Not because he smells like mothballs, but because I wore a cloak once that smelled like mothballs while we were searching through the storage room on the third floor of his manor. We were looking for a key that could open Maggie’s mysterious locked tome. Instead, we found a family tree inside the trunk of Jude’s one-eyed uncle.
Afterward, I got terribly sick.
Jude got my number from Twig.
And we spent a whole evening watchingTales from the Cryptwhile talking on the phone.
The memory makes my heart ache.
I sit down and open the bottom drawer of my desk, where I keep a growing collection of oddities. The shoebox of my mother’s things. A tattered copy ofWhere the Wild Things Are. Simon’s journal. Lily’s sketchpad. And now, the onyx and the pearl.
“The power to reveal what is hidden,” I mutter, setting the pearl on my desk. I hover my hand over the stone. “Reveal your secrets.”
I wait for something to happen.
Anything to happen.
But of course, nothing happens.
My thoughts turn to Lainey. If I brought this pearl with me to school and held it next to her, what would it reveal? Probably the same thing it revealed yesterday when I brought it to the Water Garden, which was a big fat nothing. If my mother and Simon and Emma and Sienna are trapped in Vorat’s prison, the pearl refused to show me.
I pick it up and give it a shake like it’s a Magic 8 Ball. “What are Lainey and Griffin planning?”
More nothing.
With a heavy sigh, I set it down and rub my eyes, thinking about pearls. How they begin as tiny irritants, a bit of debris slipping inside the mollusk’s soft tissue. In self-defense, the mollusk begins coating the irritant with nacre—layer by painstaking layer, until months, or years later, a pearl is formed. Given its nature, I shouldn’t be surprised that this particular amulet would be so temperamental.
I pull the quilt tighter around my shoulders.
My eyes are heavy.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep all week.
There are too many irritants stuck inside the soft tissue of my brain.
I move the pearl aside, cross my arms on top ofmy desk, and rest my head in the crook of my elbow.
Why have Lainey and Griffin gone dormant?
If I broke into one of their homes, would I find a rift in the basement?
Yawning, I surrender to the heaviness and let my eyelids sink.
Jude sits at a table in the cafeteria. Everything inside me lights up. He’s back. Jude came back. Maybe he’s better. Maybe the specialist has found a way to break whatever hold the ruby has on his soul. I smile and wave, but he ignores me. Twig, Naomi, and Harper join him at the table. I grab an empty seat, but Jude holds onto it. He says there’s no room. But of course there’s room. There are two empty seats. When I point this out, Twig says they’re saved for Lainey and Griffin. Then they all laugh. They laugh and they laugh for what feels like hours and I’m left standing by myself, in Evermore’s basement, while my mother records a podcast about Brady Keller and Caleb Briggs.
“They’re running out of time,” she says, grabbing my hands—her grip so tight it hurts. “Hurry up, they’re running out of time!”
Her head turns into a clock, its hands spinning wildly.
“Selah,” she whispers in my ear. “Come find me.”
I shoot upright in the chair.
There’s a crick in my neck.
Drool on my cheek.
I wipe it away and blink at the night outside my window.
