Sever (The Ever Series Book 3) by C. J. Valles

to UCLA in the fall.”
    “How would you know? Look at you. You could totally be a Pacific Northwest native … if only everyone here didn’t have an unnatural obsession with tanning salons.”
    “Uh, yeah. What is with that?” I laugh.
    “Personally, I think the vitamin D deficiency makes everyone cra-zy.”
    “Which means I’m just going to get crazier the longer I’m here?”
    “Definitely. And you could have escaped,” Matt chastises. “Didn’t you get into San Diego?”
    I nod. I got into a handful of perfectly good public schools in California. The problem is that I can’t even explain why I don’t want to go back to California. During the grand total of three weeks in the past year that I’ve spent at my dad’s, I felt like a stranger visiting a foreign land. The first time—when Alex erased my memory and my life was crumbling around me—feeling isolated and alone was normal. But even when I visited my dad last summer, being there still felt wrong. Like I was going back to a chapter of my life that had ended.
    When Matt goes back to working on the cartoon he’s doing for the last issue, I look over Mr. McG’s edits to my column. He still doesn’t like that I use the second person. Plus, I’ve been writing anonymously, which drives him crazy. He thinks I should “reveal” my identity in the last column. When he said that, my answer was simple: no freaking way. If I wanted people to know who I was, I would have taken Drama.
    Getting up, I go over to the layout room where Mr. McG is backseat driving someone, simultaneously worrying his tie with one hand and using the other hand to comb through what little hair he has on the top of his head. I try to think of a politically correct way to tell him that I’d rather bite off my tongue than expose myself as the writer of The Invisible Girl . When he looks over at me impatiently, I figure being blunt is better.
    “What is it, Wren?”
    “I want to take my byline off of the final print. If it needs to have one, I just want it to read: A. Girl .”
    He frowns.
    “Are you sure? Might help you if you apply for the paper when you get to college.”
    I shake my head.
    “That’s okay.”
    I turn around to walk out, and that’s when I see Matt talking to someone at our table. I stop breathing when Victor looks up at me and smiles.
    “I was just having the nicest conversation with your friend Matthew,” he says when I reach them.
    I look at Matt and see the same vacancy in his eyes that I saw in Ashley’s the night Alex took her. Looking back at Victor, I wish I could incinerate him with the power of my hatred.
    “Leave my friends alone.”
    “I can’t do that, you see. Unless, of course, you cooperate.”
    “Cooperate? So you can kill everyone I care about? You’re not very bright for a super villain.”
    “I can offer you immortality.”
    My eyes narrow. If I didn’t take Ever up on his offer, why would I take the same offer from Victor ? Then my blood turns to ice. What if Victor doesn’t know about Persephone—that Alistair changed her, and Ever could do the same to me? What would Victor do if he knew his offer wasn’t the only one? Would I be dead already? I smile, but it’s more to hide my terror than anything else.
    “You’re going to have to offer me something better.”
    “Humankind has been seeking immortality for its entire history, and yet you ask for something more?”
    “Yes. Leave my friends and family alone … or I’ll end this for you, and then you’ll just have to wait and see if there’s another human doorstop out there sometime in the next millennium.”
    I don’t have to spell it out. I can see from his expression that he understands my intent. If these immortal psychopaths touch anyone, then I’ll end things on my terms. I will not be manipulated. Not again. I’ll die before I lose my family or my freedom.
    When Victor disappears, Matt looks up at me like he wasn’t just frozen in time. I smile and take out a