FIRST IT’S BLACK AND THEN IT’S BRIGHT. I’M RUNNING.
Someone has me by the hand. He’s shouting for me to hurry as he drags me over tangled roots and under sharp branches.
I realize I’m back in this world before I know I’m racing up from the shores of Wormwood Island, between its craggy trees, and toward its dark, beating heart: the Cania Christy Preparatory Academy, a stately campus of mossy stone buildings veiled in ocean mist and secrecy.
Oh, God. I’m back.
My heart’s pounding at double time.
I’m staggering. Lumbering. In bare feet.
“Come on!” Teddy hollers at me. I recognize his voice at the same time my eyes adjust to the bluish light. Sunlight through the trees. Sunlight trapped in swirls of low-hanging fog. I trip, and he yanks me back to standing, to running. “Wake up, Anne, before it’s too late. Before we’re there.”
Teddy. Teddy brought me back here. He was next to me in California only moments ago—or what seems like moments ago. And he was taking my blood, doping me, telling me—what was he telling me? My mind feels stuck back in that damn hospital bed, back with my body, back where I’m supposed to be. Remember. Think.
Ben helped me. Ben risked it all to help me escape Wormwood Island.
Ben Zin.
I’m back here, where Ben is. A silver lining I’ll think about later. After. After I wrap my brain around the here and now.
“Can’t you move any faster?”
“Teddy?”
“Good. You’re alert. Now hurry. He’ll be here any minute.”
“Teddy,” I repeat and stop suddenly.
He jerks my arm like it’s the leash of a disobedient dog. I pull back. He yanks again, harder. I free myself from his hold, stumble away, and stop cold against a tree. My feet sink into the chilly, wet earth of the forest floor. Standing here, feeling the ground beneath my feet, makes this all real.
My efforts with Ben were for nothing.
Flashes of last night—God, was it just last night?—strike me like furious fists. The glowing interior of Valedictorian Hall. That short-banged girl named Hiltop P. Shemese transforming into Villicus, and Villicus revealing he’s none other than Mephistopheles, the not-so-fictional devil who makes exchanges with humans. And then came Pilot Stone, my very own Judas, to help the devil do his dirty work. I see the vials—his, mine, beautiful Ben Zin’s—glinting in the firelight; I see myself grab them and flee, in flames, into the rain, up to the cliff. And then…and then Ben joins me, holds me, frees me. Kisses me. We jump. I vanish. Wake. And then Teddy…
“I need a sec,” I tell Teddy.
“I didn’t say we could stop!”
“I’m not asking.”
He’s panting when he halts to glare at me with those pale eyes of his. This demon-boy.
Behind him, the woods double and conflate. I brace myself against a tree, clear my head. I know what’s happening. I know I’ve just been vivified, created anew. I know Teddy’s got vials of my blood in his satchel.
I know all those things.
But I can’t intellectualize away the fact that I feel like my body, mind, and soul are bricks that have yet to be cemented together.
“Don’t give me that look,” I growl his way. “You’ve ruined everything.”
“Everything? You had nothing. What’s to ruin?”
“I was awake. After years in a coma, I was awake.”
“You’re not needed in California. I need you here. So does your mom.”
Teddy told me I had a purpose on Wormwood Island. Over the racing beep of my heart rate monitor and the slow drip of my IV, he said I should trust him, that my mom trusted him. My deceased mom. How could he know my mom?
“Why?” I ask him. “Why did you bring me back here?” And then I ask the question I should have been asking all along: “What don’t I know?”
“We could fill the world with what you don’t know.”
“Then start with the big stuff, Teddy. The life-and-death stuff.”
“We don’t have a moment to spare, Miss Merchant.” He goes for my arm again, but I jerk away. “You’re going to make this difficult?”
I hold his glare. “No more secrets. I’ll call my dad, tell him I’m being fed poison, and he’ll get me out of this coma faster than you can blink.”
“Don’t you realize Mephisto will bring you back? There’s no escape. He wants you here.”
“Why?”
“Naive little girl. Do you think he needs a reason for everything?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’re going to waste time,” he says. Kneeling, he swings his satchel down and rummages through it.
I glimpse two of my vials.
“Just two?” I ask. “You took three vials of my blood.”
“I sank one into the earth by the dock. I needed to vivify you. I thought you understood: this island is enchanted.”
“You mean cursed.”
“Enchanted, Miss Merchant. Those with the power to vivify the dead have enchanted Wormwood Island such that the moment a bone or a strand of hair or a vial of blood touches any part of the island, that person returns to life in an immaculate version of their past body.”
“Yeah, I know. The escape plan you foiled was kinda based on that whole idea.”
“I am not gifted with the talent to vivify merely by touching a vial, so I had to connect your vial with the earth. Now.” He tugs a heap of navy, gray, and yellow clothes out of his satchel and shoves them at me. Tall boots follow. It’s my Cania Christy uniform. “Put this on.”
“No.”
He looks up at me. His teeth are clenched. The kindness I thought I saw in him in my hospital room—the kindness that made me trust him for the faintest moment—has vanished like the dream it probably was. Only a monster would bring me back to this place, knowing what he knows about it. The vivified high-schoolers. The deaths narrowly escaped thanks to a devil’s trickery and outrageous sums paid by desperate parents.