In a rust-ringed sink, the water ran and ran in paltry spurts. Cold spat into her palms, tracking down her wrists in spears of ice. She brought a cupful to her throat, pressing chilly fingers to the fever in her skin.
When she glanced up, water running down her neck in thinning rivers, it was to the sight of Nate Schiller’s face in the mirror. Her breath caught, every bit of her seizing up. He was gaunt and grinning, his skin gone gray in the bald bulb glare of recessed lighting. He looked half-mad. He looked like something dead.
“How did you do it?” he demanded. “How did you swallow it whole and live?”
“What?” Her voice came out of her in a rasp. “What do you mean?”
His head canted to the side in a wholly inhuman lean. The wrongness of it caught her cold. “It’s in your skull, boring holes into your head. In your chest, fluttering like a moth. It’s in your belly like a spider, spinning its sticky, sticky web. Doesn’t it tickle? Doesn’t it itch? Doesn’t it make you feel just so goddamn fucking mad?”
One moment he was still as a shadow, pitted in dark inside the narrow walls of a slung-open stall. The next he was running for her, head down, arms flung wide.
Delaney screamed and sat up straight. The motion lights clicked on overhead. Her leg was asleep. Her back was stiff. She was in the library, hemmed in by the stacks, her heart beating, beating, beating in her chest.
“Hello,” said a girl’s voice, with the distinct impatience of someone who’d already repeated herself several times. Delaney glanced up to find a disdainful blonde in a zebra onesie and a septum piercing. She stood framed in the mouth of the stacks, clinging to the straps of a yellow backpack. “You’ve been yelling in your sleep. Everyone else is getting super uncomfortable.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Thanks for waking me.”
“I drew short straw.”
“Oh.” Delaney rubbed at her eyes. She felt scooped clean, all raw on the inside. “Well, thanks anyway. You’re Haley, right? Mackenzie’s roommate?”
“That’s me.” Haley’s brow arched. “You’re Mackenzie’s weirdo friend who talks to dead people.”
“I— Okay. Only once or twice.” She wasn’t sure that’s who she wanted to be. Delaney Meyers-Petrov, the dead people girl. At the window, the sky was black as a void. “What time does the library close on Thursdays?”
Haley scowled down at her. “It’s Friday.”
“What? No.” She scrabbled for her things, shoving them into her bag as she went. Her stomach gnawed at itself in protest. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. “That’s not possible,” she said. Then, with a sinking feeling, “I think I’m losing time.”
Haley looked unimpressed. “Same.” Her voice winnowed in and out. “I feel like I haven’t left the library in days.”
“No, I mean I really think I’m losing time. I—”
Her words were snatched up in a whine. She stood shivering in the middle of the wind-bitten quad, spotlit in a single oval of lamplight. The distant trees rustled, bare branches clicking like teeth. She fumbled for her phone only to find the battery dead. Her fingers shook. Somewhere nearby, something whispered her name.
Her heart climbing into her throat, she broke into a run.
Colton’s front door was open. The portico was dark, unlit by the merry twinkle of the wrought iron porch light. The stairs were unswept, concrete cluttered with thick clumps of wide, wet leaves. No one had set out pumpkins. No stacks of hay sat twined against the bone-chilled brick.
The door hadn’t been thrown wide, but left ajar, as if some sneak thief had slipped in through the crack. The street was gilded in the hazy glow of streetlamps, the tree trunks girdled in yellow-gold fairy lights.
Inside Colton’s house, it was dark.
Delaney dithered on the walk, leaves slick under her boots, and felt the creeping sense of being watched. It started as a shiver, moving down her spine in a slow tiptoe, like a spider had dropped off the leafless branches overhead and wiggled its eight long legs down the back of her shirt.
The other brownstones yawned away from her in a row of cheery brick, buttery light spilling out onto the sidewalk. The only thing that watched her was a scarecrow, set out by a lamppost and swinging just so, his rope unspooled. He reminded her, chillingly, of Nate. His button eyes were empty, his smile stitched into place.
Too afraid to linger, too afraid to continue on home alone, she took the steps to Colton’s house two at a time, her dead phone clutched to her chest like a shield. Putting one boot through the open door, she wedged herself inside.
“Hello?”
Her voice catapulted across the foyer. Several leaves blew in through the opening, scraping over the floor in brittle cups of brown. She pushed the door shut behind her.
“Colton?”
The house was silent as a tomb. A fat October moon shone in through the window. It flooded the space in a funny sort of light, turning the shadows indistinguishable. She pushed forward, uneasy.
“Colton, are you—”
