“What now?” she asked, breathless.
“You tell me,” he said. There was something regal in the lines of him. Something imperious in the way the dark gathered against his frame. It struck her again—as it often did—how not like a boy he seemed, but like a god, untouchable, unclaimable, unknowable.
You are not entirely wrong.The murmur stung her chest like smoke. It prickled all through her in a smolder. She found she didn’t recoil from it, didn’t shudder or cry out. Instead, the voice disseminated its message through her in purls of warmth.The boy carved out much of himself years ago. Such is the price to pay to cross the endless, flowering fields.
Tentatively, all packed with immortality like a vapor, Delaney ran a fingertip across the angry split of red at the corner of his mouth, the tight ridge of his scar. He captured her wrist, turning to press a kiss into the cradle of her palm.
The boy is as beholden to you as the keening dead, snaked that abysmal voice through her skull.Command him. He will not refuse you.
Her heart skipped a beat. It skipped several. In front of her, Colton’s stare was black and unwavering. Rising onto her toes, she brushed a kiss to the broken blade of his smile.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
The world winnowed out. It winnowed in. A soundless cry. A snapping tether. Colton drowned, as he always did. He came up for air, lungs burning—as he always did. Chest pinched. Throat aflame. The crisp autumn night pulsed around him. The alleyway was black and cold. He was on dry ground and the dead were gone and his ghosts were gone and Delaney Meyers-Petrov was standing in front of him.
There was no singularity but her.
Everything he did was out of habit. By rote. He woke up. He fell asleep. He stomached the pin-and-needle prod of a curse he couldn’t shake. He bore the silent dead and the silent feel of dying. The endless fall of nights spent alone. The taste of mud in his throat. The knowledge of what he was, like a too-heavy cross.
And now here was Lane.
Her eyes were moonlit, fringed in snow. The dark mauve of her mouth was smudged by his kisses. Her breath hung between them in serrated strips. His fingers were shackled around her wrists, silver nickels clutched in both her hands.
They would come for him.
Sooner or later, the Priory would learn what he’d done and they would come for him.
But for now, there was the world edged in tinsel and there was Lane.
Somewhere in the distance, a church bell was ringing. The midnight hour. That most liminal of spaces. And in front of him, a girl of in-betweens. One foot among the dead and one among the living. He’d seen the silent shades drop to their knees at her feet as he led her home. The deep carillon call pealed through him in a brassy knell. He was alive, alive, alive, and the minutes running through him felt suddenly euphoric. Like a drug for once, and not like a poison.
He tightened his grip. The bones of her wrist bit into his palm.
The bells sang into the sky.
“Stay the night with me,” he said.
The house was sepulcher dark, black as a grave. Delaney could feel the dead crawling over and through it. Could feel them murmuring her name, clear enough now that she wondered how she’d never felt it before. It shivered through her head in a low chorale.
Yes,they whispered.We are here, we are here.
Look at us.
Look.
She didn’t look. She was inextricably tangled in Colton, and he in her, the dark running over them in variances of deepest black and gold-threaded blue as they moved between street-lit windows and pale-papered walls, shedding coats and scarves and shoes as they went. His guidance was rough, unforgiving, and she found she liked it that way—liked the desperation in his touch, the way he backed her up the steps without a care for the way she stumbled, nylons slick against the finely lacquered wood.
Her fingers traveled over the slight stubble of his chin, down the strained cordage of his throat, to the strangled knot of his tie. She drew him closer, felt him stagger a step, and reveled in the slam of him against her. He was everywhere—his hands in her hair, tongue tangled in her mouth, his knee between her thighs.
And the dead followed.
They watched, murmuring and roiling, prostrate amid the shadows.She thought, suddenly, of how she’d spoken to them once, as a little girl. Tucked away in the shaded juniper trees, cast in dappled light, she’d felt the itch of dark along her skin, the bite of shadow like a frost. It had been too much, too much. Afraid, she’d climbed atop a lichen-kissed stone and bidden them obey.
“Stop that.”
And they had.
She’d been left in silence and in sunlight, the forest empty, the windless afternoon streaming over her skin in streaks of gold. She’d felt a little like a proper queen then, buoyed atop her moss-plaited obelisk, the empty glade her court, the very dark at her command.
