Grinning, he pulls her with him as he turns to leave. “Trust me; it’ll be fun.”
Chapter 18 HER
LUCY HASN’T BEEN BACK TO THE LAKE FOR weeks, not since the day Colin walked with her around the entire lakeside trail and she discovered what she now knows is the site of her murder. So while Colin and Jay prep their bikes, she wanders off, taking the time to actually look around. Winter has dug its claws into this part of the world, and everything looks at once more barren and also softer. Snow blankets everything, tree branches are softened with white and blue reflected from the glacial water. In her memory, the autumn leaves are flames and her disorienting awakening is a hell long since past.
She finds where she landed and for some reason is surprised that no traces remain. There’s no girl-shaped bruise in the earth, no chalk outline of a body. She fell, she’s here, and it’s time to carry on.
Heading back to the lake, she sees Jay and Colin on the ice, zipping around.
“Wait,” she says. “You’re riding on the lake?”
“Yeah. It’s frozen,” Colin says, hopping up and down on his bike. The tires squeak against the ice as if in agreement. “Solid.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Absolutely,” Jay calls.
Before she can respond, Colin has his hands up, placating. “No, no, honestly, it’s safe. It’s at least three inches thick, and we do it all the time.”
He clearly expects her to be horrified—anyone hearing this should be horrified—but Lucy isn’t. She’s only curious. Three inches thick doesn’t sound like a lot, and she gives in to the strange high that suddenly tears through her. She almost believes if she looked down at her arms she would see red blood surging through newly solid veins. Sitting on a snowbank at the lakeshore, Lucy watches the two boys trace snakes of tire prints in the thin layer of crunchy snow on the surface.
She’s never seen Colin like this before. She loves how loose he is, how he lets the bike be hard while he prefers flexibility, molding to its movements, sliding over the pedals and leaning into the force of every sharp turn. He spells her name in the layer of snow over ice, and he hops on his front tire from a soft embankment, landing in a crouch on the pedals.
“Wanna try?” he calls.
Shaking her head quickly, she answers, “No.”
He laughs and pedals over, carefully kissing her cheek. He looks down at her, as if surprised. It feels different here, where it’s snowing and the air is heavy with water on the verge of solidifying. She presses her fingers to her skin when he leaves, pushing the memory of the sensation farther inside.
Jay spends a while packing snow into a ramp, and they take turns launching from it. The ice creaks when they land where the tire tracks have patterned the lake, and they instinctively shift the angle of their jumps to avoid the spot.
Despite their care and obvious skill, she looks down, suddenly unable to watch. Instead, she focuses on the way her skin swirls in the strange blue light. Tiny ice crystals land on her arm and then sink in, becoming part of her. Colin bikes over and kisses her again, releasing a puff of steam against her face. It disappears into her cheek.
“Jump’s ready,” Jay yells from the middle of the lake.
Colin pedals away from her before turning and taking off hard down the hill and onto the ramp. He flies through the air, his torso twists and arches, and for only a moment, she can see his eyes close in euphoria, can imagine what it would be like to see him make that face closer to her own. His arms flex and his hands squeeze the grips as he recovers and lands. Releasing a loud “Whoop!” he circles back as Jay takes off. Over and over they ride the ramp, and each turn their jumps are more daring, their lands are more solid, and their cheeks glow redder in the frigid air.
“I’m starving,” Jay yells as he bikes to the lake’s edge and pulls his phone from his pocket to check the time.
“You’re always starving. Ten more minutes.” Colin pedals to Lucy. “Are you bored?”
As soon as she shakes her head, he’s off again. But this time, what has to be his twentieth jump, Lucy can tell immediately that he’s crooked—too far to the right—and when he lands, the ice splits open with a deafening crack.
Water, blue and sharp, bubbles up and across the surface. Colin slips under as if he’s melted into the lake; there’s not even a moment when he gripped anything but his bike handles. It all happens so fast, but the yawning pause after he disappears feels like it lasts a year, and never has the world been more silent.
He’s gone. Beneath the snow and thick ice. Lucy is screaming and Jay is screaming, digging his arms into the water, reaching wildly for Colin. The first thought hits her like a dark shadow: When he’s dead, will he be able to find her?
“Colin!” Jay yells, lying flat on the ice and leaning over the jagged hole. He shoves his arms in again and again, feeling for any trace of a body. The ice where he leans groans and cracks, and he scrambles back as Colin appears and punches at the solid surface. Jay tries to grab his hand, but he can’t reach him.
“GET HIM!” Lucy screams, scrambling closer to the edge. “Jay, get him out. Get him out. Get him out!”
Jay lunges, but Colin is too far away, now moving beneath the ice in the wrong direction. Lucy shoves him aside and dives in without thought, but the water pushes her up, bobbing her uselessly against the ice. She has no strength against the weight of water that presses into her. Colin falls unconscious, his face eerily blue as he begins to slip away. It makes him look already preserved.
With a surge of wild strength, she ducks under to grab his sinking hand, pulling his arm close enough that Jay can grab him. He’s screaming so many words at her as he pulls Colin out, but she doesn’t hear any of them because she’s already out and up, running for help.
She charges down the trail, screaming her head off and intent on heading straight for the kitchen or Joe’s or somewhere where someone can help. She falls in the snow and gets up again, clothes leaden with water that’s quickly turning to ice and limbs propelled by terror.
“Luce?”
It has to be a hallucination. In his voice she hears relief. But it’s impossible because she just left him unconscious and frozen and dying on the lake.
“Luce, stop!”
Whipping around, she sees Colin behind her on the trail. Somehow he manages to both smile and apologize with his eyes. “Stop,” he says. “Please.”
She can’t see through him, can’t blink him away. He’s there, saying her name one more time and waiting for her to respond, hands curled into fists at his sides.
Relief floods her so rapidly that she’s choking on words, unable to speak. All she can do is turn and run, throw her entire body against his. He catches her, and where he has always been hard and too solid, now he’s simply warm and perfect. His forearms wrap around her back, pulling her to him, and he presses his face into her neck. Not too hot, not too much. Just Colin and the contours of eyes and lips and nose and chin against her skin. She feels him kissing her, feels his mouth open on her throat, his lips tasting her skin before he whispers, “Hi.”
Strange, but perfect. They feel the same.
She wants to scream words of relief into the air. Her question, “How did you get out?” comes out shrill, her voice disappearing in a rasp at the end.
Colin silently bends and kisses where her neck dips into her shoulder. “Where are we?” he whispers, voice heavy with awe. “Is this how it always looks to you?”
“Where is Jay?” she asks, looking behind him down the trail. Muffled shouting drifts from the lake, and Lucy registers with a leaden clarity that Jay is there, panicking.
But Colin is here. And dry.
Understanding seeps into her, slow and thick. His skin is like her skin and it’s warm and soft and familiar. His skin isn’t freezing. Looking back down the trail again and behind Jay’s crouched body, Lucy can see the top of Colin’s soaking-wet hair and a single unmoving hand against the ice.
Panic and confusion flood her. “Hey,” she says, tugging at his hair so that he meets her eyes. And it’s then that she finally sees what he sees when he looks at her: His irises swirl, flames licking. Where his used to be amber-dark, honey flecked with gold, now they are molten. He’s afraid, excited, and hopeful.
And she can see, too, that he knows something is wrong. He knows and he doesn’t care.
“Just touch me.” He shakes his head, looking around as if caught inside a wholly different world. “Just pretend it’s okay.”
She nods, lifting herself on her tiptoes to kiss him. Lips press, tongues touch, and then it deepens, finally. The warmth and wet of a real kiss, the vibrating taste of his sounds, and the pressing hunger of Colin finally able to take more. He grows frantic, and a spreading tingle engulfs her skin, flames down her neck and across her chest. She feels the heat in ten pulses in her fingers, ten pulses in her toes. And yet, while his eyes fall closed, hers cannot. She’s simply fascinated with what’s happening. He exhales through his nose and lets out a sound of longing that is so strained and tight, she digs her fingers into his hair, wraps everything that she can around him.
But it isn’t enough; she’s not strong enough to keep him yet.
Somehow, in the split second before it happens, she feels it. A small jerk to the back of his ribs, the impact of life being forced back into him. Or of him being forced back to life. And then he’s gone, hurled backward through the air, gasping and choking, propelled by an invisible band around his chest. Lucy is left alone on the trail where, for an achingly perfect moment, he was just like her.
Chapter 19 HIM
THE CHANGE IS SLOW AT FIRST: SILENCE IS broken by a rhythmic beep. Darkness gives way to light. Numbness bleeds into pain.
He’s somewhere between awake and asleep. Or, maybe, alive and dead.
Colin always thought that dying would be the hard part. But feeling life seep back into his body is pain unlike anything he’s ever known.
It burns. His fingertips feel capped with lead weights, red with heat. Every inch of his skin pricks and pulses; the pain is so intense he can hear it, as if he’s on fire and the flames lick and tick near his ears.
Is he dreaming? Only a dream could whisk you from heaven to hell in moments and leave you willing to give up anything to do it over again. Wasn’t it only seconds ago that he was somewhere else? Somewhere both too bright and too dark, a world made of prisms of color warping rhythmically, as if everything around him pulsed with energy. For a flash, he remembers his skin prickling all over with the most intense anticipation he’d ever felt.
A face floats in the hollow space between his memories. Cool lips grow warm against his, and color swirls in irises that tell a story he wants to remember. He finally got to touch her.
If he sleeps again, maybe he’ll go back. Maybe she’ll be there too.
Voices seep into the quiet, and he opens his eyes, blinking against the dim light. Stark walls surround him, and the nauseating traces of antiseptic and coffee hang in the stale air. Everything around him seems lifeless.
The infirmary.
He flexes his hands, but they move in jerks. His fingers are stiff and numb, like rusty cogs. Colin tries to sit but quickly realizes it’s a bad idea. The room shifts and bends in front of him, and he collapses back into a pillow that’s too soft, hitting his head on the bed frame. Tubes and wires wrap around his arms, and each breath hurts more than the last. It feels like he’s inhaling propane, exhaling fire, yet he’s shivering.
A girl outside the room is asking to see him. He recognizes his name and turns his head toward her familiar voice. His lips know the shape of her name, but when he tries to say it, there’s no sound.
“I promise I won’t stay more than a few minutes,” she says.
“I told you, I can’t let you in there.” The other woman’s voice is familiar, but where he’s used to hearing soft honey, he now hears only edge.
“I’m not leaving,” the girl says flatly. “Please, tell him Lucy is here.”
Lucy. Blond hair and swirling eyes. The lake. The ice. Cold like he’s never known. The fear that he would die and then those fleeting moments when he didn’t care.
“Do you think I don’t know what you are?” The voices are closer now, quieter. “No way am I letting you get to that sweet boy.”
The silence outside his room stretches, making the air around him feel even more stagnant and stale. He opens his mouth and exhales Lucy’s name, but it’s too quiet for anyone to hear.
“You know about the others? Where are they?” she asks.
“If there’s even one more here, that’s one too many. You’re going to break that boy’s heart. Or worse.”
Maggie. Colin remembers her name, and everything comes back in a cluster of images and sounds: How many times he’s been in this bed, how many times Maggie has set his dislocated shoulder, stitched his cheek, given him everything from aspirin to morph**e.