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.”
“The Bait and Tackle?” Bea asked as the five of us huddled under a battered and torn awning at the north end of the docks. We were standing across the boardwalk from the business in question. “You think he’s in there?”
“I can’t imagine anyone would dare go in there,” I said with a shiver.
The Bait & Tackle was a square, gray-shingled building built into the center of a wide plank dock that stretched out over the bay. The roof was concave on one side, and the whole thing listed to the left so far I was surprised it hadn’t already toppled over. The hand-painted BAIT & TACKLE sign was cracked in the middle, right over the ampersand, and hung in a V shape over the front door.
“He started hanging out there late at night a while ago,” Cori said with a sniffle, a relentless stream of water pouring off the gutter and onto the shoulder of her black rain jacket. “Tommy told him he couldn’t spin in the house anymore, so he snuck a bunch of equipment out here to keep practicing. Nadia and I are the only people he told.”
“He hid a DJ deck inside a bait-and-tackle shop because his fake dad wouldn’t let him keep it at home?” I asked dubiously.
Fisher sighed. “Tommy runs this place. He’s doesn’t really keep track of anything. I bet he hasn’t even noticed it.”
“Pete keeps his stuff covered with a tarp in the back of the stock room,” Cori said, her teeth chattering. “So are we going to get him or not?”
Joaquin nodded and stepped out from under the awning. “Fish, you, Bea, and Cori get the front door. Rory and I will go around the back. If he’s there, we’ll draw him out. He might bolt around front, so keep your eyes peeled.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
We moved away from the shingled wall, our feet slapping through the shallow puddles that had gathered on the boardwalk’s weathered planks. There was one creaky light hanging from a curved metal post in front of the Bait & Tackle’s front door. It swung like a metronome in the wind, illuminating the words on the sign over the door one by
one. BAIT. TACKLE. BAIT. TACKLE. BAIT. TACKLE.
We reached the front door. Fisher and Cori stood off to one side, Bea on the other. Joaquin gave me a nod, and we crept around the short south-facing wall of the building, ducking beneath one window that had the blind drawn anyway and paused at the back. The dock stretched out so far over the water I could barely make out the end of it in the storm. Rod holders were screwed to every other pylon so that fishermen could rest their fishing rods while they spent the day hanging out and hoping for a catch. In the distance, I saw a rocky jetty in the bay parallel to the dock, the churned-up waters of the usually placid surface smashing against the stones.
Joaquin stepped up and pounded on the back door. “Pete!” he shouted. “We know you’re in there. Come out and we promise you won’t get—”
Suddenly the door burst open, swinging outward and hitting Joaquin square in the face. Pete darted out and ran right past me, vaulting over the guardrail on the dock and dropping onto the sand below. Joaquin fell backward, his head knocking against the wood planks. He was out cold. I hesitated a split second, torn between chasing Pete and making sure Joaquin was all right.
“Sonofabitch!” I shouted in frustration.
Then I sprinted as fast as I could along the side of the building, blowing right by Fisher, Bea, and Cori.
“What the hell happened?” Bea shouted.
“Check on Joaquin!” I blurted back. I tore around the corner and up the boardwalk. The stairs down to the beach were yards away, and Pete had a lead on me as he raced along the sand, but in seconds he would hit the jetty. With any luck, he would try to scramble over it, which would be next to impossible with the rocks slicked down by rain and algae. Hopefully it would help me make up time.
Heart pumping, I ran as fast as I could, trying not to think about Joaquin and whether he was okay. Trying not to think about Tristan or Nadia or Darcy or my dad. I had to run the race of my life. Everyone’s existence depended on it.
Down on the sand, Pete came to the side of the rocky jetty. He looked back at me, his eyes wild, and started to climb. Finally I reached the stairs down to the beach. I took the turn at a sprint, and my feet nearly went out from under me, so I jumped down to the sand, vaulting past the eight or ten steps. I landed in a crouch, but thanks to the soft, wet ground, the impact was hardly jarring. From the corner of my eye, I saw Fisher running toward us.
Pete was climbing the rocky slope. His foot slipped and his knee went down hard. I climbed after him, gritting my teeth as my sneakers squeaked against the jagged rocks. Sweat prickled down my back, mixing with the relentless rain.
“Fisher! See if you can get down on the other side!” I shouted. “Cut him off!”
“On it!”
Fisher ran ahead, then disappeared from sight. In seconds I was so close to Pete I could make out the pattern of the treads on the bottom of his shoes. Then he jumped to his feet and started carefully across the expanse of the jetty. Suddenly he froze in his tracks.
“Nowhere to go, dude!” I heard Fisher shout. “Give it up.”
“Yes,” I said under my breath. We had Pete trapped. I climbed to my feet. He turned around, took one look at me, and started to run—toward the ocean.
“What the—”
I took off after him. The terrain was uneven, wet, and pocked with puddles. Dead jellyfish clung to one angled rock, their bulbous bodies torn and limp. I slipped once and my hands came down atop a pile of broken crab shells, pincers, and legs. I gritted my teeth and pushed myself up again. Somehow, I was still gaining on Pete, but it no longer mattered. He’d reached the end of the jetty. His back was to me, and his shoulders rose and fell as he heaved in breath after breath.
“There’s nowhere to go!” I shouted. “You can’t hide from us forever.”
He turned around, his knees like jelly, and looked me in the eye. “I can hide from you long enough.”
I blinked. “Long enough for what?”
“For me to get what I want,” he said, turning his palms out. His eyes flicked past me, and I turned my head just enough to see Fisher clambering up the rocks nearby. “Listen, Rory. In case something happens, I want you to know, it wasn’t my idea.”
“What?” I asked, my heart pounding anew. “What wasn’t your idea?”
“To take your family,” he said quietly. “Or to pin it on you. I was just the muscle.”
My brain felt about as steady as the roiling waves behind him. “I don’t understand. You’re saying you were involved? With Tristan and Nadia? With the ushering?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t them. It was never them.”
My head went weightless, everything I had believed, obliterated in one breath. If it wasn’t Tristan and Nadia, then who the hell was it? How had they done it? Where had they gotten the tainted coins, and why had they set up Tristan to take the fall?
“Who?” I demanded as Fisher approached me from behind. “Who are you working with?”
“Don’t do anything stupid, Pete,” he said, his voice rumbling like thunder. “You know better than anyone that we’re not immortal. Not anymore.”
Pete chuckled. “That’s a chance I’m gonna have to take.”
Then he took a step back and turned.
“No!” I screeched.
But it was too late. Pete launched himself off the jetty and disappeared beneath the ink-black waves.
Tristan’s chest rose and fell under the crisp blue sheets folded across his body. After we’d left the night before, the mayor called in Teresa Malone, a Lifer who had been a nurse in the other world, and it seemed as if she’d taken good care of him. His head was now wrapped in white gauze and positioned flat against a slim pillow, his arms straight down against his sides. I stood next to his bed while the wind whipped outside, pelting the windowpanes with a smattering of fat, relentless raindrops.
It was Friday morning. Thirty-six hours since my sister had been taken and almost eight hours since Fisher dove into the water after Pete and came back empty-handed. Pete had disappeared. He’d either drowned or somehow managed to get away. I hoped like hell he was still out there somewhere, because if he was dead, we’d never get our answers. If he was dead, all was lost.
Dorn was supposed to radio everyone if and when Pete was found, and I’d been waiting on pins and needles throughout the night. Until, that is, I’d finally passed out from utter exhaustion in the bed next to Krista’s. When we’d woken this morning, we found two brand-new, shiny gold coins on her nightstand. With Pete on the run, did that mean they were clean? Was it safe to start ushering people again?
The only thing I knew for sure was that we needed to find Pete. He was the only one who would know how to save my family. I checked my walkie-talkie to make sure it was on, and of course it was. Radio silence had become my enemy.
I turned the volume up, just in case, and sat forward, staring at the well-worn leather Lifer bracelet clinging to Tristan’s thick wrist. I looked at his profile, his normally tanned cheeks seeming sunken and waxy. He moaned softly, and I wondered if he was dreaming of when Pete had attacked him. Had he seen who was working with him?
I pulled the desk chair over and sat next to Tristan’s bed. My hand twitched to take his, but I hesitated, suddenly confused. Tristan was innocent, wasn’t he? He was just a victim. Like Darcy, like Dad, like Aaron. And if it could somehow help…tether him to the here and now…I had to try.
Placing my hand over his, I looked at his face. His skin was warm. That had to be a good sign. Especially after how cold he had felt yesterday. He was improving. Tears welled in my eyes.
“Tristan?” I said quietly. “It’s me, Rory. I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can…we’re here. We’re here for you, and we want you to get better.”
My voice cracked and I took a breath. “I’m so sorry I thought you were guilty. I should have known. I should have believed.
…I was just so upset about my dad and now Darcy.…” I paused, hearing myself, and cleared my throat. Was I really sitting here trying to make excuses to a guy in a coma? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
My head popped up. Joaquin stood, perfectly framed by the bedroom doorway, wearing a blue-and-gray baseball T-shirt and jeans. Even with the purple bruise in the center of his forehead from when he’d been knocked out earlier, he looked, in a word, gorgeous. And also concerned.
“Nothing.”
I slid my hand away from Tristan’s, across the sheet, and into my lap. I lifted my eyes to meet Joaquin’s. “Just that I thought he was guilty.”
“Everyone did, at some point or another,” Joaquin said. He stepped into the room and hovered on the other side of the bed. “How is he?”
“The same. Teresa from the bike shop was with him through the night, and he hasn’t woken up.”
I shrugged feebly as more raindrops pelted the window behind me. The wind whistled through the gutters and eaves. As the silence between us went on, I started to sweat. Yesterday I had kissed this guy. I had wanted nothing more than to be with him. To let him help me forget the rest of this stupid universe existed.
“Rory…” Joaquin said.
I looked him in the eye. “What’re we going to do, Joaquin?” I said simply, without thinking.
His shoulders dropped half an inch. It might have been imperceptible if I wasn’t so totally in tune with his every movement.
“I have no idea.”
Suddenly our walkie-talkies crackled to life. “Rory? Come in, Rory. It’s Dorn. Over.”
My breath caught, and I fumbled the radio off my waistband, pressing down firmly on the talk button. “What is it? Did you find him?”
There was a beat of silence. A beat too long. “I…well, we’re not sure yet. Over.”
I looked up at Joaquin, and I could feel our panic rising together. He lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips, his eyes never leaving mine. “What the hell does that mean?”