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Run, please run with me.

Hot air closes my throat. Nausea spools in my stomach, saliva puddling in my mouth.

Out out out.

I pull harder, wet skin sliding over wet skin. Salty sweat drips into my eyes.

“Elivander!” I scream, and it burns.

He spasms, shocked back to the moment, and we run. Smoke rises over the carpet. He hauls me along through the sticky, suffocating room, opens the door and hurls us outside. The porch bucks in response, and we leap down the stairs. The cold air strikes my sweat-soaked body.

My muscles lock, and my feet give out beneath me. I fall to my hands and knees and rest my head on the ground. Eli drops to my side and feathers his hand over my back, fingers climbing up and up the notches of my spine, like the ones I so often feel around him.

“Now try.”

I close my spread fingers, trapping bits of life between them. I beg for them to do something at my touch,anything. If a house can buck and purr, then I can pull some damn magic out of a plant.Please please please.

Nothing.

Tears crowd their way past my restraint. “I can’t!”

He moves his hand from my upper back to my skull, holding me in place against the ground. “You can. Ineedthis.” His quaking fingers dig through my hair, snagging as they meet knots. Tiny stones indent my cheek.

“I said I can’t,” I sob. Still holding the back of my head, he collapses next to me, lying on his side with his knees curled halfway up. I crumple to the ground too, rolling to face him. His hand slowly falls away, and we look at each other—me with pebbles embedded in my cheek and half my face covered in dirtstuck to a layer of sweat, and him with wet hair clinging to his forehead and a lingering look of derangement in his wild eyes.

But they soften, growing big and round. The golden specks try to take over the brown, and maybe I’m as far gone as I thought because I swear I’m looking into two pools deep with regret.

But my failure, the sting of my tears, the deep fall into his eyes—they plow through me. I push up onto my elbow and punch him in the gut, my petrified muscles like rock, hitting with a force beyond my own, a violence and a vengeance I didn’t think could surface.

He curls into a ball, disbelief claiming his face, but not ten seconds pass before he puts a hand on my heated cheek and rubs the dirt and pebbles away, wide eyes blinking, saying so many things I can’t decipher.

I retreat from his soft touch, confused and shaking, and tuck my necklace inside my shirt, hiding it away with the other bits of me I don’t want to share. He can’t scare me away with a little heat. That house strums with life, and with vision after vision of death after death, I could use a little life.

“I win,” I say. Because at least I’m not in that cell, rotting.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

With every hour that passes, the pit in my stomach grows and churns along with my thoughts of Kelter, worsened after realizing I spent that entire day of silencenotthinking about him, letting my mind center on waiting for Eli. I can’t take the bars and the helplessness, the not knowing and the worrying. I’m done.

I go through the motions of breathing only to stay alive, but I’m not sure why I bother. Maybe for Kelt. Maybe out of habit.Breath after death,Cam would say, reminding me to go on with living after I died in my visions.

It’s been four days since we ran out of the house upstairs, and the life inside those walls hasn’t stopped calling to me. But now, I sit slumped against the stone wall of the cell, secret notes fromEli tucked safely behind my back as night falls around the castle, coating it in darkness save for the light stones scattered around the main room.

Eli’s in his black shirt and pants, my own clothes matching his, and he sits next to Sypher on the floor, their backs to my cell door, the couch in front of them. The bars push into their rounded spines, arms slung around their knees. Sypher, wearing his blue jumpsuit, huddles close to Eli, so close that their elbows bump. Every time Eli scoots an inch away, Sypher follows.

Two new friends of Eli’s slouch on the couch—Sola and Coen from what I’ve picked up, both distressingly tall. Coen surveys the room with unease despite the apparent casual gathering, the muscles padding his trim body never relaxing. He wears black pants and a loose gray shirt, so subdued compared to the bright clothes in Caldera. I don’t miss them, but I do miss real food. And my mattress.

Sola’s dark brown locks sling around her chin as she sits up and hands out glass bottles, each shaped differently—round, cylindrical or wavy—with a flat base and a cork in the top instead of a metal bottle cap. Coen sits close to her, his beige fingers drumming against her thigh and his other hand slicking his hair back over and over, only to have it settle in silky strips of black on his forehead again.

I’m a forgotten set of eyes as they open their drinks and chat—until Sola notices me, almost hidden under Eli’s blanket in the corner and imagining a hot coffee mug in my hand.

“How’s it going with the Hollow?” Sola asks Eli, fiddling with the delicate folds of her black dress, eyes on me—warm and golden like her skin, but with an unsettling mischief sparking in the upturned corners.

Eli glances over his shoulder at me and takes a swig of the red liquid, his light aura clinging to him. “None of the triggers haveworked, and neither did Milo threatening me to let her figure it out herself.”

“Why not try a little scarlet soda to wake things up?” She taps the bottle in her hand. “What do you think it’ll do to a Hollow?”