“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lys smiles a close-lipped smile. “Enjoy your silver platter.”
“Lys, wait.” Asher’s voice grits out of him just as Lys reaches for the door. He freezes, his grip tight, the dark clinging to him like a second skin.
“Lys?”His knuckles are white against the handle. “You think because I marked you, we’re friends? You think this means something? Once a watchdog, always a watchdog. All you’re good for is following orders. You take mine so well.”
The door slams shut with a rattle.
“What the hell was that?” demands Shea the moment he’s gone.
Asher doesn’t look at her. He’s watching the door, his face bloodless. “Nothing.”
“Oh yeah? It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“It’s nothing, Shea.” Asher scrubs the rain from his hair. “Please, for once in your life, will you drop it?”
She balks at his tone. “What? You’re mad at me now, too?”
“I’m notmadat you, I’m—God.” He groans, running a hand down the length of his face. In the rain, Lys’s bite has bled through the white of his bandage. It leaves a red, watercolor grin at his wrist. A mark, same as hers. Everything feels suddenly too precarious, like she’s holding together a vase that has already been shattered. Like the slightest shift will bring it all crumbling to pieces.
Poppy senses it, too. With far more cheer than the situation merits, she asks, “What if I made more scones?”
“I need a minute,” says Asher to the sky. “Just—don’t follow me, okay?”
He’s gone before Shea can argue, slipping back out into the downpour. Shoulders rounded, he heads back toward the sea, where the tide rushes in on a white, wild surf.
He doesn’t come back until dawn.
The drive the next day is silent.
Even Kit is quiet, dozing in a cabinet out of sight. They stop to rest at a cabin along the Gravewood’s southern terminus. So far off the main roads, the forest is wet and lush. It feels like a land lost to time, like they’ve stumbled out of the real world and into a storybook. Everything is lovely and green, white-capped mushrooms growing in rings everywhere Shea looks.
The inside of the house is just as charming. Well-tended, as if whomever lived here kept it with a loving hand. The main room boasts towering ceilings and a pressed stone fireplace, the hearth blackened with soot. The soaring cathedral windows have been thoroughly blacked out, and the walls are paneled wood. In its abandonment, signs of neglect have crept in. The furniture is damp and moth-bitten. A careworn couch sits atop a rug gone patterned in mold.
“What is this place?” asks Asher, once he’s finished his inspection.
On the couch, Lys kicks his feet onto the coffee table. “An abandoned nest.”
It’s the most they’ve spoken in hours, their voices clipped, as if they’re each doing their level best not to come to blows.
Asher eyes the blacked-out windows. “We don’t have to worry about guests?”
“We shouldn’t,” says Lys. “No one comes here anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It has bad blood.”
“That’s not an answer,” says Asher tightly.
Lys tips his head back and shuts his eyes. “It’s all you’re going to get, Sunshine. Be a good little soldier and build me a fire. There’s wood out in the shed.”
“Sure,” says Asher. “And when it’s done, maybe I’ll shove a hot poker up your—”
“Poppy and I will bring in the firewood,” says Shea, cutting him off.
In the end, the task is easier said than done. It takes them the better part of an hour to find wood dry enough to burn. With a fire sputtering in the fireplace, they scrounge together a meal from the remainder of their food supply. They eat in silence, the cabin smoky. Shea finishes first, shoving back from the table and snatching a flashlight from the top of Asher’s bag.
“Where are you going?” calls Poppy, when no one else cares enough to ask.
