Page 24

To Vivienne’s surprise, Reed was there. They found him down in the Turners’ finished basement, planted in the plush leather of a gaming chair, a controller in hand. At the sight of Vivienne, he paused his game and leapt to his feet, tugging his headset down around his neck.

“Holy shit, Viv.”

It looks worse than it is , she signed, but she didn’t know if that was true.

Each subsequent pulse of her heart seemed to bring a fresh bloom of blood cascading down the side of her face. Her leg was screaming. Her abdomen had a heartbeat. Haloed by the flashing red of his dying avatar, Reed didn’t look much better. The bridge of his nose sported an ugly gash, and his eyes were underlined in angry violet.

What happened to you?

“This?” He jabbed a finger at his nose. “You can thank your boyfriend. He went full-on John Wick after you took off.”

Something fluttered in her stomach—something butterfly light and twice as buoyant. She quashed it immediately.

“She needs somewhere to stay,” said Hudson. “I told her she can crash here for the night.”

Reed frowned. “Where’s Grayson?”

Vivienne shook her head.

“Shit.” Reed scrubbed a hand over his head. “Can’t say I didn’t see that coming. You okay?”

I’ll be fine.

“You can’t stay with Walsh?”

She pinched her fingers. No.

Reed’s eyes narrowed. “Understood.”

“Speaking of Walsh,” hedged Hudson, “where is he, anyway?”

She didn’t want to admit that Thomas was likely back in Massachusetts, his pockets full of cash and a copy of his NDA sitting in his glove box. She didn’t want to acknowledge the thought that every perfect thing he’d ever said might have been a lie.

Wincing, she dragged two thumbs up.

“He’s alive,” translated Reed.

“I know what she meant,” said Hudson, still studying her doubtfully. “And I didn’t ask you what state you left him in, Vivienne. I asked you where he is.”

Why do you care?

“Because he doesn’t want him in the house after the shit he pulled last time,” said Reed, without bothering to translate.

She wanted to ask what he’d done, but talking about Thomas felt like a wound—too raw to poke at.

Instead, she signed, He won’t be coming back.

Reed sank back into the chair with a grim smile. “Are you sure about that? I didn’t think I’d be back, after all the shit that went down, but here I am, anyway.”

Upstairs, someone hammered on the front door. The sound thundered all through the house, setting the dogs to barking.

“I’ll bet you anything that’s him right now,” said Reed, pulling on his headset.

Hudson’s eyes met Vivienne’s across the lamp lit dark. “I’ll give him this,” he said drolly, “his timing is impeccable.”

···

Thomas didn’t spare a glance toward Vivienne as he shoved his way into the Turners’ foyer. Pushing the dogs gently but firmly off him, he moved into the sitting room just off the hall. The Turner house was a virtual colossus, the coffered ceilings soaring well over twelve feet, but still Thomas seemed to fill and fill the space, until he was all that was left. Vivienne wasn’t sure if he’d always overwhelmed a room this way, or if it was only her perception. If maybe he’d consumed her so thoroughly that everything else fell away.

She willed him to look at her.

He didn’t.

He peered out the wide bay windows out front, triple-checking the latches and then wrenching shut the curtains.

“Come on in,” said Hudson ruefully. “Make yourself at home.”

“Don’t open the door for anyone,” said Thomas, checking another latch.

“Oh, I won’t,” Hudson reassured him. “I’m already regretting the last two people I let inside.”

“I mean it, Turner.”

“Jesus, Walsh. I hear you—I won’t let anyone in.” He butted his hip against an end table, his face lit from beneath by the Tiffany glass lamplight. “Are you going to tell us what’s happening?”

Thomas answered his question with another. “Are your parents home?”

“No,” said Hudson. “Why?”

Thomas ducked into the next room—an office, by the looks of it, sparse and neat. Diligently, he repeated his process. Latch. Curtain. Next. Vivienne and Hudson tailed after him, standing shoulder to shoulder between the double French doors.

Another curtain snapped shut. “Is Connolly here?”

“He’s downstairs,” said Hudson. “He didn’t want to come up. You’re not his favorite person right now.”

“He’s not mine, either,” Thomas assured him. He turned to face Hudson. “Keep him here.”

“How come?”

“There’s people.” Another curtain snapped shut. “They might be looking for him.”

Hudson’s eye’s tightened in suspicion. “What kind of people?”

“ Bad people,” bit out Thomas, his patience frayed. “I think they’re affiliated with the House of Hades.”

“That loser club?” asked Hudson. “From the internet?”

“These guys were different,” Thomas said.

“Different how?”

“I don’t know, Turner, they didn’t seem like they were into demon role-play. Can you keep him here or not?”

Hudson regarded Thomas coolly for a long moment. “Yeah, I think I can convince him to stick around.”

“Good. Vivienne, let’s go.”

The sound of her name sparkled through her, like a match held to the tip of a firecracker. She jolted to attention, her heart racing. He still hadn’t looked at her, but now he was gathering up the dogs’ leashes, heading for the door.

“I think it’s safe for the moment,” said Thomas. He stood by the door, peering out through the narrow sidelights. “Let’s move.”

···

Thomas’s truck was parked outside, just a short way down the road. He helped her into the passenger seat without a word, tossing her bag in the back. The inside was timeworn but neat. No clutter. No mess. A blue rosary hung from the rearview mirror. It swung like a pendulum as Thomas pulled out into the street.

They rode in silence. The only sound was the hum of the engine, the wind rushing over and over the hood. Molly and Judd slept stacked one on top of the other in the shallow back seat, their perked ears the only sign at all that they were listening for trouble. The highway raced past in wide patches of dark, interspersed here and there with quick bursts of white.

In the glass, Vivienne had no reflection at all.

She reached out and touched a finger to the place where her face ought to be, stretched out like taffy in the arcuated pane of the passenger window. There was nothing there but dark, dark, dark, the faint strip of the guardrail whipping past in quicksilver flashes.

Sitting back, she found Thomas watching her sideways, a muscle firing in his jaw. His eyes snapped back to the road. His knuckles were white against the wheel. If he noticed her lack of a reflection, he didn’t say.

He didn’t say anything at all.

Where are we going? she asked, when they reached a well-lit stretch of highway.

“Somewhere safe,” he said.

He didn’t say anything else.

An hour passed. Another. The sign for Massachusetts slipped by in a flicker of blue. Thomas kept to the speed limit, his eyes flitting intermittently to the side mirror. The road behind them was empty.

It was past midnight when he pulled the car into an overgrown driveway and put it into park. They were fifteen minutes off the pike, lost in a flat suburban sprawl of split-level houses in varying states of disrepair. In front of them, several crooked solar lamps lit a brick path gone snaggled with weeds. A cobwebbed porch light hung askew on its mount, iron red with rust. A television flickered inside the screened-in window, illuminating a wall adorned with mismatched picture frames and a lumpy couch bordered in floppy houseplants.

Her door was pried open, and there was Thomas, dogs standing at attention beside him.

“Come on.”

Is this your house? she signed, but he didn’t see. He was scanning the dark road, watching a car crawl past on the adjacent street.

“Let’s move,” he said, and there was an edge in his voice she didn’t recognize. “Quickly.”

He ushered her up the walk, cursing under his breath as Judd and Molly paused multiple times to relieve themselves on the overgrown rhododendron.

They’d just made it to the front door when it flew open. Framed in the glow of the television was a girl no older than fifteen. Tall and slender, she stood in a tackle position, her hair in a messy topknot and her graphic T-shirt three sizes too big.

“It is the middle of the night,” she said, in a voice so infused with venom Vivienne was surprised it didn’t strike them both dead on the spot.

Thomas scooted her out of the way without a word, somehow managing to usher Vivienne and both dogs in through the door in one fluid sweep. The door slammed shut. The dead bolt clicked into place. They were in a living room with low ceilings and mismatched trim, the walls a vivid, sunrise array of colors. Between the warm light of the living room and a cramped sheet-vinyl kitchen there hung a single, drooping banner.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

“Close the curtains,” Thomas said to the girl, peering out the eyehole.

The girl—his sister, Vivienne assumed—looked thoroughly unmoved by his tone. “You promised, Tommy.”

“Close the curtains, Tess.”

“You promised you wouldn’t miss your birthday. We made cupcakes.”

At the door, Thomas tipped his brow against the frame. Shutting his eyes, he drew a single, steadying breath. His fist rose to drum against the wall in three slow but firm thump, thump, thump s. And then, with alarming alacrity, he moved to the curtains and snapped them shut. When it was done, he turned to face his sister.

“I am sorry,” he said, speaking clearly and slowly, “that I missed my birthday.”

“We saved you a cupcake,” said Tess, though it came out grudgingly. “What happened to your eye?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She tailed him into the kitchen. Vivienne, feeling a little lost and extremely horrified, trailed after them like an unwelcome ghost. She watched Thomas rise onto his toes over the dish-filled sink and secure the window latch. On the laminate counter sat a kiln-fired plate smeared in little blue handprints. Tommy , someone had painted along the lip. Age 3. A single cupcake sat in the center, the candle going lopsided where the frosting had begun to melt.

“Have you been fighting again?” asked Tess, tailing Tommy the few short steps to the back door. He jostled the handle, ensuring it was locked. “Because if you have, Mom will kill you. And you’ll feel terrible, because the effort it would take to kill someone your size would knock her flat for a month. Do you want that, Tommy? To be plagued by guilt for eternity?”

Tommy swung around, gripping his sister firmly by the shoulders. “Tessa.”

She didn’t balk. “Tommy.”

“Go finish your movie.”

“I don’t want to,” said his sister brightly. “This is way more interesting. Is that your girlfriend?”

Thomas went visibly, painfully still. He still didn’t look at Vivienne, but this time, she could feel him very deliberately not looking at her. As though she was all that he was aware of, every last cell in his body urging him to turn and face her.

“No,” he finally said. It came out strained.

“She’s bleeding,” noted his sister. “Were you in a car accident?”

Thomas edged past her with a scowl and tugged open a cabinet, rattling the contents until he reemerged with a compact medical kit.

“Are you going to eat your cupcake?” asked Tess, tailing him back into the living room. “It’s Funfetti.”

“I’ll eat it later,” said Thomas. “Vivienne, let’s go.”

Vivienne stood isolated in the dark of the kitchen. She wanted to ask why he’d brought her here—why he’d let her in his home like this, after she’d been so deliberately awful. It felt like he’d scored himself open and she was looking directly into the heart of him, and it was cruel, cruel, cruel because how was she supposed to keep from loving him now?

“Vivienne?” Tessa rounded on her with wide, pale eyes. “Is that your name? It’s pretty. My brother is exhibiting his usual weirdo behavior, so can you please tell me—were you in a car accident? A ten-car pileup, maybe? Is that why he missed his birthday ?”

“Leave her alone,” said Thomas, shooting an arrowed glance in her direction. They had a brief but silent sibling conversation—the sort that made Vivienne starkly aware of how blisteringly lonely her own childhood had been—and then Thomas, emerging victorious, announced, “We’ll be in my room. Don’t feed the dogs anything from the fridge.”