Everneath (32 page)

I looked up at his face. “If I don’t, then I’ll have to Feed off someone else. And I will always be draining someone in order to survive. Just like I was drained.”

His phone buzzed right then, and he flipped it open to read a text. “Mary’s waiting. Let’s go.”

Meeting Meredith. Days left.

J
ack drove us to the abandoned Firestone tire factory, where squatters lived in between police sweeps. Will was waiting for us outside the doors.

“Where is she?” Jack asked.

“Inside,” Will said. “She won’t talk to me. Wanted to wait for you two.”

“Okay.” Jack reached for the door and Will grabbed his arm.

“Mom’s freaking out. Said you’re not answering your phone.”

“Yeah, well—”

“Don’t worry. You two have this. I’ll deal with Mom.”

Will took off at a jog toward his car. Jack and I turned back to the building. The wind had picked up and was blowing with such force that when we opened the large wooden door, it smacked against the wall with a loud clap. We found Meredith in a corner. She was hunched over, rocking back and forth on her heels. Something was very wrong.

“Mary?” Jack said, crouching beside her. “What’s going on?”

Meredith raised her head off her knees. “This,” she said, and she held out her arm to Jack. The longest fingers of her mark had reached her inner wrist, all the way to the crease between her wrist and her hand. “It stopped just now. Stopped right at the line.” She shoved her wrist closer to Jack’s face.

I didn’t realize it, but when she spoke I took a step back. Meredith looked frantic and despairing, and I realized that she was my future. My bleak future, with all my fears, was staring me in the face. I couldn’t speak.

“What are you saying, Mary?” Jack said. “How do you even notice something like that?”

Meredith looked past Jack and spoke to me. “It’ll go fast. For an entire day, it will go fast. So fast that you can actually see it move. And then it will stop.”

She put her head back on her arms and continued rocking. The old building failed to keep the wind out, and the ends of her hair got caught in the draft. It twisted and curled around her face.

“Maxwell told me at the end it speeds up, and then it stops. And then the Tunnels come,” she said. Her lower lip began to tremble. “I was supposed to survive. But I didn’t. I didn’t.” She rocked back on her heels. “I shouldn’t have Returned.” She buried her head in her knees and started sobbing. “They’re coming for me, Nikki. The Tunnels are coming and they won’t stop until they have me.”

“Mary, I’m so sorry,” I said.

Jack stood straight, glanced at me for a quick moment, and then took hold of Mary’s hand. “We’re getting out of here.” He pulled her up.

I could’ve told him right then that there was no point, but something inside me wouldn’t allow it. Jack needed to see how futile it all was. And I needed to see what was waiting for me.

Jack and I flanked Mary, took her hands, and started pulling her along. Out of the building. Down the street toward the center of town. Leaves and dust got caught in the gusts of wind, making it difficult to see.

“Where are we going?” Mary asked, gasping for breath.

Jack answered. “To Cole’s place. He has to see. They all have to see what they’ve done. You know where it is, right, Becks?”

I nodded. “It’s up near the resort.”

We made it to Jack’s car, and Mary climbed into the passenger seat while I sat in the back. Jack shoved the gearshift and we were off. The wind picked up and the trees on either side of the street bent and swayed as if our car were going so fast the suction was affecting them.

“That’s a strong wind for Park City,” I said. I don’t know why I said it.

Jack didn’t answer, but he stepped on the gas as we turned onto the highway that led to the ski resorts.

Stray branches and twigs ricocheted off the windshield as we raced along. I glanced toward the base of the mountains, a couple of football fields away. The trees there didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe it was too long a distance for me to see. We wound our way up the mountain as the strange storm brewed outside.

Jack looked in the rearview mirror, and then whipped his head around to look out the back window. “Shit.”

I turned around too, trying to make sense of what I saw. A dark mass swirled behind us, as if a funnel cloud had been turned on its side and we were staring up one end. I looked at the sky. Past the debris that encircled Jack’s car, the sky above was clear. The hairs on my arms stood straight, as if my body were reacting to an electrical current from the cloud, and then the mark started to spin and churn on my skin.

“The Tunnels,” I said. I glanced quickly at my own arm.

Mary twisted around and caught me. “You feel it too?”

“I feel something,” I said, and then I looked up and noticed Mary’s hair. It was flapping against her face, as if there were a breeze in the car. But the windows were rolled up. Whatever it was, it was stronger for her.

Jack rammed the accelerator to the floor, screeching around every curve in the road until I was sure he would lose control, but the funnel cloud kept gaining on us.

Mary turned to Jack, and with a voice almost too soft for me to hear, she said, “It’s over, Jack. Pull over.”

“No!” Jack squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “We’ll find a shelter. Underground or something.”

“You know concrete walls won’t stop it.”

“Five minutes and we’re at Cole’s place. I want to see their faces at what they’ve brought here. Five minutes, Mary!”

She shook her head. I’d never seen her so lucid. “Jack, if you don’t let me out, that thing behind us will destroy the car, too. You can’t give up on Nikki now.”

Jack’s eyes flashed to me in the rearview mirror. His shoulders sagged and I could feel him let up on the gas. Moments later the car came to a stop on the side of the road.

“Thank you,” Mary said. She paused. “Do you still have the bracelet I gave you?”

Jack and I both nodded.

She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “The bracelet holds a secret the Daughters of Persephone have been protecting for centuries.” She opened her eyes and looked at Jack. “By telling you that, I’ve betrayed all of my ancestors.”

“What secret?” Jack said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

She pulled on the handle and cracked open the door.

“Wait!” I blurted from the backseat. “What about Orpheus and Eurydice? What did you mean, Orpheus was strong?”

She looked at me for a moment. “Poor Nikki. You won’t like the answer.” Then she leaned over the seat and whispered in my ear, “You have a debt to the Tunnels. But the secret is, it doesn’t matter who fills it, as long as the debt is paid.”

She kissed my cheek, and then, with the dexterity of a teenager, Mary threw the door open and sprang out of the car.

All we could do was watch. Once she was out of the car, and waiting, the Tunnels didn’t hesitate. The funnel cloud was on her, and then she was gone. And everything went quiet.

Jack clenched the steering wheel tightly until I was sure he would rip it off. “How long?” His voice was barely audible.

I knew what he was asking. “Meredith left two days before me.”

He leaned his head down on the steering wheel. “How did this happen, Becks?” Then he seemed to remember I was in the backseat. “Would you please get up here and talk to me?”

I climbed into the front.

“What did she say to you about Orpheus?” Jack asked.

I looked him in the eyes.
It doesn’t matter who fills it, as long as the debt is paid.
Orpheus was strong. He took Eurydice’s debt. He went to the Tunnels in her place. I knew without a doubt that’s what Mary was telling me.

But Jack could never know that. “She told me Orpheus stayed strong to the end, and helped Eurydice choose the Tunnels over her Everliving.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “We already knew that.”

I looked out the window. “I know. She was only reminding me that no matter how enticing Cole makes it sound, we can still make the right choice.”

Jack sighed. “I should’ve found you, Becks.”

“When?”

“That night at the dorm, when you drove off, I thought I’d still have time to explain. I didn’t know about the Kevin Reid verdict. I thought tomorrow morning would come, and then I’d talk to you and everything would be okay.” He rested his head back on the steering wheel. “I should’ve chased you down. It’s my fault you went with Cole.”

“No, it’s not.”

“But Lacey was in my room.” And there he said it. The thing we’d never talked about.

He kept his head down on the steering wheel. “I was asleep, and I didn’t know she was there. One of the guys helped her get in. Nothing happened, but it could’ve. I thought if I could just talk to you, I could make it all okay.”

I turned my head to look out the window. The last bits of debris from the Tunnels were settling to the ground. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I made the decision to find Cole. I talked him into it. You need to remember that, because when I’m gone—”

“You’re not going!”

I inhaled a long, deep breath and lowered my voice. “That night, when I left the dorm, I could’ve gone home and shut myself in my room. I could’ve faced you and yelled at you. But I didn’t. I took the easy way out. I begged for the easy way out. Cole took the pain away, and I didn’t care that it would ruin everything in my life, because I was stupid enough to think I had nothing else to lose.”

I watched in the reflection of my window as he slammed the heel of his hand down onto the steering wheel over and over, so hard it cracked the plastic covering at the base.

Watching the Tunnels absorb Mary, I lost that niggling little scrap of hope inside me. But Jack hadn’t. I knew I could take his despair and make him focus. “Jack. What are we going to do about it?”

It worked.

He raised his head. “It all comes back to the bracelet. The Daughters were protecting a secret for the Everneath, and I can only think of one secret worth protecting over all the others.”

“What?”

He held my gaze. “How to bring them down.”

My house. Forty-eight hours left.

J
ack and I ended up at my house, at my desk, while we tried to figure out where to start. My dad and Tommy were renting a room at the Silver Lodge after the win, but I begged him to let me stay at home instead. Jack and I had the house to ourselves.

I bent the desk lamp down as close to the bracelet as I could. The markings on it were worn with a patina, so I grabbed a rag and a tube of toothpaste from the bathroom and dabbed a little dollop on the silver.

“What’s that for?” Jack asked.

“It’s a trick my mom taught me. In a pinch, if you need your silver polished…” I rubbed the toothpaste onto the bracelet until the entire surface area was covered with a thin layer. “And then when you rub it off”—I swiped it with the clean part of the rag—“you get this.”

I dangled the bracelet in front of Jack’s face. The worn, smudged parts were clear of dirt, and we could get a better look at the shape of the markings.

“It doesn’t look like a language,” Jack said. “It looks more like pictures. Or symbols.”

I nodded. “Maybe like hieroglyphs. We are talking about mythology, after all.” Jack’s leg was bouncing up and down. “Jack, go grab a pencil and a paper. You’re better at drawing.”

He rifled through the top two drawers of my desk until he found a notebook and a pencil. He set the paper on the desk and then looked from the bracelet to the paper, drawing what he saw. The first shape looked like a pot. The second like the outline of a person, only shaded in black. The third like a bird with a human head.

I opened my laptop and searched for “hieroglyphics bird with a human head,” because that was the only symbol for which I could imagine search terms. There were a few that didn’t make sense at all. But about halfway down the first page, I saw a similar image to the one on the bracelet.

I read off the screen. “Bird with a human head can mean ‘ba.’ Or soul.”

“Try the other two,” Jack said.

I typed in “hieroglyphics pot.” The search came up with thousands of entries. No pattern as to what it meant. I tried the human figure next. “Hieroglyphics man shaded.” Nothing. I tried “hieroglyphics human form” and other descriptive terms for the outline of the person, but it didn’t help.

“It’s not going to work because I’m not describing the symbols right. I’m saying ‘human shape,’ but it’s too general, or completely wrong, because I’m not getting any answers.”

“I know, Becks.” He rubbed his chin with his fingertips. I smiled. Another typical Jack Caputo move. “The bird with the human head was specific enough. ‘Ba,’ right? So let’s look up ‘ba’ and see if anything else pops up.”

I typed “ba” into the search engine, but the first few entries were for British Airways. So I added “hieroglyphics,” and that’s when I saw it. An article titled “The Five Elements of the Egyptian Soul.”