Her heart slammed hard into her ribs. She hadn’t realized how intently she’d been staring. “I was just thinking,” she said, too quickly.
He glanced down at her, the knife of his jaw thrown into stark, flickering relief. “About?”
“Well, this is excellent preparation for me.”
“Oh yeah?” His eyes sparked black in the gloom. “How’s that?”
“One day, when a producer comes knocking on my door asking me to do an interview for your true crime biopic, I’ll know what to expect.”
Colton didn’t laugh. Instead, he said, “You’re very mean to me, Wednesday.”
She couldn’t help it. The way he was looking at her left her wrung out and aching. She said, because she had to saysomething, “I was actually thinking about Nate. There wasn’t even a trace of humanity behind his eyes. I don’t understand how a person can be emptied out of themselves like that.”
Colton didn’t say anything in response. He was looking at the television again, the clean blue hues of a soap commercial reflected in his eyes.
“Whitehall doesn’t teach on this,” he said, “but there’s a reason we can feel the doors and no one else can.”
“Because we’re weirdos.”
His mouth turned up at the corner. “Not quite. Every single student at Godbole has had a brush with death. And when a body dies, even for an instant, the soul crosses between planes. Most people who die stay dead. But there are those of us who survive, shocked back into living in a hospital bed, or the back of an ambulance.” His hands sat palm up in his lap, and he stared down into them, his fingers curled. His pinkie stuck out at an odd angle from the rest. “Death is the most natural thing in the world,” he said. “Surviving it isn’t. And so, we bring a little of it back with us once we’ve cheated Hell.”
Delaney frowned. “A little bit of what?”
He shrugged. “Whatever’s out there. Whatever it is that thrums along the ley lines. We carry it back in place of the piece we lost.”
The hum in her head. The way it shivered in place of sound, timorous and strange. She’d flatlined in the hospital, her little glass body succumbing to fever. Her heart stopped and the world went dark and she was pulled back into herself by a well-timed jab of epinephrine. A shock to the system, stark enough to raise the dead.
Peering over at him, she asked, “What was your brush with death, then?”
Colton didn’t answer. His fingers curled, tension cording the sinews in his arm. Delaney had the sense she was homing in on something deeply private, and she instantly regretted asking. Her pulse at a clip, she disentangled an arm from her bubble and ran a featherlight finger down the inside of his forearm. He watched her do it, his breathing accelerating as she worked open his fist and laced her fingers through his.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, “if it’s too hard to talk about.”
By the time the credits ran, Delaney had mostly managed to will away the lingering chill of her nightmare. Her head was a whirl, her thoughts spinning out like a top. She’d come to Chicago to see a friend and found a monster instead. And now it was out there, and it knew her name. She didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know where else she could go but home. Back to her classes. Back to her night-lights. Back to pretending.
Burrowing deeper into the bed, she curled alongside Colton and watched the steady rise and fall of their interlocked fingers against his chest. The ink along his rib was a looping cursive, clearly visible to her at this angle.
Non omnis moriar.
The sight of it sank into her like teeth, and suddenly she was back in the Sanctum again, cowering in the open door, watching Nate try and try again to stagger to his feet. She disentangled her hand and walked her fingertips over the yellowing contusions on his torso. Along the curve of his third rib, there was a noticeable dip. A shallow divot, where there should have been bone.
“Colton,” she whispered into the quiet. “What did you do?”
But when she glanced up, it was to find him asleep.
Everything was different, now that they’d come home. Colton knew it. Lane knew it. The understanding hovered unspoken between them as they stood outside arrivals, time rushing away and away, the chilly October air whipping past in the wake of terminal traffic. Colton tried not to feel guilty about the building wall of secrets as he stepped down off the curb and hailed her a cab.
She’d asked to rideshare, but he’d refused. For one, they were going in opposite directions. For another, he had a deep aversion to city taxis. He tried to imagine what the cab ride would look like. Stuffed into the back of a car that likely hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, pressed knee to knee with Lane in halting Pike traffic. It seemed like a Herculean challenge to undertake before breakfast, and he didn’t have the constitution for Grecian tragedy.
In any case, he’d already seen the SUV waiting for him at the far end of the loading zone.
“Do you think he’ll turn up?” Lane asked. “Nate?”
She was trying to pretend like she wasn’t afraid. Like the thought of Nate lurking just around the corner didn’t terrify her. She wasn’t fooling anyone. She stood huddled in her coat, her eyes darting from face to face. A businessman passed by, luggage rattling, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Don’t worry about Schiller,” Colton answered, one hand on the rear passenger door. “It’ll be taken care of.”
He pried the door wide, but she didn’t get in. “By who?”
