Chapter 19
Back at the bar, Ember and Acton sat in silence at a table in the corner.
“Asher and Isaac could have kept you company,” she said quietly.
He sighed, leaning back. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
“No.” She looked down at the table, wondering exactly when and how her life had spun out of control. Was it when she had decided to defend Acton to her mother? When she had taken her first drink at the bar? The shattered window? Or maybe it had been long before she had even come back, when she decided she wanted to come back. In any case, she couldn’t go home; the situation with Gina was beyond an apology. It was beyond salvation, and even if Thalia would continue to be her friend, Ember wasn’t sure if she wanted to risk bringing her sister down with her.
Acton was all she had left, for as long as he wanted her. She had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t of a disposition to let her leave until he was done, if he let her leave at all.
The thought made her blood run cold. “Are you going to kill me?”
Acton didn’t move. He hardly reacted to her accusation. “No.”
“Not tonight, I mean. I know you’re not going to do it tonight.” She licked her lips. “But eventually. Eventually…”
Finally, he looked over at her, unblinking. “I suppose I could be the death of you, eventually. But as of this moment, I have no intention of killing you myself. I’ll protect you, as Gina seems to have left her post. I suggest you don’t push me though—I am prone to changing my mind.”
Ember stared at him. After a moment, she started to shake her head. “Why would you want to help me?”
Acton looked back out over the bar. When he placed his arm around her shoulders, using his other hand to gesture at Isaac, she didn’t bother trying to stop him. “I may have my moments, Ember, but I do occasionally like to entertain. Allow me to entertain you.”
Ember tried to relax, but the threads of tension that ran taut through the dark bar every time someone glanced over at her kept her on pins and needles. As Isaac walked up to the table, wearing a sheepish expression and pulling something from his back pocket, she sat up at attention.
Acton filled her in before she could ask. “I told you, Isaac had a surprise for you.”
With her eyes fixed on Isaac’s intense stare, Acton had to nudge her before she looked down at his hands.
“My book!” she gasped, taking the book from his hands. It was dirty, and the pages were wrinkled like they had been wet, and they smelled slightly of mold and something unsavory, but it was her book. One of the many she thought that Gina had burned.
“I was there the night when she was doing it.” Isaac seemed unsure about what to do with his hands now that the book was gone, and they hung awkwardly in the air before him. “She had it all bundled up in her arms, and this one dropped. I picked it up before she could come back and find it, and I was holding on to it, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it.”
Ember looked back up at Isaac, too grateful for words.
“I thought you might like to have it,” Isaac finished. “As a welcome present.”
As she stood up from the chair, Isaac shied away. She took two more deliberate steps forward, and hugged him as he stood stalk still and stiff as a board. Moving away, she saw the horrified look on Isaac’s face as he stared at Acton. When Ember looked over, she saw that Acton was smirking.
“What?” she asked.
“He’s afraid I’m going to do something, because I told him not to touch you.” Acton explained.
“Oh.” Ember frowned, stepping away from Isaac and sitting back down. “You won’t, will you? I mean, he gave me back my book…”
“Not this time,” Acton said quickly. “But don’t make a habit of it.”
Giving her one more curt nod, Isaac shoved his empty hands back into his pockets and left. It wasn’t long before Asher appeared with drinks, and Ember was grateful for the crutch that the alcohol provided. Time started to speed up, and soon she was laughing at jokes, and expressions, and even Asher—just for being Asher. He had a way of making her feel loose and happy.
Even as she sloshed about at the table, and Asher gently pushed her back upright, or off of the table, or back into her chair, she noticed the way that Acton glared at him for it. She was mostly sure that he wasn’t touching her except to help her stay off the floor, but as the night went on, she became less and less sure of anything.
It wasn’t until the cold blast of air whipped past her face that she looked up and realized that they had left the bar. They were among the tall grass by the spring again; this time, however, they were closer to the water. The sound of the waves was deafening to her overly sensitive ears, and as she watched the hot spring water slowly join the freezing ocean, she realized where so much of the fog was that hung around this place came from—it was steam.
The stars filled her vision, and she felt gravity shift. Acton was sighing.
“You shouldn’t drink so much,” he said.
“Why do your eyes do that?” Ember asked, a thin, sick smile crossing her lips. “You look like a doe in the headlights.”
He laid down next to her, and Ember was surprised when she felt him right next to her as he turned her on her side. “It’s because my night vision is better than yours.”
Ember tried to roll onto her back. She wanted to drown in the stars again, but Acton held her shoulder firmly, keeping her facing away from him. “Don’t—you could choke if it all comes back up.”
Ember smiled grimly. “At least it would be beautiful.”
“Em, vomit is never beautiful. Never.”
“The stars, I mean.” She sighed. “I’m going to die here, aren’t I?”
Acton kept a hand on her shoulder, but she felt him as he rolled away from her. “We’re all going to die here, eventually.”
The waves were so loud, and the grass started to glow a faint blue. Ember tried to roll onto her back again, protesting, but Acton rolled her back.
“Don’t fight it. Just sleep it off.”
“You make it do that?”
“It’s my hypnotism, but it’s your dream,” he said quietly. “You see what you want to see, which is often fairies and glowing things. You’re not very original, but whatever does it for you.”
“What did you do?”
Acton paused. He sat up, scanning the forest and the ocean. He didn’t like being so close to the water, because sounds didn’t carry well from the water to the air. Asher had caught him off guard that way too many times. But the loud sound usually discouraged her talking, and made her sleep faster.
“Acton?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you did something unspeakably evil.” She yawned. “What did you do?”
“I said that I had been accused,” Acton replied. “And by very virtue of the word ‘unspeakable,’ we will not be speaking of it, now or ever again.”
She coughed a little, and Acton reached over to be sure she wasn’t on her back again.
“Is that why she hates me?” she asked. “Did I do something unspeakable”
“No.”
“But if she won’t talk about it—“
“Em, you didn’t do anything. Not that I know of, anyways.”
After a long silence, he was almost sure that she was finally surrendering. But then she suddenly flopped onto her back, and he allowed her to turn to face him when he realized she wasn’t going to stop until he let her.
“Everything’s going to be alright for us, isn’t it?” she asked. Her eyes were glassy and her breath was sour from all of the alcohol. “There’s forgiveness for people like us, Acton. There’s forgiveness for people that can’t be loved.”
He sighed, and fought the urge to roll his eyes. He tried to keep his voice soft and touched. “Everything will be alright.”
She didn’t speak again. After a while, she curled up on her side on the patch of grass he had laid her on. It was always
a challenge to find an appropriate spot to lay her on this part of the island. The ground was covered in rocks, except for the soft and muddy areas where there weren’t enough rocks to raise a body off of the spring-permeated ground. The large ones left bruises on her body when she laid on them wrong, but it was better than when she laid in a puddle for most of the night. The shivering was incessant, and the second time her lips had gone so blue that he had taken her back to Zinny’s house and wrapped her in towels and blankets until she had stopped and returned to a normal color.
He left her in the forest that night, exhausted and sore, and eventually Ethel had found her and carried her home. He didn’t dare take her back himself—it was one thing to taunt the Gillespies, but quite another to spit in their faces. When Gina came for him, it would be because she had decided to end his life, and not because he had forced her hand.
That was when he had started keeping blankets and clothes hidden around in plastic bags in the grass. When he could get her out of the wet clothes fast enough, she didn’t shiver for nearly as long.
He laid back down next to the soft sounds of Ember’s breathing. He had sworn that the night that she had mistaken his interest for actual affection and kissed him would be the last time, but he found himself cursing everything from the cool breeze to God as he found himself slowly inching up next to her again.
She was warm. Not as warm as the spring, or nearly as hot as the fires that Gina set to execute offenders. When he laid next to her, he liked the soft warmth that came off of her. It made him want to put his hands inside her stomach the way he had seen Zinny hold her hands in the warm oven when she baked. He had never understood the expression of pure bliss on her face when she did it.
He understood it now. He also understood that he couldn’t put a bloody, steaming hole in Ember’s stomach without killing her. If she died, the warmth would be gone forever.
But his moods were like the tide, and what went out eventually came back. Like all demons, he was a slave to his mood, and he knew fighting it would only make it worse.
Killing Ember was not what he wanted to do. For now, at least.