“You—” His hand slammed into the frame and stayed there, silenced. “Please just open the door.”
She pulled it open—just enough to see his face. Cold drove in through the crack and his relief mushroomed between them in a cloud of gray.
“You cut your hair,” he said.
“How did you know where I live?”
He huffed out another breath, gray fragmenting between them, and moved to slip his hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers brushed the edge of a little blue box bound in ribbon and he let his hand drop. He didn’t answer her question. Instead, he peered up at her and asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
“No,” she said, though it wasn’t entirely true.
“Angry, then.”
“No,” she said again, though that wasn’t entirely true, either.
“Well, I’m not sorry,” he said. “I’m not sorry for what happened. You have no idea what the Apostle would have done to you if he found out what you’ve managed to do.”
Managed, he said. As if she’d set her mind to it. As if she’d opened her mouth and swallowed this fluttering, insidious thing down like cough syrup. The laugh that cracked out of her was half-mad. A cardinal took off from a low-hanging poplar branch, winging through the sky in a brush of violent red.
When she fell silent, it was to find him frowning down at the pocket of her pants. The shard curled out of the top like a fang. She wondered if he felt it—the slide of bone, like the phantom tickle of a severed limb. A hollow ache where a piece of him ought to be. She tried to ignore the marked shift in his breathing. The way he braced his hand against the railing.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care about your mysterious Apostle or your secret club or your wall of names. There is somethinginsideof me, Colton.”
His jaw feathered in a grimace. “I know that,” he said. “You think I don’t know that?”
“It’s talking to me. It’s stealing things from me. It’s chewing me up. And it’s your fault.”
He hesitated for the barest fraction of a second. Then, scuffing a shoe against the leaf-impaled welcome mat, he said, “I feel like this might be the wrong time to remind you that I was vehemently against going to Chicago.”
This time, when she slammed the door, it closed on his foot. He swallowed a wince, sliding the garment bag from his shoulder and propelling it through the crack. “Wait,” he said. “This is for you.”
She hung back, suspicious. She felt stiff as cardboard—like she was very carefully going through the motions of talking, blinking, breathing. Like if she were to stop, her body would carry right on without her.
“What is it?”
“A dress,” he said, “not a viper. So you can stop looking at it like it’s getting ready to bite you.”
“What’s it for?”
“An outing. Of sorts.” He let the garment bag slump in his grip. “You left so fast the other day. I didn’t even have a chance to talk to you.”
She frowned. “Youkilled someone, Colton.”
His foot remained determinedly wedged in the door. He looked, she thought, very tired. “I know,” he said. “I was there.”
“God.” She pushed the door harder into his foot. It didn’t budge. “It’s not a joke.”
“I’m not making a joke,” he said, something plaintive creeping into his voice. The garment bag hung limp and dark between them. She thought of the way he’d trembled, the way he’d crawled across the floor on his knees.
“I dragged myself out of Hell to you,” he’d said the other night. All this time, she’d assumed it was a metaphor. Now, with the shard of bone digging into her thigh, she wasn’t so sure.
Something sick and nameless roiled in her gut. Something she didn’t understand. Something she wasn’t ready to pick apart. After she’d come home from Colton’s that day—fighting back tears on the T, racing along the iced-over sidewalk—she’d shut herself into the second-story bathroom and thrown up until there was nothing left inside her but air.
Air, and that ageless fluttering.
The haunt like a clearwing moth.
The skitter of something strange along her bones.
