Just a peculiar little girl’s peculiar little daydream.
She paused in the door to Colton’s room, pulling back from him. His mouth was stained red from her kisses, his curls disheveled. He looked, in the low cast of streetlights from the window, like some black-eyed, beautiful thing. Like he wasn’t even human.
His tie was gone, the buttons of his shirt undone. Breathless, he caught the doorframe in his hands, elbows crooked. Caging her in. The dead clung to him like a mantle. They chittered along the ground at his feet. They genuflected, going prone along the floor, and she wasn’t entirely sure if their adulation was meant for him or for her.
Look at us.
Look.
And so she did.
“Be still,” she snapped, refusing to feel foolish for it. The shadows fell. The streetlight framed in the window became a bright, burgeoning spot of gold. She blinked, stunned. Her heart was a wild, cantering creature beneath her bones.
Very good,crooned her odious passenger.You are learning.
In the door, Colton watched her with eyes that swallowed up the light. He didn’t look surprised. Not unsettled, not alarmed. He only looked pleased.
He only smiled and said, “There you are.”
The day Colton Price died, he’d only pulled himself up because Delaney Meyers-Petrov told him to.
“The water’s too cold for swimming,” she’d said. “You need to get up.”
He’d been dead. He’d been dying. The cold had gone out of his bones and left something empty in its place. Something without any fight. At her command, the pain came rushing back. It slammed into him like an anvil, and suddenly his chest had been packed with mud, his mouth flavored like silt, his bones juddering hard enough to hurt. He’d never hurt so much. He’d never felt so alive.
Be still.
That’s what she said, standing in his room. The dark a cold, beseeching specter. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t hear it. But he’d walked through Hell often enough to know the feel of it. Sulfur and brimstone. The muddied brine of a slow-melting pond.
Be still, she said, and the dead listened.
The way he couldn’t help but listen.
He fixed his gaze on hers. She’d never looked more like herself, eyes bright and chin upturned. The dark knew it. He knew it. They were in the presence of something regal. A gold-limned queen, the very depths of Hell at her beck and call.
“Come here,” she said. An order, soft. He would have crawled across the floor to her, if she’d commanded it. He would have dragged himself, the way he’d torn through fire and through ice. The way he’d thrown himself at her feet, halfway dead and ice thawing in his lungs. He surrendered a step into the room. In spite of her initial boldness, she drew back from his approach. Something primitive shot through him at the sight of her retreat.
“Malus navis,” he said, without entirely meaning to.
Her breath caught. “What?”
“It’s Latin.”
“Meaning?”
He swallowed thickly. He couldn’t look anywhere but at her. In his room. Under his thumb. The girl who could command the shades. He’d spent so long pretending this wasn’t what he wanted that now it hurt to have her here. Like he’d spent years training his body to do one thing and now was asking it to do quite another.
“Colton,” she chastised when he hesitated. “Tell me what it means.”
“Beacon.” The word fell out of him. “It means beacon.”
He stepped again and she drew back again, until he was stalking her across the book-cluttered space of his room. His throat went dry. His blood heated. He liked this newest game a little too much. “It’s a phrase the dead have,” he explained, “for someone who draws them in like a moth to light.”
He heard the very second her spine slammed into his bookshelf. Several tomes went toppling to the floor. It lit something in him, the way her fingers bit into wood, the way her knuckles went white against the shelving. The way he could see, even in darkness, her pulse hammering in her throat.
“Malus navis,” she echoed.
He swore he felt the dark shift under their feet as he drew in close, bracing his hands against a shelf. Beneath him, her stare drilled into his.
