Everneath. Part 26

"I told you, Nikki. You weren't listening. n.o.body listens to me." Her hands were shaking again, but this time I didn't think I was in any position to comfort her.

I thought back to that first day I met Mary-the day she threw her plate to the floor. "You're seventeen. You're my age."

She looked at me with an expression that was lucid for a moment as she waited for me to figure it out.

"You were there, in the Feed, at the same time as me," I said. My age. From Park City. Could she be the same girl who'd introduced me to Cole in the first place? "You're Meredith."

Her face crumbled, and she started rocking and moaning again. "Don't say that name. Meredith's gone. Look at me. Brittle bones. Skin like paper. I don't know who or where I am. Meredith didn't survive. Not like you did."

I put my hand on her back to comfort her, but she threw herself against the wall as if I'd hit her.

"Leave me alone!" she screamed.

Now everyone, including the bus driver, was looking at us.

"Everything okay back there?" he said over the speaker.

Jack answered. "We're fine. We're getting off at the next stop."

Mary's cries were getting louder and louder, and so Jack and I made our way to the back exit of the bus to show her we weren't going to hurt her anymore.

When the bus pulled over and the doors opened, I gave one last look at Mary. She suddenly had a peaceful expression on her face, and right before I stepped down, she called out, "Remember Orpheus, Jack! He was strong!"

Through the open door, she tossed me an object, which I reflexively caught. The door started to close and the bus pulled away.

I looked at the object. It was her silver bracelet.

TWENTY-THREE.

NOW.

The side of the street. One month left.

I held the bracelet out to Jack. "She wore it a couple of times to the shelter. She said it was a family heirloom or something." He fingered the bracelet in my palm, turning it over a few times before shaking his head in confusion.

"I don't get it. That was Meredith Jenkins?"

I shrugged.

"How is it possible? She's old. And crazy. I thought Meredith Jenkins moved away with her dad."

It hit me that Jack wouldn't have known Meredith was Maxwell's Forfeit. The move was probably the story her mom told people to explain Meredith's absence. I filled Jack in.

"I guess I know what Cole means when he says I survived like no one else." The bus made its climb up the street and then turned right at the top. "Poor Meredith."

I shoved the bracelet in my jacket pocket, unsure if Mary- Meredith-had even meant to give it to me. She'd seemed so protective of it at the soup kitchen.

"They all end up like that?" Jack said. "All the Forfeits?"

"The ones who don't survive do."

"Why didn't you?"

I shook my head slowly. "That's the question, isn't it?"

"That's why Cole wants you," Jack said. I didn't reply, but the same thought had crossed my mind. "Mary said something about you having an anchor."

Oh yeah. I hadn't been paying attention because I'd thought they were the ramblings of a senile old woman. "I don't know what that means."

I thought about all the things I didn't know. All the unanswered questions. And I started to tremble.

Jack held me tight against him. "It's okay, Becks. We'll find out. Starting with that Orpheus story."

"I know the story."

The bus had dropped us off at least a couple of miles from where we'd picked it up, and so we began the walk home, and on the way I told Jack what I knew about Orpheus and Eurydice.

My car. The parking lot.

We ended up back in the parking lot of the soup kitchen, sitting in my car and trying to make sense of everything.

I'd told him the same story about Orpheus that Mrs. Stone had told me. How Orpheus had saved Eurydice, but she still got sucked back under. "But sometimes the myths get parts wrong."

"So, this Eurydice went to the Underworld, and then, what, Orpheus went there too and rescued her? What is that supposed to mean?"

I tried to lay the story out in my head. Eurydice went to the Everneath, as I had. Like me, she didn't age. Maybe her Everliving wanted her to go back to the High Court too, but instead Eurydice chose the Tunnels. She was sucked back in. Maybe when Mary said Orpheus was strong, she meant he was strong enough to lose Eurydice to the Tunnels rather than watch her turn into an Everliving herself.

I didn't tell any of this to Jack. I couldn't. Not yet. He still didn't know the Tunnels were coming for me.

Jack's phone rang right then. He looked at the screen. "Will."

He started to put it back in his pocket, but I stopped him. "Go ahead. He probably needs you."

Jack pressed the b.u.t.ton that would send Will to voice mail, and he took my face in his hands. "We have a plan, Becks. We have time. We'll do as much research as we can, find out more about Orpheus and the Daughters of Persephone, and then we'll be here next Sat.u.r.day. And we'll know what questions to ask Mary."

I nodded. Now was the time to tell Jack about the mark and its meaning. We watched each other's faces, and the moment hung perched above us at the tipping point, waiting for me to spill the truth, and I didn't. Jack walked toward his car, and I told myself the moment would still be there when I saw him again.

But as I watched him drive away, the front end of his car still twisted from the wreck, I knew that there were no perfect moments left. When Jack found out the truth, it would be too late.

Jack came over that night, so we could research the Daughters of Persephone. We didn't know where to start other than Google, and the search produced just two results. The first was a bluegra.s.s music band by the same name. Two older women who looked comfortable in overalls and who I imagined had chewed on their fair share of stalks of wheatgra.s.s. Reading further, we discovered their mom's name was actually Persephone. Their website didn't even mention anything about a myth. It was a dead end.

The second showed a little more promise. But only a very little. It was a microfiche article about a missing newspaper reporter from 1982. The article didn't mention the Daughters of Persephone until the second-to-last paragraph, when the editor in chief said that the missing reporter had been working on an expose of several cults, one of which was called the Daughters of Persephone.

"What do you think it means?" I asked Jack.

He shrugged. "If there's only one article out there that might have to do with the real Daughters of Persephone, it means they keep their tracks hidden."

"You don't think the reporter's disappearance had anything to do with..." I trailed off, thinking about the possibilities.

I typed the reporter's name and hometown into the search engine, but no other articles about her came up.

Jack pressed his lips together in a grim sort of way. "I wouldn't put anything past Cole, or anyone like him."

We also started digging deeper into the Orpheus myth, but further research turned up only slightly varying accounts of the same story Mrs. Stone had told me months ago. If there was something there, I wasn't seeing it. Maybe we'd have to find Mary. Press her for more information.

A few days pa.s.sed, and Jules showed up at my locker. We hadn't spoken since that day handing out flyers.

"Hey," I said.

She smiled, but it didn't look like a smile. "You wanna go to the Ray and grab a coffee? Or are you still working with Mrs. Stone after school?"

"No. I'm caught up enough now. I could go."

She let out a breath of air. "Great. I'll drive."

The Ray was about halfway up Main Street. Jules didn't say much on the way. When we got there, several booths were filled with other students from school and the air was thick with the smell of coffee, and French toast and eggs cooking. The Ray was famous for its French toast, which was as thick as a brick and made out of coffee cake.

I followed Jules to a couple of stools at the bar and we ordered lattes. As the waitress walked away, Jules turned to me and said, "I'm sorry things are so different now. That day with the flyers... That was painful."

I didn't know what to say.

"I miss my friend," she said. "I miss being able to talk about anything with you, and knowing you'd take it to the grave. I don't have that anymore. I can't talk to my mom-you remember her, she never understands anything. And talking to a boy just isn't the same as talking to my girl."

I smiled at that.

"I miss it too," I said.

The waitress returned with our steaming lattes, and we spent the rest of the time talking. Not about Jack, and not about where I'd been, but about regular high school stuff, and eventually we fell into our old conversation patterns.

I loved it. To be with my old friend, slurping coffee and forgetting about life.

For a little while.

Jules dropped me off at my car in the school parking lot, and I waved to her as she blew me a kiss. Nothing had really been resolved over our lattes, but fixing problems hadn't been the point, I don't think.

My dad was in the kitchen reading the paper when I got home. His hair looked like he'd been running his fingers through it.

"Everything okay, Dad?" I went to the fridge to get us both juice.

He grunted. "Apparently I'm not hip enough for a resort town." He shook his head and folded the paper back and kept reading.

"The paper says that?"

"It's an op-ed piece. I'm-quote-'old-fas.h.i.+oned and holding the town back.'"

"Back from what?"

He shrugged and put the paper down. "World domination? I don't know. Should I plug earphones in my ears and walk around looking at my iPod like all the kids do? Would that make a difference?"

"Ignore it, Dad." I poured him a cup of orange juice and set it in front of him. "You're perfect for this town."

He rubbed his face in his hands. "Thanks, Nik." And then he looked at me as if noticing me for the first time in a long time. "Thanks."

I wanted to stay that way for a few moments longer. Me and my dad. Looking at each other. Seeing each other. Grafting this moment.

Look at me, Dad.

Too soon, he turned back to his paper and the moment was gone.

Sat.u.r.day morning was crisp and blue. The rest of the state was suffering from the effects of an inversion in the weather, which made the air thick with gunk, but Park City was above all that. Closer to heaven, we used to say. I showed up at the soup kitchen an hour early, and just as I swung my car into an empty spot, Jack's car pulled alongside. He gave me a knowing grin. Neither of us could wait to talk to Mary.

I unlocked my doors, and he got out of his car and slid into the pa.s.senger seat of mine. "Looks like we both had the same idea."

We waited with the heat on, watching for Mary. People started to gather near the soup kitchen door, waiting for it to open, but we still didn't see her.

"Maybe we should just go inside," I said. "She'll be here."

Jack and I went in, and Christopher put us to work at our stations. Neither of us spoke. I dripped and sloshed the soup a couple of times because I couldn't keep my eyes off the entrance.

We served up hundreds of trays. She never showed.

Christopher hadn't seen her all week.

After the last straggler made his way down the counter, Jack started to clear the dining room while I went to the closet and gathered the mopping supplies. He stacked one chair on top of another with more force than was necessary, the clanging metal providing the sound track for his frustration.

"There has to be someone else who knows about this stuff," Jack said.

I grimaced. "I'm sure there is. But how would we find them? The internet search didn't turn up-"

"Wait," Jack interrupted, pausing with a chair two feet off the ground. He set it back down.

"What?"

"Meredith said the Daughters of Persephone are raised to have no attachments to the Surface."

"Yeah?"

He tilted his head at me as if I should've seen it. "So who raised her to believe that?"

"I don't know. Her ... mom," I said as it finally hit me what Jack was getting at.