Chapter Thirteen Shea
Shea startles awake to silence, a pit in her stomach.
She’d been dreaming of Christmas. Snow in the window and her mother on the couch, humming as she threaded a needle along a cranberry garland.
Her father in his chair, his legs thin beneath a woolen blanket.
No fire in the fireplace. No food in the pantry.
Sound in her ears, grating enough to make her weep.
Bing Crosby on the turntable, his baritone indecipherable.
The room she’s awoken in looks nothing like home.
A faint yellow film clings to everything.
The ceiling is dark with water rings. On the narrow console sits an old television, the screen fractured.
It takes her a single, panicked moment to remember where she is—a roadside motel, the curtains drawn, sunlight falling in at a slant.
The bed is lumpy, the comforter covered in yellow-gold carnations.
Everything smells cold and wet. There’s a stain on the floor that looks like blood.
They’d come upon the motel in the final moments before dawn, pulling into the abandoned lot just as the first bit of sun broke over the trees.
After Asher cased the building and found only raccoons in the lobby, they’d stashed the bikes and headed inside.
Wind-whipped and motion-sick and cold to her bones, she’d fallen asleep before her head hit the pillow.
Awake, she stretches out a cramp in her thigh.
She feels curiously battered, her body fatigued from the ride.
Poppy lies curled on the bed beside her, breathing deeply.
The chair where Asher kept watch, his shotgun across his lap, is empty.
Lys is nowhere to be seen. Sliding out of bed, Shea slips on her hearing aids and pads toward the bathroom, pulling the door shut partway behind her.
The mirror over the sink is hackled, disfiguring her likeness in the glass.
She tests the faucet and finds it dry. Only a single, fat droplet plops into the sink.
She doesn’t notice Lys until she turns to leave. He lounges in the empty bathtub, his knees bent and his head tipped back against the tile. She gives a violent start at the sight of him, her elbow catching on the towel rack.
“Shit!”
“Hi,” he says.
“What are you doing in there?”
He flicks a baseball card between his fingers, considering her with one eye pinched shut. The corner of the card taps against the yellowed fiberglass in a restless rat-tat, rat-tat, rat-tat.
“It’s too bright out there.”
“Oh. Oh. Sorry.” She pushes the door all the way shut. The last of the daylight snuffs out with a click. “Better?”
“Infinitely.”
Another drop of water plops into the sink.
In the near-total dark, she asks, “Can I sit with you?”
Lys is quiet. She hears the rustle of the curtain and the slide of a shoe, his heel stuttering as he shifts to make space. It’s as much of an invite as she’s going to get. Fumbling along the tile, she feels her way to the tub, climbing in across from him and tugging the curtain closed.
By what little light slips in beneath the door, she can just make out the angular lines of his face. Her knees slot into place between his. Her heart stutters against her ribs. She wonders if he can hear it . Rat-tat-tat , goes the card against the tub.
“I used to imagine it was a wolf,” he says. “My soul, I mean.”
The declaration feels immense, though she can’t say why. She scoots back against the tile and wills her eyes to adjust. “Why did you stop?”
“Because make-believe is for children.”
She can’t make out his expression in the dark, but she can feel the hard impact of his stare. Quietly, she says, “I used to be jealous that everyone else could hear the Gravewood except for me.”
There’s a brief pause as he considers her admission. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I know.” She suppresses a smile. “Logically, I knew that it was because I couldn’t hear as well as everyone else.
But when I was younger, it felt like maybe I wasn’t worthy.
Like maybe everyone else could hear the trees whispering to them because they’d done something right.
I used to sit at the edge of the Gravewood and make wishes.
I’d ask the forest to send me a protector. ”
“What did you need protection from?”
“Nothing, really. Nothing that matters anymore, anyway. Kids can be mean, and hurts feel bigger when you’re small.”
“That’s bullshit,” says Lys.
She frowns. “It’s something my mom used to say.”
“Well, your mom is wrong. Sometimes they’re just big hurts, no matter what size you are.”
She peers up at him and finds him focused on the card, turning it over and over like a talisman. He sees her looking and tucks it out of sight, scooting up just enough to slide it into his back pocket.
“You and your mom are close?”
“We are,” she says. “Or, we were.”
She thinks of waking to find Hemlock on her chest, yowling futilely in the dark.
Beside the bed stood her mother. She’d been oddly hunched, jaw slack and eyes dull.
She hadn’t responded when Shea called out to her.
She’d only lunged. It should have rattled Shea more than it did.
Instead, it felt like a natural progression.
The next logical step in her mother’s slow disappearance into herself.
“It was hard for her, after my dad left,” she explains. “She started spending more and more time out by the Gravewood. She used to say she could hear him in the wind.”
“She was lured?”
“Maybe.” It hurts to admit it—that there’s a chance she hadn’t been. “Sometimes I think she would have gone into the woods either way. She and my dad married so young, and I don’t think she ever learned how to be alone.”
“She wasn’t alone,” says Lys. “She had you.”
“I guess.” Shea draws her knees into her chest. “I wasn’t the easiest kid.”
He’s quiet for a long time after that. She can feel him watching her, unapologetic in his focus—not bothering to pretend he’s doing anything else. She focuses on the fraying seam of her sock, plucking the thread until it unravels.
“Why a wolf?” she asks, when the quiet starts to eat at her.
“Maybe I like wolves.”
“Or maybe there was something you needed protection from, too.”
His mouth tips into an almost-smile. “Do I look like I need protection?”
“Not now. Not like this. But maybe before.”
He says nothing. Without the card, he falls to tapping his finger against the fiberglass.
The drumming keeps time with her heartbeat.
He seems on edge. Restless and overstrung.
Had he been that way when he was small? She tries to imagine him before.
It isn’t hard. She’s seen him after a feed—quicksilver stare and an easy smile, no fangs in sight.
She tries to picture him in a school like Hornbeam.
In a tie and sport coat, a stack of books under one arm.
He must have gone to school somewhere. He must have had a home.
He must have had something terrible enough to run from.
“Stop thinking about it,” he says.
“About what?”
“About me.”
“I’m always thinking about you,” she admits, and watches his smile die.
She hadn’t meant to say it like that. She hadn’t meant to say it at all.
She knows better. She knows this feeling in her chest isn’t real.
She knows these thoughts were put there by the venom in her blood.
By this poisonous thing that compels her to him, makes her docile and unafraid.
He knows it, too.
“You can’t help yourself,” he says, his voice acidic.
She’d been thinking the exact same thing, but hearing him say it out loud turns her mortification to hostility.
“I can, too.”
Lys’s brow lifts. “Yeah?”
It’s a push. A small one. She pushes back.
“Yeah.”
He moves before she can react, shifting so she’s pinned beneath him, his mouth at her throat. Her chin kicks up, granting him access. She’s all reflex, lightning crackling in her blood.
“The neck is the most vulnerable part of the body,” he murmurs into her skin. “Every single animal on this earth is born with the instinct to defend the throat, and then look at you. I could sink my teeth into you right now, and you wouldn’t even try to stop me.”
“I would,” she says into the tiled dark.
“Prove it, then. Fight me.”
The ensuing quiet is a held breath. She wedges her hands flat against his chest and feels him brace for the shove. His heart is a jackhammer. It drills into her palm.
“You can’t do it,” he says bitterly. “I’m in your blood.”
He says it like it’s the worst possible thing he can think of.
“I don’t need to prove anything, and neither do you. We both know you won’t hurt me.”
He pulls back just far enough to meet her eyes. “Your trust in me is synthetic.”
“Is it?”
He doesn’t answer. There’s a hint of panic in his expression, like he’s not so sure. Like he wants to believe the opposite is true.
“You didn’t come after me that night on the bridge,” she reminds him. “And I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I saw you, Lys. You were barely in control, and you still didn’t hurt me. Just like you’re not going to hurt me now.”
The panic in his eyes sharpens into revulsion. Leaning in, he licks a brazen stripe along her throat. Her surprise comes out in a gasp.
“Maybe you think about me all the time,” he says, “but I think about this all the time. This spot— right here . I can see your pulse. I can hear your pulse. It’s in my head, even when you’re not in the room. It’s making me fucking crazy.”
“So, bite me.”
“No.”
“Then Turn me.”
He goes still as Perseus, the air shutting up around them like a box.
“Turn me,” she says again, emboldened by his silence. “And then it won’t be like this.”
He shuts his eyes, brow furrowed. Slowly—reverently—he leans in and presses a kiss to the flutter in her throat. So fleeting, she doesn’t even realize what he’s done until it’s over.
And then—in a voice so low she’s not entirely certain she heard it—he says, “Not yet.”