The sudden burst of adrenaline was gone, and now my hands lay limp in my lap. Jack steered the car over a speed bump. The jolt whipped my head back and then forward. If I’d had any energy, I would’ve been able to resist it, but I had nothing left in me.
“Sorry,” Jack said. He pulled the car over.
Cole had said I couldn’t go a day without feeding on him. I was beginning to feel the truth of those words. I felt it from my spaghetti muscles to my brittle bones.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“Hospital.” It wasn’t a question.
“You know they can’t help.” I didn’t want to spend my last moments—if these were my last moments—in a hospital gown with doctors running pointless tests and turning over rocks looking for stray hearts.
Jack closed his eyes and sighed. “Can you think of anywhere else he would be? Has he ever mentioned any hiding places? Anything?”
For the first time, Jack’s voice cracked almost beyond recognition. I raised my hand to his face and ran my fingertips down his cheek. A single teardrop followed the trail I’d just traced.
I racked my brain trying to remember any old haunts of Cole’s. But the band traveled around so much that whenever they were in town, they were either playing a concert or they were in their condo.
I looked at Jack and shook my head. Just then my phone buzzed. Jack grabbed it out of my bag, his eyes wide with hope.
“Is it Cole?” I said.
Jack’s face fell. “No. It’s Jules. She wants to know if you’re feeling better. I told her you weren’t in class because you were sick.”
Jack set down the phone and looked at me.
“Take me home,” I said.
We were quiet on the drive home. The sun was sinking behind the mountain, and reflecting the sinking hope in my chest. I had no idea how it had come to this. How the end was coming at me so quickly.
I tried texting Cole for the hundredth time and again got no response.
“Should we check his place again?” Jack asked.
I shook my head. “Just take me home,” I said. “I’m tired. And I want to be with you.”
Jack’s lips thinned into a tight, white line. “This isn’t it, Becks. It isn’t.”
“I know,” I said. We’d never openly admit to each other that our fight was over. We didn’t operate that way. “I just want to rest for a little bit, and then we can start looking again. But listen. If Cole doesn’t make it back in time—”
“Don’t say that, Becks.”
“I know. It’s going to work out. But if something happens, don’t try to destroy anything. Just stay far away. Stay safe.”
Jack’s lips relaxed and formed a deep frown, his brow furrowed, his chest heaving in and out with the pain of a heart that was breaking. He took my hand and pressed it against his chest.
“Do you feel that?” he said.
I blinked and nodded.
“This heart is yours. It belongs to you. It beats only for you. And somewhere out there is a heart without a home, and it beats for me; and we’re not giving up until we find it.”
“Nobody’s giving up.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly and then turned the car back onto the road and in the direction of my house.
When we got there, Jack stared straight ahead out the windshield at . . . nothing. He put the car in park and let it idle, an automatic reaction. He made no move to cut the ignition.
I decided there was no hurry to get inside. We’d do this at our own pace. My dad and Tommy were probably eating dinner, and I was in no hurry for anything resembling a last meal.
No. I would treat this night like any other. It was the only way to have hope. Besides, I’d learned long ago that good-byes were useless. The time would slip away too quickly with too many things left unsaid and too many chances for the wrong words to escape my lips.
“Let’s go to your room then,” Jack said. “We’ll rest. And then we’ll look again.”
I nodded, knowing that once we were inside, we’d probably never leave.
I tried to make it to my house using my own legs, but I only made it a few steps before Jack had to pick me up once again.
Jack squeezed me tight. “I can’t ever seem to get close enough to you,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
“I used to want to fill every nook and cranny,” I said sleepily. “My nooks were made for your crannies.”
I felt Jack’s cheek pull up in a smile. “That they were.”
He carried me inside quickly and quietly, my head resting against the crook between his shoulder and his neck. As we passed the kitchen, I heard my dad ask Tommy a question, but I couldn’t make out the specific words.
Then we were on the bed, face-to-face.
I never wanted to stop staring at his face, but before I knew it, my eyes had shut involuntarily.
Jack’s fingers stroked my cheeks. “Don’t worry about anything. Just rest. And when you’re up to it, we’ll go looking again.”
I nodded, relieved that he wasn’t trying to leave me to go search for Cole on his own. If he did, and I slipped away while he was gone . . .
We lay like that for a long time. I kept drifting off to sleep, fevered dreams forcing their way into my head. Dreams of worlds crumbling all around me, pieces of lives deposited at my feet.
Each time, I forced myself awake, and each time, the interval between my waking moments grew.
“Don’t let me fall asleep again,” I said to Jack.
“I won’t,” he answered. But I could’ve guessed that was something neither of us could control, and just after I’d said it, I was out.
My bedroom.
I dream . . .
But this time my dream is not fragmented.
I walk into a large room, the walls of which are lined with shelves and shelves of knickknacks: miniature figurines and thimbles and tin toys that look as if they were made in a different century. I don’t get a closer look, because a woman with long, flowing red hair steps out from behind one of the walls of shelves.
The queen. Adonia.
I back up and then turn to run out of the room, but the door has disappeared. I turn to face her.
“I see you,” the queen says. She said those same words the first time I dreamed of her.
I shake my head furiously. “No, you don’t.”
She steps forward and lowers her head until it is level with mine. I try to move, but my muscles don’t obey my brain. She brings a long, red fingernail up to my cheek, just under my eye, and traces downward. It feels like a paring knife against my skin, carving as she goes. I try to scream, but no sound comes out.
Her red lips form the next words as if she is inventing the language as she is speaking it.
“I see you. Nikki Beckett.”
She knows my name. The queen of the Underworld knows my name.
“Becks!” Someone was shaking my shoulders. Someone strong and loud.
“It’s just a dream,” Jack said. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”
I opened my eyes to find Jack’s face inches from mine. Once he saw that my eyes were opened, he sighed and briefly kissed my lips. Then he pulled back and got a look at my face.
“What happened here?” he said, lightly touching my cheek with his finger.
“What is it?” I said.
“It looks like a fresh scratch.”
I shook my head and thought back to the nightmare about the queen. Cole had always said dreams were a connection between the Surface and the Everneath, but she couldn’t literally invade my dreams, could she? More than that, I didn’t think she could hurt me, physically, in a dream. . . . The thought frightened me.
I wanted to tell Jack about my nightmare, but my eyes were falling shut again. I wondered if this next time would be the time I didn’t wake up.
Through the haze of my cloudy brain, I heard a buzzing noise. Jack dug through my bag and took out my phone.
“Is it Cole?” I asked hopefully.
“No. It’s . . . Christopher? From the soup kitchen?”
He handed me the phone, and I checked the screen. “Yeah. That’s Christopher.”
“What does it say?”
I squinted, the symbols on my phone seeming smaller than they ever had before. “He says ‘A man showed up at the shelter, speaks no English except to say your name. Do you want to come look at him before I call social services?’”
Jack stared at my phone warily. “No, you don’t,” he said as if the answer should’ve been obvious.
I tilted my head to look up at him. “A stranger who knows my name and shows up at the soup kitchen the day after Cole disappears? What if they’re connected? We have to go.”
He looked at me with a conflicted expression, as if he felt hope but didn’t want to put his faith in it.
I placed my hand over his. “At this point we have nothing to lose.”
He looked away and nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
TWELVE
NOW
The Surface. The soup kitchen.
Twenty minutes later, we were parked at the soup kitchen, which was adjacent to the homeless shelter. It was nearly ten o’clock now. Cole had been missing for almost two days.
I was used to seeing the line to get food stretched out the front door and around the corner of the old redbrick building that used to be part of a mine-processing facility. Today was no exception.
We walked past the soup kitchen entrance and entered the main lobby of the shelter. The place was filled with all sorts of people, from a table with four elderly men playing cards to a family with small children waiting at the check-in counter.
Christopher must’ve been watching the door, because as soon as we were inside, he nodded a greeting and jerked his head over toward the far back corner of the giant room.
We turned toward the direction he’d indicated. In the corner, one of the shelter volunteers—Dan, I thought—was sitting on a bench, his arm around another man. He was talking to the other man softly. The man’s clothes were in shreds. His hair was coal black, and he rocked back and forth while wringing his hands.
I took one more step inside the room, and the man’s head shot up. Clear blue eyes locked with mine, even though the place was filled and there was commotion all around us. It was as if he heard my footstep and was waiting for it.
Even with black, sooty stuff all over his face and in his hair, I knew who it was.
Jack looked from the man to me and waited expectantly.
I turned toward him without taking my eyes off of the man. “It’s Cole,” I said.
Cole didn’t wait for us to make our way over to him. With an intense gaze, he shot out of his seat and sprinted across the room, leaving Dan scrambling after him.
He barreled toward me quickly. Jack pulled me behind him to shield me from the impact, and only then did Cole even notice Jack was there. He slowed his gait and looked at Jack quizzically, then stared at me again.
“Nikki.” He said it with a long expulsion of air, as if he’d been holding his breath for years. The next sounds that came out of his mouth didn’t resemble words at all, and it took me a moment to remember that Christopher said the strange man didn’t speak English. Whatever the words meant, they sounded frantic.
Jack looked back at me and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s okay,” I said, moving out from behind Jack. “Cole?”
At the sound of my voice, the tension eased out of Cole’s body; and lightning quick, he closed the gap between us, wrapped his arms around me, and smashed his lips against mine.
For a moment I could breathe again. It felt as if the blood that had been slowing and coagulating in my veins began to thin out and move inside me again, and my feet began to tingle with renewed sensation. For the first time since this morning, I thought I might survive the night.
Unlike the last time I’d fed on Cole, I received no distinct memories of his to accompany the kiss. Just a jumble of faces with no distinct features and unfamiliar buildings that could’ve been anywhere in the world.
In the next moment, he was torn away from me and lay sprawled on the floor.
Jack stood above him, his fist clenched. The lobby went silent.
“Jack!” I said. “No!”
Using the energy Cole had just given me, I ran to Jack and yanked hard on his arm. He stared back at me with blank eyes that slowly came back into focus, and when they did, he bowed his head.
“Sorry, Becks.”
He bent forward and held a hand out to Cole, who was rubbing his jaw and looking suspiciously at the newly proffered hand.
“It’s okay, Cole,” I said in my most soothing voice.
Cole took the hand, and Jack hoisted him to his feet again. With a glance toward Jack to make sure he wasn’t going to get hit again, Cole came toward me and again brought his lips to mine.
I tried not to think about the time I’d voluntarily kissed him in the Everneath to save him from the Sirens. Not just because I’d been so fooled back then, but also because I didn’t want to remember how I’d thought he was a friend.