“I’m working it out. It’ll be fine,” Lily said. “I’m helping. But I have to do it on my terms.”
“Your terms? There’s no room for terms, sweetheart.”
“Listen, jack hole, I wasn’t aware until recently that Ivy Springs is some kind of …” Lily waved her hands around, searching for the right word. “I don’t know … freak magnet.”
“Freak is my word, not hers,” Em contributed, her gaze bouncing back and forth between us.
“Whose word is jack hole?” I asked.
Lily kept going. “You might be comfortable with whatever your abnormality is, but mine’s not something I usually talk about, and it’s definitely not something I’d choose to discuss with you.”
“Did Em tell you the consequences if we don’t find Jack?”
“No.” Bewilderment.
“The people who want Jack claim to have a way to rewind time,” I informed her. “If we don’t find him and turn him over, they’ll rewind it. My dad will be dead, and Em will be a vegetable in a mental hospital.”
Frustration and anger, moving quickly into fear.
Lily shook her head as if she didn’t believe she’d heard me properly. “A vegetable in a mental hospital?”
“Okay, enough.” Emerson pushed her way between Lily and me. “I don’t want guilt to be Lily’s motivation for breaking a promise to her grandmother.”
“Breaking a promise or jeopardizing lives,” I said. “Which is more important?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the consequences?” Lily asked Em.
I took Em’s hand, concentrating, reading her. She tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t let her. “Why are you trying to hide the truth?”
Em finally broke away, reminding me how much strength there was in her petite body, and took off toward the back porch at a jog.
“Give us just a second?” I pleaded with Lily. She nodded, and I caught up with Em.
“We’ll stop Jack,” I said. “But we have to find him to do it.”
“No, that’s not it.” She fought tears. “Jack never mentioned Lily specifically in the list of all the things he ‘did’ for me. But I’d be an idiot to think otherwise. A best friend with a supernatural ability? A coincidence?”
“I’m sorry, Em.”
Her fear was for Lily. “And I don’t know where she’ll end up. Her life … it hasn’t been easy as it is. What if it was as easy as Jack could make it?”
“Why don’t you just tell her?”
Em lowered her voice as Lily walked toward us. “How would you feel, hearing that? Knowing your whole life was manipulated because someone wanted something from your best friend?”
“But you don’t know if—”
“If he did put her here, he knows what her ability is. Jack has a reason for everything he does.” The tears she’d been fighting filled her eyes. “Why would he put someone in our direct path who could find him, especially when he doesn’t want to be found?”
“That’s it. Private time is over.” Lily interrupted and pulled Em into her arms, hugging her long and hard. “Em. Go inside.”
“What?” Em wiped her eyes and frowned.
“I want to talk to him. Alone.”
She was looking at me.
Chapter 10
Once Em was gone, I faced Lily. “I usually find bossy to be a sexy trait in a girl. You’ve broken the streak.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think about me.” Lily didn’t mess around; her words always matched her emotions. “You haven’t broken any streaks at all. I’ve met a hundred boys like you in a hundred different scenarios, even dated one or two, and you’re all exactly the same.”
“It’s not nice to stereotype.”
“Don’t talk to me about stereotypes.” She stared up at the pale pink sky and frowned. Her eyes matched the tiger’s-eye pendant that hung from her neck. “I’m not here for friendly conversation. Michael’s solidly on Em’s side, so I’m not going to get any information from him. But you’re selfish enough to tell me the truth.”
“Perceptive.”
“Very.”
“Maybe Em’s already told you the truth,” I countered. “Catch me up on what you know.”
“Smooth.”
“Very.”
Lily sighed. “I know that Jack Landers messed with her time line. I know what the Hourglass does, sort of, and that you all have to find Jack.” Worry. Helplessness. “I knew there was an ultimatum, but I didn’t know what it was, or the consequences of it. Until you.”
“Now that you do know, why did you ask me to stay out here with you, alone?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up at me. “Do you have any other way to find Jack, or am I the only option?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Dad says he’ll handle it. Well, that he and Michael will handle it.”
“So Em’s being her usual self by trying to circumvent the problem and take care of it herself?”
“Yes.”
Lily’s face was screwed up in concentration, her features smoothing out as she put puzzle pieces in the right places. I didn’t want her to fit in the piece about how she ended up in this exact time and place.
“Ivy Springs isn’t a magnet for freaks,” I said abruptly, trying to derail her train of thought. I fished a stick out of a pile of leaves and peeled off the bark, throwing it on the ground.
“This many ‘special abilities’ in one tiny town makes it a magnet,” she said, disagreeing.
“How do you know there aren’t fifty freaks living in Nashville? Or five hundred in Atlanta?” I peeled off another piece of bark. “Maybe they’re keeping it a secret, too.”
“There are at least five hundred freaks in Atlanta, but that doesn’t mean any of them have a special ability.” She jerked the stick out of my hands and snapped it in half.
“Okay.” I raised my eyebrows.
“You’re trying to change the subject.” She chucked a piece of the stick toward the woods. “I don’t know why, but if you want to succeed, you’ll have to try harder.”
“One point to Lily.”
“If you don’t find Jack, and time is rewound, how do you know things wouldn’t play out the exact way they did the first time?” she asked. Too perceptive. “How do you know people wouldn’t make the same choices, live the same lives?”
“I think the people who want Jack will take him out of the picture. From what point do they take him? After he killed my dad but before he changed Emerson’s time line?”
She threw the other half, harder this time. “That sucks.”
“That sucks,” I agreed.
“If I do help …” She stopped, catching her breath, and stared over my shoulder. I turned around.
A man sat on a horse twenty feet in front of us.
“That’s … not … right,” Lily choked out from behind me.
One end of a long rope circled the man’s neck in a makeshift noose, and the other end draped over the highest branch of a black walnut tree. None of it had been there two minutes ago. His hands were tied behind his back, his feet tucked into stirrups. A shotgun came into view behind the horse he sat on, aimed at the sky.