The Graces (20 page)

She was true to her word – the doorbell buzzed just before nine.

‘Are you even allowed to drive?’ I said as I slid into the passenger seat of her borrowed car.

‘Nope,’ Summer replied cheerfully. She had her long black coat on with the oversized buttons and lined knee boots. A red knitted hat capped her raven hair.

‘Are you taking lessons?’

‘Sally’s been teaching me the last few weeks.’

I guessed this was the friend at school whose car we now sat in. ‘Seriously?’

‘Esther was never into the idea of us all learning to drive. She always said we didn’t need to go anywhere by ourselves that wasn’t in this town, until we were actually leaving home for good.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yeah.’

She pulled out slowly and we headed into town, towards the seafront. She looked like she’d been driving for years. I didn’t think she ever bothered with anything she wasn’t immediately good at.

‘So,’ she said casually. ‘What did you tell your mother about where you are right now?’

I glanced at her. She’d never been so worried about my mother before. Was she as nervous as me?

‘It’s okay,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘I left her a note saying I picked up an extra shift at the café. She won’t expect to see me until this evening, when she wakes up.’

Summer seemed satisfied. It was a short ride, and neither of us talked much. We parked and went to Blue Juice, a cute little place right on the front. It was probably too early to run into anyone from school in here, but I was still jumping in my skin. I wanted them to see us and I didn’t want them to see us. Summer seemed to be in the latter zone, as she chose a booth at the back, hidden from the whole place except the table right next to us, and it was pretty empty right now.

I didn’t know the waitress, but she might have been a couple of years older than Thalia. She stared at Summer like she had grown two heads. She didn’t write down my order, even though I said it twice. Summer was blank on the outside, but inside I could tell she was shrinking, squirming.

‘Hello?’ I said to the waitress. ‘Maybe stop staring at her and do your job?’

The waitress gave me a dirty look. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I want scrambled eggs on toast and black ginger-nut coffee. She wants poached eggs on spinach and green tea with honey. Maybe you should write it down?’

‘I can remember it fine,’ she said. ‘Everyone round here has a great memory, actually.’

She threw Summer a hard stare and then walked off.

‘Wow,’ I tried to joke. ‘What was all that about?’

She shrugged, sullen.

‘Come on.’

‘The tide is turning,’ she said, mysteriously. ‘It does, every so often.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘It means that some of the more gullible people in this stupid town think we killed Wolf.’ She laughed, sharp.

‘What?’ I said, astonished. I wasn’t exactly in with the crowd at school any more, but I hadn’t heard anything like that. I wondered if my mother had. I wondered if she just hadn’t been telling me. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

Summer looked away, fiddling with the corner of the menu.

I watched her. ‘Do you want to go?’

‘No, it’s fine. It’ll be the same everywhere. They’ll get over it eventually.’

I cleared my throat, trying to think of things to say.

‘Hey,’ she said suddenly. ‘I just realised, I’ve never once asked you what your favourite colour is.’

I searched, caught off guard. ‘That midnight blue, purple velvet kind of colour. Yours?’

‘Burgundy. Like wine. Like old blood.’ She grinned. It was a very Summer colour.

We went on like that for a while, trading favourite things, and it started to feel better, but everything was still drenched in expectation. Jokes were funnier and words more carefully chosen. Too much had happened, and it crouched between us, an ugly, patient toad waiting for a mistake.

The waitress came back with our food, and despite her venom-tinged silence, our breakfasts looked and smelled amazing. I picked up my fork and opened my mouth to say something stupid about eggs and balls, but Summer was looking away from me, smiling, and I glanced round right into Fenrin’s chest.

The world froze.

‘Hey,’ she was saying. ‘You’re disgustingly late. As always.’

‘Oh, stop your moaning, you had a good substitute.’
He winked at me.

For a long, long moment, I had absolutely no idea what to do.

Fenrin slid into the booth next to Summer and nudged her. ‘She doesn’t look happy to see me.’

‘It’s been a while,’ she said.

‘It really has.’ He flashed me a beautiful smile, and I felt my whole body quail.

He looked lovely again, like nothing had ever happened to him. He wore a thick fisherman’s sweater over a loose shirt, and his blond hair was tousled by the wind. I could see the top of his turret shell necklace poking just above the V of his collar.

I had not let myself think about him because all that was over, over, filled with pain and shame. And yet now here he was, as if no time had passed at all.

‘What … are you doing here?’ I managed.

‘Sorry, I invited him—’

‘Sorry, it’s my fault—’

Summer and Fenrin both talked at once, looked at each other and laughed awkwardly.

‘It’s my fault,’ Fenrin said again. ‘I said not to tell you I was coming. I thought maybe you wouldn’t show if you knew I was here.’

I tried to relax my grip on the fork. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

‘The last time we saw each other,’ he said, ‘I didn’t handle things very well. I’m sorry. It was not a good time for me.’ He spoke carefully, and I wondered if it was to conceal the pain underneath, like speaking carefully, as if he’d rehearsed it, was the only way it would come out.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I messed up, anyway. I mean … I’m sorry, too. I should have … I should have told you everything.’

He was silent. I stared into my eggs as hard as I could.

‘Well, now we’re all very sorry for being complete asses to one another,’ said Summer brightly, ‘let’s eat before our food gets cold.’

I tried to laugh, and stabbed at a yolk.

Fenrin grabbed the menu tucked behind the salt shaker. ‘What’s good here?’ he said. His voice was nearly as cheerily forced as Summer’s.

And so, in a slow, halting way, it went. Fenrin ordered waffles drenched in wildflower honey, and I kept my eyes down when he ate. I’d never been able to watch him eat without craving him. He and Summer laughed and flicked each other and joked, but there was something to it, an edge I’d never noticed before, and I thought maybe it was new. But then, I couldn’t expect everything to be exactly the same between us after all that had happened.

‘So what are you guys up to this weekend?’ I asked them, after we’d all finished eating.

‘Taking advantage of the fact that our parents are away and running riot over the house,’ said Fenrin, pouring himself some coffee from the pot we were sharing. ‘You should come round.’

‘You should come and visit us,’ Summer said, at exactly the same time.

I laughed. ‘Guys, you have to stop doing that. It’s weird.’

‘God, stop copying me,’ Fenrin said, shooting Summer an evil look. She stuck her tongue out at him, but he missed it as he turned back to me. ‘So?’

‘So?’ I said.

‘So are you coming round? We could watch films or something, like we used to.’

My chest tightened like a vice.

‘Probably not,’ I said slowly. ‘I have loads of school work to do this weekend.’

‘School work?’ Summer rolled her eyes. ‘There are more important things in life. Like this horror film I found about dead serial killers resurrected as ghost clowns.’ She waggled her eyebrows excitedly.

‘Christ alive, Summer,’ Fenrin said, ‘we want her to come round and hang with us, not promise to give her nightmares.’

I smiled weakly. ‘Seriously, I don’t think I can this weekend.’ An awkward silence fell. I should have said yes – I

had no idea when I’d be able to see them again. And yet I still couldn’t quite face it. Go back to that house with no Wolf in it. That
house
, drenched in memories. Fenrin seemed sanguine, but I got the distinct impression that I’d made Summer angry.

I excused myself and went to the toilet, as much to figure out what to do as anything else. I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to see what they saw. How much did my features betray of me, the real me, the coal-black and coal-bright me?

How long was I going to keep this up for?

When I got back to the table, they were muttering together, but Summer was smiling a little, and my nerves eased.

‘Poured you some more coffee,’ said Fenrin, indicating my mug, and I took it gratefully, as it gave me something to focus on. Summer launched into a long-winded anecdote about a girl at her new school she was sure was the daughter of a famous rock star trying to go incognito, and the tension eased as the conversation changed. They talked about how strict the school was, the beautiful grounds, the tennis courts, the swimming pool, the French teacher, who,
according to Fenrin, defied all cultural expectations, since he was the worst dresser he’d ever seen.

They talked about new lessons, and new friends, and trying to fit in at the same time as trying to stand out, which was a problem I’d thought only lesser mortals like me grappled with. They asked me about the café, and I talked for a while about the cakes there and about Delia, who was full of stories but told them much better than I did.

We did not talk about Wolf. We did not talk about magic, and we did not reminisce about the things we had done, because all of them, I supposed, contained things we’d rather forget. Had it really gone so wrong for us that this was all we could be now?

They had come to me. I hadn’t tried to go back to them. That had to count for something.

They really were funny, though. I was giggling about something stupid; I couldn’t stop giggling. We’d moved on to our childhoods, and I was trying to tell them about the toys I used to have, and how for a while when I was really small, I would insist on getting only boxes of coloured paper clips as my birthday and Christmas presents because I wanted to make necklaces from them, but I didn’t think the story was coming out the way it should have been. I felt like my jaw might be made of chewing gum – when
I opened my mouth to speak it stretched out in rubbery strings.

‘Hey,’ I tried, and then I forgot what else I meant to say because my head was so heavy, and I leaned back, feeling sleepy.

I must have been a lot more tired than I’d thought.

I heard Summer saying, ‘I’m sorry.’

For a while, I thought I was dreaming.

The room was dark and close, but I recognised it. It was the spare bedroom on the second floor, the one I used to stay in. The rag rug on the floor. The little chest of drawers. The white walls. The bowl of devil stones on the bedside table.

I was dreaming about the Grace house again. This happened sometimes, especially nowadays.

But then my head gave a sharp throb, and my whole body felt like it was rolling, rolling. I stared at the twists in the rug, knotted flaps of colour, waiting until everything made sense.

There was a smell lying heavy on the air. Flowers – that was why. Two vases of them perched on the chest of drawers. Another jam jar rammed with thick stems on the windowsill. Scattered loose all over the floor. I turned my head and it seemed to slosh gently. Looking
down the length of me I could see that the same flowers had been placed all around my body, resting up against my hip and side.

This was more than a little weird.

Something dark caught my eye – something at the foot of the bed. I sat up, heart rate spiking, head surging, and I saw her. Summer, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, arms between her thighs, hands locked together, watching me.

I tried to make my brain work. This felt like something a stalker would do from some dark drama, like those grim crime shows on TV my mother always watched. But Summer didn’t need to stalk me. I was all hers. Hadn’t breakfast proved that? Despite everything telling me no, hadn’t I let her in again?

‘How do you feel?’ she said. I tried to analyse her voice. All I could hear was concern.

‘Kind of like I’ve been punched in the face.’ My voice was startlingly slurry round the edges.

‘I’m really sorry about that. I might have overdone it a bit. We tried to measure right, but I wasn’t sure how much coffee there was in your cup. And the flowers, you know.’ She gestured.

What? No, I
didn’t
know. What was she talking about?

She was looking at me, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I couldn’t read her. It struck me suddenly
that maybe I’d always found her emotions easy to tell because she didn’t see any reason to hide them from me. Not me, her best friend.

Now she did.

She was becoming a stranger, a loping, frightening stranger girl with black-ringed eyes. So fast. It was happening so fast. I felt thick and sick in the throat, and maybe it wasn’t just because of whatever it was they slipped me in my coffee. She opened her mouth, but the door rattled, her eyes dropped, and Fenrin walked in.

He glanced at Summer, and then his gaze settled on me.

‘What the hell is going on?’ I said. It seemed to take me years to get the sentence out.

Neither of them answered. There was movement behind Fenrin, and in slipped Thalia.

There they stood, all three of them, looking at me silently.

Cut her in half and you’d see ‘Grace’ the whole way through
, Marcus had said.
Like rock candy
.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a reunion, you could have just asked.’

‘We did,’ said Fenrin, seriously. ‘You said no.’

‘I said not yet.’ I tailed off as I realised what game they had been playing with me at breakfast. Asking me
to the house had been a test. The drug in my coffee was a last resort.

They all seemed to be waiting for something. What? For me to scream and rage at them? To ask them in a wobbling voice why they were doing this?

‘What did you use?’ I said to Summer. ‘To knock me out?’

‘Thalia’s sleeping pills,’ she replied, to the wall. ‘Sure you’re all right?’

I ignored this. ‘Are we going to have a party, then?’ I said. ‘It’s probably a bit cold this time of year for the cove. We could do a bonfire, though, like that time in the woods.’

‘The fact that you can joke right now,’ said Thalia, her doe eyes dark, ‘just proves my point.’ She glanced at Summer, who wasn’t doing much of anything.

I imagined myself rising up from the bed, striding over to Summer and hitting her across the face. A nice big cuff that sounded like a gunshot. A cuff that neatly demonstrated her betrayal while the audience back home silently cheered me on.

‘And what point is that, Thalia?’ I said, drawing her name out.

‘Are you hearing this?’ Thalia said to Summer, her voice rising. I wasn’t the only one trying to get her attention. ‘She acts like nothing’s happened. She
doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t care. I told you. Don’t you get it now?’

‘Sure,’ said Summer mechanically. She was picking at her nails. It looked deliberate to me, a forced air of apathy.

‘
Sure
is not going to cut it. I need to know where your loyalties lie. We both do.’

Summer finally looked up, irritation lacing her voice. ‘For god’s sake, Thalia, I’m the one who got her here. I did all the work. What do you think?’

Silence descended. I wanted to open the crack further, make some quip that would whip Thalia into a meltdown, because she looked like she was close. But my heart was hurting, distracting me.

I miss you. You’re my best friend
. Last night had been an act. A perfect plan to get me to trust Summer enough so they could kidnap me without raising any alarms. She wasn’t my best friend. None of them were. It was all a lie.

I wanted to wait for the perfect moment. One beautiful, perfect moment where I could hurt them the absolute most. I wanted to find their one big weakness, nail them to the wall with it and watch them bleed.

If only I could clear this fuzzy thickness in my head first. If only I could think properly.

‘I think,’ said Fenrin slowly, as if he were tasting
the words, ‘that you should tell her why she’s here.’

I was half expecting Summer to bite back. But then she shrugged, shook it off. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it done.’ She turned away from her slouch against the wall and looked at me.

‘It’s the winter solstice tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘The festival of rebirth.’

I felt my skin fur up in response to her words, but I held her gaze, trying to be unreadable stone like her.

‘So it’s the perfect time to bring Wolf back.’

Except I wasn’t expecting that. My pulse stuttered.

‘What?’ I said stupidly.

She sighed. ‘You heard.’

‘You’re going to bring him back from being dead?’

‘No,’ said Thalia. She was calm now, her arms folded. ‘
You
are.’

I snorted a long, disbelieving piggy snort. They were prepared for my faithlessness, though; none of them even blinked.

‘This is ludicrous, right?’ I said. ‘Summer. You know this is totally
ludicrous
.’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Thalia. ‘You killed him. So you can be the one to bring him back.’

I didn’t just hear that.

This wasn’t funny. This wasn’t real.

I needed to say something. Be shocked, and then
angry. That was what innocent people were, weren’t they? Shocked at the suggestion; angry that they could be thought of as capable of that. But the only thing I seemed to really want to do was laugh, hard and sharp until my belly hurt, laugh at them and me and this ridiculous, ridiculous situation.

‘Thalia,’ I spat out, finally. My throat convulsed with a giggle. ‘You are officially off the rock.’

‘Oh,’ Thalia said quietly. ‘Did you think we wouldn’t work it out?’

‘Work out what, exactly?’

‘Your secret.’

Those two words, and all they might imply, made me want to throw up, or kill her, maybe. Maybe both.

‘
What
secret?’ I asked.

But she didn’t want to say, and no one rushed to fill it in for her.

I shook my head. ‘You’re insane. Wolf died in an accident. He was swept out to sea.’

She sneered. ‘Well, it wasn’t like we were expecting you to just confess.’ Her gaze fell on Fenrin, who was utterly silent, impassive, his arms folded. His eyes were on the far wall. Summer was watching me intently.

‘Oh come
on
,’ I said. ‘What is wrong with you all? So you’re telling me you think I killed Wolf? If you’ve known that all this time, why the hell would you wait
so long to do something about it? I’d have kidnapped me and drugged me up
ages
ago.’

‘Well, let me tell you the rest,’ said Thalia. ‘If you refuse to bring him back, we’re going to do it ourselves, with old magic. All we have to do is make a sacrifice. One life in exchange for the other.’

My bones turned to ice because they knew what was coming.

She tipped her head. ‘You know. Yours for his.’