“That night, I had a dream about Claire falling. I saw it happen. I felt it as if it were real, but it was happening to me.”
I shivered. Why would Hadrian make Brynn do something like that? I thought he was using humans for manipulation, not trying to kill us off.
“Do you think Brynn made your dream seem real simply by believing you were up on that roof with us?” Ryan’s voice broke my thoughts.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I felt water logged. Heavy. Ten years must have passed since we started this conversation. “And why would you all of a sudden see Claire in the cemetery? If it really was Claire?”
“Oh, it was Claire, all right.”
“How … ?”
“Because I was thinking about her. I was wishing I could see her again and …” his voice came to a screeching halt as I picked up the pieces of his sentence and finished it for him.
“And there she was.”
We sat staring at each other in silence. In disbelief. How could someone wish for someone or something and get it, simply by wishing it so? That was impossible. Wasn’t it? I had wished for Garreth to appear in my room this morning and that didn’t happen. So much for that theory.
“You hate me,” Ryan whispered.
I sat thinking. Did I?
“No, I don’t hate you. I wish you could have prevented that night. But I don’t hate you.”
“It all happened so fast, I swear if I could’ve done anything … I wasn’t myself then. You know that.”
“Either was Claire,” I recalled how different she had become in the course of a few days. How each of us had become forever changed by the events that happened last spring.
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that I happened to be at your locker at precisely the right time this morning, right before you passed out in front of half the school?”
“Okay. Is it a coincidence?” I narrowed my eyes, unsure where we were headed with this.
“Not really. Think about it,” he leaned forward again, “have you noticed me hanging around a lot lately?”
I leaned forward too. “Come to think of it, I have. What’s going on?”
“I’m trying to make it up to you.”
“How? By being Superman?”
Ryan exhaled a deep sigh, “Brynn’s not done with you yet. I feel it in my gut. Especially since your mom is dating her dad. That’s dangerous territory, Teagan.”
“So what you’re telling me is you feel guilty, you’ve become my guard dog and as always, Brynn is up to something.”
He nodded.
“What’s she up to?”
“Beats me, but all I know is you’re already on her list and you have something she wants. I don’t know what. I live with what happened every day. At least if I help you, I’ll feel like I’ve done something good.”
I let it simmer a bit. If Brynn had been willing to do me harm then … my shoulders slumped. Maybe she had something to do with Garreth’s behavior yesterday?
That had to be it. “I think she’s gotten her claws into Garreth.”
“Why Garreth?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know.”
Lucky for me, I was sitting across from Ryan when the light bulb went off in his head, flooding him with inspiration. A strange, happy light returned to his bloodshot eyes as he blurted out, “Your pizza dinner! It’s perfect! You can start hanging out with her to try and figure her out!”
“Do I have to remind you? She hates me and there’s no way I’m pretending she’s my new BFF.”
“Then you’ll never know. Besides, if she does have her claws in Garreth, wouldn’t you want to help him?”
I didn’t answer.
“Your mom is trying to throw you two together anyway, it’ll just look like you’re trying to make her happy. Just be careful, something strange is going on with her. I don’t know what. But based on your dream and that night, it’s too weird to ignore.”
Ryan took a swig of his coffee, but I just stared at mine. I always knew Brynn was trouble, I just never realized it might be more than I bargained for.
I drove by the cemetery on the way home. I didn’t want to; the car just seemed to go that way, which figures. It used to be Claire’s car.
The conversation with Ryan played over and over in my head. My insides felt funny.
Ryan seeing Claire really threw me for a loop. I knew she was on my mind, why else would I have written the email-to-nowhere? It was too strange that all this would surface the day after sending it. Staying mad at Ryan was hard. He could have helped Claire, but more than anyone, I understood that things were very strange that night. Just as Claire wasn’t Claire, Ryan wasn’t Ryan.
They were all unaware of Hadrian’s existence, that he was responsible for the way they had behaved. I thought about what Ryan had said, about me being the one Brynn wanted to watch fall from the roof. God, she was going to be in my house for dinner and the girl had wanted to kill me?
I couldn’t help wishing Brynn had been on that ledge. As much as I hated her, though, I knew that was wrong. Brynn and her friends had also been victims. Their guardians were corrupted, transforming them into twisted humans who no longer knew right from wrong. But things didn’t go as planned. I shuddered at the thought. Thankfully, Garreth showed up in time to help me. Garreth. I let out a big sigh, and started to wonder if maybe Brynn’s guardian was still corrupted.
I pulled into the cemetery past the black iron gate held open during “visiting hours” by a thick tattered rope. Claire’s car trailed around the winding loops, past the little shed that stored God knows what and up the incline toward her grave. I never went to her funeral. I couldn’t bear it. I had only visited her grave in a dream and it wasn’t pretty. It certainly wasn’t the way I wanted to remember her.
Sloping around the bend of Japanese maples, I let the car come to a stop and idle. I was tempted to get out and walk through the sodden grass to look for her marker, but I stayed put. It felt colder here. As I reached to turn the heat up something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention.
Piles of leaves had been raked, ready to be bagged and taken away. They looked darker than usual, soggy and wet from the never-ending rain we’d been having. Pressing my nose up to the glass for a closer look I tried to make out the colors. The once brilliant foliage was now faded and grayed, reduced to muck. They barely stood out against the crunchy-turned-mushy brown and black … wait. Why were there black leaves? Then I realized they weren’t all leaves. Raked up among the rot were black feathers. I squinted and rubbed my hand across the glass, wiping clean the condensation from my breath.
They were poking out randomly, the black down was clumped, held together by thick quills. Like the feather from the puddle. Like the feather from my locker this morning. There were so many, as if a raven had gotten into a vicious fight with another animal and lost. But there were too many feathers for one bird to lose.
Unless, the bird was huge.
Unless, the bird was the size of a man.
An icy chill spread down my arms and I pulled away from the window. Suddenly I was freezing cold. I cranked the heat dial up to the highest setting but the warmth from the vents wasn’t going deep enough to kill the chill. I drew in a deep breath, closed my eyes for a second and then laughed nervously as I reopened them.
“You’re losing it, Tea,” I muttered to myself uneasily, staring out at the piles once again. Feathers poked out in several spots, but not nearly as many as before. I grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed hard, trying to convince myself it was all in my head. But I found myself putting the car in drive. I was getting out of here.
I turned the wheel and stepped on the gas, backtracking around the looping, narrow path and ignoring all the ten mile per hour signs. The main road was just up ahead.