Leon had turned sideways and was busy pretending he wasn’t looking at me. He hadn’t bothered to clothe himself yet. His hair was still damp and curling. “Track and field.”
“That sort of counts.”
“It counts. Are you planning to wear that or not?”
I wrung out my own hair onto my towel before pulling on the T-shirt. “You know you’re never getting this shirt back, right?”
“It doesn’t even fit you.”
“It fits fine.”
“Then I’ve changed my mind. You can’t have it.”
I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious, but considering how angry he was with me, I suspected it might be the latter. I folded my arms over my chest, hugging the shirt against me. “Too bad.”
He crossed the room in three long strides. I stood staring up at him, my heart thumping erratically. His blue eyes were dark and narrowed. A lock of hair was sticking to his forehead. He had that stubborn look on his face that usually foretold an argument. But instead of yanking the shirt up over my head, he backed me against the wall and kissed me. Hard.
I tilted my face to his, returning the kiss—but I didn’t unfold my arms, in case this was some ploy to distract me. Gradually, however, the tension left my shoulders. The kiss turned hungry, heady. I eased toward him. Without raising my arms, I moved my hands and pressed them to his chest, feeling the heat that burned through his wet skin, the rushing of his pulse. He had his own hands on my hips, lifting me against him.
And then, predictably, his phone rang.
Once again, he released me so rapidly it was almost dizzying. I was dizzy, at any rate. While Leon turned to answer his phone, I wobbled to the edge of his bed and sat down, forgetting that my shorts were still drenched from the rain.
“It’s Mom, isn’t it?” I said.
Leon didn’t reply.
“I told you: kiss radar,” I groaned, flopping backward onto the bed. His bedspread was dark blue, striped with gray. Warm cotton. I closed my eyes, taking a slow breath. For just this moment, I thought, everything was okay.
“She’s at your house,” Leon said after he’d finished the call.
I crashed back to Earth. “Is Gideon…”
“Verrick is gone. Lucy’s packing you a bag. You’re staying with Esther again.”
I lifted myself up on my elbows, watching Leon. He’d finally pulled on dry clothes and was once again avoiding my gaze. There was a tightness in his jaw that I recognized. I could never read him very well with my Knowing, but now he’d grown even more closed off than usual. He appeared to have remembered that he was mad at me. I sighed, rolling to face the wall, where through his window I could see the lights of Minneapolis pushing back the dark. Outside, the rain had finally stopped.
At the St. Croix house in St. Paul, I was given the same guest room I’d had the last time I stayed there. That had been three months ago, after Susannah had appeared in my living room, injured and angry, her human disguise fading into scales. The night she’d taken Mickey Beneath. Relocating to St. Paul hadn’t made me feel any safer then, and it didn’t make me feel safer now. But Mom wouldn’t hear any arguments. Verrick had been in our house; that meant it was now off-limits.
“Gideon knows where Esther lives,” I said. “He’s been to this house before. If he really wanted to come after me, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding me here.”
Mom only tightened her lips. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and then turned away, leaving the house to head off into the dark of the city. I lingered on the porch, watching her drive away. The sky had cleared, but far off on the horizon I could still see the edge of the storm, pulses of lightning shooting from cloud to cloud. The rumble of thunder was low and distant.
Mom had packed two suitcases for me and placed them on the floor of the guest room, along with my purse. I flicked on the overhead light and stood in the doorway, staring at the old cherrywood dresser and night stand, the gauzy drapes open to the night air, the pale green bedspread with tiny pink roses embroidered along the edge. The room had once belonged to my uncle Owen, who had died beside his wife in a car crash one rainy evening and left his daughters, Iris and Elspeth, orphans—but there was no trace of him here. His belongings had long since been packed away, furniture replaced. There was just that clinging hint of sadness that lived in the walls of the house, a sense of mourning that never fully eased. The St. Croix family had known its share of grief, I thought. I felt it now, as I pulled out the dresser drawers one by one and slowly set about filling them; a subtle weight between my shoulder blades. The memory of footfalls and shrieks of laughter that echoed through the halls. Mom had sent me from the silence of our house to sleep among ghosts.
Leon had returned to his apartment almost immediately after delivering me to St. Paul. He’d only stopped a moment to speak with Esther. Then his eyes had met mine, and his brow had furrowed. He hadn’t spoken, not even to demand his shirt back again. I was still wearing it. I wore it to bed that night, curling up tight beneath the green-and-pink bedspread and listening to the drone of traffic out my window and desperately hoping not to dream.
The next few days were tense. Every time my phone rang, every time I saw Esther’s grim face, or Charles worried and frowning, I expected news. When it came, it was never good. Another member of the Kin had vanished, and then another. No bodies were recovered, but the crime scenes matched. Houses found trashed, furniture broken. Blood on the floor.
And then came the words I’d been dreading.
“Verrick attacked another Guardian,” Esther informed me Thursday evening.
My throat was so tight, I had to fight the word out. “Who?”
“Anthony.”
I nodded. I knew Anthony, peripherally. He’d been injured during one of Susannah’s attacks. “Was he hurt?”
Esther’s answer was a succinct: “He will live.”
She didn’t offer many details beyond that. Gideon had retreated once more, after wounding Anthony—but he was growing bolder.
More like Verrick. Less like Gideon.
I was still trying to find a solution of my own. Iris’s warnings rang in my ears, loud accusations that it was me, my fault, that I had to kill Gideon. I’d been puzzling through her words, dissecting them. If she was right about the reason the Beneath had woken up—that it was the Astral Circle’s power that was feeding it, through Gideon’s link to both of them—that didn’t mean Gideon had to die, I reasoned. It just meant we had to somehow break his connection to the Circle. After that, I could figure out some way to help him.
Not that I had any idea of how to do that. But there had to be some answer, I told myself. The connection between Verrick and my father was severed, but maybe there was still some way of sealing Verrick himself—the Harrower part of him. It had been sealed before. He’d spent seventeen years sleeping, while Gideon smiled and laughed and grew, all unknowing.
But since my attempt to get information on sealing from the elders had been rather horrifically interrupted, I wasn’t certain where else to look.
It was Tink who suggested we try Dora Hutchens.
Tink had been haunting the St. Croix household since I started staying there. She’d stopped going on patrol. She was afraid of running into Gideon before we figured out some way of helping him.
“That old woman,” she said Friday morning when I mentioned that my search for information had come to a standstill. “The one with all the hats. She keeps records, doesn’t she? I remember hearing about that.”
It took me a second. “Dora Hutchens?” The hat reference baffled me, but I remembered Esther’s friend who kept Kin histories. Though Dora was more of a hobbyist—her records weren’t extensive or official—she was something of an expert on Kin lore. “It’s worth a shot,” I said.