The loneliness was my fault too.
Somehow, a shred of my soul beat fiercely inside her, just as a slip of her soul had stuck deep in me.
Neither of us knew how we’d traded pieces of our souls. It might have been during the attack, as I lay dying, watching the monster feed on her.
Our gazes had locked and then…
…then everything had gone black. It was a good blackness. Peaceful, warm.
Until I’d woke into the shattering of her scream.
She: bent over my unbreathing, unresponsive body.
Me: standing above myself—poor dead bastard—unable to close the deal, finish the story.
There was no white light guiding me up, no red flames dragging me down. I wouldn’t have wanted them anyway. All I wanted was her.
I was more dead than alive, she was more alive than dead, and as far as we could tell, we were stuck that way.
After ninety years, we’d both given up on the why and had moved solidly onto the how.
As in: how could we kill the assholes who did this to us?
Back when we were alive—the Dirty Thirties, they called it—monsters had been on the move.
Boats, trains, roads, highways did as much to move the supernatural critters across the country and around the world as it had the humans.
People settled down to make homes, businesses, towns. Monsters staked out their territories, claimed their towns, cities, and hidden patches of land.
The monsters were still out there, still here, all around us. Moving as much as they liked, or staying put and setting down roots.
And it wasn’t just monsters who moved through the modern world. The gods were among us, meddling in the lives of mortals for reasons of their own. I’d even heard there was some sort of town out in Oregon where the gods liked to vacation.
“Touch the watch,” I urged Lu. “Ask me if I like the truck. We agreed all big purchases have to have both our approval. Remember that accordion? Or the beehives? Or that boat? Ask me, sweetheart.”
I stood in front of her and hooked my thumbs in my belt.
“’Cause those tires ain’t looking too good either.” I pushed need and desire toward her, focusing hard. It was a fifty-fifty chance she’d sense me, much less hear me, but it didn’t stop me from trying.
“You like trucks,” she whispered, her eyes skipping right past me to focus on the wilted patch of thistles leaning against the porch. “I like the truck. I can modify the back. Put in a bed, a light. Some of your books.”
Sorrow squeezed what was left of my heart. I reached for her, unable to stop, my fingers brushing along the side of her face, down her shoulder, her arm to rest on her wrist.
Her honey-colored eyes went wide and distant. She shivered before closing them.
“Plus silver’s your favorite color,” she whispered.
“Ah, love.” I wanted to kiss her, wanted to feel her, warm and soft and tender in my arms. But she was mist, only the slightest sensation of warmth on my fingertips, like a dream half forgotten and fading in daylight.
“Lorde and I are going to dicker the owner down by half.” She held up the sign like maybe I hadn’t noticed her plucking it off the truck. As if I’d miss a single thing she did. “If not, we walk.” She opened her eyes, waited for me to say something else, then marched up the stairs.
I chuckled at the stubborn set of her shoulders. Whoever lived in that house didn’t know what was about to hit them. “All right. All right. Give ‘em hell, girl.”
Chapter Two
It was a big silver lug of a thing, sporting the newest technology of its time: an AM radio and a push-in cigarette lighter.
It had exactly six hundred sixty six miles on it.
