Elizabeth Miles - Eternity

And they left. Just disappeared into thin air.

I ran through the flames. I grabbed my little girl. She was untouched. It had worked. I came home, hid the pin, and prayed that I would never see them again.

I believed we were free of them. But it was too late. Edie had already done what she did. I was too late. I hope you’re not.

—Walt

JD scoured the page, making sure he understood what Walt Feiffer was trying to tell him. He held the paper in his right hand; in his left, he ran his thumb over the contours of the snake pin. Almost identical to the one he’d found near Henry Landon’s icy grave. The one Walt referred to in his note.

He stared down at the page until the words started to blur. He felt sick to his stomach. He thought of little Drea, behind a wall of flame. . . .

But if  Walt Feiffer had done it, couldn’t JD do it too?

Sprawled on his twin bed, he focused on each letter, trying to block out the sounds of thudding pop music bleeding through the walls from Melissa’s room.

It was only a few hours later, but he’d already memorized certain lines.

Edie kept talking about fire . . . and we were free of them.

When he finished reading the note, JD’s hands were shaking. The paper was crumpled from how hard he was gripping it.

He understood the banishment ritual. It had worked for Drea’s dad. It could work for him. And maybe he wouldn’t be too late. But he needed to find an innocent—someone who could serve as a sacrifice. Someone he would have to rescue at the last second, as Drea’s dad had rescued her. From beyond the wall of smoke and flame.

The faint wail of a song seeped through the wall. Melissa always listened to her music too loud.

Melissa.

No.

The idea bled into his mind quickly.

No. I can’t put her in danger.

But she would be safe. That’s what Mr. Feiffer’s note said. He could save her at the last minute.

She’s my sister.

Drea had been Walt’s daughter.

But what if it doesn’t work?

What if it does?

What if I don’t do it?

Em’s eyes flashed before his own. Big, trusting, light with laughter.

With that, JD got up, marched out of his room, and knocked on Melissa’s door. It was time to send the Furies back to hell.

SMASH.

The greenhouse window broke easily, several shards of glass spraying out onto the cement floor inside. Em looked down at her hand, amazed that it didn’t hurt—not one bit. Not even that fresh laceration on her right knuckle, which was rapidly healing in the last of the moonlight.

Em reached her hand through and twisted the lock on the door, which squeaked open rustily. She looked around behind her at the quiet, dewy fields, the buildings with darkened windows, and the long driveway to the road. No one was around.

And so she slipped inside.

Just before the dawn of what was possibly her last day on earth as Emily Winters, Em was breaking and entering.

She was still shaken from Crow’s confession and Lucy’s odd insights. Shaken, shocked . . . and scared. For him, for her, and for everyone.

After Crow had left her outside the Dungeon, she had frantically reviewed everything she knew: Edie killed herself to save Drea from the Furies. Ty was trying to take over Em’s life. Skylar seemed to be left alone now, but her sister Lucy could hear the Furies—likely a result of her brain damage turning her, as the book had put it, “mad.” But then again, Lucy wasn’t exactly a trustworthy source, babbling about albinos and mouths and seeds.

That was how she’d made the connection.  Albino flowers . . .

Hadn’t Nora mentioned rumors of an antidote, a way to clean the slate and become pure again? Something derived from nature, something derived from the Furies’ source?

Em’s heart started hammering and she stood up, pacing the alleyway.

She wondered if the secret was in the seeds. If it was possible that she had literally ingested the Furies’ evil, and if it was possible that the white flower held an antidote. Was it feasible, even, that the same seeds had properties of both evil and good?

Ty had said that evil always contained the power to destroy itself. That she wanted to be “good.” What if the very thing that symbolized the Furies’ evil was the key to their undoing?

She had practically flown to the greenhouse. She couldn’t even remember the drive. She knew that if there was any connection between the plant world and the Furies, she would find it at the greenhouse.

Once she was inside, the atmosphere was claustrophobic; shining her flashlight around the space, Em noticed the yellow-white film that had accumulated on the inside of the glass panes. The plants looked more cooped in than they had before.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed thinly off the walls. On her tiptoes, shining the blue light in front of her feet, she made her way slowly down the center aisle of the greenhouse, toward the wooden table where she’d sat with Nora, Skylar, and Hannah Markswell the other night. Her shoes clicked against the cement. To the left was a rickety metal shelving unit filled with books about gardening, landscaping, and botany, some of them ancient and some brand-new. She positioned herself so that she could see both the front and the rear doors, and leaned over so she could read the books’ spines. Plants of the Northeast. Growing Annuals Indoors. Victorian Horticulture. She ran a finger down the row. Next to those was a set of black three-ring binders, each labeled with a name. Nora’s was one of them.

Em pulled the binder from the shelf and opened it to find loose-leaf papers marked in Nora’s neat cursive. Notes. Each of the gardeners kept notes on their plants, on their findings. Nora’s appeared to be arranged alphabetically by type of plant: heliotrope, ivy, violets. The largest section, however, was labeled with a simple F .

Em flipped quickly to those pages and found exactly what she’d expected to find: Nora’s observations about orchids. The terms were scientific, but Em’s breath hitched. Nora was attempting to breed what she referred to as the “albino orchid.”

I am starting to believe that the red orchid turns white only during a full moon, Nora had written. It has happened to me twice now. There must be some significance. The moon must be at its peak in order for the flower to open its petals and reveal the seeds inside. The seeds can be good or bad—they can yield new plants, or shrivel in the dirt. It wilts almost instantly—usually within one hour of having bloomed. The flower is extremely rare, extremely sensitive. As yet, I have not succeeded in keeping it in bloom.

Em read the passage several times. As she closed the binder, she realized her hands were shaking. It was starting to make sense. If the flower was special, then its seeds must be unique too. The seeds can be good or bad. Just as the red seeds from the Furies’ evil flowers had launched her transformation, the seeds from the albino orchid could counter their effect. When the seeds were bad, they were very bad. And when they were good, they were saviors.

“You were right, Lucy,” she said into the silence.

When the light brings up the albino, Lucy had said.

Good or bad.

Ty wanted those seeds too. They’d make her good, make her human again.

The red orchid turns white only during a full moon, Nora had written.

Em pulled her phone out and clicked over to her mariners’ calendar—the one JD had downloaded to her phone one night when they were hanging out. It listed high and low tides, what time the sun would rise and set, the phases of the moon. A combination of humidity and nerves made the phone slick in her hands. What was the date? She could barely remember.