“Your heart is beating so fast,” she whispers.
“So is yours.”
He can smell blood somewhere on her, as if she nicked something while stumbling through the forest. The heat of it—metal and salt—brings the hunger frothing to the surface, makes him feel like he’s splitting at the seams. He can’t tell if he wants to sink his teeth into her throat or press his mouth to her pulse—forget her name and drain her dry, or kiss her until he forgets his own.
“Do it,” she says, and he realizes that he’s said it all out loud, muttering his private inner monologue like one of his mother’s recitations. He feels half mad, the last shreds of his composure going up in smoke as she rises onto her toes beneath him and whispers, “Kiss me.”
It isn’t real, the way she’s looking at him, no light in her eyes at all. It’s his venom in her blood. It’s his teeth at her wrist. The real Shea Parker is pining after a boy named Asher Thorley. She lives in Little Hill with her mother. Her cheeks are freckled from the sun. She doesn’t spare a thought for what lives beyond the trees.
“You don’t mean that,” he says.
“How do you know?”
Her breath blooms over his lips, slips between his teeth. He wants to do it. He does. It would be easy to give in. He turns his head instead, screwing his eyes shut as sense prevails.
“Coward,” whispers Shea.
He’ll take it. He’ll take cowardice over this—this awful, synthetic thing between them. This knowledge that they are doomed to fail. The snap of pine snags his focus, and he opens his eyes just in time to witness Asher barreling toward them. For once, Lysander is relieved to see him. He falls back as Asher catches himself against his knees, doubled over and breathing hard.
“Holy shit. I’ve been looking everywhere for the two of you.”
“Your timing is impeccable as always, Sunshine.” Lysander flashes him a grin he doesn’t mean, ignoring the wary look Asher cuts his way. “I’ll do the noble thing and take the next watch. I could use the air.”
He leaves them there without another word, slinking off into the trees. Overhead, the sky is devoid of stars. Just how he wanted it. He moves beneath them, unmoored, haunted by Van Haut’s final warning:She’s a cataclysm, Oliver. You will not survive her.
A storm hits midway through the following day, bringing a wall of freezing rain that drives them off the road. They shelter inside the mouth of a twin-bore tunnel, watching the sleet turn the pavement slick as glass. The mood in the RV is tense. It’s as if Shea’s fight with Lys has put a crack in the foundations. The very air feels tremulous. As though at any moment, this unsteady thing they’ve built might all come crashing down around their ears.
Shea passes the time in the corner dinette, loading and reloading the crossbow until her fingers are raw. Poppy sits in the front passenger seat, knitting her scarf and singing along to an old mixtape she found in the glove compartment. The sound of classic rock floods the little space, driving out some of the day’s dreariness. Outside in the tunnel, Asher watches the road.
Lys stays shut away in the dark. He doesn’t speak to anyone at all.
It’s late afternoon when Shea heads out to swap places with Asher. The sound of the rain is loud against the overpass as she takes her spot against the wall. The stone is cool to the touch, the air thick and wet. For a while, Asher stays behind, cleaning the barrel of his gun with a slender boring brush. She hugs her knees to her chest and peers over at him, watching him work.
“Is this what you pictured?” she finally asks. “When you said we’d leave Little Hill someday?”
He stops scrubbing. “Not really, no.”
“Me neither.” She fiddles with the ring on her necklace. “Out of curiosity, whatdidyou picture?”
He’s quiet for too long. Longer. Eventually, he sighs. “You know how my dad is. He runs the house like a war general. It’s not that he’s— He’s not an angry person, he just doesn’t like disorder.”
It feels like the understatement of the century. Whenever Shea and Poppy visited, they’d leave their shoes at the door and follow Camellia upstairs on the tips of their toes, stealing like ghosts through the halls. The Parker house may have been silent to Shea, but it neverfeltsilent. It felt full. Full of her father’s music, scratching on the record player. Full of her mother’s singing. Full of laughter and mess and happy, warm disorder. In contrast, the Thorley house was a powder keg. Alder Thorley had very little patience for disruptions.
She thinks of an April day eight years past, when she and Camellia broke one of her mother’s vases. They’d been using it as a cauldron, mixing yellow merrybell petals into a maidenhair stew. At some point, they began quarreling over the ladle. The vase went crashing to the floor.
Asher found them seconds before his father did.
He took the blame, staying behind to sweep up the scattered petals and chunks of ceramic. He’d come to school the following day with his knuckles split, the skin raw. He never said a word about it.
“Wherever I end up,” he says now, “it’ll be different.”
“Loud,” suggests Shea. “Chaotic. Messy.”
He cracks a smile. “A pigsty.”
She matches his smile with one of her own. “We’re off to a great start, then. The RV is disgusting. Your dad would hate it.”
“He’d light it on fire,” Asher agrees.
