Eva tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s just go.”
No.
Adrenaline pumped inside me, and I clenched and opened my hands. Where were my gloves when I needed them?
“Arthur,” Eva pleaded.
Lenny popped to his feet. “She’s mine,” he snarled.
The monster rushed forward, filling my hollows. I didn’t remember choosing to lunge forward; I registered Eva’s shout onlywhen my shoulder slammed into Lenny. We hit the ground hard, knocking over a stack of hymnals.
Eva’s shout found me in a sea of red feelings. Despite the monster’s grip on me, her presence and fear pulled me back to the surface, where I gasped.My gloves. I need my gloves!The monster and I had shared space in moments of crisis before, but never like this, where I was nothing but a husk to its flame.
Pink spittle dribbled from Lenny’s mouth. He spat out a tooth, and my thoughts slipped like sand through my fingers.
“That all you got, Connoway?”
This time, Lenny found skin, digging his nails into my cheek. Pain sliced through me where he scraped back flesh, followed by quick relief as a whisper of life stole out of him and into me. It took only an instant for my death-touch to start draining the life out of a person.
But an instant wasn’t enough to kill.
The monster snapped our arm forward and shackled a hand around Lenny’s throat, curving our lips into a smile.
The chapel door slammed open. I didn’t care. I didn’t look. Lenny clawed at my hands. My fingers bled, but the monster squeezed our grip tighter.
“Arthur, stop!” Eva pleaded.
I didn’t. I tried, but my control over the death-touch weighed nothing against the monster’s hate. A heavy cold bloomed inside my chest, spreading quickly down my limbs as the monster surged into every part of me. It wanted to take and take and take.
Someone shouted behind me, someone I knew. Lenny’s stare blackened. He whipped something out of his pocket and slashed…
Silver flashed.
I let go, pain rearing through my arm and yanking me out ofthe monster’s icy grip. Eva screamed. Green vines rushed through my periphery, and a figure shoved between Lenny and me.
A slick and horrible squelch filled my ears as something dark and wet sprayed the chapel’s plaster walls. It speckled my skin too.
I smelled summer. I smelled iron. The world thinned to a ringing in my ears, and I blinked fast, trying and failing to process the scene before me. None of it made sense. A blanket of moss and wildflowers, spread over the pews. Lenny Walker, dry-heaving the contents of his stomach. Eva, my Eva, sobbing.
The real horror, however, was Dane Walker. He lay face up on the hardwood, eyes fixed on the rafter starlings, a bloodied vine impaling his chest.
Chapter 33
Isobel
The hospital waiting area was a quiet place, with nowhere near enough distractions. Every breath stung Isobel’s nose with the sharp scent of hand sanitizer. She hung on to the steady sound of someone’s heart monitor beeping down the hall as she bounced her knee, glancing up from her shoes to where the Dawson family was gathered, waiting for Avi to finish giving Dane his official statement.
Isobel couldn’t stop seeing Avi’s face. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the blood smeared down his cheek and pictured the flowers growing out of his empty eye socket as though he were already gone and ready for rotting, a corpse not yet decomposed.
But he wasn’t a corpse. Whatever had happened up that trail, Avi had survived to tell it. Any minute, Dane would walk out of Avi’s hospital room with answers that would finally calm her beating heart.
Isobel unscrewed the cap of the bottle between her knees and sucked down the last quarter cup until the plastic crackled. Her hangover migraine had thankfully downshifted into a dull throbbing behind her eyes. She was angry at herself for slipping at all.Shame never did her any good—she knew that—but it was hard to resist giving in to its pull.
She would focus on what she could control. Tomorrow, she would attend the hospital’s biweekly AA meeting. That was a step she could manage.
Her eyes lifted to the Dawson family again. Even June had come to support Priya, though June tellingly hadn’t said a word to Isobel all night.
As though drawn by a magnet, her former best friend lifted her gaze from where Esther scribbled in a unicorn coloring book on the floor. June’s expression stilled when it met Isobel’s, instantly becoming more guarded.
