Cold Kiss (14 page)

By the time I meet Gabriel behind the public library a half hour after school is over, I’m back to exhausted. I can’t even think about the essay I have to write, or the new trig problems, even though I know my grades are slipping. College seems like a distant impossibility today, and one that matters a lot less than the next twenty-four hours.

“Hey.” Gabriel is slouched against the faded red brick, and he stands up when I round the corner of the building. I never got closer than five feet away from him yesterday, and I don’t even bother to argue with myself as I walk straight into his arms. We connect with a vague
oomph. I
don’t think he was expecting that, but I don’t care.

Judging by the way his arms go around me, sliding under my backpack, he doesn’t either.

“Bad day?” His words are muffled by my hair.

“Bad night,” I tell him, and pull away far enough to look up at him.

His voice sharpens. “What happened?”

“Don’t be a big damn hero, okay?” I poke his chest with one finger. “Just be my friend.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

I sigh. “I know.”

I don’t want to, which is the first problem. Not because I’m afraid Gabriel will go all tough guy, but because it hurts to admit that Danny is getting harder and harder for me to control.

Last night when I finally snuck out there, he was down in the garage, prowling around near the door to the yard. Thin and pale in the sliver of light through the window, he looked like something from another world when he turned around and saw me standing there, my mouth hanging open and my heart pumping pure terror.

He didn’t even smile the way he used to. When I think about it, he hasn’t in days. Instead, he focuses those flat dark eyes on me, as if now he can see into me, too, and he wants something there that he can grab onto and twist, viciously.

I wriggle out of Gabriel’s hold and kick aside some damp leaves to sit down with my back to the cool brick. Gabriel joins me, his knee brushing mine.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” I shrug, and he winds his arm around my shoulders. The weight of it is a comfort, and I let my head rest against it. “I had to make up a spell last night just so I could leave. It was terrifying—I was trying to remember what I’d read in some of the books and figure out what to say, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to make things worse.”

“What do you mean, so you could leave?”

I stare at my lap, where my battered backpack is covered with Danny’s doodles, faded Sharpie initials and faces. “He doesn’t like being alone anymore. So when I need to leave, he gets … upset.”

It’s an understatement for the stubborn way Danny held on to me last night, wrapped around me from behind, his chin digging into my shoulder, his voice low and cold in my ear.

“Wren.” Gabriel stiffens beside me, and I reach up to grab his hand, twining my fingers with his.

“I’m going to figure it out, I promise. And he’s not going to hurt me, Gabriel. He wouldn’t.”

I wish I was actually sure of that. I wish I had any idea what “figuring it out” meant. Just the thought of doing something to hurt him is enough to make me ill. I’m not strong enough to strangle him or smother him, and he isn’t actually breathing anyway, so what good would that do?

The fact that I’m sitting here in the chilly leaves imagining ways to get rid of the boy I loved so much I brought him back from the dead is so ridiculous, so horrifying, it’s almost funny. In an unbelievable, black humor way that’s not really funny at all.

“I wish I believed that,” Gabriel says, and rests his head against mine, kissing my hair gently.

I can’t tell him that Danny was down in the garage last night, way too close to venturing outside. I can’t tell him that with Danny’s arms around me last night, it had been hard to breathe, harder still to concentrate on winging a makeshift spell with my ribs crushed under Danny’s forearms.

“I just have to get through tomorrow night,” I say instead. “This weekend, I’m going to … well, I don’t know what, but I’ll figure something out. And then…”

I don’t know where that sentence should end. Then what? We can stop hiding? We can date? I can pretend that I didn’t make the most horrible mistake you can make in the name of love and get on with kissing the cute new guy?

I don’t deserve a happy ending. I don’t even deserve a semi-happy ending, because Danny isn’t going to get one. He might have—he might have been in heaven, for all I know, lounging around in his favorite T-shirt with his guitar making the kind of noises he couldn’t quite get it to make while he was alive and pinning his drawings to the clouds. I took that away from him. So I could have him back, so I wouldn’t be alone.

And now, somehow, I’m going to be the one to end his life, again. Kiss of death, that’s me.

“Hey,” Gabriel says, and nuzzles the top of my head. “And then, okay? Just concentrate on there being a then.”

“I know.” I twist around so I can look up at him, the bricks scraping against my back, and find him right there, waiting. There aren’t any more words, not right now, so I kiss him again.

He tastes sweet, and the soft give of his mouth feels like coming home. I lick the curve of his bottom lip before I pull away, and he shudders out a breath and tightens his arm around me before resting his forehead on mine.

Then
feels impossibly far away.

“HEY, ARE YOU LISTENING?”

I drag my gaze away from the window in the butler’s pantry, where I’m holed up with my phone. The yard is dark in the shadow of the trees, and I can barely make out the outline of Mrs. Petrelli’s garage.

“I’m here, sorry. Just trying to figure out this last trig problem.” It’s a lie, of course, but Jess will buy it. I’m worse at trig than she is.

“Wren, it’s almost midnight. Do it tomorrow. Or skip it and beg mercy from Ms. Nardini. She’ll let you off if you just gush about her knockoff Louboutins.”

“Oh yeah, because I really look like the type to be craving Louboutins of my very own,” I say, rolling my eyes. The windowsill is digging into my forearm as I press my nose to the glass and squint into the thick blackness outside. There’s barely a moon tonight.

Mom didn’t go up to bed until almost eleven, and I heard the low hum of her TV for a half hour after that. I had just crept down the stairs to the kitchen when Jess called. I’d forgotten my phone was in the pocket of my hoodie, and it sounded so shrill in the silence, I’d flipped it open without thinking.

And wound up here, huddled in the butler’s pantry, which Mom uses as storage for pretty much anything she doesn’t want to haul up from the basement or find cluttered in the hall—Christmas lights, Robin’s sports stuff, the box from the new toaster, lightbulbs. At least there’s a window.

“All I know is, no homework talk tomorrow night,” Jess says sternly. “Even from Dar. I know she’s freaking about her lit project, but I am not discussing dead nineteenth-century white men on a Friday night.”

I just hope we’re not discussing dead twenty-first-century ones instead.

“Speaking of Friday, it’s after midnight now.” I yawn, trying to make it sound natural. “I have to go to bed.”

“Me too.” Jess sighs. “Okay, see you tomorrow. And if you think of anything you want me to bring tomorrow night, tell me at lunch, huh?”

“Gotcha,” I say, and click the phone shut the moment we say good-bye.

It’s cold tonight, colder than it’s been for weeks, and I shiver in my hoodie as I run across the yard and slip through the hedge. My heart is already a loose fist, knocking clumsy and hard in my chest. I hate being nervous when I climb the stairs now, but Danny has changed so much since that first night, kneeling beside me in the cemetery, clinging and kissing and smiling the smile I loved so much.

A stray branch smacks my thigh as I wriggle through, and I stop in my tracks. The side door to the garage is wide open, and as I watch, it creaks wider in the wind.
No.

“Danny,” I whisper as I run inside. The stairs are pulled down; the broomstick I’ve used to push them up into place the last few days is snapped in half on the gritty cement floor.

I know he’s not up there. I can feel it, a howling emptiness that nearly swallows me, but I clatter up the steps anyway.

The loft is just as empty as I imagined, the stubs of candles left unlit on the floor, the blankets on the mattress heaped carelessly against the wall. Danny’s colored pencils are strewn all over the floor, half of them broken, amid used sheets of paper.

I’m shaking as I kneel and pick one up. The tree again, slashed dark and angry against the cheap copier paper. It’s all there in the pages he left behind—the tree, a flickering candle, the snub nose of Becker’s car, my face, my mouth, my hand. And there, at the edge of the pile, his mother, his dad, his brother, Molly, with her round eyes and the same loose curls Danny has.

I drag in a breath, trying to stave it off, but it’s too late. I lean over as I vomit all over the papers, a foul splash of dinner and bile. Sweat breaks out on my brow and the back of my neck, slimy and cool, as I wipe my mouth.

He remembers. And he’s gone.

It’s so chilly I can see my breath as I walk the streets. The shocked, blinking part of my brain imagines a trail of mist superimposed in crazy circles over the neighborhood, a child’s scribble on a map.

By just after one my teeth are chattering, and I’m halfway between my street and Danny’s. The houses crouch along the streets, folded up for the night like sleeping birds on a wire, window eyes shut. I can’t scream for him, and I can’t even run after a half hour—I’m too cold and my leg muscles are cramping.

It doesn’t usually take so long to walk from my house to Danny’s but I’m being careful, walking the blocks in circles, watching for moving shadows. He may have remembered the accident and the night in the graveyard, but there’s no guarantee he remembers how to get home, or where exactly home is.

I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and it breaks my heart either way.

I’m so panicked, the power inside me is churning in sickening waves. Every time a twig snaps or something moves, I startle, and twice a streak of faint gold light arcs away from me, a sudden flash in the dark. Far down at the end of Dudley, where it turns into Lawrence, the globe in a streetlight explodes, and I have to run when the lights go on in two houses at the sound of shattering glass.

I feel like I could float, fly, so much pure energy is humming through my veins, snaking under my muscles until they’re quivering as I walk down each block. It’s too much, though, too intense, and when a squirrel runs in front of me on McKinley, a skittering gray shape too close to my feet, I muffle a scream of surprise and watch in horror as it explodes into a cloud of dandelion puffs. The wind carries them away in a starburst, pale green stems wheeling along helplessly.

“Oh my God.” I sink to my knees right there on the sidewalk, shaking. I did that. I made a squirrel disappear, change, explode, whatever it was, and I didn’t even mean to.
I did that.

I’ve done so many things now, and in the big picture one harmless squirrel morphing into a weed isn’t exactly tragic, but it doesn’t matter. It feels so wrong, as wrong as the cold pallor of Danny’s skin under my hands, as wrong as the sickly bright sting of pain in my palm when I sliced it open with the athame.

You’re wrong,
that voice whispers, cool and slithering in my head.
All wrong.

I can’t stop shaking. I fumble my phone out of my pocket and press the number for Gabriel.

It rings three times before he picks it up, and I cut right through his sleepy, muffled hello.

“He’s gone. He’s
gone.
I’m walking and I can’t find him and I don’t know where he is, and what if he does something, Gabriel, he drew all these pictures and—”

“Whoa.
Whoa.
Wren, calm down.”

I can’t, not right away—the words tumble out of my mouth, broken and breathless, until Gabriel nearly shouts, “Wren,
stop.
Just hold on, okay? I’m on my way.”

It’s after two when Gabriel runs toward me. I stumble straight into his arms and bury my face in his chest, breathing in his heat.

“Hey.” He strokes my back briskly as I shiver. “You’re frozen.”

I am, but it doesn’t matter. I shrug off his arms and step back, shaking my head. “We have to find him. Come on.”

“Wren, you’re a Popsicle. Just warm up and tell me everything, all right? Slowly.” He bends his head to look me in the eye.

“I told you! He’s gone, Gabriel, and we’re still blocks from his house and—”

“You’re not getting the hang of ‘slowly,’” he says, and pulls me back against him. “Put my jacket on at least.”

It’s got to be near freezing for real now—the grass shimmers with the pale sheen of frost, and the stars are an icy blue. I let him drape the faded army jacket over my shoulders but it’s hard not to just bolt, dragging him along behind me. I’m still jittery, echoes of that explosion of power rippling through me, and I can feel time ticking away, every second another chance that someone has seen Danny, paper white and unreal.

No.
I swallow back another awful surge of bile.

“Come on,” I say, and grab his elbow.

Gabriel blinks in surprise. “
Wait
. Tell me where you’ve looked, where you think he might be.”

“While we walk,” I insist, and the wet heat of tears scalds my cheeks. “Come
on
. Are you going to help me or not?”

“Wren,” he says, and he’s so self-possessed, so logical, talking to me like I’m insane, like he has to be careful or I’ll attack at any moment.

He’s probably not wrong.

“You need to calm down. I can feel the power in you, and it’s like fireworks waiting to be lit.” He steps closer slowly, takes the hand I’ve left outstretched, and closes his fingers around it.