Either someone was having a nightmare starring Celia or she was alive.
And if she was alive . . .
She loved her brother, didn’t she? And Luvic loved her. He’d never asked me to help her. In fact, he’d always warned me to stay away from her. He said she’d kill me if she knew what and who I was, and he wouldn’t be able to save me from her.
Yet I’d died my seventh death for Celia. Well, not for her, but for Luvic, who’d wanted to save her. And now Luvic was in trouble, and maybe—if I asked—his sister would help him. If she was alive. If this was her.
I looked down the tunnel. How long did I have before I had to turn around? I’d come down here to find the Smiths. Finn.
But . . .
I stood on my tiptoes, grabbed the floorboards overhead, and slowly pulled myself up. I’d just take a peek. A quick look before I hurried on.
I pressed my forearms into the wooden floor and kicked into the spongy walls, peering into the room. The mattress bulged and shifted as I poked my head out of the tunnel.
The room was dark. The windows were shrouded with newspapers, and the lights were off. It smelled like cigarettes, old coffee, and fried eggs. My eyes adjusted, and I realized I wasn’t in a bedroom but in a tiny, one-room, railroad-narrow apartment. There were stacks of magazines on the floor. An old TV with a cracked screen. Clothing thrown over a chair.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I blinked.
Celia may be sleeping in the bed above me, but she wasn’t the only person here.
A man lunged at me from the darkness.
I shoved off the floor, scrambling back toward the void. He sprang forward and grabbed the end of my braid.
“Gotcha!”
My head snapped back, and I yelped as he yanked me out from under the bed. I fought, trying to scramble back into the darkness. He shook me and slammed me against the wood floor.
The light flicked on.
I stared, my eyes watering in the bright light. It silhouetted a man, a rock star on his stage. I looked up and smiled into the blinding white halo of a dead man.
Ragnor Bard pressed his thumb into the vulnerable curve of my throat and purred in his melodic, weep-your-heart-out baritone, “Well, look at me. I’ve caught a little monster under my bed.”
56
The wind followed the boy through the shadowed alley, and the boy followed the citrus and pearl dust scented woman. It was almost a game, tiptoeing behind dumpsters, ducking behind food carts, and flattening into the ventilation cracks spaced between brick walls.
The woman didn’t know the boy was following her, and the boy didn’t know the wind was following him. It reminded the wind of when the boy was small and they’d played hide-and-seek in the woods to the north. Its favorite type of hiding had been circling around and following the boy from behind as he peered in mossy tree hollows and under pine-cone mounds and beneath rotting logs, until finally, after a long time seeking, the wind would tap on the boy’s shoulder, and he’d swing around, laughing at how the wind had snuck up on him.
It was a fun game.
Maybe the boy would tap on the woman’s shoulder and she’d laugh too.
The boy was in a good mood. The corners of his lips kept tilting up every time the woman worriedly peered over her shoulder. He even laughed when she grabbed a newspaper, hopped on a crowded bus, and then got off at the next stop as a completely different person. The newspaper was like a theater curtain, and when it dropped, she’d changed from an old man into a young one.
She kept her head down, hurrying onto a busy sidewalk. Then, as if she sensed someone following her, she darted across the street, dodged a taxi, and ducked into another alley.
At the other end, she was another person again—this time a large, round man with a protruding stomach. The boy leaned against a bus stop, his hands in his pockets, smiling as she darted past. His own features were obscured, the way Ward features often were, so the woman didn’t notice him, even though he was hiding in plain sight.
The wind sniffed the street. There’d been a quick rain shower that had sprinkled the sidewalks and tickled the wind as it flew to the boy. It wasn’t enough to wash away dirt or grime, but it’d lifted the wind’s mood. The raindrops were gone now, but the smell of rain remained. It was still humid though—the rain hadn’t broken the heat. The boy’s face was flushed, and a bit of sweat clung to his forehead.
He pushed off the bus stop and followed the woman across the street. She took one last, quick look over her shoulder and then disappeared down a cross street.
“She’s up to something,” the boy said, curiosity and laughter warring in his voice. “Don’t you think?”
Oh. So the boy did know the wind was following him.
