Kevin had hit the floor, and Joaquin now leaned down with his arm outstretched to help him up. Amazingly, Kevin took it. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as he quietly stood, his sheepish gaze on the ground.
“Sorry, Bea,” he said.
“Me, too,” she replied, holding out her hand. After a beat, he shook it.
Joaquin took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Look, we can’t let our emotions get the best of us right now,” he said to the crowd. “What’s really going on here is huge.”
At that moment, the door swung open. Fisher made a move to block the intruder but then backed off. The mayor stepped in from the back alleyway wearing a black trench coat over a pressed white shirt, her blond hair pulled back from her face, as always. I shrank back at the sight of her, knowing in my gut that this was it. Her and Nadia in the same room. They were going to officially accuse me. They were going to send me to Oblivion.
As the door began to close behind the mayor, I stepped closer to Joaquin, closer to the door leading back to the bar. Then a hand stopped the back door before it could shut, and Tristan slipped through.
I froze. His normally tanned skin looked pale under the fluorescent bulbs. His gaze darted around from face to face. I couldn’t tell if he felt guilty, betrayed, or something else entirely, but when he looked into my eyes from across the room, I felt calmer. I felt safe. At least, relatively. Whatever suspicions my brain was entertaining about where he’d been today, my heart was glad to see him.
“Well,” the mayor said, scrunching up her nose at the dusty top of a vodka box. “Isn’t this cozy?”
She looked at Nadia, who lifted her chin and smiled. A shiver went through me. Joaquin took a step closer to me.
“What’re you doing here?” Joaquin demanded.
“We came, Mr. Marquez, to apologize.” The mayor sniffed. “It appears that you and your little friend here,” she said, sneering at me, “were correct about the usherings.”
My jaw dropped slightly. I hadn’t known the mayor long, but she didn’t strike me as the type of person who readily admitted her mistakes.
“So you admit it?” Joaquin said. “You admit that something’s wrong?”
She tilted her head. “Five souls to the Shadowlands in one fog is…”
“It’s unprecedented,” Tristan cut in. “Nothing like that has ever happened before. As long as I’ve been here, the good souls have always outnumbered the bad. Always. And five have never been taken at once.” He looked at me. “Not only were some of those people certainly not destined for the Shadowlands, some of them weren’t ready to go at all.”
I glanced at Pete and Nadia, thinking of the tally from the cave. The good souls have always outnumbered the bad.
Whom did the tally really belong to? I looked around the room. Whoever it was could be here right now, watching. Itching to make five more marks on that page.
“How do we fix it?” Lauren asked.
“That’s just it,” Tristan said. “We don’t know. Until we figure out how it’s going wrong, we can’t figure out how to make it right.”
A disturbed murmur filled the room.
“But we will figure out what, or who, the problem is,” the mayor said. Then she turned and looked directly at me. “You can trust me on that.”
My face burned so hot I could have fainted. So she did still think it could be me. She just hadn’t made her final decision yet. Realizing this, I somehow still managed to muster up enough courage to state the obvious.
“In the meantime, we have to stop ushering souls,” I said.
The mayor looked me up and down coolly. “I agree.”
Nadia’s face went slack.
“We talked about it, and we both think that’s the best plan,” Tristan told the room. “Better this place get foggy and crowded than more innocent souls get sent to the Shadowlands.”
“And what about the souls that are already there?” Joaquin asked. “Can we get them back?”
There was a long, heavy silence. No one moved. No one breathed.
“You already know the answer to that,” Tristan said finally. “No one ever comes back from the Shadowlands. That’s why it’s imperative that we all understand what we need to do.” The mayor took a step back as he commanded control of the room. “From this moment on, no matter how many coins we each have, no matter how strong the call, no one is to leave this island. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” the room said as one.
“Good,” Tristan said.
Then he looked me in the eye, his gaze so intense it took my breath away.
“Rory,” he said firmly. “We need to talk.”
One of a kind
Tristan and I were silent as we walked back to his house, Krista and the mayor trailing slightly behind us. Every now and then I would catch his gaze; the guarded look in his eyes made me hold my tongue. He held the front door open for me, and together we moved up the creaky stairs and into his dusky room, the only light the full moon glowing through the window. He closed the door behind us, and I turned to look at him. His expression was filled with sorrow and sympathy, apology and regret.
“I’m so sorry, Rory,” he said. “About your dad. You must be—”
“How?” My voice cracked. “How did you know?”
“It’s a special…awareness I have,” he said, taking a step toward me. “When a Lifer’s charge is first revealed to them, it’s revealed to me as well.”
“So that’s how you knew about Aaron,” I said, tears flooding my eyes.
He nodded. “Are you all right?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head as the tears spilled over. “How can I be all right? He’s moving on. He’s…he’s going to leave me.”
Tristan closed the distance between us then, pulling me into his arms. I inhaled the scent of him, so like the calming, floral scent of the island itself, and released all the misery, confusion, and anger I’d been feeling since the moment I’d had that flash.
Tristan stroked my hair back from my face, clinging to my shoulder with his other hand. He kissed the top of my head and whispered in my ear, “It’s okay. I’m here.”
Gradually, my tears began to slow, my breathing returning to normal, until finally I was quiet.
“Where were you today?” I muttered, looking him in the eye. “Where were you when you found out about me ushering my dad?
“I was at the cove,” he said.
“With Nadia?”
Tristan knitted his brow. “What? No. Not with Nadia. I mean, she did come by here earlier today, but I didn’t go anywhere with her. I was at the cove, reading.”
“Reading?” I repeated dumbly.
Tristan released me slowly, as if afraid I might crumble at any sudden movement, and went to his desk. For the first time, I noticed that piled on top were dozens of leather-bound journals, some with yellowed pages, others with crisp white ones. He grabbed one from the top of a pile and brought it to me, sitting down on the edge of his bed. I sat next to him.
“What’s that?” I asked, dragging my hands over my face to try to dry the tears.
“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” he said, tilting the spine up. “It’s my daily log. The most recent one. I’ve been keeping them since I got here, so there are actually quite a few by now, but this is the one that matters.”
“Why?” I asked.
He blinked and looked at me like it was so obvious. “Because you’re in it.” Tristan held the journal out to me, gazing directly into my eyes. “Take it.”
“What?”
“I want you to have it,” he said firmly, placing it in my hands. “I want you to see what I wrote tonight before I came back to town—how you’ve changed everything for me.”