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This new body is unwieldy to the Dark. It will take time to adjust to this skin, to these eyes, to the anxious beating of this new heart.
In Snakebite, you were either fleeting or permanent. People who came to town always left, and people who left didn’t come back.
“but a part of me hopes they don’t find him. If they finally lose one of those kids, maybe they’ll stop acting so high and mighty.”
She was sure something was there. It watched her, dark and hungry and waiting.
This is only temporary, the Dark says. As I told you in the beginning, when you have the strength to stand on your own, I will leave you. When your heart tells you what it wants and you no longer hesitate to act, you will not need me.
She used to think that home wasn’t a place, it was family. But the family she had then—their strange, broken trio of misfits—hadn’t felt like home in a long time. They were still three lost things, but they were infinitely far apart. Home wasn’t family now. Home was nowhere.
Even when she was defending him, Brandon wasn’t on her side.
Ashley hated secrets. They were needles pricking at her skin, small and sharp and constant, reminders that there were some truths she still didn’t deserve, no matter how hard she worked to live up to her name.
“You know where you sleep.”
The Ashley Barton who drove the Ford was different from the one Logan had met at the police station. She was unbothered, casually slouched in her seat, T-shirt shifted carelessly above her belly button. The sun-kissed skin of her stomach was dappled with light brown freckles. Logan stared for a moment too long. She sat back up and focused on the road ahead. She was gay, but not thirst-after-straight-horse-girl gay.
The woods weren’t quiet. Not completely. Music drifted between the trees. It was a piano song trickling through the quiet somewhere nearby. The sun filtered through the bare branches, dousing the world in lonely magic. The piano played a ghost song, haunting and strained; unbearably sad, but beautiful.
They laughed, quiet and warm, and the whole display punched Ashley in the stomach. It was stupid to be jealous, but she wasn’t sure what else to be.
It was Tristan in a way that she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t just that he was missing. He was still here, lingering like a shadow at her every step. It was that she was seeing things she shouldn’t be able to, and no one would believe her if she tried to explain it.
Nick dug into computer parts,
Logan guessed this was how the room had looked for Ashley’s whole life. It was the room of a girl who’d never known herself well enough to make it her own.
“One day,” a voice breathed, “we’ll be happy.”
“Not real,” he whispered.
I’d say sorry there’s only one bed, but we’re clearly in one of those dark, murdery romances. We should just lean into the cliché.”
She wondered if kissing Logan would make her forget about everything else.
Tammy looked at her for a moment, and Ashley understood with crushing clarity that everything was different now. Her mother looked at her like she was a puzzle that needed to be pieced together to make any sense. Like there was a mistake tangled deep in her veins that her mother was trying to unravel.
“The thing you’re looking for is called the Dark, and I created it.”
He wasn’t an outcast; he didn’t exist at all.
A collection of three lost things that had cobbled together a life they could be happy in. A family.
