The cold cut right through me, and I wondered if he could teach me how to walk around in the middle of it so easily. “August wants to talk to you.” It was like carrying messages for Dad, and I didn’t have to name the feeling swelling behind my heart.
It was relief, getting stronger with every second. Here was someone more experienced than I was, even if he was my age. Just what I’d wanted, right? Someone who could tell me what to do now that the lines that kept my life on track had vanished. Between August and this guy, things would get Under Control. It would be Handled. It would be Dealt With.
Chris gave me an odd look as he passed, his blue eyes darkening and apple spice drifting in his wake, and I shivered. Graves pitched his butt out into the snow, the glow of the cherry vanishing in a gray glare caught between cloud-hazed sky and white-shrouded ground. “He checks out?”
I nodded. Something dry and hot caught in my throat. “Yeah, he checks out all right. Come in, it’s freezing.”
Graves pushed past me, and I glanced out over the street. It was so quiet, a blanket of white over everything. The snow had come down hard and pebbled, a moaning wind flinging it everywhere, and the radio said ice was coming. The morning had dawned clear and sunny, but now the sky was overcast and lowering, striations of darker cloud like ink just dropped into water billowing under the higher cloud-cover.
Huh. I stepped out onto the porch, cupping my elbows in my palms. Hugging myself. It was dead quiet except for the uneasy sound of air moving, the porch posts and the corner of the house like a ship’s prow, slicing the waves and producing a low hum of torn air.
We could have been on the moon, I realized. The house set away from the other houses like that one kid at school who’s always dressed just a little bit wrong.
No wonder nobody’d come to greet us when we moved in, or heard the gunshots and screaming.
The street was an evenly frosted expanse of white. The two driveways that didn’t lead into a garage had car-sized lumps of unbroken snow, the paint jobs peeping out from underneath—the blue mini-van at the corner, the green, wallowing Ford across the street. And in front of the garages were wide, pristine ribbons of snow leading down to the street.
Why doesn’t this feel right? I had to look a little harder before the assumptions I made started crumbling and the wrong note in the orchestra jangled hard enough for me to catch it.
No tire tracks. There wasn’t a single break in the snow. The street looked as deserted as a Western town right before the bad guy rides in for the ultimate battle.
The sunlight dimmed, and a chill fiercer than the wind walked down my back. I was shivering, though I didn’t feel it, and Graves’s curly head popped out of the doorway. “What the hell are you doing, trying to freeze to death? You’re not even wearing a coat.”
I took my time, watching the street. Nothing felt hinky at all.
It just felt quiet. Empty.
Dead.
The snow must’ve cleared up sometime this morning when the sun rose, because we were all up having our hot chocolate and funny snakes with wings before dawn, and it was coming down hard then. What, everyone just decided to stay home today? Maybe. But. . .
The last piece of the puzzle slotted into place as Graves made a spitting sound of annoyance. “What the hell? Dru?”
I stepped back, shifting my weight uneasily, as if the porch might decide to fall apart at any second. “The porch lights.” I sounded queer even to myself. “They’re all on, and it’s the middle of the day.” It’s eleven, and it gets dark early this time of year. Real dark, real early.
“Yeah,” he said. “Christophe said that, too. What are you—”
“We have to go.” My teeth chopped the words into little bits, and I made it inside, pushing him down the hall and sweeping the door shut. Warmth closed around me. I locked the deadbolts and leaned against the door. How long until sundown? I don’t know, have to check. “Pack your stuff, okay? And help me with the ammo boxes, and—”
“Dru?” Christophe, from the kitchen. I didn’t know him at all, but I knew that tone.
The Oh shit there is serious trouble, honey, pack everything up again and let’s get movin’ tone. He appeared at the end of the hall, his sharp face suddenly graven with frowning lines that made him look a lot older.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got to get the ammo packed.” He halted, regarding me, and I swallowed crow and a few lumps of my pride, too. “Will you . . . I mean, would you help us get the truck loaded?”
I had to keep leaning against the door because my knees were deciding again that they weren’t knees, they were actually noodles. Fully cooked noodles at that. And what I was really asking was something more like, Will you help me? Please?
Christophe’s blue, blue eyes flicked to Graves, and I was suddenly positive he was going to say, Sure I can, but we can’t take him. He’ll drag us down.
Oh, Christ. What was I going to do if he said that? Graves tensed, a movement I could feel even though all the starch had gone out of me, as Gran would have said. And I reached over, grabbed Goth Boy’s thin shoulder, and dug my fingers in.
Dad would never have left me behind. Not willingly. I was damned if I would leave someone else in the dust.
He bought me a cheeseburger. It was a ludicrous, laughable thought. But it was just the surface over a truckload of other things. I hadn’t heard a single word of complaint from Graves, not even over getting bit or having a gun held to his head. He’d done the best he could to help me, and that was something strangers rarely ever do. I was shipwrecked, and he’d been the only thing I could hang on to.
And he hadn’t let me down. Not once.
He was all I had. I wasn’t going to leave him here.
Christophe’s eyes fastened on my hand. He really did look old before his face smoothed out and he nodded, as if finishing a long conversation with himself. His shoulders went back and his chin came up. “You probably have a system,” he said, folding his arms. “What goes in first?”
“My bed—the mattresses. Everything else gets folded up and—” I stopped dead, as the next problem rose up and crashed into me. “Where are we going?”
“Don’t worry.” Christophe dropped his hands. “I’ll handle that. Start your packing, Dru. You, wulf-boy. Come with me.”
What does it say about your life when two hours of three teenagers working folds all of it up in the back of a Chevy half-ton’s camper?
I put Mom’s cookie jar in the top of the bathroom box and bit the packing tape, tore it deftly, and taped it down. “This one’s important,” I told Graves. “Pack the blankets around it.” Next to the fireproof box. The one with the ashes in it. God, Daddy, I wish you were here.
If wishes were fishes, even beggars would eat. Gran was fond of that saying, too.
“Got it.” Graves tramped out of the kitchen and toed open the door to the garage. Christophe had manhandled the garage door open, metal squealing in protest—the broken spring rubbing against itself with a sound like a lost tortured soul.
Well, maybe not exactly like that, but pretty damn close. Dad and I had both tried to get the garage open, knowing it was going to get cold, but in the end it was a lost cause.
But not, I guess, for a half-sucker. Djamphir.
Would I be as strong as that once I did that thing Christophe was talking about? Blooming? Would I smell like a bakery item? Or was that just him? Did he use pie filling for cologne?