Eternity

strained to hear the voice again, to try to place where it was coming from. Took a few steps in the other direction.

Then the sound came again, traveling like leaves caught in a swirling gust of wind, fading in and out in a spiral. He caught fragments of words, and the high trail of someone’s laughter. He stood weighted down, like every ounce of his blood had turned into a liquid metal. Move, he told himself. More snippets of a girl’s voice, melodious, as through from a music box. Otherworldly. ?JD had seen his share of scary movies, but nothing could have prepared him for the way his heart was pounding in his chest right now.

“I can hear you,” he said, a bit louder. He balled his fists and turned in a circle, unsure what direction it was coming from. Every headstone seemed to grow taller, the sky grayer. As far as he knew, he was the only person in the cemetery now that Crow was gone. If Crow was gone. No other cars had been parked when they got there, nor had any arrived in the past few minutes.

And then he spotted her, not ten yards away. A girl, sitting with her back against a huge, bare-branched maple tree that towered over a white-stone mausoleum across the way. How long had she been there? She was in navy-blue sweatpants and a white T-shirt, and her hands and feet were covered in dirt. Her blond hair was stringy and her body looked gaunt. JD made his way toward her.

“I see you,” she said in a singsong voice. She pulled at the grass around her but didn’t look up.

He stopped short and waited for her to say more, but nothing came. He took slow steps toward her and finally, she raised her head, startled—as if she hadn’t called out to him just moments ago. She scrambled to her feet and he could see that she was about his age, with dirty-blond hair and a blank gaze. He could tell she’d been beautiful once. Her eyes were green, but bloodshot. JD swallowed hard.

“Are you—are you okay?” he stuttered. He saw a long, angry scar along her hairline and his stomach went tight.

She turned away from him again, staring intently at a patch of grass for seemingly no reason. She whispered something, to herself or to him, he couldn’t be sure. But he took one more step closer, straining to hear what she was saying.

“From blood the seeds are borne and from blood they will be buried,” she murmured as though reciting something—a poem, or a spell. It was eerily similar to the words in the book he’d seen on Em’s bed.

“Hey . . . Hi. Are you all right? You must be freezing. Can I get you some help?” In the pocket of his Windbreaker, JD closed his fingers around his cell phone.

The girl swiveled again, but this time her expression was different—softer, more lucid, like she somehow recognized him. She reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears, smearing dirt on her cheeks in the process. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking embarrassed. “Did you say something to me?”

JD looked around; it was an empty graveyard at nine o’clock in the morning. “I asked if you needed help?”

“Oh, well, now that you mention it, I think I should call my aunt.” She smiled a wide, toothy smile—the kind you’d see in some sort of beauty pageant—and cocked her head slightly. It was weird how quickly she had shifted from Crazy Girl in the Cemetery to Miss America at a Dinner Party.

JD fumbled for his phone. This girl could be on drugs or insane or maybe she was just a wild hippie chick, but whatever she was, he didn’t know what to do with her. “Sure,” he said. “You can use my phone.”

But when he handed it to her, she just held it limply in her hand—looking at it like she’d never operated a phone before. It fell to the ground. Her arms were shaking, like she was starving and weak, or didn’t have complete control over her muscles.

“I’m supposed to call her whenever I hear them,” she said, blushing deeply. A single tear ran down the side of her face, leaving a pale rivulet in the dirt. “They’re so loud. They’re laughing. They’re—”

“Who?” he said, grabbing his phone out of the dirt.

“The Furies.” She looked at him matter-of-factly. “I can hear them. It’s getting worse. Henry was just candy to them. That’s what they said. Just easy. Easy, easy, easy. Easy prey.” She spoke evenly—like they were talking about the weather—but her words were totally out-there. JD was completely mystified.

He stared into her eyes then for the first time, feeling a current run up his spine, raising all the short hairs on the back of his neck. The Furies. Those words again. He didn’t know what to say. “Listen, do you need me to make the call for you? Who’s Henry? Do you want to call Henry?”

“We can’t call him,” the girl said, suddenly desperate and shaking violently. “He’s dead. . . . Dead, dead, dead, dead—”

“Look, just hold on, okay?” JD punched 911 into his phone, praying the signal would be strong enough to connect.

“They’re just waiting for the next one. The next mistake. They’re everywhere. They’re watching.” He could hear a hysterical tremor in the back of her voice. She covered her ears and shook her head violently.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. Shit. His phone call wasn’t connecting. Come on, come on. He could run to the road and try calling from there, but he didn’t want to leave her.

All of a sudden, female voices shot across the grounds, loud and jarring. “Lucy! Lucy! ”

It took a moment for JD to realize that the voices were coming from the little cemetery road, where a sedan had come screeching to a halt. Two figures got out of the car, leaving the engine running as they came toward JD and the girl. As they got nearer, JD was shocked to see Skylar McVoy and the older woman who had accompanied her to Drea’s memorial service.

Meanwhile, the girl—Lucy, apparently—had calmed down. Her eyes were dull and her limbs now hung at her side. “She wants out,” she muttered to JD under her breath. “The others want blood, but she wants out.”

The gray-haired woman immediately went to Lucy and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. “Sweetie. Are you okay? We were so worried. . . . ”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Nora. I had another episode. I got . . . confused.”

The woman nodded as if this was a familiar routine. “Let’s just go home, then.”

“Aunt Nora—” Skylar started to say. But she cut herself off when she saw JD staring at her. She just stood there, motionless, her eyes veering from JD to the two women and back. She looked down at herself; she was wearing flip-flops and pajama pants.

“We realized she was missing at five this morning. . . . ”

“Oh,” JD offered, not knowing what else to say. Clearly, Skylar had been hauled out of bed. He opened and closed his mouth several times. None of the questions in his brain were able to make it to his mouth. The older woman, Aunt Nora, began to shepherd Lucy toward their car.

“Thank you so much for finding her,” Nora said with a pasted-on polite expression. “We’re so sorry. She’s not well.”

“I’m sorry if I scared her,” JD offered, wanting to help. “I didn’t know what to do. . . . ”

The woman gave him a warm, sad smile. “She’ll be fine. This just happens every so often. She’s still recovering.” She turned and began to walk away.

He saw that Skylar was about to follow her. “Wait,” he croaked. He had to say something.

He came up to her and tried to meet her eyes. “She said . . . ” He licked his lips nervously. “I’m not sure if it matters. . . . ”

“What?” Skylar refused to look at him. Even though she kept her head down, so her hair swung forward, he could see her scarred cheeks were flaming red.

“She was talking about something—or some people—called the Furies,” he said. “She sounded pretty freaked out.”

The word seemed to jolt Skylar back to awareness. She stiffened and raised her face, which was transformed into a glare. “Forget it,” she snapped. “She’s out of her mind. Brain-damaged. Broken. Forget everything you heard.”

“Who is she?” JD asked helplessly. There was a pause, in which every one of his senses seemed to be at high alert. Blood pumped around his joints and insects hummed in the woods that bordered the graveyard.

“She’s my sister,” Skylar spat, before spinning around and stalking off into the fog.