Sign Here(52)

“Do you want me to come get you? I don’t like you feeling unsafe.”

Lily leaned back against the wall.

“I’m fine,” she said, her pulse slowing simply from his voice. “I’m safe. He is probably just passive-aggressively letting me know he knows I did something for Sarah. But I can explain that easily enough. Sean just turned seventeen, you know.”

“Makes the whole thing real on a different level.”

Lily closed her eyes. She had always loved the boathouse. She loved the sounds it made: the slap of water over the rusted boat lift, the creak of the weather vane.

“He couldn’t possibly know about us.”

“No,” Gavin agreed. “Not from a flower.”

Lily could hear Gavin press the receiver into his neck as if pulling her close.

“Fuck, Gav. I really wish I could see you.”

“I wish I could do a lot more than see you.”

Lily leaned back against the wall harder, and then she heard the screen door slam shut and saw Sean shuffling down the porch steps.

“Shit, I have to go. Hold that thought, okay?”

“As if it ever goes away,” he said. “Would be nice to get some work done once in a while.”

“I love you,” she said, before slipping her phone under a half-deflated inner tube and grabbing a bag of birdseed from a shelf just as Sean stepped inside.

“There you are!”

“Where else would I be?” Sean asked groggily as he walked into the boathouse. He had on his swim shorts and held a book under his arm.

“Where is your father?”

Sean shrugged as he continued past her to the dock.

“Well, don’t mind me,” she said to his back. “Just feeding the birds.”





PEYOTE





TO HER CREDIT, CAL didn’t say a single word until the elevator doors closed.

“I have been trying to be nice to you,” she said, jamming the emergency brake and bringing the whole thing to a screaming halt. “I mean, honestly—maybe for the first time ever—I am genuinely trying to be nice. Not because I need you for something, but because for some fucknut reason, I actually kind of like you. And you, you fucking asshole—”

She slammed her fist into the wall with the word.

“Cal, I—”

“Do you think you’re the only one who suffers? It’s Hell for all of us, not just you.”

And then she sank down into the corner of the elevator and put her head in her hands.

I don’t think I’ve been sorry once since I arrived in Hell, except sorry for myself. But that did something to me. Seeing her like that, like she was small.

It hurt.

Maybe this side of success made me sentimental, I thought as I touched the paper in my pocket. Or maybe I realized that my plan relied on her willingness to lie for me, a kink I hadn’t quite ironed out. Or maybe it was the deeper, sharper truth.

As far as I could remember, Cal was the closest thing I’d ever had to a friend.

She could’ve told Felix the minute he opened that door, and I would have been on the conveyor belt. But she didn’t. Despite all my efforts to push her away, she was the only person—in millennia of this existence—who cared enough about me to keep a secret.

The words left my mouth before I could stop them.

“I’m getting out.”

“Excuse me?”

“I found a way out of Hell, and I needed those results to make sure I never come back.”

Cal laughed an angry, scary laugh.

“Go fuck yourself, Pey.”

“I wouldn’t have screwed you over like that for anything less, I promise. But I have a plan. And if you help me, we can both get out of here.”

I said it because I didn’t want her to turn me in. I was sweet-talking my way out of damnation—or, rather, worse damnation: deeper, darker, closer-to-the-hot-core damnation, unlike the current cozy damnation of home. But once I said it, I realized it was true. It would probably be bad for the world, having Cal out and about once more. But I didn’t care. It was good for me.

Cal stood up.

“Assuming even one word of what you’re saying is true—and that is a very, very big assumption—” Cal started as she paced, “it won’t matter, because KQ will send us both Downstairs if we fuck up this deal. And there is no deal without the target’s location, which, thanks to you, we don’t have.”

“We know he’s in Georgia, somewhere near the coast. Do you have any idea why he would be there? Any intel from Third?” I asked as I rolled the edge of the paper, just to feel it cup my finger back.

“Without the one contraption in Hell meant to find people, you mean? The one we just fucking left?”

“Okay,” I said. “What about Jason? I bet he has more in his memory than he originally shared. Maybe more than he even knows.”

Cal paused. “You know who you told me had memory clearance?”

“No,” I said, catching her drift. “Cal, come on. Be reasonable.”

“If you had been reasonable, we wouldn’t be here. But here we are.” She hit the emergency brake again, and the elevator shrieked into motion. “We need Trey, and we need him now.”