Jillian Cade (19 page)

Just ask the Romans.

From what Norbert and I could discern from my father's notes, it looked like the Elem had
known
their rule was about to come to an end (which had to suck), so they'd started squabbling about what to do. They split into two factions. One wanted to become a part of the world that was coming, and the other wanted to fight against it. The two sides went to war, and you can pretty much guess what happened: whole cities turned to dust, massive calamities, things like that. At the end of the day, the leaders of both camps were forced to surrender. They got together and made a pact (or rather, a
Pact
): everyone would go to sleep—a special, magical sleep—rather than allow the world to be torn apart.

Norbert squinted at the screen. “It says the Elem ‘crawled into the bones of the earth.'”

“What does that mean, ‘bones of the earth'?”

He shrugged. “You got me.”

I flashed back to the rooftop and what Corabelle had said to me. My mother hadn't fallen asleep with her kind. She and the other six traitors had stayed awake, and now others were awakening too.

“Corabelle,” I said out loud.

“Huh?”

“Corabelle said she'd been awakened
. . .
”

But that didn't make sense. Corabelle was a succubus, not an Elem. I returned to the screen. “All evidence of their existence was erased from the world,” I read aloud before looking over at Norbert again. “Okay, that's wrong. We
know
all evidence wasn't erased because, besides the monsters we keep tripping over, everyone keeps talking about keys and bridges.”

Norbert shrugged again, peering at the screen. “Maybe it's like wiping a kitchen counter. It might look like you got everything. You might even have used a spray bottle, but you always miss a crumb or two. Maybe a piece sticks in the grout or gets stuck in a corner somewhere. A splash of milk dries before anyone can clean it, and the residue is still there, nearly invisible. Stuff sticks around.”

I swatted his arm. “That's a lot to get from Dad's file.”

“I'm extrapolating.”

I started to pace around the cluttered room, my mind racing again, a familiar heat rising somewhere inside my chest. “The Pact was broken. And the new world has to be
our
world. So do you think that guy on the roof was an Elem? One of the original seven hidden Elem? If so, he would have known my mother.” I waited for my cousin to agree with me, but when I looked over at him, he was frozen. “Norb?”

He stared at the screen.

“Norbert!”

His face had gone pale. “They set a trap for the seven who didn't sleep.” He quoted the words as they formed in my head, lifted verbatim from the terrifying memory of that
thing
in Misty's lair:
“The seven lied and one of them died.”

“Norbert.” I whispered.

“Jillian, there's more,” he whispered back.

Of course there was more.

“There was a law,” he said. And then he spit it out in one fast breath: “A-law-decreeing-separation-between-worlds.”

“What does that even—” I started to ask, and then stopped.

Click.

The puzzle pieces came together with a sickening lurch.

I stared at Norbert. “Someone broke that law. Two someones. An Elem and a human.”

Norbert stood and stepped toward me, unsure of what to do. I knew he wanted to hug me. But he also knew I didn't want to be hugged. “You were that first child. When you were born, the trap was sprung. The doors opened for the old world to come back.”

“Corabelle was right. It
is
my fault.” Somehow, I squeezed the words out past the horror that rose up in my throat, strangling any hope for light at the end of this very dark tunnel. “When I was born, the monsters came.”

Twenty-Eight

Norbert finally went
home after leaving a voice mail for Sky. I also tried to call him several times but didn't hear back until early evening. Until then, I was left alone with my thoughts. The ones that were all about unleashing hell, for starters. And also the ones about the con man whose biggest, longest con had been on his own daughter. And about Rosemary. But mostly they were about Sky, the one puzzle piece that still refused to fit.

At 7:15, Sky texted, asking me to meet him.

I immediately called Norbert.

“Meet him,” Norbert said.

“Really? Do you want to come?”

He laughed gently. “No, you got this one. But you know that you're not alone now, right, Jilly Willy?”

I hung up before he could get sappier.

LA-96C, also known as
the Nike missile site, is a hiking destination off Mulholland Drive above Encino. Technically speaking, it really should be known as an
anti
missile site, since its purpose during the Cold War was to detect hostile aircraft.

I wished it could detect all things that were hostile.

I'd been there once before, so I was familiar with the layout. I parked on the dirt track near the entrance and, ignoring the signs that the area was closed after sunset, climbed over a yellow gate and onto the trail. I used my (now fully charged) phone to light the way. I had downloaded a flashlight app, which was surprisingly bright.

With its help, I reached the radar tower in less than ten minutes of silent walking. I paused for a moment at the base. A crooked ramp led up into the darkness.

Halfway up, I saw that Sky was already there, standing in the center of the platform on top. When he heard me, he flashed his own phone to light my way.

“I should have met you in the parking lot,” he said. “It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.”

“That's never been your strong suit,” I said, walking past him to the edge of the platform. As I set my hands upon the chest-level railing, I had a brief flashback to the last time I had been this high above the ground with my hands on a scabby metal bar. That time, someone had died. I shook off the memory and turned to Sky. Of course he was even more angular and messy and beautiful by starlight.

“Why here?” I asked him.

Sky set his hands on my shoulders and gently turned me back to face the way I had been looking, out over the Los Angeles Basin, where millions of lights twinkled up at us, the dark silhouette of the mountain ranges beyond. “Because this is your city,” he told me. “Because it's mystifying and dangerous, but it's also beautiful and complicated.” He wrapped his arms around me from behind and tucked his face down close to my ear. “Like you,” he whispered.

If I had been a normal girl with a normal life, the moment would have been perfect. I would have spun around in the circle of Sky's arms. I would have risen up on tiptoes to kiss him. This would have become our preferred spot for make-out sessions. Maybe I would have changed my online status to “in a relationship.”

But I wasn't a normal girl. I was the daughter of an ancient betrayer. And my life wasn't normal because the boy who liked me was also the boy who had deceived me.

I pulled away and took a step backward, putting distance between our two bodies. “Tell me about the obituary.”

“I will. I promise. But I want you to know something.” Sky smiled the most gentle, saddest of smiles. “I have no regrets about any of this.”

Well, that makes one of us.

“In that first moment by your locker, the whole world opened up,” he continued. “Before, I didn't really believe in anything, and now, everything is possible.”

I wanted to cry, but I didn't know why. “Say it,” I whispered. “Please just tell me.”

“Will you believe me?”

I registered the pain in his eyes, but I still told him the truth. “Probably not.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I want to hear it anyway.”

Sky nodded. He ran his fingers through his hair, making it messier than usual. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, like he was releasing more than air. Then he pulled a tablet out of his jacket's interior pocket, turned it on, and tilted it toward me.

On the screen was a photo of a taffy-yellow two-story home. “What am I looking at?”

“My house in San Francisco. It's three blocks from the bay.” Sky swiped a finger across the tablet, and a cocker spaniel came into view. It was lounging on a rug in front of a fireplace. Nearby, a tabby kitten was caught midlick, cleaning its paw. Sky pointed to the dog. “That's Odie. The cat is Lars.”

“Cute.” I wasn't sure why I was getting a tour of Sky's personal life, but I figured it was best to play along.

Sky swiped again, and now a middle-aged couple smiled at me from a picnic bench. “Dad's a partner at an insurance company and Mom's an architect. And this was me, last year.” It was a picture of Sky himself, lying on a queen-sized bed in the middle of a messy room. He was asleep, one arm draped over his face. He was wearing
. . .

“A letter jacket?”

“Varsity soccer. Team captain.” Sky's smile widened into one that was more familiar. “Oh, you would have hated me. I made good grades in everything except math. I fiddled around with a guitar. Sometimes I partied.”

“You were a jock.” I shook my head. “That's almost as weird as finding out the cheerleader was a succubus.”

“Right, but it all changed last spring.” Sky's grin fell away. My stomach muscles tightened.

“What happened?”

“I was asleep.” Sky pointed to the photo of himself. “But in the middle of the night, something woke me up. I don't know how because I don't remember a sound, but suddenly I was awake, and there was a shadow standing over my bed. It should have been super creepy
. . .
” He paused, remembering. “I mean, it
was
creepy, but then the shadow started talking in this delicate, silvery voice, and suddenly it wasn't scary anymore. It was just
. . .
weird. The shadow said, ‘I'm not really here.'” Sky shook his head. “I guess I should have yelled for my parents or something, but its voice was so fragile, and it chose its words so carefully. I didn't feel like I was in danger.”

I had a hard time believing I would feel so safe with a stranger looming over me in my sleep, but who knows? Crazier things had happened in the last week.

“It leaned close to me,” Sky continued. “Close enough that I should have been able to feel its breath when it whispered in my ear, but I couldn't. I couldn't feel anything. All I could hear was what it said. ‘You have to save the world.'”

I must have made a tiny sound, because Sky stopped talking and turned to look at me.

“What?”

Out of habit, I was about to make a snarky comment—
Delusions of grandeur, much?
—but the look on Sky's face made me decide against it. “Nothing.”

“The shadow said, ‘There is someone who must be protected. If she dies, so will the world.'” He looked at me again. “Which I know sounds nuts. It sounded nuts at the time too. But when I heard it
. . .
that's when I felt like I was finally all the way awake, because I suddenly had all these questions. I think I said something, like ‘What?' or ‘Huh?' and the shadow said, ‘You have to protect her.'”

My heart lurched. I flashed back to the empty parking lot, to the moment right after Sky kissed me and right before we went searching for the succubus lair. He had said it to me then.
All I want to do is protect you.
I wanted to remind Sky of that moment, but he was still talking. Still telling me his story.

Still telling me
our
story.

“The shadow said I was being sent into a time that didn't exist yet. It said that I had to make sure that it never would, because if it came to pass, our world would end.” Sky paused. “That was the phrasing. ‘Your world will end.'”

“Our world.” I said it out loud. What I didn't tell Sky was what Corabelle had called my mother.
Destroyer of worlds.

“I tried to get more information,” Sky told me. “I asked, ‘Why
me
?' and the shadow said it saw the paths of the future and that they're always twisting and changing, but that when it saw
hers
—”

“Hers,” I repeated numbly.

“Yeah,
now
I know it was talking about you,” Sky said. “But at the time, I asked the shadow who it meant, and it was really sketchy about answering. It kept saying things like ‘Her' and ‘She who must be protected.' I told it that I got that part, and I just wanted to know what we
call
the person who must be protected. The shadow said, ‘We call her by her name,' and I said, ‘Right, that's the part I'm trying to get. What's her name?'” Sky gave me a wry smile. “It told me to stop interrupting. I actually apologized, if you can believe that. Anyway, then it told me that when it looked into the future, it saw
me
on
your
paths.”

Sky's tablet suddenly turned itself off, because we hadn't been using it. As my eyes readjusted to the starlight, he slid the tablet back into his jacket and looked down at me. “It said that it saw me on your good paths. On the happy ones. It said that sometimes I meet you in a room filled with books, and sometimes over a glass of ruby liquid. It had seen me stumble into you in a patch of open grass, and it had seen us find each other while walking over warm sand.” He gazed down at me. “It said that the futures that bring you to me are all the ones where you are happy and strong and filled with light.”

I knew I wasn't any of those things. I was scared and sad and filled with confusion. None of this made sense. “What was so bad about the other future, the one you had to stop?”

“I asked it the same thing,” Sky told me. “The shadow said that it would show me. It waved its hand over my head. I started to reach out, to try and grab it, but I was suddenly tired like I hadn't slept in a month. Like it
did
something to me. I tried to keep my eyes open, but I couldn't. Everything faded to black, and as I fell asleep, the shadow said, ‘Save her. Save her and you save the world.'”

“So you
were
dreaming?” I asked him. “You were asleep the whole time?”

“No,
then
I started dreaming,” Sky told me. “I could tell because everything was weird and twisty and blurry like in a dream. I was outside a church. A small one with wooden doors. A handful of mourners were walking in. I could tell they were in mourning because everyone was wearing black, and some of them were crying. I started to follow them in, but—because it was a dream and you know how sometimes this happens in dreams—suddenly I just
was
in. It was the church's lobby, I guess. There weren't that many people inside, but
. . .
” Sky trailed off for a moment, remembering.

“What?” My voice trembled when I said the word.

“It seemed like more. It seemed like thousands. Or millions, even. I could
feel
their sadness. It was heavy and awful, like the entire world was crying. And there I was, in the middle of all that private grief. Feeling it all around me, but not understanding
. . .
until I saw it. Over by the entrance to the sanctuary, there was a bulletin board on a stand. I
. . .
” He paused, searching for a word. “I
ghosted
over to it. That's what it felt like when I moved around, like I was a ghost. It didn't seem like anyone could see me.”

“What was on the bulletin board?”

Sky gazed at me for a moment before answering. “Someone had decorated the edges with rose petals and leaves, and in the very middle of the board, there was an obituary.”

My lips went cold. Sky kept talking.

“I took a step closer so I could read it, but everything was still all blurry and watery around me. Before my eyes could focus, someone shouted at me. Someone across the lobby. They yelled, ‘Wake up!' and I knew I'd been found out. Someone
knew
I didn't belong. There were footsteps pounding toward me, and everything started to dissolve. The whole church was going away. The air shimmered and I could hear the rain against my bedroom window at home. I knew I had to do
something
to hold on because I hadn't figured out who the shadow wanted me to save. So I lurched forward, grabbing at the obituary
. . .
”

“And you got it.” The words managed to escape from between my frozen lips. “You got the obituary.”

“Only half of it,” Sky told me. “A hand grabbed my shoulder, but I already had the paper in my hand. It ripped away from the bulletin board, and everything started to fade. All the shouting and crying grew dimmer and then evaporated into nothing at all. I was back in my bedroom. I had been gone—or asleep or whatever—for most of the rest of the night, because it was very, very early morning. Light was just beginning to come through the blinds, and the shadow was still there. For just a second, it was still there. And it wasn't a shadow anymore. It was a girl.”