Page 21

“No.” Oh, God. It was Noah. He was doing the fires, fucking with Lee’s life.

Determination settled over Cassian’s face and he reached for me, his hands curving around my shoulders. He held me in place and looked me right in the eyes. “My cousin swears the school is haunted. She swears it. My cousin has said enough strange shit that’s come true, things she couldn’t know about, so I know it’s possible. I believe ghosts exist. Do you?”

I couldn’t answer. Stricken.

He was looking at me, believing in the very thing that’s kept me away from so many people and relationships. I’d been so alone for so long and he was giving a connection to me, handing it over on a platter. The words were stuck in my throat.

“For fuck’s sake.” Two voices said those words.

My head jerked around, seeing Lee in the doorway, his hands in fists as he was glaring at us. And Noah was next to him, but he was looking toward the far corner. A whirlwind happened. A dark energy ripped up from the floorboards, whipping around, taking form from underneath where Lee and Noah were. As it grew, it got stronger. Hungrier. More ferocious. Growing darker, dimming the actual lights in the room.

Cassian let go of me, his head lifting, looking around, but he couldn’t see anything.

Lee was still fixated on us.

I turned to see what Noah was furious about—it was Sabine.

I gasped, stepping toward her.

She was half in a wall, half hiding. Her eyes were big, terrified. She gulped. Did ghosts gulp? “I—You never came back. I was worried.”

Noah roared at full volume, “GET OUT!” The walls shook.

Cassian said, “What the fuck?”

A glass fell off the counter.

Sabine’s hand curled around the wall, defying Noah’s command.

I was aware of people yelling from the basement and another room. They could feel the house shaking, but as Sabine was literally trembling when Noah raged, there was Lee.

Not moving. Not an inch.

He was watching me. Just me.

I couldn’t say he was calm, but he wasn’t terrified either.

What was happening?

Noah roared again, “GET OUT NOW!” The whirlwind tore through the house, right at Sabine and she yelped before disappearing.

I couldn’t move. In that moment, as that was happening, there was a string that connected Lee and Noah. It was dark energy. A frequency. They were linked and it was pulsating in that moment, actual lights traveled between the two. Like a bolt of electricity running back and forth.

The wind slammed into the wall, making the house shake with enough force that people scrambled up from the basement. “Dude.” It was Nimrod. “Is there, like, an earthquake or something?”

A girl clutched to him.

A few others ran past, going outside.

Lee didn’t stop staring at me.

Cassian was looking between us, his eyebrows high on his forehead. “What?” he breathed out, slowly. Lowly. “The fuck is going on?”

Lee saw me. That realization slammed into me.

He didn’t see a version of me that others did. He didn’t see the terror that my mom had on her face when she found out my truth. He didn’t see the worrisome burden I was to my grandparents or the girl with no life that Ethan relied on to cover for him every week. Lee saw me.

Something deep shifted inside. A knowing and a door slid open, revealing a room in me that I didn’t even know was there. Something more, more primal, more fulfilling, more… It was the room where my soul hid. Lee saw it. I couldn’t understand it, or explain it, but I felt it and it was everything in that moment. It was filling me and taking me completely over. It was my own storm, inside of me, but it was cementing something, something that I’d never experienced. A longing that I yearned for that I hadn’t allowed myself to taste. It would’ve been too much, but the start of it was being quenched.