“Okay,” he said. “Focus on your classes if that’s what you need. I’ll stay here and keep picking away at the research. I’ll call you if I find anything.”
***
By the time Lane returned, night had fallen. Colton sat buried beneath a mountain of books in the family room. He’d spent the entire day searching for a solution, and he had nothing to show for it aside from a fraying temper and a tension headache.
He was about to head to the kitchen and heat up a plate of leftovers when, without warning, Lane exploded into the room. She dropkicked her bag onto the floor, then sank onto the couch. Her movements were exaggerated—not quite hers—and the thought left Colton unsettled.
“I stopped by the student health center,” she said. Color had crept back into her cheeks in a flush. Her eyes were glass. “The nurse said I most likely have mono.Mono. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”
“I’m not sure what you expected.” He shut his book and tossed it onto the growing pile of discards. “How do you feel?”
“Tired.” She didn’t look tired. She looked restless. Agitated. Her nails were picked to the quick. Covering up an overexaggerated yawn, she said, “I’m going to go to bed.”
“Did you eat?”
She rose to go, toeing out of her boots as she went. “I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry,” he said, hooking his arm over the back of the couch. “I asked if you ate.”
But she was already gone, the wooden creak of the stairs marking her departure. Quietly, he gathered up the piles and piles of books and set them on the coffee table in neat stacks. He gathered up her shoes and set them by the door. He sat at the kitchen island alone and ate a plate of lasagna. When he was done, he got two cups of water from the kitchen and headed upstairs.
The moon was perfectly framed in his window when the clock clicked over from 11:57 to 11:58. Seated at his desk, he felt the tug of it. Like he always did. Like a shoestring pulled loose from a grommet.
On the bed, Lane stirred. Drawing a breath, she sat up in a stretch. For a moment, it was so perfectly Delaney-like that he’d thought she really had woken. But then the wild spill of her hair fell back like a curtain and he was met with the otherworldly dark of her stare.
“Awake again,” she said. “Don’t you get tired?”
“I’m exhausted,” he admitted.
It was the truth. He’d never been so tired in his life. But he’d done this to her. He’d refused to leave her alone. He’d kept too many secrets. He’d followed her to Chicago. He’d let her get too close to Nate.
He’d known better, and yet he still made the exact wrong decision at every possible juncture. And now it was up to him to fix it.
“Ego mittam te,” he said.I cast you out.
The look the creature gave him was decidedly unimpressed. “You tried that last night.”
“I’m trying it again.”
He didn’t know how to exorcise the beast. Not permanently. Not in any way that mattered. Schiller, like the others, had invited it in. There’d been no need for counteraction.
On his bed, Lane sat with the blankets pooled around her waist. His white undershirt was too big on her. It hung limply off her shoulder, as if she’d clawed at it in her sleep. She was inhumanly still. Statuesque, the moon painting her silkworm silver. She looked, he thought, more like a painted icon than a woman—made for worship and for offering. Blood rite and candlelight.
“You’re staring,” said the thing in her bones.
“You’restaring,” he shot back. The lack of sleep was making him petulant. Pushing up his glasses, he pawed at his eyes. None of the other hosts had spoken a word aloud, once it was inside them. Lane didn’t stop talking.
“You find me unsettling.”
He sighed, weary. No point in lying. “Yes.”
Silence ensued. The minutes were like water in a drain. Swirling away from him without possibility of retrieval. The creature regarded him through cold, inhuman eyes. Borrowed eyes. Lane’s eyes. There was no trace of jade anywhere in them.
“Why won’t you tell the girl in this skin the truth about the pond?”
He stilled, halfway through reaching for the open book on his desk.
“Little drowning boy,” whispered the beast. “Too afraid to pry himself open and show her what he’s made of.”
