Chapter Fourteen Shea #2
The ensuing silence thickens with the dark, deepening to a gulf as the stars blink awake. A screech owl trills, emerging from a nearby roost to hunt. Asher unzips his jacket and Shea realizes he means to go through with it—to offer himself up as her proxy. Her stomach sinks to the dirt.
“Asher—”
“It’s fine,” says Asher, cuffing the sleeves of his flannel. If Lys is surprised, he doesn’t show it. “Go ahead. I meant what I said.”
“You think you’re stronger than her?” goads Lys. “You think you wouldn’t start to crave it, after a while?”
Asher’s throat bobs in a swallow. “Better me than her.”
Lys’s smile is slow. It doesn’t touch his eyes. “What a fucking hero.”
There’s a commotion behind them—the sound of running feet.
They turn in time to see Poppy skid into the open front door.
She looks out of breath, Kit cradled in her arms. “I was up in the attic looking for Kit. He likes to wedge himself into the eaves when he naps—any small space, really, I think it’s the burrowing instinct—”
“Get there faster,” says Lys.
“I saw a light out the window.” It comes out all as one word. She expunges a heavy breath and adds, “I think there’s someone in the woods.”
Asher tugs his sleeve back into place. “Rangers.”
Far off in the distance, a gun fires. A dozen starlings take, screaming, to the sky.
“They’re hunting something,” says Asher. He and Lys share a meaningful glance.
“We should have left five minutes ago,” says Lys. “Let’s move. And keep quiet.”
···
They next stop just before the dawn, the shadows of the Catskill High Peaks emerging like giants against the lightening sky.
Lys leads them off the highway and into the trees, down a little dirt road ravaged by rainwater.
At the end of the road is a battered old A-frame wedged deep in a grove of towering hemlock.
It’s loud, the murmuring forest stifled by the roar of a nearby waterfall.
“How much farther?” asks Asher after he’s conducted a sweep of the cabin.
“Another night of riding.” Lys pokes through the kitchen cabinets, taking out the coffee mugs one by one for inspection. “Maybe less, if we make good time.”
Asher watches him, hanging up his jacket by the door. “Tell me more about this guy in Pennsylvania.”
“He’s human,” says Lys, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Do you trust him?”
“You asked me that already.” Lys lets the cabinet fall shut with a slam.
“I’m asking you again.”
There’s a beat before Lys answers. “Keeling is after me. The watch is after you. We need someone neutral.”
“And is he?” Asher asks. “Neutral?”
The twitch in Lysander’s eye is nearly imperceptible. “Let’s just say, the only thing he cares about is himself.”
···
The day passes much the same as the previous one.
There’s a woodstove in the living room and Asher builds a fire, stoking it until it floods the cabin with heat.
Shea lies curled on the couch, listening to the thundering falls and watching the sun drag across the floor in rectangles of gold.
Poppy knits. Asher whittles. Lys stays shut away in the cabin’s windowless loft.
A nighttime creature, burrowed in the eaves with Kit.
She wakes when he stirs. With her hearing aids off, it’s more of a feeling than anything.
The groan of a door. The creak of a floorboard.
She sits up just in time to see him descending the ladder staircase, a skeleton finger held to his lips.
Poppy is asleep beside her, the knotted scarf trailing onto the floor.
Asher dozes by the fire, a stake in hand.
Neither of them wakes. Not when Lys slips outside.
Not when she follows.
Out in the yard, the sun has just set. Remnants of it blister, liquid gold, between the distant trees.
The air here isn’t as cold as up north, but there’s a chill regardless.
She pinches her flannel closed as she joins Lys at the railing.
A dark-eyed junco clings to a nearby balsam sprig and bobs in the wind, assessing them with suspicion.
Lys waits as Shea fits her hearing aids in and turns them on.
There’s a telling beep. A rush of sound, indistinguishable at first, until she remembers the waterfall.
Heralded by the deafening cataract, they watch the bird.
Neither of them mentions the fight in the bathroom, or the way he’d looked half mad as he whispered, I feel it, too.
“My mom calls them snowbirds,” he says, breaching the quiet. As if in answer, the white-bellied bird lets out a single, sharp kew . Shea glances up at him, surprised.
“Your mom ?”
“Did you think I materialized out of thin air?”
“I don’t know, actually. Cyrus says you were spat out of hell.”
His face crinkles in a smile. She’s amused him.
Another kew sounds, farther than the first, and the songbird takes flight.
They watch as it fades to nothing against the blackening sky.
The wind picks up, tugging strands of her hair loose from its plaits.
Their hands sit flat on the railing between them, their pinkies close enough to touch.
“She used to tell me that whenever I saw a snowbird, I should remember to be brave,” he says. “Everything has an end. Winter. Night. Pain. None of it’s permanent, and the snowbird knows.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Waiting for an end?”
He looks slighted by the question. “Waiting is a coward’s game.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I stopped listening to my mother’s advice a long time ago. If you want to be done with something, you end it yourself.”
She tries to picture him as a little boy, looking for the junco. Remembering to be brave. Waiting for spring to bloom, for the sun to rise. For a wolf, sharp and snarling. She wonders if he only ran because he realized no help was coming.
She wishes he would hold her hand.
He doesn’t, of course. He stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and pivots to face her, propping an elbow atop the railing.
He is deceptively casual this way, his ankles crossed and his lean lazy, his hair spilling into his eyes.
His nonchalance is a ruse. His features are gaunt, his skin gray.
Dark vessels pop into the wide column of his throat.
“Don’t do it,” he says.
“Do what?”
“You’re thinking about offering up a vein. Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have the discipline to turn you down.”
“So then, don’t turn me down.”
He catches her forearm, flattening her wrist between them. Carefully— carefully —he drags the pad of his thumb along the bowed gash of his bite. Teeth, sunk deep. Until the aching stops.
“Thorley won’t like it.”
“He’s not the boss. And you’re starving.”
“And you want it.” He drops the accusation between them like a gauntlet—like he’s daring her to deny it.
“I wouldn’t have followed you out here if I didn’t want it, Lys.”
His face is a barrage of emotions, relief warring with disappointment. He tips his forehead to hers, his eyes drifting shut. He exhales. She inhales, the knot between them slack enough to draw breath. In the quiet, she can almost pretend he’s just a boy—that this is just a crush.
When he bites down, she doesn’t make a sound. And when it’s done, she tucks her hand into her sleeve and cleans the blood from his chin. The gesture is absurdly intimate. Both of them freeze, caught, the wind battering them from all sides.
“Sometimes you make me nervous,” he says quietly.
It’s so unexpectedly earnest, it startles a laugh clear out of her.
He frowns. “Don’t laugh.”
She can’t help it. Everything feels funny.
She laughs again, harder this time. He’s so close she can taste the blood at his lips, metal and heat.
His eyes are a pale, angelite blue. He turns his head just a fraction, his nose brushing along the length of hers.
Electricity snakes up her spine, and suddenly she’s not laughing anymore.
“Lys—”
“Don’t say it.” His breath blooms across her jaw. “Don’t ask me to Turn you.”
“If not now, then when?”
He’s too quiet. She pulls back to get a better look at him, but he halts her in her tracks, grabbing a fistful of her flannel. His eyes are on the house, listening to something Shea can’t hear. His throat cords in a swallow.
“Our chaperone is awake.”
Just as he says it, the screen door swings wide. Asher is there, his cap pulled low and his eyes still heavy with sleep. He takes quick stock of the tableau before him—Lys’s full cheeks and bright eyes, blood pooling in Shea’s open palm.
She expects him to yell. To criticize. To get angry .
He doesn’t.
“Let’s get back on the road,” he says flatly. “We’ve got a long night of riding ahead.”