Stabilizing her open hand in his, he pressed the wipe to her palm. He heard her suck in a breath. He kept his head down, focused on his task. A clean, dry cloth. A sterile strip of gauze. A dab of antiseptic.
If she showed up at his house, he was supposed to turn her away. Those were his instructions, etched bone deep. “Don’t open the door for her,” the Apostle said. “Don’t let her inside. You’ve wasted more than enough of our time playing at being a boy. We can’t afford another setback.”
He hadn’t opened the door; she’d forced it on her own.
He hadn’t let her inside; she’d invited herself. And now she was here and he was crawling out of his skin. He felt her all along the splintering stria of his bones, like he was a mortar and she the pestle. She was grinding him all to powder.
Not at all lightly, she nudged him in the side with her foot.
“Colton.” His name scattershot across the tile. She nudged again, harder than before. “Did you hear me?”
He caught her foot before she could prod him a third time, pinning her ankle to his ribs. “I heard you,” he said.
“And are you ignoring me?”
He lifted his eyes to hers. “No.”
Whatever she saw on his face softened the corners of her scowl. Inch by inch, he ran his hand up the underside of her calf, until his fingers cupped the back of her knee.
A little breathlessly, she said, “Don’t look at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you, Wednesday?” The question came out casual. Cavalier. His heart was all thunder.
“Like you think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t.” His hand skated higher, over black nylon moons. Over thin, gauzy stars. “I don’t think that.”
When she was quiet, he traced a finger along the thigh-high sliver of a crescent moon. She let him do it, the color in her eyes deepening to an inky emerald. An implacable want for her crowded his gut.
“Colton.” The tip of her index finger landed featherlight on the bloodied starburst at his temple. “Tell me who did this to you.”
The answer skipped out of him like a heartbeat, involuntary and immediate. “Meeker.”
He could tell by the surprise on her face that she hadn’t expected him to offer up an answer so readily. Tentatively, she probed the purpled lid of his eye. “Who’s Meeker?”
A question, this time. Not a command. A modicum of control crept back over him and he gritted his teeth hard enough to hurt. She frowned at his silence, continuing her careful ministrations. Her touch slid over the plane of his cheek, dropping to the angry pinch of his mouth.
Quick as a shot, he caught her wrist. “Don’t.”
The breath that tore out of her was a lit match, his veins kindling. All of him caught fire at once. He’d been cold for so long that the sudden spark left him fevered. Sweat cropped up along his skin. His vision swam.
“There’s something inside of me,” Lane said. “I can feel it fluttering in my chest. I dream, and it’s all nightmares. I wake, and I’m not always in the same place as before. I keep saying things I don’t mean to say and doing things I don’t mean to do.”
Too late, he began to understand. The pieces clicked into place.
Capax infiniti, he thought, his grip tight around her wrist.I am holding the infinite.
Something deathless, beating beneath his thumb. Something he’d waited for his entire life. Something that carried divinity in her chest like pictures in a locket. All twined in bone, like she’d been made for immortality.
Everyone else had died.
Everyone else had cracked beneath the strain, but not her.
Not Lane.
“It talks to me.” She squeezed her eyes shut, suppressing a shudder. “It whispers to me at night, when I’m trying to sleep. And I recognize it. It’s the same voice that spoke inside my head back in Chicago.”
He angled his face toward hers, his chest strung tight. He was torn between a sick, sorry euphoria and slow-budding horror. He wanted to gather her up in his arms. He wanted to swing her around and exalt her with kisses. They’d done it.She’ddone it.
