Sage’s voice loops in my head, frantic and young. Younger than he usually sounds. Like he’s eight years old again, calling for help from the wreckage of a car.
He looked right through me.
I know that look. I’ve seen it before, that day in the park when Bastian pulled that man off me. When his eyes went black and bare and I didn’t recognize the person they belonged to.
My breath comes shallow and quick. I press a hand to my chest, trying to slow it down, but my lungs won’t cooperate. They keep snatching at the air in little gasps, like I’m drowning on dry land.
He’s about to do something bad.
I stop walking and bend forward to catch my breath, hands on my knees. The rain beats against my back. I can feel it soaking through the velvet, through my skin, all the way down to the core of me.
The tears keep coming like I’ve sprung a leak somewhere essential. I wipe at my face with the back of my hand, but it doesn’t help. Everything’s wet anyway.
I straighten up, blinking rain out of my eyes, and remember: I have Bastian’s location. We share our locations with each other. Have for weeks now.
The screen is slick and hard to see through the water streaming down it. I swipe, tap, and wait for it to load. The little blue dot that represents me pulses in the center of the screen.
And there—half a mile north—is Bastian’s dot.
Half a mile. I can do half a mile.
I start running.
The heels make it almost impossible, so I kick them off and leave them behind. I keep going, running barefoot through nasty puddles and over jagged, broken concrete that tears at my soles.
My dress tangles around my legs. I hitch it up with one hand, clutching my phone in the other, watching that blue dot grow closer with every stride.
A huge crack in the sidewalk catches my foot and I go down hard. My palms smack against wet concrete. Pain shoots through my hands and knees—the same spots I injured just days ago, barely healed, opening up again like new.
I push myself up. Blood mixes with rainwater on my palms.
I keep running.
I arrive at the location three-quarters drowned and dripping blood from all my limbs after falling again and again. Bastian’s blue dot on my phone has led me to a dingy Irish bar wedged between a Chinese restaurant and a boarded-up storefront. It’s so generic that I almost don’t believe it’s real. It looks like it’s been here since before I was born, with a flickering neonshamrock in the window and green paint peeling off the door frame.
I shove through the door hard enough to make it bang against the wall.
The bar is dull and dim. Just a handful of regulars hunched over their drinks and a bartender polishing glasses behind the counter. They all turn to stare at me, and I guess I can’t blame them. I must be one hell of a sight: barefoot in a gala gown, soaking wet, torn and bloody, with black-streaked eyes like some kind of undead ghoul.
The bartender, an older woman with gray-streaked hair, sets down the glass she’s polishing. “Jesus Christ, honey. You alright?”
I stumble forward until I can grip the edge of the bar to keep myself upright. “I’m looking for someone. Tall, blonde, blue eyes. Have you seen him?”
She exchanges a glance with one of the regulars, then looks back at me with concern etched deep in the lines around her mouth. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “He’s out back. But?—”
I don’t wait to find out what might follow her “but.” I just shoulder my way through the bar, leaving wet, crimson footprints as I go, until I reach a metal door at the back.
A sign hangs over it:EXIT,in huge, red letters. As if I needed a fucking metaphor right now to inform me that the happy part of my life is over.
I rear back and punch the bar of the door hard. It flies open, and the suck of the wind and storm keeps it there.
I step out onto the stoop. Turn my head.
And there, at the end of the alley, I see him.
58
ELIANA
