It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,9

of her and give it to him and his Church of Light. Take it, she would say. You horrible bastard. You evil man.

But she had Charlie. They were together. Somehow, they would survive. That’s what Emma told herself over and over as the sun rose in the sky and the world kept on spinning. That’s what she told herself as she understood—really understood—for the f irst time that the world didn’t care about the people who lived and died in it. Her head f illed with images of the bodies. Simon’s baby-f ine hair blackened with soot.

Charlie tugged her arm. “Stop,” he said. Something in the roughness of his voice made her glance up, but his expression was unreadable.

They were at a fork in the road. How far had they gotten? Fifteen miles? Maybe twenty. Not enough.

They’d sneaked north past Fort Mose, skirting a marshy area, f leeing in the dark. She’d remembered some half-forgotten school lecture about freed black men and the Spanish, all jumbled up with Frank Ryan’s stories about the Calusas in the steamy stew that was Florida. A farmer had given the two of them a ride for a few miles but they’d jumped off his wagon when he started asking too many questions. After that they’d avoided the main roads as much as they could, but now the sun was coming up, and underneath the terror, Emma could feel exhaustion lurking.

A few miles back, Charlie had changed their direction, muttering something about maybe hiding out for a while at Ponte Vedra and then taking more back roads toward Jacksonville. They could get a room in a local inn and then f ind the safest route from there.

“We should go back to New York,” Emma suggested. “We could be safe there.”

New York had been her original plan only yesterday morning when they had gone to that stupid island. They would get more of the plant and brew more of the tea, just in case the whole thing wore off, and be young and happy forever. That’s what she wanted. In a big city, they could blend in. If someone noticed them, they could just move to another neighborhood. Another borough. Like those stupid, awful gators, she thought, only half-ironically. During hot weather, they’d dig holes in the mud and hide until things cooled down.

“Emma,” Charlie snapped, “we’re not safe anywhere. Don’t you understand?”

She hadn’t heard that tone before. Not from Charlie.

“Maybe Key West, then,” she said, hearing her own sharp-toned desperation. “We could double back and get someone to sail us out there and then on to Cuba, maybe. They’d never think we would do that.”

But he was right. And besides, wasn’t the beach at Ponte Vedra one of the places Charlie’s father had said Juan Ponce de León once sighted land? Maybe the stories mentioned a hiding place. Only they hadn’t made it to Ponte Vedra. They were here—wherever here was—a clump of ramshackle wooden houses. From one of the rickety porches, a gaunt-faced woman in a dark muslin dress stared at them with too-curious interest.

Emma turned away, peering down the road to their left and then the one to their right. No signs marked any direction or destination. Neither seemed to go anywhere. The sun was warming the air to a thick simmer of dust and heat. Her heart felt like it was beating only because it didn’t have a choice.

Every time they stopped, she saw her family’s faces in her head. It couldn’t have happened. They couldn’t be gone. But they were. Oh, God, she thought, I don’t know what to do.

Beads of sweat dotted Charlie’s forehead. “Em,” he said. He paused. His jaw twitched.

Her heart stuttered, hard, like something had stabbed it.

“Em. Emma. We need to . . . we need to split up. It’s the only way we can be safe. We have to leave two trails, or they’re going to track us down. I know . . .” He swallowed and set his jaw. “It’s the only way, Emma.”

Was he joking? That had to be it. She was exhausted, but they had to keep moving, and so he was telling her this awful joke to keep her going. Maybe even get her angry because she and Charlie squabbled like mad sometimes, but that was different. It wasn’t like when her own parents argued; it never lasted long, and it always ended up in kissing . . . and so that must be it. Now he was trying to make her