Platinum (15 page)

“You need her.”

“Who?” I blew a single strand of hair out of my face, completely exasperated.

The woman looked to the side, her red, red lips curving up in a simple smile, and all of a sudden, I was in a memory I recognized all too well. Lissy, Lexie, Tracy, Dylan, Audra, and me standing in a classroom. The fire. The powerful man ready to leave us to die, and then Lissy starts coming out of her body. She reaches for Lexie, and I can see the colored lights streaming off the younger girl’s body. They’re moving and growing and so very pink that I almost can’t look at them.

And then Lissy turns toward me, and memory-me nods slightly. Her hands dip into the pure purple light surrounding my body.

This is Lissy’s memory, and so I don’t see her colored lights as clearly, but I don’t need to. I know without looking that they’re blue.

Pink.

Purple.

Blue.

“She needed you, my daughter.” The woman was there beside me again. “And you need her.”

Boys yelling.

Fists flying.

Another dead body on the ground. Brock-Cade-Brock-Cade and a blond girl in a poodle skirt smiling over a dead body.

This time, the blonde stared straight at me. “They kill for me,” she said. “Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

My eyes flew open, and only years of practice kept me from making a fool of myself. I’d practically made a career of fitting in when it mattered and standing out when it mattered more. Keeping the vision a secret, at least now that I’d managed to get past (or at least ignore) the emotional chaos of the day before, was nothing. That morning, I’d resolved to do three things: stay in control, teach Fuchsia a lesson, and solve the Ghost Boy mystery. So far, I was doing pretty well on the first two, which led me to number three. I allowed myself to consider the dark-haired woman’s words, and in an effort to at least
look
like I was taking notes, I doodled my thoughts in the margins of my math notebook.

You need each other.

Once whole, may no mortal hands tear them apart.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

They kill for me. Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?

I thought about the image of Brock lying in a pool of his own blood, thought of the tortured look on Cade’s well-sculpted face as he told me, again and again, that someone was going to die. I thought of the blond girl, her poodle skirt, and the sick, satisfied smile on her face.

“They kill for me. Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

The girl’s words sent chills down my spine as the pieces slowly fit together in my mind. I’d seen the way Cade had looked at her. She’d been in my vision all along, watching the fight, twirling the ring on her finger. I’d thought she was watching with horror, but by her own words, they were fighting over her and she was glad.

But what did this have to do with Brock? Or me? Or the other guys I saw moving in and out of my Cade visions? If this whole thing was really about some fifties love triangle, where did
I
come in?

As much as I wanted to concentrate on that part of the mystery, and the excellent visual in my mind of shirtless Cade, the rest of the vision nibbled at the edges of my thoughts, subtly but constantly demanding my attention. I kept flashing back to that day with Lissy and Lexie, and Tracy’s pathetic attempt to seduce the evil math teacher. I hadn’t known what was happening then, but now I knew. Lissy had stopped him from leaving by tying our auras to his, and once all three of them had been attached, he’d been destroyed.

Lexie’s was pink.

Mine was purple.

Lissy’s was blue.

Just like the rings of light I kept seeing hanging in the air. It was after that day that I’d started seeing things. It had started small. My attention would wander, and I’d imagine a scene from my own past. Bits and pieces of images would hop into my head unexplained, and then I’d seen Cade, and the images became more frequent, more intense.

I’d helped Lissy destroy the bad guy, and somehow I’d ended up with the Sight.

I
knew
this was her fault, I thought.

You need her.

The voice was an echo in my mind, a memory of the words the dream-woman had said.
She needed you. You need her.

The words were depressingly close to the ones Lissy had spat at me during lunch.
Lexie says you need my help.

In the five minutes before the last bell rang, I considered my options. I could go against Lexie’s truth-speaking dictate and the dream-woman’s prophetic-sounding words. It wasn’t like this whole Sight thing was totally new and uncharted territory anymore. I’d even started to use it on cue. I also wasn’t totally clueless as to what was going on. Obviously, the freaky mojo centered on the blond chick and my ghost boy. Whatever was happening had been happening for a while, so a little walk through the newspaper archives at the library might give me a better idea of what this ghostly love triangle entailed.

My second option was to suck it up and ask Lissy to join me. I’d helped her (however inadvertently) with the Kissler situation, so it wasn’t like she could turn me down. Besides, I had Lexie on my side, and I of all people knew how convincing that kid could be.

My third option involved taking Lexie back to the library and letting it slip that there was danger involved. Lissy would follow, and I could use them both to figure out what exactly was going on. But I couldn’t do that. There was something about the library that had given me a distinctly wigged-out feeling, and Lexie had practically done a corpse impression trying to divine the truth about the whole Cade situation. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, there was something more dangerous than a lip-happy ex–best friend going on here, and Lexie had to stay out of it. I’d deal with it alone before I’d drag her back into it.

You need her.

The reminder echoed again in my mind. Just what I needed on the day I’d managed to get everything back under control—supernatural nagging.

The final bell snapped me out of my train of thought. I decided to let fate decide it. If I saw Lissy on my way off campus, I’d shove her in the backseat of my car and take her with me. If I didn’t, I’d go to the library alone and deal with “needing” someone later. I slung my oversized purse (backpacks = so overrated) over one shoulder and sauntered out of the room.

Walking through a high school hallway is sort of like being a secret agent. Your mission is to collect classified information being exchanged by enemy operatives. It can happen anywhere: at the lockers, the water fountain, the girls’ bathroom, even the boys’ bathroom if you can pull it off. You must, however, achieve the goal of your mission while undercover as a person who couldn’t care less about what anyone else says or thinks.

I stopped at my locker, more to eavesdrop on Elle and Katie than to pick up my chemistry textbook. Atomic elements could wait until study hall the next day. Fresh gossip, on the other hand, had a half-life of about twenty minutes. After that, it became old news, quick.

“Well, I heard that he gave her some kind of fungus.”

“A fungus? Where?”

Katie gave Elle a look. “You know…down there. Pits Ewww must have all kinds of funguses.”

Fungi, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say anything out loud. Grammar Nazis didn’t make homecoming court.

“Lilah!” Katie squealed, leaning over to give me a faux hug, the kind where another girl touches her forearms to yours and shrugs her shoulders a little bit. “We were just talking about the party tomorrow.”

Yeah, I said silently, and I’m completely deaf, but whatever. Undercover Lilah was on the job.

“It’s going to be great,” I said. “I heard that Bridget Stone is going with Jackson Hare. Wouldn’t they make like the cutest couple ever?”

Elle and Katie both nodded vigorously and squealed.

“Are you and Brock going?” Katie asked. I could tell by the hungry look in her eye that she was dying for a new piece of gossip, and that Fuchsia had tried to redeem herself by claiming to have hooked up with Brock.

Some people never learned.

“Of course,” I said. “I mean, I may let Fuchsia tag along with us, so that she can, you know, pretend that that whole fungus thing never happened.”

“You heard about the fungus too?” Elle asked.

I declined to answer. Sometimes, silence is the most incriminating response.

Katie leaned toward me. “Fuchsia’s telling everyone that she and Brock are together,” she said, shaking her head. “How sad is that?”

“Yeah,” I said, “and last week she said she hooked up with Tate, and the week before that, it was Jackson, and we all know she’s not exactly a Bridget, if you know what I mean. Besides, you know how guys are. If any of them had actually hooked up with Fuchsia, the whole world would know about it. I mean, look at Pits Ewww.”

Elle and Katie nodded. My word was gospel.

“So things are fine with you and Brock?” Katie pressed.

Were they? Did I want them to be?

My pausing to think was giving the girls way too much information, so I played my trump card.

“Brock told me he loved me yesterday.”

And today, I was using it as ammunition in the Great Girl War. I couldn’t let myself think about it, couldn’t let it get to me and wear me down to the place I’d been the day before.

Katie and Elle squealed. Loudly.

I leaned back against the locker bank, knowing that I’d damage-controlled everything I could, when my stomach flipped itself inside out and an electric shock jumped into my body, jarring my bones with the force of a painful, unexpected vision.

“Loser.”

Large hands on small shoulders, pounding the smaller boy’s body against a bank of lockers.

“Did I say you could talk to Jessica?”

“I just asked her for her h-h-h-history notes.”

“Did I say you could ask her for her history notes?”

The larger boy relaxes for a minute, and then slams the smaller boy back up against the lockers. Metal clangs.

“No.”

“I don’t want to hear it, because last I remembered, I didn’t say you could talk to me, either.”

Large hands on small shoulders, cold metal on his back.

“You should have left Helen alone.”

“Lilah?”

I had no idea what Elle and Katie had been saying, so I improvised and tried to distract them from the way my body had tensed the moment the vision had entered my mind. “You don’t think she’s pregnant, do you?”

“Who?”

It wasn’t something I wanted to do. In the beginning, channeling everything I felt about what Fuchsia had done to me into doing something to her had made me feel better about things, made me feel like I wasn’t the same little kid who didn’t have the right shoes or a daddy or a cookie-cutter mom and couldn’t do anything about any of it. But now, taking it this far didn’t make me feel better.

It made me feel mean.

“Who else?” Elle asked Katie pointedly, taking my pregnancy comment and running with it. “I mean, don’t you think she’s put on a little weight?”

I eased myself off the locker bank and pressed down my screaming conscience. Fuchsia would have done it to me, I thought. I know she would have.

My head ached with the thought, and I sternly reminded myself that I had problems right now that extended above and beyond high school rumors.

“Listen, guys, I’ve got to go, but do me a favor?”

They nodded.

“If you see Fuchsia, be nice to her. Now’s the time when she really needs friends like us, you know?”

With another faux hug, I was out the door. I couldn’t get away from the locker banks, or for that matter, from what I’d just said about Fuchsia, fast enough. I was halfway to my car when I ran, quite literally, into Lissy James. We both went flying, and I silently cursed her and my luck as I rose to my feet.

If I hadn’t stopped at my locker to talk to the girls, I wouldn’t have gotten the touch-triggered retrovision, and I wouldn’t have been rushing out to the parking lot at the exact same time as Lissy. I’d left the decision up to fate, and fate had spoken.

“You need a ride?” I asked.

“You’re offering?” Lissy’s tone was wary, not defensive, and that gave me the push I needed to ask her for help a second time.

“It would require a detour by the library,” I said.

“The library?”

I didn’t repeat myself.

“You need my help, don’t you?” She gave me an odd, not entirely unattractive smile.

“Maybe.”

Lissy looked at me again, but this time her eyes flitted to my left and right, then above me, before settling on my face.

“Okay,” she said.

This was, quite possibly, the first civil conversation I’d had with Lissy James. She hadn’t treated me like I was a horrible person. She hadn’t walked away from me. She hadn’t said no.

It was a start.

16

Beauty

Cleopatra probably wasn’t nearly as beautiful as most
people think she was,
but she was probably a hell of a lot smarter.