“Oh, there’s more good news?”
She grimaced. “Something else happened to me today. Another one of those . . . episodes. I got angry. . . . This kid in class was talking about Mr. Landon—our old English teacher—and then saying all this stuff to make a girl uncomfortable, and I was just like, Please shut up, and then his chair just . . . fell back. He hit his head and started bleeding. It was terrible. It was like I willed it to happen.” She shuddered.
Crow snapped his fingers in front of him, trying to call up some buried information. “Landon, is he the teacher that chick found in the woods? Drea was freaked about that.”
“Skylar?” Skylar. Yes. Of course. Skylar was hunted by the Furies. All of this was connected. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he was.” There was a heavy silence. She looked at the big red numbers on the alarm clock next to Crow’s bed. It was already after midnight and suddenly she felt so weary.
“I should go. . . . ”
“No, don’t,” he said grabbing her hand. He let go of it just as quickly, realizing he’d somehow overstepped a boundary. “I need to ask you what you think . . . about what Drea said about you. Is she right?” He sounded as scared as she was.
Exhaustion was building in her chest and her head. “I’m not sure,” she said—though every instinct inside her screamed the opposite. How could she possibly make him understand? That her time could be running out. That she could feel it looming closer: the darkness that wanted to inhabit her, to swallow her forever.
“You want to try to get some sleep here?” he asked. “I’ll stay on the floor.”
“No. I should get going soon. . . . ” She began to make a mental list of all the pieces she’d collected today. About Crow being a prophet, about Henry Landon possibly being a victim of the Furies, about Skylar. Em had always suspected that Skylar’s aunt knew more about them than she was saying. Em had to find a way to discover what Skylar—and her family—knew. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Em had so many questions. . . .
But she was fighting to keep her eyes open. Crow’s inched closer to her, and he moved his hand up her scalp; he massaged it with his fingers and it felt like lapping waves on the back of her skull, lulling her toward sleep.
“I’m going to try to understand them, Emily,” he was saying. “The visions must be telling us something. I promise to help you, Em, even if it means giving in. Giving in to the darkness.”
She started thinking of a million different responses. Ways to explain that she could see the blackness was already seeping through his blood—that if he went down even deeper, he might never come out. That she was turning bad. Hurting people, just as he’d predicted.
But her thoughts came in abstract wisps. The gears in her brain were revolving slower and slower. . . . She couldn’t fight the exhaustion any longer. She let go, into sleep, like a bottomless well. Her sleep was thick and dreamless. Like falling down into absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Over the next two days, JD found that he couldn’t stop thinking about Ty: her uncanny similarity to Em, the throatiness of her voice, and especially, what she had told him about Chase Singer. The intimate detail—the fact that Chase’s face had been marked with lipstick when he died, which meant (had to mean) that he had been kissed by someone wearing lipstick before he died—stuck in JD’s mind like a celery string between his teeth: annoying and uncomfortable.
JD didn’t hang out with any of Chase’s friends, discounting Em, but he had woodshop with Aaron Johnson, who played football, and they sometimes sat together at lunch talking about old cars and machinery.
During fifth-period lunch on Tuesday, JD blurted out to Aaron: “Hey, weird question: Have you ever heard that Chase Singer had lipstick on him when he died? Like, on his cheek?”
It was strange, given the local media’s blanket coverage of Chase’s death, that JD didn’t remember that striking, if small, description. When he Googled the news reports from a few months ago, there was no mention of any lipstick mark. The only distinguishing marking was the red flower he’d had in his mouth, and even that detail hadn’t come out at first, but had finally been admitted by the police after rumors had spread about it. JD wondered what other secrets had been covered up. And he wondered, too, about that red flower that kept showing up in all the wrong places.
“Nope, never heard that one,” Aaron said.