Evertrue

TEN

NOW

The Surface. Outside Cole’s condo.

My feet smacked against every step as he hauled me down the stairs. I gave a feeble push against the cement, hoping to throw him off balance, but my strength was gone. I wasn’t sure I even moved my feet.

When he reached the bottom, he kicked the metal door open and took a couple of steps outside, and then I heard the sound of glass shattering.

His arm across my chest loosened, but only for a moment.

Another sound, this time like a fist making contact with a face.

His grip loosened just enough for me to slip out and down to the ground. Strong hands lifted me up.

“Becks! Can you hear me?” I opened my eyes to see Jack’s face, but it was only for a split second. The man with the black eyes grabbed him from behind, forcing him to let me go.

I sank to the ground again. The man was almost as tall as Jack, and just as thick. I couldn’t believe he was still standing, considering Jack had smashed something over his head.

Jack punched him in the face. The man stumbled back a few steps and then lunged at Jack, who anticipated the move and stepped to the side just in time. The man went past him, and Jack kicked him in his back as he went. This time he didn’t let up. He threw punches again and again until finally the man fell backward.

Jack rushed to my side.

“Becks. Are you hurt?”

I shook my head. At least I thought I shook my head. I had no energy left. Jack crouched down next to me, and that was when I saw the dark shadow of the man stagger up off the ground.

“Behind you,” I whispered.

Jack turned and kicked the man away before he had a chance to stand up fully. Then he wasted no time. He gathered me in his arms and took off.

I closed my eyes and let the darkness close in around me.

Intense sunlight urged my eyelids open. Too intense for morning. I blinked back the haze, and when my eyes focused, I saw Jack’s face.

He was sitting on the edge of my bed, and he was so pale it looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.

“Becks,” he said, his voice cracking. “You came back to me.”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” I said. Then I thought about the sunlight. “What time is it?”

“Four o’clock. You’ve been out for more than fifteen hours.”

I tried to sit up but lost any arm strength halfway through the motion. Jack helped me the rest of the way.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

He grimaced. “I tried. Every hour. I even splashed your face with cold water.”

He gestured toward my nightstand, where there was a nearly empty bowl and small puddles of water everywhere. “It didn’t work.”

I realized I wasn’t sitting up on my own; I was propped up against Jack. If he let me go, I’d fall back on the bed.

“What’s wrong with me?”

Jack closed his eyes for a few long moments and then opened them again. “You missed a Feed.”

My breathing became rapid. “We have to find Cole.”

“I know.”

“Where do you think he is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s my dad?”

Jack nodded toward the door. “He left a note this morning saying he had an early meeting. It’s a good thing, too, because if he had seen your face . . .”

My hand flew up to my cheek. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. It’s just, you have the dark circles again. And you look like . . . Well, it’s just a good thing he didn’t see you.” He ran his hand through his hair. “You’re black and blue.” He glanced down at my arms. “Look. It’s the same on your arms.”

I followed his gaze. The skin looked almost translucent, with purple and blue patches starting near my wrist line. They grew denser as they traveled upward to my biceps.

Jack touched my inner arm, just below the elbow, and the skin reacted like water-soaked paper, as if it were on the verge of falling apart.

The sight of it made bile creep up my throat. I looked as if I were wearing someone else’s skin.

“I thought about taking you to the hospital, calling 911, anything. But I knew they’d check for a heartbeat first . . . .”

“They can’t do anything to help me.”

The events of last night came crashing back into my head. The man with the black eyes and mouth who wouldn’t stay down after a severe beating. The lights out at Cole’s place. The front door that looked as if it had been kicked in.

“We have to go to Cole’s. What if he’s been . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Jack’s face was grim. “I know. Now that you’re awake, we’ll go.”

“Together.”

He tightened his embrace. “Do you think I’m ever going to let you out of my sight again?”

With those words, I sighed and melted into his chest for a moment.

Jack didn’t put voice to the consequences if we couldn’t find Cole. We both got out of bed, though Jack moved much faster than I could. My yoga pants and hoodie were hugging my body before I knew it, and I realized that Jack was ushering me around the room, pulling things out of drawers, dressing me. Spinning circles around me.

Frantic.

But everything for me was moving slower. I started to tell Jack he didn’t need to go so fast, but it took several seconds at least for my brain to send the message to my mouth. Jack bounced around the room like a movie on fast-forward.

“Jack . . . ,” I said, wanting to warn him that my muscles weren’t working properly, and definitely not when I wanted them to.

“I know, Becks. I can see it. I’ll help.”

His words spilled out of his mouth like tiny pieces of paper in front of an industrial fan. I had to concentrate hard to understand them as they tumbled to the ground.

“Ready?” he asked.

I tried to smile, but the way things were going, it wouldn’t show up until sometime next week.

He pulled me tight against him, and with congruent movements, we were out the door, my backpack perched on Jack’s shoulder.

The house seemed to melt away behind us, swirling in a colorful mass as we sped away in Jack’s car. The vibration from the acceleration rattled my teeth, and I gripped the door handle to steady myself.

Jack’s eyes were hard brown circles bouncing back and forth between my face and the road in front of us.

His fingers gripped the steering wheel so tightly that I worried he’d rip the whole thing off.

In a deliberate move, I raised my hand and placed it limply over his fingertips.

“Don’t break . . . ,” I said, quicker than I realized I could but still unable to finish my sentence.

He smiled sadly at me. “I’m trying not to.”

Of course my words reached deeper than mere concern over the steering wheel. Right now, we were doing everything we could not to splinter our souls. Again.

We made it to Cole’s, with Jack only running two and a half red lights. Half because he swore it was still yellow. Not that I had the capacity to call him on it, but he knew what I’d been thinking.

Jack pulled into the handicapped parking stall closest to the stairwell. I almost expected him to dive over the hood of the car to get to me, but he didn’t. Barely.

He threw my door open, then gently, but quickly, scooped me up in his arms.

“Faster this way,” he said.

He was strong. I mean, I’d known it all along; but feeling his strength as he ran up the steps with me in his arms, it was unearthly. My bulk was nothing to him. He gracefully skipped the top three steps, bounded smoothly down the hall and around the first corner.

He stopped only for a moment to peek around the corner and make sure there weren’t any more black-eyed crazy people. When he seemed sure the coast was clear, he took us to the door.

I raised my head from its cushion against his chest and followed his gaze. The door to Cole’s condo still lay ajar. Wooden splinters jutted out in all directions where the lock had once been.

Jack set me down, his eyes looking right and left, cautiously. I took a step toward the door; and with an exasperated grunt, Jack picked me up again, turned around, and placed me behind him, as if he were moving a fragile piece of art out of the way of a wrecking ball.

“Stay behind me, Becks.” His eyes burned.

I took in a deep breath. The man who had broken in had to have been someone from the Everneath, but what kind of someone? Everlivings didn’t have black eyes, and he wasn’t a Shade or a Wanderer. What if he was still here? What if he wasn’t alone? Jack took care of him, but he had taken a good beating and was still coming after us. If he had had a friend last night . . .

I shook my head violently, but it came off as a mild tilt. Jack still knew what I meant. His lips quirked up.

“I can take care of anything waiting for me in there. But you will stay safe.”

Jack crept toward the door and stepped lightly over the threshold. Despite his size, Jack could move like a cat. It’s what made him a good quarterback.

He disappeared into the condo, and the moment he was gone, the hairs on my arms stood on end. Something dark in the shadows of the courtyard caught my eye; but when I turned to look, I couldn’t see anything unusual. Except that the shadows themselves seemed to be bigger and blacker than they should.

Was it the direction of the sun that made the shadows feel so out of place? I squinted, still seeing nothing. Maybe it was the state of Cole’s condo, but my stomach twisted with the feeling that we weren’t alone.

We were being watched.

Jack shouldn’t have left me outside by myself. At this moment I believed any danger here was no longer inside Cole’s apartment. It was outside.

With a final glance toward the darkest shadows in the northeast corner of the courtyard, I ducked inside the condo after Jack. When I saw the living room, I gasped. Chunks of what had once been Cole’s couch lay shredded all over the floor. Someone had broken the coffee table into five or six pieces. Whoever it was had ransacked the place, looking for something. But what could they be looking for that was small enough to fit in the leg of a coffee table?

Nothing longer than a foot in length was left intact. Whoever had been here left no object untouched.

“Becks!” Jack stood in the hallway that led toward the bedrooms. “I told you to stay outside.”

I couldn’t put into words the sudden fear that had washed over me in the courtyard, so I took a few shaky steps and buried myself in Jack’s chest. What I wanted to say was that I’d just gotten him back, and I couldn’t lose him again. We’d promised each other we wouldn’t be apart.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Jack wrapped his arms around me. “Okay, okay. There’s nothing here anyway.”

I realized he was whispering, and his eyes darted back and forth as if he were expecting something to jump out of the shadows.

He held my face, simultaneously brushing some strands of hair out of my eyes. “The band’s not here. And whoever trashed this place didn’t hold back.” Jack grabbed my hand and navigated us through the carnage of the living room and out the door.

“What were they . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the question, but Jack did.

“What were they looking for? I have no idea. I didn’t see anything that could give me a clue. Everything was destroyed. Even the clock on the nightstand. It was shattered.” He sighed. “Whoever was here did a thorough job, and they probably got what they came for. There wasn’t one square inch left untouched.”

Thorough job. Not a square inch left undisturbed. If the intruders had actually found what they were looking for, wouldn’t they have stopped searching at that point? Which would mean that unless they’d found it in the last place available, there would be at least one corner of the condo untouched.

Jack seemed to reach the conclusion at the same time I did. “They didn’t find it, did they? Whatever it was they were looking for?”

I shook my head and stumbled over the threshold of the door, hitting the ground before I had a chance to right myself. Jack swept me into his arms again. He set me down gently on the floor.

“I’m going to look for a stray hair of Cole’s. Just in case.”

He left me for a few long moments, which could have lasted seconds or hours, and then returned.

“What do they do? Scrub the place down every time they leave?” He sighed. “I didn’t find any stray hairs. Let’s get you out of here.”

He carried me down to his car, opened the door for me, and gently placed me inside. He buckled me in, and I weakly rolled my eyes at the gesture.

“Hey, I’m not going to defeat the Underworld only to lose you in a car accident.” He got in on the driver’s side and started the ignition. I shivered, and he switched on the heater. He kept the car in park and shook his head. “Cole’s place . . . it’s the level of destruction that has me confused. I’d sooner believe someone had a vendetta against him and just wanted to trash the place instead of someone looking for something. I mean, what would Cole have that’s valuable but small enough to hide in an alarm clock?”

Something valuable. Something small. Everlivings didn’t place very much value on Surface things, such as money or diamonds; but Surface things weren’t the only small things of value.

I’d seen Cole protect one small thing in his life. So had Jack. His eyes narrowed, and he became as still as a statue.

I managed one word. “Hearts.”

“Everliving hearts,” he said. “Cole’s heart is a pick. Max’s is—what did you tell me? A guitar string?”

I nodded.

“But why would anyone go after their hearts? I mean, why now?”

Jack had a point. The only time I’d heard of conflict or fighting among the Everlivings was at the hands of the queen. Or when someone was trying to take over the throne.

I closed my eyes. Is that what this was about? Did someone find out what Cole had planned? Did someone find out that I had survived the Feed?

“Jack.”

“What?”

I took a deep breath and put together two sentences. “What if they weren’t looking for Cole’s heart? What if they were looking for mine?”

Jack’s mouth went slack. His eyes got a manic look.

I gathered the energy to speak. Energy I didn’t have. But the words still came. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Cole said they kept my identity a secret. He made sure there wasn’t any connection in the Everneath between him and me.”

“But people on the Surface know you’re connected to the Dead Elvises,” he said, bitterness lacing his voice.

“But most other Everlivings don’t know about the Deads.” Cole had told me they made sure they spent most of their time up on the Surface. “He wanted to stay anonymous.”

“Obviously it’s not working!” Jack snapped. “Someone found him. It’s only a matter of time before they find you too.”

Jack took his eyes off the steering wheel and glanced at me as if to say more; but seeing my face, his stony expression immediately softened.

“Sorry, Becks.”

“It’s okay,” I said quietly. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Someone has found Cole.”

And with those words, I put voice to the very thing we were most scared of. Cole was gone. My salvation, my lifeline, had disappeared; and if we didn’t find him by tonight, or sooner, I would probably die.

Jack grabbed my hand and brought my fingers to his lips.

“I’m not going to let that happen, Becks.”

“But what if we don’t find him?” I said the words before I could stop them, an audible desperation in my voice.

Jack didn’t answer right away. I turned his hand over and caressed the lines, the calluses, the knuckles . . . skin to skin. I’d been close to death before, and it always amazed me how there was a moment of realization when all the extraneous things melted away and my awareness became only about simple things. The details of Jack’s skin. The sound of his breath. The way Jack’s lips bent around his words.

These were the things that transcended death. These were the things I was sure the real afterlife was made of.

But was I ready to find out if I was right?

No. I was ready to fight for life. My own, and the countless future Forfeits who would succumb to the Tunnels if we didn’t destroy the place.

“We’ll find him,” I said.

“We will,” Jack said. “We’ll look everywhere. We’ll find him.”

“And if we don’t, we’ll go all Thelma and Louise and drive off a cliff together.”

He didn’t even smile. In fact, he frowned. And then nodded. “Let’s just make sure it doesn’t come to that.”