Chapter Eighteen Lysander #2
“He holds the career record with seven hundred sixty-two home runs.” There’s a stick on the ground and he leans forward to swipe it up, poking holes in the dirt with the stunted end.
“I don’t really care about baseball. It was Nel’s thing, but there wasn’t a whole lot else to do out in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. ”
When she’s quiet, he continues.
“There was a ghost town about three miles out from the farm. Blackburgh. There’d been an outbreak a few years back, and the watch came through and cleared it out.
No one was left. At night, we’d hop the fence and go through the houses.
We’d find all kinds of shit, most of it useless.
Nel liked baseball cards, so that’s what we took. ”
She’s looking right at him, her temple pressed up against the rusted links, and there’s no light in her eyes at all.
The look on her face is a fist around his guts.
Her wool cap is askew beneath his hood, her nose nipped pink by the cold.
She picks at a run in her stockings, her skirt ruffling in the wind.
“Did you Turn together?” she asks. “You and Nel?”
He doesn’t want to answer that question. He thinks of Nel racing out of the pine thicket behind the farm—tripping over himself with excitement, his chin wet and pupils blown. All these years later, Lysander can still feel the panic in his chest: What the hell did you do?
That memory brings another—the uneasy quiet of Nel’s dormered room, the smell of bile permeating the air as he pushed his fingers down Nel’s throat.
Come on. Come on , Van Haut. Fuck. Fuck!
A rapid-fire knock on the door sent him lurching to his feet.
Nel stayed down, curled in on himself in a small, dark c . He didn’t get up.
On the swing next to him, Shea is still waiting for an answer. It isn’t fair of him, and he knows it—the way he covets everything of hers, and offers nothing in return. But all his secrets are damaged, disfigured by a lifetime in the dark. She won’t like them.
On a whim, he reaches into his pocket and pries out a set of batteries. A half dozen alkaline stars glitter in his palm. All the cosmos he can give her.
“Here,” he says, more vehemently than he meant to.
She peers warily into his hand, like he’s offered her a live snake. “What’s this for?”
“For the feed. Back in the Catskills.”
Her starless eyes flick to his. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. That fist around his guts tightens until it hurts. He’s doing everything right. He’s playing by the rules. Her rules. Her game. And she’s looking at him like he’s struck her.
“Take the batteries, Shea.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re making it feel cheap.”
He searches her face, confusion rattling in his chest. “This is how we’ve always done things. Blood for batteries. I’m giving you this because I owe you payment—”
“Payment,” she echoes, and the look on her face shuts him up immediately.
She launches to her feet and he follows, frustration radiating through him. Even his best intentions come out spoiled, withering before they can blossom into something worthwhile.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Payment,” she says again. She spits it out like poison. “For services rendered?”
He cuts her a look. “Don’t do that.”
“Like I’m a whore ?”
“No.” His patience is strained to breaking. “You know that’s not what— Where are you going?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s storming away, veering off the road and into the cluster of wide red oaks ahead. He falls into a jog after her, pocketing the batteries as he goes.
“Shea, wait.”
Her voice comes from somewhere just ahead. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“Fine. Just stay where I can see you.” He ducks under a low-hanging branch just before it snaps back in his face. “Did you hear me? Shea? You can’t— Shit . Shea!”
She’s gone, swallowed by the wood. With a curse, he tails after her.
The air here is sharp and cold, and the smell of turpentine clings to everything.
The trees thicken, gathering close. He wedges himself sidelong between the boles, doing what he can to scent her in the dark.
Cupping his hands to his mouth, he calls for her again.
His voice catapults uselessly off the trees.
“Fuck!”
He falters to a stop, tuning his ears to the forest’s deadly frequency.
He listens to it breathe—to the primeval pulse of it, same as the pulse through his veins.
Sticky. Slow. In the quiet, he hears the murmur of wind through the trees.
The snap of a branch and the flit of an animal.
The far-off sound of some small thing dying.
There, beneath it, is the hammering of a human heart. One he’s memorized. And she’s afraid.
He takes off running at a clip, shoving through a thicket of needled balsam and bursting into a wide, open clearing. The stars have been dulled by the clouds, blown in from the east. A storm is coming. He can feel it. The moon sits behind a screen of gray, the light sucked out of it.
In the middle of the clearing stands Shea.
“I’m sorry,” he hears her cry. She’s not speaking to him.
She’s looking out into the trees, transfixed by the gaped mouths of the ancient trunks, their limbs humanoid.
Old oaks, the bones of their prey tangled in their branches.
Ancient leshiye, hunting for their next meal.
He wonders what it is Shea hears, calling from the dark. He doesn’t have to wonder for long.
“Ellie, I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’m looking, I swear.”
He steps out in front of her, cutting off her view of the forest. “Shea.”
She stares clean through him, the vision dancing in her head. Her cheeks are wet, her eyes fractured in tears. He pinches her chin between his thumb and forefinger, lifting her face to his.
“Shea,” he says again, firmer than before. “Look at me.”
Her stare pulls to his. Her pupils are blown, her gaze unfocused. Still caught in the forest’s thrall, her expression contorts into one of fear. She moves with surprising quickness, shifting so that Asher’s crossbow sits flat between them, the tip of the stake jabbing neatly into his sternum.
“Get back,” she whispers. “Get away.”
In the quiet of the clearing, he hears her heart give a single loud thump. Hideous , he thinks. He has never coveted anything so badly in his life. Reaching a hand between them, he adjusts the crossbow until the stake sits between his fourth and fifth rib.
“If you’re planning to shoot, you’d better not miss.”
Something in his voice calls her back. She blinks up at him, her eyes clearing. Slowly, recognition crawls into her features. She doesn’t lower the crossbow.
“I saw her,” she whispers. “I saw Ellie in the woods.”
“It wasn’t her. It was a trick of the trees.”
“It looked like her.”
“It wasn’t,” he repeats. “And you know it.”
Each time he draws breath, the stake digs into his chest. Just a little. Just enough to make him shiver. On the other end of the weapon, Shea is his mirror. Her hands shake, and not from the cold. Her knuckles are white against the foregrip.
Quietly, she says, “Egor van Haut said you and I are going to destroy each other.”
It hurts to breathe. “He’s probably right.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
“It terrifies me.”
It’s the most he can give her—a jagged confession. He can hardly tell her the truth—that she’s already destroyed him. His heart feels as though its clawing out of his chest to get to her.
It will, before the end.
“What if you Turned me?” she asks, and he should have seen the question coming. “Would we destroy each other then?”
He doesn’t want to talk about this. Not here. Not now. Not when he can hear the nearby burble of a stream, its running water laced with Rot. Not when he thinks he might have changed his mind.
“Maybe,” he says thinly. “Maybe not.”
“So then Turn me, and let’s find out.”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because.” His voice is gruffer than he’d meant for it to be. “I’m not ready.”
Whatever she sees in his face makes her drop the subject.
It’s a small mercy. She lowers the crossbow and he staggers forward as though he’d been leaning all his weight upon it, crowding her without thought—swallowing up her space until there’s nothing left between them but a shredded breath and a sliver of dark.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” she whispers.
“So is yours.”
He can smell blood somewhere on her, as if she nicked something while stumbling through the forest. The heat of it—metal and salt—brings the hunger frothing to the surface, makes him feel like he’s splitting at the seams. He can’t tell if he wants to sink his teeth into her throat or press his mouth to her pulse—forget her name and drain her dry, or kiss her until he forgets his own.
“Do it,” she says, and he realizes that he’s said it all out loud, muttering his private inner monologue like one of his mother’s recitations. He feels half mad, the last shreds of his composure going up in smoke as she rises onto her toes beneath him and whispers, “Kiss me.”
It isn’t real, the way she’s looking at him, no light in her eyes at all.
It’s his venom in her blood. It’s his teeth at her wrist. The real Shea Parker is pining after a boy named Asher Thorley.
She lives in Little Hill with her mother.
Her cheeks are freckled from the sun. She doesn’t spare a thought for what lives beyond the trees.
“You don’t mean that,” he says.
“How do you know?”
Her breath blooms over his lips, slips between his teeth. He wants to do it. He does. It would be easy to give in. He turns his head instead, screwing his eyes shut as sense prevails.
“Coward,” whispers Shea.
He’ll take it. He’ll take cowardice over this—this awful, synthetic thing between them.
This knowledge that they are doomed to fail.
The snap of pine snags his focus, and he opens his eyes just in time to witness Asher barreling toward them.
For once, Lysander is relieved to see him.
He falls back as Asher catches himself against his knees, doubled over and breathing hard.
“Holy shit. I’ve been looking everywhere for the two of you.”
“Your timing is impeccable as always, Sunshine.” Lysander flashes him a grin he doesn’t mean, ignoring the wary look Asher cuts his way. “I’ll do the noble thing and take the next watch. I could use the air.”
He leaves them there without another word, slinking off into the trees. Overhead, the sky is devoid of stars. Just how he wanted it. He moves beneath them, unmoored, haunted by Van Haut’s final warning: She’s a cataclysm, Oliver. You will not survive her.