And there he stood. A boy she knew. Colton Price, as strong as the living. As bold as any memory. Behind her, that dark spot of water burbled again. She didn’t look, and neither did he.
“It was even colder after,” he said. “I sank like a stone to the muddy bottom, and then I woke up here. Trapped between worlds. Counting the minutes. Picking myself to pieces.”
The dark line of trees stood still, like mourners beside a grave. The water lapped and murmured. She saw him swallow.
“Until you,” he said.
The lines of him seemed supremely human, but there was something incongruous in the way the light was refracted off his features. Something that flickered just beyond the reach of her vision. His teeth seemed too sharp, the whites of his eyes swallowed in black. She felt as if maybe she should be afraid, but she was only buoyant. Only content. Armored in asphodels. Cradled in cold.
Colton surrendered a step, and the field of flowers shied away beneath him. “I begged,” he said. “I crawled. I dragged myself through the dark until the dark gave way. And then I opened my eyes and you were there.” His ankles were ringed in white. His laugh was the breath of wind through the trees. He opened up his hand to her and there, in the center of his palm, was a single flat pebble. “You were all done up in colors. You had braids in your hair.”
“I remember.” Her teeth clinked against something hard and round, tucked up into her cheek. Her voice slipped out from the trees, and not from her chest. As if she were already a part of this strange, unmoving place.
“You left me a message,” he said. “You didn’t need to.” His veins traced through him in deep skeins of black. The snow dripped and dripped and dripped in radiant dazzles. “I will never not find you, Delaney. I can’t help it. I follow where you lead.”
He was in front of her, now. He was dropping to his knees. The flowers bowed low, as if before a king. He took her chin in his hand and pressed, drawing open her mouth. A penny slid out into his palm, the copper obol sparking in the light. His fist closed over the coin and he leaned in close, pressing his brow to hers. She stayed resolutely still, swallowing down his breaths.
“What are you,” she asked, the way she had in the elevator, bathed in a well of dark the color of blood. Then, he hadn’t answered her. This time, he smiled.
“Yours.”
His incisors sharpened to points. At his brow were twin crests of severed bone. He’d never looked more like himself than in this singular moment.
“I brought you something,” she said.
“Did you?”
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew the shard. Pale white and shell smooth; she cupped it between them like something coveted. The trees rustled, murmuring. The earth felt hungry.
Behind them, the struggle continued. Water lapped wetly at the ice. He didn’t look. He didn’t look, but there was turmoil in the bottomless brown of his gaze.
“There’s a little boy in the water,” she said.
His brows pinched together. “I know.”
“Is that what you left behind?”
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t expect him to. He’d always been careful with the pieces of himself. Mindful not to let them show. She didn’t need to see all of him to know that certain parts were out of reach, their shine rubbed off.
Leaning forward, she scooped a cupful of dirt into her hand. Another. Another. The trees rattled, branches bent. Colton watched her without moving, without breathing, his shoulders bowed, his hands in his lap. Listening to that ceaseless slap of water against the shore.
When she’d dug a sufficient furrow in the earth, she set the bone neatly into it. Carefully, she scooped the soil back over the top. A burial, for a boy who’d never been mourned. For a son who no one remembered. She’d learned, early on in life, that not all losses looked like death. Some losses were quiet. They made no sound. They slipped by unnoticed, impossible to grieve.
Gently, she patted the last of the sweet-smelling earth into place.
The rush of trees fell quiet. In the water, that horrible stirring went still. The pond’s inky surface turned back to glass, reflecting the diamond-white sky in a dizzying palindrome. In front of her, something warm and bright swam into Colton’s eyes. Raising his hand, he touched a finger to the petals at her brow.
“You look like a queen.”
“Maybe I am.”
His smile grew. “Get up, Delaney,” he said, in a voice that quieted all the rest. “It’s time to come back home.”
Delaney woke to silence, as she usually did. She woke to sunlight, as she usually did.
She woke in a hospital bed.
Her parents were there, Mia lost in a fitful sleep in the chair beside the window, Jace in a chair by the narrow bed, a beanie crushed low on his brow, his head resting on folded arms. His eyes lit up when he felt her stir. His joy was a vibrant, silent thing, his words uncaught in the stream. He kissed her hand, smoothed back her hair, roused her mother. He spoke and signed and summoned for the doctors.
