Eternity (27 page)

I offered a sacrifice. What else do the gods ever want? It’s been that way forever. Greeks knew it. The Romans, too.

The gods and goddesses want sacrifice, plain and simple.

They want blood. Blood like the color of those orchids.

I saw that in my visions.

JD was starting to get pins and needles in his right arm. He flipped onto his other side and kept reading.

Edie kept talking about fire. About how there had been a fire here, in Ascension. That’s when the Furies first infiltrated this place. I thought I could draw them back. With a fire. End it how it all began. I saw that in my visions too.

The way I saw it, I was offering Drea as a sacrifice. An innocent. The way it happened in my visions, I put Drea in the middle of a circle of sticks and a pile of those red flowers. She was wearing a gold pin—shaped like a snake. It was her mother’s. I figured it was for good luck or something. I’d light the fire, watch it burn . . . and then they’d disappear. Drea would always be safe. It was like they got cheated. It was like they got tricked. Because they got nothing.

Finally I broke down. I decided to try it. Follow the vision like it was an instruction manual. I brought Drea (she was still so little) into
the Haunted Woods. Even back then, that’s what everyone called them. Where Edie had seen the Furies’ house.

That morning, I’d taken her mother’s snake pin from its jewelry box. I stuck it to Drea’s shirt for protection and then I built a fire around her. She just sat there the whole time, looking up at me with those dark eyes. So trusting. It almost broke my heart.

What could I do?

JD shivered and looked over to his bedroom window. It wasn’t warm enough yet to keep the window open overnight.  After closing it, he settled back down on his bed, holding the letter above his face.

The flames got higher and higher, until I couldn’t see her anymore. They were getting so close and it was getting so hot. She started crying. My little girl started crying.

They weren’t there, and then suddenly they were—they appeared out of nowhere. They were screaming. Like they were in pain. Through the smoke, I watched their faces melting.

And they left. Just disappeared into thin air.

I ran through the flames. I grabbed my little girl. She was untouched. It had worked. I came home, hid the pin, and prayed that I would never see them again.

I believed we were free of them. But it was too late. Edie had already done what she did. I was too late. I hope you’re not.

—Walt

JD scoured the page, making sure he understood what Walt Feiffer was trying to tell him. He held the paper in his right hand; in his left, he ran his thumb over the contours of the snake pin. Almost identical to the one he’d found near Henry Landon’s icy grave. The one Walt referred to in his note.

He stared down at the page until the words started to blur. He felt sick to his stomach. He thought of little Drea, behind a wall of flame. . . .

But if  Walt Feiffer had done it, couldn’t JD do it too?

Sprawled on his twin bed, he focused on each letter, trying to block out the sounds of thudding pop music bleeding through the walls from Melissa’s room.

It was only a few hours later, but he’d already memorized certain lines.

Edie kept talking about fire . . . and we were free of them.

When he finished reading the note, JD’s hands were shaking. The paper was crumpled from how hard he was gripping it.

He understood the banishment ritual. It had worked for Drea’s dad. It could work for him. And maybe he wouldn’t be too late. But he needed to find an innocent—someone who could serve as a sacrifice. Someone he would have to rescue at the last second, as Drea’s dad had rescued her. From beyond the wall of smoke and flame.

The faint wail of a song seeped through the wall. Melissa always listened to her music too loud.

Melissa.

No.

The idea bled into his mind quickly.

No. I can’t put her in danger.

But she would be safe. That’s what Mr. Feiffer’s note said. He could save her at the last minute.

She’s my sister.

Drea had been Walt’s daughter.

But what if it doesn’t work?

What if it does?

What if I don’t do it?

Em’s eyes flashed before his own. Big, trusting, light with laughter.

With that, JD got up, marched out of his room, and knocked on Melissa’s door. It was time to send the Furies back to hell.

SMASH.

The greenhouse window broke easily, several shards of glass spraying out onto the cement floor inside. Em looked down at her hand, amazed that it didn’t hurt—not one bit. Not even that fresh laceration on her right knuckle, which was rapidly healing in the last of the moonlight.

Em reached her hand through and twisted the lock on the door, which squeaked open rustily. She looked around behind her at the quiet, dewy fields, the buildings with darkened windows, and the long driveway to the road. No one was around.

And so she slipped inside.

Just before the dawn of what was possibly her last day on earth as Emily Winters, Em was breaking and entering.

She was still shaken from Crow’s confession and Lucy’s odd insights. Shaken, shocked . . . and scared. For him, for her, and for everyone.

After Crow had left her outside the Dungeon, she had frantically reviewed everything she knew: Edie killed herself to save Drea from the Furies. Ty was trying to take over Em’s life. Skylar seemed to be left alone now, but her sister Lucy could hear the Furies—likely a result of her brain damage turning her, as the book had put it, “mad.” But then again, Lucy wasn’t exactly a trustworthy source, babbling about albinos and mouths and seeds.

That was how she’d made the connection.  Albino flowers . . .

Hadn’t Nora mentioned rumors of an antidote, a way to clean the slate and become pure again? Something derived from nature, something derived from the Furies’ source?

Em’s heart started hammering and she stood up, pacing the alleyway.

She wondered if the secret was in the seeds. If it was possible that she had literally ingested the Furies’ evil, and if it was possible that the white flower held an antidote. Was it feasible, even, that the same seeds had properties of both evil and good?

Ty had said that evil always contained the power to destroy itself. That she wanted to be “good.” What if the very thing that symbolized the Furies’ evil was the key to their undoing?

She had practically flown to the greenhouse. She couldn’t even remember the drive. She knew that if there was any
connection between the plant world and the Furies, she would find it at the greenhouse.

Once she was inside, the atmosphere was claustrophobic; shining her flashlight around the space, Em noticed the yellow-white film that had accumulated on the inside of the glass panes. The plants looked more cooped in than they had before.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed thinly off the walls. On her tiptoes, shining the blue light in front of her feet, she made her way slowly down the center aisle of the greenhouse, toward the wooden table where she’d sat with Nora, Skylar, and Hannah Markswell the other night. Her shoes clicked against the cement. To the left was a rickety metal shelving unit filled with books about gardening, landscaping, and botany, some of them ancient and some brand-new. She positioned herself so that she could see both the front and the rear doors, and leaned over so she could read the books’ spines.
Plants of the Northeast. Growing Annuals Indoors. Victorian Horticulture.
She ran a finger down the row. Next to those was a set of black three-ring binders, each labeled with a name. Nora’s was one of them.

Em pulled the binder from the shelf and opened it to find loose-leaf papers marked in Nora’s neat cursive. Notes. Each of the gardeners kept notes on their plants, on their findings. Nora’s appeared to be arranged alphabetically by type of plant: heliotrope, ivy, violets. The largest section, however, was labeled with a simple
F
.

Em flipped quickly to those pages and found exactly what she’d expected to find: Nora’s observations about orchids. The terms were scientific, but Em’s breath hitched. Nora was attempting to breed what she referred to as the “albino orchid.”

I am starting to believe that the red orchid turns white only during a full moon,
Nora had written.
It has happened to me twice now. There must be some significance. The moon must be at its peak in order for the flower to open its petals and reveal the seeds inside. The seeds can be good or bad—they can yield new plants, or shrivel in the dirt. It wilts almost instantly—usually within one hour of having bloomed. The flower is extremely rare, extremely sensitive. As yet, I have not succeeded in keeping it in bloom.

Em read the passage several times. As she closed the binder, she realized her hands were shaking. It was starting to make sense. If the flower was special, then its seeds must be unique too.
The seeds can be good or bad.
Just as the red seeds from the Furies’ evil flowers had launched her transformation, the seeds from the albino orchid could counter their effect. When the seeds were bad, they were very bad. And when they were good, they were saviors.

“You were right, Lucy,” she said into the silence.

When the light brings up the albino,
Lucy had said.

Good or bad.

Ty wanted those seeds too. They’d make her good, make her human again.

The red orchid turns white only during a full moon,
Nora had written.

Em pulled her phone out and clicked over to her mariners’ calendar—the one JD had downloaded to her phone one night when they were hanging out. It listed high and low tides, what time the sun would rise and set, the phases of the moon. A combination of humidity and nerves made the phone slick in her hands. What was the date? She could barely remember.

And when she pulled up today’s date, Em’s heart leaped from her chest. The full moon was tonight. It all made sense: the same night as the play, just as Crow’s vision had predicted. She had one final chance to save herself. And Ty had to be thinking the exact same thing. Those seeds would save her, or, in the wrong hands, condemn her forever.

• • •

The school day had been itchy, like wearing a wool sweater with nothing on underneath. She’d spent half of fourth period shaking in the corner of the girls’ bathroom by the cafeteria, even as everyone bustled around her, psyched to see buds blooming on the trees, looking forward to spring break. She wanted to say good-bye to everyone one last time, but couldn’t stand to even look at them. Just like she couldn’t bring herself to pick up Crow’s insistent calls and texts. Just like she was avoiding seeing JD, and Gabby, and Skylar, who were all going to the play.

And now she was back at home, hiding in her room, trying
to stop her whole body from trembling. Because it was tonight.

Do or die.

Her last chance.

“Thank god it’s finally calmed down out there.” Her mom poked her head into Em’s room. “Remember how terrified you used be of thunderstorms?”

Em did remember. The smallest bolt of lightning, the thinnest roll of thunder, would send her shrieking into her parents’ room, into their bed, under their covers. That was before everything else got scary. Even now, a part of her wished she could just run for their bed as she used to, and hide. Instead, she was curled up in her own, pretending to do homework and staring at her laptop at the foot of the bed. Thank god the Winterses had been able to keep living in their home after the fire—if Em were stuck in some bland hotel, she’d probably lose her mind completely.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” asked Mrs. Winters, breaking into Em’s thoughts. They were going to see the school play with the Founts; her parents saw every performance at Ascension, even the ones Em wasn’t in. Weirdos.

“I’m sure,” Em said. “I’m just not feeling all that well. Tell JD I said congrats.” She kept her eyes on her computer screen, afraid to look at her mom. She was scared she might start to cry. She’d been home from school for hours and all she’d done was leaf sadly through last year’s yearbook and rifle through a wooden box filled with special letters and mementos. She wanted to hold
everything in her hands—not just the pieces of paper and scraps of tickets, not just the photographs and shards of beach glass, but the feelings that came with them. The hilarity of one of Gabby’s disjointed notes, passed between classes, unfolded in secret. The excitement of her first trip to Portland without her parents. The peacefulness of summer days spent on the sand and in the salty ocean. Would she never feel those things again?

Mrs. Winters nodded, then came into the room and ran her hand once over Em’s head. “Everything will be okay, sweetie,” she said.

Hot tears pricked the backs of Em’s eyes.
But will it?
She turned and gave her mom a weak smile. “Thanks. I love you.”

Right before her mom left the room, Em spoke up again. “Mom? Also? I wanted to ask you . . . Can you make homemade mac ’n’ cheese tomorrow night?” If she was still here, and still Em, there was nothing she’d want more.

Her mom tilted her head quizzically and then smiled. “Sure, hon, if that’s what you’re craving. We can have a nice family dinner, the three of us.”

“That sounds awesome,” Em said. She kept her game face on until her mom closed the door.

As soon as she was alone again, she pulled out her notebook and started to write. There was one more person she needed to say good-bye to. She scribbled furiously. And when she was done, she folded up the note and left it on top of the coiled, broken
piece of string on her windowsill. She’d kept it there, through all this craziness. On the outside, she wrote
JD
.

The sun had set. It was time to go.