Cold Kiss Part 10

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 s.h.i.+ver 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 gla.s.s.

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 m.u.f.fle 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 G.o.d." 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, m.u.f.fled h.e.l.lo.

"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 s.h.i.+ver. "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 gra.s.s s.h.i.+mmers 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.

I nod, and wipe the tears away with my free hand. Calm. I can do that.

We're halfway down the block when he glances sideways at me, wincing. "A squirrel, huh?"

He gets an elbow in the ribs in reply, and I don't feel a bit guilty.

"I really thought he would be here."

We're across the street from Danny's house, and it's nearly three now. The sky is slowly losing color, beginning to bleed out the black, but the streets are still sleeping.

The Greers' house is closed up for the night, blinds drawn and doors shut, and in the fading dark it looks sad. As if it's faded in the last few months, too. Even the yard looks shabby in its bare fall clothes.

Gabriel puts his arm around me, but I shrug it off. I know it's wrong-it's the middle of the night and he's here to help me, but standing across the street from Danny's house with another boy's arm around me is wrong, too. Wronger, and I can't even remember if that's a word, but it's still true.

"It's the first place I would have looked," Gabriel says, and if his voice sounds a little strained, I'm not going to apologize. Not right now anyway.

"What if he's inside?" I whisper, squinting across the street. "Or, I don't know, on the back porch?"

"If he was inside, the whole house would be lit up, don't you think?" He glances at me. "I mean, your dead son walks in..."

"I know." I rub my temples in exhaustion. I don't want to think about the look on his mother's face if that happens. What would it be? Horror? Relief? Joy? Confusion? All of the above?

"Let's go look, okay?" Gabriel's hand in the small of my back is just enough motivation to get me across the street. We start up the driveway with our heads down, and I don't even know what we're looking for when Gabriel veers left across the dry gra.s.s.

I see it then, though. Scuff marks in the gra.s.s, as if something has been dragged through it. And then footprints on the porch steps, which stop at the top before turning around again.

"He was here," I whisper, and I glance down the block as if I'll see him walking away.

"He didn't go in," Gabriel says, and he sounds worried. "He went ... somewhere else. Come on."

He pulls me off the Greers' lawn and down the block to the corner. I'm suddenly so exhausted, I sit down abruptly, landing roughly on the curb. The number of places Danny could have gone seems endless. Becker's, Ryan's, school, even the cafe...

"Let me see," Gabriel says, and grabs my shoulders, shaking me gently until I look up at him.

"See what?"

"Where he might have gone, places that mean something to him," he says, and stares into my eyes.

I try to relax, to open up and picture the places where Danny and I have been together, places where Danny hung out with his friends, anything. I feel the jolt when Gabriel sees the site of the accident. His fingers tighten on my shoulders as the memory of the tree flashes through my mind, the scarred trunk still scorched, pieces of the hood embedded in the bark.

"I can take you there," I say when he lets go. "We have to look everywhere, though. He could have gone to Ryan's house or-"

"o."

I blink. "What do you mean, no? Come on, Gabriel, we can't just sit here. I can't just sit here. Whether you want to come or not, I have to find him!"

He takes one hand as I start to stand up, pulling me down again, and I can't shake free. Power pumps through me, urgent and angry, an unfocused hum that needs to be released, but Gabriel says, "Shhh, listen."

I take a deep breath and try to relax, so his voice will cut through that awful buzz.

"It's after three. You need to go home." I shake my head, ready to argue, but he keeps talking, his strong hand clenched firmly around mine. "This is bad, okay? But I can find him, or at least keep looking. I mean, it's going to be bad enough if your mom already figured out you're gone, but if morning rolls around and you're not there?"

A new wave of nausea rolls through me then. Mom. I hadn't even thought that far ahead, hadn't thought of anything but finding Danny and getting him back to the loft.

Across the street a dog barks, and I nearly jump out of my skin. In the night silence, it sounds too close, and Gabriel and I stand up at the same time, moving into the shadow of a huge pine. The neighborhood is still asleep, but in the distance on Mountain Avenue I can hear the occasional car pa.s.sing, and any minute kids with paper routes could start cycling up and down the streets.

"Go home," Gabriel says, and winds his arms around me, pulling me close. "Go home and pretend to get up for school, and when you leave, call me. I'll keep looking."

I want to refuse, tell him it's not his responsibility, that I can handle this on my own, but I can't. I press my cheek to his chest and choke back more stupid, hateful tears. I can't handle this on my own, and I've known it for weeks now.

"I'll make this up to you." The words are m.u.f.fled into his hoodie, but when I lift my head to kiss him, I know he heard me.

When my alarm goes off at six thirty, I haven't slept for even a minute. I'm so tired I feel sort of drunk, and I'm pretty sure adrenaline is the only reason I can move.

I'm sitting on the edge of my bed when Mom opens my door and sticks her head in, the way she almost always does.

"You up, kiddo?" She's still in the old flannel s.h.i.+rt she wears to bed, and her pillow left a pink crease in one cheek.

"Sort of," I manage to say, and study my bare feet until she closes the door behind her.

I rush through my shower-every time I close my eyes I see the empty loft, the confusion in Danny's eyes when he tells me he can't think, the horrifying image of him walking toward his mother, arms outstretched...

And now it's daylight. Anyone could see him, this marble statue of a boy with dead eyes and cold, gray lips. I throw on jeans and my boots and pull on a ragged black hoodie over a dirty T-s.h.i.+rt, and my hands won't stop shaking. I don't know what's adrenaline and what's the power anymore-there's too much of both, a constant pulsing hum beneath my skin.

My trig book breaks into a pile of dead leaves when I pull it out of my backpack, and when I try to do my hair, it goes purple and blue by turns until I give up. I have to calm down, but if wis.h.i.+ng could make it so, I would already be downstairs drinking coffee and pretending I'm heading off for school.

If wis.h.i.+ng could make anything so, Danny would be up in the loft and I would be ... I don't know where. Asleep. In a coma. It sounds pretty good at the moment.

My phone rings just as I'm finally collecting my stuff to head down to the kitchen. I don't bother to look at the display before I flip it open-it has to be Gabriel.

My h.e.l.lo isn't even completely out of my mouth when I hear, "I found him."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

I'VE NEVER REALLY BEEN NERVOUS ABOUT THE whole meet-the-parents thing. I may dress sort of weird and have a lot of holes in my ears, but I'm little and polite and most of the moms I've met have never even blinked at me hanging out with their kids. Even Danny's mom, who is sort of disgustingly sitcom normal in her sweater sets and khaki pants, loved me.

I'm terrified to meet Gabriel's sister, Olivia, though.

Mostly I'm just plain freaked out to start with, since Gabriel had to walk all the way across town to the park to find Danny, which means Danny had to walk all that way, too.

To the place where he died, and from what Gabriel said on the phone, Danny remembers every minute of it now. Gabriel doesn't want to get too close, and I don't blame him, but he told me he can hear Danny from behind the storage shed where Gabriel's waiting for me. He's sometimes mumbling and sometimes shouting. Stuff about Becker, the car, that night.

Me.

When I stop to think about it, meeting Olivia is actually a lot less scary than seeing Danny is going to be, even though my hand is shaking when I knock on the door to their apartment.

She must have been waiting. The door opens a mere second after I draw my hand away, and the girl standing on the other side looks so much like Gabriel I blink in surprise. She's older, yes, but her hair is the same cool, ashy blond, her eyes only a slightly deeper gray. She's not as tall as he is, but she's taller than I am, and concern has already bled into the tight line of her jaw.

I guess it's better than suspicion.

"I'm Wren," I say needlessly, and she nods.

"Come on in."

Her hair is twisted into a careless knot on top of her head, and she's still in faded sleep pants and a pink YOGA IS LIFE T-s.h.i.+rt. When the door is closed, she leans up against it and folds her arms over her chest.

"You do know how to drive, right?"

In theory is probably the right answer to that question, but Gabriel a.s.sured me she doesn't have the same gift he does.

I can't make my mouth work, though, so I simply nod. She considers me for a long minute, her face pinched with worry. She looks kind, pretty cool, but it has to be a little weird to get a phone call from your kid brother at seven fifteen in the morning saying some girl is coming over to borrow your car.

"I don't know," she says finally, and pushes off the door to cross the room toward me. "You look like you're about to jump out of your skin, he sounds like a truck ran over him, and someone needs to tell me what the h.e.l.l is really going on here."