“Ash! Hey, wait up!”
Griffin emerged from the shadow of the club’s side wall, his smile bright but brittle at the edges, fists shoved deep in his jacket pockets. He moved with the jittery energy of someone who’d been waiting, watching for the right moment.
“Hey,” he said, closing the distance quickly, boots scuffing over damp concrete. “I saw you leave. Figured I’d catch you before you took off.”
Ash kept his stare on the street ahead, watching the oily shimmer of lamplight in puddles, palms on the handlebars. “Not interested. I told you earlier.”
“Come on, don’t be like that.” Griffin’s voice took on a coaxing edge, stepping right up beside the bike, one hand reaching out to rest on the handlebar near Ash’s. “We had fun before, didn’t we? I know you felt it too.”
Ash pulled his hand back, jaw tightening. “That was a one-time thing. It’s done.”
“But it doesn’t have to be.” Griffin leaned in, his cologne too sharp, too insistent in the crisp air. He laughed, but it came out strained, desperate. “We could go back to my place. Or yours. Wherever. Just you and me.”
The words were needling under his skin now. He tried to keep the tone even. “Go home, Griff.”
But Griffin leaned in and reached out, hand grabbing at Ash’s arm, fingers digging in too tight.
That’s when something inside Ash letloose.
That heat in his chest, the one that had been simmering since the dance floor, surged. Not mere irritation; something coiled, feral, an instinct that leapt before reason could muzzle it.
He turned his head, meeting Griffin’s eyes directly for the first time, and the world seemed to cinch tight around them. The background blurred into a dim watercolor wash. The pressure inside him unspooled— not a thought, not a gesture, onlyforce—and Griffin lurched backward as if shoved by an invisible hand, his grip torn away. His spine slammed into the brick wall hard enough to rattle the drainpipe beside him, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs. His eyes flared wide, shock fracturing into fear. His breath came in short, panicked gasps, fogging between them.
Ash sat frozen on the bike, his own pulse a drumbeat in his ears. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t touched him. His hands were still on the handlebars.
“What the…” Griffin’s voice trembled as he scrambled upright against the wall, staring at Ash in terror.
The heat in Ash’s chest ebbed, replaced by something colder: the dangerous clarity of control. He slid off the bike slowly, stepping close enough that his shadow fell across Griffin’s face. When he spoke, his voice was a low tide receding, each word settling into Griffin’s mind like silt. “You’re fine,” he murmured, the words wrapping around Griffin’s panic, smoothing it away. “Nothing happened. You tripped, that’s all. Hit the wall. You’ve been drinking. You need to go home.”
Griffin’s posture slackened, the fear draining from his face, replaced by a mild, glassy vacancy. He blinked slowly, confusion flickering across his expression before settling into dull acceptance. He nodded once, mechanically, and pushed off the wall with the gracelessness of a sleepwalker. “Yeah,” he mumbled, tone flat. “Yeah, I’m… I’m tired. Gotta go home.”
He turned and shuffled down the alley, footsteps uneven, spine hunched, his silhouette vanishing into the mist within seconds.
Ash stayed where he was, the cold air brushing over him without finding a way in. His hands felt empty, hollow, as though he’d set down something heavy but intangible. A tremor climbed up his spine—not from the chill, but from the thing he’d just done. Effortlessly.
Telekinesis? That was comic-book shit, not real life. And yet…
He raked a hand over his face, his skin still prickling with residual energy. The river breathed again, bringing up the scent of dark water and rusted steel, and for the first time tonight, it made him feel unsteady, untethered, like the ground beneathhim wasn’t quite solid anymore. Without thinking, he swung onto the bike, kicked it into life, the engine’s growl swallowing the last of his hesitation. He aimed it toward the only person who might be able to tell him what the hell was happening.
If Rick wouldn’t come to him, he’d damn well go to Rick.
Chapter Thirty-Four
(9:59 p.m.)
The Eldorado’s engine purred with new life beneath him, Orlov’s handiwork sealing the bullet holes and replacing the shattered taillight from the Silver Cove shootout. The scars from it were now invisible, black chrome catching the streetlamps in fleeting glimmers. Rick let the wheel settle into his grip, the leather cool against his palm. He’d told Frank he’d be heading home, going to lock himself in for the full moon like a good animal. The lie had slid out easily; Frank hadn’t even raised an eyebrow. But instead of Thornefield, Rick guided the Cadillac west, the dashboard lights painting his hands in sickly yellow as he cut through the deserted streets of the Hollows toward Hyde Cemetery.
The district had earned its name. Once a neighborhood of modest homes and corner grocers, it had long since been gutted by industrial collapse and civic neglect, leaving behind skeletal row houses and streets that ate lamplights without giving back glow. Most of the living had moved on. What remained were the poor, the stubborn, and the forgotten. It was a place most people avoided after dark; not for superstition, though there was plenty of that, but because the Hollows had a way of erasing things. People. Evidence. Hope. And Hyde Cemetery sat at its tainted heart like a mouth that never closed.
The wrought-iron gates rose soon enough, tall as gallows, rust seeping through the scrollwork. Rick parked across the street and killed the lights. For a moment, he sat in the stillness, listening. Not even a stray dog barked. His senses stretched—ears pricked for the faintest scrape, lungs drawing in the coldnight air. Nothing. Too clean. The kind of silence that settles over the nightly creatures when an apex predator is around.
He lit a cigarette, the flare briefly etching his face in orange, then stepped out and crossed the asphalt. Grit crunched under his shoes as he pushed past the gates. Beyond them, the cemetery unfolded like a slow delirium, a Gothic tableau painted in shades of ash and shadow.
Trees rose on either side of the path, mute wardens with gnarled branches clawing at the sky, bark blackened by rot and age. Fog rolled in low and thick, spilling between the graves in slow, serpentine coils, blurring headstones into hunched shapes that might have been mourners frozen mid-prayer. The pathways were choked with dead leaves, layers of them matted and soft, muffling Rick’s footsteps to whispers.
Gravestones leaned at drunken angles, their surfaces cracked and pitted, inscriptions worn to illegible ghosts by a century of rain and decay. Here and there, statues of weeping angels jutted from the mist, their marble faces cloaked in moss, hands clasped in eternal supplication—or perhaps warning. One had lost its head entirely, leaving only a broken neck and hands that reached toward nothing.
The fog thickened as Rick moved deeper, shrouding everything in a dim, spectral glow, as if he’d stepped through a veil into some half-remembered nightmare. The air tasted of damp earth and stone dust, old wood and older grief. Smoke curled past his teeth, sharp against the cold. The moon hadn’t risen yet, but Rick could feel it in his blood—the change was coming. He had to be quick.
