gran’s journal,” Scott said, closing the car door. “It has all these Seer spells in it, and notes about how the afterworlds might work.”
Jillian plucked the book from his hands, rewarding him with a small kiss that made him blush and Joshua wince. Unbothered by the obvious conflict she’d created between her brother and his friend, she thumbed through the notebook until she found the appropriate page. Then she pressed the book flat and carried it over for me to read.
Beneath Jillian’s thumb, I saw the spidery scrawl of handwriting. But other than a few key words—“gate,” “darkness,” “dust”—I couldn’t make out the rest of it. I shook my head, blinking awkwardly from the concentration.
“I can’t read it, Jill—either it’s too dark out here, or she was too old when she wrote it. Maybe both.”
Jillian uttered an exasperated curse. “Well, I can read it. And it says that demons seem to link their gateways to certain structures—particularly those associated with rivers; these structures not only function as lures, but also as sources of the demons’ earthly powers. The journal says if we lace one of these haunted structures with Seer dust and then destroy it, we should be able to stop any harmful spirits from escaping.”
I paused, still studying the page in front of me. Then, softly, I asked, “What about nonharmful spirits, Jill?”
Beside me, Joshua stirred. Probably because he’d already followed my question to its logical answer. I hadn’t intended any harm to Ruth, yet her Seer dust—or Voodoo dust, according to Kade—had limited my movements. Kept me from entering or exiting wherever the dust had been poured.
The same rules applied to all ghosts, “harmful” or not. Intentions meant nothing to a line of gray powder. I couldn’t use something so pitiless, so final, to bar the doorway to and from the netherworld. Especially when a certain few ghosts still resided there.
Gaby, for one, and possibly my father. Even Eli, dark as he could sometimes be. Not to mention all the other souls that Eli and his predecessors had unfairly imprisoned there.
I couldn’t trap them in the darkness, just to save myself from it.
“No dust,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll agree to do the rest, but no dust. We can’t risk the afterlives of all those trapped souls. Even if it means that the demons themselves might break loose.”
Jillian started to protest, but Joshua waved her silent.
“Amelia’s right—we can’t condemn the other ghosts like that. We’ll just have to do what we planned to do tonight, without the dust. And if anything bad happens later . . . then we’ll deal with it later.”
When he finished, Joshua gave me a small, reassuring smile. I knew what he was doing: asserting a compromise between Jillian’s plan and my own. Between the total destruction of the netherworld, and the total destruction of my soul.
Joshua just saw through me that well. He knew that this situation could end badly for me, if I thought I had no other choice.
Huffing angrily, Jillian stomped over to where Scott stood near the entrance to High Bridge. She started to complain to him, but he took her hand in his and leaned close to whisper in her ear. Instantly, her frown softened and the fury went out of her eyes. She hesitated, just for a moment, before whispering something back. Then she turned to me with a strangely rueful smile.
“Your dad, Amelia. I forgot.”
At that moment, I wanted to hug Scott. Instead, thick tears welled in my eyes. I tried to brush them aside quickly, but a few drops still fought their way to the surface.
“Thank you,” I managed to croak. “Thank you all for understanding why I can’t . . . why I just won’t . . .”
“Write your dad off like that,” Joshua finished gently. “Or Gaby.”
“Or any of them. Jillian, Joshua—you’ve seen part of the netherworld. You should understand.”
Slowly, and a little begrudgingly, Jillian nodded. She may not have liked it, but she knew I was right. Very few souls deserved to spend eternity in that place.
I cleared my throat of the remaining lump that my tears had left.
“So, now that that’s all settled, how do we do this? How do we destroy High Bridge?”
Scott and Jillian exchanged a look—one I couldn’t quite identify—and he grimaced. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small, rounded object, and lifted it into the glow of the streetlamp. Light glinted off the object’s metal shell, like some cold, sadistic wink.
No one said anything. No one even moved.
Well, aren’t you just a bag of tricks tonight, Scottie-boy?
I let out a noise that sounded like the offspring of a hiccup and a hysterical giggle. Then, in a bemused voice that I almost didn’t recognize, I asked, “Would someone please tell me that that’s not a grenade?”
No one spoke again for a while. Not until Joshua broke the silence with a low growl.
“What the hell, Scott? What is that thing?”
“It’s one of my dad’s hand grenades,” Scott replied evenly. “From his ammo closet. Which is stupidly easy to break into, by the way. This was the best thing I could come up with to collapse the bridge, since I’m pretty sure none of us carries around a spare stick of dynamite.”
Joshua leaned forward to glare at Scott and his sister.
“So you two have been planning this demolition project for a while, huh? Without consulting Amelia and me, even though we’re the ones who have the most at stake. Do I have that about right?”
Clearly unruffled by her brother’s harsh tone, Jillian snorted. “Well, it’s not like we could have told either of you—you would’ve just said no.”
“Damn straight,” Joshua hissed. “We would have told you both to go to—”
“Actually,” I interrupted softly, stepping around Joshua, “I think it’s worth a shot.”
From the stunned looks on all their faces, you would have thought I’d pulled out my own grenade. To be honest, I surprised myself. But the longer I watched that tiny bomb glitter in Scott’s hands, the more this plan made a terrible, wonderful kind of sense.
The end of High Bridge? The end of a place that had taken my life and so many others? Wasn’t that worth the risk?
Of course it was, especially if the burden of risk fell squarely on me.
Before Joshua could talk me out of it, I strode over to Scott. Then, with one hand held up in a signal of extreme caution, I used the other to take hold of the grenade. He relinquished it with surprising ease, probably because he was still a little shocked that I’d agree to this plan at all.
I took a few steps closer to the bridge, handling the grenade delicately, turning it over in my palm so slowly that my movements probably looked comical from the outside.
Of course, no one was laughing. If anything, Joshua’s frown had deepened and his eyes had grown even wider. Although he was my voice of reason—my heart—I turned away from his horrified gaze; I couldn’t let him weaken my resolve.
“So, now that that’s settled,” I said with forced nonchalance, staring at the miniature bomb in my hands instead of the people around me, “how does this thing work?”
“As . . . as far as I know, you hold the lever down, pull the pin, and