Breathless (8 page)

“She’s nice,” I said.

Sir snorted. “Real y? You want to know what kind of girl paints her nails black? I’l tel you: a drug user or a Satan worshiper. And I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with either.” He stared at my hands as if knowing that I’d spent the last fifteen minutes in the bathroom removing the polish.

No longer hungry, I lowered my gaze to the table and I pushed my food into a high pile so it looked like less was on my plate.

“I’l tel you another thing,” he continued. “If her father had any sense he’d send her to a good military school. They’d whip her into shape in not time. That’s what I’d do.” He paused, giving me time to take in the masked threat before he sat back in his chair. “Anyway, we’re invited to their house for dinner. I want you to make a casserole, Carol, but not the ham casserole that you made last month. Disgusting.”

Mom twirled her fork on her plate. “I saw the recipe on Rachel Ray and thought—”

“No,” Sir said, “you didn’t think.”

Mom nodded. We ate the rest of our dinner in silence.

***

The handprint remained. I exhaled, the fog from my breath rol ing across the glass where it touched the palm of the print and quickly retreated. I should have wiped it away before Mom noticed, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Something about it felt important.

I was afraid.

If I wiped the print away, the stranger might not come back. Stupid, because I didn’t even know what he wanted. Of al the things he could be—thief, pervert, or worse—al that mattered was what he was.
My secret
. And in a world where I was constantly reminded how I could lose everything in a moment, I just wanted something to belong only to me.

I placed my hand inside the print. The fingers were just long enough that, if they curled, they could swal ow my hand entirely.

A voice growled from outside my bedroom startling me from my thoughts. “Lights out in five!” A typical Sir goodnight.

I peeled my cheek off the glass, leaving an oily imprint of my own. Luckily, Mom had already come and gone, changing my bandages and trying to pump more information out of me on my new friend. I stuck to the story Morgan had concocted, insisting I had helped the wheezing girl from the bathroom to her car where I’d heroical y retrieved the inhaler. Mom had smiled and kissed the top of my head. I hated lying to her, but it was nothing she wasn’t used to.

I turned away from the door and climbed into bed, trailing my fingers along the nightstand and over the two remaining pearls and the strange green stone. I’d removed the stone from my jeans pocket over an hour ago. The pearls were room temperature, but the green stone stil held a chil that tickled the tips of my fingers like an electric current.

Strange.

I climbed under my heavily starched sheets. They remained stiff and unforgiving as I struggled to fold them around my body. How long would I have to wait tonight? It wasn’t a question about whether or not he would show. I knew—my body hummed in anticipation.

The digital clock on my nightstand ticked off another minute as I watched. The flashing colon beat a hypnotic rhythm, pulsing in time with my heart.

Flash. Thump. Flash. Thump.

Minutes passed. Then hours. I wiped my sweating palms along the sheets. My throat was dry and I wished for a glass of water.

Flash. Thump. Flash. Thump.

The sound of my own heartbeat grew to a deafening level, echoing in my room until I was sure it would shake the wal s around me.

I almost didn’t hear the tapping.

At first, I thought the wind had brushed the tree branches against the window. But then the shadow spil ed across my lap like an overturned bottle of ink, and I knew.

He was here.

I sat up, gasping. The stranger stumbled back a step.

A quick glance at the clock told me it was two AM. Suddenly, this was no longer the bril iant idea I’d thought it to be. I couldn’t face the shadowy figure alone in the dark! What if he was here to kil me?

The fine hair on the back of my neck raised as my hands began to tremble.
Stupid, stupid Edith
.

The stranger took two cautious steps forward and tapped on the glass pane again.

I whimpered before shrinking back against the headboard and raising the covers to my chin.

He spoke, his voice muffled, yet oddly familiar. “On my word, you are safe with me.”

His voice was low and smooth, like a bow drawn across the strings of a cel o. I knew I’d heard it before . . . but where? The covers slipped from my chin and pooled around my waist. I narrowed my eyes, hoping that would al ow me to make out the distorted shape behind the glass. It didn’t.

Curiosity pierced me like a fishing hook and pul ed me forward. Slowly, I peeled my comforter back and slipped my bare feet onto the floor. Not feeling particularly stable, I curled my toes into the carpet for support.

I took a step forward then stopped. What was I doing?

As if sensing my doubt, the stranger stepped away from the door and held his arms wide, indicating his wil ingness to give me space.

His gesture worked to unwind the locks on my bones and pul them into movement. One step. Then another. The closer I came to the door, the more difficult it was to breathe until I stood before the glass gasping for air.

“What do you want?” I whispered.

The stranger had backed into the shadow cast by the house, yet I could see something glinting silver in the moonlight. A weapon?

“To talk.”

I knew that voice, thick like a pool of chocolate syrup. It was the voice of the boy from the beach. The one who’d pul ed me from the ocean.

Bastin.

Before I knew what I was doing, I flicked open the lock. A cool breeze greeted me, fluttering the hair across my face. I tucked the ends behind my ears.

“Thank you,” he said, stil hidden in the shadows.

I said nothing, only stepped outside, slid the door shut, and leaned against it.

Bastin stayed hidden a moment longer, as if deciding. Final y, he stepped out of the shadows, and I was glad that I’d shut the door. Otherwise, the cry that tore from my throat would have certainly woken Sir.

The boy that stood before me was unlike any I’d ever seen. He wore only a pair of beaten up cut-off jeans. A curtain of silver hair cascaded over one shoulder, ending at his knees. Only it wasn’t the same silver-grey like the roots of my mom’s hair before her monthly dye job. His hair was the shining metal ic of tinsel on a Christmas tree. But unlike tinsel, when he tossed his head, it swayed like a silk curtain down his back.

“Please don’t be frightened,” he said.

I tried to answer him but my words tangled into a gurgle. I coughed to loosen the knot and tried again. “I’m sorry, but your hair—” My words trailed off as he took a step forward and the shadows were peeled back from his face.

His eyes held only night.

Two black orbs gazed at me. He licked his lips and blinked repeatedly, an action too impossibly fast to be human. I clung to the door handle, trying to think, trying to make sense of what I saw. The hair couldn’t be real—probably a wig. And his eyes . . . maybe he had a medical condition?

Or real y freaky contact lenses?

The boy took another step forward and blinked another inhuman blink. “I’m sorry for startling you tonight and the nights before. I—” He tilted his head toward the sky as if the right answer might fal from the moon itself. “I needed to talk to you. I wouldn’t have put you through al the stress if it hadn’t been important.” He lowered his head and directed his onyx eyes at me.

“Important?” I focused my attention on the sharp lines along his jaw, afraid that if I kept staring at his eyes I might fal in and drown.

“Yes.” He swept his gaze around the yard. “Are we safe here?”

I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of his question. Had I ever been safe a second of my life? “Probably not,” I answered. “There’s a chance that Sir might find us.”

He cocked his head. “Sir?”

“My stepdad.” The words tasted sour on my tongue. “He’s a master sergeant and pretty strict.”

He nodded. “Come with me?” He held his hand out and I marveled how the moon bathed his pale skin in a blue glow.

I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

There had to be a good reason for not wandering off in the night with a strange boy, but for whatever reason, my mind refused to conjure one up.

Absently, I began to pick at the gauze that stuck out from the edge of my nightshirt.

His eyes swept along my injured shoulder and his face turned hard. The muscles along his jaw flexed. “I am sorry Luna injured you. I wouldn’t have al owed it, but her orders came directly from the king.”

My head swam in a sea of confusion. “Luna?”

“The one who hurt your shoulder.”

Fear, like the rustling of scales, tickled along my skin as I remembered the girl who smiled as she watched me drown. Instinctively, I brought my hand to my throat. “She broke my necklace.”

He frowned. “We have to hunt for the old power spheres. It’s a rare thing when a human brings them into our waters. It was too much for her to resist.”

A dul ache pulsed inside my head and I pressed my fingers into my temples to keep the throbbing at bay. “Nothing you’ve said makes any sense.”

“I know.” He held his hand out to me. “If you come with me—to a place where we can talk safely—then I can explain everything.

I stared at his reaching fingers and hesitated. His skin was so pale that it seemed to glow in the moonlight. There were a mil ion reasons I shouldn’t go with him; he didn’t
look
like a normal teenager, he didn’t
talk
like a normal teenager, and his friend almost ripped my throat out. Not to mention, if I got caught, I’d be on the first bus to military school. And then it would be goodbye to col ege and the freedom I desperately craved.

But there was something else. In front of me, the boy’s fingers wavered in the air, waiting to take hold of my own. A knot formed in my chest and I struggled to breathe around it. I’d never held hands with a boy before.

Before my boating trip with Marty Sherwood, I’d never been on a date. It wasn’t that nobody had asked me out, it was just that the high school boys I’d met, with little more on their brains than sex and footbal , held little appeal to me.

Until now.

My hand trembled as I reached out.
Remember what happened the last time you went out with a boy?
a voice inside my head warned. The safe thing to do would be to run back inside, lock my door, and pretend this whole night never happened. Only, that was what I’d been doing every single day since my brother’s death—and look where that got me.

The coolness of his skin startled me. My breath hitched in my throat when his fingers wove into mine. There was no backing out now.

“Thanks for coming with me.”

I couldn’t answer, could only stare at our fingers knit together so tightly that they resembled a peony closed to the dark. It was strange that instead of clasping hands, he’d chosen to slip his fingers through mine. It was more intimate and—I realized when he pul ed me forward—a more difficult grip to slip out of.

He smiled once before leading me to the back of the yard and down a thin animal path that twisted beyond the overgrown vegetation and led to the bayou.

“It means a lot that you trust me,” he said over his shoulder.

Did I trust him
? There had to be some reason I felt compel ed to fol ow him as he led me behind peeling privacy fences and over fal en trees.

The path grew narrower. The long grass on either side scratched along my bare feet and ankles until we emerged from the trees. A sun-bleached dock rocked on the water before us, a dozen crab traps roped off its side. I wrinkled my nose as a breeze carried the smel of rotted fish from the shore. Why had the boy brought me here?

He climbed on the dock, which swayed lightly under his weight. Before he could pul me beside him, I dug my toe under the edge of the dock and ripped my hand from his grip.

He turned, frowning. “Is something wrong?”

The closest house was nothing more than a pinprick of light down the shore. There was no boat, and as far as I could tel , no one else around.

Ribbons of fear tightened around my chest. I shouldn’t have come.

The boy cocked his head to the side. It was too dark to see his eyelids close, but I could tel he blinked by the disappearance and reappearance of the moon in his eyes. “You think I’m going to hurt you?” he asked.

My fingers brushed the edge of my bandage. “Your friend did. Maybe you’re here to finish the job?”

“Why would you think that?”

I shrugged. Death was always on my mind. After it devoured my brother, it consumed me—grinding me against its razor teeth, and yet, always refusing to swal ow. I was obsessed. I wrote poems about it. I listened to music about it. I read the obituaries to see if there was a way to die I hadn’t discovered. No wonder being taken to a remote location by a stranger didn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies.

Bastin’s lips pressed into a straight line. “I understand,” he said. “You have every right to not trust me. I just wanted to talk with you and . . . I feel better by the water. It’s soothing.” When I stil didn’t move, he nodded to the shore. “We can sit on the grass if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” I answered. Land seemed a safer bet, even though my other decisions tonight hadn’t exactly had caution in mind.

He hopped off the dock and I fol owed him to the edge of the beach. I sat down on a patch of grass that had folded under its own weight. He sat beside me, his long legs crossed at the ankles.

I’m not sure how long we sat that way, staring at each other. Seconds? Minutes? An hour? His eyes hypnotized me with their disappearing, reappearing moons.

Final y, he spoke. “I’ve never talked with a girl before.”

That made me sad. But I had to admit, the freaky wig and contacts were a little off-putting. I wondered if he wore them to hide an il ness, or if he just had a bizarre sense of fashion. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t talk to boys much, either.”