“I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“I blew it. I thought I knew what... I thought...” He coughs again, spewing blood down his chin. I lay him down on the roof. He’s scarily pale, and he tries to lift his hand toward me but only gets a few inches off the ground before he has to drop it down again.
“Shh. No. It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay. Help. We’ll get you help.” I pat my pockets, looking for my phone, but I’m still in Jasper’s borrowed clothes, and my cellphone is somewhere in his apartment.
Wolfe. He must have a phone. The ones on the goons will all be frozen. Wolfe wasn’t in the room. If he was far enough away, maybe he didn’t freeze completely.
I push to my feet. The warm evening air makes my insides thrum, like I’m recharging. I still don’t know what happened in there, but I can feel it. Now that I’ve touched it once, it really is like a lighter, and since I’ve finally learned the proper way to flick the spark, I can do it again.
“Morgan,” Jasper gasps.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Please.” And his voice is so soft, he doesn’t need powers to stop me where I stand. I glance over my shoulder, and he’s lying there, red spreading over his clothes. His movements are sluggish, his eyes unfocused.
“No.” I shake my head. “No. I can save you. I can get help, I can—” But I drop back to my knees and crawl toward him.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Guess we’ll find out if it’s just you who starts the day over.”
My tears start unexpectedly. “You better come back.”
He gives me a bloody, toothy smile. “I’ll try. Want to see how this ends.”
“I can’t do this without you.”
“Sure you can.” His fingers brush against mine, flexing unpredictably. I think he’s trying to take my hand again, so I take his instead. “You’ve been holding out on me. That was a pretty cool trick.”
I laugh, sniffling. “You have to come back. I have to tell you. So many things. I want to tell you all about me.”
His gaze is unfocused, but his smile fades, and oh fuck, he can’t die. I need him. I want him. Want to tell him and to trust him.
“I’ll try,” he says.
“No.” I’m begging now. Sobbing. All the things I never got to do for my mother. “That’s not good enough. You can’t just try, Jasper. You have to come back. We have to get out of this together. Jasper.”
But he’s gone. His face goes slack, and he stops struggling for breath.
I close my eyes and count to ten, waiting for the air to change. The background noise. Wait for this empty penthouse on the tallest building in the city to transform into a superhero-themed diner with a painting of my mother on the wall. Wait for Jasper to come through the door so I can tell him that he’s late and that his hat is hideous and that I’m so glad he’s back.
But it doesn’t.
I’m still on the roof with Jasper’s body. He’s dead, and he’s staying that way. We aren’t starting over.
The wind catches my hair, dragging my tears over my face, and my gaze goes to the edge of the building. It’s not far. I could run. Three steps and a hop over the railing into empty air, a few seconds of gravity, and I’d be all set. Back at Wench. Jasper would be alive.
But I can’t. I run straight for the patio railing, but the second my hands touch the metal, instinct kicks in and my feet come to a halt. I try twice more but the same thing happens, leaving me to scream in frustration even though no one will hear me. We have to bring Jasper back, but I can’t jump. I’m afraid and I’m sad, but in the end, I’m not suicidal.
I’m going to have to do this alone.
CHAPTER 15
Walter Wolfe’s phone is a block of ice. He must have been about to make a call when I went off, because the phone is in his hand, but he’s frozen like everyone else. He didn’t even have time to look up before he died. Whatever I did, it happened really fast. It felt endless inside me, but it must have only taken the space between one breath and the next. His death was instantaneous and painless while Jasper struggled to breathe outside. The unfairness of it chokes me.
Wolfe is in a home office. The antique desk is made of heavy wood, covered in a film of frost like the rest of the apartment. There’s a small statue on one corner, a howling wolf carved out of stone. My heart races as I pick it up and swing it. I scream out loud this time as the wolf collides with Walter Wolfe’s frozen head and smashes it into shards. Bits of him fly off in a wide arc. I do it a couple more times, basically smashing him to dust. This is his fault. Not mine. He’s the reason Jasper was in this situation at all. In another life, I’d have gone on a date with Jasper the med student and we might have had a great night. Instead, we wasted so much time because of his debt to Wolfe, and now Jasper’s gone and I can’t bring him back.
When there’s none of him left—and not much of the wolf sculpture either—I stand there for a second, examining my work while I wait for my breathing to settle. If I could hurt him more, I would. But I’ll have to be satisfied with this. I drop the lump of smashed stone to the floor.
