Platinum (19 page)

Competition

If you acknowledge them as worthy competition,
you just might lose.

For three or four seconds, I stood there, watching the two of them. Their bodies collided, and the sound was something akin to crunching gravel crushed slowly under a solid steel heel. It was sickening and low, and I felt it in my flesh as Brock’s nearly anvil-shaped fist moved toward Cade’s face.

“Lilah? Where are you? Are you okay?”

I recognized Lexie’s voice inside my head. I didn’t have time to wonder what it was doing there before a second mind-voice chimed in.

“You’re gone, but traces of your aura are still here. I bound you to us.”

Huh. So it was sort of like an aura phone—their minds to mine, connected by aura streams that only Lissy could see.

Back in the real world (okay, perhaps “real” is an overstatement…back in the time-loop world of the photo I’d touched) Cade dodged Brock’s blow, but a left hook immediately followed, and Brock’s fist connected with Cade’s jaw.

“Stop it,” I ordered, moving forward and forcing Lissy and Lexie’s voices back in my head. “Both of you stop it, right now.”

Brock should have recognized the voice I was using. It was my “stop it if you ever want to get any ever again” voice. My “stop it before I hit you where it hurts” voice. It was the voice of the Ice Queen; the voice of a person who didn’t know the meaning of the word “mercy.” And it was having absolutely no effect.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” Helen’s bottom lip stuck out in an exaggerated pout.

I got the distinct feeling that someone didn’t play well with others, especially other girls. Well, that officially made two of us.

“I don’t follow rules,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant, the deadly smile never leaving my face. “I make them.”

With those (over) confident words, I swung my gaze away from Helen and back to the boys, who had yet to yield to my order to cease their neanderthalean altercation. “And right now, rule number one is that everyone is going to keep their fists”—and knives, I added silently—“to themselves.”

“They can’t hear you,” Helen said, a smile replacing the pout. “I don’t know why
you’re
here, but they’re here for me.”

I didn’t dignify that claim with a response. I had no idea what magical mojo she was pulling here, but I did know that, Fuchsia incident aside, Brock was mine, and there was no question in my mind about Cade.

“They’re both such good kissers,” Helen continued. “And they’re here for me.”

It took me a second to understand what she was saying, and then a vision hit me.

Fuchsia and Brock in a room. Fuchsia running her hands through Brock’s hair, flirty as ever. Fuchsia, leaning in and hesitating for just the smallest second before the kiss. Helen in the room. Helen in Fuchsia’s body. Fuchsia kissing Brock. Helen kissing Brock.

It took me a moment to process what I’d seen. Helen had been there—inside Fuchsia’s body—when Fuchsia had kissed Brock. And maybe Fuchsia would have done it anyway—she was certainly thinking about it—but maybe she wouldn’t have.

I’d completely destroyed her, and there was a slight chance that her skankiness was mystically fueled.

“Such good kissers,” Helen said again, twirling the ring around her finger.

I’d come here to stop this, and now, more than ever, I was determined to do so.

“Stop it,” I said again, louder this time.

“It may be some kind of magical barrier. Maybe they can’t hear you.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious (aka Lissy James).

“Definitely a magical barrier. They can’t hear you.”

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the psychic aura connection went both ways. Lissy and Lexie were picking up on my thoughts, seeing the scene through my eyes.

“You may as well go home,” Helen said. “He’s mine now.”

Her eyes were on Brock, hungry.

I snorted. “You think you’re the first one who’s tried to take him?” I asked. “Puh-lease. Compared to the world I live in, you’re nothing. That little thing you pulled in Fuchsia’s body? So what? You think she hasn’t tried to work her way up to it a million times before? You think there aren’t a dozen girls out there, waiting for the second they can take what I have? Do you think,” I gritted out, “that I somehow don’t know that? That I’m not ready for it, for you?”

“The boys are here for me.”

She was a broken record. Mine. Mine. Mine. Like I’d never come up against that before.

“News flash, blondie. Maybe in your time, you were something special, but those clothes, that hair, and that waistline? You’re out of style, out of fashion, and right now, totally out of luck.” I advanced toward the fight, determined to put a stop to it if I had to physically come between them.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Helen said, and the moment the sound left her mouth, an invisible force threw me backwards, away from the boys.

“Uhhh…Lilah? Not just an audio barrier.”

“
Yeah,”
I replied silently.
“I got that. Thanks. Any idea how to break it?”

Somewhere in the backmost portion of my mind, I could hear Lexie’s mind-voice going over and over the possibilities, sorting out the truth of her own spoken statements, but the sound was faint.

“I love this part,” Helen said. “Ohhh, look, they’re getting rough!”

Cade’s fist crashed into Brock’s mouth. No knife yet, but given the circumstances, that was somehow less than comforting.

I tried again to reach them, knowing I’d be stopped by the implacable force field of doom but unable to give in, especially to her. To Helen. This time, the barrier lashed out at me before I pressed against it, slashing my skin with violent waves of nearly electric force.

“No interruptions,” Helen decreed. “They have to finish.”

“Finish? Don’t you mean kill each other?” My voice didn’t shake, but inside I was screaming, barely aware of the blood that trickled down my forehead, a souvenir of my last attempt to break up the fight.

“They kill for me.” Now she was gloating. “Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

I moved toward her, intent on strangling her with her own supernaturally shiny blond hair.

“Well,” she pressed on, her words holding me to my place with magical force. “Don’t you?”

Apparently, the question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, and even as I refused to answer her, refused to give in to her even that much, the answer coursed through my veins.

I may be popular, I thought. I may be, nay, I
am
a little harsh, and yeah, maybe I like being the center of attention. Maybe I like feeling like I matter to even one person, and if that person is someone who matters to everyone else, all the better. Maybe I like to be on top, because I know how much it sucks to be on bottom. Maybe…

I shook my head and cleared it of maybes. Bottom line, if you said I was a completely horrible person, there’s a distinct chance that you wouldn’t be lying. I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I do whatever I have to do to keep my head above water. I wear the right clothes, and I say the right things, and I live in a world where that is all that matters.

But I am more than just that, and I would never wish this on anyone.

Not Brock, who says he loves me, but doesn’t really know me in any way that matters.

Not Cade, who has done this so many times before.

I wouldn’t even wish something like this on Fuchsia, even if she had been one hundred percent herself during the kiss that shall not be named. Cafeteria exile was one thing—death and destruction were completely another, a subtlety that had been somehow lost on my blond companion.

“No.” I spoke the word aloud, trying to block out the sounds of the fight, trying not to see the blade that had just appeared in Brock’s hand.

Brock’s, not Cade’s.

“No,” I repeated. “I don’t wish they were fighting for me. I don’t want that.”

Helen twirled the end of her ponytail around one finger and smiled at me coyly. “It’s just as well,” she said. “They’re not fighting for you. They’re fighting for me.”

“They’re not fighting for you. They don’t know you.”

My words fell on deaf ears.

“They don’t care about you.”

She responded to that with a smile that, had it been audible, would have sounded something like “I can’t hear you, la la la la la.”

“Try talking about her boyfriend. I don’t think she’ll like that very much.”

I accepted Lexie’s silent advice the moment I received it. “Tad didn’t care about you.”

This time, I had Helen’s full attention. “He
died
for me.”

I shrugged off her claim as if it were completely trivial. “Was that before or after he repeatedly cheated on you?” I paused for a microsecond. “Oh? After? Or maybe before
and
after? Maybe good old Tad is doing the horizontal hokeypokey with some ghost chick as we speak?”

“He died for me.”

I was sensing a mantra here, and everyone knows teenage-girl mantras are a sign of weakness. I continued pressing her while trying to pretend that Brock and Cade weren’t circling each other, and that Brock wasn’t holding the blade loosely in his right hand. I knew that Cade would get it away from him, knew that in the end, Cade would be the one with the knife, the one to live—if you could call being stuck here, in this moment, living.

“Tad didn’t care about you enough to keep his lips to himself.” I lashed out at Helen, giving voice to my own well-suppressed feelings. My lips curled into a sneer as I threw everything I had at Helen, hoping it hurt her the way it would have hurt me. “Does it make the poor itty-bitty blond girl feel better that Tad cared enough about her to fight Cade?”

Her hand left her hair and went to the ring on her index finger. Inside the force field, Cade sidestepped the knife, and it caught only the tip of his skin, leaving an angry red line in its wake.

“Keep her talking. Whatever’s going on with the boys, she’s at the center of it. As long as her attention’s on you, it’s not on them. The show can’t finish without its director.”

“Lexie?”
I silently sought verification of Lissy’s mind-words, and the instant Lexie gave it, I continued my harassment of the ghost girl.

“News flash, brainiac,” I said, going for the jugular with the same lack of mercy she was showing the boys. “Tad would have fought Cade for walking down the street on the wrong side of town. He would have fought Cade over the last slice of pizza.” I shook my head in mock pity. “Tad would have fought Cade over any other girl.”

The unspoken words dripped from my voice.
You aren’t special. This isn’t about you. You. Are. Nothing.

For a moment, Helen’s lips trembled, but then she thrust out her chin and turned her attention back to the fight. While we’d been talking, Cade had taken the knife from Brock, the way I’d known he would. He held it in his left hand. The scene was all too familiar.

“So now Cade’ll kill Brock,” I said, forcing my voice to sound neutral, light. “And you’ll have your fix, for what? Another ten years? And then ten years from now, you’ll realize again that no one loves you, that no one has ever loved you, and that when you disappeared from the real world into whatever magical, mystical time warp this place is, no one missed you at all.” I tilted my head to the side. “Did you know that Tad had a whole spread in the yearbook, and they didn’t even mention your name? That people think you took off for the border with Cade? That somebody else won prom queen because you weren’t there to win it?”

I paused. “Do you even realize that it’s not your school anymore? That if you came there now, you wouldn’t be on the homecoming court, and the boys wouldn’t look twice at you, and that, if you were lucky, maybe I’d take pity on you and ask the other girls to stop writing things about your uneven breasts and your presumably loose legs on the bathroom walls?”

I paused again. “Do you even realize that without magic, they’d choose me?”

I’d had years of practice sounding more confident than I felt, and it was paying off. Big time.

Helen whipped her head around. “You?” she sniffed. “You think you’re so pretty. So special.”

I didn’t. Not really, but she didn’t need to know that. No one did.

“I’m beautiful,” Helen said. “I am the girl men die for. I am the one who starts wars.”

“And you have a spot right here on your chin.” I pointed daintily with my middle finger.

“I am Helen.”

Like this was news. “Sure, you’re Helen,” I said. “Allow me to not give a rat’s ass. In my world, you’re nothing. In your world, the one you left to come here, you’re nothing. For all anyone else knows, you died, and all that happened was that the next girl in line, the one you thought was your friend? She was so traumatized by your disappearance that it was all she could do to keep up appearances, take over your spot on the cheerleading squad, date all the boys, and rule in your absence.”

I didn’t know for sure if that had happened, but I could easily imagine what Fuchsia would do if I disappeared off the face of the earth tonight.

“I am Helen. My beauty is unsurpassed.” Her voice shook. Beside us, the fight continued.

“Helen of Troy.”
Lissy’s voice rang out in my head, throwing off my game by the smallest of margins. I avoided mentally blasting her, however, because all of a sudden, Psycho Chick’s claim of identity took on new meaning.

The face that launched a thousand ships. The woman men had died for. The one who had started a war and sunk an empire.

Suddenly, I was overcome with memories: of Trojans and knights, of love and betrayal and beauty. Of power. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Guinevere and Lancelot, Morgan and Arthur.

And here, amidst the gorgeous, flawless eyes that stared back at me, among the perfect complexions, the bloodshed, and the even, symmetrical features, I saw it. The ring: slender and sleek, with an insignia in a language so ancient I doubted any of the wearers could understand it.

But I did. In that moment, that individual instant in time, my mind connected with Lissy’s and Lexie’s, and I saw things through another set of eyes: color rose off my body in waves, pale purple lights that streamed off at odd angles. I saw the past in the air, the future on the tips of my eyelashes, and like a person putting on contacts for the first time, I saw everything so incredibly clearly.