EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Forty

The clock by the bed read 2:00 a.m. when I finally sat up in my hotel room, rolling my head to stave off the whisper of a headache. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't turn off my brain.

I walked over to the window, pulling the curtains aside to provide a view of the woods behind the hotel, illuminated with an eerie glow by the full moon deep on the horizon. A flash of yellow eyes met mine, some night creature prowling the woods, looking for its dinner.

But it was gone before I could make out its form in the shadows.

I wanted to talk to my brother, to ask his advice. But he was asleep in his old bedroom, with Piper by his side, five floors above my head. Mom and John were up there too, in their own room. I didn't want to risk texting him, lest the sound reverberated through the open floor plan and woke the wrong people.

Because I knew now what I had long suspected. I didn't trust my mother to help me. Alexei was already putting his plan into motion; he'd already approached Jin. And if I wouldn't help him build the ICDs, then it wouldn't be hard to find somebody else to do it—not now that Alexei had all the information he'd gathered in the future.

In her letter to me, Mom had called Alexei her "friend," and that meant he was John's friend too. I knew John was susceptible to that charming Russian, with his money and his power. John had always been the first chess piece to fall. It was funny to think how much Sage and the others had worshipped him in high school. They'd all looked up to him, followed him anywhere. Sage especially. I couldn't blame her. She'd been a kid at the time—a kid with a crush. I blushed, even now, standing alone in that dark room, remembering what that was like.

But when push came to shove, John turned out to be the weakest one of them all. He'd handed the keys to Down World to Alexei, enamored by the idea of who he could become with all that power. He'd sold out his friends. He'd betrayed Sage, with my mother's help.

My mother—who had become Alexei's lover in the dark world under the lake. She saw what he was, and she went to his bed anyway. She went to his bed because of it.

I wouldn't trust them now. Not when Alexei was at it again.

Could I stop him now? Tonight? Before it was too late? Sage said Adam had been arrested breaking into the botanic gardens. I knew which ones she meant—the gardens were an estate with a large house in the middle that was almost like a castle. A rich man had originally owned the property, and in the world under the lake, that man had been John.

So maybe in this world, that man was Alexei. That would explain why Sage had a drawing of a large garden in the room below her restaurant. Maybe she'd been doing her own work to stop Alexei. Maybe I wasn't barking up the wrong tree by going to her after all.

The gardens weren't far away; they would be the perfect location for Alexei to stay near my mother, near enough that they could rendezvous at night at a place she could easily sneak off to. A place like...like the lake cabin.

I thought of the smoke rising from George's chimney. Someone was in there right now, plotting. Someone was making the wheels turn. What if it was him?

I looked to my left, to the room next door where I knew Kieren was sleeping. I threw a sweater on over my T-shirt and slipped my feet into my sneakers. Then I headed into the hallway, my arm braced to knock on his door.

But I stopped before I could do it, and my hand fell gently by my side instead.

I sighed, letting my head bob with indecision. It was the middle of the night. If I knocked on Kieren's door, he would think it meant something else. Something I wasn't ready to give him. Something I didn't know if I'd ever be ready to give him again.