“He is lying,” sang the ghoul in his ear. “He is lying and lying and lying.”
“Boys like Price need to be handled,” he said. “I am handling him.”
The laugh that oozed out into the dark made him shiver. He shut his eyes, though shutting his eyes didn’t do anything at all to rid himself of the slap of wet shoes against the floor, or the permanent reek of decay in everything he owned.
“We will see,” it sang. “We will see, you and I and we.”
On Monday, Lane found Colton deep in the library, buried beneath a labyrinthine assortment of books. He didn’t look up when she arrived, though she knew he’d heard her approach. For several silent minutes, she hung back and watched him work, the lines of him indistinct beneath pale fringes of midmorning light.
“I want to go see him,” she said when she grew tired of waiting. Several shelves away, someone let out a scathingshush. It carried through the rows and rows in a disembodied sigh. At his desk, Colton continued to annotate the text in front of him, the round wire frame of his glasses slipping low on his nose.
“Colton.” She drew out the seat next to him and plummeted into it. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said, highlighting a line of text. “I heard you.”
“And?”
“And I can’t have this discussion.”
“Why not?”
“Wednesday, please.” He fell back into his chair and peered over at her. He looked tired—his curls mussed, deep bruises like thumbprints beneath his eyes. “Don’t push me. Not on this.”
But she couldn’t leave it alone. She thought of Nate on his knees, a scream ripping from his chest. The Latin inscription inked into his skin:Non omnis moriar, I shall not wholly die. She’d felt the oppressive weight of the dark, the watchful quaver of the shadows, and she’d run from it. She’d left him there alone to die. Or to come back from death. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything, save for the fact that Nate had crawled to her, that day in the meadow. He’d wept. He’d begged. The plaintive specter of his cries haunted her in her waking hours. It chased her through her dreams.
“Don’t leave me here alone.”
“I have questions,” she said, a little desperately.
Colton pried off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Which makes this different from any of our other interactions how?”
She ignored the dig. “All those times I saw Nate at the Sanctum, was he actually—”
“Dead,” Colton finished for her, when it was clear she felt too ridiculous to say it on her own. “Yes. It didn’t stick. I told you the Sanctum was a locus of supernatural energy. I doubt he’s the first ghost to hang around the place.”
Ghost.
Ghost.
The word felt laughable, but then she was a girl who’d walked through worlds. A girl who’d spent her childhood whispering all her secrets to the shadows. Why shouldn’t she also be the girl who befriended people who were dead, whether temporarily or otherwise?
A memory resurfaced, like the cresting of a leviathan through a flat, glassy sea. She thought of the boy in the dark behind her childhood home, of waking in the night to follow him over the dew-slick grass, through the winter-bitten wood, into the path of an oncoming car.
“I know you. I know you.”
All this time she thought he’d been a figment of her imagination, but maybe the truth was something far more nefarious. Maybe he’d been dead all along. Something tormented and afraid, waiting in the dark for her to stumble outside and catch sight of him.
Next to her, Colton kicked out his legs, draping the inside of his elbow over his eyes as though he meant to take a nap. His glasses dangled between his thumb and forefinger, lenses winking in the light of the drum lamps. It should have been her cue to leave, but Delaney couldn’t bring herself to back down.
“Mackenzie said Nate is recovering at Amity General out in Illinois,” she said. “I looked it up. It’s only a three-hour flight. I’m going tomorrow, with or without you.”
“Jesus.” Colton dropped his arm and fixed her in a steely gaze. “What can I say to make you leave the Schiller thing alone?”
“Nothing,” she snapped, and was met with a harsh “Quiet,” the admonition flung from the far reaches of the third floor. Still thinking of the boy in the wood, she said, “I bailed on him once already. He was hurting, and I left him there by himself.”
Some of the frustration softened around Colton’s eyes. “There’s no need to be this worried about him, you know. He’s not even dead anymore.”
He said it casually, as though death were a transplanted organ, and Nate had simply rejected it. Pushing it out, the way the body flushes out an infection.
