He caught up to Meeker beneath the chandelier, where daylight sparked through the endless crystal seeds. He didn’t make any effort to reason with him, he only crooked his elbow around Meeker’s throat. There was a grunt, a curse. Boots scuffled over tile. Both of them slammed hard against the ground.
“Colton!”
His name wrenched out of her. He didn’t look. He didn’t stop. His hands were fists, knuckles white, the muscles in his arms corded tight. Trapped in a chokehold, Meeker gasped for air. The thick tracery of his veins rose in his skin in angry, broken vessels. The heels of his boots kicked wildly, scraping tile, scuffing grout, scrabbling for purchase where there was none to find.
And then it was over.
In one minute, or perhaps ten. An instant, or an hour. The struggle quelled. The foyer lapsed back into silence. Delaney stood frozen on the kitchen threshold, her heart behind her teeth. On the floor, Colton shoved Meeker away from him. The body fell with a thud into a pool of refracted light, arms akimbo.
The body.
Thebody.
Not a man anymore, but a corpse.
Her knees wobbled. She slid down the striated pilaster, hitting the floor. The sound seemed to jar Colton back to awareness. He turned to her, still seated beneath the fractured prisms of sunlight. His hands sat upturned in his lap. His cheeks were flushed, his breathing ragged.
Her voice scraped the air between them. “What did you do?”
He drew to his knees, picking his way toward her, half crawling across the floor. Behind him was the body, unmoving. The shadows quavered out of sight, teeth chattering and so very afraid.
“Delaney.” He’d drawn near enough now to press his brow to hers. “Lane? Look at me.”
She only stared past him, where the body lay with eyes open, mouth agape. The question wrenched out of her a second time. “What did youdo?”
“Don’t—” His fingers trembled against her cheeks. His touch was ice. “Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
She did. Against every last one of her better instincts, she did. His breath sawed between them. He felt like a stranger, and yet his face was the same. So brutally familiar, it hurt her to look at him.
He can’t help it, thrummed a soft, aeonian voice deep within her head.It’s what he is. His true nature. Wherever he goes, death follows close behind.
“I had to do it,” Colton said, and let out an unsteady breath. “I had to. I didn’t have another choice.”
Delaney was looking in the mirror. She was staring at a ghost.
The subway-tiled bathroom of her family home was tight and cluttered, the countertop packed with hair product and brush kits and makeup bags, a coffee mug stuffed with toothbrushes, the open tube of toothpaste her father never bothered to squeeze from the bottom. A pair of kitchen shears sat discarded in the sink.
The mirror in front of her was a wide oval, the frame unfinished wood. Her mother had painted a thin train of ivy along the border, leaves unfurling in emerald fans of green.
She shut her eyes. She opened them.
The ghost was still in the glass.
Bright jade eyes. Stark white hair. A pale, pinched face.
Immortal.
“Say something,” she ordered.
Her reflection went silent when she did. It went still when she stilled, moved when she moved. It was, for all intents and purposes, her—dressed in a black tank and joggers, a mismatched pair of Colton’s dress socks pooling around her ankles.
Her hair was short, the purple hacked away. The ends fell just beneath her chin in a choppy bob. She’d taken the scissors to it in a fit, sawing through violet coils until they spooled at the floor by her feet. As if in changing herself on the outside she could saw away the hidden bits that made her itch.
That was yesterday. Or maybe the day before.
She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t slept.
In the days since she’d fled Colton’s house, she hadn’t done anything other than stare and stare into the depths of her reflection and will the thing in her bones to show its face. Its flutter in her chest had become synonymous with her heartbeat. The hum in her head had whittled to a shrill, loud and clear as a whistle. The shadows stayed away, away.
