It was clumsy in the dark where they collided. His warm, chapped lips parted in surprise against hers. He whispered her name, a soft, fractured “Ev” so light it almost wasn’t there at all. His obvious confusion stirred something buried inside her. There had been a time when Arthur Connoway knew exactly what she felt for him. She’d made it her mission to prove how vital he was to her by touch and taste and so much trust. She’d given him the parts of her that no one else had access to. The rough, the raw, the needy.
This kiss was not that.
This kiss was a ghost.
It lasted only a few seconds, but the haunting pressure of his lips sent a chill over Eva’s skin. A thousand other kisses echoed through her, kisses she’d fooled herself into thinking she’d buried. But no. She remembered and remembered and remembered.
When Arthur’s hand found the bend of her waist, Eva broke away, shaking. “You can do this,” she whispered. Her palm wasstill pressed to Arthur’s chest, and she felt where his breath caught, the trip of a heart beating faster.
Even with her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out only the shape of him. His neck ticked, his silhouette shifting in clear agitation.
“No,” he moaned. “Not now.”
“It has to be now,” Eva said, a tremor running through her.
Arthur shook his head. “Not that. Not you. Ev, I—” He cut himself off, the words strangled as his breath came harsher. In the dark, he felt like another person entirely. Someone sharper than the boy she remembered. “There’s something inside me. It won’t let me… I can’t…”
When he didn’t continue, Eva prodded him. “Can’t what?”
But Arthur only shook his head again, his hands twisting into the hem of her sweatshirt. Eva gently took his wrists in her grip. When her thumbs ran over his pulse points, Arthur twisted, pinning her back against the wall of dirt and shackling her hands above her head.
“Your heartbeat,” he muttered, “is so loud.”
Eva trembled. The tone of his voice had downshifted from its usual warmth into something hard and full of gravel.
The ground continued to groan as the cavity that had opened up in the earth began to close again, the spill of loose dirt flecking her arms and putting Eva in mind of the sands of an hourglass rushing to fill any empty space gravity provided them.
Above them, a shelf of hard-packed earth jutted from the side of the pit. Using strength she wouldn’t have guessed he had, Arthur gripped it and hauled first her, then himself, up onto it. “You’re not dying today, Freckles,” he said with a grunt. When they were on the ledge, he thumbed the dip in her waist. “If he won’t save you, I will.”
Chapter 22
Arthur
Cold shot through my veins, a hard freeze working a path up my body from toes to crown. In seconds, the fear I felt, pressed between the walls of sinking soil, gave way to a much worse kind of claustrophobia as the monster fit itself into my hollows.
I tried to suck in a breath, tried to push back, but the monster held fast, its relentless determination disconnecting me from my body in the space of a moment.
The trickle of raining sediment lifted away. The pain I’d felt released, leaving me untethered, weightless to the point of nausea. I shivered as even that physical anchor sloughed off, leaving me wholly detached from my body. I became nothing. Just a scrap of detritus in my own head.
Terror gripped me.
The monster reached to grasp a root squiggling out of the dirt to the side of Eva’s head. Upon contact, the roots curled back from the deadly power coursing through me. That was all Icouldstill feel: cold, bitter death.
“Can we get on your shoulders?”the monster asked Eva.
I couldn’t smell the dirt coating the both of us in a dark rime ofearth. I couldn’t feel the warm pressure of her body against mine, as I had when she’d taken my face in her hands and kissed me.
Kissed me.
For a moment, our connection point had felt like the first drop of summer. She was a warm flash of heat.
But then she was gone and I was ice again.
Eva nodded, bending into a crouch. I felt the monster’s intention move through me as it stepped both our feet onto her shoulders. It was careful to position our weight so as not to knock her off-balance. I couldn’t feel my legs shake. Maybe I had stopped trembling, or maybe the numbness had stolen that too.
“Okay?”the monster asked her. It was strange, and awful, to hear my voice speak without my consent. To watch my body move and act as an observer, the claustrophobic weight of my own mind pressing in around me like walls closing in, while I was trapped inside myself like a prehistoric insect caught in amber.
Eva nodded. “I’m okay.”
