Chapter
TWENTY-FOUR
Every nerve in Em’s body buzzed as she prepped for the pep rally. Despite all the horrible things happening around her, she felt electrified—so much so that she seriously thought if she touched a TV, it might turn on, or short-circuit.
Her thoughts were a flip book, bouncing back and forth between the Furies and JD. She was getting ready for a date with the boy she’d known since they were in diapers. That’s what it was, right? A date? The thought made her breath come faster. Would they kiss tonight? By the bonfire, faces lit by shifting flames?
But alongside that image came a more disturbing one: Ali’s monstrous eyes and face, shining ghoulishly the way people did when they held flashlights up to their chins to tell campfire ghost stories. Em shuddered and flipped on the bright orange reading lamp by her bed, even though the overhead was already on, as well as the vanity bulbs around her mirror. She’d had enough of dark corners.
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When she opened her closet, she did so with a bang, as if to rustle out any lurkers. She batted at the hanging dresses, willing Ali—or one of her equally creepy cousins—to emerge. All was quiet. The closet smelled, as usual, like a combination of cedar and laundry detergent. Em breathed a sigh of relief, but it was marred by the realization that not seeing Ali in her closet only meant she’d see her somewhere else.
Pushing the thought from her mind, she pulled out her favorite pair of well-worn, dark-blue Levis and a white, long-sleeved shirt. She paired it with a nubby gray sweater, which she loved because of its enormous pockets. She ran a brush through her hair and arranged it into a low, messy bun. She didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard. Not for JD.
That was the whole point—JD didn’t care what she wore, what she looked like, what she said. Or rather, he cared, but he saw past that stuff. She got the feeling that to JD, she was just Em.
She liked that.
Her phone rang shrilly. The musical tone pierced the air suddenly, causing Em to jump and let out a small shriek. She exhaled when she saw it was just Gabby. Jesus. She was on edge tonight.
“Hi,” she said, catching her breath. “You scared me. I’m getting ready for the rally and—” Em broke off when she realized that Gabby was crying. Sobbing, actually.
“Gabs? What’s wrong?” She looked out her window instinctively. But her yard was empty. The moon was low, casting silvery-dark shadows onto the lingering crust of snow.
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“I can’t—Em—come get me—he hit me—we had a fight—” Gabby was hysterical, speaking in fractured sentences punctuated by sobs.
“Wait, Gabs, what?” Suddenly, Em felt very alert. “Who hit you?”
“Zach . . .” As soon as Gabby spoke the name, another sob transformed her voice, making her words inaudible for a moment. Then she blubbered: “He wanted to talk. I know I shouldn’t have gone, but—” Her words were swallowed by another sob. “We had a fight and he . . . I can’t believe this is happening. I’m here alone.” Gabby was wailing now, her pitch getting higher and higher.
Em’s blood was pounding in her ears. Zach hit Gabby—tiny, beautiful Gabby. Oh my god.
I’m going to kill him.
She tried to sound calm. “Gabby. It’s okay. Please just tell me where you are.” As she spoke, Em clenched the phone between her shoulder and her ear, pulling on socks and searching frantically for her boots.
“I just can’t believe this is happening,” Gabby said again.
“I’m coming to get you, don’t worry.” Boots on, Em started another mad search for her keys. She’d been using her mom’s Toyota since her car was in the shop again, getting its brake lines repaired.
“I just jumped out of his car. I started walking . . . I’m at—
I’m at the new mall. I needed to get inside.” Another sob. “I’m so cold.”
“Okay, Gabby? Listen to me. Just stay there.” Keys, keys, 306
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keys. Where the f*ck had she put them? “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Just stay put, okay?”
“Okay.” Sniffle. “Okay.”
“I’m coming, Gabby.” Em hung up and at last located her missing keys, which were on the windowsill, where she’d left them after talking to JD. Oh god. JD. She dialed his number.
“Yes, madame?” JD’s voice had an excited lilt that made her heart soar.
“Hey. Hi. I’m so sorry, but . . .” She trailed off. Suddenly, she felt like she would cry.
“What’s up? Sorry about what?”
“It’s just . . . Gabby’s having a crisis. A real one. I have to go meet her.” Em hoped she didn’t sound as frantic as she felt.
“Oh. Okay.” JD sounded crestfallen.
“I’m not just, like, being weird,” Em said, stumbling over her words, not sure how much Gabby would want her to tell.
“I want to go with you tonight. And hopefully we’ll be there in time for the bonfire. I just have to go get her. She’s . . . she’s not even at home. She’s at the Behemoth.”
“The Behemoth? Why? Is she okay? Do you want me to go with you?” JD offered immediately. She did want him to come, but she didn’t know how Gabby would react to his presence.
“No. I mean, yes, but no. I think I should just go alone and make sure she’s okay. But thank you so much for offering.”
“Sure. And you think you’ll still come to the bonfire part?”
His hopefulness made Em want to use the string as a tightrope and walk right into his room and his arms.
“Yes. I will. Promise. See you later, okay?”
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“See you later. Call or text if you need anything.”
With that, she was careening down the stairs, grabbing her coat from the hook in the hallway, and calling to whichever parent was home and watching the news in the den: “I’m going to get Gabby and then to the pep rally! Home later!” She tried to make her tone sound as un-freaked-out as possible.
“Okay, hon,” her mom called back. “See you tonight.”
And then, just as Em was pushing out the front door: “And be careful!”
The new mall was glowing with construction lights when Em drove up. She’d heard that lots of the work was being done at night—overtime based on the project’s lagging progress. It put her at ease. At least Gabby hadn’t been here all alone for the past twenty minutes. She squinted into the floodlights, looking for Gabby’s blond curls, but saw nothing but glinting steel beams and orange cones. The air was full of a noisy, mechanized whine, the chugging sound of concrete mixers and cranes. The workers didn’t appear to notice her arrival.
She reached into her pocket for her phone to call Gabby, and as she did so, she remembered that she’d forgotten to put her snake-charm necklace back on after she changed. Oh no.
Though she’d only had it for two days, the idea of leaving home without it made her heart beat to a panicked rhythm. She made a mental note to grab it on their way to the bonfire.
Great. Her old flip phone didn’t have service, no matter how high she held it out the window, even when she pulled farther into the gravel lot. Gabby’s Droid must have had bet-308
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ter luck. Em was going to have to look for Gabby. Silently, she cursed her best friend. Next time you’re dealing with an emotional disaster, please make sure to wait close to the exit, Gabs. Then she thought about who was really to blame—Zach—and she felt her breath hitch in her throat. She finally understood what people meant when they said they were blind with rage. Next time she saw him (like, in half an hour at the bonfire, if he dared to show up—which she knew he would), she would have to restrain herself from spitting on him, or worse. But this wasn’t the time to think about revenge.
She got out of the car and called Gabby’s name, but her words got swallowed by the noise and the space. Across the site, there was a portion of the complex that was nearly complete.
Maybe Gabby was waiting in there to keep warm. That made sense. Em set off across the icy gravel, looking behind her every few steps, making sure to keep her car in view. She wished JD
had come after all.
In the most complete wing of the mall, snow had piled in high drifts, where eventually big glass doors would be installed.
Next to this building was a more skeletal lattice of beams. Here, men were working, pouring concrete into the ground, sealing off section by section. Em watched, mesmerized for a moment, as they dropped in long pieces of pipe, then covered the ground with heavy, wet concrete that looked like gray pancake batter.
One of the men looked up. She stepped quickly into a gaping doorway before anyone could ask what she was doing there.
Em peeked around a corner, seeing nothing but store shells and concrete stairwells. She called out to Gabby. Her words 309
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echoed back to her in the enormous space, tinny and metal-lic. No response. Em’s heart was beating faster now. What was going on? She paced around the entrance to the building.
“Gabby? ” she yelled now, top volume. “Gabby, where are you?”
She grabbed for her cell phone again, knowing it was futile—why would there be service here if there wasn’t any closer to the road? She was about to turn and run back to her car, back to the road, where she would call Gabby and find out her exact location, when she heard it: a tiny sound. Crying. It seemed to be coming from the right—the area closest to where the current construction activity was happening.
She took a step inside. “Gabs?” And another. “I’m here, Gabby. Just shout and I’ll find you.” The quiet crying continued, but no one spoke.
The farther she got from the entrance, the darker it was.
Em held out her phone, using it as a makeshift flashlight. Her breath was coming in short spurts, clouding in front of her in the dark, frigid air.
She walked slowly down a long, empty hall. Big, rectangular holes—where huge display windows would go—revealed yawning black spaces, like open mouths.
Out of the darkness, Em thought that she heard her name, like a whisper, down a corridor that reached to the left.
“You shouldn’t have gone so far in. I can’t see a thing. I’m coming.” She spoke too loudly, too harshly, but she didn’t care; she spoke more to drown out her thoughts than anything else.
And then, miracle of miracles, her phone vibrated in her 310
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hand and gave a little bing! She must have entered a pocket of service. She stopped short and looked at her screen. But the message wasn’t from Gabby. It was from JD.
At the pep rally, it read. Gabby is here???
Em’s blood turned to ice and her vision went bright, like she was staring into a camera flash. Her arms went stiff at her sides and she froze.
Gabby’s voice came again: “Poor little Emily . . .” And at that exact moment, the soft sound of crying turned into a cackle.
It was as though the curtain of black parted: There, right in front of her, stood the Furies. She knew now that Drea was right—
that’s what they were. Ali, whose bright red lipstick reminded Em too much of human blood. Meg, the pixie girl from the side of the road. She seemed to have found a new choker: Another shiny scarlet ribbon was tied tightly around her neck, knotted in a bow just under her right ear. It made Em think of that ghost story about the girl who always wore a green ribbon—how if she ever untied it, her head would roll off. And then there was the third girl. Em recognized her fire-red hair, striped with a white streak, and model-like features: She’d been standing at the side of the road after Ian Minster’s party. All three of them had. This must be Ty, the one who’d seduced Chase. Oh god. Chase.
It was Em’s turn to pay. Now. The realization came to her on a wave of fresh terror. It hadn’t been Gabby on the phone. It was them, impersonating Gabby, luring her here.
“Leave me alone,” she said, but it came out as a whimpered plea.
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They were looking at her. No, they were looking into her.
And while their features were superficially beautiful, they were somehow horrible to look at. Their faces were masks. She had to get away.
One step back, then another, then she turned and sprinted.
Her bun came undone and her hair f lew behind her. Run—
don’t stop running. She didn’t look back but she could feel them there. They trailed like smoke. She panted as she ran but they made no sounds. The hallway felt much longer than it had before.
She went the wrong way. She felt it, suddenly. She was running in the wrong direction. Turn around. The thought seemed to take forever to travel from her brain to her legs. She was moving in slow motion. Faster. She needed to move faster. Get outside. To the car. Leave.
Em. They were calling to her. You can’t escape. There’s no way out. Don’t you understand?
There had to be another way out. This was a mall. There had to be another gaping nondoor somewhere. So she kept going, keeping her phone out in front of her for the weak light it emitted.
They followed her still. They weren’t speaking aloud, but she heard them in her head. Em. Em. Em. An entryway appeared in front of her. She went through it. No. This was wrong. It wasn’t another hallway—it was a big, empty room.
She was trapped. Shit. Shit. There was a tendril-like touch on her neck. She screamed and threw herself across a low concrete sill, back into the hallway. Running, running.
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She rounded a corner. No idea now which way she was going. It was like taking off the blindfold after being spun in Pin the Tail on the Donkey. She tripped over something—a pile of paneling, or some other thin strips of wood—and almost fell to the ground, catching herself right before she hit the floor.
She cried out: “No!” Keep going. Run. Faster.
She steadied herself. And as she did, she saw it—a window- or door-shaped hole in the wall about fifty feet ahead.
The construction lights, or the moonlight, she didn’t know which, shone through it. She could see that it connected with the area where the workers were laying foundation—the banging of the pipes and the churning of the concrete mixer filtered faintly through the air. Finally. She could make it.
You’re almost there. If she could get outside, she could get the attention of one of the men. She could get in her car and drive. She could get away.
But then a crystalline voice seeped into her, less through her ears than through her pores.
“You can’t get away from us.” Em watched as Ty simply appeared in front of her, between Em and the exit. “Don’t even try.”
Not fair. The words pummeled Em’s brain. She was so close.
She wanted to reach out and tear Ty’s head off. Em dragged a piece of hair out of her mouth, where it had become lodged during the near fall. “Get out of my way,” she spat. She moved to the left. Ty blocked her. She tried to cut to the right, but Ty was there, too.
“This way,” Ty said, motioning for Em to follow her down 313
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a narrow hall that led away from the open space. Strangely, it seemed as if Ty was trying to help her; but Em knew better than to trust it.
“Get away from me.” Em tried to cut away again, down the hall, but Ty grabbed her arm. It was like being caught in a spiderweb—the feeling was almost nonexistent, but Em couldn’t shake it. This must have been how Ty had tricked Chase. Teasing, mesmerizing, killing. Ty was wavering in and out of Em’s vision. It made her feel dizzy, as though she were staring at a disco ball.
“You can’t get away,” Ty said calmly. “But there may be another way to fix things.” For a moment Em got lost in Ty’s green eyes. She looked Ty up and down, taken for a moment by her floor-length, Grecian-style white dress, with twisted straps that had gold strands woven into them. Her red hair seemed to slither at her shoulders. And she was flickering. “Follow me now. Or stay—let them have their way with you. Who knows what will happen then.”
Em felt cold all over. She could hardly breathe. It felt like there was a fist squeezing her lungs. She backed up but she felt like she was backing into something, someone. She screamed.
“Help me! Please! Someone!”
“No one can hear you,” Ty confirmed calmly, as though she were talking to a toddler. “Last chance. Follow me if you want to live.”
Tears stung Em’s eyes and her mind was reeling. Why would Ty all of a sudden want to help her? It didn’t make sense!
And yet, she had no choice; nowhere to go, no one to help her.
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Her lips were coated with salt and dirt. “Fine,” she choked out.
Her throat was spasming. “Fine.”
Ty swept down the dark hallway that looked like a dead end. She was racing in front and Em had to run to keep up with her; Ty’s white-gold dress was like a beacon up ahead. As she went, she snuck one peek over her shoulder. She was sure she saw two figures flicker past the door they’d just gone through.
Ali and Meg. They were off her track, at least momentarily.
Maybe Ty really did want to help her.
Suddenly they had reached a truncated flight of stairs. Ty raced ahead, leaving an almost tangible mist behind her. And then Em was outside, on some type of second-floor terrace, sobbing with relief into the freezing night air. Ty was nowhere to be seen. Off to the left, stairs led down to the gravel and the construction site. As she sprinted down them, she saw a crane dropping three heavy pipes into the last section left to be covered in concrete.
And she realized that the pipes had dropped into the exact place where she would have been if Ty hadn’t diverted her path.
Then she heard the screams. Someone calling her name.
Em. Em. Em. She didn’t know if it was real or just carried through the wind.
Ali and Meg. They’d been hit by the pipes; they’d be buried in concrete.
Trapped. They’re trapped. Was that even possible?
She kept running toward her car. Run home. Run to JD.
Keep running. Would she always be on the run? She was shivering uncontrollably, tears freezing on her cheeks. Not even 315
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looking for Ty, to thank her, not knowing how. Or why. Why did she help me?
She wiped her nose with her sleeve and ran her fingers through her hair anxiously. But still her face broke into a grin, and for a few breaths, relief swept over her, a feeling like stepping into a warm bath. They were gone. They’d been trapped, and she had escaped.
And then, just as quickly as the feeling came, it left. Because there they were. She stopped running. The breath left her body instantly, as though she’d been socked in the stomach.
Ali and Meg. Leaning against her car like they’d been waiting for hours. They looked so nonchalant. Ali was running a hand through her blond hair; Meg was examining the fingernails on her left hand. Ty was picking her way across the lot toward them, holding the train of her white dress delicately in one hand, as though at a formal party.
“No!” The fear came rolling back. It was like being at the ocean, being knocked over by a wave and standing up only to have another one, a darker, more swollen one, smash her back into the sand. Em collapsed to the ground. She screamed, ripping her voice raw. “Fine. You got me. I’m here, all right? Take your revenge. Do whatever you’re going to do. Did you hear me?
I said you can kill me. ”
Ali looked at her, puzzled. She smoothed her hair over one shoulder. “But we don’t want to kill you,” she said, her mouth still blood bright. “Besides, we already took our revenge.” She looked pointedly behind her.
That’s when Em saw it. There was an empty car sitting 316
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right behind hers, parked askew as if it had been driven reck-lessly and then abandoned in a hurry.
She recognized it instantly. It was a beat-up blue Volvo. It belonged to JD.
She swiveled between Ali, Meg, and Ty—sputtering, reeling.
“What’s going on? You—you tricked me,” Em said to Ty, pointing her finger and watching as it shook in front of her face.
“You followed me because you wanted to live,” Ty said simply. “That was your choice.” She allowed her lips to curl back into a sneer. “You should have learned about choices by now.”
“Poor Emily,” Meg said in a singsong. “Apparently you’re not as smart as they say.”
Ali spoke up cheerfully. “It’s much better this way, Em dear. It’s perfect, really. The punishment has to fit the crime, you know.”
And suddenly, all became clear. The screaming she’d heard.
The pipes falling. The revenge they were after. Oh god.
JD.
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