It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,1

jars to dip in the stream, but the clear water had vanished without a trace. They’d brew more tea from the plants, but the plants had vanished as well, leaving only nettles and swamp grass in their absence.

As for the last part of the plan—running—that they could still do.

Emma had thought the escape would be joyous. Liberating. Their parents, both hers and Charlie’s, were drowning in paranoia, unable to think or act sensibly anymore. But who knew what or how grown-ups thought, anyway? They were all crazy, the good ones, the bad ones, the dangerous ones. She and Charlie would f inally be free of the worry, free of all the hateful whispers. They would be together. That was all that mattered.

Except the stream and its plants and the world itself had chosen not to cooperate. She felt as if the island were playing a cruel practical joke, or worse, punishing her for the sin of wanting to run off with the boy she loved. Three years they had been together. But it wasn’t three years at all; it was nothing. Time was meaningless once you discovered you’d drunk from a Fountain of Youth. How stupid Emma had been, thinking that if they could just get away from their families, they could stop treading water and hide for an eternity.

Now Charlie pulled her to him again, kissing her over and over until she was dizzy from it. “It’s okay,” he insisted. “We’ll f igure something out—” All at once he stiffened. His hands fell from her body. He sniffed the air. “Smoke. It’s . . .”

“The Church of Light,” she f inished with him.

Under different circumstances, this would have struck her as impossibly romantic: their habit of sharing the same thoughts, of ending each other’s sentences. And now the sudden, wary anger in Charlie’s eyes echoed the thought that squirmed in her brain: if something was burning, Glen Walters and his followers had lit the f ire.

They were running again even before Charlie’s f ingers threaded through hers.

Chapter Two

Dallas, Texas

Present

Emma pried open one eye. Her head was splitting, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She felt like she had licked the bottom of a dirty shoe—after the shoe had been dragged through a puddle of bourbon. She eased up on an elbow. The room tilted, her stomach giving a sickly lurch.

She wasn’t alone in bed. There was a guy next to her. Snoring.

Vaguely she remembered having bought street tacos outside the bar from a girl with an Igloo cooler. At the time, it seemed like a solid idea. Emma had many solid ideas when she was drunk. The tacos, involving a meat substance of unknown origin, did not seem so solid at the moment.

Her reason for being at that particular downtown Dallas bar wasn’t scoring high points, either. Another dead end, it turned out. But Emma kept at things, because you just never knew. Cold trails turned warmer. Hopes bloomed, well, hopefully. Things happened. People came and went.

Girls disappeared on their way home and later turned up dead.

There had been a rash of kidnappings and murders, or at least Emma saw it as a rash, given her, well, uniquely expansive view of time. It was a decades-long rash, a near-century-long rash. Crimes spread apart by a dozen years and thousands of miles, not close enough together in any reasonable sense for the cops to see a pattern—and who could blame them?

But recently, there had been a subtle uptick. That f irst girl, Allie Golden, in Rio Rancho, north of Albuquerque, four years ago. Then six months back, one outside of Fort Worth. Karissa Isaacs, twenty years old. Both living near Emma, their deaths following her as she moved east. Both kidnapped and poisoned and dumped.

And now the third in four years, right here in Dallas. Elodie Callahan, just sixteen.

There might have been more. Emma guessed there were more. She would like to think she was certain about that; she still prized certainty. But she’d learned many lifetimes ago that certainty was a luxury. You could shrug off the pattern, chalk the atrocities up to coincidence. A long time ago, Emma had tried that very thing.

Or you could leap into the fray and see where it led you. Move to Dallas. Poke and prod. Hone your investigative skills. See if the pattern was indeed what you feared.

Now, in the much-too-bright light of yet another day, on the cusp of yet another new year, Emma pressed her knuckles to