I had to force myself to breathe.
“Tristan, please,” I whispered, lifting my head and looking up at his placid face. “Please don’t die. Please don’t do this to me. I know that what I’m saying is selfish. I know it. I do. But I can’t take this anymore. I can’t handle losing you on top of everyone else. There are only so many people in this world I love, Tristan, and they’re all gone. Every one of them. Except you.”
I leaned back, willing him to blink, to gasp, to do anything. Anything to show me that he was still in there, that he could hear me, that he understood.
But there was nothing but the steady rise and fall of his breath, and the ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs.
“So let’s break it down,” Kevin said, dropping onto a blanket in the sand next to a roaring, comfortingly warm and dry bonfire. The rain had stopped at three o’clock. Just suddenly stopped after days and days of relentless soaking. It was still drab, gray, and cold with a solid layer of fog overhead, but it was dry, so we’d decided to meet up at the cove for a dinner of sandwiches and chips—which was great, since I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—and to figure out our next move. Kevin popped open a can of beer and took a swig, licking the suds from his lips. The skin on his knuckles was dry and cracked, tiny white flakes clinging to his skinny fingers. “Pete is the bad guy. He killed Nadia, and he may have killed Cori.”
“Yep,” I said, tossing a piece of driftwood into the popping, crackling fire.
“And he has an accomplice, but we have no clue who it is, and he can’t tell us who it is, because he’s unconscious,” Kevin continued.
“Yep.”
“Well, this totally sucks.”
Kevin chugged the rest of the beer, crushed the can, and reached for another one. I poured coffee from Krista’s plaid thermos into a Styrofoam cup, then shuffled through the cool, damp sand and sat on a towel between Krista and Bea.
“I still can’t believe we thought it was Tristan,” Lauren said, shivering under the gray wool blanket she had arranged over her legs.
“None of us can believe we thought it was Tristan.” Kevin tugged his black baseball cap lower over his brown eyes. “But let’s not go there right now. I want to talk about Pete. That fucking little backstabber, Pete.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Bea said as she reached into a crumpled brown paper bag for a sandwich. “Nadia was one of his best friends and he just kills her? Why?”
“He said if he waited long enough he’d get what he wanted,” I told them, probably for the dozenth time. “So what does he want?”
“Pete? Aside from a lifetime supply of beef jerky and a record deal, I have no clue. He’s a pretty simple guy,” Fisher said.
“God, I wish he’d wake up,” I muttered, checking my walkie-talkie. It’s red “on” light gleamed brightly as if laughing at me. I dropped the hem of my jacket over it, annoyed. Bea tore her sandwich in half and handed one side to me.
“I say when he does wake up, we break each of his fingers one by one until he talks,” Kevin said, hunching his shoulders toward his ears as he took another loud slurp of beer. “That’ll do the trick.”
“You wouldn’t actually do that, would you?” Liam asked, alarm lighting his handsome face.
“No!” the rest of us answered in unison. To punctuate the message, Fisher flung a scrap of bark at Kevin’s head. It bounced harmlessly off the bill of his cap.
“That is not the way we do things,” Krista snapped, brushing some ash off the sleeve of her white sweatshirt.
“How do you know?” Kevin asked, sitting up straight and pushing the cap up on his forehead to better glare at us. “How do any of us know? It’s not like anything’s normal around here. Who’s to say how we do or don’t do things?”
Bea took a deep breath and sighed. For
the first time in days, her red curls were loose around her shoulders, and they danced and shook in the cold ocean breeze. “He does have a point. It is a whole new and not-very-pleasant Juniper Landing.”
“But we’re not torturing anyone,” Joaquin said firmly. “End of discussion.”
Suddenly our walkie-talkies buzzed in unison, and there was an awful, piercing peel of feedback, so loud I wouldn’t have been surprised if our ears had started to bleed. I grabbed at my radio as Krista ducked her head into her hands dramatically.
“Apologies,” Chief Grantz’s voice blared through the radios. “My apologies for that. Let all ushers be advised that the mayor has decided the usherings will begin tonight at sundown.”
There was no movement other than the endless wild dance of the flames and the meek waves of low tide, lapping at the shoreline behind me. I stared at Joaquin. His jaw clenched as he tossed another twig, then another, then another into the fire.
“The souls on the watch list will be the first to be ushered, as previously stipulated. Please bring your first charge to the bridge once it’s dark. Over.”
Lauren hugged her knees up under her chin. “Well. So there you go.”
“I’m sorry, but I cannot wait to get rid of Tess,” Bea said, munching on her sandwich. “I’d usher her ass right now if they’d let me.”