Page 40 of Devoted

I shivered.

Where had that thought come from?

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what all this secrecy is about.”

“Please, Emberline. Just go back. You don’t want any part of this.” His pleading tone surprised me enough, I almost stopped right there, but I plowed through those grasping shadows until I wrapped my arms around his waist, and I laid my chin against his chest.

All around us, the ocean crashed and retreated, like the water had for eons and still would, long after we were gone.

“You can’t shut me out forever, Nico. You know I’ll always find a way in.” I smiled when his jaw flexed in frustration, and I held on tighter. “Why can I see your shadows, but no one else can? Why do I feel like I’m standing in a foot of snow, not a beach in the middle of summer?”

“I can’t,” he murmured, dropping his chin to his chest, as if trying to block out the sight of me.

“Tell me why I can see them, and I’ll stop asking questions.” I stroked his face, staring up into a pair of pain-filled eyes, full of the kind of torment usually reserved for someone who’s lost everything.

I’m right here, I wanted to tell him.

“So. These shadows.” I decided I’d either get my answers, or we’d stand here until we turned to dust. “I’ve been seeing them for weeks, ever since I drowned. They have something to do with me dying, right?”

His entire body jerked, like I’d struck a nerve.

“You don’t want that answer,” he insisted, but he reached down to stroke my cheek, the pink mark that stubbornly wouldn’t go away, the reminder of that night in my father’s office when he saved me from Blackwood.

“There are some secrets, Emberline, that you don’t need to know. Secrets that will haunt your dreams, and the very last thing I want to do is make those anything less than sweet. I can’t become a monster to you. I just… can’t. It would break my godsdamned heart if you ever thought of me that way.”

“First, you’re no monster. Second, stop deciding what I do and don’t need. Just tell me the truth.”

He ground his teeth together, temper flashing, the first real emotion I’d gotten from him all morning.

Good.

“Fine. If you don’t want to talk about the shadows, then tell me about the spiders. I saw them, Nico. Hundreds of them. I watched them hatch from their sticky nests, and I had no way to fight them. Tell me how to kill them, and we’ll be done with this conversation.”

His throat worked.

Once.

Twice.

Like he was arguing with himself, and losing, until finally he pinched his lips together and shook his head in silent denial. Disappointment swept through me, but I asked the last question that had been haunting me for weeks.

“The dream, then,” I prompted softly. “Tell me how you were inside my dream. How did you touch me, like this?” I ran my palm down his neck, his chest, so my whole hand covered his thumping heart. “Tell me how you were real inside my head. How can you walk through the Underworld with me, Nico… unless you’ve known Death, the same way I do.”

“You weren’t supposed to remember that.”

My breath caught, heart tangled in knots as the words settled. The admission that wasn’t quite an admission but answered my question, just the same.

Then every nerve in my body lit up because everything was true.

The dream, the veil, the Underworld.

My parents, together in death.

All I could do was hang onto him as shadows nipped at my bare legs.

Gods. All of it was true.

He could really visit me in my dreams.