Eternity

sauce, used silverware, and napkins. Despite her exhaustion, it felt calming to do something so normal. There was a tube of ointment that Em swept up in her cleaning, turning it over to read the label. Wig Adhesive: water-based and waterproof, for the strongest hold that dries clear. Skylar returned and strode straight to Em, grabbing the glue out of her hand.

“I’ll manage,” Skylar said quickly. Her wig had been adjusted and now looked perfect. If Em hadn’t known it was fake already, she’d have been completely fooled. “You sit down and I’ll take all this to the kitchen.”

Em thought to apologize, but nodded instead, handing her the things. She did her best to ease into the couch. Her sense of calm had all but disintegrated.

Rain drummed on the windows.

When Skylar came back and took a seat on the far side of the couch, Em cleared her throat.

“Look, I’m sorry to drag all of this up,” she said. Talking about the Furies still felt crazy, surreal. “But it’s important, okay?”

Skylar nodded, mute.

“The orchid. You were marked.” Her heart was beating very fast, keeping time with the rain still pounding on the windows and door.

Skylar hugged herself. “Marked? What do you mean?”

“You were marked by the Furies. That’s how they indicate their targets,” Em said. She took a deep breath. “It happened to me, too.” Saying it made her feel instantly a little better, as though a fraction of the weight in her chest had been released.

“What are they?” Skylar said in a whisper.

“I don’t know,” Em confessed. “But they’re evil.”

Skylar stared at her, wide-eyed. “How did they find me? How did they find us?”

Em shook her head. “I don’t know that, either. All I know is that those girls—Meg, Ali, and Ty—they’re sick. They seek revenge. They try to make people pay for their mistakes. But it’s worse than that. They don’t stop. They want to make people miserable. Insane. And . . . and they’re willing to kill, too,” she blurted out.

“An eye for an eye . . . ” Skylar said. A clock tick-tocked in the background. Rivulets of water ran down the windows. “They were there when I found that body,” Skylar said suddenly. “That teacher who died.”

She knew it. Mr. Landon.

So the Furies had been involved in his death in some way. Maybe they’d marked him, too. Maybe that explained why she became so furious when she heard Portia and Andy talking about him the other day. “What do you mean?” Em pressed. “What did they say?”

“That’s when I first started to feel like they were . . . off,” Skylar said. “They just showed up at the exact right time and their reactions were so weird. I was freaking out, you know? And they were like, Oh, whatever, there’s a dead body.”

Because they knew about it already, Em thought. Of course.

She could picture it. Ali’s icy smile, Meg’s permagrin, Ty’s sneer. “Did they do other things that seemed ‘off’?” Maybe together, she and Skylar could pinpoint a weakness—a flaw in their strength.

Skylar seemed to shrink back a bit. “Well . . . there was . . . ” Her voice faded.

“Spill it, Skylar,” Em said. She was running out of time.

“Ty always scared me the most,” Skylar said in one breath. “She was just . . . weird. Like, when she dyed her hair—”

Em held out her hand and interrupted. “You were there when she dyed her hair?” About a month ago, Em noticed that Ty had exchanged her fire-red locks for a shade that was much closer to Em’s hair color—deep, dark brown. Almost black.

“She did it upstairs in my bathroom,” Skylar said, and they both reflexively looked toward the stairs. “But the weird thing was that after she did it, there was no, like, evidence of it. No mess. It was like she magically transformed or something.”

Transformed.

Her fingers started tingling. Em had the foreboding sense that Ty’s “magical transformation” was more than just a parlor trick. It was a sign. A signal. A mirror of Em’s own transition.

You’re becoming one of them. Em heard the refrain in her head. It was increasingly clear that Ty was changing too—becoming more like Em.

“Don’t you want answers?” Em said, as much to herself as to Skylar. “Don’t you want to know who they are?”

“I guess so. . . . ” Skylar didn’t sound convinced.

“They messed with you—hurt you, disfigured you—but at least they’ve left you alone since that. For now,” Em added. Skylar took a quick breath. Em knew she was being harsh, cruel even, but Skylar needed to know the truth. “What if they come back?”

Skylar’s eyes practically bugged from her head. “What are you saying?” she whispered.

“Sky, you have to help me,” Em said. “We’ll never be safe unless we get rid of them for good.”

“But how do we do that?” Skylar asked. “I don’t know what to do!”

“Your aunt,” Em said flatly. “She knows things. We need to talk to her. I think she might be able to tell us some things about the Furies. Don’t you see it? Don’t you think she knows something?”

“She’s not here,” Skylar reminded her. “But . . . ” Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling and she bit her lip.

Em pounced. “But what?”

“There are a few things in the attic,” she said. “Like, an old box . . . I dunno. Do you know what you’re looking for?”

She didn’t, of course. She had no clue what she was looking for. But her heart leaped. Because she had a feeling she’d know it when she saw it. Em envisioned a velvet diary with a tiny padlock, or an old-fashioned safe hidden behind an Impressionist painting. Something in which to hide dangerous, black secrets.

“This is crazy,” ?Skylar added, “but Nora was always really weird around Meg. Like, even worse than she was around you . . . It did almost seem like Nora knew Meg was . . . bad. I guess it’s possible she knew something about all this. It wouldn’t surprise me. . . . ”

Skylar stood and Em followed her into the kitchen, where they got a flashlight from a drawer, and then up two flights of stairs to the third floor, and helped her pull on a string that hung from the ceiling in the hallway. ? Down came a short, creaky ladder that led up to a drafty attic. Em watched Skylar ascend, then push up a trapdoor and disappear in the darkness. Em followed once it was clear, testing out her weight. The ladder was old but seemed reliable enough. When she got to the top and heaved herself onto the wood floor, the trapdoor sprang down and closed behind it.

“Freaky,” Em said in the darkness.

“Yeah, me and Nora couldn’t find the rod that’s supposed to keep it propped open.”

“So there aren’t there any lights up here?”

“That’s what the flashlight is for,” Skylar said, clicking hers on.

Em found herself squeezing in between headless dress forms and boxes of old clothing. There were hatboxes on every surface, and an empty baby carriage sat in a corner. A row of masks was hung along one wall. The effect was freaky—Em felt like there were a dozen sets of eyes boring into her no matter where she turned. When her shoulder brushed against one of the dress forms, she involuntarily jumped.

“My aunt used to be a costume designer,” Skylar offered as explanation. “That’s why she has all this theater stuff. She’s going to do the costumes for Ned’s play.”

“I heard you were in that,” Em said, relieved to speak about something normal, everyday, even if only for a minute. It helped distract her from the creeping anxiety she felt, and from the weirdness of all those pale masks mounted on the wall.

She was tempted to add that she’d also heard that JD was doing the lights for the show. She felt a fluttering in her chest when she imagined him stringing lights, sleeves rolled up, brow slightly furrowed, as it always was when he worked on his car. She loved that about him—that he knew how to do things with his hands, that he was so smart but also such a guy. Part of her was dying to ask Skylar for any crumb of a detail—what JD