“Did you hear me?” he cried. “I stopped everything and came back here. To this…to this place! For you. I need you, Delaney. I need you to need me too.”
About half the bar was silent, staring our way. The other half was too drunk to care. Someone shouted at him to shut up.
I kept my expression calm. I’d seen Cooper like this before. He was feeling lost and flailing for something to hold on to. He’d been lost for most of his life, eyes on a horizon that never led to home. He had told me he had come back to town looking for something. Hoping to find something here.
The easiest thing to think he was looking for was the one thing he knew he couldn’t have. Me.
He’d been the one to push us away, to push me away. And in our time apart I’d done a lot of honest and painful looking around in my own heart.
I liked Cooper. Could even love him as a friend who had once been more than a friend when he wasn’t being an ass.
But I knew with all my heart that we weren’t the horizon the other was searching for. We’d been a safe port for a time, but even if Cooper had stayed in town, even if he’d wanted to stay with me, it never would have lasted.
He deserved something real. He deserved what he was looking for, not some ghost of the past he was willing to settle on having.
“We should talk about this later,” I said gently. “When you’re sober.”
He made a sound low in his throat and lunged forward. Maybe it was the medicine, or the fact that I was still in pain, but I didn’t think fast enough to move away. He grabbed my arm and jerked, forcing me onto my feet.
I gasped in pain as everything in my body caught on fire, and then I punched him in the face with everything I had.
The screaming of the song in my head went to white noise, and for a moment, I was lost, floating on pain and an unhoused god power that seemed intent on getting free of me.
No, no, no!I couldn’t lose grip on it now.
A part of me knew I was standing in a bar. But the rest of me was somewhere else, somewhere in my mind, fighting against a power that would not be denied.
The wave of power and song dragged me under, and the bar faded from my sight. All around me was song and thrum and a need to possess, to control.
I had to contain the power. Had to shovel it back into me, somehow, hold it in the imperfect vessel of my body. A vessel it would no longer tolerate.
And if I lost? This power, Heim’s power, would devour my body and pour free like a wave over jetty walls, roaring into Ordinary to tear it apart.
How was I supposed to fight it?
Delaney.My father’s voice, near, urgent. Was I dying?Fight.
That was the plan. I just didn’t know how. I pushed upward with imaginary fists, pushed out with imaginary arms, scrabbling and kicking to find purchase against the song that swallowed me whole and sent me spinning. Power slammed me around, churned until I couldn’t find the way up. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
A memory flashed:
The kitchen light shone in my eyes through the crack of my bedroom door. I couldn’t sleep, even though Mom had tucked me in hours ago. It wasn’t Myra’s soft snores from the other side of the room that kept me awake.
It was the music.
A shadow crossed the light, throwing me into darkness, then light shone on me again. Dad was pacing in the kitchen. He did that sometimes.
I tucked my stuffed crab, Polly, under my arm. I was probably too old for a stuffed toy—I was almost nine, after all—but tonight I clutched her close.
Dad leaned both hands on the edge of the kitchen table, arms locked, back toward me, his head hanging down. He was still except for muscles in his forearms that flexed and flexed, bunching and lengthening as he squeezed the table’s edge like he was trying to hang on to something for dear life.
A bunch of papers were scattered across the table and the floor. Dad had been furiously drawing again. Drawing a lot. He did that sometimes too.
One paper by my foot held an image of a woman’s face I’d never seen before, but it was scribbled out with big, looping lines, like the pencil had traced her face so many times it had completely lost the details it was trying to define. As if he were looking for that person and had no way to find her.
These pictures scared me, even though I didn’t know why.
“Daddy?”
