He lay his forehead on the dirt and sobbed as he raked his dirty nails against the muddy mound between us.
“Please. Oh, go.” Cole cried into the dirt.
My heart caved into my stomach. It was still my Cole.
I scrambled over to him and pulled him up the rest of the way. Trying my best not to injure him, if that was even possible, I pulled him into my arms. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
He buried his face in my shirt and clung to the hem of my coat. “It was so dark. There was no light. There’s always light.”
“It’s okay. Just breathe.” What a stupid thing to say. He’d been dead. Now he wasn’t. Of course he was breathing.
Wasn’t he?
I felt for a pulse on his wrist.
A hard pound slammed through his veins.
“Where are we? Did Grace do this? Your father won’t believe us. He’ll blame it on her. He’ll make me marry her.” He sobbed more.
He thought we were back in the 1800s.
Sloshy footsteps ran toward us as Cole shuddered in my arms. Oh, crap. What if he shifted? If he thought we were in the 1800s, then he didn’t know anything about his special ability. Damn, damn, damn.
“Cole, it’s me. Your mother?” Shelby dropped to her knees.
Cole turned his head, but kept his cheek buried in my chest. He flinched when she touched him. “You’re not my mother.”
“Bring the syringe,” Mama said.
Trevor neared us with a needle.
“Wait! We don’t have to do this! Give him a chance!” I pulled Cole away from them.
“No, honey. It’s not what you think,” Shelby said. “We’re going to sedate him until he sleeps some of the fog off. I promise. We won’t hurt him.”
Her eyes were soft, trustworthy.
Cole fought against the men, but between Trevor, Daddy and Anna Marie, they finally secured him enough for an injection. In seconds, Cole’s frantic screams turned to sobs then he went limp in my arms.
I spent the night sitting beside my bed wondering how many times he’d done that very same thing. Days, months, years of watching me ail to my final breaths had to have taken a toll on him, because watching him toss and turn in my bed stripped some of the life from me. I’d have done anything to hold him, soothe him, assure him that I was there, that I was never leaving again. The only thing that stopped me was a blood promise.
* * * *
At some point in the middle of the night, I had fallen asleep. When I woke, my bed was empty, the sheets tossed to the side with red dirt marks where Cole’s feet and legs had been and the sickening smell of earth fresh in my nostrils.
I took the stairs by two and found every family member doing their same daily routines as if nothing had ever happened.
As if we hadn’t just unearthed a dead body and brought it back to life.
“Where is Cole?” I said.
Mama walked up to me in one of her smart-looking business suits and a warm smile on her face. “At school, of course. Why do you look so disheveled?”
My jaw had to have touched my chest. “I know you didn’t just ask me that?”
Mama gave me a confused smile. “I don’t understand, dear.”
I ran past her and found Trevor and Shelby sitting casually on the sofa. Trevor had just lifted a cup of coffee to his lips as he read the newspaper, and Shelby was on her phone.
I skidded to a stop beside them. “Where is Cole?”
“When he woke up, he said he needed to get back to school.” Trevor took a sip of coffee and nodded to Shelby. “Look at this listing. That house has been on the market since I left four years ago. I swear I don’t know why they try. It’s a good thing I left when I did. That idiot Homesley is going to run the business deeper and deeper in the hole. They’ll never get that price for it. Hell, they’d be lucky to give it away and pay the closing costs.”
Trevor sat down his coffee as Shelby shook her head. She didn’t even acknowledge my existence.
“You let him leave?” I slapped the paper down.
Trevor laid the paper flat. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Surely after he crawled out of a grave, you couldn’t think he was capable of having enough clarity to drive?”
Shelby looked at me now. “You must have had some weird dreams last night.”
No one in the house seemed aware of what we’d gone through.
To test my own sanity, I checked the family graveyard. There was fresh dirt filling the hole Cole had crawled out of, but his headstone was gone. All in one morning.
Somehow, he’d affected everyone’s memories.
Without another word, I packed my things and headed back to Western Carolina University.
Cole had always been brilliant. And sneaky. And this time he’d pulled off the trick of the century.
Now I had to locate him and do damage control.
* * * *
The drive back to the campus was nerve-wracking.
To get my mind off the chaos I might find at school, I tried to keep the radio blaring a pop love song that gave me hope that no matter what, love was going to prevail and something about Picasso and bungee jumping.
I flipped the radio off.
If Cole had left me again, he couldn’t feel very lovey. In fact, there was no telling how I would find him. Zombies didn’t exist. Apparently. They’d never said anything about vampires.
Which led me to believe they wanted to divert my attention from the worst he could turn out.
I checked the rearview and side mirrors almost expecting him to be either behind or beside me, monitoring my driving technique. There were only unfamiliar cars with faces staring ahead as if they could care less how I drove as long as I didn’t get in their lane or hit them.
* * * *
When I pulled into my parking place, Nicki and Lacee greeted me with open arms, but I had a hard time looking straight at them.
They were cheery and giggly as usual. As if they’d heard nothing of the catastrophe back home. Cole was a genius at everything else so he’d kept his accident a secret somehow. His life after death experience hadn’t botched that gift at all.
With little to say, I followed the chatty girls in with my bags.
“We should have a stay-in night and do relaxing things like sit around with our hair in conditioning wraps, paint each other’s toes, and eat everything in sight.” Shelby held the door open for me so I could put my things away.
I ducked out of my room finally.
“I saw Cole.” Lacee dabbed nail polish remover on a cotton ball and touched up one of her toes. The smell wafted to my nostrils. “He pulled up in a newer Camaro, sauntered into the frat house with his hands in his pockets whistling the whole way. He didn’t even look in this direction.”
“That’s weird. I saw him, and his eyes sort of looked sunk in, and his cheeks were sallow, you know, like he might not have eaten for a few weeks. He looked bad.” Nicki dug at her cuticles.
The girls exchanged glances.
That was weird. One saw him looking right as rain, and the other saw him looking like death. Could he affect their perception of him?
I wanted to run out of the building straight to him, but I needed to learn all I could about his odd behavior before I stormed his territory. If there were any mysterious dead bodies found on the campus since this morning, then I’d need to know about them. “So anything else happen while I was away.”
“I don’t know. He looked awfully different. Did y’all see each other while he was gone?” Nicki wouldn’t drop it.
It looked as though I would have to master the art of lying as much as acting.
“No. He’d already left by the time I got home. His was a short visit.” At the window, the sky was inky black. The trees swayed in the breeze parting to give me a view of Cole’s house. A light was on in his room.
“I’m going to take a walk.” I nodded to the campus be
low.
“In this freezing weather?” Lacee shot me a look.
“It’s about fifty degrees out. I’m sure I won’t turn into an icicle. I just need to clear my head.” I pulled my jacket from the coat rack behind the door.
“I don’t know how you two survive in here. I have swaddle myself like one of those igloo people.” Lacee looked distastefully at her nails.
“Not everyone is as bony as you.” Nicki pinched up her nose.
Nicki was fuller figured than Lacee, but they both had bodies to die for.
As they continued to do girly things, I slipped out the door, out into a world only I knew existed.
I didn’t want to watch my nails dry all night. Cole’s face was the only thing I wanted to see. I’d spent enough time being fake and hiding the fact that my heart pounded like jack hammer in my chest.
There was no news of dead bodies. No sirens outside. No screams from across campus.
It was time to see what Cole Kinsley looked like after he came back from the dead.
Chapter 9
As the sun dipped below the trees of the Smoky Mountains, the northern winter breeze cut through me. I zipped my jacket and tucked my hands deep into the pockets when I rounded the corner of my dorm. Suddenly going straight to Cole’s dorm was scary as hell.
I had no idea what I would walk into.
The chances that he’d have come out of the grave and been the same old Cole were slim to none.
Just as I knocked on the fraternity door, Andrew opened it as if he’d been waiting for my arrival. He stepped to the side. “It’s about time.”
“Were you waiting for me?” I slipped past him and looked around.
“No. I was just on my way to see if you were back yet. What the hell happened back home?” Andrew shut the door and ushered me into the sitting room. Once in he slid the doors shut behind us.
“I came to see Cole. I really don’t have time for the third degree.” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“The guy who left here isn’t the same one who came back. I’ve never seen him like this. He hasn’t left his bed since he got back. There’s this blank look on his face. It’s like he’s not in there.” Andrew took a glass off the bar and added ice. He poured dark liquid from a crystal container. After a sip, he continued. “He keeps saying something about the grave being cold and that he can’t get the cold to go away.”
“That’s weird.” I looked at anything but him.
He finished off the drink and slapped the glass on the table. “Weird doesn’t cover it. I’m going to let you into his room, but be warned. He’s messed up. Bad.”
If he was as weak and vulnerable as Andrew portrayed, then it would make him that much harder to resist. I wanted to touch him, hold him, kiss him, bury all his worries deeper than the grave he’d crawled from.
* * * *
“He’s probably going to kick me out of the house for letting you in.” Andrew turned the key in Cole’s doorknob.
“I owe you big.” I squeezed his shoulder.
You could learn a lot about a guy by looking at his room.
Cole had been obsessive compulsive about everything in his room. The same person couldn’t live in this here. It looked as if it had been ransacked.
Beside the window that aimed right at my dorm, a table was covered in food wrappers and old fast-food cups. A chair was facing the window.
Before he’d gone home, it appeared he’d spent time staring out that window.
The floor of the closet was cluttered with sports equipment, golf clubs, and clothes. His shoes were in the floor outside the closet. He was worse than a girl when it came to them. There had to be at least ten pairs of different name-brand sneakers along with a few smelly socks.
He never let his dirty clothes pile up.
On instinct, I almost started to clean the room but instead sat on the end of the unmade bed on a rumpled black comforter and tried not to inhale too much.
A gentle nudge on my shoulder jarred me. When had I fallen asleep?
“Allie,” a man said from above me. I didn’t want to open my eyes. Someone shoved their foot across the carpet as if to move junk out of the way. The voice came from the other side of the bed now. “Allie.”
I opened my eyes and sat up.
Cole was beside me, but I was scared to look. His voice was soft. Sad. “How did you get in here?”
“Andrew let me in. I was worried. You left me at the house after—” I got up and started for the door still unable to look. “I was scared. Since you’re okay, I’ll go.”
“Wait.” Cole stumbled around the clothes.
My tone was suddenly accusing. I didn’t face him. “We had a lot to talk about before you rushed back here. You needed to wait. We don’t know what might happen over the next few months.”
He approached me but stayed a few feet away. “This is where I’m comfortable. I needed to be where I can control my surroundings. I did just crawl out of my own grave. I have a better chance here than anywhere to find myself. Whatever that means.”
I wrapped my arms around myself and finally met his gaze.
Dark circles sank around Cole’s red-rimmed eyes. “I was in the shower. You know, I just stared into the mirror for what seemed like forever trying to figure out who I am now. The guy I see isn’t the one I remember. For three and a half years, I’ve been in my own little world, trying to forget the past.”
“Me. Trying to forget me.” My voice bounced off the hollowness in my chest.
Cole tilted my chin. Though he looked sickly, his eyes were warm, his gaze the one I remembered from years ago. “What choice did I have? You wanted something more. You wanted a life free of me. I had to give that to you.”
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” I said softly.
“So now you want a dead guy?” Cole offered his wrist. “Go ahead. My heart started back, but over the last few hours it’s slowed to almost a complete halt. When it stops, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
My heart slammed a few unsteady beats then flip-flopped in my belly. “But, but you were supposed to live. The blood promise? What about that?”
“I don’t know. I changed all their memories so that if the spell didn’t take root in us the way it did in them, then they wouldn’t feel guilty. You didn’t know. I didn’t have the chance to help you make the decision.” Cole reached out, but he turned away. He shoved more debris to the side with his foot, walked over to the chair, and gripped the back of it.
“If it had been me dead in that casket would you have done things differently?” I followed him through the path he’d cleared.
He lifted his head and gazed at my dorm. Cole’s voice was low, gravelly. “If we didn’t have the constraints of this blood promise, I would answer that question without words.”
Chill bumps covered my arms. Never had I wanted him to touch me, kiss me, hold me as much as I wanted him to then. “Why did you stop our reincarnation if you still loved me like that?”
“Because I couldn’t live eternity without you. And you would have never known the difference. You forgot us more with every life. This life you finally forgot altogether. It was time.”
“You didn’t know how I felt. You might have heard my thoughts, but you couldn’t hear my feelings. I was a spoiled brat.” I stood behind him, so close I could lean forward and kiss his shoulder.
His back muscles flinched under his shirt. “We probably need to wait to talk about feelings.”
“I want to talk now. You stayed away for four years. You have willpower.” My fingers itched to touch him, but I clenched my hands into fits.
Cole’s head dipped. He exhaled.
“I’m so sorry I treated you the way I did.” I pressed my forehead against the hollow between his shoulder blades.
He shuddered. “You have to stop.”
“Talking or touching you?” I leaned back and grasped his shoulders to turn him to face
me. “I know about the shifting thing. I know you used to have problems during heightened emotion.”
“That’s still very true, but now I have new problems.” Cole’s eyes didn’t just flash green. They glowed. “The reason this room looks like an adolescent gamer lives in it is because just before you got here, I shifted. Not just into an animal. But two animals. I tried to choose cats, but I went into the form of wolves. I had to chase the other down like a mad dog and fight him till the death to get him to succumb. It’s the only way my human form would come back.”
I stepped back from him.
“You should be scared.” The glow in his eyes died to the normal grass-green.
“I’m not. I’m worried for you.”
Cole’s gaze softened. “That’s the first time in decades you’ve sounded like yourself—and at the most inopportune time. I need you to fear me. You have to stay away. Not because of the blood promise, but to keep yourself safe. I don’t know what the other half of me is capable of. I’d lose my mind if something happened to you, whether you love me or not. I know we have a lot to work through, but I need you to stay alive until I can get myself under control.”
“Our moms said I had to wait for your soul to settle inside you. I thought they meant, like, land inside you and stay there. This is crazy.”
“Even they didn’t know the full extent of the effects of the promise laid upon two cursed people. But I understand that you had to do something. I’ll work through this. Then we can talk.” Cole ushered me to his door.
For the moment, he sounded completely coherent and like the old Cole. I didn’t want to leave without him knowing what he was fighting for.
I turned and was inches away from Cole in his doorway. “Before you shove me away again, I need you to know why I gave my blood for your life. Why I couldn’t let you die.”
“If you’re going to say what I think you’re going to say, I would rather be drawn and quartered than hear you finally admit your feelings and not be able to touch you.” Cole backed against the door frame. His chest rose and fell causing those glorious muscles to quiver around his arms and stomach.
Despite the smelly socks, I quaked with hot shivers. We were too close to a bed and too close to each other. What had I been thinking, testing us this way?
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