“What are you talking about?” Lauren asked shakily. She and Kevin still hovered near the front door, the raindrops from their jackets forming a lake around their feet. “Did you know this was going to happen?”
The mayor turned. “I wasn’t certain. I was hoping we would be able to find out what was happening—who was to blame—and fix it before it went this far.”
“Okay, enough with the vague,” Joaquin snapped. “You’d better start explaining right now.”
The mayor took a deep, audible breath and stood in front of the fireplace next to Joaquin.
“Here’s what I know. Once innocents started being relegated to the Shadowlands, the balance of the universe began to shift, which is why we saw the island become infested with bugs and death and storms. When we couldn’t find the culprit, our only answer was to stop the ushering entirely. It was the only way to guarantee we didn’t tilt the balance even further off its axis.”
“Of course. We know this,” Fisher said, his hands behind his back. “What does it have to do with Nadia?”
The mayor’s eyes grew hard. “Well, what you don’t know is that your immortality, as it were, is contingent upon your continuing to fulfill your purpose. That is, continuing to help souls find their redemption and move on. So when we stopped ushering souls…”
“We made ourselves vulnerable,” I said, my mouth dry. I leaned into the back of one of the taller chairs, gripping its brocade fabric for dear life.
“Yes, Miss Thayer,” the mayor said. “The longer you refrain from fulfilling your duty, the more…expendable you are to the universe.”
“So we can die now?” Krista asked shrilly, her voice filling the long, wide room. “Any of us?”
The mayor turned an inappropriately wry eye on her pseudo daughter. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t go cliff diving anytime soon.”
Krista sat down heavily on a kitchen stool. Bea leaned into the island, her head in her hands. No one else moved.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Bea asked quietly, her eyes wide and trained on Tristan’s wound. “Why didn’t you warn us?”
The mayor lifted her chin and cleared her throat. “It was a judgment call,” she said. “I already had a hundred extra panicked visitors on my hands. I didn’t need you panicking as well.”
“That wasn’t your call to make,” Joaquin spat.
“Excuse me?” the mayor asked indignantly.
Joaquin took one step and got right in her face. The mayor was so startled she staggered back, her shoulders colliding with the mantelpiece. The framed photos set up at careful angles along the expanse of the shelf rattled.
“You put us at risk! This? This is your fault,” Joaquin said, flinging a hand at the couches where Nadia and Tristan lay. “If they’d known, they might have been more careful. Or they might have come back to us sooner. Nadia might still be alive!”
“Back off her, Marquez,” Dorn said.
“Let’s stop focusing on what we can’t change and focus on the problems at hand,” the mayor snapped.
“Do we know who did this?”
“Tristan said it was Pete,” Bea replied. “He said Pete killed Nadia.”
“Pete?” Krista demanded. “Are you serious?”
“What would Pete stand to gain from this?” Chief Grantz asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Unless he’s the one who’s been ushering people and they found out about it,” Lauren said.
I felt as if something inside me snapped, like a guitar string plucked hard, the reverberations vibrating throughout my body. “So you think…you think Tristan is innocent?”
Joaquin looked me in the eye and my throat closed. If Tristan was innocent, everything changed. If Tristan was innocent . . .
“No,” I said out loud. “It can’t be. He had the coins. The picture of my family. He…he ran.”
The day Tristan had fled, the guys had tossed his room and found the one picture I had left of my family in the bottom of his trunk. It had been taken from my house on the night my father had been ushered to the Shadowlands.
“Think about it. In his note he said he was trying to figure out how to get into the Shadowlands to rescue those people. To do that he’d have to spend time near or on the bridge, like you said,” Lauren theorized, approaching us from the spot she’d taken against the east wall. “Maybe Tristan and Nadia saw Pete bring Darcy and Asha to the bridge last night. Maybe they were going to tell us, so he tracked them down and—”