“I’ll help,” Em yelled as she took her jacket off in the front hall. She couldn’t stand awkwardly by the door, and she couldn’t just watch as Skylar ran around cleaning. Surveying the room, she figured the best place to start was the coffee table. She began gathering things to take to the kitchen: a microwave dinner tray, a bottle of hot sauce, used silverware, and napkins. Despite her exhaustion, it felt calming to do something so normal. There was a tube of ointment that Em swept up in her cleaning, turning it over to read the label. Wig Adhesive: water-based and waterproof, for the strongest hold that dries clear. Skylar returned and strode straight to Em, grabbing the glue out of her hand.
“I’ll manage,” Skylar said quickly. Her wig had been adjusted and now looked perfect. If Em hadn’t known it was fake already, she’d have been completely fooled. “You sit down and I’ll take all this to the kitchen.”
Em thought to apologize, but nodded instead, handing her the things. She did her best to ease into the couch. Her sense of calm had all but disintegrated.
Rain drummed on the windows.
When Skylar came back and took a seat on the far side of the couch, Em cleared her throat.
“Look, I’m sorry to drag all of this up,” she said. Talking about the Furies still felt crazy, surreal. “But it’s important, okay?”
Skylar nodded, mute.
“The orchid. You were marked.” Her heart was beating very fast, keeping time with the rain still pounding on the windows and door.
Skylar hugged herself. “Marked? What do you mean?”
“You were marked by the Furies. That’s how they indicate their targets,” Em said. She took a deep breath. “It happened to me, too.” Saying it made her feel instantly a little better, as though a fraction of the weight in her chest had been released.
“What are they?” Skylar said in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” Em confessed. “But they’re evil.”
Skylar stared at her, wide-eyed. “How did they find me? How did they find us?”
Em shook her head. “I don’t know that, either. All I know is that those girls—Meg, Ali, and Ty—they’re sick. They seek revenge. They try to make people pay for their mistakes. But it’s worse than that. They don’t stop. They want to make people miserable. Insane. And . . . and they’re willing to kill, too,” she blurted out.
“An eye for an eye . . . ” Skylar said. A clock tick-tocked in the background. Rivulets of water ran down the windows. “They were there when I found that body,” Skylar said suddenly. “That teacher who died.”
She knew it. Mr. Landon.
So the Furies had been involved in his death in some way. Maybe they’d marked him, too. Maybe that explained why she became so furious when she heard Portia and Andy talking about him the other day. “What do you mean?” Em pressed. “What did they say?”
“That’s when I first started to feel like they were . . . off,” Skylar said. “They just showed up at the exact right time and their reactions were so weird. I was freaking out, you know? And they were like, Oh, whatever, there’s a dead body.”
Because they knew about it already, Em thought. Of course.
She could picture it. Ali’s icy smile, Meg’s permagrin, Ty’s sneer. “Did they do other things that seemed ‘off’?” Maybe together, she and Skylar could pinpoint a weakness—a flaw in their strength.
Skylar seemed to shrink back a bit. “Well . . . there was . . . ” Her voice faded.
“Spill it, Skylar,” Em said. She was running out of time.
“Ty always scared me the most,” Skylar said in one breath. “She was just . . . weird. Like, when she dyed her hair—”
Em held out her hand and interrupted. “You were there when she dyed her hair?” About a month ago, Em noticed that Ty had exchanged her fire-red locks for a shade that was much closer to Em’s hair color—deep, dark brown. Almost black.
“She did it upstairs in my bathroom,” Skylar said, and they both reflexively looked toward the stairs. “But the weird thing was that after she did it, there was no, like, evidence of it. No mess. It was like she magically transformed or something.”
Transformed.
Her fingers started tingling. Em had the foreboding sense that Ty’s “magical transformation” was more than just a parlor trick. It was a sign. A signal. A mirror of Em’s own transition.
You’re becoming one of them. Em heard the refrain in her head. It was increasingly clear that Ty was changing too—becoming more like Em.
“Don’t you want answers?” Em said, as much to herself as to Skylar. “Don’t you want to know who they are?”
“I guess so. . . . ” Skylar didn’t sound convinced.
“They messed with you—hurt you, disfigured you—but at least they’ve left you alone since that. For now,” Em added. Skylar took a quick breath. Em knew she was being harsh, cruel even, but Skylar needed to know the truth. “What if they come back?”
Skylar’s eyes practically bugged from her head. “What are you saying?” she whispered.
“Sky, you have to help me,” Em said. “We’ll never be safe unless we get rid of them for good.”
“But how do we do that?” Skylar asked. “I don’t know what to do!”
“Your aunt,” Em said flatly. “She knows things. We need to talk to her. I think she might be able to tell us some things about the Furies. Don’t you see it? Don’t you think she knows something?”
“She’s not here,” Skylar reminded her. “But . . . ” Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling and she bit her lip.