Chapter Forty-Three Hey Jude
She screams, then goes silent. I race after her, heart pounding and tapestry knocking against my shoulder, only to come face-to-face with a grinning Mozart.
“Welcome to Ember’s and my humble abode,” she says with a flourish of her hand.
“We’ve been watching for you,” Simon adds as he shuts the door behind us.
“Seriously?” Eva shrieks. “You couldn’t have just DM’d us?”
“Where’s the fun in that? Besides, how am I supposed to keep my old skills sharp if I never get to practice them?”
“Considering your old skills involved charming the pants off people and then divesting them of their property, I don’t particularly care if you get to practice them or not,” I shoot back. “Although you’re doing fine—at least in the former department.”
“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” he tells me as he ushers us deeper into the cottage, where—it turns out—Remy, Izzy, and Ember are already sitting around, talking while Luke Combs’s “Fast Car” plays over the speaker. “You’ve got that take-no-bullshit attitude that’s hard to resist.”
“I don’t know about that. Some people have no trouble resisting me at all.”
“You might be surprised,” he says, then gestures to the coffee table where there are several bags of chips set up, along with some sodas and sparkling waters. “Help yourself.”
“Storm Party, obviously!” Eva answers, shimmying her way over to the coffee table. “I love this song.”
“It’s a remake of an old Tracy Chapman song,” Remy tells her. “If you like this, you should hear the original.”
“Really?” She looks intrigued as she reaches for a chip. “You should play it next!”
“Are we really just doing this? Having a party when we should be packing?” I know I sound as bewildered as I feel.
“Packing shmacking.” Simon waves a hand, and those moonlit-ocean eyes of his are glowing again in that way that makes me majorly uncomfortable. “Throw a uniform and a couple pairs of jeans in a duffel bag and you’re done. It’s not like we’re going to be gone that long.”
“Unless the whole school blows away,” Izzy interjects dryly.
He shrugs. “So pack a lot of underwear and socks. You’ll be fine.”
Part of me is tempted to stay, even though I know I shouldn’t be. The storm is set to get worse anytime now, and the last thing I want is to be stuck in someone else’s cottage. At the same time, though, this looks like a lot more fun than moping around my room for the next several hours. Plus, Jude will probably text one of them while I’m here, and I can at least be sure he’s okay—
“Jude just finished at the menagerie and is on his way,” Mozart says as she hands me a towel. “So why don’t you put that thing—whatever it is—in the corner—and dry off? I put some sweats and tees on my bed for you and Eva. Grab something to drink while you wait for him.”
“I didn’t come here looking for Jude!” I tell her, and I don’t need a mirror to know my cheeks are turning bright red.
“You didn’t come here at all,” Remy soothes. “We dragged you in.”
Oh. Right. “I should go—”
Mozart steers me toward her bedroom. “Go get changed, Kumquat.”
“What did you just call me?” I demand, eyes narrowed.
“Oh, sorry.” She holds her hands up in a whoops gesture. “I didn’t realize old Sergeant Pepper was the only one who can call you that. My mistake.”
My cheeks go from pink to flaming in a second, and I duck my head to try to hide my embarrassment. Now I want nothing more than to flee, but I’ll look even worse—even weaker—if I run away. So fuck it. Just fuck it.
I close the door behind me, then dry off and quickly change. Mozart’s even taller than I am—and a little more curvy—so I have to roll the sweats up a little so I don’t trip on them. But they’re dry and warm and feel pretty damn luxurious after the nasty, wet clothes I’ve been wearing for way too long. I don’t even mind that they’re Calder Academy red.
I flop down next to Remy, who snags the bag of spicy dill pickle chips and hands them to me with a waggle of his brows.
“How’d you know these are my favorite?” I ask. Then, before he can even answer, I do it for him. “Carolina.”
He smiles, and this time it’s only a little bit sad. “When you’re locked in a cell together for several years, you tend to talk about everything. Including what flavor chips you and your favorite cousin like.”
“Apparently.” Sadness squeezes my stomach at the thought of Carolina telling him a bunch of stories about us to make the time in prison pass faster, but I try not to give in to it right now. I’ve got more than enough painful emotions roiling around inside me.
“Hey, why did your cousin get sent to the Aethereum anyway?” Izzy asks. “Normally, fourteen is way too young for that kind of prison.”
“Hey, now,” Remy answers, acting offended even though I can tell he’s just trying to deflect the question—and the attention—away from me. Which I appreciate. A lot. “I was there my whole life.”
“Exactly,” Izzy agrees, batting her big blue eyes at him in mock innocence. “And look how you turned out.”
“Very well, if I do say so myself,” he shoots back with a grin.
She shakes her head. “You’re impossible.”
“Aww, you know I’ve grown on you.”
“Like a wart, maybe,” she growls back.
“Everyone’s gotta start somewhere.” He gives her what I’m pretty sure is his most charming grin. “In fact—”
He breaks off as a knife goes flying by his head and embeds itself in the wall directly behind us.
Eva, who is just walking out of the bedroom after changing, lets out a small scream while the rest of us jump a little. But Remy takes it in stride, blowing Izzy a kiss as he pulls the knife from the wall.
She snarls in response, but I notice she doesn’t send another knife his way. And he doesn’t give her back the one she already threw.
I take a sip of La Croix to steady my churning stomach, expecting the conversation to move on now that the excitement is over. But it turns out everyone is still watching me, waiting for me to answer Izzy’s question.
So I do, though even I don’t know why. Except, in some strange way, it feels good to talk about it when my family never does. “I don’t have any idea what Carolina did. Everything was fine when I went to bed that night, but when I woke up the next morning, I had a bunch of missed calls and a couple of text messages from her. But it was too late. She was already gone, and no one would tell me why.”
“What did the messages say?” Ember asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken to me since I got here.
“She told me to take care of Jude, that he was going to need it.” I smile sadly, because we all know how that ended up. “And to trust that there would always be enough time. Except there wasn’t. Hers ran out.”
Remy makes a small, unconscious sound at that, and when I turn to him, it’s to find that his hands are clenched so tightly that his knuckles have turned white. And I know he’s blaming himself.
I reach over and place a hand over his. I don’t say anything because I don’t have the words yet, don’t know if I’ll ever have the words. But I know that no matter how much I want to blame him, it’s not really his fault Carolina is dead.
My mother is the one who sent her away from the island when nothing she possibly could have done at fourteen would have warranted that. But she did it anyway, and now Carolina is dead.
My mother and I had the worst fight we’ve ever had the morning I woke up and discovered Carolina was gone, that she had sent her away. I begged her to bring her back, begged her to change her mind. Told her she was handing Carolina a death sentence.
My mother didn’t agree, said she was doing what she had to to keep the people she cared about safe and that this situation wasn’t any of my business—something she made sure I understood before she let me leave. And when it got bad, really bad, for a minute, I thought she was going to send me to the prison right along with my cousin. But instead, she just gave me my first month’s worth of chrickler detentions, among other things.
And nothing has ever been the same since.
Not between my mother and me.
Not between Carolina and me, obviously.
And not between Jude and me, either, because that was the day he decided we no longer had anything to say to each other. Even though I’ve never stopped having things to say to him. And I don’t think I ever will.
The pain of it all comes crashing back to me, and for a second, I want nothing more than to get out of here as fast as I can. But that will just make me look like a coward—the one thing I can’t afford to be, even in front of these people who appear to want to be friends.
But appearances tend to be deceiving, especially the ones that look good. The ones that make everyone around feel normal, if only for a little while. So I stay where I am, even force myself to eat a few of the dill pickle chips Remy handed me. No one needs to know they taste like sawdust in my mouth.
Before I can think of anything else to say, Orville Peck’s “Dead of Night” comes on. Because of course it does.
“Turn it up,” Ember tells Mozart.
She complies, and the macabre and melancholy beat fills the room and my senses.
Whenever I hear this song, all I can think of is Jude. Maybe that’s why I’m not the least bit surprised when the door flies open and he walks in, looking as dark and mysterious as the song itself.