It Wasn't Always Like This (15 page)

It wasn’t often anyone dug this close. Did he know about her? Was that possible? Or was she suddenly somehow that transparent? She thought about mentioning the name Kingsley Lloyd just to see how he reacted, but decided against it.

She shrugged. “That’s not why I’m here.” And that, too, was the truth.

“Another time, then,” Meehan replied, escorting her to the door. “If you want to talk.”

Chapter Thirteen

Dallas, Texas

Present

The nightmare was always the same. First Emma was talking to Charlie.

“There must be an antidote for it,” he would say. “Some way to counteract, like for poison.”

She would tell him, “No.” And her heart would pound, and then she’d start smelling smoke, thick and acrid. They would row back from the island. But she would lose her shoes, and her feet became slick with coated mud. Every time, she slipped on the grass and fell heavily to her knees.

The dream shifted then to the museum. “Hurry!” she told Charlie. “Oh, God, Charlie. Hurry.” The smoke assaulted her lungs. Flames had engulfed everything. In her dream, she ran faster, pulling ahead of Charlie, the heat of the f ire drawing her forward in spite of her fear.

“Stop!” He grabbed her arm. “You can’t.”

She wrenched her arm away. Flames were shooting through the roof. From inside she heard one long, thin scream: her mother. She grabbed the door handle, and her hands blistered, though she couldn’t feel the pain.

Her family was dead. “But they drank the tea,” she would say over and over, willing their charred remains to return to life even as the horrible truth sank in.

Only this time the dream was different. This time, the smell of smoke didn’t fade. Nor did the heat in her lungs. There was a shrill sound in the background, punctuated now by a pounding, a f ist slamming against something over and over.

Emma’s eyes f luttered open. She was coughing. She was awake.

The air reeked of smoke.

Now. Here. In her apartment. In Dallas.

“Shit,” she said. “What?” She was on her couch, laptop open next to her. She’d been researching after talking to Meehan. She must have drifted off. So what was with the f ire alarm? And the pounding—

Wait.
Someone was at her door.

“Emma O’Neill!” a gruff voice shouted. “I know you’re in there. Open up!”

She stumbled over to the door and threw it open. The knob wasn’t hot; wasn’t that a good sign? In her half-awake state, she saw Detective Pete Mondragon of Albuquerque, New Mexico, standing in her smoke-f illed hallway. For a moment Emma thought she was still asleep. He wore jeans and the brown Carhartt f leece-lined jacket that always made him look like an aging cowboy.

“O’Neill,” he barked, tapping the cement f loor with his square-toed boot for emphasis. “Your place is on f ire. Let’s go.”

Emma blinked a few times.
Pete? Why is Pete here?

People were running up and down and she could hear sirens outside. The smoke stung her nose and eyes and tickled her throat, and she felt panic grow into something the size of a basketball in her chest.

Pete reached for her hand. “Emma, we need to go.” He punctuated this with his own cough.

Emma stepped into the hallway, and her head swam suddenly. She nearly collapsed into Pete’s arms.

“You are not going to freeze up on me, got it, O’Neill?” he grunted. He tightened his grip around her, nudging her back inside. With his free hand, he snagged her hobo bag from the narrow coffee table and waited until she took it from him. Then he nodded to the laptop. “You’ll want that, too, O’Neill. So put it in that fancy purse of yours.”

Emma frowned. “It’s not—”

“Just do it.”

She hefted up the laptop and slid it into her bag. It didn’t quite f it, and something about this annoyed her enough to break through the fear. “Watch,” she muttered, feeling like an idiot but nonetheless committed to what had just popped into her mind. She shoved the bag at Pete and strode the short distance to her bedroom.

“Wrong way, O’Neill.”

She didn’t answer. Her feet f inally seemed to be working, so she dashed to the pocket watch, still resting on its hook on the wall by her bed. No way was she leaving without this. It was the one thing she couldn’t lose, wouldn’t lose. Not after all these years of hanging on to it—

“C’mon, sweetheart.” Pete was at her elbow now. He had never called her “sweetheart,” never called her anything that wasn’t her name until this moment. “Did I mention that your building is burning? We need to get the hell out of here.” His gaze skimmed the pocket watch as she jammed it into her bag. “Damn, O’Neill, really? You can’t live without that? Looks like it weighs a ton.”

“It’s . . .” she began, but only ended up coughing more.

“Hell, Emma, it’s from the boy. I know. No sense us both asphyxiating over it. Let’s go.” But his tone was gentle. Or as gentle as it could be.

The f ire alarm was still screeching. Smoke from the hallway now f illed Emma’s apartment with a poisonous gray fog. The sirens outside were louder. She could hear a voice crackling over a loudspeaker, barking something distorted and incomprehensible, though she could guess the message:
Get the hell out of the building now.

“Why are you here?” Emma choked out as she let Pete guide her out the door.

“Because you need me,” Pete said. “And you’re a stubborn cuss about saying so.”

True enough. At present, Emma was in no position to argue with either of those observations.

“It’s not your day to die, O’Neill,” Pete added, and under his coughing, she thought she heard him chuckle. He put one big hand on her shoulder. “You think I wouldn’t come for you? Then you got a screw loose, Emma O.”

She stared at him. With a sharp yank, he tugged her down the hall, away from the heat. She’d been alone for too long, but even Emma O’Neill eventually recognized a lifeline in the dark when presented with one. After all, he’d thrown her one before.

Chapter Fourteen

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Four Years Prior to the Present

Allie Golden’s murder turned up no connection to the Church of Light, no lead Emma might follow to the people who were hunting her. Random kidnapping, random poisoning, random everything. And so she had no intention of staying in Albuquerque. Not even after feeling at ease with Detective Pete Mondragon, not even after telling him that she’d loved a boy once, not even after the green chile cheeseburgers, though Pete was right: they were mind-blowingly iconic. Sublime, in fact.

She certainly had zero intention of sharing the rest of her strange and painful truths with him.

On the other hand, they’d investigated the murder of a young girl together. A gruesome and unfair murder. That kind of intense and tragic thing built bridges, wanted or not, even if such tragedies were the hallmark of your job.

Besides, Pete trusted her from the start, accepting at face value the Emma O’Neill she had initially presented to him. This was the Emma anyone could f ind with a cursory online search, the private investigator. If he’d looked deeper back then, he wouldn’t have found much more, anyway, except that she never took on any clients and had zero client feedback.

She hadn’t questioned his reason for believing her. Sometimes, she’d learned, it was like that between people. You just found yourself trusting them. Until you didn’t. She could see that he was lonely, too, in that way you are when you spend too much time rooting around the dark underbelly of the world, when you see on a daily basis the kind of depraved horrors people are capable of. Maybe your own life has gone off the rails because of it, and you’ve brought yourself back, step by painful step.

That was Pete’s story; Emma sensed it long before he told her any of the specif ics.

Mostly she liked his company. He made her laugh with his clichéd advice, with those little hackneyed nuggets that always proved wiser and truer than most everything else she’d encountered over the last century. (A person’s teeth really
were
the surest sign of privilege. Poor Allie Golden had terrible teeth. She’d never stood a chance, had she?) But Emma knew she couldn’t stay in Albuquerque. If she did, it would be only a matter of time before he noticed the sameness she could never quite disguise, no matter how she changed her hair or wore her makeup or picked her outf its.

And if she told him?

Well, that was dangerous knowledge, and Emma had enough death on her conscience. Besides, how could she even start? Tell Pete that she had been born in 1896? That Benjamin Harrison had been president, and the f irst movie theater had yet to open? That not long after she turned seventeen, she drank a tea brewed from a stream that was in actuality a Fountain of Youth? A fountain that had disappeared? Maybe for good, or maybe to spring up somewhere else? That people had been trying to kill her ever since?

No. Impossible.

Had it not been for the other secret—for what happened with a boy named Aaron Tinsley—she might not ever have told Pete the truth about her . . . condition. She would have stayed a few weeks, a month maybe because she enjoyed eating those cheeseburgers with him, and the pull of having a friend was strong. Having a friend was the f irst sign of having a life, a
real
life. But eventually, she’d have disappeared.

“I loved a boy. But now he’s gone,” she’d told Pete. That was enough.

Except it wasn’t.

The truth was that Emma was already grieving when she’d shuff led onto the Allie Golden case. The truth, one she still could barely admit to herself, was that she’d suffered a loss—a loss beyond Charlie, one that had nothing and everything to do with him—and it had wrecked her in ways she thought she could no longer be wrecked.

It had been almost one hundred years since Emma had seen Charlie. Almost a century of keeping their secrets. Of wearing her seventeen-year-old face and everything that came with that.

In the end, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment she knew she would tell Pete. Sometimes the truth is like that, sliding out and surprising you even as you’re working up another lie.

THEY WERE HAVING
lunch together at a diner on Candelaria. Emma knew it would be one of their last times together, knew she’d be leaving Albuquerque soon. It was a funky, tiny ten-table place that served stuffed
sopapillas
and
carne adovada
. The spicy
menudo
was Pete’s favorite and the reason he’d picked the restaurant.

“It’s made with tripe,” he explained when she sniffed at the bowl. Emma had made a face. Tripe was just a nicer-sounding word for “cow intestines.” Really, tripe didn’t sound nice at all. It sounded exactly like what it was. There were things she missed from the good old days. Consuming tripe was not one of them.

“Best thing for a hangover,” he added. “Not that I indulge in those anymore.”

She nodded. Watched him slurp a healthy chunk of tripe and chew it with an admirable enthusiasm. He was the real deal, Pete Mondragon. It was a shame she had to move on.

“Something on my face?” he said, and she shook her head, realized she’d been staring. “You okay, then?” he added. He leaned across the bowl of
menudo
, gaunt face shifting to a solemn expression.

She saw in his eyes that he trusted her. She had given him far too little, but whatever he saw . . .

She would tell him. Yes, she
was
going to tell him. She’d tell him and then she’d go. It wouldn’t matter if he believed her or not. She’d be gone. But she’d have told
someone.
The
right
someone. Suddenly that was all that mattered.

“There’s something I have to tell you.” She hesitated, the words clogging her throat.

When she stayed silent, Pete put down his spoon. “I’ve seen a lot of things in this job, O’Neill. Awful ones and wonderful ones. What people do to each other, what they are inside
where they think no one will ever get to. The part they think no one will see. And here’s what I believe. Whatever you are, whatever you’ve been hiding, you’re one of the good ones. I’d stake my life on it. And I’ve never said that to anyone, not even my ex-wife.” He let out a faraway laugh. “Which says something pretty bad about me.”

Emma sighed. Was she really going to do this? He’d think she was crazy. “You’re not going to believe me,” she said.

“Tell me, anyway.”

Something in those stark three words pushed her to say it. “I have this immunity in my blood,” she began, thinking she’d keep it simple. But it wasn’t simple, was it? So she told him all of it. Let him call her crazy. She was leaving. If there was one thing Emma had learned how to do well, it was that.

And so out the rest came. She told Pete about Florida and the stream and the plant and Glen Walters’s Church of Light. About her family and the stranger named Kingsley Lloyd who had convinced Emma’s and Charlie’s fathers to brew the plant into a tea. About the f ire that killed everyone she loved, except Charlie, the one she loved the most, or thought she did.