I forced a laugh and tossed my braids over my shoulder. “I think spending your days with liars and crooks is making you paranoid.”
“Right.” Easton rolled his eyes. “Keep your little secret, then. Just don’t come running to me when this blows up in your face. This isn’t going to end well. Not for that kid anyway. I can feel it.”
“I’ll make sure he’s okay.” I looked away. “Don’t worry about it.”
Easton made a growling sound deep in his throat when his scythe burned at his hip. I cringed away from the smoke that twirled up from the scorching blade. It smelled like death. “Just promise me you’ll stay out of trouble. I don’t need your workload, too.”
I closed my eyes, drowning in guilt. Why couldn’t Balthazar just let me take the boy? He could have been happy right now. At peace. Instead he was sick and afraid and confused every minute of the day and night. I shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have followed orders, knowing nothing good could come of them. I’d never been that weak before. And being around Cash, close enough to memorize the tilt of his lips while he painted, the rhythm of his breathing while he slept, see every fleck of color behind his rich, dark eyes…it wasn’t safe. Something about those eyes…he made me feel like I was unraveling. I hadn’t felt that way in a thousand years. He made me feel things I had no right to feel.
“Anaya!”
“I’ve got it, okay?”
Easton looked me over and nodded once, seeming satisfied. “Good. I’ll catch up with you later.”
I watched a black puddle of screams bubble up through the mist and swallow Easton whole.
Suddenly I was alone in my head again. Cornered with the memories. I ran for the gates to the
Inbetween, needing to get back to Cash for reasons I didn’t really understand. Reasons I didn’t want to understand. Part of me wanted to pummel Balthazar for getting me involved in this. If he hadn’t put this on me, forced me to spend every free moment with him, then I wouldn’t feel so…so…
I gritted my teeth and shook the thought right out of my head. I did not feel anything for this boy. I couldn’t. In fact, I was about to prove it. Once I was clear, I closed my eyes and gasped, allowing the wispy white ground to fall out from under me. Warm midnight wind whipped through me. A golden light bloomed across the black of night as I split the sky. For a few perfect moments I was weightless.
I landed light as a feather on the soft green Bermuda grass outside Cash’s bedroom window, leaving stars smeared across the sky behind me. They were already here. The shadow demons. I could smell them. Death and decay and rot.
You want to be here with him. Lie to yourself all you want, but Balthazar has nothing to do with what you’re feeling inside.
I scowled at the thoughts taunting me and slipped through the brick wall. It was cold and uncomfortably solid for a second, and then I was engulfed in the warm smell of Cash. The clean lemony scent of his shampoo, and the leftover bite of paint. I walked across the room toward the curled-up lump under the covers. Pale moonlight barely illuminated his outline. His chest was rising and falling beneath the navy-blue comforter; steady, like waves pushing up from the bottom of the sea.
The only part of him I could see were a few disorderly black spikes of hair sticking out of the top of the blanket. A hiss sounded from the corner of the room and Cash’s entire body went rigid. I spun around on my heel and jerked the scythe from my holster.
A shadow demon shrank back from me into the dark corner of the room, curling up behind a big oak dresser. I’d expect to see one of them at a reap. The slime of the underworld were always looking for scraps, a soul we’d left behind, but not here. Not near a boy as alive as Cash. It didn’t make sense.
“I suggest you leave.” I waved my blade at it. “I’m not in a very forgiving mood today.”
The black puddle of scum opened its gaping hole of a mouth to bare its bloody throat before slipping through the drywall and out of the room. I sighed and turned back to Cash. He’d pulled the blankets off his face and was staring vacantly at the poster of a half-naked girl on his ceiling. I didn’t think he was seeing her, though. He swallowed and something fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings in my chest as I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“Thanks for coming back,” he whispered into the dark. I could tell it cost him to give me that much.
To him, I was just something else he didn’t understand—or want.
I sank down to my knees next to Cash’s bed and folded my arms over the edge of his mattress. I propped my chin up on my arms and breathed him in. Watched his eyelids get heavy. Studied the way his lips opened just enough to blow a slow breath out between them. From here the moon glinted off the silver ring in his eyebrow. He shifted out of the blankets and his bare shoulder came to a rest against my lips. If I’d gone corporeal in that moment, we would have been touching. My lips on his skin. I hadn’t thought about another person’s taste in a thousand years. Not since Tarik. A heavy, achy feeling tugged at the empty space in my chest and I caught myself chewing on my bottom lip. I had to stop thinking like this. Every thought, every image, every pang of want was a betrayal to Tarik.
I moved away from the bed.
“Please don’t leave,” Cash muttered sleepily. “I just need a little sleep. I can’t sleep when they’re here.”
I hesitated, torn between my duty and what was right. “I won’t leave,” I finally said, knowing he couldn’t hear, but wanting to say it anyway.
He blinked at the ceiling, waiting for just a moment. When he realized I was still there, he turned over on his side.
I laid my palm over the place in my chest where the familiar ache had started to form. It hurt. It hurt in the kind of way that made you crave it. I felt like I had when I was free-falling through a black summer sky. I felt like I had the first time Tarik held my hand. I felt…alive. I glanced down at Cash, at the half frown pulling his lips down. I didn’t know why, but I would have done anything to keep him from hurting. From being afraid.
I sat back on my heels, wrapped my arms around my knees, and stared at the ceiling. Listened to
Cash breathing, trying to understand why I liked the sound of it so much. I may have forgotten what having a home felt like. I may have been stripped of the right to have one. But here in the dark, in this room, with this boy, I’d never felt closer to it.
Chapter 3
Cash
I pushed through the swinging metal doors with my shoulder, and noise exploded around me. A hundred voices fought for space in the cramped fluorescent-lit cafeteria. I pressed my earbuds in a little deeper and cranked the volume up on my iPod a few notches. A girl named Jennifer nudged my arm and winked as she strolled by with her lunch tray. Bottle-blond curls dangled just above her waist, swaying with her hips, as she walked away with a silent invitation to follow. I waited for that familiar part of me to kick in. The part of me that usually would have had me turning around to get one more look at her painted-on skinny jeans. The same part of me that would’ve had her in the back of my
Bronco by Friday. When it didn’t come, I shrugged my bag up over my shoulder and walked on past.
Jennifer was background noise with the rest of it. Nothing meant what it used to. Especially girls. I was starting to think whatever part of me that allowed me to live a normal life had died in that fire.
I spotted Emma and Finn across the room and stopped cold. They looked like two puzzle pieces that fit together. The way they moved around each other, always touching, never allowing more than a breath of air to separate them. I wasn’t ready for this. To face her. To face them. But I couldn’t do this by myself, and he was the only one who could help me.