“I wasn’t delirious, right?” I gasp. “That really happened?”
“Yeah.” Heathcliff rubs a hand over his face.
“Okay.” I haul in a few more jagged breaths, trying to control the shaking of my limbs, the clatter of my teeth. “Okay. We can’t lie here. We’ll get hypothermia. Gotta move. Got to get up.” It’s going to hurt. “One, two, three…”
I force myself to roll over onto my belly, and from there, I push up onto hands and knees. I climb to my feet, nearly toppling over again, but I curl my toes into the sand and find my balance somehow.
“Get up,” I hiss at Heathcliff.
He groans, but he obeys me, struggling upright as well. “I think we washed up close to where I went in after you. Give me a minute while I look for my phone.”
I hug myself miserably, watching as he walks along the sand, then bends to pick something up.
He hurries back, unlocking the phone as he approaches me. “Service sucks around here.” He holds it higher. “Okay, I got one bar now. I can call Isabella, tell her where we are.”
I hate that he has her number almost as much as I hate the idea of facing the group again. I look back the way we came, at the long, dark stretch of the beach. The wind has picked up, and it feels ten times colder than before. Why did I have to run so far from the fire, from heat and cars and blankets?
“Or we could go there.” Heathcliff points to a rooftop jutting above the dunes, its slanted surface gleaming in the faint starlight.
When I don’t answer, he sets off, determination in each stride.
I trudge after him. “We can’t just break in. It’s going to have a security system.”
“Not always. Sometimes people put the signs up even if they don’t actually have the system. Or they have one but they don’t pay the monthly fee and they don’t arm it. Especially if they don’t use the place a lot. They don’t want to bother remembering the code. Come on.”
“Do you break into beach houses often?”
“Only when I need to.”
We stumble across the tough, windblown grass of the dunes and onto the packed, sandy earth in front of the cottage. It’s tiny—one bedroom and a bathroom, if I had to guess. Maybe a kitchenette. There’s a sign for Hamblen’s Security in the grimy window, butsomeone has also nailed boards across the front door. Heathcliff’s probably right that the security for this place has lapsed. Besides, if an alarm goes off and somebody does come to check it out, we can explain our desperation to get warm. At the very least, they’ll give us blankets before they take us to jail.
Heathcliff grips one of the boards and the muscles in his arms tighten as he rips it free. One after another, he tears off the pieces of wood, then gives the door a good kick. There’s a snap of rusted metal and a crunch of wood, and the door flies open.
With a grim flourish and a faint smirk, he gestures to the dark opening. “After you, Earnshaw.”
Another woman might be squeamish at the thought of stepping into an abandoned cottage that probably hasn’t seen pest control in ages. But I’m used to walking barefoot in the bristly undergrowth of Carolina forests, squashing through the marshy landscape of the Lowcountry. During my wanderings, I’ve stepped on more night-crawling critters than I can count.
Plus, I’m freezing, and I just want to be out of this damn wind. I move past Heathcliff, into the dark.
My foot lands on dusty wood. No sharp nails, no crunch of a cockroach’s stiff wings under my toes. I walk farther inside. “Light,” I say over my shoulder, and Heathcliff enters behind me, drawing the door shut with a scraping creak and shining his phone around the space.
There’s a musty, acrid tang to the air, the sourness of moisture seeping somewhere in the cottage, though the floor I’m walking across feels dry. The phone’s pale light passes over a shabby couch, a metal folding table, a big wooden chest that could probably fit a dead body, and, as I suspected, the smallest of kitchenettes. Nothing here worth stealing, which is probably why the place doesn’t actually havean alarm. At least, none that we know of. Someone could still show up, I guess. Funny thing is, I don’t much care at the moment. My whole body is trembling uncontrollably, and my head feels weird. Things keep tilting and then righting themselves again. The stark glow of the phone light isn’t helping; it makes the shadows jump and dance until my stomach clenches with terror. I can almost imagine a giant fist made of darkness emerging, smashing us both to pulp.
I sway suddenly, careening into Heathcliff.
“Hey.” He grips my shoulder with his free hand. “We gotta get you warmed up. Come on, let’s see if there’s any hot water or electricity in this place.”
He hustles me toward the back of the cottage. The first door we open is a closet, full of stale air and dusty blankets and towels. The second leads to a tiny bathroom. Heathcliff turns the squeaky knob, and water spurts out, dark at first, before it runs clear.
“It’s not getting any warmer,” he says. “But it’s not as cold as the ocean. You should rinse that sand off before you wrap up in blankets. I’ll hold the light for you.”
“Of c-course you will,” I manage through my chattering teeth. “You just…want to…see me naked.”
“The only thing I’m concerned with right now is getting you warm. We don’t know how long this water will last—there’s probably not much in the tank, so you get your ass in there right now, you hear me? I won’t look. Just hurry because I want a turn when you’re done.”
“Fine.” With trembling fingers, I strip off my hoodie, my dress, and then my swimsuit, which is pretty much congealed to my skin. I’m coated with sand, and even though the cold shower makes my breath hiss, itiswarmer than the ocean, and it feels good to rinse the grit away.
When my skin is smooth again, I step out, wet and shivering andnaked. There’s nothing sexy about it—I feel like a chilled salamander, with my hair plastered to my quivering shoulders.
