“We need to stop at the Dungeon when we get back to Ascension,” Drea said as she merged onto the highway. “I am in des-per-ate need of some caffeine.”
Em used to think she and Gabby were caffeine fiends, but Drea’s coffee addiction knew no limits. It was like she needed a Red Bull just to have a conversation. “I thought you were trying to cut down,” Em said lightly.
“I’ll cut down tomorrow. Looks like you could use some too,” Drea wryly pointed out.
Damn those dark circles. Em shook her head. “I’m having trouble enough sleeping. I definitely don’t need a pick-me-up.”
“That’s not getting any better, huh?” Drea looked over at her. Their faces were illuminated every time an oncoming car drove by; it gave their conversation an erratic rhythm.
“Not really,” Em said glumly. No need to tell Drea the lack of sleeping had actually gotten worse. She stared out the window. The winter had been a brutal one so far, but Gabby’s mom, local weatherwoman Marty Dove, was predicting a milder end of winter. Em would be grateful for a break from the frigid temperatures, the hard creaking of icy branches outside her bedroom window.
“Well, think about it this way,” Drea said, picking at her fingernails like she did whenever she was thinking hard. “All the creative geniuses in the world were haunted by something. I bet Hemingway, like, never experienced REM sleep.”
Em looked down at the journal in her bag. Its contents were definitely not genius caliber. Nor were her grades, not since the Furies had come into her life. “I might be an insomniac, but I’m no genius,” she said.
They were pulling into the Dungeon parking lot when Em spotted JD’s car. Her stomach flipped. And there he was. She watched him push through the café’s doors and stride toward his car. He had such a specific gait—like his feet had tiny springs in them.
She’d been silent for weeks, but tonight she was feeling feisty—which she could probably attribute to her exchange with Crow. Drea hadn’t even pulled the car completely into the parking spot before Em hopped out.
“Where are you . . . ?” she heard Drea cry out as she hurried to intercept JD before he reached his driver’s-side door.
“JD,” she called, her voice ringing in the night air. He looked up and flinched. “Hold on for a second, okay?” It was better to corner him here, she figured, where there were few distractions.
For the first time in what felt like ages, she found herself face-to-face with him. She was standing between him and the Volvo; he’d have to move her if he wanted to leave. In regular jeans and a black jacket, he looked kind of subdued—only his tousled hair and a pair of thick-framed glasses betrayed his typically eccentric style.
As they looked at each other, trying to figure out who would speak first, Drea walked by, head down.
“Hey, Fount,” she said to JD. “Em, I’ll meet you inside.”
“Hi, Drea,” JD said, not taking his eyes off of Em.
Then, breaking the silence, JD asked coldly, “What do you want, Em?”
“Nice glasses,” she said. Nothing. Stony silence. She sighed and continued. “Please,” she said, pulling the ends of her scarf to make it tighter, “I need to know why you’ve been avoiding me. It’s been weeks.” She thought she was in fair territory—when they’d made their pact with her, the Furies hadn’t forbidden asking questions, right?
“Clearly my strategy hasn’t worked too well,” JD said evenly. “I started coming here because I thought you preferred the Crappuccino.”
“It’s Drea . . .” Em said weakly. “She likes it here.” She swallowed back the tightness in her throat. “JD, please. Please talk to me.”
JD looked at her coldly. “I can’t,” he said. “Could you forgive me if I’d done what you did?”
Em stared back. What did he mean?
“And you want to know the worst part?” He barreled on. “The worst is that you obviously don’t even think it was a big deal. What happened that night . . . I thought things between us were going somewhere. The only place they were going, apparently, was the hospital.”
She watched as his hand rose to touch his head where the pipe had hit him, the one that had landed him at the bottom of the mall’s foundation and in danger of being buried by concrete. He would have been if she hadn’t pulled him out. A reddish scar extended from his hairline diagonally across his forehead. She was desperate to know what he thought had happened that night at the Behemoth—the night she’d realized that she was in love with him.
The Furies had tried to kill JD in order to punish her, to teach her a lesson about lost love and betrayal, and she’d done whatever she could to stop them. And that included swallowing five glowing red seeds and promising to keep her mouth shut. Not to talk about it with anyone, in fact.
“JD—”