Ever After (17 page)

Gah, I loved that. Why, why did I have to love everything about him?

“Since you arrived, every guy you’ve met has been immediately smitten with you. It shouldn’t be hard to,” he paused, “move on.”

I’d try. I’d do everything it took to take my mind off him.

He propped a foot on the railing and looked away.

My next words were exactly right for the moment. “Not every guy. But the right one is out there. I just have to find him. When I do, if I don’t know it straight away, he will. I have to have faith in that. When we meet, he’ll love me so much, there’s no way he’ll let me go.”

We stood there for a full minute in silence.

Cole stared at that still invisible thing I couldn’t see.

I turned to walk away, an internal struggle thundering inside me.

If he didn’t make a move right then, I’d have to allow the old if-you-love-someone-let-them-go saying some time to work.

My heart crumbled to dust on the floor of my chest as space increased between us.

He made no move to stop me.

* * * *

The nightgown or the pajamas? Either made me look like I belonged in a rest home.

A knock came at my door as I pulled the longer white one over my head.

“Hold on,” I called. From the closet, I jerked out a ruffled robe that’d been hanging in the closet before I’d arrived and slid it on. It was very old.

I opened the door a crack and peered out. My feet turned to sponge.

Cole Kinsley was on the other side of my door, and I looked like a nun.

He raked his hands through his dark hair as he stared down the hall. When he saw me, he diverted his gaze to the floor.

I pulled the door open farther. “Yes?”

Cole straightened and cleared his throat. “We need to talk.”

Hmm. That was fast.

“Okay. In the hall or—” I gestured to the middle of my room.

Cole glanced at my bed with a wild, scared look in his eyes but slowly stepped in. He was like an animal you had to tame so he’d come closer and closer till finally it would let you pet its head. “I’ll be leaving this evening. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

I spun on him before I could compose myself. “With no notice?”

“It’s unavoidable.” He stared at anything but me.

I pressed my trembling lips shut. My heart exploded into a million shards of disappointment.

“I can’t stay,” he said, staring at a nonexistent spot on the immaculately clean carpet.

“Why?” Last time I trust my instincts.

“I just need some time away from here.”

“You mean away from me.”

“I’ll leave tonight. Is there anything you need before I go?”

Hold me? Never let me go? Quit trying to break my heart with everything you do.

The ability to breathe had been squeezed from my chest. “I don’t—I don’t want you to leave because of—”

“It’s not just you.” At least he admitted that it was partly to do with me.

“Oh, right. The whole, ‘It’s not you. It’s me,’ thing.” Why was I even mad? He’d warned me of how he felt. So why did my heart feel like it had been crushed to mush? “Well, you do what you’ve got to do.”

He could leave if he wanted to.

I didn’t care. I pulled the white towel from my hair. When it fell around my face, I shook it out, shoved it back, and looked at him.

His eyes widened. and then he looked down and away.

I went to the vanity, got a brush, and jerked it through my hair. “You can go now.”

Through the vanity mirror, he stared, shaking his head.

Silently, I jerked the brush harder.

“Thank you for understanding.” Cole bowed out of the room and out of my life.

Three boring days passed. Eventless days. Sleepless nights.

With Cole gone, the house was quiet.

Shelby and Kaitlyn did little or no research. They must have known all they needed to know.

At this point, I was a prisoner. I could leave. But I couldn’t leave.

A need to know why I’d dreamed of Cole and a guy who resembled him in uncanny ways stopped me every time I started to pack my bags. And that had been thirteen times in the last three days. My hands shook too bad to finish packing, and I ended up on the bed in tears.

My life had gone from Mama, school, and books to Cole.

He was all that mattered.

Cole’s words, “Two and a half weeks,” kept playing over and over in my mind.

Shelby and Kaitlyn reminded me, “It won’t be much longer,” when they caught me looking especially distraught. Which was pretty much most of the time. If I heard those five words one more time, I’d maimed at least one of them, and they would no longer visibly be twins.

The fourth day in, I could no longer take another minute in the house. Intent on going for a run, I popped iPod earbuds in. I stopped at the study doors.

The girls leaned over laptops and scribbled notes. Kaitlyn nodded to Shelby, and Shelby nodded back. That irritating mind-talking stuff they did.

With a flick of my finger, I tuned between radio stations to full static strength. I couldn’t hear a word they said, but they wouldn’t detect my presence. Visuals would have to do.

Kaitlyn studied a page named
How to Lift Curses
. Curses?

Okay. Now that was weird. Surely they didn’t think the house was cursed.

Shelby used the calculator on her screen and behind it was a lunar calendar. Hmm.

Hoping to forget about Cole, twins, ghosts, and curses, I pounded my frustration all the way around the pool, the trails, and back to the house. The run did me wonders.

* * * *

A week and a half till the end of the lunar cycle was the same amount of time Cole had asked me for. But he was gone, and still, no one would tell me anything.

Friday night, the girls sat in front of the big screen in the living room, watching some vampire show. Junk food bags and wrappers scattered the floors and coffee table.

“While you two are living it up, he might be having a nervous breakdown or something. Can’t you at least tap into his thoughts to make sure he’s okay?”

“His thoughts are not ours to disclose. Shush. The vampire is either gonna bite her or kiss her. It’s the best part.” Shelby melted into the cushion with a goofy, slack expression on her face.

“Vampires suck.” I stomped to my room.

* * * *

That night, I woke to a tingling at the nape of my neck. Cold clammy fingers curled around it and squeezed. An unseen force made it impossible to move or breathe.

The fingers sprang open when everything started to go black. I was able to raise my head, but from the neck down, my body was pinned.

Detached, decomposed hands crawled the bed. The yellowed, razor-sharp nails singed my skin as they dug in, tearing trenches into my legs and arms. Warm blood oozed down my legs, staining the white sheets.

I was going to die. The invisible force muffled my cries for help.

A sinister, menacing laugh filled the room.

My body was launched from the bed. My head slammed into the footboard, and something cracked in my side when I connected with the floor.

I crawled toward the door, spreading a trail of blood behind me. The purple nail beds of someone’s toes stopped my scramble to safety. Something stabbed my ribs, sending a bolt of red-hot pain through my back.

“He’ll never be yours,” came from above me
.

I launched into a sitting position on the bed.

That had been the most vivid nightmare yet. In reality, nothing had happened, but I felt like I’d been lashed with barbed wire.

Cold sweat drenched my clothes. The lingering pressure of the fingers latched on my neck sent a shiver down my spine.

I clutched my knees, unable to breathe, rocking back and forth.

Cole had to come back. I couldn’t do this alone.

The blue lights of the digital numbers on the alarm clock told me it was two o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t stay in this room a minute longer.

I peered out my door.

The whole house was dark. Colder.

Air. I needed air.

The rear entrance of the house was dark and eerily quiet.

Past the fountain and beyond the maze, a little yellow light filtered through Cole’s window.

The flagstone walk was separated by moss. Each stone felt cold under my slippers.

Please be there,
I thought.

The cottage steps creaked. An animal of the night jumped into the bushes. The old wooden slat door was unlocked.

The house didn’t feel warm, like a room did when Cole was in it. When we were in the same proximity, the room was always a little warmer, safer.

The living room was scantily furnished.

A small hallway ended with two bedrooms. The first had a bare bed and a lone dresser against a white wall. It wasn’t his.

In the other room, the bed was made.

Everything in the room was immaculate. The furnishings were well over a hundred years old.

Taking cautious steps, I let my fingers trail over his things.

His taste in antiques was impeccable. He must have preferred them to updated hygienic tools.

The old shaving brush and comb on the back of the wash pan rack was older than my parents. A razor blade on the end of a switchblade was propped beside it. The items had been kept in pristine shape.

An old watch on a chain, a few old coins, and something I would never have thought Cole would have picked up, much less read, a bible, were spaced in OCD placement on his dresser.

He should have had a semi-messy room with modern technology everywhere, like the guys at school, but all this stuff? Weird. He wasn’t here. A longing churn in my chest tightened.

In the small old-fashioned kitchen, the back door hung open.

In the dark, starlit night, the moon dipped low in the sky. Half white, half dark. Lonely clouds blotted the sky.

He wasn’t nearby.

A strange pull tugged at my feet from underground. The catacombs.

Through the walls and walls of roses, the little round metal loop wouldn’t be hard to spot in the moonlight.

He was in there.

The barn door creaked open, and a string for the overhead light wasn’t hard to find. Flashlights were in a drawer near the gardening tools. Watching every move Cole made served a purpose other than minor lusting.

At the maze entrance, I shivered.

A ghoulish girl could shoot out of the rose walls at any minute, but Cole was in there, too. Walking through the maze in the dark was crazy, but it had to be done. Once inside, all outside noise fell away.

In school, I recreated maze tests of some of psychology’s greatest pioneers, and I had learned to memorize each maze with one time through to see if I could match a human’s thought processes to that of an animal’s, namely mice. It was one of my many psychological fascinations, and it sure had come in handy here.

In minutes, the narrow foliage opened to the clearing, denoting the middle of the maze, but no Cole. A few more steps. The trap door.

He was in there.

I looped my finger into the cool metal and lifted it. Sliding over easily, the door didn’t weigh as much as I’d worried it would. The flashlight’s yellow ray illuminated wooden slats leading down to even deeper darkness. They creaked with every step. At the bottom, the earth’s coolness surrounded me.

That way, something directed me.

Down the tunnel to the right, brown dirt and remnants of roots absorbed the flashlight’s ambience. The musty air made it hard to breathe. Dirt turned to moist soil as the tunnel narrowed. After a football field’s walk, rumbling filled the tunnel. Damp earth soaked through my slippers as the rumbling turned to splashes of water.

What had I been thinking? I was liable to get stuck in some huge mud hole, and no one would ever know.

Near the wall, the floor was drier.

Ahead, a blue glow led to a deafening opening. Warm humidity dampened my neck as I neared the gray-blue.

The air grew warmer. Not temperature warm, Cole warm.

The tunnel opened into a large cave. A misty spray of water sprinkled my face as I neared a thundering waterfall. It fell from some unseen height outside.

A ledge on the right side gave a one foot window to slide through. A blue curtain of water would have prevented passage otherwise.

I fumbled to flip off the flashlight.

On the ledge, I leaned against the rock wall, the mist of the falls coating my face. I inched from behind the wall of water. The black night was lit by the blue glow of the moon. It landed on small bushes, trees, and boulders around the mouth of the falls. It lit the water a purple-blue, and in the middle, like a dream that just couldn’t be true, the darkly tanned torso, the water-soaked black hair, and muscular biceps of the person who led me here stood waist up in the ink-colored pool.

Cole.

I’d have died holding my breath if a spot on his left shoulder hadn’t caused me to gasp. Good thing the waterfall thundered behind me.

Outlined in black were the vivid dark blue swirls and curly cues of tree limbs surrounding an almost 3-D blue, crescent moon. It was filled in with pale yellow ink. A moon?

Mine was a birthmark, but he’d purposely chosen this mark to have permanently engraved on his body.

Cole dove under the blue water.

I stepped behind the waterfall and took cleansing breaths. It was time to fight for what I wanted.

At least I’d worn half-flattering underwear that day. No granny stuff. Ava would have been proud.

I peered out from the curtain of water. Compared to his magnificence, I was utterly, miserably second-rate. I could only depend on the previous reactions he’d had to me to anticipate that he wouldn’t shove me away this time.

In the blue light, I slid my nightgown off, stepped out of my slippers, and into the dark green abyss.

Cole surfaced with his back to me. The air in my lungs turned to lead. His strong hands raked water backward out of his hair. It beaded down his milky-chocolate tanned skin. He shook his hair out and started for the edge.

I leaped in and pushed off from the bottom. The water was so dark, I could only see the water ripple where his fingers grazed the surface when he turned to face my direction. I rose up and brushed the water from my eyes.