His mouth turns down at the corners. “Who knows? Come over here.”
“I don’t think I can. My legs feel like lead.”
“Shea.”
It’s less a push and more of a nudge. She feels it just the same—a compulsion. A tightening, as if he’s tugging on the other side of a rope. Willing herself off the wall, she makes her painstaking way onto the bed alongside him. He holds himself still as she crawls into place, staring up at the top bunk. Above them, the thin wooden splines are stuffed with baseball cards, glossy placards interspersed with vintage matte. She feels like she’s crawled into a coffin alongside him. The air is tight, the space enclosed. They lie in silence and listen to each other breathe.
“The Titan of Terror,” he whispers when her eyelids grow heavy. “The Colossus of Clout.”
She angles her head toward his. “What?”
“Babe Ruth.” He tips his chin toward the planks deckled in cards. “The Great Bambino. Twenty-two seasons, seven hundred fourteen home runs. Not the record but close.”
Directly over his head is a man in blue-striped knickers. He’s squinting into the sun, his wooden bat in mid-swing. The card is bent at one corner, the details sun-spoiled from years of exposure. It looks like the card he carries with him, its corner fingerprinted in blood.
“It hurts,” he says, when the quiet deepens. “Desiccating, I mean. You feel everything.”
A wordless anger sinks its teeth into her. “Did he do that to you? Egor? Did he drain you of blood?”
It’s a while before Lys answers, his voice wry. “?‘There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice.’?”
She rolls on her side to face him. “Who said that?”
“Van Haut. Although I think it’s a quote from someone else.”
“It sounds like bullshit.”
His smile is rueful. He still hasn’t looked at her. “Sometimes on the very worst days, I used to list all the baseball stats I could remember. It was a trick my mom taught me, to hold on to myself if I started to feel like I was coming apart.”
She pictures him small and starving, his eyes black all the way through. It doesn’t fit the image she has of him—the Gravewood Devil, spat out of hell. King of the runaways, motherless and wild. She swallows the shard of glass in her throat. She forces herself to ask the question she’s been turning over since they first came upstairs.
“Is thisyourbedroom?”
“No.”
“Oh. Because the way Egor talks about you—” She pauses, reconsidering, and then approaches it from a new angle. “It’s just that it seems like maybe a little boy lived here.”
“A little boydidlive here,” says Lys. “I occupied it for a while, but it isn’t mine.”
“Whose was it?”
“A miniature Van Haut,” he says. “Insufferable little shit. He used to talk all night.”
Poppy shifts overhead, coils creaking, and they both go quiet until she settles.
“He’s dead now,” adds Lys, offhand.
There’s something raw in the way he says it—something open and bleeding that doesn’t invite further probing. Instead, she asks, “Did you grow up near here?”
“In Pennsylvania?” he clarifies, like he’s never heard anything more horrible in all his life.
“Yeah, in Pennsylvania.”
“No.”
She’s not given the chance to investigate further. The door skids open to admit Asher, his dog tags gleaming and his hair slicked flat by the rain. He casts a hard look in their direction as he shuts the door and locks it. Silence hangs, deep and expectant.
“I call little spoon,” says Lys, puncturing the quiet.
