Elegy (16 page)

Joshua watched me for a while, studying me. And slowly, I saw him figure out what was really going on in my head. I wanted to cover every possible scenario, because—one way or another—I wouldn’t be here next Sunday. Realizing this, Joshua leaned forward and wrapped his hand around mine on the swing’s chain.

“Amelia, what
happened
last night, after we left you?”

Still holding on to the chain, I let my fingers slip through Joshua’s until our hands were entwined. Then, as I had promised I would always do, I told him all about my discussion with Melissa. I didn’t mince words. As plainly as possible, I explained to him that, whether the darkness captured me or the light finally allowed me to join it, I couldn’t stay here in the living world with him. That was the awful punch line of our love story: until he died and joined me on one side or the other, we wouldn’t be together after Saturday.

By now, Jillian had rejoined the conversation, albeit silently. Like Joshua, she stared at me with a dawning kind of horror. But unlike her brother, she wasn’t too stricken to interrupt me, just as I finished.

“That’s not fair,” she insisted, wiping angrily at the fresh set of tears that had sprung up in her eyes. “They can’t do this to you.”

Seeing those tears, I came to my own realization: against all odds, Jillian Mayhew cared about me; she might even have considered me her friend. I glanced between her and her brother, and then smiled softly.

“If it makes you guys feel better, I haven’t completely decided what I want to do yet. But I do know one thing: no matter where I go, I want your friends safe, and I want
you
safer.”

Neither of them replied, at least not verbally. Instead, Joshua untangled our fingers and stood up from his swing. Then he moved in front of me and held out one hand for me to take. I did so, allowing him to pull me up from my swing as well. When he turned and began tugging me gently toward Jillian’s car, I gave him some resistance so that he would pause.

“Where are we going?” I asked, sharing a frown with Jillian as she joined us.

With a quiet sigh, Joshua turned back around to face me. “I guess we’re going home to plan our next attack.”

Chapter
TWENTY

I
t had been almost four days since Joshua and Jillian had agreed to enlist their friends in our fight, but Joshua still hadn’t touched me. Not once. He had plenty of incentive: we were finally able to touch again, we had less than one week together, and he obviously needed something to distract him from the grief of losing Ruth. Yet Joshua wouldn’t so much as let his arm brush mine when we sat next to each other, eating leftover sympathy casseroles at his dining table.

Granted, he and I hadn’t been able to spend much time alone together since Sunday. Between school, the Wednesday-night baseball game he couldn’t get out of, and the family’s frantic preparations for what promised to be a hugely attended funeral, we hardly had time to share three words, much less a kiss. Still, I knew Joshua well enough to recognize when I was on the receiving end of a cold shoulder.

I’d been patient—quiet even, considering the fact that I might only have a few more days to speak freely. But by Thursday afternoon, I’d finally had enough. Joshua had just arrived home from baseball practice—something he couldn’t avoid, even for family reasons, if he wanted to earn a college scholarship this spring. Jillian and I were sitting at the breakfast table, discussing how best to break the news to her friends that they were possible demon bait.

When Joshua breezed past us with a brief, noncommittal hello, I pushed away from the table and stormed up the stairs after him. Once I caught up to him at the top of the landing, I tapped firmly on his shoulder and mentally prepared my tirade. Joshua paused, one hand on the doorknob to his bedroom, and then turned slowly around to show me his irritated scowl.

“May I help you?” he asked flatly.

I sputtered for a second, confused. Then, without warning, I reached around him, opened his door, and yanked him into the bedroom with me. Using the back of my foot, I slammed the door shut behind us.

“What are you
doing
?” I demanded.

Still wearing that annoyed scowl, Joshua folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t know what you mean, Amelia.”

“Of course you do!” I threw my hands in the air in exasperation. “You’ve been avoiding me ever since we all came back from Robber’s Cave.”

“I’ve been busy.”

He shrugged, as if that was explanation enough for ignoring the girl you supposedly loved, during what might be your last week on earth together. For a second I blanched, fighting the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. So many feelings rushed through me: sadness, fury, loss, disbelief. Finally, all I could do was shrug, too.

“I understand.”

I let my head fall so that I couldn’t see his eyes anymore. Then I turned away from him and reopened his bedroom door. Before I could cross the threshold, however, Joshua’s hand shot past my shoulder and landed flat against the door. He didn’t slam it like I had, but instead waited until I’d let go of the knob to push it softly shut.

For an endless, fraught moment, we both held our positions: him, propped against the door by his palm; me, facing it because I couldn’t bring myself to look at him again. Eventually, I mustered enough courage to turn back around. My knees nearly buckled at what I saw in his face.

Joshua wasn’t crying, but his tired eyes were redder than I’d ever seen them. His mouth had twisted in its attempt to hold back his emotions—a battle that I could tell it would soon lose. Apparently, his crisis of faith had finally resolved itself, in the worst possible way. My beautiful, sunny Joshua had been breaking for weeks, and now the break was complete.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered shakily. “I’m . . . I’m not as good at dealing with loss as you are. And I . . .” Here he paused to draw an unsteady breath. “I’m not ready to lose you. I’m just not. I just . . . can’t.”

At the last word, his shoulders slumped forward and he seemed to fold in on himself. I should have said something comforting, or tried to convince him that he wouldn’t lose me. In other words, I should have lied.

Instead, I focused every part of myself upon Joshua and then threw myself against him. Within the span of a few seconds we went from standing apart to falling together onto his bed. I kissed him until I couldn’t breathe—until he kissed me back just as fiercely. I wrapped one of my legs around his hip and spun with him across the bed, tangling myself in his sheets and in his arms.

In between our kisses, I whispered feverishly, “I love you, I love you.” He panted the words back to me, running his hands through my long hair and using it to tug me gently to him again. Other than those whispers, we didn’t speak, and we didn’t have to. Both of us felt the same need to consume each other, to breathe each other’s breath until one of us stopped breathing altogether.

Joshua paused, midkiss, and then pulled away slightly. By this point he’d positioned himself over me and now he looked down on me with so much tenderness that I felt the fissure in my heart crackle and expand. With one hand on my hip and the other cupped softly around the back of my neck, Joshua leaned in close to my ear.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please.”

I knew what he was asking, and it wasn’t for me to make love to him; it was for me to stay—to find some way to stay here, in this world, with him. Unfortunately, that was the one request I had no power to fulfill.

In lieu of an answer, I slipped my hands beneath his shirt and, in one swift motion, tugged it over his head. He didn’t try to stop me but instead moved his hands beneath my shirt as well. After he’d positioned his fingers along my hemline, he hesitated, clearly asking me for permission. I gave him a quick but fierce peck on the lips, and he nodded in acknowledgment. Then he slid my shirt off slowly, so that the silk brushed deliciously along my stomach and arms.

Once he’d done that, however, he surprised me by catching my gaze fully and holding it.

“I love you,” he said simply.

I smiled and traced his lower lip with my forefinger. “I love you, Joshua. And I always will.”

He returned my smile, and then returned his mouth to mine.
This is it
, I thought.
This is finally it.

My heart began to knock loudly against my ribs. So loudly that I thought my heart sounded like someone knocking on a wooden door.
Exactly
like it, in fact.

“Joshua?” Rebecca’s voice called from the other side of the closed door. “Joshua, are you doing homework?”

Damn
, I thought.
Damn, damn, damn.

With no small amount of reluctance either, Joshua pulled his lips from mine to answer, “Uh . . . yeah, Mom. Just . . . finishing up some Anatomy.”

I had to clap my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling. Even though we’d been interrupted, I somehow felt lighter, happier. Strange, how his touch could do that to me: reconnect me to him in away that I doubted would ever break again. No matter what happened this weekend.

“Well, when you get to a stopping place,” Rebecca continued, “can you come downstairs? A few of our guests arrived early, and I’d like you to say hello.”

My stomach did a little flip. I knew that I would see the young Seers in just a few minutes, and that I would need to be ready to brief them on our plans. But even though I knew what I needed to say, I hadn’t entirely prepared myself to actually
see
them. Particularly after how our first meeting had ended.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Joshua called out to his mom, rolling away from me with a final brush of fingertips across my bare stomach. Despite my worries, I smiled, luxuriating in the touch for another few seconds before joining him off the bed.

While he dug around on the floor for our clothes, I couldn’t help but stare at him hungrily. Joshua bent back up, caught me looking, and grinned. He held my shirt out for me and, when I reached for it, he pulled it back slightly so that I had to stretch to grab it. I laughed and took it easily from his hands.

We began to slip our shirts back on, but neither of us could stop peeking at each other. Still laughing, Joshua yanked his shirt into place and then wrapped me in a playful hug as I finished with my clothing.

“Hey,” I teased, “if you keep doing this, I won’t be able to fix my haystack hair.”

“You’re beautiful, even with bed head,” he whispered into the nape of my neck, and I shivered happily. Then I pulled away so that I really could put myself back together. Once we both looked somewhat presentable, I placed my hand in his and let him lead me out of the bedroom and down the hallway.

I had a fleeting moment of worry that his mother would notice we’d come downstairs together, and rightly suspect what we’d been up to. But when we crossed through the archway leading into the kitchen, an entirely new set of worries replaced that one.

The three young Seers I’d met this Christmas in New Orleans were sprawled across the Mayhews’ kitchen like they owned the place, all but ignoring their older relatives. Drew and Hayley were practically slobbering over each other at the breakfast table, near a disgusted Jillian and Scott; and Annabel looked cool and collected as she leaned against the kitchen island.

None of their behavior was particularly unnerving. But my mouth dropped open when I saw the person leaning against the island with Annabel. Actually, I saw his eyes first—a clear, gorgeous blue, offset by his smooth coffee-and-cream skin. He caught my shocked stare and flashed me a wide grin.

“Hey, Amelia,” he drawled.

“Felix!” I cried out joyfully.

“It’s good to see you, too. And it’s good to see you looking so . . . happy.”

He was referring to my flushed, post-make-out-session appearance, obviously. My blush deepened as Rebecca turned away from the dishes that she’d been washing in the kitchen sink.

“Oh. Do you two know each other, Amelia?” she asked, clearly surprised.

“Uh . . . yeah,” I replied awkwardly. “He was . . . at that party that Jillian picked me up from in New Orleans. Felix was one of the nice guys.”

“Yeah, that’s how we met, too,” Annabel offered, slipping her arm around Felix’s waist. I watched her do so, confused until it hit me: Felix had arrived
with
Annabel. And they were . . . dating? Felix noticed my confusion, and his grin widened.

“Annabel brought me for moral support,” he explained. While Rebecca wasn’t looking, Felix used his free, non-Annabel-occupied hand to make air quotes around the phrase “moral support.” The two of them winked meaningfully at me, and I finally understood: Annabel must have contacted Felix for help this weekend, and he had tagged along under the pretense of being her new boyfriend. Funny, they seemed awfully cozy for a fake couple.

“That’s sweet of you,” Rebecca said, her voice once again muffled by the sounds of clanking dishes. “Just so you kids know: there’s going to be a big family dinner tonight, up at the community center. Y’all are welcome to eat with us, but we figured that you teenagers would want to spend some time away from all the adults. Considering . . . what we have to do tomorrow.”

The mood among the young Seers grew solemn for a moment. No matter what we had planned for Saturday, tomorrow’s first order of business would be Ruth’s funeral—an event that no one had expected to attend. Not yet, anyway.

Annabel broke the melancholy silence first, shifting forward from the island and gesturing to the rest of us. “That’s a good idea, Aunt Rebecca. I think we’ll all go outside to talk about what we want to do tonight.”

Annabel made a sort of round-’em-up circle with one hand. In various states of enthusiasm and reluctance, the rest of us followed her down the back hallway and out onto the patio. Annabel waited until the back door had shut solidly behind Drew and Hayley before she turned toward us with an intent expression. But before she spoke, she caught my eye.

“Okay if I talk about
my
ideas for Saturday?” she asked me. “Jillian’s already briefed us on what happened the last two times you guys tried to fight the demons.”

I blinked back, startled. Then, for lack of anything better to do, I nodded at her and resisted the urge to say “proceed.”

Now that she apparently had permission, Annabel settled against a deck chair and shifted her messenger bag forward. I’d assumed it was a purse, but as she began to remove strange, witchy-looking items from it, I realized that the bag served as some sort of supply kit. None of the items themselves—candles, spell books, etc.—really surprised me. Not until she pulled out a wide-mouthed jar full of what looked like gray powder.