Eternity (13 page)

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 the 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-tock
ed 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, relieved 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.

“I’ve seen that before. . . . ” Skylar said, frowning, as though trying to remember. Then she nodded. “My aunt tried to give it to me. Or at least, something like it. I lost it in the woods the night of my bonfire party in the Haunted Woods.”

“Drea had one. . . . ” Em said, struggling to get the words through her strangled throat. “Sasha had one. I had one.”

Skylar picked up the pendant and twirled it in her hand. “What’s it for?”

“I think . . . I think some people believe it helps to ward off the Furies,” Em said. Her hand still stung, but it was worth the pain. This was a clue. Surely this was a sign that she was right, and that Nora did have information about the Furies. “I’m not sure how well it works. Let’s see what else is in here.” She breathed a sigh of relief as she watched Skylar put the snake pin down.

They sifted through the next few layers in Nora’s trunk. Several antique books about flowers, and one about mythology—Em
recognized it as a title she’d seen in her research. A few pieces of clothing, a shawl, a silvery top, a pair of ladies’ gloves. There was a stack of photographs wrapped in ribbon at the bottom of the chest.

“That’s my aunt,” Skylar said, directing the light onto the photo at the top of the pile. It was a picture of three women smiling.

Em peered closer. She definitely recognized Skylar’s aunt, but she also knew one of the women next to her: it was the angry librarian from the Antiquities Library at the University of Southern Maine. Em and Drea had had an unfortunate run-in with her; once she learned that they were researching the Furies, she had kicked them out unceremoniously.

“I know that woman,” Em said.

“That’s Hannah Markwell.” Skylar took the picture and held it near her face. “She’s a librarian, I think. She’s a friend of my aunt’s. They geek out over books together.” Skylar rolled her eyes and for a second, Mini-Me Gabby was back.

The third woman was also a brunette. A pretty smile, a strong nose, striking features, but there were worry lines around her eyes. She looked so familiar. Em turned over the picture to see if there was more information on the back. Just three names—
Nora, Hannah, and Edie.

Edie. The name rang a faint bell. . . . Em sat there for a moment, puzzling over the photograph. Looking at it seemed
to spark an inexplicable feeling of déjà vu. She stared into the static eyes of the third woman, willing herself to remember. And then it came to her, so obvious that she was appalled that she hadn’t seen it immediately. This woman was the spitting image of Drea.