COMING BACK THIS TIME IS just as mild. A blink. A tugging on her limbs. Darkness becomes light. But where she was warm and happy, waiting for the boy on the trail, she’s now scorching hot. Colin’s back is pressed to her front once again.
And this time she knows she’s been gone, because she feels as if she’s been woken up, and Lucy knows she doesn’t sleep. She vanishes.
“Hi,” she whispers into his back.
He stiffens. “Lucy?” His voice is thick with sleep.
“How long?”
His spine relaxes, pressing back into her. “Just two days.”
“You okay?”
“No.” His alarm goes off, and he swats the snooze button with his palm before rolling over to face her.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be.”
She pushes his hair back. “I am anyway. I tried not to get so relaxed again.”
He kisses her so carefully, as if too much contact will cause her to evaporate. His tongue glances her lip, her tongue, the skin of her neck. His piercing is cold; his skin is hot. His hands pull her closer, shadow up and down her sides and over her curves. “Missed you,” he whispers.
Last time, when she returned from being gone, he looked angry. This time, he seems resigned. She pulls back so she can see his face more clearly. His freckles have faded in the past month, and only now, with a couple of days away, does she notice. His eyes are dimmer in the dark room, but something fierce drums behind them, matching the rhythm of his pulse in his throat.
His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows thickly. “I told Jay.”
“Told him what?”
“That you’re a Walker.”
She falls silent in the face of such a blunt admission.
“I was freaking out and worried I imagined everything. I needed someone else to hear it and believe it.” He laughs dryly.
She nods, supposing she can’t be upset with him any more than he can be with her for disappearing. “Okay.” She draws out the word carefully. “How’d he take it?”
He rolls onto his back, staring at the ceiling. He’s shirtless. Lucy’s eyes move instinctively to his bare skin, over the smooth lines of his chest, the definition of his stomach, and lower. “He didn’t believe me at first. But we didn’t talk about that for long. We talked about me going into the lake again.”
Lucy’s body pricks, each element drawn to the surface, making her feel like a brittle, spiked shell. “Colin.”
“He’s game, Lucy. He said he’ll do it for me.”
“And are you doing it for me?” she asks, hearing the bite in her words and feeling proud that they came out the way she intended. “Because no, thanks.”
“I’m doing it for both of us. I know it will work.” He gives her his trademark slow blink, filled with cocky confidence, but the gesture is wrong. He’s doing this because she would never ask it of him even though he probably sees straight through her to her traitor glee.
“This is a bad time to talk about this,” she says quietly. “I just got back, and I know you were scared when I vanished again. I feel like I can’t say no to this, but I want to.” The lie burns in her throat.
He sits up, facing away from her and bending to put his head in his hands. “We’ll talk about it later, then.”
- • •
Later turns out to be in the crowded dining hall, surrounded by four hundred other students. Later turns out to be with Jay.
“I told Lucy that you know,” Colin says before taking a giant bite of pizza. Suddenly the drone of hundreds of students feels completely silent.
Jay and Lucy stare at him for a beat before looking at each other. “Yeah,” Jay says. “He told me. Sorry about the . . . being dead.”
Lucy smiles weakly, raises her hands and shakes them. “Ta-da . . .”
With the truth out between the three of them, Jay lets himself look. Really look. It’s not like Lucy has never been inspected; Colin stares at her all the time, examining how she fits together or maybe trying to get his mind to believe what his eyes see and his heart feels. But other than Colin, no one ever looks at her. Not like this. Jay’s attention is unnerving and unrelenting.
“Dude, she’s not made of wax. You’re making her twitchy.”
Jay sits back in his chair, letting it teeter back on two legs. “I can’t tell.”
Colin leans forward. “What?”
“I mean, unless you look closely, she just looks like a chick.”
“She is a chick,” Lucy says, annoyed at the conversation that’s happening as if she’s not sitting right here.
“I mean, yeah, your skin is supersmooth, and you look kind of . . .” He waves his hands vaguely. “Glassy. But you look like a chick.”
She scowls. “Maybe we can talk about this somewhere other than the middle of the dining hall during lunch.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, no one looks at you,” Jay says, slapping his chair down with a loud clap and reaching for his apple. “So no one is watching us, either.”
She exhales and looks away, out the window to where snow is falling in fluffy handfuls from the silver-blue sky. She listens to the sound of the boys digging into their lunches for several minutes before Jay speaks.
“Colin says you’re not up for the lake again.”
Her head snaps to Colin, and she narrows her eyes.
“I think he’s right,” Jay continues, leaning forward and catching her gaze. “I think it’s like an extreme sport. He’s healthy and young; my obsessive hunter father has ensured that I know CPR. The infirmary is full of supplies. And I got Colin back last time without anything.”
“Which was lucky for everyone,” she counters. “Were you this enthusiastic when he suggested it to you yesterday?”
“Nah,” Jay says, grinning. “I thought all those hits to the skull had finally done him in. But I’ve come around.”
Lucy shakes her head at this strange display of trust and loyalty. “Why are you invested in this?”
Jay takes a bite of apple and shrugs. “Colin’s lost a lot of people. I like the idea that he’ll chase you down and keep you from getting away.”
Lucy looks at Colin, who is watching her with a painfully vulnerable, hopeful expression. He squints, analyzing her eyes, and then smiles. She doesn’t know what color they are or what he’s seen, but somehow he already knows she’s going to say yes.
- • •
She’d pushed for a warmer day, but January in Boundary County has few of those to offer. With blankets and a duffel bag of pilfered equipment in Jay’s backpack, the three of them head out to the lake.
Jay talks nonstop as they walk. Lucy can’t tell if it’s nervous energy or how he is when heading out to do any activity motivated by complete insanity. She and Colin hum in agreement or dissent whenever it seems called for, but she can tell Colin isn’t listening either. His fingers are wrapped carefully around hers, and she grips them as tightly as she can manage. She can feel his skin squeeze between her fingers and meets his surprised eyes.
They crunch through the snow to the giant open gash in the ice and unload everything, the air humming with the strangely loud silence that comes in a moment perched on the edge of adventure.
While she waits, she takes a moment to look around. It’s easy to see why the lake’s gotten such a paranormal reputation. In the blue-gray light of the winter afternoon, it’s downright eerie, and ribbons of fog seem to cling to its surface. It isn’t hard to imagine ghosts walking aimlessly along the shore, or even a madman dragging a young girl to her death. Lucy stares at the icicles looping from the box elders, heavy and gaudy with splinters of sunshine slanting through. She looks at her tree towering above the two benches at the edge of the lake. She doesn’t think she’s ever taken the time to look at it before, but now that she does, a shiver runs through her that has nothing to do with the January wind tugging at the ends of her frozen hair. The branches arch upward, each spindly twig like fingers hoping to pluck a ghost from the sky. Jay blows loudly into his hands and she turns toward him, grateful for the distraction.
Lucy isn’t sure what she expected—maybe Colin walking around the site of the cracked ice, inspecting, maybe psyching himself up to the act—but whatever it was, she certainly did not expect him to strip down to his boxers within minutes of the supplies being set up and jump feetfirst through the original crack in the ice into the frigid water.
She barely has time to be gripped with panic, to feel every part of her shift to the middle and clench where her heart used to beat. His head dips underwater and he surfaces, gasping and cursing, his arms grabbing wildly for the tether they’ve attached to his wrist.
“Cold! Oh my God, it’s cold!”
Jay bounces at the edge of the entry point, jittery and unsure. “You done? You want out?”
“No, no, no, no!” Colin yells. “Just . . . shit, it’s cold.” He shivers violently.
“Colin!” Lucy calls. Her chest grows with the sensation of hot, rushing water filling her empty heart. The heady sensation is disorienting, completely at odds with the panic her brain tells her to feel. “Get out!”
I’m done.
This is insanity.
I don’t want this.
She reaches for him, but Jay bats her hands away. “I got this. Lucy, this is what he wants to do.”
Teeth chattering, Colin nods and then dunks under the freezing water again, determined to soak his hair.
“This is wrong,” Lucy whispers. “Jay, this is going to kill him.”
“It won’t,” he says, voice steady. How can he be so sure when everything inside Lucy is colliding?
“I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay,” Colin whispers over and over again. “I’m okay.”
After what feels like an eternity filled with the sound of water lapping against ice, of Colin’s huffing breaths, of Jay muttering reassurances over and over, “You can do this; you got this; you can hang, buddy, come on. A few more minutes and you get to touch your girl. You can do this,” Colin shudders once, and then his eyes roll back as he turns and bobs in the water.
Jumping into action, Jay reaches for Colin’s arm and pulls him out, dragging him on his side to a foil blanket spread out on the ice. He checks the time and then watches him lying there, unmoving.
“Revive him!” she screams, slapping his shoulder, hard. “Why aren’t you reviving him?” She looks at her hand, at the flush of blood she can almost see pumping beneath her skin. Something hums in her ears—a heartbeat.
“Just give him a minute,” Jay says with a level of calm she can’t comprehend. “We’ve checked this all out. He’s good for a while.”
Colin’s semilifeless body is blue and mostly naked, laid out on the foil blanket. He looks skinnier than she remembers; his muscles spasm sharply. As soon as Colin has coughed all of the water he inhaled out on the foil, Jay sits back and just watches him shiver.
Jay seems calm. He’s totally onboard with this insanity, no nerves, no hesitation.
Just as she’s on the verge of screaming her panic into the dull gray sky, she hears, “Luce. Turn around.”
She swivels toward Colin’s voice and her heart melts.
