“What if we force an exorcism?” I drop my voice to barely a whisper, brushing my nose against the hollow of his throat.His stubble scratches my cheek. “Get the ghost out of him somehow?”
“We’re in no shape to fight an entity,” Nico whispers. “You saw what happened to Griffin. It could do that to us and worse.”
“What if we lure him down here?” My brain is racing now, grasping for anything. “Get him close enough to tie him up on the pole?”
“Morrow would flee the body the second he sensed real danger,” he says.
I force myself to think past the exhaustion. What do we actually know about the Game Master?
“Morrow thinks he knows how this is going to go,” I say, working through it. “He expects us to work together in the trials because he knows we care about each other, but once he turns up the heat, he also expects you to turn on me.”
“What are you saying?” Nico asks.
There’s a tightening in my throat because I know exactly how well this is going to go over, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. The only way I can see us getting out of this with the rest of our limbs still attached.
“I’m saying we give him what he wants.”
CHAPTER 46
Kiss my brave girls for me.
—James Callahan, in a recovered letter addressed to Kathleen Callahan from his deployment, 2012
I’ve barely gotten the words past my lips when Nico says no. He keeps hold of my wrist but leans back, putting distance between us like I just suggested we burn down an orphanage for fun and he doesn’t want to be associated with me.
“Not happening,” he says.
“He needs to believe your switch flipped.” I wish I could yell so badly, but I keep my voice low. “It’s the outcome he expects, and he doesn’t change his mind. We’d be acting. You’d pretend to kill me. I’d play dead.”
“I’m not putting my hands on you,” he says. “Not even pretending. I won’t put myself there again.”
“This would be different,” I press. He wouldn’t be the only one stepping into his worst nightmare. The Girl Who Played Dead would have to reprise her role.
“It wouldn’t be,” he says. “Not for me.”
I want to point out that we’re running out of time and options and that sometimes the only choice you get is between bad and worse, but his voice has gone thin, and I can tell how painful the idea is for him even to consider. How can I argue with him when he’s saying he doesn’t want to hurt me?
“When the police find my body, they’ll ID me eventually, and then it’ll come out that another killer murdered the Boy NextDoor,” Nico says. “That could be enough to prove to my parents and Nora that I wasn’t evil.”
“Don’t say when,” I say. “I’m not letting you do that for me.”
He scrubs a hand over his hair, then grips the back of his neck. I can feel him wrestling with thoughts in his head I can’t reach.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know where you’re coming from, and it’s a good idea—one I had, too—but I can’t do it. We’ll think of something else.”
I nod, even though I can tell how much he doesn’t believe it. “Okay.”
Nico and I drag each other back to the pole, where the water and blanket are. He moves us so I’m sitting between his legs with my back against his chest, his arms wrapped around me, and the blanket cocooning us both. His body curves around mine.
The shock that was keeping me functional drains away like water through a sieve. The temperature feels like it’s dropping. It gets through the blanket, through Nico’s body heat, until I might as well be one of those masochistic health nuts who plunge in the ocean in the dead of winter.
My vision keeps going spotty at the edges. I try to focus on Nico’s voice when he talks to me, on the steady rhythm of his breathing against my back, on the way he traces patterns on my arm.
“Eden,” Nico says. “Can you open your eyes?”
When did I close my eyes? I force them open, and Nico’s face hovers above me, his eyes wide and scared in a way that should probably alarm me more than it does.
“I’m fine,” I say, automatically.
