Shadowed Ground (6 page)

“What?”

“Hot chocolate. Milk, with chocolate in it, heated up…”

She slapped his shoulder, the leather of his jacket stinging her palm. “I know what hot chocolate is. Don’t you dare make fun of me when you’ve had your whole life to get used to this… this… thing called a future.”

He ignored the outburst. “It just seems to me that we’re getting things backwards.” When she continued to stare at him as if had lost his mind, he dropped her chin and leaned down until his forehead rested against hers. His skin was cool and slightly damp in the newborn southern night. Her nose was full of the smell of asphalt, leather, and Eliot. “I like hot chocolate, things that go fast, and the color blue,” he whispered solemnly. “I like poetry more than novels because I have a short attention span. And graphic novels. I like too many of those to narrow down a favorite.” He ran his fingers through his dark hair. As always, he managed to tousle it wildly with just one pass. She wondered if his hands carried an electrical charge she didn’t know about, to do that to his hair every time he touched it. “What about you, Chloe? Do you have a favorite book? What’s your favorite flower? Are you a cat or a dog person?” He gripped her shoulders, frustrated. She felt such a strange flickering inside that she briefly revisited her electrical charge hypothesis. “People should know these things about each other before they face death, apocalypse, and insanity together.” She didn’t know how to answer him, or if she even wanted to, so she stayed silent.

He sighed, and tried again. “So do you like it? Hot chocolate? In fact,” he leaned down as if he were about to impart a terrible secret. “Can I buy you some now?” Finally laughing, she tried to slap his jacket again. Predictably, he was faster. He trapped her wrist while his other hand pushed her sweatshirt hood down until she felt the night brush her healing skin. “I know what you’re afraid of. That’s three times in as many minutes you mentioned your scars. Look, Chloe,” he ordered quietly. “It’s dark. The moon’s out. The rest of your skin is fine. Totally normal.” His thumb rubbed the pulse of her wrist in a small circle. “You’re the same person you’ve always been and were meant to be.” He dropped her hand as if he, too, felt the mythical current, and it burned him. “Even if you don’t choose to stay in Gray’s Landing. If you… move on.” He plastered on a pained, crooked smile, his eyes glassy and distant.

“I wish things weren’t backwards, too, Eliot.” She wanted to hold on to her anger, like armor, but his thumb moved lightly over her pulse, soothing her. She wrenched her arm back, embarrassed. “You owe me a hot chocolate,” she blurted out, trying to pull back from the brink of trusting him with more than just her safety; she wanted to trust him with who she was, and who she was becoming.

“Now that,” he said, propelling her across the dark river of possibilities that was also a truck stop parking lot, “was the saddest response to that question I have ever heard.”

He hung back as she wandered the little store. There was more distance between them than he was entirely comfortable with in a strange public place. He was developing a kind of internal radar with Chloe Burke as its only blip. There were two settings that didn’t set off his internal alarms: arm’s length, and sword’s length, away from him. Any further and he grew uncomfortable. Locked doors were just barely manageable, if he was on the other side of them and the locks weren’t too strong. I really did just think that, he realized with disgust. I’m even creeping myself out. Embarrassment warred with instinct as he sank deeper into a rack of cheap t-shirts. And she thinks she’s the freak. If she only knew. He shoved his discomfort down and put it on the list of things he wished he could ask his uncle. Right now, he was exactly two paces and one lunge away from her. As badly as he wanted to shadow her, he forced himself to hang back.

She moved between glassed-in, rotating display cases and shelves of gifts. Then something specific caught her eye. He marked its approximate location as she moved away.

She wandered the few aisles of toys, books, cheap electronics, and other gifts a man who was returning to his family after weeks on the road might bring them. She held a porcelain doll with wild blond ringlets when he slipped behind her. Her slim fingers twined around the doll’s hair, smoothed its fake satin dress, adjusted a shoe. “Some people might find that annoying,” she said without turning. “The way you sneak up on them.”

“Annoyed is the least of what most people would be if I snuck up on them.”

She snorted. “I can’t tell if you’re bragging, or handing out a death threat. It’s kind of sweet, really.”

“I don’t sneak up on you.” The words tumbled out, spiced with indignation. He was losing the ability to surprise her. Just then he’d moved up behind her as quietly as possible and still she’d known.

“That’s true,” she murmured, caressing the doll’s face. “I feel you. Like radar, or something.” He jerked back involuntarily at her near-exact echo of his earlier thoughts. I hope mind reading isn’t next, he thought grimly, but she didn’t respond. “I didn’t expect to find toys,” she murmured. She yanked viciously on the doll’s hair then slammed it back on the shelf. “My father brought me this exact doll home. After a ‘conference.’ But now I have to wonder. How many times did he lie about where he went?” She was flushed; her voice climbed. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pushed her towards the restaurant section, hurrying them away before she drew stares. “He used to say, ‘There are other worlds than these,’ when he wrote in that damn book. But he didn’t just mean myths, or a burned and forgotten world.” She barely noticed when he pushed her into a booth. “He meant this one. Places like this. A world right under my nose. A world where people can just… go.” Her eyes burned into his.

In the bright diner, her skin looked almost translucent. “I don’t expect you to do it, you know,” he said after a long moment of rustling plastic-coated menus. “The binding. The sacrifice. I understand, maybe better than you do, why you wouldn’t want to. But there is no one else.” She didn’t ask him to elaborate. “Just come. Come see my home. Stand on the cliffs and see the stars, so clear and close you try to find them when they fall out of the sky, if you’re eight and extremely lonely.” He grew frustrated, as he always did when he tried to put a feeling like home into words. “Just… promise me. You’ll come. With an open mind.”

She slumped back against the red vinyl seat, wearing her tiny smile. “Even if I had a choice, which I don’t because some maniac boy in black keeps telling me it’s the one place my nightmares can’t kill me, I would still go.”

“Even if something happened to me?” he asked flatly, keeping his eyes on his menu. He watched her brown eyes narrow and flash in fury and fear.

“I already promised, so please shut the hell up now.” She raised her menu as a barrier between them. “You’re making me regret I’m letting you buy me hot chocolate.”

“Will that be two, then?” asked their waitress, dragging out a battered notepad without even looking at them.

“Yes please. With whipped cream, chocolate syrup; the works,” Chloe said with forced cheerfulness. The woman merely grunted and shuffled off.

“What if I don’t want all that stuff on mine?” Eliot queried.

“Who said they were for you?” She smiled at him then. Her mood was lifting, and he felt it too. He wondered again if it was the blood bond between Guardians and Wards.

When their drinks came, Chloe was happy again, digging into her hot chocolate with a spoon. He just wanted to lean in and soak up the bizarre combination of comfort and anger, of fear and grace, which had somehow wound up under his protection.

Chapter Seven: Unethical

Later, he watched as she dumped out the contents of a yellow and red plastic bag, pawing through a collection of tubes and bottles and fabric and gum. He sat uneasily on the edge of the farthest of the queen beds in their motel room, both hands clutching the red comforter as he wondered what to do with his feet. Chloe stood with her back to him, arranging her things around the gold-flecked formica sink. She seized on a toothbrush, still in its plastic. Slim fingers stripped the clear casing with unexpected clumsiness. Her dark eyes met his in the mirror. He remembered a doe he’d surprised at the creek at sunrise in Gray’s Landing. They both had the same shy frozen grace. Then, as now, he retreated first.

“Did you find what you needed?” He rolled onto his back, staring up at the stucco ceiling. He was edgy; he hadn’t grown up around girls. He had Callista, of course, but she was like a second mother to him. He didn’t have sisters or close female friends. The only girls he’d ever been around for extended periods of time were as lost and hard-edged as him. The kind of girls who never relaxed their guard because they were too damaged or opportunistic or predatory. In Austin, when he’d run away for a week long music festival, he’d woken up to a girl with dirty blond hair, spider web tattoos and a knife at his throat, going through the jacket he was using as a blanket. It was the first time he’d ever hurt a woman, getting that knife away from her. He still hadn’t forgotten her feral gray eyes, caked with black eyeliner, as she hissed in outrage instead of pain. Whatever she was on hadn’t let her feel the pain.

He’d slept on the floor at Chloe’s feet. He’d changed her sweat-soaked clothes and put on round after endless round of fresh bandages when she was poisoned and hurting. He’d taken care of her. But this was different. This was a hotel room, not his own familiar second home. A microcosm of the new reality in which she had no one but him, here they were off the map.

“Mostly I did,” she said, handling her purchases as if performing an esoteric rite. She picked up a silver tube, uncapped it and smelled. He wondered what magic it held, to make her whole body relax. She twisted her hair into a loose knot with practiced ease before testing the running water with the inside of one wrist. Her hands conjured a growing mass of foamy bubbles with smooth circular motions. “I still need to go shopping,” she said, her words uneven and garbled as her face disappeared into the steaming sink. “Your clothes make me look like a boy.”

“I highly doubt that,” he told the top of her head, reflected back to him in the mirror. He resolutely did not think of her dressed in his second-favorite t-shirt, a threadbare remnant of a long-dead Atlanta radio station. He tried to ignore the pair of his boxers that, even rolled at her waist, still hung from her hips.

But nothing could erase the picture of her handprint scars, like trapped wings. They were an angry shiny red shot through with silver across her bent neck.

She finished at the sink and practically stalked over to him. He remained perfectly, rigidly still as the bed dipped with her weight. She lay flat on her back beside him.

Perfectly, rigidly still. A cobweb on the ceiling. She smells like flowers, he thought as their combined weight on the mattress rolled them slightly towards each other. A crack in the stucco. Eyes unblinking. Perfectly, rigidly still.

She sighed happily. Not for you, he thought. Guardians don’t get to be with their Wards. Cass told you, time and again…it’s unbalanced. Unethical. He nodded minutely. She has only you, so she’s not for you. Another sigh followed by movement. Her hair, damp from steam, across his cheek. She rested her head against his.

He realized he could feel her heart beating, feel her breath on his face. Inches. She was only inches away. Their weight had rolled her on her side to face him without realizing.

“I don’t remember Annwyn.” Her bitten lip was swollen, her words barely a whisper. “Tell me something.” She let gravity press the entire length of her body against his. “Tell me about the ceremony that made you my Guardian.” She caught his hand and brought it up between them, weaving their fingers together against the speeding, crashing thing that was his heart. “What did we promise? What were the vows?”

Perfectly, rigidly still. He had fallen against the warm weight of her as easily, as naturally, as water rolls downhill. As easily as breathing. Only he wasn’t breathing. He was drowning. “Um.” He had to dig to find his voice. “Well.” Flowers and heat, soft curves and expectant eyes. He couldn’t breathe. His throat was closing, his vision graying. Was this what Cass warned against, reacting to her nearness, her body against his?

She needs you. You can’t do this.

He sat up so fast the world was a hurricane with him at the eye.

“Eliot?” He felt her reaching for him, felt her alarm and hurt through the same bond she asked about. The bond he was perilously close to breaking. “Are you all right?” Her voice climbed as it did right before she got really upset. He forestalled her with the flat of his palm.

“A moment,” he said, getting his breath back. He moved back an arm’s length. He would keep that between them. He must.

But he could tell from her face, from her taut, angry, empty arms, that she didn’t understand. He would make her, then. It was what they both needed, to understand why this could never be.

“First, they cut us. Here.” He indicated his palm with a vertical slash. He smiled. “You cried when they did that.”

“But not you.” It was not a question, but he nodded anyway.