Envy (Fury) (23 page)

“I’m sure she has some weak spots,” Meg said, her voice silky. “Everyone does. You just haven’t found them yet. You’ve barely looked. And neither has Pierce. . . .”

Skylar sighed. She could feel the lump in her throat slowly melting. “I guess . . .” She was still doubtful.

“I’m telling you, nobody’s perfect,” Meg replied firmly, leaning forward so her hair framed her face like a curtain. “You just have to be willing to really
look
for your opportunity.”

Skylar looked up. It almost sounded like Meg was talking about sabotage.

“Think about everything you’ve done to make this the best dance ever,” Meg continued, smiling sweetly, still tilting her head ever so slightly. “You’ve worked so hard. Are you really going to give up now?”

•  •  •

The next day Skylar was just locking a stall door in the science wing bathroom when she heard two familiar voices swing through the door.

It was Gabby and Em.

“It’s just that I feel bad for Skylar.” That was Em’s voice.

Skylar stepped up onto the toilet, praying they wouldn’t try her stall. They didn’t.

“I know, I know, me too,” Gabby answered. “But, like, I just have so many people to worry about right now. I told you how I finally broke down and emailed Zach, right? Well, he never emailed me back, so last night I decided to just call him. Just to do it, you know? But his phone is off.” There was a note of concern in her voice. “Like, off-off—like it’s been shut off.”

Both girls had exited their stalls by now and were washing their hands and primping in front of the mirror. Skylar could see them through the crack between her door and the wall.

“That’s bizarre,” Em answered, her voice sounding cagey.

“And I know I shouldn’t have tried to contact him in the first place,” Gabby went on, “but after everything I’ve been hearing, all this gruesome stuff about him not being able to play sports anymore . . . I just want to know what’s going on, you know?”

“I totally get it,” Em said. “I mean, he was a huge part of your life.”

“And so that’s why I think I’ve been reveling in the Pierce thing,” Gabby continued. Skylar’s breath caught in her lungs at the mention of Pierce. “It’s not like I
want
to date him—I really do want to be alone right now. But it’s nice to have some distraction.”

Skylar stayed perfectly still—if they hadn’t noticed they had company yet, maybe they wouldn’t.

“I mean, I think that’s fair. It’s just . . . What about Skylar?” That came from Em.

“No, no, I still think they should be together!” Gabby’s protest was high-pitched but earnest. “Like, if I can’t take him right now, she should. She’s totally adorable, and so is he.”

Skylar tried to stop her legs from shaking. Here she was, Gabby Dove’s pathetic charity case. Taking Gabby’s leftovers, or the stuff she didn’t want.

She listened to Gabby and Em leave and leaned against the inside of her stall door, letting the cool metal press against her forehead.

What about Skylar?
The words echoed around in her mind; their pitying tone made her want to throw up.

She could barely contain herself during fourth and fifth periods. She called Meg immediately at lunch.

“Are you working today?”

“No, why?” Meg answered.

“Can you drive me somewhere?”

She skipped last period, met Meg in the parking lot, and directed her to Gabby’s house.

“Wait down here,” Skylar said as they pulled into the bottom of Gabby’s long driveway. Skylar could see that there were no cars parked at the top of it; the Doves were still at work, and Skylar knew that Gabby had a spring cheerleading prep meeting after school. She was in the clear, at least for a little while.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what’s going on?” Meg said, grinning. Skylar knew that Meg loved surprises.

“I’ll tell you later. Just wait at the end of the driveway, on the street. I’ll only be a few minutes.” She pushed out of the maroon Lincoln and ran up the driveway toward Gabby’s house. She was buzzing with anxiety; her fingers felt numb in her gloves. At the front door she rang the bell, just in case. No answer. Then she ran around to the back and knocked on the panes—again, she was just being cautious. But there was obviously no one home, and the Doves didn’t lock their back door. Everyone who knew Gabby knew that. She and her mom were always forgetting their keys.

“Hello?” Skylar said as she stepped into the Doves’ gleaming kitchen, where pictures of Gabby and her brothers covered the stainless steel refrigerator.

Skylar ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and into Gabby’s bedroom. She took it all in. This was a reconnaissance mission. On the opposite side of the room, next to Gabby’s neatly made bed, was a dresser, on top of which were all of Gabby’s hair and face products. Her curling iron. Her face cream and scented moisturizers. Her makeup.

Next to the dresser was a chair where scarves and leggings and dresses were heaped haphazardly. Next to her small closet—“the absolute bane of my existence,” Gabby was fond of saying—was a shoe rack, crammed with Gabby’s trademark wedge heels in every color. Gold, red, teal, madras plaid. Straw heels, wooden heels, stacked heels.

Skylar allowed her fingers to brush against the downy, creamy comforter. It was hard not to think of Lucy as she made her way around Gabby’s room, her feet sinking just barely into the plush wall-to-wall carpeting. Lucy, too, had had a room filled with pictures and trophies and stuffed animals—probably given to her by boyfriends. Lucy, too, had had clothes that fit her perfectly, and makeup that accentuated her perfect skin. Not like Skylar, whose closet was filled with clothes that would look good “once she lost a few pounds,” whose makeup bag was packed with various tubes of cover-up to hide her seemingly constant rotation of breakouts.

Her determination started to wane. Her intent was to study Gabby and find her imperfections, but in this perfect room it was hard to imagine that Gabby had any weak points. Even as Gabby’s own admission rang in Skylar’s head—
I’m just tired. People expect me to be perfect—
it was becoming difficult to see anything but the pretty flawlessness of Gabby, her room, and her life.

Skylar felt the familiar sensation of jealousy beginning to boil, its hot fingers coiling around her veins, her throat, her tongue. It was impossible now to tamp down the burning shame that rose up every time she thought about what had happened at her Haunted Woods party, which was supposed to be her big “coming out”—instead, she had looked like a freak, and the only thing that actually “came out” was the color of her thong. No wonder Pierce would always choose Gabby over her.

Her sister had so fondly reminded her hundreds of times:
Some people are just late bloomers.
Of course, there was a tacit corollary to that statement:
Some people have it all, right from the get-go
. Her skin started to crawl with heat, as though she was in the spotlight of the unbearable pageant stage lights . . . as though she was covered in sticky, unflattering makeup . . . as though the laughing crowd was bringing a blush to her cheeks.

Skylar thought she heard a footfall behind her and spun around. Of course, she was alone. Lucy wasn’t here anymore. Lucy would never hurt her again.

Still, blistering tears welled in her eyes. She let out a plaintive cry. She was
not
a loser anymore. She was a winner—and winners took what they wanted. It was the only way. She had seen that for herself.

She needed to tip the scales. If only Gabby could just be a little
less
cute—like if she got a bad breakout or something embarrassing—then she’d withdraw from the spotlight a bit. Just for a little while. Just long enough, maybe, to give Skylar a chance of being voted Queen of Spring at the dance?

Then she heard the sound of a car pulling into Gabby’s driveway. She had to get the hell out of this house. Breathlessly, she ran downstairs and out the back door just as she heard the garage door start to grind open.

There was a woodshed off to the side of the house. She ducked inside it, peering through the slatted wood frame and
watching as Marty Dove’s car pulled into the garage. From somewhere above her she heard a faint buzzing sound. She tried to ignore it, but it only seemed to grow louder.

Skylar attempted to turn around without upsetting any of the rakes or grill instruments that leaned against the wall. Almost directly above her was a small, papery gray beehive attached to a beam. Shit. She whirled around too quickly, knocking against the wall and rocking the whole structure.

Bzzzz
. Several bees came pouring out of the hive. Skylar swatted at one of them, driving it against the wall, where it thudded to the ground. Another one stung her on the arm. She winced and gasped.

She pushed out of the shed and fled down the driveway, hugging the treeline, praying that Mrs. Dove didn’t choose that moment to look out her front windows.

“Hey, my little busy bee,” Meg said with a smile as Skylar flung open the passenger-side door and leaped into the car, holding her cold hand against her neck as a makeshift ice pack. “Did you find any dirt on your queen?”

The gravestone glowed in the moonlight, distractingly new next to the older, settled, moss-covered stones around it. Em sucked in her breath and tried not to focus on the dates below Sasha’s name, the ones that showed her to be merely sixteen when she’d died. She tried not to think of Sasha in the hospital, her maniacal grin, the blood coming from her mouth. She tried not to think of anything but the task at hand.

The Furies spring from blood,
the library book said.
Although they sometimes take the form of snakes, or appear with snakes as part of their visage, the Furies can assume many identities
.

She was taking a risk, she knew that, but she had a theory and she wanted to test it out. She’d made a deal with herself: She’d try this experiment tonight, and if it didn’t work, she would tell Drea
about the book, Sasha’s involvement with the Furies, all of it. But if she could avoid dragging Drea in deeper, she would.

That’s why she was here, alone in the graveyard on a moonlit night. She’d come on foot; the cemetery was less than a mile from her house. It had been a terrifying walk, and her imagination had run out of control. Figures behind every tree. Black birds circling overhead. An owl hooting in the distance. She didn’t know what was real and what was her imagination. So she tried her best to filter out everything but her immediate plan.

Em was going to try to reverse-conjure the Furies. Just as they had been called up from their underground lair, she was going to send them back below. And she was going to do it here, near Sasha’s burial place, because she was almost certain now that it was Sasha who had summoned them this time. Hadn’t Ty said something to that effect? That Sasha had invited them back to Ascension? What else could she have meant by that?

Em kneeled before the grave, a knife in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

“I’m here, Sasha,” she said out loud. “I’m going to finish what you started.”

With a deep breath and a determined grimace, she dumped the contents of the pet shop bag onto the dirt. A snake slithered out. Em quickly threw her hand down on its middle before it could slither away, suppressing a whimper of disgust.

Holding the snake in place, feeling her stomach clench and
roll as the creature squirmed beneath her, Em pulled a knife from her pocket with her free hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the snake, which would likely have become a child’s pet if she hadn’t purchased it just a few hours ago.

Recalling what she’d read in the book, she raised the knife in the air. She hesitated and let the knife fall to the ground, turned away, gagged into the night air. She couldn’t do this. This was insane.

Don’t think about it. This is for JD. This is to make things right. This is to save Ascension.

She drew in a big breath, lifted the knife again, and brought it down, hard, between the snake’s eyes.

The squirming stopped, and Em let out a tiny sob. She’d never killed a living thing before, other than an insect. She felt her whole body shuddering, but it was too late to stop now—she had to keep going with her plan.

She wiped her wet eyes with the back of her hand and talked aloud to herself. “You can do this, Em.” She’d memorized what the book said to do next, and pounded on the icy dirt with her fist.

“Furies, return to where you came from,” she intoned. She began digging a hole, doing the best she could in the frozen ground. When the hole was big enough for the snake, which she coiled into a neat circle, it was time for the next step.

“You spring from blood, then blood will bring you back,”
she said into the night air. She looked up, letting her hair whip around her face as she implored to the sky, “Please. Let this work.”

Then she put the tip of the knife against her own palm. It felt smooth against her winter-chapped hand. The ritual called for drops of blood—five of them, to be precise. Just like she had swallowed five bloodred seeds. Once again she doubted she would be able to go through with it.

You have to. There’s no choice.

She was about to press down and break the skin. She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see the first spurt of blood. Scared of the pain. And then—

“Em! Stop!” The words came from behind her; she screamed and dropped the knife in front of her, leaping to her feet and ready to run.

There, standing behind a cluster of larger headstones, was JD. His brown hair was blowing in the slight breeze, and his hands were stuffed into the pockets of his bomber jacket.

Em couldn’t believe her eyes. She fought to catch her breath.

“JD? What . . .” She barely knew what to ask him. How long had he been there? How much had he seen? Why was he there in the first place? But he didn’t let her speak.

“What the hell are you doing, Em? Are you out of your mind?” He came closer. Even in the dark she could see the shocked look on his face. Gone was the normally goofy grin. He was speaking loudly, in a tone that Em barely recognized. “Thank
god I followed you here. What were you—what were you
doing
?” He stormed up next to her, bent down, and picked up the knife.