He frowns. “Don’t laugh.”
She can’t help it. Everything feels funny. She laughs again, harder this time. He’s so close she can taste the blood at his lips, metal and heat. His eyes are a pale, angelite blue. He turns his head just a fraction, his nose brushing along the length of hers. Electricity snakes up her spine, and suddenly she’s not laughing anymore.
“Lys—”
“Don’t say it.” His breath blooms across her jaw. “Don’t ask me to Turn you.”
“If not now, then when?”
He’s too quiet. She pulls back to get a better look at him, but he halts her in her tracks, grabbing a fistful of her flannel. His eyes are on the house, listening to something Shea can’t hear. His throat cords in a swallow.
“Our chaperone is awake.”
Just as he says it, the screen door swings wide. Asher is there, his cap pulled low and his eyes still heavy with sleep. He takes quick stock of the tableau before him—Lys’s full cheeks and bright eyes, blood pooling in Shea’s open palm.
She expects him to yell. To criticize. To getangry.
He doesn’t.
“Let’s get back on the road,” he says flatly. “We’ve got a long night of riding ahead.”
November in Pennsylvania is crisp and clear, leaves still clinging to the trees. As if the cold hasn’t wrung all the color out of this part of the world just yet. They reach their destination just as the dawn breaks. The forest falls away, replaced by flat, bucolic fields dotted in decaying colonials. At their backs, the sun sits in a parhelion along the sky’s eastern basin.
They’ve cut it too close to sunrise. Uneasy, Shea taps Lys’s thigh. He nods once, the pale sliver of his throat visible, and urges the bike a little faster.
Head aching, she holds tight to his middle. Wide flaxen fields fall away on either side—sprawling farmland broken here and there by crumpled silos or flame-blackened barns. A deer flits across the road in front of them, fleet of foot.
Signaling to Asher, Lys slows into an upcoming turn. With a thump, the road narrows to a single, muddy artery. A small herd of horses stands grazing in a nearby field. The stallion whickers a warning as they pass, the whites of his eyes gleaming.
The way is slow going, and it takes several more minutes to navigate to the tunneled end of a driveway. By then, the sun is nearly all the way in the sky and Shea’s heart has wedged itself neatly in her throat. She gives Lys’s side a squeeze.Faster.He flattens his gloved palm over her hand and squeezes back. A silent affirmation.I’m going.
The wide, alpine acreage before them is trapped behind tensile fencing, wire swallowed in flowering bull thistle. A cluster of stables dots the nearby hills, the well-tended buildings nestled into a patchwork landscape left to grow wild. A mule lifts its head from a patch of clover as they pass, chewing crookedly on the leaves.
They come to a stop beneath an old oak, its branches flooded with ruby-crowned kinglets. Beyond the tree sits a sagging house. The white siding has gone green with moss, fretted windows cracked. It looks, at first glance, entirely unassuming—a stark contrast to the old-world grandeur of Mercy Ridge.
Shea doesn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it isn’t this.
Lys—infuriatingly—is slow as mud. He takes his time dismounting, inspecting the chassis of his bike like he has all the time in the world. At his back, the sun creeps steadily higher. The first of the daylight hits the farthest field, gilding the meadow gold.
“Hurryup,” she mutters, giving him a shove. He traps her hands against his chest, pressing them flat beneath his gloves. She can’t see his eyes through the dark tint of his visor, but she can feel his heart. It pummels into her open palm. With a start, she realizes he’s afraid.
“You don’t want to go in.”
“It’s not my favorite place,” comes his muffled response.
“Then why did we come?”
He tips his chin up to the distant trees, where the sun escapes in brittle shoots of yellow. His throat is gridded in veins, slivers of dark already rising into his skin.
“There’s only one person in the world who hates Paris Keeling more than me,” he says. “And he lives in this house.”
“Hey, prince of darkness,” calls Asher, his eyes on the sky. “Let’s hustle.”
They reach the wide, wraparound porch just as the first of the kinglets begin to herald the morning sun. The door swings wide seconds before Lys manages to knock. A man stands there, thin as a spindle and bowed in the shoulders, his hair silver alloy. His spectacles are bottle thick. He peers through the lenses, his mouth going white.
“Oliver,” he says. “You’re far from home.”
Lys flips up the visor on his helmet. “Let us in.”
