“Hello?” I said again, clutching the phone.
Laughter echoed through the line. Quiet at first, but growing rapidly louder. I banged the phone down and bolted from the room, leaving the door wide open behind me.
An ally
I ran for home as fast as I could, my pulse throbbing in my eyes, my ears, my fingertips. The chill ocean breeze did nothing to cool my overheated skin. Had that call been intended for me? Had it been placed by someone who knew Tristan and I were there, or was it just a random coincidence? A crow cawed overhead as I raced across the square, and I got this awful feeling in my gut. A feeling that on Juniper Landing, there were no coincidences. I tore through the park, turned the corner onto Freesia, and smacked right into someone.
“Where’re you going in such a hurry?” Officer Dorn asked, staring down his nose at me with piercing eyes.
I took a step back, shaking like a leaf. “Nowhere,” I said automatically. His eyes narrowed. “Home.”
He moved, infinitesimally, out of my way, and I took off again down the hill. When I got to the bottom, I checked back over my shoulder, and my heart thumped. Dorn hadn’t moved; his suspicious glare was still fixed on me.
I clenched my jaw and kept moving.
“Rory!”
I collided with Joaquin’s shoulder so hard he had to grab the trunk of the nearest peach tree to keep from going down. A startled bird flung itself from the tree’s branches, raining dozens of shriveled brown and gray leaves onto our shoulders. It swooped across the street, disappearing behind the flowery hedge on the opposite side. Joaquin reached for my arm, but I wrested it away.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now, Joaquin,” I said, pushing past him. “I just want to be—”
“Stop!” he shouted. “I need to know why you were asking about people being ushered to the wrong place.”
I froze in my tracks. The breeze lifted my hair from my neck and sent chills down my arms. Slowly, I turned. Joaquin was gasping for breath, like he’d just been sprinting. Sweat dotted his upper lip and hairline.
“Why?”
“Because I just ushered that girl—Jennifer? The one with the pixie cut?” he said. “And she went to the Shadowlands.”
I blinked “Wait. How is that even possible?” I asked. “You were with us when the fog rolled in.”
“I…got the call about two seconds after you left, so I went over to her room and got her,” Joaquin explained. “I wasn’t that surprised, because she was so simple. There was no unfinished business there, so it wasn’t like she’d need my help to get ready to move on. I just picked her up and brought her to the bridge. But then, when I got back to town…”
“The weather vane was pointing south,” I finished flatly.
“Yeah.” Joaquin tipped his face toward the ground for a second, his hands on his hips. When he looked up again, his normally cocky gaze was searching, almost pleading. “What you said before at Krista’s, about someone going to the wrong place… Why did you ask us that?”
“Oh, that was just—” I looked away. My knee-jerk reaction was to keep the peace, to not make any more waves than I already had.
“Rory, don’t mess with me right now. Please,” Joaquin said in an urgent voice that cut me to the core. “Jennifer didn’t…she doesn’t deserve what she’s getting.”
He was desperate. I could see it in his eyes.
“Aaron was sent to the Shadowlands last night,” I told him. “And I know for a fact that he doesn’t belong there.”
Joaquin dropped my hand, his eyes going flat. “And let me guess, Tristan told you that’s just the way it is. That you had to accept it and move on.”
“He did,” I said.
Joaquin pivoted and took a few steps away. His fingers curled into fists, then stretched. Finally, he took a deep breath and faced me.
“There’s something you should know,” he replied. “All this?” He looked down at the leaves that blanketed the sidewalk. “It shouldn’t be happening.”
I squinted, confused. “What? You mean the leaves changing? I know it’s early, but—”
“No! You don’t get it. This stuff never happens,” he said, pacing the width of the sidewalk in front of me, the dry, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet. “Leaves don’t turn, flowers don’t die, birds don’t drop out of the sky, fish don’t pile up on beaches, and there are definitely, definitely no hornets.”
I shook my head. “But the other day, you got stung right outside—”
“I know, Rory. And in almost a hundred years on this island, that was the first hornet I’ve ever seen,” he said vehemently. “We have bees because we have flowers, but no hornets, no wasps, no other insects, nothing like that.”
“That’s insane. It’s—”
Then, ever so slowly, realization began to dawn. Joaquin’s weird reaction to the hornet sting. The marigolds withering in their pot on the porch—alive one minute, dead the next. The reeds near the bridge that had made Tristan go pale.
“And these things…when did they start happening?” I asked, Nadia’s accusations ringing in my mind. “Was it when I got here?”
“I don’t know,” Joaquin replied. “No one really knows exactly when it started, but it’s definitely been recent. They think that it might be because the balance of good and evil around here has been thrown off somehow. That maybe a Lifer has—”
“Gone bad,” I breathed. My gut twisted as I thought of Jessica. “Joaquin, the other night Nadia accused me of being responsible for all this strange stuff that’s been going on around here. Does that mean she thinks I’m the reason things are dying?” I demanded. “Does she think I’m pure evil or something?”
Joaquin just stared at me. I felt like I was going to throw up. What if Nadia took her suspicions to the mayor? What if the mayor believed her?
“She’s going to get me sent to Oblivion,” I said under my breath, my vision blurring.
“No,” Joaquin said. “Rory, she’s not. No one thinks she’s right about you.”
“Dorn does!” I insisted. “And maybe Grantz, too. What if she starts convincing other people? What if she convinces everyone?”
Joaquin reached for my shoulders and held on tight. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I won’t let it. Tristan won’t let it. Nadia is just grasping at straws. Now, take a deep breath.”
I did, and blew it out slowly through pursed lips. I felt slightly better. But only slightly.
“Okay?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Good.” He released me. “Look, I know you’re not the cause of all this, but there’s definitely something up. And now, on top of everything, good people are going to the Shadowlands. Whatever it is, it’s not good.”
I cleared my throat. “So what do we do?”
“There’s only one person to talk to around here when something’s wrong,” Joaquin said, starting for town. “And whatever Saint Tristan thinks, something is clearly wrong.”
“We’re going to the mayor?” I asked tremulously.
Joaquin nodded, his fists now tightly clenched. “We’re going to the mayor.”
A gnat's blink
Joaquin walked right into Tristan’s house without knocking. Somewhere nearby I heard voices whispering urgently, but they fell silent when I closed the door. Joaquin was already striding toward the mayor’s office.
“Just go,” I heard Tristan’s voice hiss.