I couldn’t believe my own words as they were being said. Why was I protecting her from my own?
I released Zeph, his eyes hardened. But my gaze remained on Fallon as her lost eyes stared out into nothingness in deep thought. I dropped my back against the brick. She did that often when she was around them. Gone, but still there. Where are you going when you do that, Fallon?
After another round of Zeph kicking my ass, we huddled in the corner as the DJ pumped a song through the speakers. Most left the bar to dance, and Phoenix’s rush had slowed, finally pouring us a round of shots. Fallon stood on the sidelines, shaking her head as the redhead pulled on her hand toward the dance floor. I downed the shot under the flap of my mask, wiped the corners of my mouth with two fingers, and dropped my elbow on the bar, watching her as the guys talked around me.
“Hi,” a girl said over the hitting bass, approaching nervously with her two friends close behind.
They were standoffish and scared of us, as they should be. Usually, no one talked to us—no one approached us—but now and then, we would get the brave soldiers who came over as a dare or mission to see if they could be with a Heathen for the night. Curious to know what it would be like, to see if we had a heart at all, or to try and change us. Monsters could have hearts too, and the truth was, we had a heart just like every other living thing. But we couldn’t let anyone get close enough to feel it, see it, take it, shape it.
We had to push them away to protect them.
Because when people get close, they die.
Beck’s eyes glued to the drink in his hand. Phoenix kept his attention on the bar, and I returned my focus on the dance floor, watching Fallon sway awkwardly in place with her straw between her teeth.
“My friends dared me to come over here,” the girl continued, but neither one of us opened our mouths to speak to her. She would walk away eventually.
The rest of the silent and awkward rejection fell into the background when Kane pulled Fallon deeper into the crowd, her drink splashing down her legs. I tensed in my chair. Fallon pushed against his chest, shaking her head as her eyes darted around, landed on me. She didn’t want to. I fisted my drink.
“Not one dance?” the girl tried again.
Kane’s hands slithered down Fallon’s sides. The white shirt she was wearing under the slinky dress bunched up at the sides, revealing her smooth white skin. I lifted myself over the bar and blindly reached for a bottle.
“Not interested, now move along,” Phoenix caved, annoyed, waving the flatlanders off until they scurried away. “For fuck’s sake, I’m not a piece of meat,” he hissed under his breath.
And I chugged from the bottle as Kane used his ways on Fallon, getting her to relax.
The Pruitt’s were Sea Witches, having the ability to manipulate the weather, the sea, and little freakshows too, if that was who they wanted. Kane could trick and influence minds and, on his worst day, enter the unconscious, give wet dreams, lust-filled fantasies, and make anyone fall for him. Thanks to Kane’s grandfather, we were all forbidden to use our magic out in the open—especially since the flatlander population had increased—but Kane was childish, a one-upper.
And his move on Fallon was all a show for me.
Kane’s manipulation worked on her, too. His hands slipped into the dress’s openings at her sides, and her ass grazed across his Khakis. His eyes bounced to mine, a look of victory while Fallon’s lips pulled into a drunken smile—drunk on him and under his spell.
“Don’t,” Beck whispered all-knowingly in my ear, gauging the tell of my gaze. I could never hide anything from him—could never pretend with him. “He’s seeing how you’ll react.”
“I don’t play games.”
“I know, man. I’m just saying.”
Kane flashed me a cocky grin, his hands gripping Fallon’s bare flesh, and I flung the empty bottle into the trash on the other side of the bar. “I’m ready to go.”
Zeph cocked his head, watching me sling on my coat. “It’s still early.”
My eyes looked up to Fallon under my lashes as I adjusted my waistband, anger-fused dizziness simmering just below my surface that I couldn’t quite understand. If Zeph or Phoenix noticed how much she was already getting to me, they could do something stupid. They could harm her, get rid of her. I couldn’t take that chance. The reason I’d warned Fallon to stay away from the woods, away from them, away from me.
“I have an early morning at the shop.”
On my way out, the dark pulled me under.
Chapter 13
Fallon
Winds combed through my hair and caressed my cheeks as I walked home from the bar in a daze. Rolling clouds—the color of wet ash—crawled across the black sky, and a breath of dampened death lingered in the air. Fat raindrops fell like a leaky faucet, splashing my face and soaked clothes. The rain was coming to an end. Water sloshed in my leather saddle shoes, and the bun in my hair had fallen, hanging off me like a deadweight.
Both Kane and the girls had offered me a ride home, but I’d told them I needed to breathe.
I needed air, space, and to be away from them, but the silence was deafening, the night was whispering, and the paranoia was prickling behind my neck as my feet stumbled down Seaside Street.
I didn’t know what time it was either. Time passed fast and slow here. Time passed here as if it didn’t exist at all, a place of the in-between, liminal space. Maybe this was where I belonged all along. Weeping Hollow, the hidden town left in limbo.
As I turned the corner to Town Square, the wind howled around me and the hickey on my neck thumped under my skin, a pull to Julian. He was in my head. He was everywhere and nowhere. I couldn’t escape him.
Then that was when I heard it.
Small whimpers rose and fell and diffused into the air. I turned, scanning the pathway behind me, around me, all of the empty Town Square until my eyes landed on the silver outline.
Sitting over the gazebo’s steps was the little boy in the red and white striped shirt, hugging his knees that pressed against his chest. At first, he was no more than a shimmer of mist, the staircase appearing behind him—a poorly taken photograph from times beyond my existence.
My breath held in my lungs. My pulse sped. I should be used to situations like this, but the adrenaline was all the same.
It was the same ghost who’d led me to a distraught Julian in the woods only nights before. He was so young, merely a toddler, and so lost, it was slowly tearing at my heart. My posture turned rigid as I stared into his sad eyes that were brimming with tears as his tiny hands curled into fists.
And the ghost jumped to his feet! “Jai,” he cried. “Jai, stop! Stop it! Jai, no!”
He flickered across the lawn, coming closer, the winds swirling.
The strength of his wind pushed me back against the brick of the apothecary store when he appeared before me. His face was pale and blotchy, his hair wet, his eyes swirling with a mixture of pain and anguish.
“JAI, NO!” he screamed, and I felt his heartache bury itself inside me.
Another cold wind blew. It was the kind to trap itself in my bones as if my body was a door that had been left wide open to the icy wind, slamming only to open again—a haunted house living inside me.