Brodi Ashton - Evertrue

My mouth hung open for a long moment. Moves like that only happened in superhero movies. I didn’t know he was that strong.

He brought the safe over to a desk in the corner of the room, then picked up the drill again. But before he turned it on, I caught a glimpse of something scratched into the metal surface of the front of the safe. We didn’t see it earlier because of the dark.

“Stop,” I said. I pointed to the note.

Turn me , it said.

Underneath the words was a large arrow pointing to the side of the box, where a small crank was sticking out of a hole in the metal.

“Why does it have a crank?”

“More important,” Jack said, “why does it have a note?” After a moment’s hesitation he reached out and pinched the end of the crank.

“Wait!” I said.

He froze.

“What if it’s booby-trapped?” I said. “Like with a bomb?”

He looked at me. “That makes no sense.”

“Well, what if there’s something horrible inside?”

“Like what?”

I shrugged.

Jack started to turn the crank.

“Like a head!” I blurted out. “A severed head.” I put my hands on the safe, measuring the length, height, and width. “That’s about head size.”

I could tell Jack was raising an eyebrow even under his ski mask. I reached up and pulled off the mask. Yep, he was raising an eyebrow.

He tilted his head. “So Cole decapitates some random person, puts his head in this safe, adds a crank, and leaves a note so that anyone who breaks in would be . . . grossed out enough to leave without taking anything?”

I nodded again.

He turned the crank one full rotation. Nothing happened. He turned it again, and again, and a slow tune began to play.

Jack looked up at me. “Is that . . . ?”

“‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’” I nodded, my metaphorical heart already sinking. Nothing good could come out of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

Jack turned the crank faster and faster; and when he reached the “pop” part of the melody, the top of the safe burst open, and a clown’s head exploded out. I jumped at least a foot off the ground, even though I could see it was a harmless piece of plastic on a coiled spring.

On the clown’s bow tie hung another note.

Jack leaned forward to read it.

“It says, ‘Bet you were expecting a heart, shaped like a compass. . . .’” Jack paused and pulled the note off the bow tie. “. . . And then he drew a frowny face.”

I snatched the note from his hand, looked at it briefly, crumpled it up, and threw it into the corner of the room. At the same time, it felt as if I’d crumpled up any lingering hope and thrown it away.

“I hate Cole,” I said. I looked at Jack, the full weight of my immortal future pressing heavy on my shoulders. “Tell me it’s going to be okay. Tell me I’ll be human again.”

Jack nodded and put his arm around me. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be human again.”

Jack held me for a few moments until his phone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket.

He read the screen and frowned.

“Who’s it from?” I asked.

“Cole. It says, ‘No, she won’t. She’s going to be a queen.’”

My eyes darted around the room, searching for whatever microphone was relaying our words back to Cole, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I closed my eyes.

“I’d rather die than be your queen,” I said.

Moments later another text buzzed through, and Jack read it aloud. “It says, ‘Let’s see what the Hulk has to say about that.’ I can only assume by ‘Hulk’ he’s referring to me.”

“It’s not his choice whether I live or die,” I said loudly toward the ceiling. Then I turned toward Jack and whispered, “It’s not your choice.”

“I know,” Jack whispered back. “I know, Becks.”

I put my hand over my mouth, annoyed at myself for giving voice to the one wedge between me and Jack, the one thing that we would always disagree on. I would rather die than rule the Everneath. Jack would rather I live, no matter the cost. It was true, but it gave Cole too much information. When it came to me, he had a track record of exploiting any and all weaknesses he could find.

And now he was listening to every word we were saying. Max and Gavin probably started their guitar-and-drum duet when Cole discovered we were in his place.

Jack mouthed the words Let’s go.

I nodded. I didn’t want to let Cole overhear anything else. Jack took my hand, and I followed him to the front door and through it to the balcony. He shoved the door closed despite the shattered lock, and we had just started down the balcony when I noticed a dark figure blocking the staircase. Jack saw him too and jerked to a stop.

I couldn’t see his face, because he was backlit from the light on the stairs, but his silhouette showed he was wearing a hat with a wide brim—maybe a cowboy hat?—and a long coat, like a trench coat.

Whoever it was, he just stood there. I couldn’t actually see if he was looking at us or not, but for some reason I felt his eyes on me.

“Try to act normal,” Jack said. It was a little late for “normal,” considering we’d just come stumbling out of the condo, shoved the broken door shut, and then frozen at the sight of the man.

Nevertheless, we started walking toward him.

He made no move to stand aside. Jack flipped on the flashlight and shone it momentarily in the guy’s face, and at first I didn’t notice anything strange until I got a look at his eyes. They were pitch-black. A chill went down my back as the man smiled, revealing two rows of black teeth.

We stopped again.

“Um, let’s go down the back way,” I said, my voice cracking.

“What back way?” Jack whispered.

I pulled on his arm. “I don’t know, but there’s got to be a back way. If not, we’ll make one.”

Jack nodded. “I think that’s a good idea.”

We ran in the opposite direction, following the balcony past several other condos, until we saw an emergency exit sign. Jack barreled through the doorway, and we ran to the car.

When we got there, I lunged toward the passenger’s side. I was about to rip the door open when my knees buckled beneath me. I caught the side of the door just before I fell to the ground.

“Becks? You okay?”

“Yes,” I called out, trying to mask how out of breath I was. I still didn’t know what this new weakness meant, and until I did, I didn’t want Jack to worry.

Part of me, the naive part maybe, hoped the weakness would go away before anybody else noticed. Part of me hoped the weakness had nothing to do with my missing heart.

But another part of me knew it had everything to do with it.

NOW

The Surface. In the mountains.

Who was that guy? Jack said, driving way too fast down the mountain switchbacks. “Or maybe I should ask, what was that guy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe we didn’t get a good enough look at him. We only had a glimpse. Maybe he was dressed up for some . . . costume party.”

“Right. Costume party. In June. On a balcony. By himself.”

I glanced in the side-view mirror several times over the next few minutes, even though I couldn’t think of a reason the man in the trench coat would’ve been following us.

When I was sure we were in the clear, I said, “The bigger problem is, Cole anticipated us.”

Jack sighed and flipped on the signal to turn into my subdivision. “So what do we do now?”

“Move to Tahiti,” I said. I stared out the window as Jack pulled up in front of my house.

“That would look suspiciously like running away from our problems.” Jack grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips. “Meet you in five?” he said.