He curses under his breath, a sound of wonder, cupping her face and kissing her so hard, so hungrily, and then he’s walking her backward, around, helping her down onto the air mattress, shoving aside the pile of blankets. Dust clouds up around them, leaves crumble beneath, but the setting doesn’t matter. His skin, her skin, it slides and presses, hot and smooth. Not too much, not too little. Perfect.
They kiss, pulling away the last remnants of clothing, and then he’s moving into her, moving over her and talking, and she doesn’t care that it’s going to end, because this feeling—this feeling—is what they’ve been missing. The connection and touch, the communication that words can never reach. Colin whispers his love into her neck as he shakes above her.
She clutches him, pressing her face against his skin and listening to the rustle of the blankets near her head as he releases them from his fists. Lucy doesn’t want to move from this spot, maybe ever.
“Are you okay?” he asks quietly, his open mouth kissing a path across her throat to her ear. When she nods, he whispers, “Not sure how I feel that our first time was in a dirty shed.”
She laughs. “I don’t care about the setting.”
He pulls back and looks at her, playfully bereft but obviously giddy, and then he blinks, languid, just for her. “I don’t either.”
The moment stretches. Colin hovers over her, kissing, eyes open, with an intensity that makes every muscle in her body tighten, makes her chest ache with how much he consumes her.
He doesn’t need to say he loves her, but he does.
Then he’s pulled from her body, flying backward again as if a band pulls at his chest, his mouth wide in an anguished cry in the shape of her name. He passes through the dancing bands of light and dust, he filters easily through the cracked walls and damp wood planks, and then Colin is gone.
• • •
Hours. It feels like it takes hours to get dressed and tear back down the trail, to where Jay pulled him out early, to where Colin will be awake. Lucy trips over roots and sticks in the snowy mud of the shore. She doesn’t know how to manage these new, strangely heavy limbs.
And then she’s there, falling on top of his blue-gray body and apologizing and kissing his unconscious face. “What happened? Why did you bring him back early?”
“I didn’t, Lucy. I waited exactly an hour.” Jay pushes her away, forcing air into Colin’s lungs and smacking his chest. “Wake the fuck up, C.”
Lucy’s hands curl into fists, a wave of anger flashing along her skin, and she shoves Jay’s arm away, causing him to cry out, stare at her for a beat in horror.
“What happened to you?” Jay asks, voice shaking. He squeezes his eyes shut and looks at her again before he reaches for another hand warmer to shove into the mittens covering Colin’s fingers. “What happened to your face?”
“My face?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. I must have . . .”
Lucy ignores Jay’s rambling and bends over Colin, hugging him through the heavy layer of blankets. “I’m here. You’re going to be okay. I’m here.”
Chapter 28 • HIM
IT’S SO STRANGE TO BE in this place again, caught between life and life unraveling. Colin feels the faint burn of ice and snow against his skin, but he’s not cold. Flashes of light pulse beyond his closed lids, and the echo of his name rings through the air in panicked voices, but he can’t gather the strength to open his eyes. Despite the noise in his head, his chest is strangely silent. It’s taking too long, and the instinct to return grows fainter and fainter.
He feels a mild tickle of fear, but it’s gone quickly, the urge to slip back into darkness wrapping around him like a blanket. In a thick, creeping realization, Colin understands that his inclination to curl back into the lake is because it’s Lucy’s lake. He’s less surprised to feel positive that Lucy is the ghost at the lake than he is to feel in his frigid bones that she’s been waiting for him. For so long there hasn’t been anything for him here, and there is everything for him in the lake. It would be so easy to go back in and walk down the trail to Lucy.
That’s all he’s ever had to do.
Chapter 29 • HER
HIS EYES OPEN AT ONCE. Not the calm, fluttering awakening she expected, but one moment he’s blue and unconscious, the next he’s staring at her, gulping for air, his face burning red.
“Luce,” he gasps. He inhales roughly, as if he’s sucking oxygen through a straw.
She presses on his neck to feel his pulse.
“Colin.” She has a million questions. Can you feel me? Do you remember? Do you hurt? Can you move?
“I think I know where you go,” he mumbles thickly into her neck. His entire body has begun to shiver violently, and it takes him a moment to get the words out. “I think you live in the lake.”
Her veins run cold at the thought that her home is in that deep, isolated world. That she is the one haunting this school. But something about it rings true; she’s more peaceful at the lake than she is anywhere else on campus. And there are no waters entering or leaving it; it’s as landlocked as she is.
• • •
Sunlight steals the darkness from Colin’s bedroom inch by inch and finally shines a spotlight on his warm, breathing body. For the hundredth time she memorizes his face, his neck, the way his hair curls and falls over his forehead.
“Wake up. Talk to me,” she says. It’s been one of the longest nights she’s spent with him, waiting for him to come to and show that he’s not hurt. Or sick. Or brain damaged.
He makes some groggy waking-up noises, turning to face her. “Your skin feels so different lately.” He pauses, and Lucy hopes he’s realizing that this conversation seems familiar. “Do you think it has to do with me?” he says instead.
She pulls back to look at him. Really look at him, as in try to see if his pupils are reacting to light and his skin has taken on his normal color. Does he not remember that they’ve had this conversation before, twice now? “Maybe.”
“Do you think me being close to you, or even like you in the lake somehow makes you more . . . ?” He shakes his head, rubbing his face. “Like, more real?”
She smiles, trying to shake off the strange tickle in her spine she feels looking at his innocently wide-eyed expression. “I want to be a real girl, Geppetto.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe we can shift into some dimension that shows us how to make you human again,” he says. “With more practice.”
She gives him her best what-on-earth-are-you-talking-about look. “I don’t think we’ll be doing any more interdimensional Colin travel. I worry you’ve used up your last ticket.”
He shakes his head, immediately riled up, and although her mind worries, her heart feels a silent, electric thrill. Something inside her begins beating. And it’s this that worries her: If she’s his Guardian, why does it feel so good that he’s falling apart?
• • •
Lucy’s never seen Jay rattled before. At least, that’s what she assumes is going on outside at lunch when he’s silent and fidgety. His usually piercing eyes are focused on his shoes, where he doodles with a black marker over older doodles. The fresh black ink stands out against the faded now-gray.
Over “grenouille” he writes “eau.” Over “papillon” he writes “froid.” Almost as an afterthought he adds CHAUD, in capital letters above it all.
Frog and butterfly become cold water, then hot.
She digs in her thoughts for more words in French but is greeted by only a vast expanse of gray. She can’t puzzle out her memories, how they seem to be vaulted inside until they get the smallest nudge and then spill forward. She wonders what other things will tumble out when prodded. Maybe something to explain where she goes when she’s gone and what kind of Guardian lets her Protected dive into a frozen lake over and over just so she can touch him.
“I didn’t know you took French,” she says. Beside her, Colin is buried in a book about the acu
te effects of hypothermia.
“I don’t,” Jay says defensively, as if he’s been caught somehow. As if he’s the one who should be explaining himself.
They’re an awkward threesome, with a secret the size of the Pacific Ocean between them, carrying on with their normal lives in the strange world of private school. Sneakers squeak on the asphalt of the basketball court in the distance. A short, chubby kid makes three baskets in a row from the three-point line. Lucy wants to ask Jay how he knows the French word for frog if he doesn’t take French, but it also seems like the most inconsequential question she could ask after everything that happened this last weekend. “Are you okay, Jay?”
“My mom is French,” he says instead of answering.
“So that explains grenouille,” she says, and he grins, correcting her pronunciation under his breath. “But it doesn’t explain why you’re nonverbal today. Are you freaked out?”
His shrug is loose and slow. Jay is jerky and twitchy; the shrug is a decidedly non-Jay gesture. “Just thinking.” He reaches for a magazine inside his bag. The front is creased and covered in scribbled notes, drawings, and watermarks. The pages are dog-eared and torn on the edges, DIRT RAG emblazoned across the top in jagged green lettering.
“Jay,” Lucy begins, unsure of his mood and how to best phrase her thoughts. She looks over at Colin, satisfied that he’s sufficiently distracted. “Don’t either of you have that voice in your head saying that what you’re doing is crazy?”
“I do,” he says, then nods toward Colin. “He never has.”
Of course Colin picks that exact moment to look up from his book. “I never have what?”
“The self-preservation instinct. You never turn back from a hill or a jump. I’ve never seen you look at something and say, ‘I shouldn’t try that.’ It doesn’t mean you always land it, but you always try. You have no good angel on your shoulder.” Bending to his magazine, Jay adds quietly, “Only the devil.”
Colin laughs, and it feels like a fist squeezes Lucy’s heart.
Jay continues. “I can’t believe it went like it did at the lake.”
“How so?” Colin asks carefully.
Lucy starts to compile an apology to Jay, shifting words in her head to make the best, simplest statement, so he understands that she appreciates what he did more than he knows. She considers adding they would never ask it of him again, but the words feel slippery in her thoughts.
But instead of explaining his concern, Jay gives Colin a slow-growing smile. “It worked. I mean, look at you. You’re fine. It’s crazy that we can actually do this, and I’m over here just tripping out about it. I don’t know why more people don’t try. Makes me want to try.”
Already nodding, Colin sweeps into the conversation, and the two of them are off a mile a minute, and although Lucy knows she should be worried, everything inside her surges with relief. Apparently, jumping into a frozen lake is like any other extreme sport. You think you’re going to die, but what you get is the adrenaline rush of your life.
She hates her reaction, hates her calm. She hates how much she wants Colin in the lake. She hates not understanding.
So Lucy can’t listen to their fascinated planning; it feels too much like condoning their insanity. Instead, she pats Colin’s leg as she stands, telling him she’s going for a walk. Despite her internal struggle, she feels strength wrapping solidly around her bones; her muscles zip with vitality at the simple thought of seeing Colin go underwater, of meeting him on their trail. She wants to hide this strange, bounding strength from him but knows she can’t walk far enough to hide it from herself.
Was it because she died near the lake? Is that the connection for them? Maybe if she understood what happened to the other Guardians on campus, she’d know more about why she was back and why she can take Colin to her world. Colin’s little sister died on the school road, and her mother drove them all over a bridge, possibly trying to find her. Now that Colin knows how to find Lucy’s world, could it be different for them? Could they manage this strange balance in the world above and the one below? Where did Henry die, and is that where he goes when he’s gone?
In the library, Lucy searches the archives for any information about Henry Moss. The name shows up in several places: for a dentist in Atlanta, a high-school football star in Augusta. And then a story about a nineteen-year-old college student from Billings killed by a hunter’s stray bullet while hiking deep in the woods of Saint O’s campus. Leaning back in her chair, she stares at the picture of Henry before he died, smiling at the camera with his trademark wide grin.
Caroline Novak was hit by a delivery truck heading into the school. Henry died in the woods. Lucy died in the lake. All of them returned and seemed to return for someone: a heartsick mother, a boy with cancer, and an orphan who kept a murderer from killing countless others.
“But why do we disappear?” she asks aloud, absently rubbing the firm shape of her arm. She’s starting to suspect that she returns to the lake and had always been there. Is it true for the others too? Are they hovering in some mirror image of this world when they’re gone?
She needs to find Henry. She needs to ask when he feels the most solid and permanent and whether he feels the polar opposite right before he vanishes. But she needs to do it without giving away that she feels the best when Colin is only barely escaping death.
• • •
It turns out this time he’s easy to find, reading on a bench beneath a large naked maple near the arts building. When Henry sees her, he stands, shouting her name and gesturing for her to join him. They climb the stairs and walk through the massive doors together, right as the sky opens and the snow begins to fall.
“Where’s Alex?” she asks.
Henry gestures to the quad at their backs. “English. I’m tired of the history class I’ve been sitting in on this semester. It’s not like I remember anything about the past, but I still feel like I’ve heard it before.” With a wink, he tugs on her hand, and she follows him into the auditorium, down the long center aisle, and into the deep orchestra pit. Although their footsteps echo in the small quasi cave, it’s easy to tell that they’re completely alone. They’d be able to hear a pin drop on the stage.
“I have to tell you something,” she says, pulling at the sleeves of her shirt. “I know how you died, or, at least I know who killed you.”
“Oh,” he says. “Oh. I was . . . murdered too?”
“Yeah. Well, maybe ‘manslaughter’ is a better word. You were hit by a hunter’s stray bullet. I think you were visiting the area on a break from college and that’s when you were shot.”
Henry stands, takes a few steps away before sitting down again, and Lucy bites back a smile at his familiar ignorance. If Colin hadn’t told her about her death, she would probably still be in the dark about it all, too. Henry looks up to the ceiling, pauses, and then blinks back to Lucy. “I always half worried that I’d have that last piece of information and boom, the sky would open up and I’d be set free or sent back or whatever it is we’re waiting for.”
“That’s why Colin didn’t tell me how I died at first; he worried it would be the thing that would send me away for good.” Lucy shivers, hating the ticking-time-bomb sensation beneath her skin, that bleak unknown. What will be the thing that sends her away? She hesitates. “But I think there’s something about this school. Like it traps us somehow. Everyone I know of who died here, died on what was technically school grounds. I think there have been others, maybe there are others here now.”
“Have you seen someone?”
She shakes her head. “No, but Colin’s mother swore she saw the ghost of her dead daughter, Caroline. She drove them off a bridge, and I wonder if she thought she figured out a way for the family to be together again. Colin barely survived the accident. What if his mother was seeing her daughter? What if we’re just ghosts, and we’re just . . . here?”
“Without a purpose?”
Lucy nods. “Without a purpose. Haunting. Stuck.”
Henry doesn’t seem to like this idea, shaking his head sharply. “If Caroline were a Guardian like us, no way would she have led her mother over a bridge.”
Unease tightens Lucy’s chest. “I guess.”
He stares at her in his intense Henry way, as if he can see her thoughts hovering beneath her skin. “How’s Colin lately?” he asks.
“He’s good,” she says, not adding what a miracle that is.
“What else is on your mind, little sis?” Henry turns his chair so he’s facing her, elbows resting on his knees.
“Do you sometimes feel stronger than other times?” she asks.
“What do you mean by ‘stronger’? You mean more solid?”
She nods, picking at a thread on her sleeve. “I know this is personal, but sometimes Colin can barely touch me, and other times I feel like . . .” Lucy remembers the picture of Colin at prom, his hands resting on a human girl’s curves. “Like he can grab on to me. But I don’t think I understand what I do to make it happen. I wish I knew so I could do it more.”
“I have no good advice because it doesn’t ever seem to change for me,” Henry says apologetically. And then he growls, giving her a playfully dirty look. “Lucky.”
“But when Alex touches you, can he, like, touch you?”
As if on cue, Alex walks into the auditorium. His boots clomp down the center aisle and down the steps into the pit before he collapses into a chair next to Henry. He looks back and forth between them, the bruises beneath his eyes almost black in the shadows. “What’s up?”
Henry reaches down and pulls Alex’s legs across his lap. “Lucy asked if you like to touch me.”
She groans and buries her face in her hands. “That is not what I asked. I asked whether you can touch him. I don’t need a testimonial.”
Alex grins. “Yeah. But he feels like he’s covered in static.”
Henry watches Lucy for a beat before asking, “I’m sure you’ve already considered this, but what’s going on when you feel strongest?”
She thinks back to when she’s noticed it: at the lake, when Colin leaves for a ride. But also when Colin got back from the hospital. She wishes she could pinpoint a mood or even an event. “I notice it when we’re outside together, or when he’s riding his bike. I thought it was about him being happy, but then I felt it also when he was recovering.”
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