Platinum (18 page)

She totally needed to practice that look in the mirror.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

I put the car in park, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, and unbuckled my seat belt. It was the unflattering facial expression on the middle sister’s face that clued me in.

I swear, I thought, if that little book tells me that those three girls are Lissy, Lexie, and me, and that the grave was Shannon’s…

I didn’t have time to complete the thought. Brock Phillips, boyfriend extraordinaire /lip-cheater, was standing in the driveway, and all of a sudden, I had much bigger things to worry about.

18

Possession

Possession is nine-tenths of girl law.

“Brock.” Lissy spoke his name before I had the chance, and her eyes did this fluttery thing they always did when she saw his aura. For the record, watching someone who may or may not have been your younger sister in an extremely irritating former life aura-flirting with your questionably unfaithful boyfriend? Not my idea of a good time.

“Hey,” Brock said. The first time he’d met Lissy, he’d turned on the charm, let the good-old-boy smile speak on his behalf. I couldn’t help but think of Fuchsia and wish that my boyfriend were a little less charming. Then again, if he’d been less than the popularity god that he was, would I have dated him in the first place?

“Hey, Lilah,” Brock said. There was something in his voice that I didn’t quite recognize. It wasn’t his puppy-dog tone from the day before, when he’d been trying to make things up to me. It wasn’t his “you’re hot” voice, which he used more to remind other people of that fact than to impart the message onto me. It was different.

“What’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice as light and flirty as I could given the circumstances (and by “circumstances,” I mean the fact that Caroline Nowly, her muumuu, and Lissy’s overexuberant younger sister were quickly approaching).

“I had to see you,” Brock said. For a moment, he looked extraordinarily like a shirtless soap-opera star, despite the fact that he was wearing a shirt. It was a good quality to have in a boyfriend, though I was starting to suspect, not the most important one.

I stepped closer to him, lowering my voice in the hope that maybe, just maybe, Caroline Nowly would let us be and wouldn’t order Brock to “come” or “leave” or, I don’t know, “jump” or “wash” or whatever she wanted him to do.

“You were so mad about the thing with Fuchsia, and some of the guys were talking, and…”

His expression was serious—not good. Neither was the tension in his neck, or (from what I could gather from the expression on Lissy’s face) the movement of his aura.

“Is there another guy?” Brock blurted out.

“What?” I asked, truly shocked. Somehow, he’d arrived at the conclusion that I’d cheated on him? An eye for an eye kind of thing?

“Another guy,” Brock said, and in that moment, the expression on his face went from adorable puppy-dog concern to macho, offended male bravado. I could see the air around him cracking, the cracks jumping onto his skin like sparks from a flame.

This was so not a good sign.

“Lilah, baby, just because of that little thing with me and Fuchsia, you start seeing another guy?” Brock shook his head. “Baby, you can’t do that to me.”

He’d never called me “baby” so much in his life. It was almost as disturbing as the fact that he’d announced his infidelity to our entire audience (aka three generations of Lissy’s family, since her mother had picked this moment to come stand on the lawn).

“You cheated on Lilah?” Lexie asked, her voice aghast as she came to stand next to me.

Lissy gave him a murderous look. “Forget saving him. Maybe he deserves to die,” she muttered.

Lexie looked thoughtful. “No,” she said. “Probably not, but…” She trailed off. “He’s not really going to die, is he?”

The air around Brock was moving, breaking. Shards of this moment were dropping to the ground, and the visual surrounding his body—this time, this place—was slowly peeling away.

“You’re my girl, Lilah. Mine.”

Once upon a time, he’d said those exact words to me, and then our lips had touched for the very first time, and I’d fallen seriously in like with the guy every girl wanted.

The guy who ruled the school, as much as any male could.

The king to what I could only presume would be my eventual homecoming queen.

“Who is he, Lilah? What’s his name? Where did you meet him?”

“Are you deranged?” I asked, my voice low and dangerous. “Seriously, were you totally dropped on your head as a young child? Or, I don’t know, severely electrocuted in the past hour and a half? Because if you’re not suffering from some kind of trauma-induced psychological condition right now, then I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that the little hamsters on the wheel in your brain just died and the wheel stopped spinning.”

When I get riled, sometimes I start talking in metaphors that don’t make much sense. It’s an impulse I’d learned to curb by the time I was ten, but now I was on a roll, and I couldn’t seem to stop myself. All of the control I’d mastered, all of the rules I’d played by, all of the rules I’d forced everyone
else
to play by, were melting away. And all that was left was me.

And I was, quite honestly, royally pissed off.

“You cheated on me,” I said, and for once, I didn’t care who heard it. “And hello! You did it with my best friend. And then you told me you loved me, like that would make it all better. And now? Now you’re accusing me of being with another guy? What is wrong with you?”

My words fell on completely deaf ears.

“Who is he?”

Blackness broke through the cracks in the air. It surrounded Brock, and wisps of eerie darkness crept toward me, caressing my skin, absorbing my anger until I wasn’t sure why I was yelling.

“Who is he?” Brock asked again, only this time, the eyes looking out at me weren’t Brock’s. Even when he was jealous, even when he was stupid, even when he was jamming his tongue gracelessly down my throat, Brock had never looked at me like that. Pure, raw ownership emanated from his very being. He looked arrogant. Self-assured. Angry.

He looked like Tad Bradford wearing a Brock mask.

“Who. Is. He.”

It was a demand this time, not a question, and the air around me began to crack as well. Memories that weren’t mine—thoughts, desires, emotions that weren’t mine—flooded my body.

Make him pay. Make him pay. Make him pay.

“His name is Cade,” I said, and the instant his name left my mouth, there he was, standing beside me, the air quivering with his presence. I glanced at Brock/Tad, and his jaw tightened in anger.

“Where is he?” he asked. “Everyone knows better than to mess with my girl.”

“She’s not yours.” Lexie’s voice was soft but commanding. “She hasn’t been yours for a very long time.” She hooked her hand through Lissy’s. “She’s ours.”

Brock let out an inhuman growl, and another foreign thought replaced the chorus of “make him pay” playing in my head.

Save Meara. Save Meara. Save Meara.

The feeling—utter helplessness, terror, sadness—crept up my back like a bug with a mind of its own. My heart pounded, even as the first voice broke its way back into my thoughts.

Make him pay. Make him pay. He is yours. Make him pay.

The thoughts battled in my head, emotions that weren’t entirely mine and weren’t entirely not mine warring for control of my body. I thought of Brock with Fuchsia and how he was as much to blame as she was, and I wanted nothing more than to lead Brock straight to Cade. Cade, who had kissed me. Cade, who knew I was out of his league. But then there was Lexie, standing there, claiming me in a way that no one ever had before, and Brock, threatening that, threatening the one person I’d sworn to protect.

Make him pay. Save Meara. Make him—save her—he is—she is—yours.

A hand on the back of my neck banished the thoughts. The light pressure made my spine tingle in a far less creepy way, and as my entire body warmed to Cade’s touch, my mind calmed.

“Cade.” I whispered his name even as I tried not to, and somewhere inside me, my defenses broke down.

I could feel his lips on mine, the day we’d barely kissed.

I could feel him watching over me as I slept.

I could hear him calling me Princess, see him kneeling beside me in the library.

Brock or Tad or whoever was speaking with my boyfriend’s lips was right. There was someone else, his name was Cade, and standing there, raw and confused and on the cusp of something so dangerous I could feel the air popping with memories of death and loss, I had to admit that there was a distinct possibility that I was in love with him.

Now my life really was a bad movie. There was about a ninety percent chance my boyfriend was possessed, I was quite possibly in love with a ghost (who had somehow killed the possessor of my boyfriend), and I realized that murders featured on the front page of an October 19 newspaper had to have been committed sometime before then.

Say, for instance, October 18. Today.

“You,” Brock growled. At first, I thought he was yelling at Lexie again, or at me, but when I saw his gaze connect with Cade’s, I knew that, for the time being, Lexie was safe. Brock had a new target.

“You can see him?” I asked Brock, and only years of practice keeping my cool in high-pressure situations allowed me to keep my voice steady and even.

“She’s my girl,” Brock told Cade.

Cade’s hand squeezed my shoulder.
“Princess?”
he whispered under his breath, his eyes still on Brock.
“I’m sorry.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was sorry for, because he turned his attention to Brock.
“You don’t want to fight me,”
he said, and only I heard the pleading tone in his voice.

Brock took a step forward, power and anger clear in his movements. He
did
want to fight, and his mouth only confirmed the message his body was sending. “You should have left Helen alone.”

Those, apparently, were the magic words.

Make him pay. He is mine.

The voice came from outside my head this time, and before I could even process what it had said, the air around me shattered into a thousand pieces, and the hole left in the fabric of space and time swallowed Brock whole.

I clung to Cade for a moment longer. “No,” I said. “Don’t.”

He stiffened, his eyes darkening with pain.
“I’m sorry, Princess,”
he said.
“I’m so, so sorry.”

And then he was gone, back to the time and place where I’d first seen him fight. I knew in a way that was beyond knowing that Brock was there, too, and that Helen, perky, blond, evil Helen, was watching. Smiling.

My mouth set in a determined line, I reached blindly for my back pocket.

“What are you doing?” Lexie asked, the same moment that Lissy verbally noticed Brock and Cade’s disappearances. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lissy’s mother move forward and saw Grams hold her back.

I carefully unfolded the picture I’d stolen from the library what seemed like a million years ago (actual time: more like half an hour, tops). It was creased where I’d folded it, but the image was clear: Cade, his face turned away from the camera, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.

“If that Helen chick thinks that she’s going to use my boy to kill my…other boy, she’s got another thing coming,” I growled. And not wanting to give Lexie any more warning than that, I braced the picture against my legs and pressed my fingertips to it. I willed my mind to become one with the photograph, forced myself to find that time, that place.

“Lilah, what are you doing?” Lexie asked again.

I was moving on instinct, and beside me Lissy did the same. She came out of her body as she’d done the night this all started with Kissler in the burning classroom, and she thrust one astral hand toward me, and one toward Lexie.

“She needed you. You need them.”

I pushed the voice out of my head and ignored Lissy’s aura aerobics. I stared at the picture. I thought of everything I’d seen—the flying fists, the shiny blond ponytail, John Davis and Tad Bradford, the others. Brock. Cade. I pressed my hands flat against the picture, an unseen force guiding my motions, and in one jarring blink of an eye, the picture absorbed me whole.

Air cracking. Black everywhere.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

“I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then you should have left Helen alone.”

Brock and Cade circled each other, and beside them, Helen Landon smiled and played with the ring on her left hand. “I just love this part!” she said.

“Oh really?” I asked, stepping forward and interrupting her little monologue. “Because honestly, I think it’s getting a little old.”

Her blue eyes opened wide, and as she processed the fact that I’d crashed her little perpetual death party, Brock threw himself at Cade, and the fight began.

19