Cold Kiss (9 page)

I grab his arm, trying to pull him back to me. The silver light through the window is murky, but his eyes are gleaming.

Polished stones,
I think, remembering my dream, and pull harder.

“Remember where we went after that?” I ask him. I’m trying not to panic—he’s immovable, completely still, watching me, and I feel small, weak.

Breakable.

Danny never had much of a temper, but this isn’t really Danny in too many ways to count. I know that my Danny would never have hurt me, would have stepped in front of a bus before hitting me, but this Danny? I’m suddenly not sure. As cold as he is, I can feel the heat of fury in his stare.

“Remember?” I say again, and my voice is really shaking now, giving the word at least four extra syllables. Panic is fluttering like a trapped bird in my chest, and the air snaps with electricity. “We found that great diner on Broadway and you ordered the cheeseburger that was as big as your head.”

I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore, but I let the words keep coming, the cherry cheesecake we shared, the long, windy walk back to the PATH station, the woman with the blind Great Dane and the feathered hat, the ridiculous T-shirt Danny bought from the vendor in the train station.

After a minute, he softens, and his eyes fall shut, maybe picturing the scenes I’m describing. I pull him toward me again, gently, slowly, and he comes, stretches out beside me to bury his nose in my hair.

“I remember,” he says, and I can only hope he means that stupid vampire shirt.

Gabriel throws a pen at me in trig, and I jerk out of a doze before Ms. Nardini notices. I scrawl “thank you” on my notebook, but he doesn’t smile, just nods.

I can’t worry about him or his hurt feelings—I’m barely functional, even with two cups of coffee before school. It was close to two thirty before I snuck back into the house last night, and the four hours of sleep I got feels more like four minutes.

Anyway, looking at him is no easier than being with Danny. Every time I spot him out of the corner of my eye, I can hear his voice in my ear, feel his hand on my back, smell the musky boy scent of his shirt against my cheek.

But that was just a dream. What happened with Danny last night was real, and that’s what frightens me.

I drag myself through my morning classes and stumble into the cafeteria at lunchtime, desperate for more caffeine and a chance to put my head down and pass out, but Jess is waiting when I walk through the doors.

“Sit with me?” she says simply, and I can only nod. I can’t screw this up on top of everything else, and even if I can’t tell her anything about what’s going on, I find myself hoping that we can hang out like we used to. Laughing at things only we understand, finishing each other’s sentences, passing each other the parts of our lunch that we don’t want but the other might.

She takes a table by the windows while I get a soda and a hot dog with Tater Tots. It looks disgusting, but it’s better than the nothing I packed, and at least it’ll give me something to do with my hands.

Jess has a salad from the gourmet deli downtown, and she hands me a pile of mushrooms and green peppers as soon as I sit down. I grin and toss a Tater Tot into her greens, and she smirks. It feels good, almost like normal, until I realize, just like with Darcia, I have no idea what to say. I don’t know what Jess is up to lately outside of trig problems, and that’s a pretty lame subject to get into.

But as soon as she swallows her Tater Tot, she launches into a story about how Ian Sparks left a note in Diane Cashdollar’s locker this morning, complete with earnest declarations of love and, apparently, hand-drawn hearts.

The funniest thing about this is that Ian is gorgeous and six foot two, but because he’s a freshman, he’s completely off Diane’s radar. She’s a senior, and she takes gorgeous to a whole other level. If she had any sense, she’d ditch Mark Collins, who cheats on her during every away football game, especially since Ian is sweet, and will probably treat her like the princess she desperately wants to be.

She doesn’t have any sense, though, so that’s that. And I hate to sympathize with Ian, since I think he’s more boob-struck than love-struck, anyway.

Gossip takes us safely through the lunch period, and when we walk out, Jess seems as much like her old self as I could have hoped. She even elbows me, teasing and grinning, when we separate in the west hall to go our own ways. It makes World Lit easy, since I can tell Darcia that we ate lunch together, but none of it erases the low hum of worry just under the surface.

It’s all stirred up inside me, this bubbling happiness that maybe I didn’t completely screw up my friendship with Jess and Darcia, and a hot, twisting sickness in my gut at the thought of what Danny might say or do when I climb up to the loft. The mess of it is making me dizzy, and when I walk home I drag the wind along with me, a chilly swirl that blows up my jacket and settles on the back of my neck.

I’m taking the long way home, too, which is stupid. If anything, the longer I take to get there, the more frantic Danny will be.

This end of Dudley is busy with North Avenue so close, a rush of cars zipping in either direction, and I have no warning when a hand closes over my shoulder. I’m so startled, I nearly trip over my own feet, but Gabriel grabs my arm and pulls me upright.

“Sorry,” he says, and he looks so stricken I can’t be mad.

“It’s okay. I was … somewhere else.” I huddle into my coat as we stand there on the corner of Dudley and Forest, even though I know I’m the reason for the cold fingers of air pushing through Gabriel’s hair.

“Hey, I just wanted to tell you…” He tilts his head to one side, steps a little closer. “I asked around about you. I know you probably didn’t want me to, but I know about Danny.”

I can’t help it—I hear the words and I blow wide open, a door banging in the wind.

I see my mistake as soon as I make it—Gabriel meant he heard about Danny dying, probably figured it explained why I run so hot and cold, and wanted nothing more than to offer sympathy. Instead, his mouth hangs open as he stares, and I wonder what he’s seeing. The graveyard in the moonlight, candles flickering in a closed circle? The loft with its ratty nest of a bed and the boy waiting on it, pale and still?

“Wren.”
Gabriel grabs my arm again, harder this time, pulling me off the corner and up Forest, behind the screen of a giant maple, its nude branches creaking overhead like bones. “Wren, what did you do?”

IT’S TOO MUCH—THAT HUMMING ENERGY surges inside me and a branch snaps above us, clattering to the ground only two feet away. Gabriel’s fingers dig into my upper arm, and he steers me back toward Dudley. I’m breathless, trying to keep up, when I manage to get out, “Wait, stop, my house is that way.”

“Later,” he says, grim and determined, and we cover two blocks in a blur, leaves crunching underfoot as we head toward Prospect. Five minutes later we’re climbing the stairs inside a rambling old house and he’s shoving a key into the door on the second floor.

“Sit,” he says tersely, and I bristle.

“What are you, my father?” It’s stupid, and hardly the point, but I don’t care. I’m horrified and panicked and exhausted, and that’s just on the surface. Beneath all of that it’s even darker, smoky and dirty and wrong and regretful, and I close my eyes as I drop onto the sagging sofa.

Gabriel ignores me and goes into the kitchen through the arch to the right, and I hear the tap running, the distant
snick
as a burner is lit. I’m trembling, blood racing so fast through my veins I can practically feel the hot course of it snaking in and out of my heart. I drag my feet onto the sofa and wrap my arms around my legs, willing myself to calm down.

This is bad. I know there are words worse than
bad,
but I can’t even think of them. I was stupid to let Gabriel get close, and now who knows what could happen?

I startle when wood scrapes against the bare floor and open my eyes to find Gabriel sitting on the coffee table in front of me. He hands me a glass of water.

“Here. Until the tea’s ready.”

I take it, sloshing some over the edge since my hand is still shaking. It’s cool and wet and just what I didn’t know I needed, and when I’m done, I hand the glass back to Gabriel.

His eyes are dark gray now, the color of a coming storm, and I swallow hard. He’s seen things about me no one has seen, not even Mom, and it’s frightening. I don’t want to lie all the time, but I don’t want to be judged, either.

I do enough of that for everybody.

“Does anyone know?” he says, setting the glass on the table next to him.

I snort. “Are you high? Who would believe it?”

He doesn’t even flinch, and I bite my lip. The snark comes naturally, but he doesn’t deserve it.

“Tell me.” He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, and he’s so close I catch the scent from my dream, cotton and boy sweat and something else, too, sharp and bright.

It’s instinct again that makes me delay the inevitable. “Tell you what?”

“All of it. I mean, I could tell you had power, but this is…” He shakes his head. “Tell me.”

I wish I could just let him
see
instead. It’s suddenly so shameful, my grief, my need, my selfish, ridiculous belief that I could have what no one else gets to have without consequences.

I can’t believe I was actually stupid enough to think I could bring my boyfriend back from the
dead
and walk off into some movie happy ending.

I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn’t check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now.

“Tell me,” he repeats, and circles his fingers around the stalk of my ankle.

Instead of intimidating me, it grounds me, connecting us, and I raise my gaze to his face again.

“What did you hear about how he died?”

“Does it matter?”

It doesn’t, I guess. Death is death, and if Danny had died of some horrible, lingering disease, I can’t imagine I would have mourned differently, or less.

What matters is how much I loved him. How well I loved him. That’s where it all started, right or wrong.

I want to tell Gabriel that, explain that much, at least—I didn’t do what I did on a whim. I didn’t take it lightly, even if I didn’t really understand what it would mean.

Before I can say anything, though, he squeezes gently, and nods. “I know. I can … I know that part. Tell me the rest.”

Bringing Danny back was nothing like what I had imagined.

I wasn’t exactly functional those first few days after Ryan called with the news. I remember snatches—the smoking hole in my floor, my mother’s hand on my head, steady and soft, Jess and Darcia hovering in the door to my room, their faces blurred through my tears and sheer exhaustion. Until the funeral, I didn’t move far off my bed, curled up under the covers, even in the July heat, holding on to a green and blue wool scarf of Danny’s because it smelled like him.

It wasn’t until two days after the funeral, when I saw the pictures of the crash, that I thought of the fragile white paper bird I had created.

I spent the next week on the internet, holed up in my room with the groaning laptop I shared with Mom and Robin. By the end of the third day, my eyes were burned dry and my head hurt from staring at the screen too long, but I had a few ideas about where I could look for spells. Just the thought of it made a nervous thrill ripple beneath my skin—whatever it was that I could do, it had always just happened before. The most I had ever done was concentrate on what I wanted, like the rain in Robin’s room. A spell seemed so foreign, strangely official. But I was pretty sure I couldn’t just wish Danny back to life.

Once last year, before I met Danny, I had asked Aunt Mari about whether she’d ever looked into incantations or lore about the craft. We were shopping at the thrift store on the south side, picking through old clothes and vintage stuff for her Halloween costume, and she looked up at me over a rack of circa-1980s dresses and frowned.

“I don’t think of it that way,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she thought about it. “I know other people do, even people who can do what we do, I guess. But it’s more natural than that to me, and that’s part of the gift. Figuring out what you can do, using your skill organically, the same way you would if you figured out you were a good cook. Then you might add ingredients to things or create your own recipes.”

It sounded a little woo-woo even to me, and I was thankful she’d lowered her voice. But she was serious, and I knew it. When I thought back, I couldn’t remember her or Mom ever reading a book of spells, and certainly not brewing up some potion on the stove, what I remembered was how spontaneous it always seemed, spur-of-the-moment magic that just sort of happened.

She grabbed a long black dress off the rack and sucked her cheeks in as she held it up to her chest. “Morticia Addams is probably too much for the preschool Halloween parade, huh?”

And that was that. I didn’t push, not then, and after Danny was dead I definitely didn’t want anyone to suspect what I was thinking about, so I just started poking around the web and the library, looking up anything I could find on the occult.

The occult.
Even the thought that what I was doing qualified as the occult seemed wrong somehow, not that it stopped me. I hopped a train into the city one Saturday morning, and it was sort of frightening, how easy some of the stuff was to find, once I knew where to look. Maybe no one without the power I had could work a spell, but maybe they could. And there were road maps all over the place, it turned out, for anyone who wanted to make the trip.

I found the book I needed in a little store way down on the Lower East Side. It was tiny, down a short flight of steps in the basement of an old row house, and the whole place wore its coat of dust as if it just couldn’t be bothered to take it off anymore. Half of the shelves were empty, and the signs behind the register were all badly hand-lettered on ancient, yellowing pieces of notebook paper.