There was an endless flurry of doctors. Blood drawn and tests done and sleep, so much sleep, medicated and heavy and inescapable. The palms of her hands were burned, as if she’d stuck them into a fire. She’d cracked her head on the cool concrete of the Sanctum and suffered a concussion as a result. Her arm was broken in three different places. One side of her face was a scrape. It was, the doctors said, as if she’d been dragged some great distance.
Richard Whitehall, she was told, was dead.
Godbole’s experimental program was closed, pending an investigation, and the students had been put on leave until academic reassignment was possible. She didn’t know much else. The days went and went and went and she dreamt and dreamt and dreamt. Of a little frozen pond, of a dark-eyed prince, of a crown of asphodels.
Adya and Mackenzie came and went, sneaking in coffee, bringing by books, surfing through the limited channel selection on the television until the sun sank low and the nurses stopped by to send them home.
Every day, she looked for him. For Colton Price, standing in her door. For the arrogant shrug of his shoulders, the gold flash of his watch, the careful knife of his smile. Each day, the sun rose and then fell without word.
“He’s different,” Mackenzie told her, peeling open the untouched cup of Delaney’s applesauce. “Quieter.”
On the television, a hospital drama played out in hues of blue. “How do you mean?”
“Whatever happened to the two of you in the Sanctum changed him somehow.” On the tray between them sat three tarot cards, edged in gold. The high priestess, the lovers. A skeleton astride a white horse, bones robed in red. “It’s like it took a piece of him. I can’t even get a read on him anymore. There’s no aura. There’s no energy. There’s nothing inside but silence.”
Flowers arrived. One after the other, without cards and without comment and without end. They came in vases and in paper wrappings, in fat silken bows and glittering twine and explosions of colors. She was surrounded, daily, by great glass ewers of roses and crocks of lilies, carnations and gerbera daisies and sweet-smelling carnations.
And then, one day, a single asphodel.
She stared and stared at it, twisting it round in her fingers. She thought of a demon with the face of man, a boy turned god, a wide, flat field of asphodels. She closed her eyes and tended to the hollow in her chest until, unable to fight the trazodone lull of sleep, she finally dozed, white petals crushed in her palm.
For the first time in a long time, she slept without dreaming.
Nathaniel Schiller was laid to rest on a Thursday. The day was bright and cold. The earth was blanketed in a fresh-fallen snow. Delaney stood outside the columbarium where his family gathered and watched them say their goodbyes. His mother was a tiny spot of black against a green wall of arborvitae, her spine straight, her heart in her hands. Delaney couldn’t hear the minister from her position, but then she’d never been one to draw much meaning from sound, and so she lingered through the silent service and said a silent goodbye, her heart threaded tight enough to hurt.
Once, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a flash of dark beneath the snowy sheaves of a nearby elm. But when she looked there was nothing. Only a deep set of footprints, disappearing over the embankment.
When it was over, Delaney picked her way through the ankle-deep snow and back toward the shoveled walk, passing by winter-furred graves strewn with flowers. She didn’t head toward her car. Instead, she continued on, her nylons wet and her toes numb with cold. She knew just where she was going—where she’d gone nearly every day since her doctor deemed her fit for discharge.
Liam Price’s grave wasn’t far. Around the bend. Along the crest of a hill. Beneath the fat, red berries of a dripping yew. Usually, she stood alone and listened to the winter trill of cardinals, the distant peal of a churchyard bell. Wrapped tight in her coat, leaving flowers in the snow. Alone.
Today, someone was else already there.
She saw him before he saw her, his collar pulled up around his throat, his overcoat caught in a gust of wind. From this distance, he looked every bit like the Colton she remembered, all flat planes and bladed edges and so perfectly human it hurt her chest.
He didn’t look at her as she approached, though she could tell he sensed her. She kept her distance, heels clattering to a stop a few feet away. For several moments, they stood in total silence. Neither of them speaking, both of them watching. A perfect mirror of the way they began, buried in the sleepy quiet of the lecture hall, her heart in her throat and a coffee cooling on his desk.
She’d fallen in love with him in the quiet. Now, in silence, she loved him still.
She studied his profile. He studied the sky. His breathing looked strained, as though he were trying to remind himself to do it, the way Nate Schiller had once pretended to blink.
“Thank you for the flowers,” she said when it was clear he didn’t intend to speak. “All of them. Even the roses.”
He stayed quiet.
“The asphodel was my favorite.”
Again, he said nothing.
“I’ve been coming here every day, hoping maybe one day you’d be here.” Her voice cast out between them, her echo muffled by the fallen snow. The wind picked up, ruffling his curls, and he shut his eyes. “I feel different,” she said. “Ever since you brought me back. Like there’s some small piece of me that’s been scooped out.”
He spoke then, and it felt like a mercy. “That feeling will ease in time.”
“Has it eased for you?”
He glanced over at her, and she saw that black, interminable thing in his eyes. Slowly, he said, “Not this time.”
She surrendered a step toward him, and he tensed. The sight of it drew her to a stop. Her fingertips felt impossibly cold, even in gloves. “That first night I came to your house,” she said, desperate to hold him there with her. “I told you to let me in, and you opened the door so fast I thought it might splinter.”
