She felt breathless, as if she’d run a mile full speed. She wished Colton would look somewhere else than at her, his gaze still swimming with the dregs of their kiss. His collar was rumpled, his curls dusted with snow. He looked like something stark and unholy, backlit as he was by the string lights of the street beyond.
“Why me?”
His brows cinched together. “Do we have to do this right this minute? We’re on a schedule tonight. I don’t want to be late.”
“Colton.” His name cracked out of her like a whip. “Why me?”
Slipping his hands into his pockets, he regarded her through the sidelong rush of flurries. “Dead things are drawn to liminal spaces,” he said. “They like to congregate in the in-betweens. Between light and dark, between worlds, between midnights.” He hesitated and then added, “Between silence and sound.”
She was a girl of quiet—little glass Delaney, caught between the hush and the hum like a translucent moth fluttering in a silk-string web. Just a click away from silence. Just a button away from sound. Her entire world was a liminal space. Somewhere she’d always thought herself infinitely, maddeningly alone.
Her head was an impossible tangle. She peered into the snow-laced dark of the alley. For once, the shadows lay dormant. They didn’t spool at her feet, didn’t cling to her ankles, didn’t pluck and preen and leer.
They’re keeping away, crept that damnable voice through her bones.They do not like me here.They want me to leave and to leave you alone.
“I wish you would,” Delaney said aloud.
Colton’s eyes snapped to hers. He spoke, but the sound was lost to her—muffled by the falling snow, snatched away by the formidable presence twining roots along her ribs.
I am not yet ready to go, Delaney Meyers-Petrov. I must see this through to the end. And you are the only mortal creature that has borne the weight of me without cracking.
She wanted to cry out. She wanted to claw whatever old, interminable thing this was away from her—to scoop it out with a scalpel and leave it shivering in the frozen earth. She’d spent hours standing in front of her mirror ordering it to speak, and now that it had, she wished it would be silent. Hugging her arms to herself, she blinked back the wild pinch of tears.
“Tell me what it is,” she said. “This thing inside me.”
“It doesn’t have a name,” Colton said. “Not in any known language.”
“Is it something dead?”
The voice plinked through her with discernible scorn.Death cannot touch me.
“I didn’t ask you,” she snapped, “I asked him.”
In front of her, Colton looked as if she’d struck him, palpable guilt etching lines around his grimace.
“Where were we?” She shut her eyes. Opened them again. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know. “Just now, in the space between worlds. Where was that?”
“Another liminal space.” Colton didn’t move as he said it. Not a blink, not a twitch. “Every mirror plane in every mirror world intersects along exactly the same line.”
The wind pushed through them and Delaney suppressed a shiver. “And that line is?”
“The road through purgatory,” Colton said. “You and I just crossed through Hell.”
The taxicab had taken them almost six full blocks before Lane spoke again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She was looking out the window. The city wedged past in streaks of light. A snow-melt mosaic of yellow and red and green. Colton could still taste her on his tongue. He would never be rid of the memory of her mouth.
“I’m telling you now,” he said, as quietly as he could. Already, the cabbie had given their taciturn silence several sideways glances in the rearview mirror. Colton was certain he looked like the asshole here, with Lane’s doe eyes spangled in tears.
Next to him, Lane’s beret was still jeweled in half-melted snowflakes. With her hair shorn all to white, she looked like some wild winter’s queen. He wanted to gather her up in his arms and kiss her again. He could feel the shard somewhere on her person, nylon-scraped and blinding. It was driving him out of his mind.
“Let me pose that question in a different way,” she said, studying him. “Why now, and not before?”
He hooked his left elbow over the back of the seat. “I couldn’t,” he said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “Before.”
“Because of your mysterious Apostle.”
