It Wasn't Always Like This (13 page)

All anyone knew for certain, the cops included, was that Coral Ballard had left her house early that morning and not come home. She was not answering her phone. The GPS had been turned off. No one had heard from her.

“They think I had something to do with it,” Hugo kept saying. “They think—”

“You
don’t
have anything to do with it,” Emma f inally interrupted. She narrowed her gaze, more out of hope than suspicion. “Do you?”

Hugo froze on the sidewalk. His jaw tightened. “No. What the hell, Emma?”

“Had to ask,” she said. “Were you two f ighting? Did she go somewhere? Off with her girlfriends, maybe? It’s New Year’s, Hugo. People get weirded out sometimes.”

He stared at her. “You sound like a cop. Thought you were in school to be a nurse.”

Emma brief ly pondered possible responses to this. “I, um, well. I have friends who are cops. And detectives. And private investigators. Lot of nurses do.”

It was dark out now. Someone was setting off f ireworks again, more than just Black Cats. In the sky behind the trees, bright explosions of color f lickered and vanished, leaving small, sparkling threads in their absence.

Hugo kept pacing. “Coral wouldn’t run off without telling me. We’re not f ighting. We love each other. There’s no one else. I’d know.”

He’s so young
, she thought.
Too young
. But it wouldn’t help Coral for Emma to remind Hugo that people wore masks, that you didn’t know if someone was cheating, not really—not that she thought Coral would. Except people
did
cheat. The masks came off, and they said awful things and cheated and lied and kidnapped and tortured and killed. They demonized anything they considered “other,” convincing themselves they were making the world a better place.

But Hugo’s desperation to f ind Coral wasn’t a mask. It was very real.

Which was bad news for all of them, Coral included.

Because that was it: conf irmation that Coral’s disappearance was connected to Emma herself. And to Elodie Callahan, and to Allie Golden, and ultimately to the perpetrators—to those who considered
her
the “other,” who wanted
her
dead. Did they even know anymore why they wanted that? The image of Glen Walters with his gnarled hand on her brother Simon’s head drifted up from the recesses of her memory, sharp and painful even a century later. People always said that time healed all wounds.

People said a lot of things. Believed an endless stream of bullshit.

“I’ll help if I can,” Emma said to Hugo now. “You just need to tell me everything you remember about the last week or so. Everywhere you and Coral went, everyone you remember meeting, even if it was only brief ly. Anything you can think of. I know you probably told a bunch of this stuff to the cops. But now I need you to tell it to me, okay?”

His stare hardened. In part, she knew, because he suspected that her student nurse story was probably bullshit, too. But after a moment, he nodded.

“Okay.”

“Good,” Emma said. She glanced back toward her own apartment. They didn’t have much time. If she were right about the kidnappings and the murders, it wouldn’t take long. Just enough time to inject Coral with some poison and wait to see if it killed her. See if she was the girl they were looking for: seventeen years old with light, freckled skin, blue eyes and—at least in its original form—wavy, dark brown hair. And when they f igured out that Coral was not Emma and therefore not immortal, they’d toss her body aside like garbage.

Or maybe they already had.

After all, unlike the others, Coral had grown up here in Dallas. Two keystrokes would bring up her class pictures and a million other bits of proof that she really was seventeen. She was not a foster child or an orphaned cousin or adopted with closed records. Which begged the question: Why take her in the f irst place? Especially when they’d already killed Elodie Callahan?

Emma’s insides wobbled. She pressed her lips together in a f ierce effort to stay in control.

Because they know I’m here. Because they’re using her to make sure. They’re using her as bait to draw me out.

“We’ll f ind her,” Hugo said. “Us or the cops.”

The fear had seeped back into his voice. He was, she reminded herself, only nineteen. When Emma was nineteen, chronologically speaking, she was still living in Florida. Her family was still alive, and the magnitude of what they had become after drinking from that stream was only just sinking in.

“Yes,” she told Hugo f irmly, because the truth was a slippery thing and not always helpful. “We will.”

Overhead through the canopy of trees, another celebratory f irework lit up the night. In another few hours, it would be a new year.

It was time for this all to be over. More than time.

Hang on, Coral. I’ll bring you back to him.

PETE CALLED AGAIN
just before midnight. Still no leads on Kingsley Lloyd. If he was alive, he was clever.

“Yeah,” Emma agreed. “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

She told him brief ly about Coral. There was no point in keeping it quiet.

“I’ve got this,” she said. She
didn’t
have it. Not by a long shot. But what else was there to say?

“I’ll come to Dallas,” Pete said. “Just say the word.”

Emma could tell by the sound of his voice that he knew there was more, knew she was selecting the bits and pieces she shared.

“No need,” she said. She ended the call before he could say something else that might convince her to take him up on his offer. She would do this on her own. It was the only way.

After that, after Coral was safe and home and alive, she would use whatever Pete uncovered for her—his sources would f ind
something
, the tiniest of threads—and she would track down frog-faced Kingsley Lloyd. Then she would use whatever
he
knew to f ind a way to make sure the Church of Light would never come after her again.

And
then
she would f igure out why that damn stream and those damn f lowers had disappeared.

If they’d popped back up somewhere, she would f ind a way to destroy them.

And if she was still alive after all
that
—for the f irst time in a long while she fervently hoped she would be—she would f ind Charlie Ryan.

Chapter Eleven

New Orleans, Louisiana

1916

Four days after he left Emma, Charlie had made it to Macon, Georgia. He took rides where they were offered or where he could sneak them, walked when he couldn’t. He f igured Emma would cut north and then east once she made it out of Florida, probably heading eventually for New York like they had originally planned, so he moved west.

From Georgia, he wound his way toward New Orleans. He knew little about the city except that people said it was like Florida—a hot, humid, slow-boiling pot of everyone and everything. Something in that description drew him like a magnet. Or rather, he allowed himself to be drawn. He put one foot in front of the other, telling himself that it was all part of pulling Glen Walters and his sick followers off Emma’s trail. He would force them to follow him.

“My name is Charlie Ryan,” he said to everyone he met. “On the road from Florida. St. Augustine.”

He burned through the little cash he had, getting drunk as often as possible. “Let me tell you a story,” he announced loudly in some bar in Macon, banging his glass on the bar. Then he launched into one of his father’s old tales of Juan Ponce de León. It came as a shock to Charlie that, like his father, he could easily spin out a story. Maybe he hadn’t been lying to Emma back at the crossroads. Maybe there was a kernel of truth there, that Charlie Ryan was more like Frank Ryan than he’d cared to admit. “He never meant to f ind the fountain,” Charlie concluded. Then he added loudly and carelessly, “And neither did I.”

The other patrons stared at him, some laughing. But he said it again because he needed to dig the trail deep and wide and make sure someone, anyone, would f ind him.

If they came after him, then his beautiful Emma might have a chance to escape.

He knew, even before the f ire, that there would be no point in living without her. They had been each other’s f irsts, but he rarely thought about it in those terms. Emma was not a conquest. She was simply part of him. The part that had to go on living even after Glen Walters destroyed him. But she could do it. With enough time and distance, she could do anything.

Charlie was keeping her safe. Those ugly words he’d spoken to her back at that fork in the road . . . he didn’t regret them. He’d worn that mask because it was the only way to get her to separate from him.

He didn’t regret them.

He didn’t . . .

By the time Charlie Ryan reached the outskirts of New Orleans—a city pungent with life and death and sex and food and liquor, the muddy odor of the Mississippi, and the briny whiff of the Gulf—he knew he was a liar. He’d made the worst possible mistake. He was not a hero, Charlie realized now, just a plain old fool. He’d lopped off the only part of himself worth saving: her.

Later, he would understand that this was the trouble with being forever seventeen: certainty. At the crossroads, he’d been absolutely certain he was doing the right thing. Now he was absolutely certain he had not.

He hated that he knew exactly how to word the lie. Bring up the hawks—exactly the weak spot to make Emma doubt what they had between them. But everyone was dead. What else could he do?

A million other things
, he realized.

Idiot. Stupid, stupid, idiot. What if the Church of Light had tracked Emma? He would never forgive himself.

Charlie stood at the banks of the Mississippi, the wind blustering off the water and realized with that same absolute certainty that he had to go back. He had to go . . . where? He had no damn idea.

So he walked the streets of the city. At one point he lingered on the sidewalk and watched a funeral procession—a parade, really, some strange mixture of music and mourning and celebration. He thought of his family and Emma’s. He forced himself not to wonder what had been done with their bodies. A dark-skinned woman in a colorful headdress offered to read his palm and sell him a love potion.

“No money,” he said, tipping open one empty pocket. That much was true.

The next day, he found a job as a groundskeeper for the Old French Opera House at Toulouse and Bourbon Streets. The place had hit hard times, he could see. But it was still functioning. He knew his way around cleaning and gardening. And it could put money in his pockets.

“We took on some water during the hurricane last year,” the manager told Charlie. “But we were lucky. Some of the houses uptown weren’t so fortunate.”

Charlie half-wished another storm would swirl in and pull him out to sea with it.

A FEW NIGHTS
later, after he f inished up his rounds, he stood on the corner of Bourbon Street and waited for the cover of night—best to sneak back into the small room in the musty basement where he could catch a few hours’ sleep. He had no money yet to rent a room anywhere; he was eating mostly leftover scraps from the performers’ dressing rooms. Thieving this space was the best he could do for now. He would leave a few coins as compensation when he moved on.

“You look hungry,” a girl said to him, startling him out of his thoughts.

He recognized her; she was one of the seamstresses who came in to f it the costumes. He didn’t know her name. Nor did he ask it. She was short and thick and dark-haired, an odd sprinkling of freckles running in a thin line from her jaw down her neck.

“I can make you something,” she said.

He followed her to a boarding house off Canal.

When she kissed him, he kissed her back. Her mouth had a bitter taste, like stale coffee, but her breasts were large and full and pressed up against him, and her tongue was warm and insistent. He didn’t stop her when she moved her hand down below his waist.

“You are a handsome one,” she whispered.

She moaned against him, fumbling with the buttons on his f ly. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to lose himself in this girl whose name he didn’t even know. Having lost the only person he would ever truly love, this seemed like proof of his betrayal.

Somehow the thought emerged anyway, the way thoughts do sometimes when you need them the most. He found himself remembering the hawks.

You had to woo a hawk, had to be patient and gentle and know everything about it. You couldn’t force matters, or it would f ly away and it wouldn’t come back.