Teardrop (24 page)

She squinted ahead. Something was blocking the road. Was it Cat playing a joke? No, Eureka’s headlights revealed a gray Suzuki sedan parked across the middle of the road.

Eureka slammed on the brakes. It wasn’t going to be enough. She spun the wheel right, tires screeching. She swerved onto the shoulder, across a shallow ditch. Magda came to a halt with her hood five feet deep in sugarcane.

Eureka’s chest heaved. The smell of burnt rubber and gasoline fumes made her want to gag. There was something else in the air—the scent of citronella, strangely familiar. Eureka tried to breathe. She’d almost hit that car. She’d almost been in her third accident in six months. She’d slammed on the brakes ten feet short and probably destroyed her alignment. But she was okay. The other car was okay. She hadn’t hit anyone. She might still make it home in time for dinner.

Four people appeared in the shadows on the far side of the road. They passed the Suzuki. They were coming toward Magda. Slowly Eureka recognized the gray couple from the police station. There were two others with them, also dressed in gray, as if the first couple had been multiplied. She could
see them so clearly in the darkness—the cut of the dress of the woman from the station; the hairline of the man who was new to the group; the pale, pale eyes of the woman Eureka hadn’t seen before.

Or had she? They looked somehow familiar, like family you met for the first time at a reunion. There was something about them, something tangible in the air around them.

Then she realized: They weren’t just pale. They were glowing. Light limned the edges of their bodies, blazed outward from their eyes. Their arms were locked like links in a chain. They walked closer, and as they did, it seemed like the whole world closed in on Eureka. The stars in the sky, the branches of the trees, her own trachea. She didn’t remember putting her car in park, but there it was. She couldn’t remember how to get it back in drive. Her hand shook on the gearshift. The least she could do was roll up the windows.

Then, in the darkness behind Eureka, a truck rumbled around the bend. Its headlights were off, but when the driver punched the gas, the lights came on. It was a white Chevy, driving straight toward them, but at the last moment it swerved to miss Magda—

And plowed into the Suzuki.

The gray car caved around the fender of the truck, then slid backward, as if on ice. It rolled once, nearing Magda, Eureka, and the quartet of glowing people.

Eureka ducked across the center console. Her body shook. She heard the thump of the car landing upside down, the
smash of its windshield. She heard the screech of truck tires and then silence. The truck’s engine died. A door slammed. Footsteps crunched gravel on the shoulder of the road. Someone pounded on Eureka’s window.

It was Ander.

Her hand trembled as she rolled the window down.

He used his fingers to force it down more quickly. “Get out of here.”

“What are you doing here? You just hit those people’s car!”

“You need to get out of here. I wasn’t lying to you earlier.” He glanced over his shoulder at the darkened road. The gray people were arguing near the car. They looked up at Ander with glowing eyes.

“Leave us!” the woman from the station shouted.

“Leave
her
!” Ander shouted back coldly. And when the women cackled, Ander reached into the pocket of his jeans. Eureka saw a flash of silver at his hip. At first she thought it was a gun, but then Ander pulled out a silver case about the size of a jewelry box. He thrust it toward the people in gray. “Stay back.”

“What’s in his hand?” The elder of the two men asked, stepping closer to the car.

Behind him, the other said, “Surely it’s not the—”

“You will leave her alone,” Ander warned.

Eureka heard Ander’s breath coming quickly, the tension straining his voice. As he fumbled with the clasp on the box,
a gasp came from the foursome on the road. Eureka realized they knew exactly what the box held—and it terrified them.

“Child,” one of the men warned venomously. “Do not abuse what you do not understand.”

“Perhaps I do understand.” Slowly Ander flipped open the lid. An acid-green glow emanated from within the case, brightening his face and the dark space around him. Eureka tried to discern the box’s contents, but the green light inside was nearly blinding. A sharp, untraceable odor stung her nostrils, dissuading her from peering any deeper.

The four people who had been advancing now took several quick steps away. They stared at the case and the shining green light with sick trepidation.

“You can’t have her if we’re dead,” a woman’s voice called. “You know that.”

“Who are these people?” Eureka said to Ander. “What is in that box?”

With his free hand, he grabbed Eureka’s arm. “I’m begging you. Get out of here. You have to survive.” He reached into the car, where her hand was stiff and cold on the gearshift. He pressed down on her fingers and slid the lever to reverse. “Hit the gas.”

She nodded, terrified, then reversed hard, wheeling back the way she’d come. She drove into the darkness and didn’t dare look back at the green light pulsing in her rearview mirror.

19

O
n Friday morning, before the bell, Brooks was waiting at Eureka’s locker. “You weren’t at Latin Club.”

His hands were stuffed in his pockets and he looked like he’d been waiting there awhile. He was blocking the locker next to Eureka’s, which belonged to Sarah Picou, a girl so terribly shy she’d never tell Brooks to move even if it meant going to class without her books.

Rhoda had insisted it would rain, and though the drive to school had been clear and bright, Eureka had her heather-gray slicker on. She liked hiding under its hood. She’d hardly slept and didn’t want to be at school. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

“Eureka”—Brooks watched her twirl the dial on her combination lock—“I was worried.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “And late.”

Brooks’s green sweater was too snug. He wore shiny new loafers. The hallway was choked with shouting kids, and the seed of a headache was splitting open and sprouting a razor-wire beanstalk in Eureka’s brain.

Five minutes separated them from the bell, and her English class was two flights up and at the other end of the building. She opened her locker and threw in some binders. Brooks hovered over her like a hall monitor from an eighties teen movie.

“Claire was sick last night,” she said, “and William threw up this morning. Rhoda was gone, so I had to …” She waved her hand, as if he should understand the scope of her responsibilities without being told.

The twins were not sick. Eureka was the one who’d had a cramp across her entire being, the kind she used to get before cross-country meets when she was a freshman. She couldn’t stop reliving the encounter with Ander and his truck, the four pedestrians from hell glowing in the darkness—and the mysterious green light Ander had turned on them like a weapon. She’d picked up her phone three times the night before to call Cat. She’d wanted to set the story free, to unburden herself.

But she couldn’t tell anyone. After she drove home, Eureka had spent ten minutes pulling sugarcane from Magda’s grille. Then she ran up to her room, shouting down to Rhoda that she was too swamped with homework to eat. “Swamped
in the swamp” was a joke she had with Brooks, but nothing seemed funny anymore. She’d stared out the window, imagining every headlight was a pale psychopath searching for her.

When she heard Rhoda’s footsteps on the stairs, Eureka had grabbed her Earth Science book and opened it just in time before Rhoda carried in a plate of flank steak and mashed potatoes.

“You’d better not be messing around in here,” Rhoda said. “You’re still on thin ice after that Dr. Landry stunt.”

Eureka flashed her textbook. “It’s called homework. They say it’s highly addictive, but I think I can handle it if I only try it at parties.”

She hadn’t been able to eat. At midnight she’d surprised Squat with the kind of meal a dog on death row might request. At two, she heard Dad come home. She got as far as her door before she stopped herself from rushing into his arms. There was nothing he could do about her troubles, and he didn’t need another weight to drag him down. That was when she checked her email and found the second translation from Madame Blavatsky.

This time, when Eureka read from
The Book of Love
, she forgot to wonder how its story might apply to Diana. She found too much strange symmetry between Selene’s predicament and her own. She knew what it was like to have a boy burst into your life out of nowhere, leaving you haunted and wanting more. The two boys even had similar names. But
unlike the boy in the story, the boy on Eureka’s mind didn’t sweep her off her feet and kiss her. He slammed into her car, followed her around, and said she was in danger.

As sun rays tentatively fingered her window that morning, Eureka had realized that the only person she could turn to about all of her questions was Ander. And it wasn’t up to her when she saw him.