It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,24

to stay in New Mexico. If the Church of Light—whatever that even meant now, whatever they had metastasized into—had tracked her here, she didn’t want Pete involved. She had not yet told him that all the dead girls looked like her. If he’d f igured it out himself, which he probably had, he was choosing not to tell her. Knowing what she was and really knowing were two different things. She’d told him more since those early days, but not everything. Everything was dangerous.

“No, I’m good. I won’t get in over my head.” Emma held her breath, waiting for him to call her on her bullshit. She had been in over her head for more than a century.

“They identify the toxin that poisoned her?” he asked instead, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Something natural, hard to detect,” she told him. “Reports also say she was strangled before they dumped her in the pool.”

On the other end, a sniff. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Emma said. “Bastards do what bastards do.”

“So you think there’s a pattern.” More of a statement than a question.

“Yeah, I do.” She thought of Coral—whom she had also not yet mentioned to Pete, because what if she was wrong about Coral’s and her resemblance? And that reminded her of last night and Matt, and then she sighed again. Someday over drinks (not bourbon), she would f ill Pete in on the rest of her notable lapses of judgment.

“Well,” Pete said, drawing the word out.

She knew what he meant. Her instincts were probably right. Yet another Detective Mondragon rule: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . . They were hunting her again, the Church of Light, or whatever they might call themselves these days, just as she was once again hunting them. Only now they’d found a new way to force her out of the shadows. With the other girl, the one before Elodie, it might have been a coincidence. This was no coincidence.

Even if Elodie Callahan had been the same as Emma, if she’d somehow drunk from the same waters and was immortal, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still be dead. They’d have burned her or dismembered her.

They would take what they wanted; maybe they had even found a way to extract immortality. Emma didn’t doubt that possibility. But the autopsy report showed Elodie wasn’t like Emma at all. She’d been poisoned, and she’d died.

“You sure you don’t want me to come out there?” Mondragon asked again.

Just for one tiny, self-indulgent moment, Emma hesitated. “No,” she said.

Better to keep him at a safe distance. Her mind was stuck on the image of Elodie Callahan and her thick, wavy brown hair and bright blue eyes. The thought stirred up a dim memory of something Charlie had said once, when he was holding Emma.

“You look like one of those paintings. The ones in that art book you have.”

He’d meant the Pre-Raphaelite girls with the wild, wavy hair and creamy skin. Emma had known she was too much in motion ever to be that still and perfect. But Charlie rarely said anything he didn’t mean. When he told her something, it counted.

Murdered Elodie Callahan would be quiet and still forever. It happened like that to girls who hadn’t yet f igured out just how impossibly evil the world could be. Maybe this wasn’t the most modern of thoughts, Emma told herself, but it was true, nonetheless.

It happened to boys, too, of course. That’s what had f irst given her a f licker of hope—the hope that Charlie was still out there somewhere, too.

Eddie Higgins was the f irst dead boy’s name. It was 1937, and Emma was in Chicago. She hadn’t found Charlie, not even a trace of him. Two decades had passed since that last day on the road in Florida. She had searched all over the country—f irst across the south, to Louisiana, then northward, following the Mississippi—searched for that stubborn idiot boy, and she had hidden from the Church of Light, and now here she was, still alive and kicking and seventeen, and he was still gone.

It was time to move forward.

She told herself she wasn’t giving up on Charlie, as much as she was being practical. She’d searched for longer than she’d been alive before it happened. Far longer than she’d even been in love. Maybe it was time to do the things that had been lost to her for so long. Charlie had been right, she supposed. Separating from him had wrecked her in more ways