“I am half-alive and all immortal.” The lidless stare went wide. “Didn’t they tell you? Isn’t that their favorite thing to say? Non omnis moriar, we shall not wholly die.” He laughed again, high and clear and cold. “What rot. What rubbish. Man is not made to last forever. This one has been dead for many years. He invited me inside and I whispered in his head. I sang in his skin. I told him all my secrets. He could have lived forever, but instead he died, crash, on the side of the road, and now I play him like a harpsichord.”
Delaney slammed into the door. Her phone clattered hard against the floor and she left it, reaching for the knob, fumbling to get it open. The figure—the corpse—didn’t run. It didn’t move at all. It only watched her, teeth visible through a close-lipped smile.
“I would like,” it said, regarding her oddly, “to speak with my kin.”
Stay, ordered her haunt.There are amends to be made.
She didn’t listen. She didn’t have a chance. The door opened and she fell out into the hall, slamming into a figure as she went. This time, the scream that came out of her was full-bodied. She fell back, scrabbling away, and stumbled directly into the path of Richard Whitehall.
He was dressed for the holidays, in a collared shirt and festive vest, the wool stitched with fat dancing turkeys. His glasses sat pushed up on his head, and he regarded her through a cold, cold look.
“Interesting” was all he said.
“There’s something—” She struggled to catch her breath, barely able to get the words out. Her heart hammered hard enough to hurt. “There’s something in there. Something dead.”
Whitehall only glanced over her shoulder, peering into the stuffy silence of the sheet-wrapped room. The easel lay shattered across the floor, wood splintered. His eye twitched.
“I’m looking for an old friend of mine,” he said, pulling the door shut. “A man by the name of Mark Meeker. Do you know him?”
“No,” Delaney lied. Her heart thundered against her chest.
With a sigh, Whitehall pulled his glasses into place. “His phone is off. Has been for days. But he sent a text, just before he went missing. Do you know what it said?”
For once, Delaney wished the voice within her had something clever to say. “No,” she said again.
Whitehall’s smile was small and cerebral. A professor’s smile, carefully crafted. “?‘I found her.’Her.Now, isn’t that interesting?” His smile waned. His hand lingered on the doorknob, holding shut the way to his wife’s studio. Holding shut the way to that terrible, rotting thing.
“I meant what I said, Ms. Meyers-Petrov,” he said. “You were an extraordinary student. A good girl, with a good head on your shoulders. You should have heeded my advice. You should have stayed far away from Colton Price. I’m afraid the cost of keeping his company will be far higher than you were willing to pay. I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
Something blunt collided with the crown of her head.
And then she saw only black.
Colton Price had a carefully curated routine. It looked like this: He woke up. He stretched. He went down into the basement and punished his muscles in a careful workout regimen. When it was done, he went to the kitchen and prepared himself a shake. He showered, listening to the rush of water, the masterful compositions of Handel.Agrippina. Solomon. Sometimes, if he was in the mood for it,Judas Maccabeus. In and out. Five minutes or less.
It was the same every day.
But not today.
Today he sat in a room he hadn’t been inside in a very long time. In a dusty blue beanbag his mother had called “tacky” and “abominable” and his brother had called “comfortable” and “I’m getting it anyway.”
He was much too large for it now. His knees stuck out at odd angles. The filling shifted, older and more tired than it had any right to be, and his tailbone rested flush against the hardwood beneath.
He didn’t move. He looked at the bed. It was impeccably made. Not by Liam, but by the maid who had worked here once upon a time, before the house became a tomb. The bedspread was black-and-white checkered flannel. The cluster of fringed throw pillows were insisted on by their mother. Catalogue perfect. Home-and-garden pictorial. The headboard was gray oak. The flat top was lined with trophies.
They stared at him.
Colton stared back.
The light from the window was webbed in frost, the thick cover of ice magnifying the sun until it bathed the trophies in refracted gold. Set the dust alight on their etched marble columns. On shoulders of little metal sportsmen gilt in gleaming paints. His father had smashed a few of them after Liam died. Those were still on the floor. Shattered. Grotesque. Broken golden men for a buried golden boy. They sat at odd angles, arms akimbo or missing entirely. Time ran away and away from him, but here in this room it stood perfectly still.
“I came to say goodbye,” he said into the quiet.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. He ignored it. He wasn’t even certain what time it was. For once, he hadn’t thought to wear his watch. He’d woken to a sunrise. He’d woken to Lane. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t terrified by the thought of time careening to a stop.
The doorbell rang again.
“Just let yourselves in,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”
