Envy (The Fury Trilogy #2)
Elizabeth Miles
PROLOGUE
Henry Landon blew on his fingers to warm them. It was getting late, and he had to teach an early class tomorrow. As he stood to pack up his ice-fishing gear—a bucket, an ice saw, his bait, hook, and line—he thought he heard a rustle behind him. He spun around on the thick ice but saw nothing other than the muddy bank, the bare sweep of the hill, and the stripped trees beyond. The ice saw glinted in the moonlight.
“Hello?” he called. His voice echoed across the frozen pond. He shrugged, leaning over for the bucket, thinking about his empty house, how quiet it would be when he got home.
That’s when he saw it—a face in the ice. There, just beneath his boots.
His heart thudded underneath his thick vest. It couldn’t be. He shook his head, blinked his eyes. He couldn’t swallow.
As though encased in museum glass, a beautiful girl’s face stared at him, her full lips the color of blood. Her blond hair was fanned beneath the surface like a mermaid’s; it looked almost as though it was undulating in a current. She seemed to be clutching at the ice from below. In her palm was a scarlet flower.
He knew her face.
Landon gagged and coughed, struggling to catch his breath. When he closed his eyes, a memory surged: Several years ago, in California. At the beach. A blond girl in a white bikini had gone for a swim. The waves had been too much. She’d thrashed and called for help; then her body had gone under. He’d watched the whole thing happen—had let it happen. Not because he couldn’t swim. Not because someone else was swimming out to save her. But because she was his student. An intelligent, Harvard-bound, sixteen-year-old student. Kaylie. And they were at the beach. Together.
She had been the one to start it, not him. Telling him he looked like George Clooney. Waiting after class. Flicking his silk tie with her slender fingers as she walked by. She’d worshipped him. And he couldn’t help himself.
If the police had shown up that day, it would have been the end of his life as he knew it. He couldn’t let her ruin everything. In that moment he chose to save his own life, not hers. He chose, and he ran.
He let her die.
And now she was here.
He opened his eyes. The girl below the ice came eerily into focus, as though she was glowing.
Suddenly her eyes snapped open, watery and white. Her mouth spread into a grin.
He couldn’t move.
The crack was small at first. Sounded almost like a soft rip in fabric. But then it got louder, like a series of explosions, and before Henry Landon could step off the ice, it opened beneath his feet and he was falling. The icy water surrounded him, shot through his clothes, swallowed his legs and his torso while he flailed for something to hold on to. There was nothing. His bucket, with his pathetic catch of three fish, fell on its side; the fish flopped onto the ice, glassy-eyed.
He went under. The cold numbed him.
That day on the beach came back to him again. The sun. The waves. Kaylie’s milky skin and trusting smile. Kaylie’s body, disappearing beneath the waves.
His hands hit solid ice above his head. He gasped, choking on the freezing water, his lungs on fire. With the cold clarity of a razor’s edge, Landon realized he would never take another breath. His body cramped and convulsed as it was overtaken by the first throes of a painful death. He heard the distant sound of girls’ laughter.
Then: only whiteness.
ACT ONE
INNOCENCE, OR VANILLA ICE CREAM
CHAPTER ONE
“You say you wanna play around with other boys. You tell me that it’s over, but all I hear is WHITE NOISE!” Crow grabbed the microphone and leaned forward, and for a second Em was sure he was looking right at her.
She leaned back into the beat-up armchair and wrapped her puffy down coat more tightly around her as she watched Crow practice his latest song, “White Noise.” The sound of crappy, hand-me-down instruments and boys who love to play them reverberated through the garage. For the past several weeks Em had been spending more time with Drea Feiffer and her friends; as a result she was getting used to the buzzing electrical feed from the amps, the heart-pounding drum rhythms, and the screaming guitar solos. In addition to loving coffee and obscure movies, Drea’s alternative crowd loved music, especially the kind they created themselves.
Tonight they were at Colin Robertson’s rehearsal space in Portland—if you could call a rug on a concrete floor, some ratty old couches, and a secondhand drum set a “rehearsal space.” Colin’s name had long ago been shortened to C-Ro, and that nickname had soon morphed into Crow. Em had never heard him called anything else. Well, except for when she and Gabby and some of their friends had referred to him as the Grim Creeper, back before he left Ascension. Not graduated, just . . . stopped coming. He was the only high school dropout Em had ever known.