Endless

Death

“I don’t understand. If Pete had already found them, why didn’t he just tell us when we bumped into him on Magnolia?” Lauren wondered as we trudged across the sopping grass toward the mayor’s house. She had just radioed all the Lifers, telling them to be on the lookout for Pete. “Why did he let us walk in there all clueless?”

“Because clearly he had something to hide,” Kevin said. “He had his walkie-talkie. If he wanted to, he could have reported it right away. But instead, he attacked them and left them for dead.”

Dead. My brain still couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that we were using that word. Nadia was dead. And Tristan…

I looked ahead at Joaquin and Bea. Tristan’s body hung limply between them as they shoved through the back door of the house. Cori, Kevin, Lauren, and I hung back while Fisher walked past with Nadia slung over his shoulder. Cori’s head was bowed and her shoulders shook. I barely knew her, but I put my arm around her as we followed the others inside. She’d lost her best friend. I knew the sucking void that opened inside you—I was experiencing it right now with Darcy gone—and I wished there was something more I could do.

Every light was on in the kitchen and the wide-open great room beyond it, making for a blinding contrast to the dark night from which we’d come. The clinic had officially closed down now that the last patient had checked out, and the beds had been replaced with the original, beach-chic couches and chairs. The mayor was sitting in the living room in conference with Dorn and Grantz, while Krista stood in the kitchen wearing a yellow dress, making some kind of smoothie with a very loud, very grating blender. She blanched when Joaquin and Bea tromped past her, and the noise died.

“Tristan?”

Her eyes fluttered closed and she leaned forward, her hips pressing against the kitchen island as her hands flattened against its surface, as if she was clinging to this place, willing herself not to faint.

Fisher trudged across the hardwood floor, his massive boots leaving muddy footprints, and gently deposited Nadia onto the one empty couch. Joaquin and Bea shuffled toward the opposite one, which was occupied by the mayor and Dorn, who both stood up to scuttle out of the way, startled into motion. Neither could take their eyes off Tristan as Joaquin and Bea laid him down. His skin was noticeably paler than it had been at the gray house. When his head fell sideways, exposing his wound, the mayor’s mouth set in a grim line.

“What happened?” Dorn asked.

“Nadia’s dead,” Fisher said in his blunt way. He stepped to the side of the couch and took a wide-legged stance, like a soldier reporting for duty. I was starting to notice that when things got hairy, he reverted to this no-nonsense posture, his own personal defense mechanism.

“What?” Grantz snapped.

“And Tristan’s just barely alive,” Joaquin added. He shoved his hands through his wet hair and flung his bloodstained jacket onto the floor. It slid across the wood planks and gathered in a heap near the wall. Joaquin braced his hands on the mantel over the fireplace and leaned into it, blowing out a loud breath. Then suddenly he turned on the mayor, his eyes as fierce as a rabid dog’s. “Do you want to tell us what the fuck is going on?”

The words hung in the air as we each struggled for breath. In the distance, thunder rumbled. The only other sound in the room was the incessant even ticking of the elegant grandfather clock.

The mayor turned away from us and stood as still as granite.

Chief Grantz was the first to speak, rising slowly from his chair for the first time. “She’s dead? She can’t be dead.”

“I was afraid of this,” the mayor intoned. Joaquin and I looked at each other.

“What are you talking about?” Lauren asked shakily. She and Kevin still hovered near the front door, the raindrops from their jackets forming a lake around their feet. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

The mayor turned. “I wasn’t certain. I was hoping we would be able to find out what was happening—who was to blame—and fix it before it went this far.”

“Okay, enough with the vague,” Joaquin snapped. “You’d better start explaining right now.”

The mayor took a deep, audible breath and stood in front of the fireplace next to Joaquin.

“Here’s what I know. Once innocents started being relegated to the Shadowlands, the balance of the universe began to shift, which is why we saw the island become infested with bugs and death and storms. When we couldn’t find the culprit, our only answer was to stop the ushering entirely. It was the only way to guarantee we didn’t tilt the balance even further off its axis.”

“Of course. We know this,” Fisher said, his hands behind his back. “What does it have to do with Nadia?”

The mayor’s eyes grew hard. “Well, what you don’t know is that your immortality, as it were, is contingent upon your continuing to fulfill your purpose. That is, continuing to help souls find their redemption and move on. So when we stopped ushering souls…”

“We made ourselves vulnerable,” I said, my mouth dry. I leaned into the back of one of the taller chairs, gripping its brocade fabric for dear life.

“Yes, Miss Thayer,” the mayor said. “The longer you refrain from fulfilling your duty, the more…expendable you are to the universe.”

“So we can die now?” Krista asked shrilly, her voice filling the long, wide room. “Any of us?”

The mayor turned an inappropriately wry eye on her pseudo daughter. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t go cliff diving anytime soon.”

Krista sat down heavily on a kitchen stool. Bea leaned into the island, her head in her hands. No one else moved.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Bea asked quietly, her eyes wide and trained on Tristan’s wound. “Why didn’t you warn us?”

The mayor lifted her chin and cleared her throat. “It was a judgment call,” she said. “I already had a hundred extra panicked visitors on my hands. I didn’t need you panicking as well.”

“That wasn’t your call to make,” Joaquin spat.

“Excuse me?” the mayor asked indignantly.

Joaquin took one step and got right in her face. The mayor was so startled she staggered back, her shoulders colliding with the mantelpiece. The framed photos set up at careful angles along the expanse of the shelf rattled.

“You put us at risk! This? This is your fault,” Joaquin said, flinging a hand at the couches where Nadia and Tristan lay. “If they’d known, they might have been more careful. Or they might have come back to us sooner. Nadia might still be alive!”

“Back off her, Marquez,” Dorn said.

“Let’s stop focusing on what we can’t change and focus on the problems at hand,” the mayor snapped.

“Do we know who did this?”

“Tristan said it was Pete,” Bea replied. “He said Pete killed Nadia.”

“Pete?” Krista demanded. “Are you serious?”

“What would Pete stand to gain from this?” Chief Grantz asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Unless he’s the one who’s been ushering people and they found out about it,” Lauren said.

I felt as if something inside me snapped, like a guitar string plucked hard, the reverberations vibrating throughout my body. “So you think…you think Tristan is innocent?”

Joaquin looked me in the eye and my throat closed. If Tristan was innocent, everything changed. If Tristan was innocent . . .

“No,” I said out loud. “It can’t be. He had the coins. The picture of my family. He…he ran.”

The day Tristan had fled, the guys had tossed his room and found the one picture I had left of my family in the bottom of his trunk. It had been taken from my house on the night my father had been ushered to the Shadowlands.

“Think about it. In his note he said he was trying to figure out how to get into the Shadowlands to rescue those people. To do that he’d have to spend time near or on the bridge, like you said,” Lauren theorized, approaching us from the spot she’d taken against the east wall. “Maybe Tristan and Nadia saw Pete bring Darcy and Asha to the bridge last night. Maybe they were going to tell us, so he tracked them down and—”

“Found a way to stop them,” Joaquin finished, staring at Tristan.

I deflated, sinking in to one of the armchairs. For the last few days I had been focusing so much of my energy on hating Tristan, on what I would do and say to him if I ever saw him again, on making myself not love him anymore. The idea that he might be innocent…I couldn’t process it. I leaned forward, elbows to knees, and gasped for air, trying to get a hold of myself.

“We have to bring Pete in,” the mayor said. “We need to know why he did this. We need to know how to set it right.”

“Do you think he’s going to die?” Lauren asked tremulously, gripping the back of my chair.

My head snapped up. The mayor crossed to Tristan—the boy who acted as her son—and knelt next to him. She checked his wound and grasped his wrist between her thumb and fingers. With a gentle touch, she smoothed his blond hair away from his forehead, where the rain and perspiration had plastered it down. It was a perfectly motherly gesture, and until that moment, I wouldn’t have believed she had it in her.

Please let him be okay, I thought. Please, please, please.

Even as I thought it, I could feel Joaquin watching me, and it took every ounce of self-control to not look him in the eye. I didn’t know what he would see there, but I was sure he wouldn’t like it.

“His pulse is strong. We need to move him to a bed, sterilize the wound. Get him some fluids.” The mayor stood up and pressed her lips together. Whatever she was feeling, she was keeping it bottled up as tightly as possible. “With any luck, he’ll be okay.”

Suddenly our walkie-talkies crackled to life. “Bea? Come in, Bea?” Ursula’s voice crackled through the speakers. “Pete was spotted in the town square just now. We tried to stop him, but he got away. He was headed for the docks. Over.”

I was out of my seat and headed for the door before the last zap of static had faded away.

“Rory, wait—” Joaquin started, but I cut him off.

“No more waiting,” I said, already moving toward the door. “I’m going to find Pete, and I’m going to end this before anyone else gets hurt.”

Joaquin and Fisher exchanged a look. “We’re coming with you,” Joaquin said.

“No,” I said, whipping the door open. I was hit by a blast of cold air to the face. “I want to do this on my own.”

“No way.” Bea came up behind Fisher and Kevin, pulling her hat on over her hair. “As of now, no one goes anywhere alone anymore.”

I swallowed hard. The girl had a point. After all, we could die now.

“Fine. But when we find him, I get to interrogate him,” I said through my teeth.

Joaquin flipped his hood up. “So where do we start? His place? The Swan?”

“You guys?” Cori cleared her throat meekly. Her face was still streaked with tears, but her chin was set in grim determination. I could only imagine what she was going through, losing one of her best friends and finding out that the other was responsible. The very fact that she was able to stand right now made her worthy of awe. “I think I know where he’s going.”

I glanced around at the others and saw they were just as impressed as I was. I reached for Cori’s hand.

“Show us the way.”