It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,8

“trusted” Frank Ryan, the so-called family man, he sounded like an idiot. When Charlie said the word, it sounded as he’d carved it in stone at the very moment it f lowed from his lips.

Something wonderful and f ierce wrapped itself around Emma’s heart at that moment. Charlie. The bird. The bright heat of the day. The tanned skin of Charlie’s wrist as it peeked from his sleeve, the delicate grace of his bones, vulnerable to the hawk on his arm, yet somehow strong and secure. She stared at the goshawk’s talons and imagined she could feel something like that deep inside, taking hold.

So strange. Emma had expected, and been disappointed by, and longed for so many things since moving here. But a boy had not been one of them.

Neither had getting punished, of course. By the time Emma returned home, Jamie and Lucy had eaten most of the chocolate cake, and her mother was shaking her head with a scowl as she wiped up the remaining crumbs. Had her mother gone to f ind Mr. Ryan? Emma never did f ind out.

After that, Florida seemed different. Less strange and awful. Or maybe it wasn’t different at all. Maybe it was only that now instead of seeing a swampy, foreign place where life moved slower than she wanted, and her worries felt bigger than she was, Emma saw only Charlie.

The smoke smell grew stronger and overpowering, as Emma and Charlie ran from the dock, the unmoored rowboat drifting back to sea behind them.

“Hurry,” she gasped. She ripped the bottles from her pockets—they were useless now—and smashed them to the ground. “Oh my God, Charlie. Hurry.”

But by the time they reached the museum, it was too late.

Someone had barred the doors to the reptile house from the outside. And jammed the lock on the inner off ice door. There were no windows. So when the building began to burn, there was no way out.

They were all gone, too: the Ryans and the O’Neills. The parents. The siblings. Even her youngest brother, baby Simon, still and always two. The gators were mostly alive, having slithered out of their cages into the observation pool. But everyone else was dead, except Emma and Charlie, because Emma had insisted he row to the island with her.

It’s a funny thing to learn about a loophole in the immortality. If you drank the tea, no disease or poison would harm you. Your body wouldn’t age. You would live forever . . . unless you died of unnatural causes. Like being burned to death. Or other horrible things Emma wasn’t sure of yet. But an escape clause, so to speak. If escape meant being reduced to a charred, unrecognizable corpse.

And now they had to escape, because Glen Walters would soon realize that he hadn’t murdered them all. Emma stared, numb with shock, grief, and fury, at the smoldering ruins of the off ice. She could imagine Walters’s followers approaching fast, grim and angry, shouting as they swept in to f inish the job, shouting the words that until now they’d only hissed in the direction of the O’Neills and the Ryans.

Unnatural. Abomination. Evil.

There was no time to think. No time to do anything but f lee.

“Run!” Emma told Charlie.

“Run!” Charlie told Emma.

They ran. He was all she had left now, Charlie Ryan. Loving Charlie Ryan was like breathing, an involuntary motion that would last as long as she did—which was forever.

The horror of what had happened washed over Emma in wave after heavy wave, threatening to pull her under as they made their way north. At one point she even said, “We have to go back. We can’t leave them like that.” Then she bent and vomited, and Charlie pressed a sweaty hand to her sweaty neck, telling her it would be okay, which of course was a lie.

“We can’t,” she repeated. “Charlie, we can’t.”

But he urged her forward, sometimes dragging her when her feet refused to move, as though the grief and loss had sucked the life from her, too. Vaguely she registered the harshness with which he pulled her arm. “Damn it, Emma,” he said, “just keep going.”

Charlie never swore at her. But he was afraid and grieving as well.

What a fool she’d been with all those plans, so carefully engineered. While she was looking one way, the only way she ever looked—at Charlie—Glen Walters had taken everything and everyone she cared about. Burned it to bits. Burned them. She would gladly rip the immortality out