The Lingering Grace (31 page)

“No,” she moaned. She fell to her knees and pawed in the grass; there was nothing there, of course, and Eva sat on her heels, covering her face with her dirty hands.

“I’m sorry,” said Alice. She managed to sit up, though her shoulders, back, and hips ached from being thrown to the ground. Tony was frozen, still fifteen feet away. He stared at Eva, then at Alice, his eyes glazed.

“We have to try again,” Eva murmured. She jumped to her feet and ran back to Alice, kneeling down in front of her with her hands clasped. “Please,
please
, Alice—it’s not too late—you can help me—”

Her eyes were stretched so wide that Alice could see the whites above her irises. She panted and stared and stared, pathetic as a begging dog. Desperation … fury … hatred … Eva’s emotions were a whirlwind that Alice could barely see through. But she knew her own thoughts, her own mind. And, with the painful heaviness of a judge pronouncing a death sentence, she said “No.”

“No?” asked Eva, as though the concept were totally foreign to her. “I don’t think you understand, Alice. Penny’s life is at stake.”

“I already told you—no. I’m not going to help you kill yourself. Even if it means saving your sister.”

Eva blinked; her jaw tightened.

“I’m … ” Alice’s voice broke. She swallowed hard, dizzied by the whirlwind of feelings that were and weren’t her own. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

Eva stood up and walked away. Her shoulders were stiff and unnaturally close to her ears. She stood silently for a moment. Alice was surprised to see her taking it so well; the massive knot in her stomach began to unwind.

In a flash of silver, Eva leaned over and grabbed the thin knife off the ground. She whipped around, her face red, hair wild. Fury made her beautiful and terrifying.

Alice, trying to stay calm, reminded herself that there were a lot of reasons Eva might have picked up the knife, but Eva’s intentions became absolutely clear seconds later when she lowered the tip to point at Alice’s heart. She walked forward with slow, deliberate steps.

The whole evening had been one long ordeal of fear, but seeing Eva coming at her with a knife in her hand sent a rush of terror so cold that it made Alice’s whole body quiver. She realized that this girl was going to kill her—it was that clear. That brutal. That bloody. Eva was going to kill her even if it meant killing herself, and they were both going to die in this graveyard. Alice was too exhausted to run. Tony was too far away to reach her in time. And Eva would not listen to reason. She was out of her mind with anger and grief. Would the spell let Eva stab her? Probably. After all, the spell was more about transferring feelings and injuries than stopping them. At least if Eva tried to kill her, they would both bleed out equally.

Alice had never understood how murders could happen, how people could be angry enough to do something so horrible.

But when she looked into Eva’s eyes, she understood. Murder wasn’t a matter of good people being shot down by bad ones. Murder was a product of those seconds when people were beyond thinking. It only took seconds to destroy lifetimes.

Tony cried out, and in her peripheral vision, Alice saw him struggle to pull himself to his feet. He took a trembling step forward.

“No,” Eva pointed the knife at him. “Stay where you are.”

“Put down the knife,” Tony said, hands outstretched.

“Listen to him, Eva,” Alice begged. It was hard to keep her voice steady. She had no idea how Tony could speak so normally.

Eva’s eyes flitted between them, but that was the extent of her reaction. Her chest heaved up and down. The knife she held steady.

“Help me do the spell,” she demanded.

Alice’s mouth hung open, but no words came out. She couldn’t help Eva—not now—but the knife gleamed and her gaze was glued to the sharp, silver edge of it. Perhaps she wasn’t as brave as she had always thought. It was easy to imagine how you would react in a real life or death situation. It was another thing entirely to be staring down a knife and a pair of fierce, pitiless eyes.

Eva leaped forward—not at Alice, but at Tony. He was barely able to stand in the first place, and when Eva grabbed his shoulders, he stumbled and fell to his knees. She wrapped her arm around his neck in a chokehold, pressing the tip of the knife just under his jawbone.

“Or,” she said, “I’ll do the spell again and use
him
to bring her back if I have to.” Her voice was flat and her eyes strangely empty; she looked and sounded almost emotionless, and that made her all the more terrifying. The knife didn’t tremble. Her hands didn’t shake. She could kill if she wanted to—Alice didn’t doubt it. Eva had been pushed past feeling.

Tony, however, could feel just fine. His mouth twisted and tightened as Eva pressed the knife against his skin. He struggled to swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

“Fine!” Alice cried. “I’ll do it! I’ll help you!”

She was certain she would regret this, but all she could see was the red trickle of blood rolling down Tony’s neck. Maybe she could trick Eva into releasing Tony and they could make a run for it. Or she could wait until Eva was mostly dead, then stop the spell and flee the scene.

But, as Eva released Tony and he fell to his hands and knees, Alice realized that neither one of them was in any condition to walk, let alone sprint, out of the graveyard. And they certainly couldn’t outrun Eva, who was more wildly energetic than ever—as though the spell, when reversed, had returned to her the energy it had stolen from both Tony and Alice.

Alice’s tongue went dry. She tried to swallow and ended up in a fit of coughing. With every passing second, the night closed in on her more tightly and she grew more certain that they were boxed in. The chain-link fence around the graveyard may as well have been a twenty-foot-high stone wall.

Eva didn’t smile. Her taut lips loosened and she exhaled, but it was not a sigh of relief. Alice realized that Eva had never considered the possibility that Alice might not help her. To Eva, getting what she wanted wasn’t a maybe—it was a must. It was a matter of pushing the right buttons until she got the desired outcome.

“We’ll have to start from the beginning,” Eva said, “We’ll need more—”

There was a soft “whoosh” and Eva stopped. Her mouth fell open. “What … ” she muttered, then staggered forward. She reached an arm behind her back, grasping at her shoulder blade, but before she could do more than frown, she fell to her knees. Struggling to keep her eyes open, she mouthed wordlessly for a moment, then lowered herself to the ground.

“What did you … ?” she whispered, but her eyes closed before she could finish the thought. Her foot kicked upward, as if in protest, then fell heavily to the ground and lay still.

“Eva!”

Alice tried to run forward, but she only managed a few steps before she tripped on her own feet and fell. Tony sat up and turned over his shoulder.

A thin silver dart with a red tuft was embedded in Eva’s shoulder blade. It moved up and down with each of her slow breaths.

“Alice,” said Tony urgently. Alice could not tear her eyes away from the dart, and yet she couldn’t quite convince herself that it was actually there, either. A few years ago, when she had fallen off a trampoline and broken her wrist, everything had seemed oddly surreal for the first few hours. The doctor had said she was in shock. She wondered if it was possible to go into mental shock after one stress too many. Though she tried to focus, she felt disconnected and foggy—even Tony was distant.

“Alice!” Tony yelled.

She wondered why he sounded so afraid. He didn’t seem surprised by the dart at all. But he kept looking over his shoulder like he expected to see someone there.

“Can you run?” he asked. “You need to run—hide—something.”

“What?”

“Run,”
he begged.

“Somebody shot her,” Alice said. Eva’s cheek was pressed against the grass, her mouth hanging open.

“I know,” said Tony anxiously. He tried to stand up, but his legs shook and he ended up back on his knees. He reached out a hand to her anyway. “Alice, come on. We need to get out of here now.”

“But who … ?”

The question was answered before she even finished asking it. A dark figure emerged from behind a tombstone in the distance. It was too dark and the person was too far away to make out any features, but he was tall and lanky. Tony turned around to see what she was staring at; all the blood drained from his face. He reached out to grab her hand but fell short. She was too far away.

“I’m sorry,” he hissed.

“Sorry for what?”

The figure stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight and Alice’s breath caught.

“What the hell, Tony. What are you doing here?” Danny demanded as he rushed toward them, dart gun slung under his arm. “That girl was going to kill you. What the
hell
?”

Alice’s brain snapped back into gear. In a flash, she realized why Danny was here … and why Tony was sorry.

“You told me you wouldn’t,” she whispered to Tony before Danny got close enough to hear. “You told me you weren’t going to do it!”

“It was working fine until he ditched the meeting spot and came here,” Tony whispered. He looked so distraught she couldn’t find it in her heart to be furious. She would be angry later—if they survived the night.

“Alice,” Danny said. He stopped next to Eva, towering over all three of them. He would have been intimidating even without the gun.

Danny’s eyes flitted from Eva’s inert body to Tony to Alice, his hand tightening around the gun as he tried to put it all together. “I was in the park across the street. Supposed to meet someone. I thought I saw weird lights over here.”

Tony had tried to lure Danny into a trap and he thought he had succeeded, but Danny was still following Alice. How he was doing it, she wasn’t sure. GPS? Phone hacking? Did he get a text message every time she left the house? Whatever his methods, he found her when she was at Eva’s house and he followed her here tonight. Except tonight, Tony had followed him. If she had known—if she had known that Danny would track her here, to this graveyard, perhaps all of this could have been avoided. She could have diverted Eva somehow … she could have leaped out of the car at a stoplight … run home … never left home … something.

“Wh—why were you meeting someone here with … Dad’s dart gun?” Tony asked. His attempt at confidence fell flat; the fear on his face was all too evident. “I thought he got rid of that after the expedition to find Big Foot.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “I’m deer hunting, Tony. I’m deer hunting in a park in the middle of the night.” He nudged Eva’s shoulder with his foot and her head lolled back and forth. His eyes wandered to Alice again and his finger inched toward the trigger.

“Do you really expect me to believe that?” Tony asked. His eyes were on the gun, not on his brother’s face; he scooted closer to Alice, trying to shield her from view. It was a brave gesture, but Alice knew that if Danny wanted to put a dart in her back, Tony wouldn’t be able to stop him.

“You’re not an idiot,” Danny said. “But neither am I. I have my reasons for being here. Tell me what
you’re
doing and I’ll consider returning the favor.”

“I’m … ”

“He was helping me with a spell,” Alice butted in when Tony floundered. If magic was what Danny was after, then magic was the only carrot she had to dangle. Tony shot her an are-you-insane look, but she kept eye contact with his brother. At the mention of a spell, Danny’s eyebrows shot up. He looked skeptically at Tony.

“You were helping her with a spell? You didn’t even like
Harry Potter
.”

“I’ve … broadened my horizons,” Tony spluttered, looking desperately at Alice. “Are you meeting someone?”

Danny shrugged. “What’s it to you if I am?” His eyes flitted toward the park, but he caught himself and looked back at Tony. “Don’t act like you’ve got the moral high ground because you don’t.” He tapped Eva’s shoulder with his toe again. “No one can find out that I dart-gunned a girl, okay? I swear, Tony, if you so much as hint that I might have been here … ”

“You’ll do what?”

Danny faltered; Alice thought she understood why. As a convicted criminal, Danny wouldn’t have much ground to stand on if Tony claimed that he’d been the one who attacked Eva. Not to mention that his fingerprints were probably on the dart, and even a summary search would find that their dad owned a dart gun. Even if Danny claimed it had been Tony’s doing, no judge in their right mind would believe a girl-assaulting, cult-joining convict over an honor student with straight A’s and no history of misbehavior.

“What?” Tony repeated. His fear had worn off and his cheeks were starting to flush. “You’ll shoot me, too? Or Alice? I know you’d love to sedate her and—”

He stopped. He smacked his lips together tightly and held his mouth shut. Alice dug her nails into the ground, wishing that he had just kept his cool.

Danny’s eyebrows pulled together; in the darkness, with his deep-set eyes in shadow, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

“Look, if you just leave now, no one needs to know about any of this!” Alice butted in—a last-ditch attempt to steer the conversation into safer waters. “We’ll get Eva home … somehow. She’ll wake up. She’ll be fine. And it’ll be like this never happened.”

Danny drummed the dart gun against his leg; his eyes were on Alice, and she could tell that he was thinking hard, trying to figure out if there was a way he could still work this situation to his advantage.

“You said you were doing a spell?” he asked.

Alice’s heart fluttered. She couldn’t take it back. But she didn’t want to offer Danny any further incentive to try to achieve his original goal. If he found out—if the Seekers found out—that she wasn’t just a victim of magic, that she actually knew how to use it …

This time, it was Tony who came to the rescue. “It was Eva’s idea,” he said suddenly.

“Eva?”

Tony pointed and Danny looked at the girl lying inert at his feet.

“Oh … you mean the one who was trying to kill you.”

“Yeah, she recruited Alice to help and Alice recruited me. We didn’t know what we were doing—Eva was the mastermind. Eva is a witch.”