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“I didn’t mean to push you that hard,” he explains.
“I’m okay,” I say again, and he helps me to my feet.
“I’ve been trying to protect you,” Parry emphasizes to Colt. “C-c-ccan’t you see that?”
Colt nods repeatedly, eyes welling. “Pear, it feels like the same weather patterns. Maybe if I just sail to the point where I saw her—”
“You’ll get yourself fucking killed,” Parry snaps. “That’s what you’ll do.”
“I need this!” Colt screams.
“You need t-t-t-t-to get a fucking hold of yourself!” Parry yells back.
I watch my brother break. Unravel. His body concaves, face in his palms. If he was made of thread, he’d be frayed all over, a single string left supporting him.
I breathe deeply. “This isn’t going to work, Colt. Wait until the storm is over and then we can go out.”
Silence.
Nothing but the thrashing rain against the roof and the clattering shutters against the windows.
Not until Colt says, “No.” His bloodshot gaze lifts to no one in particular. “If Brian doesn’t give me the keys, I won’t be at the lighthouse tonight.”
“During the storm?” Parry frowns. “You wouldn’t leave your responsibility like that. I know you.”
Colt’s eyes seem blank. Gone. Lost. “Maybe you don’t know me anymore, Pear.”
Coldness ekes into the bar. Brian shakes his head. “The catamaran hasn’t been out past the breakwall in years. Even if I agreed to your suicide mission, you wouldn’t make it far.”
Colt goes quiet.
In his silence the front door blows open once more, this time it’s the wind. Heavy rain accompanies the howling, and then a girl in a pink raincoat sprints into the bar.
October spins and forces the door closed. Brian is quick to help her latch the lock. When she pulls her hood back, butterflies flap inside my body. God, she’s pretty. Brown hair a little damp from the storm, October turns around, searching for me.
I catch her gaze. “I thought you had to be at Fisherman’s Wharf?”
“I left early.” She saunters over to me like she needs to be near. “I had to see you.”
I almost ask why. But I know the answer.
The hair-raising conditions outside are the worst I’ve seen since I’ve been in Mistpoint, and I’m not cursed yet. My brother is just as worried, but October is the one hellbent on protecting me. Her hand slips against my cheek just as a strike of lightning cracks the sky.
Lamps and the old holiday lights flicker but stay lit.
And then I steal a kiss. Brief. Fleeting, but she lets me press my lips to her lips. Since the bookstore, October has kissed me more than once. Each one feels like an epic goodbye kiss. Clingy and desperate.
I think the clingy is me. The desperation is her.
Together, we’re just a gooey mess. “Like underbaked sfogliatella,” she told me last week. I hate to think we’re an inedible pastry because I’d totally still eat October out. I even said those words out loud.
“Not before I do,” she replied like there is no humanly way I’d kiss between her legs before she’d kiss me there.
Now, in the bar, I’m clinging to another kiss. She’s desperate against my lips. Light flickering again, and then a fist pounds the door.
“Hello?! Is anyone here?!”
We break away.
“Is that Baby?” Colt asks.
October is rushing to the entrance. Brian follows, and in seconds, they’ve unlatched the door and October’s younger sister races into the bar. They slam the door shut again.
“Ah, my gloves are soaked.” Babette peels them off with her blue raincoat.
“I’ll start a fire,” Colt says quietly, gathering wood from a bin. He mans the old wood burning stove in the corner.
Brian is staring at him like he’s morphed into a new person. He looks to Parry for answers, who mouths Baby.
I can’t keep up. October returns to my side with her sister.
“Zoey,” Babette greets with an air-hug. She’s out of breath.
“Did you run here?” I wonder.
“Two miles. I fell twice.” She peels wet hair off her cheek. “I have news. Or rather, news for you.” She glances at Colt.
He freezes, halfway putting a log on a tiny ember in the stove. “Me?”
“Augustine Anders—OB asked me to do some digging.” She glances between me, Brian, Parry, October, and Colt, and we all seem to collectively imprison our breaths. “So I asked around, and Patrick knows a girl in Ashtabula, who knows another girl from Conneaut, who went to Bowling Green, who has a cousin in Cincinnati that knew a girl from Sandusky. And this girl from Sandusky has been mysteriously missing—for get this, more than four months.”
“No way,” I breathe.
October is skeptical. “How do we know it’s the same girl?”
“They told me her name.”
We all wait.
“Augustine Anders.”
Thunder booms, then lightening cracks.
And just like that…the power goes out.
CHAPTER 25
Zoey Durand
“Don’t touch the fire. Don’t light a match. Don’t even sniff a fucking candle. You know what—don’t do anything. Just sit there,” Brian decrees to me like I’m a walking fire hazard. The Pelican would be pitch-black if it weren’t for the tiny fire that Colt stokes in the wood-burning stove. And the candles that October and Parry light around the bar.
