Deadgirl

would be like to be crushed to death by a fifteen-year-old volleyball player. When she let go, I felt my lungs cry out in relief.

“Beautiful,” Zack said. I barely turned around before he pulled me into his arms.

“You honey-tongued devil,” I said, in my atrocious southern accent.

I could almost feel Morgan and Puck turning away to pretend other parts of the train were extremely fascinating. In another time and place, I might have been embarrassed. Right then, with horrible danger staring me in the face, I couldn’t give a damn.

Zack leaned down to kiss me. I put two fingers over his lips.

“Wait,” I whispered. “I could hurt you. I will hurt you.”

His speech was muffled by the fingers against his mouth. What should have been, “why would you hurt me?” came out as, “why wrrrd you hrrrmmeee?”

I grinned at that. Then I shook my head and dropped my fingers.

“I can’t help it. That high you felt the last time I kissed you wasn’t just my incredible technique. I could hurt…I could make you forget everything you’ve ever…just, no, okay? Not until I figure it out?”

He slid his arms around my waist, and I laid my head against his chest. My eyes closed, and I enjoyed the moment, listening to the rustling thump of his heartbeat through his shirt. After not-enough-time, I took a breath and stepped back.

“I really want to kiss you,” I said, blatantly, brazenly, ignoring the flush blazing across my cheeks like a wildfire.

“I know,” Zack said. I hit him hard enough to make him laugh.

It was Morgan who spoke up. Well, Morgan and Puck anyway.

“Hold your breath,” Morgan mimicked. “And think of nothing.”

I turned to him and covered my mouth. Could that work? After a moment of staring into my searching eyes, Puck nodded.

I turned to Zack.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I do,” Zack said.

He looked at me with those eyes. Those cobalt blue eyes. He was cheating, and he knew it. The smirk on his stupid perfect lips told me so. I wanted to punch him on the mouth. I should have. I would have, but I didn’t want to damage that face. For selfish reasons. Naturally.

“I trust you, Luce,” Zack said. I believed him, too.

I closed my eyes and let my brain wander. The last week drifted through my mind, the horror and the chaos. The raucous blast of gunfire at close range, the ice-cold feeling of my blood trickling out of my body. Abraham’s monstrous face, the horrid thing on the slope of the Grey. Things I wanted to let go, and so I let them disappear into shadow. I let go of my worries, my fears, my thoughts.

I opened my eyes and saw Zack, and we were the only two things in the entire world. I moved forward to kiss him, but he was there first. I let my lungs still, and I held my breath as our lips crushed into each other. His fingers dug into my hair, pulling me tight to him, and I clutched at his back and tugged desperately at his lips with my own.

Then it was over. Ten seconds of all-too-brief eternity.

I wanted to linger more—some traitor’s whisper in my head wondered if it would be the last time I’d ever kiss him.

I touched Zack’s chest, nodded to Puck, and flipped.

Chapter Fifteen

The Fates

I dumped back into the real world in a bus station.

On the edge of a curb, actually, with one foot on the ground and one in open air. I tumbled and hit the ground with all the grace of a tranq-darted buffalo.

The very first thing I noticed, before I noticed the bus station, before I noticed the light pattering of rain, was the bright lance of pain shooting through my hand. I rolled over onto my back, the gravel digging its stubby spikes into my skin, and held my left arm up. My fingers were twisted and mangled, a purple and yellow bouquet of shattered digits. My gorge rose, and I snapped my eyes away and gagged and coughed up long strings of saliva.

I’d forgotten. My fingers had been stomped on during the fight at Benny’s party and had been shattered and twisted. A wave of nausea crested over me, and I gagged more bile. My fingers cycled between hot and cold, searing when the pain hit, frozen as it faded. I tucked my twisted hand under my shirt, to hide it from myself if nothing more, and tried to breathe. I sucked lungfuls of cold, wet-tasting air. The nausea made my head swim. Little dots of light swirled in my vision. Was I passing out? I might have been passing out.

As my breath began to slow, I began to think. The apparent injury hadn’t followed me into the Grey. Why? Puck said he and I, phantoms—God how I hated that word—didn’t have a body to go back to. We actually shifted between the Real and the Grey in our only body. And yet…

I looked down at my hand, just a misbegotten lump beneath the bottom of my blouse, and felt another sharp staccato blast of agony.

Was there a chance for me? Maybe I wasn’t what Puck thought I was. Maybe I just looked like something he knew—looked like himself. Was there room for something else?

I tried not to let the thought worm its way in, but it was a sneaky one, and a powerful one—maybe not just something else, but something alive?

I tried to regulate my breathing, and I had an interesting thought—I’d shifted from a train station to bus station. I didn’t for a second think it was a coincidence.

I may have been freaked out, in over my head, and possibly dead, but I’m still a quick learner.

I couldn’t see anyone—a small comfort, but the bus station looked to be in the middle of a large series of interconnected parking lots. Oh goody, nothing ever goes wrong for me in dark parking lots at night. I stood in a pool of harsh fluorescent light, and the darkness beyond shimmered and danced with a curtain of light rain.

I got to my feet slowly, trying not to jostle my demolished hand. It didn’t really matter- it was like trying to stay dry during a hurricane. My broken fingers still spun a tale of woe every time I breathed.

In the distance, I heard a train rattle down its tracks. It made me think of Zack. I touched my lips and breathed a stream of frost between my fingers. I’d never felt more lonely in my entire life.

And I was cold. Always cold. In the Grey, things seemed to even out—never warm, never cold. Here, it seemed to be one extreme or the other. The cold meant one thing—I’d have to take soon.

I waited for another ten minutes, wrapped in frost, trying to rub my arms to life on a bus-stop bench in the middle of the night. I tried to formulate a plan, but it wasn’t coming. I wasn’t exactly full-up on courage. In fact, the needle floated a breath above “E.”

The bus finally arrived. A middle-aged black woman sat in the driver’s seat. She was pretty but tired- looking—I could almost see the two-point-five children and the husband she couldn’t stand. Knowing what I did about myself, there was a good chance I actually was seeing her two children, her newborn—Kevin, or Kellin, something like that—and her husband, James.

As I walked up the steps, and I smelled something that could have been Britney Spear’s Curious, I was positive. It was Kellin, and her husband, James, was cheating on her. A little seed of panic popped inside of me, and I made a conscious effort to hold my breath. The weird ambient images disappeared.

“Bus pass, hon?” she asked me, in a surprisingly soothing voice. I wanted to be read-to in that voice. I would