Page 51 of White Lights
“Don’t tell me where you are.”
Dez’s eyes open now. “You know where I am.”
She hears her mother’s quiet sob. “I tried calling, but your phone goes straight to voicemail.”
“I know. I’m sorry. This school, it’s—”
“It’s not real, is it?”
“What?” Dez flinches, sitting up in bed. Goose bumps rise on her arms. “Why would you say that?”
“No one’s heard of it, Dez. It’s not online, not on any map. That letter you showed me … it’s okay if you faked it.”
Dez feels her chest constricting. “Mom! Why would I … I would never. I’m here. I’m at—”
“It’s better if I don’t know. If this conversation never happened. You were scared. I understand. When you’re the only suspect—”
“No.”A sea of red swarms before Dez’s vision as she tries to get out the words. “They still haven’t found him? A man tried to rob us, tried to kill me. He stole my car and kidnapped Mo.”
“I know that’s what you said.”
“Because it’strue.”
“There’s just no evidence, Dez.”
But there is evidence. The eye she pulled out of his head.
Dez’s voice sounds far away when she says, “I’ll come home. I’ll tell them everything. I’ll fix this.”
“Don’t you dare.” Her mom’s voice is suddenly sharp. “Your brother’s still in the ICU. I need to be with him, undisturbed, not running around trying to bail you out of jail.”
“Mom!”
“Please don’t call again. If you care about this family, Desdemona,stay away.”
Her mother hangs up.
Dez drops the phone in a stupor. She doesn’t know what’s more disturbing. That her mother thinks she made up Acheron. That she doesn’t want Dez coming home. That she hadn’t even told her Mo’s prognosis.
Or that the police still have no evidence of the gunman who set fire to Dez and Mo’s entire world.
Dez didn’t make up her acceptance letter to Acheron. And she didn’t make up the gunman. She looks at Rafe’s phone on the bed, thinking how yesterday she’d been desperate to get her own phone back in service. She thinks of the voicemail Asher left as she was leaving town. She has no access to it, doesn’t have his number to call him back. And what would she tell him anyway at this point? The conversation she’d wanted to have with him belongs to another version of Dez. She isn’t that person anymore.
She misses Silas. She wishes she had his number memorized so shecould call him while she has access to a phone. He’s probably texted her ten times since her phone died and is surely worried about her. He’s starting nursing school next week, and she never got to tell him good luck, never got to tell him about Acheron. She never even got to say goodbye.
Has Silas heard about what happened to her brother? What would he think if he knew Dez was to blame for Mo’s burns?
She reaches for the pill bottle in the pants she dropped by her bedside last night. She pours the melted snow out in her sink and takes out the eye. She sets it on her nightstand and stares into its inky black iris.
She thought it would have shrunk by now, decomposed or changed, but the ice must have preserved it. The viscous optic nerve looks fresh. And the expression in the iris is every bit as alive as it was that night. Vengeful, malicious, dark as hell. She would never have hurt her brother if the owner of this eye had given her a choice. She will not let this one-eyed thug keep her from the people she loves.
Not for long.
“Last night, we experienced a tragedy,” Dr. Moriah says to the first-years gathered in the Kohenet Lecture Hall hours later.
When Dez and Simon slink in, late again, fresh from their breakfast shift, Moriah stands on the dais, her white cobra a slithering snakeskin belt around her waist.
Dez thinks of the snakeskin she found in her bed the night before, after Rafe left. What did it mean? How would a snake have gotten into Dez’s room? Was the director somehow watching them? Sending Dez a signal? Meaning what?
