“What?” she shouted back, the rising snowstorm stealing our voices and tossing them into nothingness. I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the alleyway to hide from the howl.
“Have you met Stone Danvers yet?” I asked her, nerves stepping up the staircase of my spine.
“Yes.” She looked at me quizzically. “What’s going on, Adora?”
A strange feeling came over me. It started in my stomach, ropes tying into knots at the thought of no longer being the only person in Stone’s life. He’d made friends. He would meet other women. He would eventually kiss someone like the way he used to kiss me. He would get someone alone and fuck them like the way he used to fuck me. Women would fall in love with him because he wasStone.
That will never change, we’d said. But everything would change.
In spite of my stomach flipping, I stood numb.
“Are you all right?” Fallon asked, trying to grab my attention.
I shook my head in a daze.
The ominous feeling came over me again. One of impending doom.
Fallon laid a hand on my arm, trying to grab my attention.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
I shook my head in a daze.
Then a sense of déjà vu washed over me.
Fallon could feel it, too.
“I need you to give him something,” I whispered, dread looming over the nape of my neck. I cleared my clogged throat to speak louder. So she could hear. “It’s important he gets this tonight,” I pulled the very last letter from my pocket, almost reluctant to part with it. “Will you see him?”
Fallon took the envelope and looked it over. “Yeah—”
A scream interrupted us, loud enough to pierce the howling wind.
Our eyes widened, and we took off through the alleyway and came to a sudden halt on the street. Townspeople flocked to the clock tower. “HE’S DEAD!” someone screamed. Fallon and I exchanged worried glances.
“Oh my god,” she breathed. The wind was whipping and thrashing in our faces, so I didn’t hear it, but I watched her mouth move. And then she took off in a sprint, and I followed her.
Fallon was shorter than me, but she was determined. She pushed through the crowd, shoving people aside as I clung to the back of her jacket so as not to lose her. Once the two of us broke through the sea of people, she’d ripped herself from my grip and collapsed to the ground at the man’s side.
I shook my head, horror consuming me as Fallon started giving him chest compressions. “Adora!” she screamed, but I was locked up, frozen, hearing my shallow breath, my inhale, my exhale. “ADORA!” “Someone, anyone get Dr. Morley!”
I was shoved to the side.
Then the knocking came. Thethump … thump … thump.
It started low at first, then built into a sepulchral pounding in my ears.
My body locked up, paralyzed.
My gaze moved from Fallon, who continued CPR, to the clock, where the big hand trembled on the three, to Town Hall.
There, in the light of a stormy gray day, five dreadful shadows stalked the steps leading up the building as though they’d been watching me. And they were sending me a message of their own.Love casts shadows.
The Shadows shivered away, my eyes falling to Fallon.
“It’s too late,” she sputtered, tears staining her cheeks. “Ocean is dead.”
That night,Town Hall was overflowed with people, every inch and corner blanketed with skin and heads and hair. Augustine ordered an all-nighter lockdown, Flatlanders on one side of Town Hall and Sacred Sea on the other.
