Liam whistled, and I looked Darcy in the eye. He’d just relayed that news like he was going over random stats of a game. Darcy blew out a breath.
“So what happened to him? To Nell?” Darcy asked me.
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember now that he was here…but how did he get here?”
I cleared my throat. “Well…I kind of killed him.”
“What?” she blurted.
“You killed a guy?” Liam asked, sliding to the edge of the bed so that his long legs dangled down. “How?”
His eyes were bright—kind of disturbingly bright considering the subject matter. But he had to be a good person to be a Lifer, right?
I turned my shoulder to him and concentrated on Darcy while I told the story.
“I was…well, basically I was dying.” I paused and took a breath, hating the act of remembering this. “But I got his knife away from him and I…”
I trailed off, unable to find a way to complete the sentence that didn’t sound like something from a bad horror flick. I jammed it into his stomach? No. I gutted him? No. Instead, I stared out Darcy’s window at the house across the street. The gray house I’d been obsessed with when we first moved here, certain that someone was watching us from its windows. And, of course, I had been right. Tristan had been watching me. Keeping tabs on the new potential Lifer. A horrible, sour burning spread through my stomach as I remembered the day he’d taken me there—showed me the spot from where he’d watched. The day I’d first tried to kiss him and he’d rejected me.
The house was still now. Dark. Like everything else on this damn island.
“Wow. Rory, can we just talk for a second about how badass that is?” Darcy exclaimed, her face still shimmering with tears.
I flinched, my skin tightening. There’d been a time, not so long ago, when it had felt badass. When I’d felt proud of myself for ridding the Earth of the man who killed fourteen girls and took my family as his swan song. But now, it no longer felt that way.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Are you kidding me? Just think about the giant favor you did for the world,” Darcy said. “Right now there’s some random girl running around playing soccer or hooking up with her boyfriend or shopping with her mom, and she’s only doing it because you offed the asshole who was coming after her.”
“She’s right, you know,” Krista said. “You’re a hero, Rory.”
I tried to smile, but I realized, as Darcy eyed me proudly, why I felt so conflicted. Because when I took Steven Nell’s life, I hadn’t been thinking about the random girls I was saving or even the girls he already murdered. I’d been thinking about me. I’d been thinking about my family and what he’d done to us. And I’d been pissed. I’d slain the man out of revenge, plain and simple. And there was nothing pure or heroic about that. Did I even deserve to be a Lifer?
“What about Dad?” Darcy asked, wiping her eyes and sucking in a loud breath. “Where’s he?”
And there was the question I’d been dreading the most. She remembered him, now that she was a Lifer. A few days ago, when he’d moved on, I’d mentioned his name and she’d looked at me like I was crazy. Now her eyes were filled with guarded hope. I didn’t want to tell her—didn’t need to tell her just yet—about how wrong things were. I decided to keep my answers short.
“He’s moved on.”
“So Mom and Dad are in the Light.”
She didn’t ask it, just stated it. And I didn’t contradict her. My eyes met Fisher’s. He cocked one brow. I shot him a silencing look that I hoped Krista picked up on.
“We’re never going to see them again?” she asked, her voice breaking.
I cleared my throat. “No.”
She wiped her eyes. “Okay. This is a lot.”
“I know,” I said. “But the good news is, we’re going to be together. Lifers never move on. We’ll never have to say good-bye.”
Darcy’s eyes lit up, and she reached for my hand. “Really?”
I smiled. “Really.”
We sat there, clutching each other’s fingers and looking out at the rain. Back home, before we died, Darcy and I had been estranged for months—a stalemate over a guy I could barely even remember. She used to love stomping around the house, reminding me and my dad about how very soon she was going to graduate and how she’d be “outta here” without looking back. Then, I couldn’t have imagined sitting here with her like this, in peaceful, companionable silence. It was amazing how quickly everything had changed.