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Yet.
“Yes, of course I’ll wait,” Megan said.
“All right. If I’m not back in…” I checked the time on my stolen phone. “Forty-five minutes, then you can go for help.”
She winced. “Forty-five minutes is a really long time, Lex.”
“It takes almost twenty minutes just to get up there and back,” I said.
She leaned across the seat and hugged me. “I’m so sorry. If I’d just listened when you needed me—”
“Forget it,” I said. “You were doing what you thought you had to do.”
“No. That’s an excuse,” she said. “Not a reason. I was just afraid. I wanted to be safe…and keep everyone else safe.”
“Keep everyone else safe from ghosts?” I wanted to tell her that no club in the world could manage that. There were too many ghosts. And too many unlucky people.
She looked confused. “No—safe from me.”
“What?” I sat back and looked at her. “You were never a danger.”
She shook her head. Her mouth was open like she was going to speak, but it took a while for the words to come out. “I lied to you—when you needed me. When you trusted me. And I tortured your little sister. I would have killed you, Lex. I can never trust myself again.”
“Megan,” I said. “Seriously? No one thinks you’re responsible for that. You were possessed.”
“But I remember doing it.” She sniffled, holding back her tears. “I wanted to kill you.”
“I tried to murder my whole family. In their sleep. With a butcher knife.”
She made a confused noise. “It’s different. That wasn’t your fault.”
“And what you did wasn’t yours, so stop feeling bad about it,” I said. “I’ve spent a lot of time with you, and I never once worried about my personal safety.”
So that was why she was so desperate to be part of Brighter Path. She wasn’t being self-righteous.…She was just scared that somebody else would get hurt and it would be her fault.
Now that I could relate to.
“I mean it,” I said. “Stop feeling bad.”
She gave a minute nod of her head, then glanced at the clock. “You should get going.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening the door.
“Lex,” she said, as I was about to shut it.
I leaned down to look at her.
“If you don’t come back safe…” She gave me a wry smile. “I’ll kill you.”
“WHAT I’M ABOUT TO SAY is probably going to be hard to believe,” I said. “But if you’ll listen to me, I think it makes sense.”
I’d said it aloud five times, but I knew I could have repeated it to myself a thousand times and that wouldn’t make it any easier to say to Jared’s face.
I’d made it halfway up the trail, stopping every hundred feet or so to rest. The adrenaline that was keeping me going had begun to run out, and my legs felt like hunks of stone. Climbing was especially hard—some of the steps were three feet from the previous rock. Much better navigated by summer-energized kids than me.
Still, I knew I’d make it. There was no question in my mind that I would be able to climb to the top.
Finally, after dropping to my hands and knees and crawling up the sloping hill like a baby, I reached the wide plateau that looked over the crevasse of the canyon below. City officials had at least put a guardrail at the top, knowing that kids would come here and drink.
Jared was sitting on the guardrail, facing me.
The jagged folds of the rocky walls that bordered the trail were behind him, and beyond that, the small sprawl of Surrey. I could see the high school, where in less than an hour, hundreds of kids would gather for another normal day in their normal lives. I could see the building where Dad worked—the tallest one in town, soaring all of seven stories. The sun had hit its top floor and was reflecting bright orange light off the windows.
It had been a while since I’d been up here. The view was gorgeous. The almost-spring sky was fighting for color after the washed-out whiteness of winter. Interco
As I got closer, I could see that Jared looked rough. He hadn’t shaved. His hair wasn’t combed. And his light brown shirt had yellow stains under the armpits and was streaked with dirt.
“How long have you been up here?” I asked.
He gave me a long, distant look before he answered. “Since yesterday afternoon.”
In spite of myself, I felt a twinge of protectiveness toward him. “Have you had food and water?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, Alexis? I wouldn’t come up here without supplies.” His eyes flickered with a
“It’s about Laina,” I said.
He was staring at the ground, and the left side of his lips almost turned up in a hint of a smile. “Do you know how much I wish that she was here with me…instead of you?”
“I’m sure you do,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that he was basically saying he wished I were dead. “Jared, I’ve been thinking. And what you told me about her—how she was so peaceful when she…at the end…People who die that way don’t become ghosts.”
He looked up at me, confused.
“That’s good news. Laina had everything she wanted when she died. She was at peace. She moved on. She went to a better place.”
“Yeah. That’s what I believed, too.” He bent down and scooped up a handful of gravel and sand and chucked it off the side of the cliff. “Until you started talking to me about her.”
“But I was wrong.”
“Wrong? But you know what she looked like. You know about the dress.”
“I saw something, Jared, yes—but what I saw wasn’t Laina.” I shifted uncomfortably on the curved metal railing. “This is probably going to be hard to believe…but if you hear me out, it makes sense.”
He was listening, at least. I had his full attention.
So I ran through the basics of what Sava
And finally, how Jared held the power over it.
“You can make it go away. Because it…” I was afraid to say the next part. “Because it came from you.”
He’d watched me intently the whole time I spoke. Now he gave a slow shake of his head.
“You’re unbelievable,” he said, standing and looking down at me. “I finally find a way to make it up to her—to show her how much I care about her, to give her what she really wants—and you’re trying to make me think it’s all in my head?”
“No, not in your head at all,” I said. “It’s real, but…you can control it. It happened because you love her so much—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Or go this far.”
“So I just shouldn’t care so much?”
“It has nothing to do with how much you care,” I said. “I know how much you love Laina. It’s obvious.”
His mouth twisted into an ugly frown, and he turned and walked a few feet away. With a violent kick, he scuffed his shoe across the surface of a rock.
Then he spun around.
“So what am I, then, a murderer?” He grabbed me by the shoulders, and I thought he was going to push me backward over the guardrail. Instinctively, I grasped his arms and pulled us both away from the edge.
We stood there, eye to eye.
“No,” I said. “It’s not your fault. But you’re the only one who can make it stop.”
He pushed me away, like my touch was too filthy to be borne, and I caught myself before I fell to the ground.
My temper flared, but I crushed it. Losing control would just make things worse. Jared would know. He would see. And he would get angrier.
“Laina wouldn’t want this,” I said. “You told me how amazing she was. She wouldn’t want people to be getting hurt. And she wouldn’t want you and me to have to be soul mates when we can’t even get along for an hour at a time.”
He sneered at me. “If you would grow up, that wouldn’t be a problem.”