CHAPTER TWO
Sunlight glittered over the lake.
The water was so still that it looked like glass, but there was nothing still about the rest. Not the bugs, which flitted through the air and created small, ephemeral ripples.
Not the birds appearing sporadically in the sky, swooping against the blue expanse and calling to each other in high, musical sounds.
Not the gentle sway of the boat I sat in.
I leaned back and arched my pole back to cast the line. A moment later, the lure plopped gracelessly into the lake. My brow furrowed. “Damn it,” I muttered.
“Release the reel button as the rod comes to eye level,” a familiar voice said.
I nodded and reeled the line back in. “Like this?” I asked, trying again.
This time, the lure landed farther away. Finn squinted toward it, holding his own fishing pole over the edge. The corners of his solemn mouth tilted upward. “Good. Very good.”
“Thanks.” I smiled back and relaxed against the edge, holding my fishing pole in a loose grip.
After a moment, Finn turned away and gazed out at the lake. I knew I was staring, but I didn’t care. I drank in the sight of him as though I were waking up from a really long, really terrible dream. He looked the same, I thought. No, that wasn’t true—he looked better.
I’d met Finn when he’d been a captive at the Unseelie Court, a creature that had been starved and beaten for years.
Even after we’d been together for a while, after he was safe and fed and warm, I realized now that Finn had never truly recovered.
I’d never gotten to know this healed, complete version of him.
Emotions swelled in my throat, a thick tangle of them, as if I’d swallowed too much at once. Sorrow. Pain. Guilt. To hide it from Finn, I refocused on my lure and watched how the light played on the water. Birdsong rode a breeze that smelled like pine trees.
“Is this real?” I asked finally.
My question was met with silence. I looked over at Finn again, and his expression made me feel a familiar wistful pang.
The soft, thoughtful light in his eyes, the slight purse to his mouth.
He was considering his response in the same quiet, careful way he’d done everything when he was alive.
I guessed there were some things that never changed about a person, no matter how much blood and tears they shed.
“Depends on your definition of real,” Finn said finally. Another bird flew overhead and its shadow passed over him.
I rolled my eyes, smiling, and turned back to our lines. “I don’t remember you being so philosophical before. It’s annoying.”
“I was a wolf most of the time,” Finn reminded me.
“Yeah, well, that never seemed to stop you from expressing your opinion,” I countered.
Finn’s lips curved in the barest hint of a smile, and he opened his mouth to reply, but then my fishing pole surged forward.
I swore and shot to my feet, tightening my hold on it.
“Holy shit! I got one! I got one, Finn!”
“Jerk the line, make sure you’ve got him good,” he urged.
He stood and put his hand on my elbow to balance me as I yanked my fishing pole and a big, glistening fish shot into the air.
A girlish squeal escaped me. Finn laughed while I frantically began to reel it in, and I was laughing, too, nearly losing my grip on the pole again.
Finn rushed to grab it from me, his white teeth shining. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you—”
I jerked awake.
Reality came back in pieces. I was in a motel room.
My skin still stung from the shower I’d taken a few hours ago, after I had scrubbed all the imaginary blood off my skin.
Sighing, I slumped against the headboard and ran my hand down my face.
The old clock on the nightstand revealed it was the Witching Hour.
Maybe that was why I’d woken up. I wondered if Collith was awake, too, but I didn’t hear anything through the thin wall between our rooms.
By the time we’d left that blood-filled house, it was almost two in the morning. The closest Door was several hours away, and I’d felt hollowed out after what we had just seen. Collith suggested stopping at a motel for the night, and I hadn’t argued.
I’d searched for options on my phone while he drove. When I reached the drop-down menu for how many rooms we would need, my finger had hovered over the screen.
After a moment’s hesitation, I chose two.
In the months since my return from Hell, things had been …
paused between me and Collith. I never spoke about what had happened with Oliver, and Collith never asked, but he knew.
He knew about Lucifer, too. Understandable, really, that he’d distanced himself.
Collith wasn’t even staying at the loft anymore, or at Cyrus’s, and there were often weeks we didn’t see each other.
But he texted every day.
It was strange, getting messages from Collith.
Sending them back. We’d never had that kind of relationship before.
Most of our time together had been narrowly escaping life-or-death situations, or arguing about whether I should kill someone.
I’d only seen him flirt on a handful of occasions, and he’d teased me even more rarely.
Lately, Collith had been doing both of those things, and more.
He sent me book recommendations. Passages and poems he thought I’d like.
Pictures of flowers in his garden. It wasn’t constant, but the texts always seemed to arrive just when I was about to slip into the dark corners of my mind.
I wasn’t sure when it had happened, exactly—somewhere along the way, seeing Collith’s name on my screen had become a highlight in my day.
Once in a while, usually late at night, I questioned the change in him.
The shift that had happened in the way he treated me.
It was almost as if he’d made his mind up about something, and now he was …
waiting. And while he waited, he reminded me in consistent, subtle ways that he was there. Supporting me. Loving me.
If I weren’t so fucked up and confused, I might have been tempted to let him.
As I’d held my hand under the shower spray, I’d blearily gone over the victims again.
Laurie’s people still hadn’t been able to find any connections between them, either.
The kills had to be random. Mindless. Oliver was on a bender, his humanity completely gone.
Which meant there was no way to predict who he would hit next.
No way besides the dreams.
They started a few days after Oliver got free, and the dreams were how we’d found two of the four crime scenes.
Monstrous, dark dreams that were worse than any of the nightmares my best friend had once protected me from.
I felt myself tear into people like they were nothing more than paper, their flesh giving way beneath my hands, hot blood spilling over my fingers. Their screams filled my ears.
It wasn’t hard to figure out that I was seeing the killings through Oliver’s eyes. He might’ve had his own body now, but there was still a connection between us. A connection that, every time I thought about it, made my stomach churn.
I’d already asked Savannah if she could use this twisted bond to track Oliver. That would’ve been too easy, though, and magic was a fickle asshole. Savannah didn’t know of any spell that could accomplish what I wanted, and she also didn’t know enough about the strange power connecting us. My power.
The dreams were still useful, since I had been able to use context clues.
Landmarks. House numbers. Once, I’d seen a name on an envelope.
It was a strange feeling, dreading the moment I fell asleep and anxiously waiting for it, too.
Praying that we would be able to find Oliver faster next time, maybe even fast enough to get there before he’d left, and finally end this.
There was just the small matter of figuring out what Oliver’s—
My thoughts were cut short when I heard a tap at the door. I got out of bed and hurried across the room. When I swung it open and saw Collith standing there, I was suddenly too aware that I wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Hi,” I said softly, giving him a questioning look. We’d agreed to leave at seven.
Collith’s hazel eyes were inscrutable. He was fully dressed, as if he hadn’t even tried to sleep, which meant we’d stopped here purely for my sake. “I heard you through the wall and thought I’d update you in person. I just got a call from our mutual friend,” Collith said.
By mutual friend, of course, he meant Laurie. The Seelie King had been keeping his distance, too, since Finn’s funeral. But he had even more reasons than Collith to stay away, and I hadn’t tried to change his mind. Not when all I had to offer him was I don’t know or I can’t right now.
“And?” I said. Apprehension fluttered in my stomach. These days, updates from Laurie weren’t a good thing.
Collith held out his phone. “Recognize this?”
As I took it from him, my fingers briefly brushing his, I stepped back and inclined my head in a silent invitation. Collith stepped past me, and I tried not to breathe in his scent, focusing quickly on the image Laurie had sent.
It was a bird’s-eye view of a corn field, and right in the center, the crops had been cleared to form an earthen circle. And in the center of that, someone had carved a symbol deep into the dirt. When I registered the shape of the symbol, it felt like the air in my lungs froze.
It was the same as the mark on my back.
My gaze shot back to Collith’s, and my voice was sharp. “Did he send anyone to this place? Where was it taken?”
“West Bengal. In the eastern Himalayas,” he answered. “Laurelis sent two of his agents, and the area was abandoned. But they could sense magic had been there—strong magic.”
“It’s a mark Olorel created,” I murmured, my brow lowered in thought. “That it made traveling between dimensions easier. Is he trying to go back to his world?”