Scout paused for a moment and then smiled slowly. “We talk to them,” he said, because it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. “One after the other, we talk to them. Find out what their sadness was. See if they can’t change something—overcome their grief, regret a mistake, find a single good moment of their lives and cling to it to get out of that trap.”
“But….” Lucky flailed. “Scout…. Scout, they’redead! How are we going to talk to them?”
Scout thought about it for a moment. “Well, you know how the visions get more and more real every time I go there?”
They both nodded, looking apprehensive.
“Well, why don’t we try doing the same thing we did yesterday, except I grab you, Kayleigh, and you, Lucky, because you’re both the most powerful next to me, and we have Helen and Marcus do hedge-witch stuff to connect us to the past, and then we see what happens. What do you think?”
He smiled at them both eagerly, willing them to jump into this idea with the same excitement that had grabbed him.
He wasn’t prepared for Kayleigh to shove her stool away from the counter and stalk toward the door. “Youexplain it to him!” she snapped at Lucky.
Lucky, for his part, was doing the same thing, except heading for the dresser back by the bed. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he muttered. “I got nothin’.”
Scout was left alone at the island, Kayleigh’s excellent coffee drink melting sadly in one of Lucky’s big plastic glasses and a box full of donuts staring at him in judgment.
“What’d I say?” he asked the donuts, but the box wasn’t talking, so he grabbed another donut and munched disconsolately.
He figured he had some thinking to do anyway.
HE WASN’Tdone thinking by the time Lucky came out of the shower, but hewaspositive that he wanted to know what he’d done wrong.
“What?” he asked, walking to where Lucky was toweling off his hair. He’d put on clean briefs and a T-shirt in the bathroom, but had conceded to the absolutely tiny confines of the space by slipping into his jeans as he stood by the dresser.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lucky muttered.
“But if I did something wrong, I want to know what it was!” Scout said helplessly. “Kayleigh flounced off, you got your tighty-whiteys in a bunch, and I’m—”
“Clueless,” Lucky snapped. “You’re fucking clueless!”
Scout stared at him helplessly. “But isn’t ityourjob to give me a clue? You can’t just say, ‘You fucked up’ and not explain to me why. That’s stupid. How does anybody fix themselves if they don’t understand what got them into a jam?”
“You make my head ache,” Lucky muttered, and Scout almost stamped his foot.
“Maybe that’s the flip side of getting blowjobs,” Scout retorted, trying to keep his dignity. “On the plus side, blowjob. On the minus side, you have to explain what ticked you off.”
Lucky’s eyes narrowed. “Oh my God.”
“What did I do?”
“Okay, you wanna know what you did?” Lucky put his hands on his hips and tried to glare Scout into self-awareness, but little did he know that Alistair had pretty much glared any shame Scout had ever possessed right out of him. Lucky’s glare was oddly… tender. Vulnerable. He wasn’t glaring because hehatedScout; he was glaring because Scout had hurt him in some way.
“Yeah,” Scout said, nodding. That was a boyfriend goal, since they were using that word. Don’t hurt your boyfriend. “I do!”
Lucky snorted and shook his head. “Scout, when you held Larissa’s hand, your body got a little transparent. That was a little freaky, not gonna lie. But then you held Piers’s hand, and Kayleigh actuallyscreamedbecause while we could seePiers, youdisappeared.I could see a thin, ghostly outline of you, so that’s why I could step in and grab your shoulder when Piers came back and you didn’t. But see? Piers came back, and you and me, we disappeared. And while you and me were on the beach, you were getting thinner and thinner. I had to shake you to get you to come back with me.” He grimaced. “What happens if we can’t bring you back?”
Scout took three deep breaths. “But youdid,” he said, trying to reason his way through. “Youdid.And, you know….” He bit his lip and felt his cheeks heat. “That was even before, uhm, last night. I, uh, I mean, I think we’d be evenmorebound after last night, right?”
Lucky blinked at him. “Why would you think that.”
Scout bit back the hurt. “Because what we did was important!” he said earnestly. “And it wasemotional. I mean, the whole reason your touch kept me solid, kept me anchored in the here and now, was that I care about you. Last night helped make that more real too.”
Lucky’s lower lip wobbled, and he looked to be on the edge of relenting. “But Scout. See? This is why I didn’t want to get attached. What if you disappear on me one day? I-I mean, Iamattached, and if you justfadeinto the past or get sucked into some sort of dark hole, I’ll bemorethan attached. Did you ever think of that?”
Scout stared at him, and for a moment, the earth buckled beneath his feet and he was freefalling into an unfamiliar space. For years, he and Kayleigh had dreamed of being outside of the compound, where they could meet “real” people and have “real” relationships and use their magic however they damned well pleased.
But this look—this haunting vulnerability—on Lucky’s practical, plain-featured face, that was because ofScout. Scout had made him feel helpless. Scout had threatened to disappear. Just like Lucky had always imagined someone would, because nobody in Lucky’s life stayed.
