She looked around at all of the frozen faces in the audience. “What’s happening?”
“Here,” Luc said into the microphone. She stepped toward him, and he handed her a glass ball—a snow globe. “The missing piece.”
Lilith held it up. Inside was a miniature cliff jutting out over a tumultuous ocean. A tiny figurine—a girl in a white wedding gown—stood at the cliff’s edge. The ground beneath Lilith swayed, and then she was the girl in white, inside the snow globe. She scrambled backward, away from the edge. She could smell the churning ocean, and beyond it she could see the glass encasing everything.
“Take a good, hard look at your future, Lilith,” a voice behind her said.
She turned to see Luc, reclining on a rock.
“Without Cam,” he said, “what do you have to live for?”
“Nothing.”
He nodded at the water. “Then it’s time.”
Luc looked the same as he did in Crossroads, but Lilith understood that he was more. The boy before her was the devil, and he’d made her an offer she’d been too lovesick to refuse.
“I brought you to him,” he said, “and you did your best. But Cam didn’t want you, did he?”
“No,” she said miserably.
“You must hold up your end of our agreement.”
“I’m scared,” she said. “What happens after—”
“Leave that to me.”
She gazed into the sea and knew she had no choice.
She didn’t jump so much as lean forward—into the air, and then into the water. She let it take her. When the waves crashed over her, Lilith didn’t try to rise above them. What was there left to try for? Her heart was heavy, like an anvil, and she sank.
Then she was at the bottom, in the filtered light, alone. Black water filled her nose and mouth, her stomach, her lungs.
Her soul.
Back onstage, Lilith faced Cam.
She could sense Jean Rah, Luis, and the other performers from the battle, all gathered around them. The audience was dumbstruck, waiting to see what Lilith would do. But she could focus only on Cam. There was a wild look in his eyes.
“What did you see?”
“I saw…you.” Her voice trembled. “And…”
It hit Lilith then that the rumors going around Trumbull about the girl Cam had driven to suicide had been true. “The girl who killed herself,” she said, her voice echoing across the Colosseum, “was me.”
“Oh, Lilith,” Cam said, shutting his eyes.
“I took my life because I loved you,” she said as the facts of her past began to resurface, “and you—”
“I loved you, too,” he said. “I still—”
“No. I begged you. I bared my soul to you. And you told me ‘no.’?”
Cam winced. “I was trying to spare you.”
“But you couldn’t. I’d already made a deal.” She turned and pointed a single, shaking finger at Luc. “With him.”
The skin around Cam’s eyes tightened. “I didn’t know—”
“I was certain that if I could just find you, I could win you back.”
Cam closed his eyes. “I was a fool.”
“But I was wrong,” Lilith said. “What I just saw…those other lives I’ve lived…”
Cam nodded. “Other Hells.”
Other Hells? Lilith froze. Did he mean—
This life, her life, was not actually a life at all?
All the horrors she’d been forced to suffer, she had suffered because of Cam. Because long ago he had tricked her into falling in love with him. And she’d been stupid enough to fall into the same trap again.
Suddenly, Lilith was so furious she could barely stand.
“This whole time, I’ve been in Hell?” She stepped away from Cam, out of the spotlight and into darkness. “Because of you.”
Five Minutes
Cam stood onstage before Lilith, beneath the twirling lights from the disco ball, feeling the gaze of a thousand teenagers, and above them, the eyes of a million demons waiting in the sky.
He reached toward Lilith. “There’s still hope.”
She stepped away. “You’re the reason I’ve suffered so much. You’re the reason I’ve been so angry and sad. You’re the reason I hate my life.” Her eyes filled with tears.
She was right. It was Cam’s fault. He’d rejected Lilith because he’d been too afraid to tell her the truth.
“I’m so stupid. I thought you showing up in Crossroads was the best thing that ever happened to me, but it was the worst thing happening to me all over again.”
“Please,” Cam begged. He held out his hands to her, but was shocked by what he saw: his fingers were gnarled, his nails thick and yellow. “You don’t understand—”