Chapter Twenty Shea
They’re on the road within the hour, sticking to the mountain roads.
The rain doesn’t let up. It gets heavier, bringing with it a wall of fog that turns the mountain pass to soup.
They make camp at dusk, stopping for the night at an old fieldstone church buried in boxwood.
A soaring Gothic bell tower sits like a spindle against the sky, its turrets glazed in sleet.
“This’ll work,” says Asher, folding himself over the wheel in his efforts to peer out the windshield. “I don’t like the idea of spending another night on the road, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in years.”
Even so, they canvass the chapel in pairs, searching from top to bottom for signs of squatters.
When there’s nothing to be found, they congregate in the sanctuary.
Battered by the rain, moonlight falls in through the stained glass in colorful caustics.
They build a fire on the carpeted altar, burning strips of paper in an offering bowl filled with sand.
Once it’s grown to a heat-giving blaze, they gather around it, their backs against the pews, sharing the last of the scones between them.
“You’re a Scorpio,” notes Lys, his arms draped over bent knees. “What a coincidence.”
His tone makes Shea feel defensive, though she can’t say why. “What makes it a coincidence?”
“Nothing.” His eyes glimmer blackly in the firelight. “Just interesting timing.”
Her belly full, Shea closes her eyes and listens to the patter of rain against the windows.
She used to drive herself crazy, wondering if anyone else heard the rain the way she did—if she was missing out on something beautiful, mistaking her own stilted perception for loveliness.
Now, if she holds herself very still, she can almost pretend she’s back home, sitting by the fire with her parents, warm and dry while a storm rages outside. She wouldn’t resent it, not ever again.
“Do you remember your thirteenth birthday?” asks Poppy suddenly. “Your mom had Ellie and me over for cake, but there was that snowstorm and we got trapped at your house.”
“I remember,” says Shea, glad to have something else to talk about. “Thorley had to walk a mile through the blizzard to get Ellie. He was so mad.”
“I didn’t come for Ellie,” says Asher.
The fire pops, flinging embers skyward. The memory is a cloudy dandelion, seedlings knocked loose.
Shea and Poppy had spent that snowy afternoon reenacting scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Camellia directing the entire production with relish.
Shea had been cast as lovesick Hermia and draped in spare bedsheets, a chaplet of dried mistletoe set atop her head.
At Camellia’s instruction, she’d gone to fetch a jar for the love potion.
She’d drawn up short at the sight of Asher in the foyer.
“Your mom let me in,” he’d said. “I think she’s getting me a slice of cake.”
“Oh. That’s good. She made way too much, as usual.” Her face had gone hot. She felt supremely ridiculous, wrapped in sheets, a Christmas garland slipping into her eyes. Down the hall, she could hear Camellia and Poppy giggling. “You can stay, if you want.”
“That’s okay. The snow’s supposed to get pretty bad. My mom wants Ellie home before then.” He pawed at the back of his neck, looking nervous. “I, uh—made you something.”
Her chest warmed. “You did?”
“Yeah, it’s here somewhere, hold on.” He drew a sleek, silver ring from his pocket and dropped it into her outstretched hands. “It’s nothing special—just an old spoon.”
“I love it,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
His cheeks dimpled in a smile. “Happy birthday, Parker.”
Now, she folds her fingers over the ring, feeling it clink softly against her grandmother’s cross. She can feel Lys’s eyes glued to her hand. Next to her, Asher pokes wordlessly at the fire, coaxing it higher.
“I think I’ll try and sleep a little,” says Poppy, covering a yawn. “The three of you were too busy snuggling last night to relieve me at the watch.”
“Poppy,” hisses Shea.
“Well, it’s true.” She stands, gathering Kit in her arms. “Happy birthday, Shea. Next year, you, me, and Ellie will celebrate somewhere a little less damp.”
It comes out empty. A hollow platitude.
Shea’s heart feels as though it’s been nailed to the wall.
She tries for a smile anyway. “It’s a date.”
“Don’t go too far,” calls Asher as Poppy departs.
She hums in response, her footfalls dulled by the carpet. They’re left alone, the fire dying.
“Does she always say exactly what she’s thinking?” asks Lys.
“Always,” say Asher and Shea in unison.
Lys’s answering smile is faint. He tips his head back against the pew, his throat exposed. His skin is veined in dark, swollen tributaries forking along his jaw. Starving, like always. Asher sees it, too.
“You should feed,” he says.
Lys peers at him beneath heavy lids. “Should I?”
“You took a pretty hard hit the other day—”
“When you shot me.”
“—and you lost a lot of blood.”
“Again,” says Lys thinly, “when you shot me .”
Asher tosses down his stick. “Will you give me a break? I’m trying to fix it.”
Lys lifts a brow. “Is that what’s happening?”
“You can’t starve all the way to Florida,” says Asher. “And I don’t know why, but it’s becoming increasingly clear you won’t hunt.”
Lys stares at him, contemplative. “Maybe I’m lazy.”
“Among other things,” Asher mutters, rolling up his sleeve. “Just don’t make me regret this, okay?”
Slowly, Lys’s eyes travel to Shea. She sits cross-legged on the other side of the fire, her skin pebbled, her scars itching. Wishing for all the wrong things.
“He’s right,” she says. “You have to feed. It’s him or me.”
Pick me , some small, twisted part of her begs.
The part that craves. The part that wants him to need her the way she needs him.
She stifles it, but it’s too late. He’s seen it—in her face, perhaps, or else her eyes—the hunger that poisons the well of whatever this is between them.
Something akin to disgust curdles his lip and he turns away from her, craning his neck until it cracks.
“Looks like it’s you, Sunshine,” he says. “Hold out your wrist.”
Asher proffers his forearm, skin bare and unblemished. She watches, breath held, as Lys takes hold of Asher’s arm. His black eyes lift to hers as he sinks his teeth deep, breaking skin. Asher sucks in a single, pained gasp.
“Shit,” he breathes. “That hurts.”
Lys’s grip tightens and he pulls deep, his swallow loud in the cathedral quiet.
Directly in front of him, Asher is his stark converse.
He gathers the dark as it leaves Lys, his chest heaving, his pupils dilating wide enough to engulf his irises entire.
All the while, his focus never strays. He watches Lys, his lids heavy and his jaw slack, wincing when Lys finally pulls free.
Fingers flexing, he brings his wrist close for inspection.
An angry half-moon bite mars his skin. Blood seeps freely from the wound.
He presses a thumb to a puncture, frowning slightly.
“One of the first things they teach us in basic is how to identify a bite,” he says. “Two punctures means it was a clinical feed. Quick and dirty, no connection. It’s the victims with a full impression that we flag. It means they’ve been marked. There’s a bond.”
He lifts his eyes to Lys, who has gone steadily quieter as he spoke.
“You marked me?”
“You shot me,” says Lys.
Asher huffs out a laugh and then winces, shutting his eyes. “God. Everything’s spinning.”
Lys tongues the last of the blood from his lip. “That’ll stop.”
“I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
“That’ll stop, too.”
Asher thumps back against the pew, his cap shading his eyes. Lifting his chin, he peers out at Shea from beneath the brim, his skin sheened in sweat and his eyes glazed gold. She wonders if this is what she looks like to Lys—dazed and unfocused, a fever sweating out of her.
Untended, the fire burns low. It’s a long time before anyone speaks.
“You looked like a goddess,” says Asher.
Shea stills. “What?”
“On your birthday—the year I gave you that ring. I’d just come in from the snow, and you were standing right there, dressed in white. You had these green leaves in your hair.”
“Mistletoe.” Her mouth feels like cotton. “It was mistletoe.”
“I know. I remember, because I panicked. I kept thinking, You’re supposed to kiss a girl if you see her standing under mistletoe. ”
“Oh.” Her heart is racing. Dumbly, because she can think of nothing clever to say, she adds, “I was Hermia.”
Asher’s brows lift. “Hmm?”
“From Midsummer Night’s Dream ,” says Lys. He’s watching them too astutely, his eyes a pale, clouded blue. “It’s a play, by Shakespeare. William Shakespeare.”
“I know who Shakespeare is,” says Asher, defensive.
“I’m only trying to help.” There’s a beat of quiet—as painful as any Shea has ever endured—and then Lys adds, “Hermia was in love with Lysander, incidentally.”
Of all the things he could have said, this feels like the worst. Shea has never wanted so badly to curl in on herself and disappear. It worsens tenfold when Asher peers thoughtfully across the fire and asks, “Are you?”
Her heart misses several beats at once. “Am I what?”
“In love with him?”
The dark of the cathedral shuts up around her. She can feel Lys’s eyes boring a hole in the side of her face. She doesn’t look at him. She can’t.
“It’s okay if you are,” says Asher. “I’ve decided it makes sense to me.”
Her stomach tightens. “What does?”
“This.”
The word throbs horribly between them, both vague enough to be meaningless and succinct enough to mean everything.
“You don’t mean that,” says Shea. “It’s the bite.”
“You think so? Because I’m not so sure. It all comes back to you. It’s always been you. You’re the reason I became a ranger. You’re the reason I came home. It’s like—it’s like you’re the center of my universe. No matter how far out I go, I keep looping back around to you.”
Her heart squeezes painfully. Next to her, Lys looks wary. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
Asher’s gaze lifts to Lys. “By what?”
“That whole tangent.” He drops his voice from a tenor to a baritone. “?‘You’re the reason I came home.’ I thought you came home to find your sister.”
“Leave him alone,” says Shea. “It’s just the venom talking.”
“Are we sure?”
“ Yes. Back off. He’ll wish he hadn’t said all of that in the morning.”
“Is that what happens to you?” Lys’s eyes slide to hers. “You regret everything in the morning?”
Her cheeks heat. “Sometimes.”
“But you come back anyway.” He seems so like a boy—all Oliver, warm and open and unguarded—that it hurts to look at him. It’s harder to excuse his cruelty this way, when there’s no trace of the forest in him. “Over and over, you come back. Why?”
She hears what he isn’t saying—what he isn’t brave enough to ask.
Is it real? Or is it the venom in her blood?
“I don’t know,” she whispers.
“I don’t know, either,” says Lys. “And it’s making me sick.”
Outside, the rain slows. Only a few red embers remain in the bowl. They’re pitched in near-total dark. Exhausted, Shea climbs over the altar and collapses against the pew alongside Asher, letting her head drop against his shoulder. He sighs, half asleep, and rests his cheek atop her head.
“I feel horrible already,” he mutters.
“You’ll feel worse in the morning.”
“Can’t wait.”
A few minutes pass, and then Lys drops down on her right. His knee bumps up against hers. He doesn’t move it away. This , said Asher. This , she thinks. They watch the last of the embers cool to black. Slowly, Asher’s breathing deepens.
“I’ll keep watch,” says Lys. “You should get some rest.”
She does. For once, her sleep is dreamless. The rain sounds like static.
She doesn’t yearn for home.