The Golden Spiral (5 page)

No. I refused to believe that. There had to be a way to control my dreams. A way to access this shadow side of the bank. A way to reach Dante before it was too late.

The dark sky seemed to lower over me, the weight of it making my shoulders hunch as though under an unseen burden. The bank felt unstable beneath my feet, sliding and shifting. I imagined a quicksand pit opening up and dragging me down, or a bottomless sinkhole with sheer walls like a throat, gulping me whole.

Stop it,
I commanded, giving myself a little shake.
You don’t have time for this.

I took a last look around the bank. This place had taken so much from me—it would not take Dante from me without a fight. I kicked down at the ground with my heel, daring it to make the first move.

It was long past time to wake up and leave this horrible in-between place—not quite the bank, not quite a dream. If Dante was caught in the limbo between doors, then it meant only one thing.

I had work to do.

Chapter

3

The knock on my door sounded like thunder to my tender hearing.

“Abby? Are you up yet?” Mom’s voice slipped through the crack in the door.

“Yeah,” I managed to croak. I checked the clock by my bed: 10:14. Later than I thought. What had I been dreaming about? Had Dante been there? My mind still rang with fragmented sounds of tolling bells, whispered voices, and wild screams.

“Good. Listen, I’ve got to run some errands; Hannah’s coming with me. Dad’s mowing the lawn if you need him. Oh, and Jason is here to see you.”

“Okay,” I called to Mom as I struggled to find my footing in the world of the awake. “I’ll be right down.” Rolling out of bed, I managed to exchange my pajamas for some sweats and a T-shirt.

As I reached for the doorknob, a sudden flash of light across my vision stripped away my sight, turning the world into a stark black-and-white outline. Except everything was switched, like the negative of a photograph. A raw shot of pain tracked fire along my nerves, ending in a knot between my shoulders. I closed my eyes as a wave of dizziness hit me, rocking through my stomach and making me nauseated. Needles of cold pricked at my wrists, turning my fingers numb. I shook them hard, trying to force some circulation back into them.

As quickly as it had hit, the contraction of pain disappeared and my vision returned to normal. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.

In some ways it was like those white flashes I’d had a few months ago when I’d been out of sync with the flow of time. But this was worse. Much worse.

I didn’t know exactly what was going on. But I knew it was something bad.

***

Jason was waiting for me in the front room. He had made himself comfortable on the couch, piling the throw pillows to one side so he could lean back against the cushions with ease. It was his favorite spot to relax, and seeing him there—just as I had seen him there countless times before—evoked a sudden sense of déjà vu. There was something so
right
about seeing him there, and yet, something so
wrong
as well that I almost missed the last step on the stairs and had to grab at the banister to steady myself.

Jason leaned forward, one hand out to catch me even though I was too far away. “Are you okay, Abby? You look terrible.”

I offered up a weak smile. “Gee, thanks.” The world
continued to tilt around me in a rolling circle. I made my way into the front room and sat down heavily next to Jason on the couch. I leaned against the mounded pillows, hoping they would offer some stability for my spinning vision.

Jason brushed the hair away from my face, his touch tender and cool. “Do you want me to get you a glass of water or something?”

I shook my head and then wished I hadn’t. “Just . . . give me a minute.” Breathing deeply, I counted my heartbeats, concentrating on keeping them even and steady. The world finally began to settle down and play nice.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, wincing a little at the harsh undertone to my words.

Jason didn’t seem to notice. He leaned back and reached his arm around my shoulder. “Do I need a reason to visit my best girl on graduation day?”

A thin whine of panic sounded deep in my ear. I wasn’t Jason’s best girl anymore. I hadn’t been for some time now. Why would he think I was?

“Uh, I guess not,” I stammered, trying to catch hold of my fluttering thoughts. “It’s hard to believe it’s already graduation, huh? Who would have thought we’d make it?” I grimaced; my words sounded lame even to me.

But Jason still didn’t notice. “I always knew you’d be top of the class. Abby Edmunds, valedictorian. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” Jason traced his fingertips across the back of my hand, resting lightly on my wrist. He was sitting so close—almost too close.

The panic rose from a whine to a howl. I tried to shift away just a little, but the pillows were in the way.

“What are you talking about? I’m not valedictorian.”

Jason’s smile was indulgent and teasing. “It’s okay if you want to brag about it. Top marks. Every college fighting over you. Speaking of which, have you picked one yet?”

“Emery,” I said automatically. It was hard to concentrate; the edges of my vision kept blurring into a blue-white haze. “I’m going to Emery College.”

“Really?” Jason frowned. “When did that happen? Last night you were looking at USC.”

“USC didn’t want me.” The sting of rejection was all but gone, but in its place was something worse: doubt and confusion. I remembered getting the rejection letter; I still had the letter. Didn’t I? And what did Jason mean about “last night”? I hadn’t seen Jason since yesterday afternoon. Had I? My thoughts seemed to be fracturing along major logic lines, my memories sliding and colliding into new configurations.

“Since when?” Jason laughed. “Your acceptance letter came weeks ago. Nat and I are just trying to tag along as best we can.”

The blue-white haze hardened into a ring of ice, chilling my blood. The longer this conversation went on, the more things were wrong with it.

“At least you and Natalie are still together,” I said, unsettled by the sense of wrongness that filled the room.

Jason looked at me so strangely, I actually glanced over my shoulder to see if he was looking at someone else.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not dating Natalie.
We’re
dating. In fact, we’re going out tonight to celebrate. Seven o’clock at that new barbecue place you wanted to try—the Devil’s Pit—remember?”

The edges of my vision rippled as the world did its horrible inside-out trick and another wave of white-hot pain contracted through me. I clenched my teeth around a gasp to prevent it from escaping.

“I don’t feel so good,” I managed to say. I actually felt worse than that, but there was no point in trying to articulate the details. When your whole body felt on fire, what was one more flame?

“You don’t have to be sorry for being sick. Are you okay? Do you think you’ll make it to graduation?”

“Yeah, I think so.” I didn’t dare nod; my headache had sprouted spikes.

“Listen, we don’t have to go out tonight. Why don’t we just do pizza and a movie instead?”

I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. Jason and I hadn’t had a pizza-and-movie date since before we had broken up on Valentine’s Day. Jason should be dating Natalie—not me. Jason was
not
my boyfriend; didn’t he know that?

I had that sudden sense of false déjà vu again. I felt like I was standing still and the whole world had picked up, turned 180 degrees, and dropped down again. Everything was still there—just
wrong.
Everything had just . . .
changed.

The panic in my chest exploded into full-blown terror. Pain twisted through me and a drizzle of cold seeped into my fingers and toes.

I faced Jason and set my jaw. “Kiss me,” I said, though I feared it sounded like a dare.

He blinked once in surprise, but clearly I didn’t need to ask him twice. Jason slipped his hand around the back of my neck and leaned close. His lips met mine and I felt a slightly electric ripple pass through me. But not a good kind of electricity, not like when Dante kissed me. This was more of the knife-in-the-toaster kind of shock. A buzzing burr that made me want to flinch.

Jason finally noticed. He broke off the kiss and backed away from me. A shadow of confusion turned his hazel eyes the color of desert sand, and his voice, when he spoke, was as dry and dusty. “Okay, that was weird.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. I lifted the back of my hand to my mouth, barely resisting the urge to wipe it against my lips. Instead I let my fingers rest on the locket around my throat, drawing strength from the familiar shape and weight of Dante’s silver heart. At least that hadn’t changed.

“What was that all about?” Jason said. “You kissed me like I was your brother.”

His words summoned two quick memories—our first kiss last January, then the February breakup—flashing back-to-
back so fast they felt like a double punch to my gut. He wouldn’t have said that on purpose; it wasn’t like him to be deliberately mean. And I doubted that he was simply pretending those two pivotal events in our relationship had never happened.

No, this was something else. Something worse.

Zo had made it through the door where Dante hadn’t. And that meant that Zo was running unchecked, imposing his will on the river, on the past.

Jason didn’t remember those events happening because they had
never happened.
Jason remembered something different, a different past. One in which our first kiss had been fireworks for both of us, one where he and I were still dating, one where he still loved me—and not Natalie.

Things had changed—the evidence was sitting right next to me on the couch. Dante had said changes would be like rocks in the river, polluting the flow of time, creating dangerous ripples, undertows, riptides. I had known the changes were coming. I just hadn’t thought they would start so soon. Or hit so close to home. This was the first ripple in the river, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last.

If only I’d had some way to prepare, a hint of what was coming . . . I grimaced. Was that what the white flash had been about this morning? A signal that time was reversing and changing direction? If so, then maybe I had my own painful warning system in place, though I wasn’t looking forward to feeling like I’d been turned inside out every time a ripple of change reached me.

I realized I’d been sitting in silence for so long that the awkwardness in the room had turned palpable.

“Sorry,” I said, trying for a smile to break the tension. It didn’t work. I felt my heart constrict a little, and I dug my
fingernails into my palms. “Could I have that glass of water now?”

Jason stood up from the couch without a glance at me or a single word. He returned from the kitchen and handed me a glass, careful not to let our fingers touch.

I noticed he didn’t sit back down next to me, but instead stood a pace or two away, his fingers tapping his leg, his body already tense and turned toward the front door.

I drained the glass dry in three long swallows, the water tasting like sand in my throat. Jason didn’t deserve to be caught up in this mess. Breaking his heart once had been bad enough. I really didn’t want to do it again.

Maybe I could change things on my end, set things right again. Maybe I could toss this particular rock out of the river.

“Thanks for your help, Jason. I’m feeling a lot better.” A small truth. “Let’s still go out tonight, but . . . maybe I should meet you at the restaurant, okay?”

“All right,” Jason said after a moment’s hesitation. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

I wrapped my hands around the empty glass and nodded; I didn’t dare meet his eyes in case he saw right through me.

“Okay.” He took a step toward me, and paused. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay,” he said again. “Well. I’ll see you later, then.”

“See you.”

I waited until he’d closed the door behind him before I set the glass on the coffee table and went back upstairs to grab my cell phone off my desk.

“Natalie? Hey, can you do me a favor tonight?”

***

It had been surprisingly hard to convince Natalie to come to the Devil’s Pit. She kept saying she didn’t want to be a third wheel on my date with Jason. I kept trying to convince her that it would be fine. I finally had to promise to buy her dessert in order to get her to say yes. I hung up the phone and sighed. Here was more proof that things were out of whack. Normally Natalie would not have thought twice about coming along; we’d done enough as a group that no one ever felt like a third wheel. And since when had Natalie obsessed about dessert that much? She enjoyed a slice of New York cheesecake as much as the next person, but to hold out for it? No, that wasn’t like Natalie at all.

I went back downstairs and fell face first onto the couch, closing my eyes against the cushions. Playing matchmaker and fixing things might prove harder than I’d anticipated.

I heard the garage door rise with a growling hum. Great. Either Dad was done with the lawn, or Mom and Hannah were home. Or both. I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with either possibility.