“For once, can you just consider it?” I try not to think of the cellar. The door opening and slamming, the feeling of being trapped. Thatsomethingwas closing the door on me.
Kennedy steps inside the house and looks around slowly. “Okay. But even assuming ghosts exist, Emily hasn’t risen from the grave to avenge her own death. Flaw number one—and I will die on this hill—her death was an accident.”
“Okay, now I’ll assumeyou’reright. What if shethinkswe did? Can’t a ghost be wrong? Why would crossing over make a person omniscient?”
She considers. “If it were me you all left behind that night, I’d need more to go on than the fact that you were all there.That’s just not enough to motivate me to concoct a psychological torture scheme against my own best friends.We were theretoWe killed heris a huge leap.”
“But you’d believe Ryan would do this.”
“Because hehasa motive. He’s always wanted to get between us.”
“It would be seriously messed up to try to convince someone their girlfriend was a murderer just to win them back.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Kennedy corrects. I think I hear sadness in her voice. But it might be wishful thinking. Our eyes connect for a moment, and it almost all comes rushing out. Even tonight, even in this house, there are a million things I need to say to her that have been kept beneath the surface for far too long.
She reaches for my shaking hand. “I wish we could go back in time.” She looks into my eyes, and my heart rips down the middle. Two asymmetrical pieces, the larger one for her. It’s automatic. We never had one of those fancy friendship necklaces with the charms. It’s impossible to make three equal and identical pieces of a heart that fit together. And it wouldn’t have been right to exclude Emily. Shewasthe third. She mattered just as much. And it was everything in threes or nothing. When Kennedy and I were dating, for real this time, after the heirloom incident had been buried under six months of silence, I made her a secret heart. I spun it of yarn unwound from my favorite sweater, cotton candy from the carnival where she won me a purple elephant, starlight I scooped into a jar the night of our first kiss, and my own silver blood. I gave it to her on a scrap of paper and she swallowed it, and we shared thatsecret. Not that she and I were dating. Everyone knew that. But that I loved her. Love changes things. It redraws the map.
Kennedy never said it back. Now we stare into each other’s eyes, and I will her to tell me.Say it, Kennedy.But instead, she glances up the stairs. “Chase?”
“Mila?” he calls back in a muffled voice.
“It’s just us,” I say, a bad feeling settling over me. He should have found her by now.
Kennedy looks at me, worried. “We’ll finish this conversation later. I promise.” I nod and she heads upstairs.
I glance out the front window at the cars, feeling strange, like I’m being watched.
My eyes travel around the living room. The single candle on the table is burned almost halfway down, and wax is pooling on the antique wood. Kennedy and her mother are going to have twin heart attacks. I retrieve a wet paper towel from the kitchen and try to wipe up the melted wax, but only succeed in burning my fingertips and somehow melding the towel into the wax. Shit. I flatten it against the table and pick up a candlestick.
And then, something catches my eye that makes my breath hitch in my throat. A third tarot card placed face-out on the bookshelf next to one of the candles. It’s a dark-haired young man in a clearing, shadowed by a circle of foreboding pines, his hands folded around something that emits a bright, eerie glow. He has Chase’s broad shoulders and amber eyes, and below is writtenKing of Wands: keeper of secrets and lies. I know with one glance what it’s supposed to be. Chase in the cell spot. I lunge for it and stuff it into my pocket, my handsshaking, as I hear Chase’s and Kennedy’s footsteps hurrying down the stairs. I could swear the card wasn’t there moments ago, before we went outside. I wasn’t looking for it, so I can’t be sure. But that sinking feeling is back, the sensation that I’m falling through the floor, through wood and dirt, through solid ground, into a dangerous nowhere, an infinite lucid in-between, and it’s more sinister than sleep because I am not alone. I turn to the others and try to make my voice work, to warn them, to let them know that somethingisstalking us, pushing us into the darkness, something enormous and heartless and real.
Kennedy tosses me a sweatshirt and pair of warm flannel pajama bottoms, and I take them gratefully. I’ve been shivering in Chase’s dress-sized T-shirt half the night. “Suit up,” she says, unsmiling.
“What’s wrong?” I look back and forth between them as I change.
“Her things are missing,” Chase says grimly. “Mila’s gone.”
“No one was supposed to leave,” Kennedy says, pacing back and forth, biting her nails. “This is not good.”
Chase shoots her a suspicious look. “What do you mean, ‘supposed to’?”
“I mean, splitting up is the worst possible thing we could do right now!” she shouts back, then composes herself. “No. Fighting is the worst thing. We need to stay calm. Stick together.”
“No,” I say suddenly. “We’ll never get anything accomplished unless we split up. We have to find Mila.”
Chase looks at me with relief. “Thank you.”
Kennedy turns to me desperately. “Chelsea, don’t.”
But I do. It’s time to trust me for once. To trust my plan. Because I think I know exactly where Mila went and why. “Kennedy, you stay here. In case she comes back.”
She stares at me for a moment and then slowly nods. “Fine. I should be the one to stay here.”
“Chase.” I turn to him. “You and I are going to the cell spot.”
Mila may not know what the cards are, but she’s smart enough to know that they mean something. She saw the Kennedy card, and the Mila card was within eyeshot as she ran out to the driveway. But the Chase card—that was the one that would have scared her into trying to leave without him. The keeper of secrets and lies.
Chase opens the door and steps out into the growing fog, but Kennedy grabs my arm before I can follow.
“Please be careful,” she whispers into my ear.
But it isn’t the world outside that really scares me. It’s what I’m walking away from.