Still, blistering tears welled in her eyes. She let out a plaintive cry. She was not a loser anymore. She was a winner—and winners took what they wanted. It was the only way. She had seen that for herself.
She needed to tip the scales. If only Gabby could just be a little less cute—like if she got a bad breakout or something embarrassing—then she’d withdraw from the spotlight a bit. Just for a little while. Just long enough, maybe, to give Skylar a chance of being voted Queen of Spring at the dance?
Then she heard the sound of a car pulling into Gabby’s driveway. She had to get the hell out of this house. Breathlessly, she ran downstairs and out the back door just as she heard the garage door start to grind open.
There was a woodshed off to the side of the house. She ducked inside it, peering through the slatted wood frame and watching as Marty Dove’s car pulled into the garage. From somewhere above her she heard a faint buzzing sound. She tried to ignore it, but it only seemed to grow louder.
Skylar attempted to turn around without upsetting any of the rakes or grill instruments that leaned against the wall. Almost directly above her was a small, papery gray beehive attached to a beam. Shit. She whirled around too quickly, knocking against the wall and rocking the whole structure.
Bzzzz. Several bees came pouring out of the hive. Skylar swatted at one of them, driving it against the wall, where it thudded to the ground. Another one stung her on the arm. She winced and gasped.
She pushed out of the shed and fled down the driveway, hugging the treeline, praying that Mrs. Dove didn’t choose that moment to look out her front windows.
“Hey, my little busy bee,” Meg said with a smile as Skylar flung open the passenger-side door and leaped into the car, holding her cold hand against her neck as a makeshift ice pack. “Did you find any dirt on your queen?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The gravestone glowed in the moonlight, distractingly new next to the older, settled, moss-covered stones around it. Em sucked in her breath and tried not to focus on the dates below Sasha’s name, the ones that showed her to be merely sixteen when she’d died. She tried not to think of Sasha in the hospital, her maniacal grin, the blood coming from her mouth. She tried not to think of anything but the task at hand.
The Furies spring from blood, the library book said. Although they sometimes take the form of snakes, or appear with snakes as part of their visage, the Furies can assume many identities.
She was taking a risk, she knew that, but she had a theory and she wanted to test it out. She’d made a deal with herself: She’d try this experiment tonight, and if it didn’t work, she would tell Drea about the book, Sasha’s involvement with the Furies, all of it. But if she could avoid dragging Drea in deeper, she would.
That’s why she was here, alone in the graveyard on a moonlit night. She’d come on foot; the cemetery was less than a mile from her house. It had been a terrifying walk, and her imagination had run out of control. Figures behind every tree. Black birds circling overhead. An owl hooting in the distance. She didn’t know what was real and what was her imagination. So she tried her best to filter out everything but her immediate plan.
Em was going to try to reverse-conjure the Furies. Just as they had been called up from their underground lair, she was going to send them back below. And she was going to do it here, near Sasha’s burial place, because she was almost certain now that it was Sasha who had summoned them this time. Hadn’t Ty said something to that effect? That Sasha had invited them back to Ascension? What else could she have meant by that?
Em kneeled before the grave, a knife in one hand and a paper bag in the other.
“I’m here, Sasha,” she said out loud. “I’m going to finish what you started.”
With a deep breath and a determined grimace, she dumped the contents of the pet shop bag onto the dirt. A snake slithered out. Em quickly threw her hand down on its middle before it could slither away, suppressing a whimper of disgust.
Holding the snake in place, feeling her stomach clench and roll as the creature squirmed beneath her, Em pulled a knife from her pocket with her free hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the snake, which would likely have become a child’s pet if she hadn’t purchased it just a few hours ago.
Recalling what she’d read in the book, she raised the knife in the air. She hesitated and let the knife fall to the ground, turned away, gagged into the night air. She couldn’t do this. This was insane.
Don’t think about it. This is for JD. This is to make things right. This is to save Ascension.
She drew in a big breath, lifted the knife again, and brought it down, hard, between the snake’s eyes.