Sounded to me like they were high. “Did you take something?”
He huffed a breath and shook his head. “Never. You know us—knew us—and while we might drink, we’d never take anything. It’s not who we are. But we thought the same thing. Wondered if someone slipped us something.” He leaned back and stared at me. “I’ll admit, I even wondered if we’d been abducted by aliens.”
I burst out laughing. “Colton!”
He smiled, and something strange happened to my heart. “What? We live in the desert in New Mexico. We wouldn’t be the first people who—”
I held up my hand. “Okay. Okay. I’m guessing you realized that wasn’t the case?”
“Yeah.” He studied his hands, rubbing his palms together and then turning them over. “Once we got gas, we turned around and tried to come home. But something stopped us.”
I lifted my eyebrows, waiting.
“Lacey.” Colton’s face was sad, and he frowned. I preferred when he smiled, and it bothered me, that expression and the hurt it suggested. “Lacey. What I’m going to say is going to sound crazy. I know that. But can you promise me, you’ll hear me out to the end?”
He’d promised he wasn’t making fun of me. He promised he wasn’t playing some elaborate head game. This was on me to trust him, and I had a feeling it was going to be really difficult to do that.
But I could try. “Okay.”
He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his strong throat. “We’d make it maybe five miles, and Thorn would have to pull over. Be sick. With each mile we covered, we became more and more ill. We switched, and I drove, but my vision tunneled, and I couldn’t see to drive. I was positive it was something in the air, so we got off the highway, and for that time while we were traveling in the opposite direction, all those symptoms disappeared. We were fine. But the moment the car headed east, it all came back. It got to the point where we were incapacitated. Thorn was puking his guts out. I thought I was having an aneurysm, my head hurt so much.”
“Colton.” I could feel his pain. I imagined them both hurting badly, and it was too much. Closing the distance between us, I took his hand in mine. “Are you okay now?”
He laughed without humor and shook his head, but he held onto my hand, pressing it between each of his. “Lacey. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but it jarred something loose. I managed to get us moving toward a hospital. A hundred yards. Stop. Another hundred. Stop again. Until the pain lessened. And as we drove, our minds cleared. We didn’t believe our thoughts. I thought it was a pain-induced hallucination, but not Thorn. Thorn convinced me that what we saw and what was happening to us was real. And it was all connected.”
I was afraid to ask what it was. My lips and throat were suddenly dry. “What was it?” I asked.
He studied me as if gauging how strong I could be. Finally, he sucked in a deep breath and told me. “A waking nightmare, Lace. A monster.”
“Colton.” I struggled to answer in a way that wasn’t condescending. “You have to understand that I am battling to not get up and walk out. You promised you weren’t going to make fun of me, and I am trying to believe you. I am trying. But please understand that even as I ask you the next question, I am pretty convinced that you are about to go fuck you Lacey, get out of my house, you stupid idiot, I knew I could make you believe me.”
He held up his hand. “There is a reason you are so averse to hearing about the monster. It is the same reason that we couldn’t turn around and come back. We can come back to that. Come back to the monster. Let me just continue.”
He shook his leg, a fast up and down, and he linked his hands together in his lap. This was the tensest I’d ever seen him. I chewed on my lip. He didn’t look like a person who was about to go, “Ha-ha! Gotcha!” This was tearing up his soul.
“Okay. Please continue. I’m listening.”
He blinked fast. “Thank you, Lacey. I’ve missed you. Please know that.”
Had he? It was a huge jump for me to accept this truth.
I’d missed Thorn, even though he abandoned me. But Colton and I had never had this kind of relationship. Unless I believed him. Unless I gave into the idea that we’d had a life-changing twenty-four hours I couldn’t remember.
“We went to the hospital. They found nothing and threatened to call our parents. I think they thought we were crazy and wasting their time. We had to run out of there before they could stop us. Back in the car.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And even though we now know why we couldn’t seem to drive back—our heads were clear—we still couldn’t physically do what we had to do.” He sighed. “So we drove all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Ended up in a town called Capitola. It’s about an hour and a half south of San Francisco.”
That’s what I’d heard, that they were in California. “Your families told everyone you’d been so embarrassed, you’d taken off and gone to California.”
He put his hands over his head and shook it. Finally, he dropped his hands back into his lap. “No. I mean, fuck no. We wanted you with us. That was what we wanted more than anything, but we couldn’t have it. We knew we were following a compulsion. We’d been told to drive until we hit the ocean. We’d done that. We’d been told we had to leave you alone. We’d done that.”
I finally sat back on the couch. None of this was okay; none of this was the least bit possible. “Keep going.”
“Thorn had his trust fund from his great-uncle. He rented us the smallest bungalow you can imagine. We got jobs. Bad ones. It’s not so easy to find work when you’re high school dropouts. But we did anything people would pay us to do. Well, anything legal. And we started doing research.”
I didn’t need for him to tell me on what. Still, I said it. “On monsters.”
“Yeah.” He met my eyes. “Yeah. We sub-reddited the shit out of the subject. And that’s where we found the start. The thread that would follow until we got where we needed to go.”
I wouldn’t make a smart-ass comment about the quality of research that began on Reddit. I would not. “Where did it lead?” I asked.
“Lacey. There’s a whole world out there we can’t imagine, and yet it makes sense. I mean, we live in the desert. We survive in a place where no one is supposed to survive. Not only that, but we’re not the first people to make our homes here.”
“I’m well aware of that.” I aced history after all. “But, Colt, Reddit?”
His leg shaking stopped, and he fixed me with a dazzling grin. “You called me Colt.”
It had just slipped out.
“It’s what you called me that night.” The smile disappeared. “There’s truth in the improbable. And here, in this town, there’s something that hates me. Hates Thorn. And the moment we put our hands on you, it awoke and became angrier than it had ever been. It turned us toward the ocean. But for years, it’s been isolating and ostracizing you. Hoping you’ll have no one and nothing.”
As nice as it was to imagine a world where people hated me, not because they actually hated me, but hated me because some creature mind-fucked them, it wasn’t possible. But okay, I said I’d keep an open mind.
“So what kind of creature are we talking about?” I asked. “Werewolf? Vampire? Probably not vampire because there’s no shade. Um…” I hated horror movies, so it was difficult for me to come up with a bunch of possibilities. “Evil clown?”
“Everything. Nothing. Whatever you fear and whatever you love. Whatever you feel neutral about. It’s everything.”
“Well fuck, Colt. What am I supposed to be afraid of, if it’s everything and nothing?”
“Has anything happened recently—something just strange enough to disarm you—but not strange enough to scare you?”
“So the janitor doesn’t count?”
“That one’s obvious. Something else.”
My mind, weirdly enough, went to Maura. She’d never shown any interest in me, and suddenly she was trying to put the moves on me.
“What is it?” Colton asked.
“My cousin’s girlfriend hit on me,” I said.
He nodded, and then… “What if I told you, the day we came to you in class, Mr. Roberts was the monster?”
“Then I’d have to agree with you, because that guy is a monster. And an asshole. Things would sort of click into place for me.”
Laughing, he cracked his knuckles. “Yeah. So there’s that.”
“How’d you get here? Did you magic some anti-monster repellant from a recipe on Pinterest?”
“There she is,” he said. “I was waiting for it.”
Heat blasted up my neck and into my face. I really had tried my best, but if snark was a second language, then I was fluent. “I’m sorry. So there is a monster that hates you two and sent you away. Okay. Why didn’t it just kill you? And why does it want me?”
He leaned forward and took my hands in his. “It would have killed us that night if it could have. It was sleeping, and when it woke up, it was disoriented. See, the thing is that it had already just killed someone, already fed on the life force of the missing little boy.”
I swallowed. This had officially just turned not okay. My throat threatened to close. “Bringing up Robbie…”
He held up his hands. “I know, sweetheart, I know. It’s awful. But it’s true. Every so often, it feeds. And it had just finished off Robbie. It couldn’t kill us, it was tired. So he compelled us to go and to leave you alone, and we did. We left you here and just as it had made us go and forget, it made you stay and forget. It kept you here. I’m sorry. I’m sure, with the way it’s going now, that it will try to kill us if it can.”
I got to my feet. I had to move, had to do something. Anything. “I dream about Robbie.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” His leg started jostling again. “I dream about him, too. When I sleep, which isn’t much. Look, I don’t know if your cousin’s girlfriend was the monster or not. But I do know Mr. Roberts was. I saw it in his eyes. It’s a copycat. It takes over people’s bodies. If they’re healthy, they wake up from a deep sleep and don’t know anything happened other than they took a nap. If they’re not, who knows? It feeds on you a little bit, takes your energy, takes your shape, and for a while, pretends to be you.”
I hated everything about this. Goosebumps broke out along my arms, little pinpricks of pain. “How did you know his eyes were wrong?”
“Because I saw its real eyes that night in the desert. We all did. You. Me. Thorn. We saw him. He woke up because you were close, and he even talked to you. I’m almost glad you don’t remember it. Now, Thorn and I can recognize him when we encounter him. But we can’t stay here. We need to get you out of this town.” He put out his hand, and I took it. “But I bet if I said let’s leave right now, you still wouldn’t go, because he’s compelled you to stay. If I tried to steal you out of here, you’d be in so much pain you might not recover, that’s how much he wants you.”
I let him draw me to him. “Colt, why does he want me?”
“He thinks you can love him; he thinks you can be his mate.”
My stomach roiled, and Colton held me tight against him. “Don’t be afraid. I’m going to keep you safe. Thorn and I will.”
I had to shake my head. “From the extensive monster destruction you learned how to do on a subreddit?”
He chuckled. “Enough for tonight. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if you weren’t being sarcastic. It means you’re going to be okay. Come on, lie down with me. Let’s listen to the rainstorm.”
Was it raining? I hadn’t even noticed. I wasn’t usually a cuddle person, but I let him hold me on the too-expensive couch. I liked the sound of his heartbeat. Between him and Aaron, I might actually start to feel like I could be held on occasion.
“He takes people’s forms? Did he walk around like Robbie?”
Colton nodded. “Maybe. It is possible he walked around like Robbie for a long time, and his parents had no idea.”
I closed my eyes. That was too horrible to consider, but then, another worse thought dawned on me. I pulled off of Colt, who tilted his head while he looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
“How do I know you’re not the monster?”
He thought about it, and right then, I knew he wasn’t. A monster, like a criminal, would have some sort of ready explanation. “I barely understand it myself,” he said. “I’m not sure I could explain it.”
“If this thing can wear people’s skin, then I’m pretty much screwed. It could be anyone. It could have been my gran last night. Or Aaron. Or Ollie when we went to Thorn’s ranch.”
“Or me,” he said.
“Or you.” I sighed. “Explain your monster radar, or Spidey-sense. What does it feel like? Can you tell just by looking at someone?”
“Yes and no,” he replied. “There’s definitely something off about them. Their mannerisms are too forced. A monster in the role of a human.” His body tensed around mine. There was something else.
“Colt?”
“Sorry,” he said. “What was I saying?”
“Spidey-senses.”
“Right.” He shifted. “The thing you have to do is listen to your instincts. You’ll want to escape. You won’t want the person to touch you, or talk to you. Everything inside you will just want to get away. Listen to that. And run.”
I swallowed. But won’t it follow me?
Nine
Colton’s description left me frustrated and anxious. Most of my life was spent in some version of fight or flight, so my instincts were a little too well-honed. Part of my bad reputation was from me overreacting to innocuous stuff, like someone glaring at me, or a car driving too close to me while I walked down the road.
Of course, that instinct had kept me alive, so…
“What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“I can’t just run out of class,” I said, my tone short. “If I do, I’ll be expelled. And Colt, I need that degree.”
“You need to be safe,” he said. “You can earn a GED online if you need to, but you can’t do that if you’ve been dragged into some cave in the fucking desert.”
“Dramatic much?”
“For crying out loud, Lacey, this isn’t a joke.” He pushed me away and sat up. His gaze was hot and angry. “We’ll protect you, but you have to help us here.”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
He pushed his hand through his messy hair and opened his mouth to answer when the front door opened. “Colton?”
I swung my legs off the couch and onto the floor at the sound of Thorn’s voice. Our position wasn’t sexual in any way, but I was uneasy. This would be the first time Thorn and I would be meeting on neutral territory.
Sort of.
He hurried into the room, skidding to a stop when he saw me. His gaze went from me to Colton, and then back to me. “Thank God,” he said and strode toward me. He pulled me into his arms, squeezing me tightly against him. “I wasn’t sure if you’d stay with him.”
It used to be quite normal for Thorn to hug me. We’d grown up together, and even though I was from the wrong side of town, his mother would allow me to hang out at their house. Maybe she’d seen it as some sort of get-into-heaven card. Let the poor girl hang out with my son as a checkbox on the sheet she could personally turn into God at the pearly gates. That had changed when Thorn left. Anytime she saw me after that, she screamed at me about how I’d ruined Thorn, and he’d taken off because of me.
That turned out to be only half true. If this monster thing was real, he had taken off because of me. Why was I even accepting this as possible? Eyes in the darkness. Yellow ones. I blinked, and the memory fled. Was it even a memory, or just something I made up in my head because I was losing it?
Still, hugging Thorn wasn’t normal anymore, and I stepped back from the embrace. I didn’t have any memories of getting to know and care for Colton, but I sure did have plenty when it came to Thorn. I wasn’t sure I could open my heart up to him again. Losing him the first time—or rather the slow progress
ion of it when I’d fallen down in the world, and he’d done nothing but rise—had been hell. Football star. Class President. Straight A student. Everyone’s favorite teenager. That had been Thorn. Whatever the truth was, I’d been thought of as ruining him for so long, I almost believed it myself. What was the truth, when even the people who knew it stopped believing it? Did it even matter anymore?
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you okay? What happened to you?”
“Her grandmother,” Colton answered before I could.
I stiffened my back at the pity in Thorn’s eyes. He knew better than most how long I had been living with this. I’d always been a survivor, and monster or no monster, nothing was going to change in that regard. “I’ve got to go, guys.”
“Hold up.” Thorn put out his hands, like he was going to ward off an attack or surrender to something. “I get here, and you leave? I’m sorry. I was hours away. I got back just as fast as I could, as soon as Colton texted me. What’s going on? What have you learned?”
I held up my hand when Colton would have answered again. “I don’t remember the monster, but I’ve gotten the whole story, more or less, from Colton. I have to get home. I have to think about things and digest all of this. Plus, I got this bruise”—I pointed above my eyebrow to the still-tender spot—“because I cut school with you. Today, I was accused of murder. I can’t imagine the shit I’m going to walk into.”
Thorn’s shoulders sagged. “Admit it, you’re running because I came. You’re okay being with Colton, but not with me.” He looked over my shoulder at his friend. “It’s like that whole day never happened for her.”
I backed up fast. “Thorn.”
“Let me tell you what I told you then. Please, Lacey. You forgave me that day. Maybe you can again.”
Tires screeched in my brain, and I turned around, using Colton’s word. “Pardon? What did I have to forgive?”
Thorn sat on the perfect white couch in the perfect white home, and looked like he belonged there. But he didn’t look at ease. His hair, like Colton’s, was long for him. But where Colton’s curled, Thorn’s was straight and fell across his eyes. I had an urge to flick it off his forehead and almost reached to do it before curling my fingers into my hand.
Eyes in the Darkness (The Coveted) Page 7