As if to confirm my fears, the headline beneath the photo shifted. Previously, it had read:
VIOLENT MIDNIGHT CAR CRASH
Now, in two lines of garish, breaking-news red, the banner proclaimed:
FORMER WILBURTON RESIDENT SERENA TAYLOR, 32,
DEAD IN CRASH AT HIGH BRIDGE
I didn’t have the chance to catch any more of the story because the sourness in my stomach finally rose to the surface. I dove to the edge of the porch, just in time to be violently ill off the side of it. Then, without a backward glance at my mother or even at Joshua, I ran away from that house as fast as I could.
Chapter
TEN
I didn’t remember when Joshua stopped me, nor did I remember how he convinced me to get back into the truck without being able to touch me. All I knew was that I went from tearing a feverish path through the wilderness near my mother’s home to sitting motionless in the passenger seat of Joshua’s truck as it bounced us down a roughly paved road.
“What . . . what happened?” I asked hoarsely. I had a bad taste in my mouth, and I had a bad feeling about how it got there.
“You were sick,” Joshua replied plainly. He kept his gaze trained firmly on the road, almost as if his life depended on how hard he could concentrate on the task of driving. I’d never seen him so intent on not looking at me.
“Do you hate me now, knowing that I caused someone’s death?”
My question dripped with self-pity, and I hated myself a little for asking it. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to know the answer anyway.
For a long time—an eternity, to someone who’s asked that kind of question—Joshua said nothing. When he eventually cleared his throat, I cringed, ready for something awful. Ready for him to tell me, finally, that I’d put him at too great a risk.
“Amelia, I love you.”
He said it so earnestly, so fiercely, that I leaned back in surprise.
“I love you,” he repeated. “And hell itself won’t stop that. Sorry to put it so dramatically but, well, it’s the truth. And I’m terrified because I can’t keep you or me or anyone we know from what’s coming. From what’s already here.”
I nodded bleakly.
“It must have happened right after we left. I don’t know how they convinced her to drive on that road again.” Then I recalled one image from the night of my death: a young girl with crazed, possessed eyes, watching while I drowned in the river below her.
“Actually,” I amended, “I have a pretty good idea how they did it. But I just can’t believe they would choose . . .”
When I trailed off, unable to finish, Joshua spoke one, low word.
“Serena.”
For some reason, I chose that moment to lose it. I dropped my face into my hands and began to sob messily, not bothering to hide my misery from Joshua. I cried like I hadn’t done in months, letting the full force of what I’d seen on my mother’s TV wash over me in a brutal, guilty wave. And as I sobbed, other things started to seep in along with the details of the morning news report.
Memories.
The image of an eight-year-old Serena on the day we met, beautiful and a little wild in her grass-stained soccer uniform. A whiff of the rancid volcano we’d tried to make together for a seventh-grade science credit. The slight chip on her right canine, from a rock-hard jelly bean we found in her mom’s couch that I’d dared her to eat. The heart she’d drawn around Doug Davidson’s name in bright-red ink, right on the front cover of her Government book, our first day of public school.
Our friendship had been the lifelong kind . . . for as long as I’d lived, anyway. Now, neither of us had a “lifelong” existence. Not anymore.
It was the thought of her, lost and alone and probably tormented in the netherworld, that ultimately made me stop crying. I swallowed back the last of my sobs and wiped furiously at my eyes, smearing the tears away haphazardly across my cheeks. As my vision cleared, I could see that Joshua had pulled his truck to the shoulder of the road, and he now waited patiently for me to work through this outburst of misery.
Yet another reason why I loved him; yet another reason why he deserved so much more from me than self-indulgent misery. He deserved my action, as did Serena, and Gaby, and my father, and every other wrongfully imprisoned soul. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but I knew that I wouldn’t go into the darkness without freeing the people I loved from the demons.
And I wouldn’t go without one hell of a fight.
I kept silent until the force of tears and sickness and loss no longer controlled me. Then, when I felt like my body would better obey my mind, I finally turned to Joshua.
“Please take me back to your house.”
Joshua began moving fast, as if he was dealing with an unstable situation—or person.
“That’s a good idea,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll get you back there so you can rest for a while, have some of my dad’s cooking, and then maybe—”
“No.”
My interruption wasn’t cruel, but it didn’t leave any room for argument, either.
“I’m done resting,” I continued, a touch more gently. “I’ve been resting since Christmas—since Gaby—and look what that’s accomplished. First, you and I love each other, more than ever, but our relationship is stalled. It will be, until something about me changes. Then, the demons are obviously a bigger threat than they were the day we met. And now, another one of my friends is dead.”
“None of that is your fault, Amelia—”
“I know,” I interrupted again. “Really, I do. Like you said: I didn’t create hell. I didn’t invite this evil into our lives. But I’m tired of my loved ones hurting because of the darkness. I’m tired of being its victim too. And I’m ready to do something about it. Now.”
Once I’d finished that pronouncement, I leaned back against my seat and did a quick self-assessment. I felt . . . good, actually. Surprisingly good. Galvanized, even.
But Joshua clearly didn’t know how to respond. As he drove, he opened and shut his mouth several times without saying anything. Finally, after taking more than a few miles to collect his thoughts, he nodded.
“Okay, then. What do we do next?”
Joshua’s question sounded just as fierce, just as determined as his earlier declaration of love. Which meant that both came from the same, good place inside of him. The place I loved most.
Despite everything that we’d gone through, despite everything to come, I couldn’t help but give him a wide, bright smile.
“I think it’s time to gather a coven of Seers.”
It was a good plan. Not to mention, it was the only plan I could come up with on short notice. But that didn’t make it any easier to implement. First, sheer numbers were not on our side, as Jillian wasted no time in telling me.
“It’s just math, Amelia,” she mumbled through an enormous bite of cold fried chicken. “One, two, three.”
To illustrate, she used her cleaned drumstick to point at Scott, then Joshua, then herself. She swallowed her huge bite and added, “Three versus—what?—thousands of demons and their ghost slaves? No offense to anyone at this table, but I don’t like our odds.”
I groaned and let my forkful of potato salad clatter to my plate. Math, I laughed to myself. How quickly Jillian forgot that I’d helped Joshua to an A in Calculus last semester, while she almost failed basic algebra.