“I’m halfway there,” he said. “Don’t move, I can see you.”
The line went dead. She opened her eyes, phone still pressed to her ear. Another lamp had gone out. Winter moths flitted over her head in a frenzy, evading predators. Beyond the pale scope of fluorescence, she couldn’t see anything at all.
A towering figure burst into frame, and she stifled a scream, scrabbling backward as a longboard went past, wheels snicking audibly over lips in the sidewalk. The rider, heavily bundled against the cold, threw her a cursory hello. One shoe to the pavement, he propelled himself back into the dark.
“Oh.” The slow blush of mortification crept into her skin. She felt infinitely stupid, her implant useless. Of course that’s what it had been. Nothing ancient. Nothing arachnid. Just a boy on a skateboard. She was about to call Colton back and tell him not to bother when the light over her head clicked off.
A blind dark fell. She clapped her hands over her eyes just as the shadows swarmed. They pried at her with frozen fingers. Pleaded in frozen voices.Please, please, please.
Two sets of fingers closed around her forearms. Just as cold but twice as firm.
“Wednesday,” came Colton’s voice. Gently, he pried her hands from her face. “Jesus. Open your eyes.”
She did. The streetlamps were on, electricity fizzing. Colton stood before her, his brow furrowed, his hands bracketing her wrists. In a dizzying rush, all the nerve endings in her body gathered beneath the pads of his thumbs.
“You look like you’ve been in a fight with a holly tree.” He said it like he was cracking a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. Releasing her wrists, he worked something loose from the tangle of her hair. The scalloped green of a leaf came away in his hand, the stem clustered with tiny red berries.
Embarrassed, she said, “I put that there.”
“And the cut on your cheek?”
“That too,” she said meekly, touching a fingertip to the sting.
“You’re a bad liar.” He didn’t prod her for the truth. He only took silent stock of her, his jaw gritted. She fidgeted beneath his scrutiny, making a subtle effort to work the knots out of her hair.
Finally, he said, “Let me walk you back to your dorm.”
“That’s really not necessary. I’m sure you have better things to do.”
“Yeah, analyzing fourteenth-century poetry is a real gas. Seriously, let me walk back with you. I was heading home anyway.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He handed her the sprig of holly and she took it. His fingers lingered. Her breath caught, the sound treacherous in the quiet, and his smile hooked. The brimstone of his eyes dropped to her mouth. She thought of Nate on his knees in the Sanctum, the bestial echo of his scream, the lies that built and built. Suddenly, and with the dark pressing in, Colton Price was the only thing that felt solid. An anchor, in the middle of a nightmare.
As though he knew it, he pushed his fingers through hers. The holly dropped to the sidewalk. With a tug, he drew her a half step—out of the light and into the broad swath of dark.
She braced herself for the onslaught of shadows, but nothing happened. She was positioned just beneath Colton, their breath crashing between them in clouds of gray, her face angled up to his. Her heart slammed into her ribs. The cold bled into her toes.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you back.”
Hands still threaded together, they made their way toward the twinkling lights of the freshman row, the night around them as still and quiet as glass.
Ronson’s Do-It-Yourself Storage was located right off the Pike, two miles outside of Boston proper, and directly on a magnetic ley line. Once upon a time, the highly sensitive spot had been the location of a new age boutique, the owner a self-pronounced purveyor of charmed trinkets and tarot readings. Situated directly along a hum of energy, it was a great venue for the supernatural, less so for customers. The rumble of rush hour traffic persisted all throughout the day, ferrying in a steady soundtrack of truck brakes and car horns, the smell of exhaust, and the scream of police sirens.
It wasn’t, in short, where one might choose to spend their Saturday.
When the shop closed, Ronson’s storage rose up in its place. Godbole owned several rented units, each of them situated along the buzzing ley line, each of them housing an open door. Dust in the light. A hum in the head. A mirror ripple, the sky rent open to a mirror world.
Now, lit beneath a solitary streetlamp, the Apostle stared down the labyrinthine corridor of steel-plated units. The doors were much too bright, a festal motley of reds and oranges and blues. There was something sinister in its silence, foreboding in its emptiness. Somewhere in the dark, something clattered to the ground. The sound was followed by the softscritch-scritchof dragging.
“Whatever you’re touching,” he called out, “don’t.”
The slow scraping silenced. A sigh lumbered out, filling the alley like something odiferous. Something rotten. He pulled his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. The hour was late—near dawn—and he’d left a pork roast warming in the Crock-Pot that was surely turning tough as rubber by the minute. His feet were losing feeling. His stomach was aching. He was quickly growing irritable with waiting. It was incredibly like Colton Price—a boy obsessed with timeliness—to be purposely late.
As though he’d summoned him, Price arrived, whistling an earsplittingly jaunty tune as he rounded the corner into sight. He was needlessly cheery for the godforsaken hour. This, coupled with the thought of a perfectly good pork roast gone to waste, soured the Apostle’s fast-spoiling mood even further. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jacket and felt for the item within, the cold splinter of the bone shard sliding into his grasp. The talisman felt the way it always felt, like grabbing hold of a live wire. A jolt ran all the way to his elbow.
