“I would find a better hiding place this time.”
He raised his voice. “There’s no hiding your energy!” He paused. “They found you because your broken heart leaked, and they picked up on your human energy. If I hadn’t saved you they’d have turned you into a Nikki-kabob.”
“But my energy didn’t leak until I got scared. If I could stay calm—”
“You can’t hide your humanity!” He slid a little closer and spoke softly. “The point is, they found you tonight. They’ll always find you. And take you to the Tunnels. You can’t find Jack if you’re buried alive too.”
Buried alive too. I closed my eyes for a few long moments, trying not to flinch at Cole’s casual reference to Jack being buried alive, and realizing how close I’d just been to joining him.
“Then how am I supposed to find him?”
“Well, I should’ve said you can’t find Jack no matter what. It would just suck for you to be buried alive as well.”
I tried to turn away, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me closer.
“You knew this, Nik. You saw that woman at the Shop-n-Go take the pill. I told you what would happen to her.”
I thought back to the woman in the back of the store, desperate looking, sinking to the ground. Taking the pill that contained Max’s hair and then slipping through the ground. All in a sacrifice to the Everneath. I remembered seeing them at Harry O’s, punching information into their smartphones.
Something clicked for me. They used text messages to track the sacrifices they sent to the Tunnels. “But the Shades were expecting her, weren’t they? They were waiting for her. At the square,” I said.
Cole narrowed his eyes. “Why do you think that?”
“Because I saw how you and Max would send information about your sacrifices through your phones. You did it the first night I met you, but I didn’t know what it meant.” I smiled. “You told me they were texts from your manager. Who you called ‘the queen.’” I shook my head at how it all made sense now. Cole and Max would alert someone on the other end to expect a sacrifice.
Cole frowned at my deduction skills. “It’s true; the Shades wouldn’t be expecting you. But your energy would eventually give you away like it did today. And why would you be stupid enough to try it? So stupid,” he muttered. Anger flashed across his face, but he seemed to will it away with a deep breath. “Why am I trying to convince you when you saw it happen?”
I turned away. From where we were, we could look out over the Park City valley. But my brain was too muddled to even try to figure out which mountain we were on.
“So, Nik. Here we are again. Stuck between a rock and a bigger, harder rock. How do we always end up like this?”
I glared at him. “There has to be a way around it. There has to be a way to hide. Maybe there’s something we could do to … I don’t know … conceal my energy.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment something in his expression made me think I was on to something. But too soon his face went blank, and I was left wondering if I had only imagined the flicker of recognition.
“Leave it alone, Nik. There’s no way to cover you.”
He pushed himself off the ground and brushed off his jeans. He was getting ready to leave.
I grabbed the hem of his pants. “Has anyone ever done it before?”
He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t walk away. “What do you mean?”
“Has a human ever gone to the Everneath and made it to the Tunnels without the Shades knowing?”
He finally met my gaze. “Maybe. But that’s not the point. The question you should be asking yourself is, did anyone ever make it back out?”
His expression told me the answer to that question.
I wrenched the hem of his jeans tighter. “But they didn’t have you. You know the Everneath. You know me. You told me today that I changed you. Prove it.”
He pulled his leg free. “I’m tired, Nik. What I just did … you know, the whole saving thing … that took some energy. I’m done.”
He turned and started to walk away, and that’s when I remembered that I had no idea where we were. Somewhere in the mountains, but I was completely at a loss for directions or anything familiar.
“Why aren’t we at the Shop-n-Go?”
He was still walking away when he answered. “Because I’m an Everliving. I can enter and exit anyplace I want. If anyone happened to follow us, they would’ve checked the Shop-n-Go first, so I brought us here.”
“Oh.”
Cole stopped by a motorcycle on the side of the road. I hadn’t seen it until now. He swung his leg over it and kicked it to life.
“You brought your bike?” I shouted over the roar of the engine. “How did you even—”
“I told the band where I’d be coming out. On the off chance I found you in time. They left it for me.”
“The band’s here?”
He ignored me. With a screech of tires against asphalt, he whipped his bike around.
“Wait!” I called out.
“You are so finding your own way home,” he answered.
“But where are we?”
“Deer Valley.”
It was the small ski resort town just above Park City on the mountain. “Which way do I go?”
He revved the engine. “When given the choice to go up or down, go down.”
I ran over to his bike. “You said the band’s here, right? You guys are staying?” Had he lied about coming alone?
He clicked his bike into gear and looked at me. “If you still want to talk, you know where to find me. Tomorrow night. Do you think you can wait? For one day? Before you do something stupid again?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just took off.
I started walking, all the while looking over my shoulder as if a tall woman with red hair would suddenly appear.
Cole said I was safe, I told myself over and over.
By the time I got home, it was dark. The lights in my dad’s study were on. Apparently I’d only been gone a couple of hours, including the time it took me to walk from Deer Valley to my house. As I climbed the stairs, my knees wobbled and I grabbed on to the railing for support.
I was exhausted, but I knew I had to face my dad.
I stopped by the study. My dad looked up from the article he was reading in The Economist. “How’d it go?”
I thought of what I’d just been through. Traipsed through the Everneath; had my first encounter with the queen; watched a man get blown apart; faced hundreds of Shades intent on doing the same to me, or worse; headed toward the Tunnels until Cole—an immortal—pulled me out and dropped me in Deer Valley.
How’d it go? “Fine,” I answered. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the graduation ceremony. “I saw Mrs. Caputo. She said she’s been trying to contact me.”
My dad didn’t deny it. “I wanted to give you some more time.”
“She’s not going to give up.”
“I know.” He took off his reading glasses and placed them on his desk. “That’s why I agreed that her detective could interview you tomorrow afternoon. I was going to tell you in the morning, because I didn’t want you to worry about it and lose sleep.”
“It’s good,” I said, nodding my head and trying to convince myself. I had so many other things to worry about. “It’s time.”
“Do you want to talk about it first?”
“No. I’m tired.”
“Okay, Nikki. Besides, you have nothing to worry about. All you have to do is tell the truth.”
I smiled at how complicated the truth really was. “No problem. Good night, Dad.”
“Good night. Get some rest.”
SIX
NOW
The Surface. My bedroom.
I dream.
In my dream, I tell Jack of my attempt to find him.
“It didn’t go quite as expected,” I say.
“Why?”
“I almost got caught. By some … Shades.”
“No,” he says. “Why are you trying?”
His words slam my heart. “I’ll never stop trying, Jack. You know this.”
He closes his eyes. “Your hair used to fall in your eyes.”
The abrupt topic change makes me pause. “What?”
He opens his eyes and looks into mine, and he is suddenly so aware. So with me. So different from the night before. He holds up his hand, palm toward me, and I mirror with my own. “Your hair used to fall in your eyes. I’d get so frustrated. I’d think, Why does she let it happen? Is it a matter of needing a clip or something? Why doesn’t it bother her like it bothers me? I used to think I hated it. But then there came a time when all I could think about was how much I wanted to push it out of your eyes for you. I convinced myself that you needed me because otherwise your hair would blind you, and that wouldn’t be good for your health.”
I smile. “I remember the first time you brushed it out of my face. We were hiking the Fiery Furnace with our history class. We stopped on that rock—”
“The Loveseat,” he interrupts.
“Yeah, the Loveseat. I was opening the string cheese, and my hair fell in my eyes, and you brushed my hair away and tucked it behind my ear.”
He glances at my hair. “It was a milestone for me. It took me a year to get up the courage to do it.”
“I’m glad you did,” I say, surprised that the memory has stuck with him as it has with me.
He shrugs. “Well, it was either that or buy you a hair clip. And I didn’t have any money.”
I laugh. He curls his fingers around my hand in a move formed out of habit and then frowns as they only wrap around air. He looks at me with sad eyes.
“I’m trying not to give up,” he says.
“Don’t say that.”
But he doesn’t speak anymore.
He hasn’t given up. I tell myself over and over, He hasn’t given up. He will never give up. Even if I have to remind him.
But before I can say it out loud, the sun rises, and he’s gone.
I jolted awake and fell out of bed. Scrambling to get up, I lurched to my desk. Ransacked it, opening every drawer until I found what I was looking for. A picture of the freshman and sophomore classes on our trip two years ago to Arches National Park. The picture was taken at the base of a rock formation known as the Fiery Furnace because of the way the red sandstone juts into the sky like the spires of a fire.
I ran my finger over the glass of the frame. There we were, in the far right-hand corner. Me and Jack, his arm slung casually around my neck.
“You are not giving up, Jack Caputo,” I murmured. And neither am I.
I set the picture upright on my shelf and thought about last night. Cole was so adamant that it was impossible, but there had to be more to it. He was holding back something. I could feel it.
I did learn one good thing. Cole wasn’t alone in Park City. The band was here. That meant that he wasn’t going anywhere, at least for now.
Setting the Fiery Furnace picture upright next to my computer, I ran my finger over the mouse pad and woke up the sleeping screen.
WHERE ARE THE DEAD ELVISES PLAYING NEXT? the headline of the Looking for the Deads blog read.
I knew the answer to that one. Park City. Harry O’s on Main Street, most likely. I had to see Cole again. Find out what he was hiding. But I couldn’t go there unprepared. I had to talk to Mrs. Jenkins. She was the only other mortal who knew all about the Everneath, and I’d been talking to her about how to get back there. But we’d been so focused on that first step—finding Cole—that we hadn’t discussed anything else. Maybe she would know what Cole was hiding.
If anything.
It was too early to go to Mrs. Jenkins’s house now, so I closed the drawer and went into the kitchen to brew some coffee. Tommy was at the table. He still had school today. Three more days until he was done for the summer.
I looked over his shoulder. The top of the paper read HELP DOROTHY FIND HER WAY TO THE WIZARD. “Mazes? That’s what the fourth grade considers homework?”
Tommy pressed his pencil into the paper so he wouldn’t lose his spot and looked up at me. “It’s the last week of school. I have, like, a stack of these to do.” He lowered his head. “And they’re harder than they look.”
“Start from the end.”
“Why?”
I paused, not really sure why. It was just how I’d always done them. “It’s easier that way.”
He lifted his pencil and placed the point deliberately at the end. “I’ll try,” he said.
I couldn’t stop staring at the maze. Pencil lines twisted around corners and back on themselves where Tommy had run into a block.
I’d never understood the educational legitimacy of mazes. They didn’t necessarily test cognitive ability. Wasn’t it really just an exercise in trial and error? Did anyone ever lose points for going the wrong way initially?