“That was fun,” I said through gritted teeth, collapsing into the passenger seat of Will’s battered Dodge. My heart was pounding way too hard from the adrenaline rush, and pain shot up my leg in uneven bolts of agony.
“Hands in,” Will warned before slamming my door shut and scrambling around the car and into the driver’s seat. Once he was inside, he cranked the engine and peeled out of the parking space in reverse. “Are they coming?” His gaze was fixed behind us as he backed out.
“How should I know? Unless they’re talking about following us, they could be in the freaking car for all I know.” Which wasn’t quite true, but I was feeling a tad irritable because once more I didn’t have answers, and did have—hello?—intense pain. God, I’d forgotten how much it could hurt to be alive. And to be scared. Really and truly scared.
I squeezed my hands together to stop them from shaking. There’d been a moment when I wasn’t sure, when I thought the spirits might try to stop us, and we would have been screwed. Will’s abilities gave spirits physicality around him. They were as real and as capable of violence against him as any living person. I’d seen it happen before. Crowds of the dead pushing and shoving at him to get his attention. It wouldn’t take much to turn it into a tug-of-war with Will as the rope.
And me, too, most likely. I shuddered at the idea. We hadn’t tested whether ghosts could touch me and vice versa. I’d taken a leave of absence, sort of, from my spirit-guide duties. Since my “transformation,” I’d been doing my best to stay away from disembodied voices, including those belonging to the spirits waiting for Will’s help. If it turned out they could touch me—and there was a decent chance that would be the case—I would be utterly defenseless against them, just as Will was. His theory was that it was better to risk only one of us until we figured all of this out. So he was doing his best to manage them without me, relatively unsuccessfully, from what I’d heard.
“You were seeing something, though, I could tell.” He spared me a glance as he shifted into drive, and I crossed my arms over my chest, hiding my hands so he couldn’t see the trembling.
“Distortions, like shimmery spots in the air.” I shook my head, and he accelerated toward the exit, the tires spewing gravel behind us. “I don’t know. It’s—”
The car hit a pothole, jarring my leg, and I sucked a breath in through my teeth.
He slowed down and looked over at me. “Are you okay?”
I shifted in the seat, putting more weight on my right hip, trying to alleviate the pressure on my left leg, which, at the moment, felt like it was going to explode into a thousand pieces. “I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “Just go, get us out of here.”
He complied, but I couldn’t help but notice that he also took care to avoid the worst of the holes until we reached the smoother pavement of the street. “What you did back there…” He hesitated.
No, no, not getting into this.“I was saving my ass as much as yours,” I pointed out quickly, trying to stop this topic in its tracks.
He shook his head. “No, you weren’t.” He sounded almost stunned, which, frankly, stung a bit. “Until you said something, they didn’t know you were different, that you were anything other than a regular living person.”
Which meant I’d been dumb, dumb, dumb to stick my neck out. But I couldn’t leave him like that, defenseless and trapped, even if it meant risking myself. And that was so unlike what I would have done a few months ago, it unnerved me. I definitely did not want to talk about it.
I forced a shrug. “If they’d started tossing you around or something, somebody would have probably called the cops, and then we’d have to go through that whole is-he-crazy-or-not conversation, not to mention a hospital trip to get you fixed up.” I sighed. “And I don’t have the time or patience for that today.”
He made a face. “Can you just let me say thank you?”
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” I snapped, growing more and more uncomfortable with the conversation. I…I cared too much about him, and this should not have been happening. It was way too big of a risk for me, leaving myself open to that kind of vulnerability. “You could have done it yourself. Shouldhave done it yourself.”
And short of that, what he probably should have done was find himself a new and fully functioning spirit guide to keep his ass out of a sling.
That was the real trouble. Before, at least, I’d been useful. He’d needed me, maybe even more than I’d needed him. And that was the way I liked it. If somebody needs you more than you need them, you’re the one with the power, the control. But now…now he didn’t need me at all. If anything, I was a burden, a problem to be solved. I was worse than useless, and that sucked. If I had truly been the person he thoughtI was, the one he was trying to thank, I’d have told him to dump me and find someone who could really help him, keep him safe. That’s what I would have done in his position.
But I couldn’t make the words come out. Because that would mean I’d be alone. No, not just alone…I’d be without Will. And somehow that was even worse. I’d gotten used to him being here with me, and it was getting harder and harder to imagine my life—in any form—without him. Which was terrifying in an entirely different way. Just thinking about it made me flinch.
Will noticed, of course. “Do you need to go to the hospital?” he asked quietly.
“No.” I stared out the windshield, willing my eyes to stop burning with unshed tears.
He slid his hand across the seat, offering it to me. I looked at him, and he took his gaze off the road for a second to meet mine. My heart thumped triple-time in that moment, at the warmth in his eyes, the question that I wasn’t ready to answer.
Hating myself for the weakness—because I knew, on some level, even this was for Lily, the person I looked like instead of the person I was—I took his hand, locking my palm tightly inside his. Holding his hand made me feel more securely tethered to the world, as if I wasn’t going to float away and disappear like one of the balloons we used to release on the first day of Sunday school.
“So, why did he run?” I asked, shifting my attention to the side window and changing the topic, trying to pretend that this was not somehow more intimate than the kissing we’d done, that we weren’t connected in this simple and yet powerful way that I felt in every cell of my borrowed body. “Malachi, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” Was it me, or did Will sound a little unsorted himself?
“Better question: why did you chase him?” This time, I did look over at him.
He hesitated. “I think he recognized me.”
“Really? How?” I was pretty sure Will would have remembered and mentioned meeting Malachi before; dude cut a fairly distinct figure in that stupid cloak of his.
“I think maybe he put it together, connected me with my dad.”
Will did look a lot like his father in the pictures I’d seen, but…
I frowned. “We’re talking years ago, though. Ifthey even met. And he’d have to have left a hell of an impression for Malachi to recognize you from your dad and then also to run.” I shook my head. “Which doesn’t make sense. The guy’s a fake. What would be the point of your dad talking to him at all?”
Will shrugged. “Maybe my dad was hunting down con artists for the Order or something.”
“None of the other fakes were scared of you,” I pointed out. In fact, based on the sheer amount of false-eyelash-batting that had gone on, I was pretty sure Madame Selena might have tried to keep him as her houseboy/love slave if I’d been paying less attention.
“That’s exactly why we need to talk to him again.”
“Again?” I turned carefully in my seat to stare at him. “Did you miss the part where the guy is a fraud? Totally of no use to us?”
“Maybe he can tell us what my dad was doing, give us some direction on what to try next,” he argued.