Page 59 of First Verse

Her eyes find mine. “Right now, yes, but there will come a time when he isn’t. You’re not as dissimilar as you think you are. He has his own shadows.”

My chest burns. I suck in air, the reflex alone alerting me that I was holding my breath. A tremendous weight descends on my shoulders, like giant hands pressing me down. Making me smaller. Reminding me how powerless I am.

“Don’t worry,” Katherine continues, her gaze shifting to the tree line. “When the time comes, you’ll be ready.”

The vague reassurance doesn’t help, the spectral hands on my shoulders moving to my lungs and squeezing,squeezing. I can’t hear the wind in the trees anymore. I can’t hear anything but my heart pounding on my eardrums.

A soft hand covers the fingers clamped on my knee. “We need to talk about Evangeline.”

Shaking my head like the movement will dislodge the demon using my chest as a stress ball—it doesn’t—I force my eyes to Katherine. My mouth opens to say,Stop. No. Don’t tell me,but nothing emerges save for a harsh exhale.

I shouldn’t have come outside.

Katherine’s face sags slightly, her eyes losing focus. Tiny fires ignite all over my body as she begins to speak.

“Force and effort. One destroys harmony, one maintains it. What you cannot hold gently will be destroyed. To become who you’re meant to be, let go of who you think you are.”

She sucks in a breath, her eyes closing. Beneath fragile lids, her gaze darts back and forth. Whatever she sees brings a lattice of wrinkles to her forehead and makes her fingers twitch around mine.

“Ah, I understand now,” she murmurs. Her eyes open and look at me—no, lookthroughme. Every hair on my body stands up. “If you’re both afraid of the dark, there will never be light. One cannot exist without the other. There must be balance. Be brave again. Dive into the dark and find the light inside you. For yourself and for her.”

An old memory rises and pops like a bubble, splashing me with sights and sounds from a multi-family camping trip when I was seven. Thin, cool air. A crackling fire. Itchy mosquito bites and sunburns. The sun falling fast over jagged mountain peaks. Adults panicking because no one could find Evangeline. An hour’s long search with flashlights.

My legs carrying me in a direction opposite everyone else. Crunching pine needles. Scratching brambles. My shaking hand on a cold metal tube, the glowing orb bouncing with my steps, my too-fast breaths.

A small body curled in a depression at the mossy base of a tree. Pale hair like a beacon.

“Fairy,” I whisper now, as I did then.

“She cannot survive in your dark,” Katherine murmurs.

Goosebumps roll up and down my body like sound waves on a loop. “Am I going to lose her?”

Not again. Not again.

Her mind back from whatever strange place it went, Katherine pats my hand. Wrinkles deepen around her eyes as she smiles softly.Sadly.

“She’s a woman, Wilder. Not an object to find, keep, or lose.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t. Not yet. But you will.”

CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE

wilder

By the time I let myself into Evangeline’s with the key she gave me, it’s past midnight. I almost didn’t come, and it took hours of driving aimlessly for me to get here.

The house is quiet and dark—or as dark as she can stand it, with nightlights plugged into multiple outlets in every room. At the threshold of her bedroom, the sight of her sleeping face almost takes my knees out. I grab ahold of the doorframe to steady myself.

She’s curled on her side, a nightlight glowing on a flushed cheek, pale hair rioting across the pillow and around her shoulders. She looks ageless. Both young and ancient. Her thick, dark blond eyelashes flicker with dreams; from her furrowed brow, unpleasant ones. Probably about me.

She cannot survive in your dark.

Katherine’s words whisper through me for the thousandth time since I left my parents’ house hours ago.

The need to protect Evangeline from harm bucks against another need, just as potent and driven by selfishness. Iwanther. It consumes me. Owns me.

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