The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I managed to shake my head. The blood was a network of streams now, a delta of red down my calf and into my sock.

  “Do you want help upstairs?”

  I worked my jaw, trying to ease the tension. “Yeah.” That was the hardest part. And I knew I could do a little more and try to make up for being an asshole. “Yeah, why don’t you come with me? We can, you know. A shower. It’s a tight fit, but we’ve made it work before, and—and it’d be fun.”

  “Yeah. Fun.”

  I slid my hand along his arm, hooked his fingers, and tugged.

  Austin pulled away. “You go on ahead. Unless you need help up the stairs.”

  “You don’t want to . . .”

  “I’m just going to stick around until Sara gets back.”

  “I didn’t mean it. Will you let me take it back?”

  He dropped my hand. “Forget it. It’s fine. Vie, would you tell me if something was wrong? With—I don’t know. With you. With us.”

  “I should shower.” The words came out sharper and colder than that fucking miserable day.

  And nothing from Austin. Just that sensation of ice prickling my chest, sliding through skin and muscle all the way to the heart.

  I limped to the stairs and dragged my sorry ass up, step by step. About three steps up, I stopped and looked back. Austin had stretched out on the sofa, heel propped on toes, hands behind his head as he stared at the ceiling.

  Other people say they have regrets. I just had a black hole at the back of my head. It was bigger now. It wasn’t just a smudge on the glass. It was a black hole. Everything had been great, everything had been perfect, and that black hole had been there the whole time, eating up light and life and energy, until this. Until I fucked up everything again.

  I made it up the stairs. Someone had managed to cram a stall under the eave of the house, so the shower head hit me at the chest. Still, the water was hot, and the pressure was good, and I scrubbed off blood from my thigh and knee and calf. The towel came away pink when I dried my leg, but the scratches looked a lot better. I tossed the towel in the hamper and limped, naked, into my room.

  Emmett Bradley, dark-haired and slender and raising every hair on my body like he was a lightning storm, was sitting cross-legged on the bed.

  NOTHING. NO RAISED EYEBROW. No smirk. No heavy-handed attempt to ravish me. Not so much as a leer.

  Months. It had been months since I had been this close to Emmett, and my body still reacted to him like somebody flipped a switch and sent electricity into me. His hair was still in short, messy spikes; his tan had faded over the winter, but he looked almost better this way, the contrast between dark hair and dark eyes and the pallor of his skin. He was so beautiful he could have started a war, or ten wars, or a hundred. The scar on his neck, though, that was new. It was still shiny, and it hooked like a J toward his collarbone. He still hadn’t said anything.

  “It’s a bad time, Emmett.”

  He nodded. His eyes were all over me. My face, my chest, my arms, my crotch. I grabbed at a drawer, yanked out boxers, and stepped into them. They didn’t hide anything. Hell, they just made it worse. And those eyes. Worse than touching. If he’d touched me, I could have slugged him, I could have knocked him down the stairs. But those eyes, all over me, and my skin prickling, my breath sizzling. I snagged a pair of clean running shorts, jumped into them, and yelped as they scraped along my scratched leg.

  Better, I thought, checking myself. But not by a whole lot.

  “It’s a bad time. What happened? You disappear for a few months and now you’re deaf?”

  He slid to the edge of the bed.

  “Go.” I pointed to the window he had used—the window he had used once before to sneak in and catch me like this. At least that time I had a towel. “Get the hell out. If you want to talk, you can come to the door and knock like everyone else.”

  He stepped around me, and his hand fell on the doorknob.

  “Don’t go out there. Austin’s here, and he’s pissed, and if he knows you were up here like this—”

  “Like what?”

  The old Emmett would have grinned. He would have smirked. It would have been like running the wheel on a lighter, sparking all over the place.

  “Like this, dumbfuck. Like you eye-fucking me and me naked.”

  “You’re not naked. And I’m not . . .” He paused and shook his head. He turned the knob.

  “I’m serious. Don’t.”

  “Don’t worry; your watchdog won’t know I’m here.”

  With that, he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.

  Downstairs, the sofa springs pinged as Austin shifted. Footsteps padded across the floor. Emmett didn’t hurry; he sauntered toward the bathroom, a full-on, goddamn saunter like he was walking down a runway and wanted everyone to get an eyeful. As Emmett passed through the bathroom door, Austin poked his head around the stairs.

  “You don’t have to babysit me,” I called down to him. It just popped out of my mouth, and I wanted it back as soon as it did.

  Probably thirty seconds passed and Austin stared up at me. “I’m going downstairs. I’ll leave the door open; if you need anything, just shout.”

  “If you want to work out, you can go work out.”

  Another thirty seconds. He looked tired. Beat. Worn the hell out. “Just shout.”

  No sooner had Austin thumped toward the basement than Emmett emerged from the bathroom, still moving in that goddamn saunter like a cat swishing his tail. In his arms, he held an orange tackle box.

  “Put that back.”

  He bumped up against me, forcing me into the bedroom, hooking the door with the toe of his sneaker, his chest against my chest. I could feel him. The lean heat of him. The slight dampness of the cotton. The stiff nubs of his nipples. His breath on my neck.

  A few months ago, touch like that would have sent my abilities into overload. I was psychic—I didn’t know if that was the right word, but it came close enough to describing my abilities. I could read people: their emotions, their thoughts, their memories. And I could send my own thoughts. I could overload them with guilt or pain or rage. I could soothe them. For most of my life, I couldn’t control it, and touch would send it into hyperdrive. Now, thank God, I had some modicum of control, and I didn’t get swept into Emmett’s mind.

  The last time I had been this close to Emmett, he had been in a hospital bed, bandages swathing his neck, and I had been lying next to him, holding him as he wept. I had watched him stab Makayla Price. And then I put him to sleep. And he hadn’t called. In four months, he hadn’t picked up the phone. He hadn’t visited. He hadn’t stopped by Bighorn Burger. He hadn’t talked to me at school. He hadn’t so much as looked me in the eyes. As far as I knew, Emmett hadn’t even known I was still alive. And I knew—I knew—that Emmett knew exactly how much that hurt me.

  And now he was here. His goddamn nipples poking through wet cotton. His goddamn nipples poking into my chest as he barreled me toward the bed. Here. He’d come here, right into my room, caught me naked, put on that face like he didn’t know me from a guy on the street, watched me like he was taking me apart for his own private porno, talked about Austin, called him my watchdog. Emmett kept coming, the edges of the tacklebox biting into my hip when he bumped me, his face smooth as slate.

  I pushed back.

  He shoved me toward the bed. Nothing on his face.

  I slapped him. And I put my shoulder into it. His head cracked to the side, and his lip split against the heel of my hand, and the first drops of blood were so hot against my palm that they could have been embers.

  He staggered a little. The tacklebox fell, and the lid flipped open. Gauze, medical tape, a pair of silver snippers, Hello Kitty Band-Aids, and a foil-wrapped condom that was probably older than I was bounced across the floorboards. Emmett shook his head and straightened up.

  I’d gone to a funhouse with Gage once, back in Oklahoma. And one of the rooms at
the back was a total blackout. You walked in, and one of the workers slammed it shut, and boom. Dark. And then the floor dropped on a mechanical lift. Not far. Maybe an inch. Maybe two, tops. But for that fraction of a second, there was no light, no space, no up, no down.

  Emmett’s dark eyes met mine, and that was what it was like: no up. No down. I wasn’t even falling, not yet.

  From deep below us, metal clanked. Austin. Austin was down there, lifting those damn weights that he’d installed in the basement. I could shout. I could shout loud enough that he’d hear me because he’d promised to come running if I shouted, he’d promised he’d leave the door open so he could hear me.

  Emmett ran the back of his index finger under his lip, collecting beads of blood.

  If I shouted now, Austin could be here in forty seconds. Maybe thirty.

  Emmett wiped the blood on his shirt, right on the Dolce and Gabbana emblem.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  Dropping into a squat, Emmett ripped off a length of gauze and wadded it against his lip. Then he stood again, eye to eye with me. My bare chest prickled.

  “You knew. You knew, Emmett. You goddamn fucking knew I was worried about you.”

  Crimson wicked along the gauze, diffusing as it went, darkening individual threads at the edge of the fabric.

  “I wanted to know you were ok. I needed to know. And you—you wouldn’t even look at me. And now you’re here? You just show up, you’re just in my room one night, sitting on my bed, and you goddamn knew I was in the shower. You could hear me. And you’re such a fucking little perv that you stayed right there and waited for me. And I needed to know, Emmett. God damn it. I needed that much from you.”

  Peeling off the gauze, Emmett gave a shadowy little smile. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was the closest he’d come to looking human since I found him in my room. “You don’t always get what you want, tweaker.”

  Something about his look, something about my standing shirtless, about the boner that hadn’t completely gone away, about that ancient derelict condom near my foot, made the goosebumps worse. My skin was so tight I felt like it might split.

  “Are you going to tell him I’m here?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On why you’re here.”

  And then Emmett did smirk, and it was scorching. He dropped to his knees, his mouth level with my bulge, and his fingers hooked inside the elastic band of my boxers.

  “Are you going to tell him now?”

  “Christ, Emmett, what are you—” I grappled with him, prying at his fingers, but all I was doing was helping him inch the elastic lower, exposing pale flesh and, then, an oblong of blond fuzz. “I’m not—we’re not fucking doing this, not like this—”

  Laughing, he pushed, and I stumbled backward. The bed hit me at the knees, and my legs folded and I sat hard on the mattress.

  “Relax, tweaker. I told you before: your virtue is safe with me. I just needed to get a closer look at that leg.”

  I tried to draw away, but he caught my ankle and planted my foot on the ground. Scooting closer, he swept the tacklebox toward the bed. He picked up the hundred-year-old condom, turned it once like a card shark, and flipped it. The damn thing landed right there, right at the hot spot at the center of my lap. Right goddamn there, like he’d been playing the ring toss. Emmett just grinned and started winding gauze around my leg.

  “I can do that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Austin can help me.”

  “Yeah, it sounded like he’d be happy to help.”

  His head, at the level of my knees, was distracting me, and I kept fighting the urge to run my fingers through his hair. “You, uh. You heard that?”

  Frank, brown eyes came up at me.

  “Oh.”

  “There might be a few people who didn’t hear it.”

  “All right.”

  “Back east.”

  “I get it.”

  “Across the Atlantic.”

  “You’re such a prick sometimes. And you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.”

  He just gave another of those shrugs. With surprising skill, he taped the gauze in place. Then he dropped back. He looked good there, between my knees, that perfect face fixed attentively on me. He looked really good. The heather-gray shirt had slipped down, exposing the smooth flatness of his chest, and his pulse beat in his neck. A very fast pulse, I realized. I thought maybe if I flicked that condom in his lap, it might be a little like ring toss again.

  This time, I couldn’t stop myself. I touched his hair. Just the side of his head, just the tips of my fingers, just a short line above his ear, and then I managed to pull back. Because I was dating Austin. Because I had a boyfriend. And because Emmett had made it perfectly, painfully, one-hundred-percent clear that I was not dating material—not for him, anyway.

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “A prick? Yeah. Most of the time.”

  “No. Are you ok?”

  His face shuttered. He retreated to the rocking chair Sara had insisted on putting in my room, and his clasped hands hung between his knees.

  “Emmett, I need this. I don’t ask you for shit, but I’m asking for this. Give me this.”

  “No.”

  The word was a quiet, emotionless slap, and now I knew how Emmett must have felt when I hit him. It practically knocked my head off.

  “What do you mean—”

  “What do you think I mean, tweaker? I mean no. We’re not going to talk about that. About any of it.”

  “Not going to talk about what?”

  “Don’t play stupid. You’re not stupid. You’re big and you like to act like you’re all muscles, but you’re not stupid.”

  “No, I want you to tell me. What aren’t we going to talk about?”

  He wiped at his face. When his hands swung between his knees again, he was blank again. “You know they’re coming for you.”

  “You just said we’re not going to talk about—”

  “And you know that whatever they want from you, whatever they think you can do for them, that’s not going to be the end of it. You know they’re all in on this. Life or death. Your life. Your death.”

  I rolled my shoulders. What he was saying was true. It was scary true. It was the root of the fear that sent me out into the freezing April rain to run. To try to run far enough and fast enough to get away from that fear. And I didn’t want it here with me, with Emmett, with Austin, with me. So I pushed it away. I wanted to be here, only here, in this warm room with the rag rug between my toes and the rain spitting on the window.

  My wet hair brushed my shoulders, the tips chilly, carrying a whiff of Dove shampoo. That didn’t seem fair. I didn’t want to smell Dove shampoo and wet hair. I wanted to smell Emmett. I wanted to smell that hot, citrus cologne he wore. If he were next to me again, on the floor between my knees, his hand on my ankle, if I bent forward, I could pull in a deep breath of him. Pure Emmett.

  The condom in its foil wrapper jostled and slid right off the front of my shorts.

  “Try to focus, tweaker.” But he was smiling again. “I’m talking about you getting killed. And I’m not going to allow that.”

  “You don’t get to come in here, play doctor, poke and tickle, whatever the hell you were doing, and then shut me out.”

  Emmett shook his head slowly. “You still don’t understand, tweaker. I get to do whatever I want. Whenever I want. And you’ll let me. Now sit on the floor.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Come on. Scoot your ass.”

  “I’ll let you? You think I’m that pathetic? Yeah, Emmett. Yeah. One time, one lousy time I let you see a part of me that cares about you. But that’s over.” That was a lie; my heartbeat, my thick tongue, those gave it away. And Emmett knew it was a lie. Once, on accident, I had let Emmett see how much I loved him. And he had run. Shoeless. Practically naked. Into a Denve
r winter. And that, more than anything else, had made it pretty clear how he felt about me. Somehow, I managed to keep talking. “If you think I’m some head-over-heels sap who’s going to let you walk all over him, if you think—”

  “I think,” he said quietly, “that you should keep yelling if you want your watchdog to come up and sniff around.”

  From the basement came another clank, heavier, of weights hitting concrete, and then the creak of steps.

  “Call him that again,” I said evenly, levelly, perfectly, sanely, reasonably. Total control. “And I’ll do more than bust your lip. I’ll break your jaw. I’ll break it in so many pieces you’ll be slurping soup until graduation.”

  That shadow-smile darkened Emmett’s face.

  “Vie,” Austin called from the living room, his voice coming nearer. “What’s going on?”

  “Tell him I’m here,” Emmett said. “I want to see his face. I want to know what he thinks, you naked, water dripping down those big pecs, all cozied up with me?”

  “Stay the fuck quiet,” I hissed at Emmett, moving to the landing and drawing the door closed behind me.

  Austin took the stairs two at a time, at a jog, his face flushed and sweaty. All of him, in fact, was flushed and sweaty. And all of him was very, very visible. He’d changed clothes, and now he wore a skimpy pair of workout shorts, and they did nothing to hide one of my favorite parts of Austin. That was all: just those shorts. They were so damn distracting I probably would have been able to focus better if he’d been naked.

  Maybe it was Emmett in my room, maybe it was having him so close to me again after all these weeks, maybe it was the painfulness of the arousal I felt for both of them, Austin and Emmett, maybe it was the fight with Austin. It might have been a dozen things. It might have just been that I needed a lay because I was a teenager and my hormones were pumping out sex 24/7. But I saw Austin, really saw him, and how he’d changed over the last few months.

  He hadn’t just cut his hair. He hadn’t just lost baby fat or bulked up his arms a little. He was ripped. He was shredded. He was—he was a fucking Hulk. Not as tall as Emmett, not as tall as I was, but more muscled than either of us. With Emmett and his slender frame, that wasn’t much. With me, though—it had been a long time since I’d met a guy more built than I was. His arms. God damn. How had I not noticed how big his arms had gotten?