Chapter 36
A CRACKLE OF ICE
The temperature drops when Jude leaves. A bitter cold front rolls into town and persists.
WMTM’s chief meteorologist promises relief on Friday.
But when Friday comes, Jude is still gone, it’s just as cold as Thursday, and the school boilers aren’t keeping up.
Every classroom feels subterranean. By the time the final bell rings, all I want to do is go home and crawl under a pile of blankets.
Chairs scrape as students come to their feet.
Harper and I gather our things and step out into the hallway, where I nearly walk into Twig. Naomi stands behind him, feigning interest in a trophy case. They accompany me to my locker.
I love them. I really do. But they haven’t left me alone all week. Every time I turn around, at least one of them is there. Whether Jude put them up to it—his way of ensuring I don’t do anything reckless—or they’re simply worried about me, I don’t know. Whatever the case, I’m feeling smothered.
“Do you want to grab some pie at the Cobbler?” Twig asks, handing me my coat.
“I could go for some pie,” Naomi says.
“Pie sounds delicious,” Harper adds.
“I think I’ll pass.” I shut my locker and face my frowning friends.
They try to suggest something else—whatever I’m in the mood for—but I wave them off, claiming a headache. In truth, I’m depressed. Due, in large part, to Jude’s prolonged absence. But also, this standstill we’re in with Vorat.
Emma and Sienna are still missing.
Lainey and Griffin have been acting normal, which I find incredibly unnerving.
The plant isn’t around to give me anymore visions.
And despite my best efforts, the pearl—which is supposed to reveal hidden things—is redolent to reveal anything. Had it not behaved the way it behaved in the crypt, I would be convinced it is simply a pearl.
Twig gives me a ride home.
I assure him I’m okay. I’m a little sad, but that’s fine. Sadness happens. It’s not fun, but it’s part of life. I’m sure with some extra sleep I’ll be feeling much more like myself in the morning.
I retreat to my bedroom and wrap myself in a thick quilt that’s been languishing at the bottom of my armoire.
It smells like mothballs.
Which reminds me of Jude.
Not because he smells like mothballs, but because I wore a cloak once that smelled like mothballs while we were searching through the storage room on the third floor of his manor.
We were looking for a key that could open Maggie’s mysterious locked tome.
Instead, we found a family tree inside the trunk of Jude’s one-eyed uncle.
Afterward, I got terribly sick.
Jude got my number from Twig.
And we spent a whole evening watching Tales from the Crypt while talking on the phone.
The memory makes my heart ache.
I sit down and open the bottom drawer of my desk, where I keep a growing collection of oddities. The shoebox of my mother’s things. A tattered copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Simon’s journal. Lily’s sketchpad. And now, the onyx and the pearl.
“The power to reveal what is hidden,” I mutter, setting the pearl on my desk. I hover my hand over the stone. “Reveal your secrets.”
I wait for something to happen.
Anything to happen.
But of course, nothing happens.
My thoughts turn to Lainey. If I brought this pearl with me to school and held it next to her, what would it reveal?
Probably the same thing it revealed yesterday when I brought it to the Water Garden, which was a big fat nothing.
If my mother and Simon and Emma and Sienna are trapped in Vorat’s prison, the pearl refused to show me.
I pick it up and give it a shake like it’s a Magic 8 Ball. “What are Lainey and Griffin planning?”
More nothing.
With a heavy sigh, I set it down and rub my eyes, thinking about pearls.
How they begin as tiny irritants, a bit of debris slipping inside the mollusk’s soft tissue.
In self-defense, the mollusk begins coating the irritant with nacre—layer by painstaking layer, until months, or years later, a pearl is formed.
Given its nature, I shouldn’t be surprised that this particular amulet would be so temperamental.
I pull the quilt tighter around my shoulders.
My eyes are heavy.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep all week.
There are too many irritants stuck inside the soft tissue of my brain.
I move the pearl aside, cross my arms on top of my desk, and rest my head in the crook of my elbow.
Why have Lainey and Griffin gone dormant?
If I broke into one of their homes, would I find a rift in the basement?
Yawning, I surrender to the heaviness and let my eyelids sink.
Jude sits at a table in the cafeteria. Everything inside me lights up.
He’s back. Jude came back. Maybe he’s better.
Maybe the specialist has found a way to break whatever hold the ruby has on his soul.
I smile and wave, but he ignores me. Twig, Naomi, and Harper join him at the table.
I grab an empty seat, but Jude holds onto it.
He says there’s no room. But of course there’s room.
There are two empty seats. When I point this out, Twig says they’re saved for Lainey and Griffin.
Then they all laugh. They laugh and they laugh for what feels like hours and I’m left standing by myself, in Evermore’s basement, while my mother records a podcast about Brady Keller and Caleb Briggs.
“They’re running out of time,” she says, grabbing my hands—her grip so tight it hurts. “Hurry up, they’re running out of time!”
Her head turns into a clock, its hands spinning wildly.
“Selah,” she whispers in my ear. “Come find me.”
I shoot upright in the chair.
There’s a crick in my neck.
Drool on my cheek.
I wipe it away and blink at the night outside my window.
I check the time on my phone.
6:32 p.m.
The clouds outside break apart and a beam of moonlight shines through. It streams inside my bedroom and hits the pearl.
The amulet flickers like red and blue police lights.
A familiar female voice rises inside me. “They just—they fell in. We tried to get to them. We tried to help.”
Lainey.
Behind her, jagged cliffs and tall pines.
Footprints on ice.
A spiderweb of cracks.
A boy falling through.
He thrashes and flails while Lainey and Griffin watch and grin.
I scramble out of my chair so fast, it tips backward and crashes to the floor. The lacerations on my arm tingle with warmth, but when I touch the pearl, it’s cold.
Like ice.
At the quarry.
Someone fell through.
Already?
Or not yet?
Without wasting time on contemplation, I race down the stairs, yank a coat off the hook, grab my dad’s keys, and drive through the dark.
When I reach my destination, when I pull off the road onto the gravel clearing swallowed by weeds, my headlights sweep over two familiar cars—Lainey’s Toyota Corolla and Brady Keller’s CR-V.
A battalion of goosebumps march across my skin.
Quickly, I turn off the lights and cut the engine.
Outside, the frigid air nips at my nose and cheeks. I step over frozen puddles trapped in tire ruts and hurry down the trailhead where the sound of laughter echoes across the ice. I hide behind a tree and watch the scene unfold beneath a crescent moon.
There are four of them. Lainey and Griffin. Brady Keller and Caleb Briggs, too.
They stand along the rocky bank.
“Ten to one you end up like Winslow,” Griffin says.
Their laughter boils my blood. The ease with which they can joke about a classmate’s death makes me sick.
“So, how does this dare work?” Caleb asks.
“It’s pretty simple,” Griffin replies. “Walk across the ice to the other side.”
“And you’ll give me fifty bucks?”
“Keller, too, if he’s brave enough.”
“Since when did you get that kind of cash?” Brady asks.
“Since I received a second, very generous birthday gift from my rich demented grandmother.”
Caleb snorts. “And you want to give that hard earned money to us?”
“I want to be entertained. Watching you two slip and slide across the quarry seems like good entertainment. Plus, I don’t think you’re brave enough.”
Brady tests the surface with a prod of his shoe. “Seems pretty solid.”
I set my hand against the tree.
“Don’t do it,” I whisper, my breath a frozen cloud.
But Brady doesn’t listen.
He steps onto the ice and stops. When nothing happens, he grins. “A pretty easy payday if you ask me.”
Caleb joins him.
I watch as they slide out onto the ice, laughing and cracking jokes. Then I see something that neither Brady nor Caleb seem to notice. A glow—like someone is under the water, shining a flashlight.
Caleb throws a playful insult at Brady.
Brady responds by giving him a shove.
Caleb shoves him back.
With a laugh, Brady shoves him harder and Caleb slides so far, he’s right over that glowing, phosphorescent light.
He slips and falls.
Lainey and Griffin guffaw.
A crackling sound breaks through the night.
For one terrible second, nobody moves.
Then Caleb plummets into the water.
Brady scrambles to the shore.
I don’t think.
I don’t hesitate.
I just run.
Past Brady.
Out onto the precarious ice.
I drop onto my stomach and slither forward, reaching out my hand, shouting at Caleb to take it as the phosphorescent light grows brighter. His eyes are panicked orbs inside his face as he chokes and flails wildly for my hand.
Our palms connect.
I squeeze like a vice, determined to hold on, when he’s yanked straight down, dragging me with him, into the frigid water.
The cold feels like a thousand knives stabbing my body.
Brady’s hand slips from mine and I watch in horrifying slow motion as he’s sucked into the rift below.
Something slithers around my wrist.
A familiar, eel-like tentacle.
A demon squid from the deep.
It tightens and pulls.
I scratch and claw, my scream escaping in bubbles, my coat tangling around me as I scramble desperately for the surface.
A hand plunges into the water.
I reach for it.
With everything I have, knowing it’s my only hope. My only chance at survival. I’m running out of oxygen. I’m running out of time. My brain screams for air. Our fingertips touch as instinct takes over and I inhale. Ice floods into my lungs and the world fades to black.