“You’re not crazy,” I said calmly. “You must have just gotten things mixed up in the wreck. I was bleeding, but they were mostly surface cuts. When I woke up, you were gone. I was worried, so I came here.”
“I think I’d know if you weren’t dead,” Bethany snapped. “And, no offense, but I’m pretty sure I’m more qualified to tell if I’m crazy than you are.”
I couldn’t tell if Bethany was on the verge of hysterics or reading me the riot act. Skylar must have been leaning toward the “hysterical” interpretation, because she wound up and smacked her, right across the face.
Bethany blinked. “Did you just hit me?” she asked, disbelief coloring her every feature.
Skylar raised both hands, palms outward. “I come in peace!”
“You do not come in peace. You hit me.”
“I hit in peace!”
Sensing that this could devolve into an all-out brawl very quickly, I took matters into my own hands—literally. I stepped forward and put my right palm on Bethany’s shoulder.
“I told you I’d be okay, and I’m okay,” I said softly.
I could see the wheels turning in Bethany’s head, see her wanting to believe me.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
Bethany shrugged off my touch. “I’m fine.”
“No you’re not,” Skylar piped up. “Somebody drugged you, and your dad is keeping you locked up in your own home. That’s not fine.”
“What is she even doing here?” Bethany directed the question at me, and I took that as evidence that she was at the very least less sure that I was a hallucination than she’d been a moment before.
Skylar didn’t wait for me to answer Bethany’s question—she jumped right in herself. “Someone’s watching you, Bethany. They’re after Kali. And I can’t shake the idea that this is bigger, that there’s something else, someone else.…” Skylar frowned. “Bad people are doing bad things. Good people are doing bad things, too. I’m supposed to be here. I’m supposed to help.”
Skylar blinked, and her eyes stayed closed for a fraction of a second longer than they should have. “This is it.”
She sounded … sad. Stubborn, determined, and sad.
“This is what?” I asked, wondering how many times I’d worn that same expression on my face and what exactly had put it on hers.
“It,” Skylar said simply. “This is it.”
Bethany snorted. “Because that really clears things up.”
Skylar smiled, but the expression only took on half her face. “Give it a few days,” she said, “and it will.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but for better or worse, at the moment, I had bigger fish to fry.
I’d come here as step one in a plan to track down Bethany, but it looked like I wasn’t going to need steps two through four. Instead, I needed to find out what Bethany knew, what she remembered.
Besides the fact that I should have been dead.
“Can we come in?” I asked.
Bethany planted her body firmly in front of the open door. “My dad could come home any second. You shouldn’t be here when he does.”
“Then can we go somewhere else?” I gave her a look. “We need to talk.”
“I can’t leave,” Bethany replied without hesitation. “They’ll know if I do. My dad said everything was going to be okay. He said he’d take care of it, but I have to stay here.”
There was something in her eyes when she talked about her father—not quite anger, not quite fear.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” I didn’t mean for the words to come out of my mouth with an edge to them, but they did. Bethany had left me on the side of the road. Maybe she hadn’t had a choice. Maybe they’d forced her to go, but she’d left me broken and bleeding on the ground and hadn’t lifted a hand against the people who’d put me there.
“You were already dead!”
The vehemence of Bethany’s words took me by surprise.
“You were dead, and it was my fault. I was the one driving. I was the one who got bitten. I couldn’t—I can’t do this again.”
Again?
“There was nothing I could do for you, Kali.”
“But there was something you could do for someone else.” Skylar tilted her head from one side to the other and then back again, staring intently at the lines of Bethany’s face. “Someone you love.”
Bethany’s eyes hardened, and she stepped back into the house, ready to slam the door in our faces. Unfortunately for her, I was quick.
Too quick.
Quicker than I would have been two days before.