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“I lie constantly. All the time. I’m nothing but one big mass of lies.” I shouldn’t tell her that. I should tell her that I’m good and obedient and do exactly what I’m told all the time. But I forget around Pixie, because she is lonely and small and fragile. I still don’t know whether or not Keane can trust her, and whether or not that means I can’t. She is such a silly, pointless assignment for me it’s hard to take it seriously.
But I can’t trust anyone. James and me. That’s all there is, all there will be. Us against everyone. I need him. I tap tap tap tap against my leg. I need him to keep me away from the holes in my soul, but he’s not here.
“You’re honest about being a liar,” Pixie says. “And you don’t lie the way normal people do. You don’t tell me my dress is cute and then think to yourself that I’m too flat to pull it off. I can’t tell you how much I hate girls. I hate guys, too, because they tell you one thing but think another. There’s always an agenda, and the agenda is always the same.”
“Yup. They only care about your brains.”
She laughs. “That’s one of the things I like about working for Keane. They don’t pretend to like me for anything other than my mad Reading skills.”
I sit up straighter, narrow my eyes. “Have you actually met him? Mr. Keane?”
“Calm down, puppy. His name lights up your brain like Vegas. And the answer is no. Never been in the same room as him. Everything comes via phone or message. I get the feeling he doesn’t want me crawling around in his head.”
“Can’t imagine why. You’re a delightful tenant.”
She flicks a piece of ice at me, then looks wistfully out over the crowd of writhing bodies. “I’d like to find a super hot guy with Asperger’s whose thoughts are the same as his words.”
“In that case we need to work on your targeting, because this audience? Probably not your best bet.”
“What about you? What do you want in a guy? Besides a body to dance by.”
James. I want James but he isn’t here and the longer I go without him, the more scared I get. The fear sets in so quickly now, always lurking, waiting to swallow me. I hate being scared, hate it, it makes me sick and I want to cut it out of me with a knife, leave it bleeding and dripping on the table, a quivering mass of weakness. Every time I dream of Annie, I can’t shake the scared. What if I chose wrong? What would that mean? A sudden image of gray eyes pops into my head. I wonder …
Dead dead dead dead. I snap my thoughts back into line. Dead. Adam’s dead, Annie’s dead, everyone’s dead. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I grin at Pixie. “Dance with me?”
Her dark eyebrows have disappeared under her blunt white bangs. “Sometimes you scare me.”
“That’s because you don’t really know me yet.” I hold out my hand to her. “When you really know me, I’ll scare you all the time.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out. James.
“What,” I answer, annoyed. I don’t want his voice on the phone, I want it in my ear.
“Has anyone ever told you how sexy you are when you dance?”
A hand comes around my waist and I grab the wrist, twist it, then turn to find myself right up against James, and everything is right again. I lean against him, tip my face toward him.
“Oh, hi,” I say.
“Oh, ouch,” he says.
I let go of his wrist. He laughs and puts his phone away. “I have a surprise for you.”
I can hear the smile in his voice, the sly quality it gets when he’s truly pleased with himself. I want to ask what it is, but audience, we have an audience.
I glance over at Pixie, who’s watching us with her arms folded. She looks like a cat, all clever eyes and inscrutable expressions.
Cats are annoying.
“Guess our night is over, then,” she says.
James smiles at her, but it is his cold smile. “You’ve been monopolizing my girlfriend’s time.”
I know in an instant that James doesn’t like her, doesn’t trust her. I’m torn between wanting to turn and leave with him and feeling oddly protective of my tiny, tired companion. I wonder what will happen if I decide Keane can’t trust her. I don’t want to think about it. “Go home,” I say to her. “You look like crap.”
She lets out a burst of bitter laughter, then looks up, scanning the crowd. “Do you know that guy?”
“Which guy?”
She shakes her head, eyes darting. “Can’t tell. Someone here is thinking your name like crazy.”
James looks wary, shoulders tensing protectively as his arms go tighter around my waist. He forgets that I can do more when he lets me go. Always at war, this need to have him close and push him away.
“Any of my shadows here?” I ask him, but even before he shakes his head I know that’s not it. There’s a whisper of caution running down the back of my neck, and I can’t tell if I’m in danger or if I should pursue this. One of those horrible in-between feelings I’m getting more and more, that are neither right nor wrong, that make me feel off and disconnected like I’m experiencing my own feelings through a bad phone connection.
I tap tap tap tap. What to do.
“All right.” I slip away from James and grab Pixie’s arm. She squeaks in protest. “I don’t feel like fighting tonight, and I really don’t want to have to protect both of you. Cab. Straight home.”
I drag her out, probably with more force than is strictly necessary but I’m unreasonably annoyed that I won’t get to dance with James. His car, some sleek black money monster, is parked at the curb, but I hold my hand up for a cab.
“I’ll be waiting,” James says, lips brushing the back of my neck and making me shiver.
I want to go straight to him, but I can’t. I like Pixie. I’m not going to let her get hurt tonight. Maybe she will get hurt later, maybe it will be my fault, but not tonight.
She rubs her arm where I grabbed her. “What do you do to the people you don’t like?”
I flash my teeth like knives in the dark. “Do you really want to know?”
She kicks my shin in a halfhearted pout. “You think different around him, you know.”
“Oh?” A cab pulls to the side and I open the door.
“Clearer. Happier. But scarier.” She gets in the cab before I can ask what she means. At least she’s safe. As far as I can tell.
James is waiting with my door open when I walk back to him. He has a scowl on his beautiful face, and I want to trace the line between his eyebrows with my finger.
“You need to finish up with her,” he says, pulling away from the curb with a screech. I hate being in the passenger seat. I belong behind the wheel, sliding into spaces between cars, speeding through the dark.
I slump in my seat, put my feet up on the polished wood of the dash, hoping to scratch or scuff it, knowing James won’t say anything if I do. I finally have him and he wants to talk about my waste-of-time assignment with Pixie? “I haven’t been able to decide. Tell your father if he’s so anxious for answers, he can ask me himself.”
“She’s too good. She could mess everything up for us, find out things we can’t let anyone know.”
“I barely know the things we know. She isn’t pulling anything out of my head. There’s nothing to pull! I’m still waiting!” I know it’s irrational—it will take time. We are laying the groundwork for his father to be arrested, for the company to implode. It can’t happen overnight.
But I just want it to be done. When it’s done, I can get Annie back. We can all leave this behind forever.
“We have to be patient.”
I want to rip out his hair. I want to grab the steering wheel and swerve into oncoming traffic.
I lean forward, clutching my knees to my chest, taking deep breaths. James puts his hand on the back of my neck, warm and steady, and the breathing gets easier.
“I know it’s hard,” he says, his voice so different when he’s being gentle. I don’t know whether I love it or hate it. It confuses me. Angry James I knew. Angry, distant James was easy to love because he was still safe. But this James that is mine feels dangerous.
I don’t ever get to keep the things that are mine.
He squeezes my shoulder. “I promise you, it will all be worth it. The things you’ve done—they haven’t been for nothing.”
I look out the window into the night, not dark here but lit with thousands of glaring eyes, watching everything always. All these things I’ve done. So many things. Please, please, they have to be for something. I’ll make them for something.
“How is your dad?” I ask, needing to get away from the horror movie of my life playing in my head.
“We’re not talking about him tonight. Tonight is about us.”
He pulls over and parks the car illegally, then gets out. I follow. We’re at a building I don’t recognize. It’s closed, dark, locked up for the night. He’s grinning, boyish in his anticipation.
“Well?”
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
I do. Every second of it.
I shrug.
“I broke into an all-girls school and we got drunk together.” He pulls a bottle out of his jacket. I notice the copper plaque above the door, identifying it as St. Mary’s School for Girls. I can’t fight the smile that tugs on the edges of my mouth in response to his.
He closes the distance between us, leaning down, forehead against mine. “I was feeling nostalgic.” I lean up and my lips meet his. I always lose myself in his lips, but it’s the best way of being lost.
“So, what do you think?” he says, hand on the small of my back, pulling me closer. “Should we break into a school and get smashed?”
James is mine. He is my north, and as long as we are together, everything is okay.
ANNIE
Two and a Half Months Before
THE BLOOD IS POUNDING IN MY HEAD; I CAN FEEL IT building pressure behind my eyes. Still nothing. My arms and stomach muscles are trembling; I can’t hold this handstand much longer, even with the help of the wall bracing me.
“What are you doing?”
I startle and fall down, my legs smacking against the wood floor of my bedroom. “Ouch.”
“Are you okay?” Cole asks.
“This is my room,” I snap from my undignified position on the floor.
“Door was open. Dinner’s ready.”
“Not eating.”
“That’d explain the crankiness.”
I flip him off, then stand. I don’t have to put up with crap from someone who obviously hates me and wants me out of the house. Rafael and Adam and Sarah all like having me here. I’m determined to show that I have some value.
Unfortunately, this experiment proved fasting plus making all the blood rush to my head does not a vision trigger. Sucks. Guess I won’t sleep tonight and add extreme fatigue.
“What are you trying to accomplish?” Cole asks.
“Are you still in here?” I grab a throw blanket off the edge of my bed and wrap it around my shoulders. Adam’s way more thoughtful.
“Yes.”
I sigh and flop down on the bed, light-headed. “Sometimes I can make myself see something if I push my body far enough.”
“Doesn’t sound healthy.”
“I need to see …” Fia. I need to see Fia. But I also don’t want to. I don’t want to see her trailing after James like a well-trained pet. It makes me sick, makes me angrier than I’ve ever been, that she chose him.
She chose him. Call me, Fia. CALL ME. Tell me why.
I kick a pillow off my bed. “I’m sick of being useless.”
“You aren’t useless.”
I laugh harshly. “Is that why you’re so eager to ship me off?”
He doesn’t respond. I think he’s gone, so when he talks it startles me. “Fia wanted you safe.”
“Yeah, well, Fia’s not here, is she?” I stomp past him and out of the house. I’ve gone on enough walks to familiarize myself with the path down to the beach. It’s late in the evening, the Georgia air still sticky, so there aren’t many people out. I walk in relative silence, guided by the steady pulse of the ocean.
When I feel the ground shift into sand beneath my shoes, I take a few steps to the side and sit, facing the eternal ocean breeze. It doesn’t smell like I thought it would. I spent too many years with those horrible “sea air” candles confusing my brain about what, exactly, a huge body of salt water would smell like. It’s not sweet at all; it’s heavy and cold with the slightest hint of decay.
But breathing it in, filling my lungs with it, makes me feel very, very alive.
Eden was from California. She always talked about taking me there and teaching me to surf. It wasn’t until a year ago I found out she’d never surfed in her life; she’d lived in one of the interior desert cities and had never even seen the ocean.
If Fia wasn’t going to stay with me, why couldn’t she have gotten Eden out so I wouldn’t have to be alone? Eden deserves the ocean.
Then again, Eden never hated the school like Fia always did and like I learned to. She’d laugh and say everything’s relative. I can’t imagine what her “relative” comparison was that the school was preferable, but I don’t doubt it was horrible.
Someone sits next to me and I startle. “Sarah?”
“Cole.”
I roll my eyes. I don’t know why he’s out here, but I’m not going to try and initiate conversation. I dig my hands into the sand, flashing back to that day on the beach in Chicago. That day I thought I knew exactly how everything would feel and turn out. That day they made my sister kill two people. I didn’t see that. I never see enough.
I find a rock beneath the sand. Sarah told me they cart in the sand for the tourists, and that if you go a mile down the beach it’s nothing but rocks. I rub my thumb along the contours of the stone, wonder how long it had to be turned around on the bottom of the ocean, battered and broken, until it came out this smooth.
“Why are you here?” I ask after a few minutes, unable to stand him sitting this close, saying nothing.
“I like the ocean.”
I throw a handful of sand at him. “Here here, idiot. With Lerner. With Sarah. With Rafael. You don’t seem to agree with anything they do, so why are you helping?”
My question is met with silence. I’m about ready to stand and go back to the house when he finally speaks. “My mom was psychic. She didn’t talk about it much. I probably wouldn’t have listened. I left home at fifteen. My father was … I shouldn’t have left her there, but I was mad. Mad at him, but even angrier at her for staying. By the time I went back three years later, he was gone and she was sick.” He pauses, the break punctuated by sharp laughing gulls. He clears his throat. “She forgave me. Told me to find a girl she’d been seeing in visions for months. One of Keane’s.”
“Sarah?” I’ve wondered about her. She knows so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if she had worked for Keane at some point.
“No. Her name was Leanne. She was a Feeler.”
For some reason it’s a relief to me that Sarah never was Keane’s. It makes her feel … cleaner. “Did you find her?”
“Too late. I don’t know what they made her do, but she killed herself before I could get her out.”
I let my head hang, feeling the weight of the memory on my shoulders. I reach out and find his arm, rest my hand there. “Fia tried … she tried to kill herself, too. It’s not your fault. It’s Keane’s fault.”
He clears his throat. “Sarah found me at my mom’s funeral. I’ve been helping where I can ever since. I don’t agree with all her decisions, especially not bringing in other people like Rafael, but someone has to do something.” He sounds sad and lost, a quality in his voice I’ve never heard there before.
I squeeze his arm, then let my hand drop.
“Why did your sister go back?” he asks.
I curl up, resting my chin on my knees. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe she wanted to stay with James.” I glower, thinking about him. I hate him. “But who knows? Maybe she has some grand master plan.” I snort, then move so my eyes are against my kneecaps, pushing into them. “Then again, planning was never her strong suit. She probably just felt like it.”
“She loves you.” He states it like fact.
“How do you know?” My eyes burn with tears, and I push them harder into my knees.
“When we took her, you were the only thing she cared about. She was desperate to get back to make sure you stayed safe.”
I gasp a messy snort of a laugh. “I really thought she was going to kill me.”
“And you still showed up.”
“I owed Fia her freedom. And she needed me.”
“As a general rule, when you think someone’s going to kill you, you run the opposite direction.”
“Yes, sir.” I stand, brushing the sand off my pants. He joins me in the walk back to the house and I turn things around in my head, everything mixing together and jumbling up. Cole’s tragic history. Fia’s choice to leave me. Her relationship with James.
The world bursts into bright colors, and I see a girl, a teenager, but tiny. She’s got white hair and black eyes. She’s sitting across from a woman I actually recognize—Doris, from the school—but she looks bored, slouched with one leg draped lazily over the side of her chair.
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