way around the garage to the side where a door stood open. “I thought we could use this space to work on the foxglove. It used to be my mom’s potting shed, and no one comes in here anymore. I can leave it unlocked. There’ll probably be some days when I can’t meet you here at the same times you can sneak out, and we’ll need somewhere to store supplies as we get them. Obviously, the house has an alarm, so you can’t go in there.”
“Obviously.” Jory stepped in and peered around the empty space.
“That’s a good idea. I didn’t want to keep stolen stuff in my room with Delaney there. Now we can run over and drop it off anytime.” She’d noticed the comment about his mom, but they’d never found a way to ask him about her. She let it go again.
She spotted the remaining frog in the terrarium on a long table. They’d kept the oldest one. At least, it was the oldest one according to the Pyx they’d liberated, in this case, Belyx. Cara got the feeling the Pyx were choosing one without much longer to live anyway, but she hadn’t dared to ask what was going to happen. It might be one time she’d rather not know.
“I sure hope Livyx goes quietly without any more problems.” She peered down at the frog.
Jenyx spoke from the doorway. “It is likely she will be too exhausted after her time trapped struggling inside Olivia’s mind to do otherwise. She will need time to recover, just as Olivia will.”
“Then what, though? How do we keep her trapped in the frog so she can’t do it again? What happens to her?”
“We have a way to keep you all safe. You will leave the rest to Tomyx and me. We are already working on plans and will tell you what you need to know.”
Somehow she knew he was going to say that, and it had nothing to do with being able to sense his emotions. This was one of those things the Pyx were cryptic about, and it made her feel like a little kid not allowed to know what the grown-ups were talking about. She turned away from the door with her nostrils flaring. She took a deep breath.
“Why frogs?” she asked Rhys instead.
He shrugged. “Superstition. Wes would explain better.”
Great, now Wes knew stuff she didn’t. How much was he communicating with Rhys? When did they have this conversation?
Wes turned to Cara. “That time you came over for a barbeque at my house this summer, did you see the raven rattle on our mantle?”
“Yeah, I think so. Your mom said it was ceremonial, and a lot of the native cultures from the coast have them.”
“If you looked at ours, the back of the handle is a frog with a long tongue. That’s common. The rest varies more. Ours has a kingfisher on the tail and a thunderbird carved on the belly. The whole thing is supposed to represent the transfer of spirit power. Whatever forms are on the raven rattle, the idea is, when it’s shaken in a ceremony, all the figures occupy the same space. Like they’re transforming into each other.”
She stared. “Transferring spirits . . . you think it has something to do with Pyx and how they move between hosts?”
“Who knows where legends come from?” Rhys said, jumping back in as Wes raised his palms in front of him. “I’m not really superstitious, but I hated those snails, anyway, and I needed something to use. No harm in trying frogs. That aggressively annoying raven who was always hanging around made me think of it.”
Cara couldn’t help it. A smile spread across her face. She tried not to laugh, but it came out, anyway. At least she had an ally in hating that stupid stinking raven.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, waving a hand. She gained control of her face. “Ryx is super annoying.”
Rhys huffed. “Figures you know the one I’m talking about. So you sent a Pyx to spy on me?”
“To spy on your house,” Jory said. “Although, since you were actually the bad guy too, I guess he was sort of spying on you. Didn’t do a great job. Anyway, what stuff do we need to do this?” His face turned serious again.
Rhys led the way up to the house so they could sit in comfort to make a list of the things they needed to borrow, or steal. With the lists rattling around in their heads, they snuck back to school in time for dinner.
OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, they managed to acquire a handful of the things from their lists. Luckily, Cara and the boys shared the same chemistry class this semester, and they could work together to distract Mrs. Johansen while one of them slipped something into a bag. It usually involved Cara, who was partnered with Ethan for their labs, causing some sort of distraction. It wasn’t hard. Ethan turned out to be terrible at chemistry, and she literally had to put out some small fires, which always brought Mrs. Johansen running. No one ever suspected Wes of anything, and he did most of the actual pocketing.
Rhys had to work alone in his class but had managed to swipe a bottle of ethanol so far. Most of the times she saw him, he was sitting either alone or with Emma at lunch. They didn’t often cross paths outside of mealtimes, and she’d never seen him at the Treehouse after that first night. The few times she went for a morning run alone, she ran up past the castle and the parking lot. Twice, his van was missing, and her heart ached to think he might be spending nights at the manor by himself rather than staying on campus.
Other days, she went for afternoon runs with either Jory or Wes down to the mansion to bring stuff they’d gathered. She still loved running the trail through the forest and still admired the beauty of the mansion with its grey stone walls and surrounding long grasses. For the most part, though, the strange pull it had on her before had faded. She didn’t get the anxious flutter in her chest or the desire to stand in front of it anymore. Maybe it had been her subconscious mind trying to make her see that the answer to who had abducted the Pyx lay in the mansion itself. Or maybe some sixth sense had been telling her that the people who loved this place needed her help.
The pull had faded but not disappeared. When they went later in the evenings, after dinner, Rhys was usually there, and then the flutter came back. Her body jittered with nerves all the way down the path if she let herself think about it.
Her other classes, aside from chemistry and its frequent “incidents,” were all going well. In their creative elective, she and Wes both stuck with pottery. She moved on from bad mugs to lopsided bowls. Meanwhile, Wes had started working on a series of small cylindrical boxes with lids. She marveled at the beautiful forms and how he made the cylinders flare out at the top and bottom so symmetrically. He never seemed happy with them, but he kept trying. By the third class, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“What are they?”
His noncommittal grunt only made her more curious.
“Wes.”
He met her eye and then looked around the classroom. A tiny headshake told her he couldn’t explain in the crowded room. Her curiosity grew.
“I’ll tell you when I get one right,” he mumbled.
CHAPTER 24
Do Something
ON FRIDAY, CARA LEFT Jenner with Wes and Jory and boarded the bus with the rest of the cross country team for their first race of the year. Coach Francis still hadn’t announced the new green team members, which, according to Emma, was highly unusual. Emma eyed the seat beside her, much to Cara’s surprise.
“Is it okay if I sit with you?” Emma sat down with a huff.
“Sure. You’re not sitting with August today?”
“Is it awful of me to say I’m tired of them? All they do is gossip.”
Cara assumed she wasn’t just talking about August. She probably meant the whole group of girls she’d seen surround Emma the first day. Kaylee gave Cara a confused glance when she came down the aisle and spotted Emma in her usual seat, but she turned and found a seat with Ethan instead.
Emma sighed. “You don’t seem like the gossipy type. Don’t get me wrong, I like to talk as much as the next girl. It’s just . . . they don’t get it. They don’t know him like I do . . . or did”—she shook her head—“or thought I did.”
Cara had no idea what she’d done to earn Emma’s trust, but
the girl’s troubled face made her want to measure up to it. “I did notice you and Rhys have been hanging out some.” She kept her voice low and tried not to study Emma’s face too closely.
“I feel bad. He’s still going through a lot. He said his sister is finally getting better, so that’s a relief. But missing almost a year and a half of school was hard for him. He doesn’t really have any friends anymore. People are still friendly to him, like Mak, but it’s not the same. I wish I could help him more.”
It was exactly what Wes had said the first time they’d spotted Rhys eating alone before Emma had arrived to sit with him. Her insides clenched to think he might actually be lonely.
“At least he has you.”
Emma gave a sad shrug. “He feels distant, not like he was when I knew him before.”
Cara’s heart squeezed a little for both of them.
“I wish he’d make more of an effort to get to know people in his classes, but he disappears after dinner all the time. We all need to have our people. You know. You have your crew with Mak’s brother and Jory.” Emma stopped to smirk. “Still just a friend?”
Cara laughed, shaking her head. “Yeah. Still just-a-friend Jory.” His new serious side was intriguing in some ways, but she was still fairly sure she’d made the right call. Hopefully she wouldn’t regret it. Her conversation with Emma turned to light topics for the rest of the ride.
When the bus stopped, Coach Francis stood up at the front and motioned for everyone to stay in their seats.
“I know you’re all wondering what I’ve been waiting for, but I finally have the lists for the green team. The majority of both our boys’ and girls’ teams were seniors last year, so we were seriously short this year.” She paused to glance back down at her sheets. “I wanted to take my time checking out all the talent we have before I made the final decisions. Okay. There are too many of you and we’re running late, so I’ll be handing you your new shirts as you leave the bus. Everyone can congratulate you outside.”