It Wasn't Always Like This

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dallas, Texas

  Present

  Emma launched herself from the chair, slamming into Matt, anger and adrenaline surging as her body collided with his.

  They hit the f loor together, her elbow knocking over a container of something acrid and pungent, sending it puddling just beyond where they sprawled, her forehead smacking the f loor with an audible thump.

  This time the blackness threatened to drag her under.

  “Emma!”

  She jerked her head painfully in Pete’s direction. His hands might be free, but his legs were still tied to the chair, his left shoulder def initely broken or dislocated. How had he even managed to untie her hands?

  In that distracted second, Matt pushed up hard, breaking her hold, and somehow he was dragging her to her feet, the cold metal nose of a gun pushed against the back of her aching head.

  “Don’t!” Pete said, his voice a low and dangerous growl.

  Emma’s vision had gone wonky, spots and pinwheels, and a sharp panic rushed over her.

  “Let her go,” Pete said. “Let both of them go. Deal with me.”

  Matt tightened his grip on Emma. He pressed his mouth to her ear, and she shuddered. “We’re going to walk out this door together, Emma. Just you and me.”

  The dizziness threatened to overcome her, but she forced her voice to stay steady. “Your friends run off on you?” Because there had been others, so why weren’t they here? Had something happened?

  “Shut up,” Matt said. “Get moving.” He was backing toward the door now, dragging her with him, the gun still pressed to her temple.

  She was so dizzy it was hard to move. So dizzy that she barely heard the sound of the door opening behind them. And then an excited and oddly high-pitched voice said, “Drop the gun. Do it now.”

  Matt whipped around, pulling her with him.

  “Your friends aren’t coming back, by the way,” said a short, bow-legged man with distinctly frog-like features. He was wearing tidy khakis, a striped button-down, and what looked to Emma’s increasingly hazy vision as some form of boat shoe. Other than his footwear—which was a step more fashionable than the clumsy work boots he had favored in the distant past, he looked exactly as Emma remembered him.

  “Kingsley Lloyd?” She wondered if she was hallucinating. How was he here? Why was he here? Was he working with Matt? How was that possible?

  But all she could manage was, “You’re alive.”

  She’d known, of course, deep down, that he probably was. But the shock of it—of another person who had traversed the decades, who had lived and lived, even if it was this absurd, traitorous man. Even if it wasn’t Charlie. She was shaking now, and not just from the waves of dizziness.

  “So are you,” Lloyd said, and there was something like wonder or delight in his wide eyes.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Pete muttered.

  “What the hell did you do?” Matt lifted the gun from her head and waved it over Emma’s shoulder at Kingsley Lloyd.

  “Evened the odds,” said Kingsley Lloyd.

  Matt was dragging her again, the gun still pointed at Lloyd. Emma could see Pete now, his gaze f licking from the gun to Emma and Matt to Kingsley Lloyd.

  Emma could no longer hear Coral’s labored breathing.

  It was like that f irst day she had loved Charlie. The day she had let the hawk free. Emma O’Neill, the girl who could not bear to make mistakes, the girl who would make so many of them that she would soon lose track. She had lost everything but never given up hope. Would never give up as long as her heart was still beating in her chest, because really, what else could she do?

  The years pressed on that beating heart, all of them, a tumble of lives and moments, of words said and unsaid, promises made and broken.

  And a thought rose from her jumbled brain. If Matt wanted her dead, he would have already shot her. There was no reason not to.

  So if not that, then . . .

  A memory of something, of one thing, rose to her tongue. Or rather, she allowed it to rise. Because Emma remembered mostly everything. The endless span of days and weeks and months and years.

  Yes, Emma thought. It could work. It had to work.

  She turned her head as best she could. “Do you know we’re mostly made of water, Matt? Did Mr. Lloyd tell you that was the key?”

  A few feet from her, Kingsley Lloyd made a hmm sound in the back of his throat.

  “Shut up,” said Matt, but she knew he was listening.

  “What did he promise you? Eternal life? To be like us? Because that’s what you really want, isn’t it? I thought you wanted what they’ve all wanted. To kill me. To make sure no one stayed on this earth longer than they were supposed to. Because that just ruins your fun, doesn’t it?”

  Matt waved the gun at Lloyd again. “You told me you had something.”

  Emma pondered his question, but her head was throbbing harder now, and her left eye erupted in some kind of kaleidoscope pattern. The odor of the liquid spilling out of the container made her breath come harder in her chest. She managed a quick glance at Pete. His gaze was locked on Matt’s gun.

  She shifted her attention to Kingsley Lloyd and saw his lips lift in a quick slash of a smile.

  “Do you remember what you asked me that day, Mr. Lloyd? About the lobsters?”

  “Lobsters?” Matt yanked Emma tighter against him. Pete’s gaze slid to Emma’s, and she could see the question in his eyes. What are you doing? Even if she had been able to answer, she wasn’t sure what she would say.

  “They don’t age,” Emma said aloud. “They just get bigger.”

  “Enough of this bullshit.” Matt’s hand steadied on the gun.

  “You don’t want to kill me,” Emma said. “You want to be me.” When she heard his quick intake of breath, she knew it was the truth. “You want to know what it’s like?”

  She had him now. She knew it. She just had to distract him long enough for Pete to make a move. And if Emma knew anything, it was that Pete, injured or not, gun or not, would make a move.

  “It’s amazing. Like Christmas and birthdays and sunsets over the ocean all rolled into one. I don’t age. I don’t get sick. Ever. I won’t ever contract a cold or the f lu. I won’t get cancer. I won’t start forgetting my keys and discover I’ve got Alzheimer’s. My hair won’t go gray. My skin won’t wrinkle. I won’t wake up one day and think, ‘My God, I’ve wasted all these years, and now I don’t have many left.’ You know why? Because I’ve got an inf inite number. I won’t drop down dead from some aneurysm. If there’s a place I haven’t seen, well, I can always go see it tomorrow. Because I have all the tomorrows. Every single one. You know why? Because Kingsley Lloyd here, he found the impossible. And then he shared it with me.”

  Emma’s head was f lying now, threatening to rise dizzily off her shoulders. “What did he promise you, Matt? Was it that?”

  Matt’s gaze was locked on Kingsley Lloyd. “You said you had it still. The plant.”

  “I do,” Lloyd said. “Absolutely.”

  Kingsley Lloyd’s face did not give away the lie. Did not let on to what he must know just as she did—that the few original sips of tea from the plant on the island was all they had needed. It didn’t matter if the stream had disappeared, that none of them (so she assumed) had ever found it again.

  She had not aged. Not one bit. And neither, she assumed, had Charlie. Kingsley Lloyd looked exactly as she remembered him, which was to say, not that good. But he was the same, just as she was.

  She would always be this.

  Unless of course, Matt shot her in the head. That she preferred to avoid.

  And then Matt’s arm jerked and something sharp and hot grazed Emma’s cheek, and then Kingsley Lloyd was screaming and swearing and clutching his arm.

  In that moment, P
ete, chair and broken shoulder and collarbone and all, hurled himself at her and Matt.

  What followed was a wild commotion, a f lurry of bodies, and a dropped gun skittering across the f loor, but not going off. Emma grabbed for Matt but he twisted away, running for the gun. And then out of the corner of her still-functioning right eye, she saw a f lame, just as she heard the rasp of a match striking.

  “Go!” Kingsley Lloyd was shouting, pushing her aside. “Go!” He dropped the match to the f loor.

  The f ire caught the spilled liquid from the containers, burned, and spread swiftly across the f loor in a mesmerizing line straight toward Matt, who had almost reached the gun.

  The f lames caught the cuff of his pants, traveling up his leg in the time it took Emma to realize what was happening.

  “Pete!” She reached for him, not sure how she had the strength because she was so woozy, but managing to shove him toward the door. Then she somehow scrambled over to Coral, because even in her terror, she knew that whatever Coral was sick with, Emma and Lloyd were the only ones who could safely come near her.

  But Lloyd stood where he was, arm dripping blood, a box of wooden matches in his hand.

  The room was burning faster now, empty wooden pallets furiously catching on f ire, the whole thing igniting.

  Had it been Matt who had set that apartment in her building on f ire? Or Lloyd? Or neither of them? She saw her family and Charlie’s, trapped in that room in the Alligator Farm and Museum. She saw them as she and Charlie had found them. Matt was burning to death like they had. Like she might have in her apartment, had Pete not knocked on the door.

  She watched dizzily as Matt dropped to the f loor, rolling, but the f lames were everywhere, and he was screaming.

  “Help him,” she shouted as she untied Coral from the cot. “Help him.” The girl’s skin was too warm, her fever seeming to build as she leaned heavily on Emma. “Help him.”

  But no one did, and Emma would always know that a part of her felt it was a fair exchange for everything else. Whatever Matt was, whatever he wanted, whatever he understood in those moments, she would never know. He had not told them. He hadn’t said he was sorry or threatened revenge. He hadn’t explained himself beyond the actions that he had already committed.

  Emma saw her parents’ faces. Her brothers and sister. Simon. His hair.

  “O’Neill!” Pete stumbled to her side, barely mobile, somehow unbound from the chair. “Keep moving. Don’t you dare give up now.”

  The insistence of his voice broke her fear. “Don’t touch Coral,” she rasped, the smoke f illing her lungs. “She’s too contagious. I’ll get her out of here. Help him. We can’t let him burn.”

  “It’s too late,” said Kingsley Lloyd. Emma registered that Matt was no longer screaming.

  Lloyd pushed on the door. There was a rush of air, and the f lames were growing, but she was outside and not on f ire.

  Could they have saved Matt? She didn’t know. What did she really know, anyway? After all this time, not enough. Never enough.

  Kingsley Lloyd was bleeding, and Pete was broken, and Emma—still and always seventeen—had saved Coral Ballard. She had told Matt what she thought he wanted to believe.

  She thought of that tattoo on his arm.

  Whatever he’d actually believed hadn’t saved him.

  Now she sat on the cold, weed-strewn ground in the middle of what was clearly some half-abandoned warehouse district. She saw the shadow of downtown Dallas looming in the distance, and wondered vaguely if Matt had wanted to die, to become a martyr, if the f ire was a surprise or the plan all along. But there was nothing that could be done. The warehouse was an inferno.

  In the distance and growing closer, the sound of sirens and emergency vehicles f illed the air.

  “Stupid bastard,” said Kingsley Lloyd.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  St. Augustine, Florida

  1913–present

  Kingsley Lloyd had always known he was destined for greatness. Even before. The problem was, no one else knew it. Even more, no one cared. His life was a sham, but the funny thing was, sometimes even a sham turns out to be the truth.

  When he arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, on a hot April afternoon, the sun beating down relentlessly, even with the cooling ocean breeze sifting over him, he was almost dead broke, without any family relations he cared to claim, and unclear why he’d chosen this place. He was on the run from the law after a slight altercation concerning his organizational role in the type of questionable f inancial pyramid that would later be referred to as a Ponzi scheme.

  Kingsley Lloyd—whose real name was something else he had sloughed off so long ago, he barely remembered it—was moderately educated, although the best and most important things he knew he had taught himself through reading, by pissing people off, and by observing with great interest all he aspired to yet hadn’t found a way to acquire.

  In shorter terms, a con man, although not always a successful one.

  But he was, as he would later see in Emma and Charlie, and the late Frank Ryan, ever hopeful and optimistic that things would turn around. He knew when he stumbled out of that warehouse many years later that, had he asked her, Emma would have said she was none of those things, that she was instead, jaded and cynical and terribly lonely. He would have told her he could do nothing about the last one, but the fact that she continued to search and live and f igure things out made her far more positive-thinking than she acknowledged.

  But he also knew she would never ask. She was most likely far too busy mourning the f iery demise of Matthew Thigpen, even though she would eventually realize as Lloyd had, that his death meant they were free. The Church of Light, or the Light Givers as they had renamed themselves, would fracture and dissipate, and eventually some new awful thing might take their place, but for now the threat was gone.

  Kingsley Lloyd had done what he’d needed to in order to save his own skin. He’d saved Emma O’Neill, too, or at least that’s how he saw it. He f igured he owed it to her, although in truth, he rarely thought in those types of terms. He didn’t owe anyone anything. He was a survivor.

  That—more than any potion of immortality—was what had kept him alive all these years.

  When he arrived in St. Augustine, he knew enough natural science and biology and botany and the stray smattering of zoology to offer himself up to the Ryans and O’Neills as an expert herpetologist. The truth was, he had overheard Frank’s bragging tales. One con man would protect another, he f igured, at least as long as Kingsley Lloyd kept his nose clean and did what they were paying him for, or faked it enough to get by. It all came down to wanting a piece of the business. Just like he told Charlie that day in 1939 when, having tracked Charlie down through the army photograph, he hoped to convince him that Emma was dead.

  Because if the boy stopped looking for Emma, he would stay put, and the Light Givers would f ind him and kill him. It would be one more safety measure to make sure they never got to Lloyd. That’s how he had worked it out in his head. Besides, the girl had to be dead by now, didn’t she?

  He’d tried to track both of them, but only Charlie had left a large enough trail, although Lloyd supposed that was on purpose. If he had a girl he loved (he’d never quite given up that possibility, but it no longer seemed likely), he would have left a set of obvious clues to draw people off her path, too. So he got it. He really did.

  Still Charlie Ryan was, in Kingsley Lloyd’s estimation, a romantically deluded fool. He was searching for a ghost.

  But Emma, well, Glen Walters hadn’t found her, but Lloyd suspected Norman Thigpen had. Or would, if Charlie was right, which seemed unlikely. Still, odder things had happened. Certainly their eternal life was proof of that. The key was to make Charlie believe it, to accept that Emma was dead and gone, regardless of the truth.

  But that was in 1939. Back when this whole thing
began, back in St. Augustine, the twentieth century brand spanking new, Lloyd’s only thought had been that Florida seemed as good a place as any to succeed.

  If that didn’t work, he f igured he’d make his way across the country to that other coast. Maybe live in Hollywood out in California. Get a job in the movie picture industry, because if there was ever a con man’s game, that was it. If Lloyd knew anything, it was how to make people believe in dreams and sleight of hand.

  But he’d try this f irst. See what he could make of it.

  Kingsley Lloyd had never seen an alligator up close, but why should that stop him? He’d read about them and studied their physiology. It would be enough. Besides, O’Neill and Ryan were self-made men, both of them, which Kingsley admired. Hadn’t O’Neill told him straight up that he’d apprenticed for only six months with the former owner when he bought the place? That was how it worked in America. You took what you wanted and hoped for the best. Then you worked your ass off to keep it.

  Lloyd was f ine with that. The gators scared him, he had to admit. But what was a little fear when he was going to earn his fortune? Be like the Rockefellers or the Hearsts. He could have his own castle someday if he wanted. Nothing was impossible!

  He had never imagined the plant at the edge of the now missing pond held the secret to eternity: the plant and the pond together, in concert. He simply thought the plant looked like something he’d read about in an old botany book, one he’d bought in a little odds-and-ends shop on Royal Street in New Orleans. Now there was a strange, magical town, f illed with people who believed absolutely in the unseen and the impossible. But oh, the heat. Made Florida feel positively moderate some days.

  What he f igured was that his little ground-plant concoction might very well stave off that horrid polio virus. The rest of it he watched unfold along with the others, the only difference being, he understood before the rest of them what seemed to be happening. It took the young ones not changing for him to see it.

  The ones who weren’t like him, already sicker than he cared to admit, had some liver ailment, the doctor had said. It wouldn’t kill him right off, but eventually . . .