He doesn’t walk it back. He watches her shiver, hunger banding his skin like striae in marble. She thinks of the creature on the bridge—monstrous, clawed, a heart pulsing in its hand. She knows it was him. She’s never been more sure of anything. Before she can tell him so, he beckons for her to follow.
“Come on. I want to show you something.”
He heads back toward the lodge, confident she’ll follow. And she does. She always does. She falls in after him, every cell in her body compelling her in his wake.
It’s begun to snow. The wind ferries the flakes in sideways, twisting them round in a white-out squall. Shea tails after Lys as he slips through a battered fire exit. The heavy door grinds shut. The wind snuffs out. The silence here is all-encompassing, like some great Goliath has placed a bell jar over the whole of Mercy Ridge.
They stand in a circular room with soaring rafters, windows fanged in broken glass. Snow spills in through the gaps, falling in slow motion over a carefully preserved greensward. Lush. Alive. The floor is carpeted in evening primrose. Ivy rains from the ceiling in lavish vines. Most striking of all are the orange jack-o’-lantern mushrooms that cluster along the rotted beams, gills glowing blue-green. It pits the whole of the room in an ethereal cast, like she’s stepped into a ring of fairy stones and found herself whisked somewhere new.
She does a slow turn, taking it all in. When she stops, she finds Lys propped against a nearby column, a folded letter in one hand. All sense of awe flees her body. Her heart plummets to the floor with an icy crack.
“There were no letters to me in your little tin,” he says.
“That was private.”
“Can you blame me for looking? It really paints a picture of your life back in Little Hill.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m not. I’m fascinated. Although maybe you can solve a mystery for me.” He unfolds the paper with needless aplomb, scanning the date scrawled along the top. “This is the last one. May eleventh. That’s six months ago.”
The heat of his gaze cuts through the cold. She thinks of the previous spring—the trees in bloom and the long trek to Mercy Ridge, her palm stinging. The wild way he’d looked with her blood painting his chin, his eyes gray all the way through.
“I hate a cliffhanger,” he says. “Why’d you stop writing?”
“Why’d you kill Sullivan?”
The letter crumples in his fist. Hunger forks into his skin in cyanotic brooks.
“Don’t push me,” she says when he only stares. “I’ll push you back.”
He stalks nearer, casting the balled-up letter aside. He doesn’t stop his advance until they’re nose to nose in the dark, their foreheads kissing. Not like lovers, but like boxers in a ring, staring each other down before a match—fists at the ready, both of them breathing just a little bit too hard.
Cutting herself on the edge of Oliver Lysander is better than falling on the blade of her worst mistakes. Fighting him is easier than taking swings at her ghosts. At least, with Lys, she manages to land a blow every now and again.
His voice is sandpapered when he says, “Push me again.”
“I’d never write you a letter. We have nothing to say to each other.”
His smile is soulless. Reaching into his jacket, he procures a narrow blister packet. The alkaline batteries gleam oddly in the light. Without a word, he slips them into the front pocket of her flannel. It’s cold. It’s ugly. It’s familiar ground. Everything in her steadies as she rushes to cuff her sleeve. Lys peers thoughtfully down at the shape of his bite, his features limned in a blue-green cast.
He looks like a creature of the forest, more myth than boy.
With a touch that borders on delicate, he closes his fingers over her wrist and guides her into a turn. Her back collides against the flat wall of his chest. Breath held, she allows him to coax her into position. The flat of his thumb digs into her pulse. His breath fans along her skin.
“You know why I killed Sullivan,” he says. “It’s the same reason you stopped writing letters to Thorley.”
She stifles a cry when he bites down. There’s a rush of blood, a white-hot locus of pain, and her head tips back against his shoulder. The bioluminescence seems to ebb and then flare as he pulls deep from her veins. The click of his swallow is loud in the quiet.
So, too, is the sound of a door careening open.
She looks, and there’s Asher. He stands frozen a few feet away, the light from the interior hall falling in around him. Lys sees him, too. He sinks his teeth in deeper, biting down until Shea sees stars. His hand finds her waist, fingertips digging into bone. Every nerve ending in her body gathers beneath his touch and she lets out a single, mortifying gasp.
Asher takes it all in with an unflinching stare, his expression remote. Some deeply buried instinct tells her to push Lys away. To wriggle free. Toexplain.She doesn’t. The soporific effect of the bite culls her panic. Her heart slows. The world grinds to a halt. Even the snow hangs motionless, shimmering.
Inhibitions banished, she reaches for Lys, her fingers skimming the contours of his cheek. There, just above his temple, her touch snags on the hard rind of bone ground flat.
The change in Lys is immediate. He works his bite free, shoving himself away from her in the same fluid movement. She sways around, dizzy, and finds him wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His cheeks are pink and full. His eyes are the color of a lake in deep winter. For a tremulous instant, she can see panic thrashing just beneath the surface. And then his gaze ices over and he turns his attention to the door.
