CHAPTER EIGHT

“Are you allowed to smoke in here, Felicity?”

Kade looked over at Skeeter, annoyed. Skeeter was interrupting one of his favorite boyfriend rituals. Smoking was one of the most intimate things he got to do with his boyfriend, full of indirect closeness and prolonged eye contact that made Kade’s stomach swoop in shivery delight every single time. And here was Skeeter, ruining it with her questions.

“Officially? No,” Felicity said from her seat next to Skeeter on the couch. “Unofficially? Mom doesn’t care. Smoke away, boys.”

Kade nodded in silent agreement. Theo was still breathing in, the tip of his cigarette flaring against his own. Kade couldn’t stop thinking about Theo’s arms around him at Skeeter’s house, those big hands on his waist. Just like how Theo held him at night—with a sheet between them, of course.

Theo leaned back, his cigarette already half gone. He could breathe in for a long, long time. “How’s the translation coming, Skeeter?”

Felicity snorted. It was technically a translation, but only because none of them could read cursive except for Skeeter, who was still having trouble deciphering the handwriting that was not, as they had assumed, her grandmother’s. It was probably her great-great-grandmother’s, she had said when they handed it over. Maybe add another great on there.

“Um,” Skeeter said, squinting at the faded pages. “There’s a lot of stuff in here about Cyth. About getting her out of the coffin. It needs certain ingredients. A dress, a spear, and a flower that only blooms one week a year.”

Kade made an urgent noise and turned to Theo. Theo already had the pouch in his hand, yanking it open to show Skeeter the impossibly plush petals.

“Oh,” Skeeter said. She held up the spell book to compare the sketch: same diamond-shaped petal, same soft veins running through the middle of it. “That looks like it.”

“So we need to find where they grow,” Kade said. “Lucky we have a plant expert on our hands.”

“I don’t know,” Theo said. “I really don’t recognize it. What dress? What spear?”

Skeeter flipped the pages. There was the dress Kade had seen when he was examining it earlier: white and flowy with a fanged belt. Not the one he’d seen her wear in visions, but close to it. The spear was on the next page, short and barbed. The kind that hurt you more when you pulled it out.

“Does it mention anything about needing newborns?” Kade asked. “He turned you. He had to have a reason. Or anything about the pouch?”

“Um.” Skeeter turned the book back so she could look at it. “This handwriting is really hard going. So maybe that’s in here later.”

Felicity tutted. “What’s all this new shit? I thought he just needed you guys.”

“This is good,” Kade pointed out. “If we break the spear or burn the flowers, he’s screwed. Until next spring, anyway. Right?”

“Sure,” Skeeter said, sounding unsure. She dropped the book into her lap, twisting the pages anxiously. “Hey, when you said my parents were ‘as good as can be expected,’ what did that mean?”

Kade, Theo, and Felicity traded a look.

“They’ll be really happy to see you’re back,” Felicity said.

Skeeter gnawed on her lip. “I just don’t see why I can’t visit. They can keep a secret. I feel really bad, letting them think I’m dead.”

Kade tucked the snake-flower lighter Theo had gotten him back into his pocket. Smoke drifted up toward the Sloans’ living room ceiling, and Kade watched it warily. Beverly Sloan didn’t hate him, he was pretty sure. But she didn’t like him either, and he wouldn’t win any favors if she found out he was smoking in her house. It was the kind of thing he’d have done eagerly a year ago. But he was getting tired of daring people not to like him.

Theo was pacing now, tight circles in between the two couches. “This is useless. Even if we destroy all that stuff, we still have to fight him. I should be learning how to grow wings, get bigger, get stronger . Does it say how to do that?”

“I don’t see why it would?” Skeeter said. “This isn’t, um…a vampire how-to book? It’s a spell book?”

“Right,” Theo said. “Yeah. Right. Okay. That’s…fine.”

The cigarette burned down in his fingers. He often forgot about it. Like he was only smoking for the first part, where he got to lean in so close to Kade and breathe in, watching him with those big dark eyes.

“Not a problem,” Theo continued, pacing faster. “We have one and a half weeks until the ritual and now we have some…some highest stakes scavenger hunt, like we don’t have enough to deal with?—”

“Theo,” Kade tried. Theo was starting to blur.

“ What ?” Theo turned, superspeed elbow catching on a vase and sending it smashing into the wall. Ceramic went flying, embedding in the curtains and skidding under couches.

Skeeter yelped. Felicity let out a nervous snicker.

“Nice,” she said. “I hated that one.”

Theo gave her a tired glare and stubbed his cigarette out on his own hand.

Kade started toward a shard of ceramic. “It’s fine. We can?—”

“ Don’t ,” Theo snapped. “I can fix it. I broke it, I can fix it.”

Something dark and defensive curled inside Kade, all fangs and snarling. If he got barked at, he barked back. That was how he’d lived his whole life. He reared up, ready to bare his teeth. Then he looked at Theo’s wide, angry eyes and remembered that time Kade had tried to help Theo clean up a mug he’d broken in the sink. Theo had yelled at him, and Kade had yelled back, and Kade had retreated into the woods for a long walk with music blaring from his headphones. Theo had caught up to him five minutes later, fists clenched at his sides.

When someone tries to help after something like that , Theo had admitted, it just feels like they’re rubbing my nose in it. Like they’re saying I broke something and I can’t even fix it on my own .

Kade stubbed out his cigarette on a glass coaster. “I’m going to get the vacuum.”

He headed down the hall toward Felicity’s laundry room, trying to smooth down the jagged edges that appeared whenever someone snapped at him. You don’t have to blow yourself up every time someone hands you a match, his mum had said to him once while she scrubbed blood off his face. Ironically, she was quoting her own mother. The Renfields were a family of wildfires, handing down the blaze to the next generation.

Kade had barely stepped into the laundry room when Theo appeared in the hallway behind him, his hands full of vase shards, the spell book poking out of his jeans pocket. He looked like he wanted to have a serious conversation, so Kade cut him off before he could start.

“We’re taking the spell book to Milly after all?” he asked, gesturing at the book peeking out of Theo’s pocket. “Told you we should give it to her. She translates dead languages on pages that have been rotting for centuries, she can deal with Skeeter’s great-grandma’s handwriting.”

“What? Sure.” Theo caught a vase shard that was trying to escape his grip. “Look, I’m sorry.”

Kade stooped to pick up the vacuum cleaner. “It’s fine.”

“No,” Theo said. “I’m sorry I said I’d marry you. I freaked you out.”

Kade winced, tightening his hands around the vacuum handle. He had hoped they would stumble past that and forget to mention it until they knew if they would survive until summer.

“You didn’t?—”

“I did ,” Theo said. “I saw your face.”

Kade turned to face Theo, vacuum cleaner banging against his knee. “You didn’t freak me out. I want…I’d like to marry you one day. I just can’t see it happening.”

“Oh.” Theo’s jaw tensed. Kade could see him doing the same thing Kade had done after Theo snapped at him: trying to read between the lines. Trying to glimpse something that didn’t hurt.

Kade squirmed. He wanted to explain it: he had thought about them dying tragically in each other’s arms a hundred times. He hadn’t thought about marriage . The idea made his stomach twist with delighted horror. They’d only started saying I love you this week. The idea of marriage freaked Kade out even more than dying tragically. He’d never envisioned life after high school. Not seriously. He’d had pipe dreams of fashion school, bright cities, likeminded people who Kade didn’t have to snarl at. But they were just that: dreams. Dying young was always more likely. Dying young was simple . A full stop to the world’s messiest run-on sentence. Marriage sounded…complicated. A beautiful mess that Kade would flee from the first time it got hard.

“It’s not you ,” he said finally. “It’s my giant self-destruct button. It’s the Renfield curse of snarling at people and burning down everything good we get. I want to keep you, of course I want to keep you. I want…I want all the time I can get with you. I want to be with you so long we watch the sun burn out.”

“Oh,” Theo said, softer this time. Still holding the vase shards. Still blocking the damn door so Kade couldn’t run away like a coward. His face was so unbearably tender Kade couldn’t bring himself to look at it.

Kade hoisted the vacuum higher, relieved he had something in his hands. “Hey. After this, let’s do something that has nothing to do with our inevitable doom.”

Theo’s unbearably tender gaze became more manageable. “Watch a TV show we only kind of like so it won’t be corrupted ten years from now by thinking , oh, that’s the show I watched when I was waiting for my dad to show up and try to make me kill my boyfriend? ”

“You got it.”

Theo hesitated. “Tomorrow? I want?—”

Then he froze, his head cocked. Listening for danger, Kade realized with a dull thud of panic. He’d been doing it more often this week.

Kade swallowed. “What’s up?”

Theo didn’t say anything for a moment. His jaw flexed uneasily. Then he straightened with an unconvincing smile that did nothing for Kade’s nerves.

“Probably nothing,” Theo said. He cleared his throat. “Uh, I want to train with Liss today. We’re going to try and trigger the transformation.”

Kade nodded, doing his best not to picture Theo nine feet tall and spindly, his beautiful face pale and ravaged. The wings were badass, sure. The monstrous form was fun in a grotesque kind of way, if you were watching it on-screen and not having it fly at you. But Hawthorn and Victor had been unrecognizable. Kade didn’t want Theo to be unrecognizable to him, even for a minute.

“Makes sense,” he said. “We’ll watch some mindless TV tomorrow.”

His toes twitched in his shoes, fingers drumming on the vacuum handle. When Theo felt helpless, his first urge was to throw himself into something productive. When Kade felt helpless, his first urge was to growl at someone and then go and break something. Ideally himself. If Theo left him alone, he was going to do something stupid.

Theo hefted the vase shards. “I’m gonna throw these out.”

“Yeah,” Kade said. He shook the vacuum. “I’m gonna?—”

“I can do that.”

Kade shook his head. “I got it.”

Theo paused. Wrestling against his programming, trying not to get frustrated. Kade kept his face unjudging and open, a silent version of what he’d told Theo that day in the woods : I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m helping because I want to help .

“Alright,” Theo said finally, only a little strained. “Thanks.”

Kade was proud of Theo for battling his demons, and he tried to focus on that as he watched Theo head down the hall with his hands full of vase shards. But Kade’s own demons were closing in, and they were ravenous.

The Sloan liquor cabinet was tucked away in the corner of the kitchen. Kade had never stolen from it before. He didn’t count that time he stole a bottle of vodka from Felicity’s house party, since it was from the drinks table, not the cabinet. Even when Felicity let him roam around the house unattended—which took several hangouts—he never stole from the cabinet. Not even the minibar-sized bottles the Sloans had kept from motels.

But the time had come. Kade was honestly surprised it took him this long. Drinking had lost its luster since he got a life. Homework and friends and a boyfriend, not to mention classes he actually went to. Still, he’d been idly planning to get drunk alone in the woods for weeks. Theo assured Kade he could drink around him, but something about it set Kade’s teeth on edge. He didn’t want Theo to judge how fast he drank. Some people drank for fun; Kade drank for the same reasons he threw himself into fights: because he wanted to destroy something.

“Whatcha doing?” said a voice from the doorway.

Kade banged his head on the liquor cabinet and swore. He’d been leaning in to grab something from the back, rearranging the other bottles so it looked like nothing was missing.

“Jesus Christ,” Kade said, turning around to see Felicity leaning against the kitchen counter, chewing gum. “Don’t you dare put chocolate in my good jacket again. I had to replace the lining.”

Felicity shrugged and sat down, examining the bottles with him. “You haven’t asked for this for a while.”

Kade waggled the whiskey he was holding. “Maybe I got really good at stealing.”

“I’m not my mom, dumbass. I actually keep track of what’s in here.” She grinned, sticking her gum under the kitchen counter and ignoring his look of disgust. Then she grabbed the whiskey from Kade’s hand and cracked the lid. “I have an hour before I’m kicking Theo’s ass. He wants to go for a run first. Want to get smashed?”

Kade thought about pointing out the obvious danger in fighting a vampire while wasted. Then he thought about how he never actually enjoyed drinking, not like everybody else seemed to. It felt bad from the very beginning. But a wonderful kind of bad, like pressing on a bruise.

Felicity pressed on her bruises all the time. Kade watched her feel them when she was bored during class. He watched her now, tipping the bottle against her mouth before he’d even had a chance to agree.

She held out the bottle.

Kade took it.

“I don’t get you,” he said when he resurfaced. “I thought I would, once we were friends. But I still don’t.”

“Good,” Felicity said. She smiled, and at first Kade thought she was genuinely flattered. Then her smile slipped, and she tugged on the new bangs she’d cut when her modeling agency fired her from her latest gig. She only did that when she was trying to hide her hurt.

“So what caused this?” Felicity asked, gesturing at Kade sitting next to her on the kitchen floor with the bottle.

“Other than my inevitable doom? Shit, Liss, I don’t know.”

“You didn’t break into my liquor cabinet yesterday. You were doomed then.” Felicity nudged him.

Kade pushed her away halfheartedly. The back of his head was itching again.

“It’s been waiting for me all my life,” he admitted. “I’ve felt it. Shadows behind me. Breath on my neck. Now it’s finally here. And I can’t do anything to stop it.”

He lifted the bottle. “I don’t know. It’s this or break something, and I don’t think your mom would appreciate it if I started smashing her stuff.”

Felicity was silent for a long time. She took a deep breath, and for a moment Kade thought she was going to say something profound.

“I’m going to grab my favorite knife,” she said instead. “If we’re getting one-on-one time, we need a knifey fingers rematch.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” Kade deadpanned. He didn’t even remember how their last match ended, only that he’d woken up to Theo healing his torn fingers with a worried look that made Kade want to shut himself in his room and never come out.

Felicity handed him the bottle. He watched her leave, dread still curling in his gut. He took another swallow. That fake ease was spreading through him, blunting all his jagged edges. Maybe if he drank enough, he could finally convince himself what Theo and Sundance had been telling him all year: that he wasn’t doomed. That everything was going to be okay.

After a few more swallows, he was even convinced it could work.

Then the screaming started.