“No,” I said. “You’re okay.”
Put like that, it felt like a lie.
Eva licked a fleck of red off the bow of her lip. More blood smeared her cheeks and nose. Alarm rose in me. I couldn’t let her or anyone else see her like this.
The voices at the chapel doors grew louder, knocking more insistently. When I snuck a look back, I saw moss sneaking under the storage room door. We slipped out the back into the shadows. The remaining partygoers had congregated at the front of the chapel, clearing a path. I took her hand, and we ran across thenow-abandoned dance floor, my heart racing. I tasted copper on my tongue.
What would happen when the crowd finally made their way inside and found Jack and Izzy covered in a dead man’s blood? Would Jack lie for me and call it an accident?
And what story would Lenny tell?
When we got to the truck, I yanked open the passenger door. Eva scrambled to click in her seat belt, hands shaking. When a sob escaped her, she covered her mouth with bloodstained knuckles, smearing red over her lips.
I took her face in my shaking hands. Even now, every touch between us felt like a battle won. Scars replacing wounds. It didn’t feel right to find relief in her, not now, but the relief came anyway. “We have to go.” I planted a rough kiss on her temple, then slammed the door and ran to the driver’s side.
We made it halfway to the cottage before Eva rolled down the window. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I shot her a look. “You want me to pull over?”
“No.”
The instant the house came into view, however, Eva tapped my leg urgently. I pumped the brakes, and we screeched to a stop, leaving a cloud of dust in our wake. Eva burst from the truck and vomited on the side of the road.
I was out the door and at her side in a moment. Helplessness flooded through me when I settled a hand between Eva’s shoulder blades and she burst into sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed.
As I crushed her against my chest, Jack’s instructions filled my mind. We had to wash off the blood. Get rid of the dress. My shirt. My pants. “Let’s go inside, okay?”
“Okay.” A soft, childlike response.
I cupped the back of her head and forced a bit of calm into my voice. “All right, honey. Arms around my neck.”
Eva pressed her nose into my shoulder as she cried. Once inside, I carried her to the bathroom with the claw-foot tub and set her gently on the rim of it. Eva looked a little dazed.
“She’s going into shock.”
The faucet shrieked when I turned it, water plonking on the porcelain.
“I killed him,” Eva whispered again.
My heart twisted as I slid the zipper down her back, a reversal of my role earlier that day.
“I’m a monster,” she said in anguish.
“Don’t say that.”
I could still feel the rush of the withering vines in my palms. I could still hear them crackle as summer turned to autumn in Dane’s rib cage, the monster parching him of life. I could still feel the final beat of his heart.
Maybe she’d landed a blow, butIhad been the killer here.
“You did him a mercy,”the monster said.“He wouldn’t have survived that anyway.”
Its callous words stunned me to the core. I’d never hated the creature, and myself, as much as I did right then.
Even though I knew it was right.
I raced down the hallway and fetched some towels from the closet. When I returned, Eva had peeled off her ruined dress. She perched on the edge of the tub in nothing but her underwear, eyes blank, knuckles white. Sweat plastered a blond strand to her cheek.
