The Third Kiss

by Kat Colmer

  “What’s keeping you up?” I asked. Partly to divert the conversation away from me, but also… I was curious.

  His eyes traced my features, then he pushed away from the counter and walked back over to the kitchen island where he’d been sitting.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what this means.” He picked up his Guardian letter off the granite benchtop. “Have a look.”

  I grabbed my Nesquick from the counter and clutched the mug to my chest like a shield, protecting me from I didn’t know what. I edged to stand next to Jonas. “What am I looking at?”

  “The last coil.”

  My heart tripped over its feet. “It hasn’t faded?” I couldn’t hide the note of panic in my voice and avoided meeting Jonas’s eyes. Of course it hasn’t faded. Otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here, talking to one another.

  He waited a fraction too long before answering. “No, but the other two haven’t reappeared, either.”

  Sweet relief coursed through me, followed by muddied confusion. “So the gazebo didn’t change anything?” I’d claimed as much earlier, but my conviction had been all hot air and not a lot of substance. I looked up at him and instantly regretted it. His eyes pooled with heat. When his gaze strayed to my lips, that heat licked the insides of my stomach.

  Okay, I could be handling this better.

  I took a gulp of Nesquick and quickly brought my gaze back down to the letter. How on earth was I going to survive the week with him shadowing my every step?

  “One thing did change.” Jonas angled the letter so it caught the moonlight through the window. My breath hitched halfway up my throat: the coil came to life in ripples of liquid silver.

  “I’m going to take a punt and assume this isn’t good.”

  Jonas rubbed a hand over his eyes. Even in the faint light I could make out the worry lines creasing his forehead. “I have no idea what it means. But I can’t help thinking the attack has something to do with it. Here’s hoping the prof has some answers.”

  Yep. Although, so far his answers hadn’t been much help. Besides, there was one answer the professor couldn’t give me. One answer I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to hear, but I knew I had to ask the question. I gathered my resolve and braved Jonas’s eyes. “Last night, why did you kiss me?”

  Heat flared in his half-lidded gaze. He watched me for a long-held breath.

  “I acted on an impulse,” he whispered.

  My own words.

  It wasn’t until much later, just as sleep weighed down my eyelids in the early hours of dawn, that I realized he’d left out one significant word:

  Deviant.

  In the morning I woke to a sight more terrifying than a charging Groth Maar demon—Beth sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed, an I-want-answers expression punching through her flawless makeup.

  I rubbed sleep from the corners of my eyes; a futile attempt to avoid looking at her. Because of the attack, she’d spared me any uncomfortable questions last night, but an inquisition was heading my way.

  “Morning.” She looked out of place on the end of my bed in her tailored gray pants and delicate white blouse. Her birthday pendant glinted green in the rays of sun streaming through the blinds.

  “Hi.” My voice was scratchy, yet to wake up.

  She glanced at my injured hand. “How’s your wrist?”

  I rotated it gingerly, waiting for pain. None came. “Seems okay. A bit stiff but not too sore.”

  A brief nod. “You sleep all right?”

  If I said no, would she leave me alone? “Not the best.”

  “That’s no good.” She crossed her arms. “Now what the hell is going on with you and my brother?”

  Here we go. Rubbing my stiff wrist, I stalled. I owed her an explanation. Except I didn’t have one. I didn’t know myself what was going on between Jonas and me. Not having an answer drove me to do something I usually detested—I played dumb. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on! Don’t even think you can try that on me.”

  Stupid idea. Beth detested playing dumb almost as much as I did. I drew myself up to sit. “I don’t know.” And that was the pathetic truth.

  Beth slapped the mattress. “You kissed him!”

  What? “No, I didn’t. He kissed me!” At least he started it.

  “That’s not what he said.”

  The lying— “I don’t know what he told you, but he made the first move the other night.”

  Beth folded her arms again. “I’m not talking about the other night.”

  Crap. He’d told her about a year ago. I pulled the sheet up higher around me, took my time as I wedged it underneath my armpits, while I worked out how to approach this thorny topic. “That was a year ago.” Like that somehow made a difference.

  “Exactly. You had a whole year to tell me that you made out with my brother!”

  I cringed. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you would overreact.”

  She leaned toward me. “Overreact? Why would you even—” She pulled a face. “What got into you?”

  “I don’t know.” I fussed with the sheet, folding a section over and over onto itself. “I was a mess after Mom dropped the Manhattan bomb and he…he was there.”

  “And, what, a hug wasn’t enough? You had to plant one on him?”

  I cringed some more. At this rate I’d need heavy-duty wrinkle cream before my twenty-first birthday.

  “It’s almost…illegal…or something!” Beth continued her rant. “He’s practically your brother.”

  But he wasn’t. And just as well, otherwise I’d need my head read considering the way my body reacted when I thought about what happened in the gazebo. I looked up and found Beth studying me. “What?”

  “The other night, he said you didn’t exactly discourage him.”

  The guilty creep of heat up my neck and face was instant. I’m going to kill him! Had he told her everything?

  Beth tugged the sheet out from underneath my armpits. “I don’t believe it. You have a thing for my brother!”

  “No, I… No!” I gripped the sheet and pulled back hard.

  “Then why didn’t you knee him in the balls when he stuck his tongue in your mouth?” Beth demanded.

  Because the smell and feel of him had short-circuited my brain, that was why. Ugh.

  I glared across at my best friend and said the only thing that made any sense to me: “I. Don’t. Know.”

  She scoffed. “Yeah, well, I know the two of you are reading from the same badly written script.”

  What on earth was she talking about? She climbed off the bed and faced me. “The last coil hasn’t faded.” It was more challenge than statement.

  Instinctively, I lifted my chin higher. “Yes, but the other two haven’t reappeared.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Cora. What do you feel for him?”

  I flung the bed sheet off me. Muscles groaned as I swung stiff legs onto the floor, reminding me of yesterday’s brutal workout session. And what had come after it. I shook off the shudder that skittered through my body and focused on Beth’s question.

  What did I feel for Jonas? “Look, it’s just…physical. That’s all.” Biology. Pure and simple.

  When I braved a glance at them, Beth’s eyes were full of skepticism. “So you’re telling me that you—Cautious Cora, the girl who doesn’t see the point of a hookup—have the horn for my player brother?”

  When she put it like that it sounded so juvenile. Maybe I was suffering from some hormonal abnormality? I should check Dad’s medical literature for write-ups of abnormal hormonal surges in late adolescence. Whatever it was, I could handle it, darn it!

  Testing my legs, I stood and walked around Beth to the end of the bed where I’d dumped my bag of clothes the night before. “Look, I can’t explain this sudden, bi
zarre…attraction. But I’ll deal with it.” I yanked a T-shirt, shorts, and underwear from the mess in my bag. “It’ll pass.” My tone wasn’t as confident as I’d have liked.

  “Because this thing with Jonas is just physical, right?”

  “What else? It’s Jonas! I’m not stupid enough to fall for him.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she stared at me for three uncomfortable seconds before she turned for the bedroom door. “I have to go. Text me if the professor has anything to explain the weird coil.”

  Then she strode out of the room, allowing me to take my first deep breath of the morning.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jonas

  I was a fan of silence. It meant no time wasted on useless conversations with people I had no intention of getting to know better. No questions about what foods I liked best, or favorite colors, or which deodorant I fricking used because it smelled so good. No poking into my past, my friends. My family.

  Cora and I did silence well. Sure, there were words, lots of them. With Cora—and only Cora—words often came in avalanches, wild and uncontained, because she never judged. Listened? Always. Argued? Sometimes. But judged? No, never. And in between the avalanches there was often silence. The comfortable kind where it was enough to share the same air for us to connect, no words necessary. Here, meaning floated in the familiar space between us, carried on a well-known glance, a shift in posture, an impatient sigh.

  That was how it’d been that day she found me in the gazebo two years after Dad’s suicide. I sat on the floor, frozen on the outside and shattered deep within. She didn’t say anything, just curled up beside me, and took my cold hand in hers. Maybe it was her quiet acceptance of what I was feeling, or the strong, reliable grip she had on my hand. Whatever it was, it unlocked a landslide of words.

  The silence after I told her the truth about my father’s “accident” should have been uncomfortable. It wasn’t. Cora said everything she needed to say with her presence and the warmth of her touch.

  And so we did silence well. Or at least we used to.

  This morning there were too many uncertainties in the gaps between our unspoken words.

  I pulled the Mazda’s hand brake on outside Professor Scholler’s red brick federation-style bungalow and glanced at Cora’s guarded expression. She wore her customary uniform: cartoon character T-shirt and shorts. I liked her PJs better.

  She’d barely said a word the entire twenty-minute trip here. Her silence was a torch to my raw nerve endings, making me twitch to fill it. Today, I needed her words. After the gazebo I couldn’t read her other forms of communication. She was sending too many scrambled messages.

  I turned her way. “You all right?”

  Hazel eyes met mine. “Yep. Why?”

  “You’re quiet.”

  “Thinking about the attack, the coil…” Her gaze skittered away and out the windshield. “What it all means.”

  Yeah. What does it all mean? I’d spent most of last night going over the same question. To say I was relieved Cora didn’t hate my guts because of the curse was an understatement. Her friendship had always been important to me. I just didn’t realize how much until Love’s Mortal Coil threatened to strip it away.

  I still hadn’t shaken the feeling of dread after her attack yesterday. The thought of her hurt or worse… I sucked some air through my nose to settle the sudden bout of nausea. Truth was, it wasn’t just Cora’s friendship that was important to me. Cora was important to me. Her opinions, her struggles, her dreams, all of her. I couldn’t imagine a life without her in it. What does it all mean?

  Last night she’d sworn the kiss hadn’t changed anything. But something was different. Something had shifted.

  What if it’s shifted in a direction other than friendship? Palms slick with sweat at the thought, I gripped the steering wheel and forced myself to turn the idea around in my head, examining it from all angles. If I had to be shackled to someone, I could do a lot worse than Cora Hammond. There was just one problem—Cora Hammond deserved a long-term kind of guy. Could I be that guy? Could I risk long-term and the kind of emotion that drove Dad to smash our lives apart?

  I glanced across at the passenger seat, at Cora’s familiar profile with its straight nose and full lips.

  Damn soft full lips.

  I slid the keys out of the ignition. “Well, hopefully the prof will have some answers.” Because I sure as hell didn’t have any.

  No doorbell, so I knocked. When the professor opened his front door, surprise dragged both his brows up past the wire rim of his glasses. “Only two of you today?”

  “My sister has to work,” I said.

  “And your friend Leo?”

  My brows scrunched. I had no idea where Leo was. I hadn’t seen him since the Boom Room on Wednesday night. When he hadn’t replied to any of my messages yesterday, I started to get edgy. Not that we kept tabs on each other, but this kind of radio silence was strange for Leo. Then, this morning, a short text: See you tonight. Could be he was shitty with me for bailing on him and the two German backpackers. Or he’d caught some computer-programming virus and couldn’t drag himself away from the keyboard. Who knew? But if he didn’t show tonight, I’d go looking for him.

  Professor Scholler led us along a slate-tiled hallway to the rear of the house. He stopped at an open door and motioned us in. Massive bookshelves covered all four of the spacious study’s walls. He even had one of those neat little library ladders to reach the shelves near the ceiling.

  And he’d prepared—all the notebooks lay spread out on his sprawling desk. “I suggest you start with the first one as that’s the one which explains what we discussed the other day.”

  I pulled my Guardian letter out of my back pocket and handed it to him. “Does the first one mention anything about this?”

  The moment his eyes landed on the quicksilver coil, his brow creased. “When did this happen?”

  “I found it this morning,” I said. “Any idea what it means?”

  “No, but I may have come across something like this in my reading last night.”

  Two swift steps had the professor standing at his desk, sifting through the notebooks. “Now, which one…not this…no…here!” The lines on his forehead dug deeper into his skin as he skimmed the handwritten notes next to a picture of a coil identical to the one on my Guardian letter.

  About to turn the page, he stilled and looked up from the notebook. “Did you, by any chance, kiss someone since we last spoke?”

  So the strange coil indicated I’d used up my third kiss. “It wasn’t exactly planned.” I risked a glance at Cora to gauge her reaction. Closed off like a crime scene, her face gave little away. With her shoulders rigid under her T-shirt, she looked nothing like the girl in that flowing, strappy, red thing she’d worn on Wednesday night. On her date. With muscled-up Markus.

  My jaw clenched. “I was provoked.”

  The prof’s eyes widened. “You were provoked into kissing someone?”

  “Yes.” Man, that sounded stupid.

  Beside me, Cora bristled. “Really?” Her glare was filthy, but I’d take it any day over the guarded glances and stiff silence she’d offered me all morning.

  “Yeah!” The date, the dress, her stubbornness, her…just her. Lately, everything about her was a provocation.

  If Scholler picked up on the tension between us, he didn’t show it. Instead, he waved an impatient hand at the large green couch near his desk, then lowered his head back to the text in the notebook and resumed his reading.

  I’d taken two steps toward the couch when the professor’s voice ground me to a halt.

  “The third girl, where is she?”

  My eyes sought Cora’s. “Why?”

  He tapped at the notebook. “Now, I’m not saying this is to be believed, but according to this, she’s in danger.”

 
Instinctively, I moved back toward Cora.

  “It might be an idea to call her.” The prof cleared his throat. “Only as a precaution, of course.”

  “There’s no need to call her,” Cora said, “because that someone is me.”

  The professor raised a brow. “I see.”

  Cora rubbed her wrist. “I was attacked last night.”

  His face paled. “Your attacker, what did he look like?”

  “Like he’d walked off a GQ magazine cover, only he had violet eyes.”

  The rest of the color leached from Professor Scholler’s face. “Was there anything else unusual about him?”

  “He was…cold.” Cora wrapped her arms about herself. “When he grabbed me, the guy was a solid brick of ice.”

  “Well.” The prof inhaled a shaky breath. “I never thought I’d say this, but I no longer think we’re dealing with just a prank.”

  No shit, Sherlock.

  “If what I read is correct, then these Groth Maar are also exceptionally strong.” The professor’s eyes widened at Cora. “How did you escape him?”

  “Cora’s a second Dan black belt.” I’d never been so thankful for her ass-kicking skill. “What does the strange coil and the kiss have to do with Cora’s attack?”

  Daniel Scholler looked back and forth between me and Cora, then waved at the couch again. “You’ll need context first.”

  I sank onto the green leather.

  “To understand the significance of the change in the last coil, and how it endangers you,” he began, “you must first learn about the Book of Threads.”

  “The Book of Threads. You mentioned that last time,” Cora said, sitting down next to me.

  Professor Scholler reached behind him for another of the notebooks. He pulled an orange one from the set and opened it to a vivid image of an ancient, leather-bound tome sitting high on a lectern, pages spread. In the center of the aged parchment I made out an unfamiliar female name written in the same intricate script as that on my Guardian letter. Around it were other names, names I recognized as male. One or two spider-web-thin lines ran between each of the male names and the one in the middle, their connection fragile, even broken in places.