“Could you slow down? Hold on. Let me just…” Izzy growled and ripped her high heels off her feet, flinging them to one side.
“I don’t want to hear it, Iz.” Eva tossed a glower over her shoulder.
And froze.
When our eyes connected, the overbearing heat of the day took on a different shape. Instead of clinging to my skin, a flush of awareness, of aching recognition, sank right through to the core of me.
Izzy stumbled into her sister, who caught her before she could fall, then brushed past her, stomping toward me. Bewildered, Izzy spun, seeking the source of her sister’s abrupt change in demeanor.
“Ah.” Izzy’s voice went soft with sudden understanding, but I had eyes only for the woman charging toward me like a bull, cheeks flushed. A nauseating wave of wrongness flooded my senses.
I shouldn’t have come back.
Instinctively, I took a step back but stumbled, tripping over a rock. Air rushed from my lungs in surprise, and I hit the ground tailbone first, the urn slipping out of my grasp. It shattered on the stepping stones, spraying ashes across my cheek.
Eva came to an abrupt halt in front of me. “You,” she whispered, the pain in her voice like a striking bullet.
A memory flashed before me. In it, Eva was smiling as she coaxed my glove off finger by finger. I could still recall the first brush of her skin against mine, could still see the parting of her lips as she asked me the most dangerous question of all:
You trust me?
Beyond, someone else stepped out of the workshop, casting an enormous shadow across the lawn. I rolled to one side, panting with the effort it took to ignore my aching tailbone, and pushed to my knees, where I began anxiously scooping up ashes before the wind could blow them away.
But the urn, now completely shattered, could no longer hold them.
“Arthur?”
In her mouth, my name sounded almost delicate, the syllables preserved like a flower in a book. My throat went hard with grief.On my knees, with my hands still cupping the ashes, I felt suddenly like a supplicant come to beg her forgiveness.
I shoved to my feet and tossed my head to one side to get a stray lock out of my eyes, stacking my spine with a confidence I didn’t feel.
“Hey, bee girl.”
Chapter 3
Arthur
You.” Eva stepped back, her voice thickening with sudden emotion. Accusation filled her eyes as she raised her finger and thrust it in my direction. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Something squeezed inside my chest, and I opened my mouth to speak, only to choke on dead air.
Luckily for me, Izzy swooped in before the awkwardness could grow. “Impeccable timing, Fairy,” she chirped. “We were just talking about your arrival.”
My eyes zipped from her face back to Eva’s, a question budding on my lips, when the size of the figure that had stepped from the workshop registered in my mind. My pulse leapt in recognition. There was only one man on this mountain as impossibly large as he. I hadn’t been sure when I’d dialed if the number was still accurate, and part of me had hoped it would ring and ring, that I’d never have to hear his voice again.
But Jack had picked up right away.
Doubt tugged at me. This was a mistake. How could I walk back in after all this time? I couldn’t face them. Not now. Maybe not ever.
It wasn’t too late to just turn around and go. Mom’s ashes had been delivered.
“In the loosest sense of the word,”the monster chirped.
I gritted my teeth in annoyance.
At first, I’d thought to ignore Mom’s last request and send her ashes through the mail, which had only convinced the monster that I must have been deep in the throes of grief. Driven by a desire to curb my self-destructive tendencies, it had… changed. Grown bolder. The monster had forced me to sleep, dreamless. It had tried to force me to eat to keep up my strength, but despite the gnawing in my belly, everything made my stomach churn.
When the monster had started hunting again, I’d caved to Mom’s wishes, and had set a course for Audrey, Pennsylvania, desperate to do whatever it took to soothe the beast into submission.
