by Gwen Hayes
He let go of my face, and I shrank away from him. His words hit their mark with stunning precision. Every part of my body that had been so hot only a few minutes ago was now ice-cold. Yet, despite his threats, I thought of all the times he could have done me harm but hadn’t.
“I’m a demon, Theia. You have to stop pretending I’m not. If I ever did anything to hurt you, it would kill me. But I can’t control it.”
“You’re lying so I will let you go. You think if you scare me enough, I’ll believe you want to murder me or take me, and I’ll wish you gone. Because making me hate you by coming on to the other girls didn’t work, you think this will.”
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t deny it. “I’m going back Under. For good.”
“You’ve chosen your bride, then?” Jealousy blew a stinging kiss down my spine. Did I want to know whom he would choose if he couldn’t have me? Wouldn’t have me?
He stood. “Theia, we both knew we weren’t going to find a way to be together. I won’t have you suffer any longer. You take foolish risks with your body and your heart already. I won’t have you jeopardize your soul. Not for me.”
“And your absence will stop my suffering? Knowing you are making a life with someone who isn’t me is supposed to make me feel better? Knowing you kidnapped another girl will keep me carefree?”
He raked his hands through his hair. “You’re like an open vein to me, Theia.”
“Who are you taking?” A thread connecting me to him snapped. I hoped the rest would go all at once or I would go mad with each little loss, one at a time. “One of the cheerleaders? Are you going to pick someone I hate? Do you honestly think that will make it easier on me?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“I’m not taking a bride.”
That was a choice? “This whole time you’ve been tormenting me and you could have chosen not to take anyone? Why didn’t you just tell . . . me . . . ?” The shadow that crossed his face spoke volumes of sadness. “What aren’t you telling me right now?”
“My mother will not be . . . pleased.”
Crossing a demon, even one that gave you life, must be quite an undertaking. I rose to my knees on the bed. “What will she do?”
“She’ll . . . I don’t know. Which is why I have to break all ties with you. Tonight. Now.”
“Can’t you stay here?”
“She would find me, and it would be worse. She wants me to inherit her domain. She’d never just let me go. She allowed me to come here only to choose my victim. I assumed it would be you, given my unholy obsession with you. Because that’s who I am. I thought that since I wanted you, I should have you. But the first night, when I burned—”
He paused and I choked on a cry.
“You were so compassionate. You were like a balm to me. I decided I didn’t want to hurt you, so I thought I could just pick someone else, but still be near you while I was here. But the more I’m near you, the more I want to be what I’m not. But my mother—she won’t understand.”
I reached for his shoulders. “You can’t just give up. She’s your mother. . . . She loves you. We just need to convince her that you’re happier here.”
He pressed his forehead to mine. “She’s a demon, Theia. She doesn’t reason and she certainly doesn’t love.” He tried to push my hands off him. “And there is no ‘we.’ You will never get anywhere near my mother. Never.”
“So you go Under, never to return. How does that help anything at all?”
So far away he went, behind his eyes, his expression so very grim. “Nobody else will pay for my heritage—isn’t that enough?” He sat back down on the bed. “I won’t ruin your life or any other. Bringing a young girl to hell is a mistake.”
“And not bringing one to your mother will bring the wrath of hell onto you, won’t it?”
“I can handle my mother.”
“Take me,” I whispered.
“No.” His voice cracked.
“Please. I’ve been Under half a dozen times already. It’s no hardship. We can be together.”
“No.”
“You won’t even listen? Haden, there must be some reason that I’ve been able to go back and forth between our realms, why I don’t succumb to the Lure.” I held his face and forced him to look at me. “It might be my destiny, don’t you see? Maybe I’m supposed to go with you. Your mother will be happy, and we’ll be happy together. Why not?”
He gazed into my eyes, his eyes like deep pools I’d have drowned in if he let me. “How can you ask me why not? Theia, what about your future? Your friends and your family?”
I shucked my pride and climbed into his lap. “What if you are my future, Haden? How can you think I’d ever find happiness if I knew you were miserable? If I knew you were alone?”
His fingers glided through my curls, my cursed curls of all things. He seemed to like them; he touched them often enough. In all, it appeared to me that Haden enjoyed the very things about myself that I was most uncertain about. He stroked my hair longingly while he spoke, “The idea of you withering away hurts me more than anything my mother could dream of doing in retaliation. And you would wither there, just like my father did. If you want to please me, promise me you will live . . . really live.”
“Haden, give us some more time. We could come up with a solution. We don’t have to give up so soon. Please.”
“I can’t control my urges. When I feel things as a human, it inflames my demon side. What if I hurt you or someone else? You remember the day I turned the entire school deaf, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes against the memory. He was going to leave, and I couldn’t stop him. My heart was aching so badly that it hurt to breathe, but I needed him to understand. I needed to say it right. Haden should know, before he left, that his time in my life meant something. “Before you came, I was different. You’ve changed me. I’m learning to stand up for myself—and not to be so shy.” I blushed a little. “I’m still working on that.”
Haden stroked my face. “I’m different too. Before I met you, I would never have walked away from something I wanted so badly. I thought I deserved to take whatever I desired. I didn’t know what it was like to care more about someone else’s happiness than my own. I never thought I would know what it was like to fall.”
His words burst something inside me. The unfairness of his sacrifice—that the only way he could show his humanity was by giving up being human—made me want to scream. He deserved so much more. I kissed him then. It was a promise of heartache. Something tugged at me from the inside, loosening the knot of desire I’d kept hidden, and unleashing dark, mysterious tendrils of yearning. Haden’s breathing changed, causing a flare of white-hot awareness to my core. I needed him, needed to be closer, to touch his skin.
I pulled us back towards the bed, ignoring his protests, and we tumbled onto the bride-white quilt.
“Theia, slow down.”
“No.” I dragged him back for another kiss. Though he resisted initially, I arched into him, eliciting a groan of pleasure and perhaps defeat.
His hands roamed my torso, and I tried to get mine under his shirt. He stopped then, and grasped my wrists to hold them together in one hand above my head. “We can’t do this. I’ll never forgive myself.” He drew in ragged breaths against my neck, his body on top of mine and sandwiched between my bent knees.
He inhaled deeply one last time at my neck and pushed away to stand next to my bed. I immediately sat up, hugging my knees and waiting. Waiting for the barbed thorns of his words to push into my flesh. Because they were coming.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Be well, Theia.”
“Wait.” The words wouldn’t come, all the reasons I needed him to stay, not to leave me. I’d just found him, how could I say good-bye forever? I wanted to tell him all the secrets of my heart, but only one mattered. “Haden . . . I think I love you.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said think, but it seemed too soon, so rushed. But he was leaving and he migh
t never know.
He squeezed my shoulder tightly and disappeared. Just evaporated.
My heart returned to its own beat.
Broken and useless.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I don’t remember falling asleep, though I remember trying very hard, hoping that in my dreams I could find Haden again. Instead, I drowned my pillow in tears and ached in the hollow where my heart used to be before he took it with him.
I remember dreaming that I was trapped in my room. Every time I managed to get out of it, I woke up with a start. All night, I drifted in and out of restless sleep, trying to leave my room and always failing. When I awoke the last time, I realized that it was Haden’s doing. He was keeping me from traveling somehow. He’d succeeded in shutting me out.
I heard Father’s car pulling out onto the street, and I rolled over towards the window. The day was thick with fog, ceaseless in its gray shroud. A mirror of how I felt. Though I should have begun getting ready for school, instead I threw off the covers and began searching under my bed for the box of photos of my mother. I wasn’t sure Father even knew that I had them. My aunt gave them to me. They were from before they got married.
As a child, I would paw through the photos whenever loneliness squeezed my heart too hard. I used to talk to my mother while I looked at the pictures, thinking that the box held her soul in it; I’m not sure when I stopped doing that.
I opened the box slowly, not knowing what I expected. Comfort, likely; the ghost of my mother to save me, possibly. Instead, it was just a box of three-by-five prints. The photographs captured a woman I didn’t know, who died giving me life. She looked so small when everything around her was big. Big hair, big earrings, big shoulder pads. My mother loved acid-washed denim and long-haired rock bands. And animals—she adored animals, dogs the most.
She’d been waiting tables to put herself through veterinary school when she spilled a plate of chips—fries—in my father’s lap. My aunt said he was smitten instantly, though I can’t imagine it. I’m sure he fumed and chastised her clumsiness. Told her she should be more careful. But instead, somehow, they’d fallen in love.
By all accounts, my father had loved my mother very much, and she him. In all his heeds of caution and dire this and dismal that, he’d been reluctant to ever speak of her as his wife, my mother. She was a poster model of hazard, not the woman he loved.
My aunt told me the story, once, of the girl my mother had been. Jennifer Hadley, smart, beautiful, funny, and fearless. As a child, she’d come close to losing a fight with sickness, losing a kidney instead. When she went into remission, she bloomed into health and vowed to live—really live. She held nothing back and faced each day with a passion that must have blinded my father.
She also wasn’t supposed to have children.
What would my mother have done if she were me? I wondered. What advice would she give me about saving a boy from the demon that lived inside him? Would she caution me against the danger or tell me that nothing was more important than what I felt in my heart?
It didn’t matter. Jennifer Hadley was dead. She wasn’t coming back to help me figure out my life. She was never going to fix my father’s heart either.
I didn’t want to live his life. I didn’t want to be careful anymore.
I found myself in Father’s room. It was particularly menacing to me, the immense, masculine furniture full of sharp angles, and the scent of my father’s soap a subconscious signal to me to be cautious. I crept across his thick carpet as if I weren’t alone in the house because I knew invading his suite was wrong. Perhaps I was hiding from my own judgment.
The bottle of my father’s sleeping pills from the top drawer of his nightstand shook in my hand as I tried to open it. Backing down was out of the question. I needed to go Under again. Haden would not be able to get rid of me so quickly now.
I texted the girls to let them know I was coming down with something and wouldn’t be at school. And then I went back to bed to wait.
When I opened my eyes, I was in someone else’s bed.
I sat up, startled, throwing the sheets off me and rolling to my feet.
The room smelled like Haden, felt like him. It was almost the normal room of a teenaged boy. A very spoiled teenaged boy. I walked around on wobbly legs, touching the corners of his furniture, hoping it would make me feel closer to him. It sort of made me feel like an intruder. Or maybe a ghost.
His bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled into a red and black lump. Perhaps when we met in my dreams, they were his dreams too. I’d never thought to ask; there were always so many other questions.
I don’t know why, but I began smoothing the sheets. It seemed so intimate to make his bed. The ache started in my belly and moved to my heart. I found his duvet on the floor, and, as I shook it, his scent carried gently on the breeze I’d made. I plumped his pillows, imagining that I was going insane. Why was I making his bed? Surely there were far more important things to do. My head was filled with cotton, though, so I righted the corners on the blanket.
If things were different, if we got married in the future, we would make the bed together in the morning, I imagined. I would probably blush, like I was doing now just thinking about “our bed.” Our tousled sheets.
I couldn’t quite capture my own thoughts. The sleeping pills, I guessed. Forcing my gaze away from the bed, I looked at the rest of his room. He had a large flat-screen TV on the wall opposite his bed, with shelves and shelves of movies below it. They were double-parked—two rows to each shelf. The titles were current as well as older films I hadn’t heard of, but that wasn’t unusual, since Father and I didn’t watch much television or view many movies. Haden apparently did, and he really liked space movies. One row held everything from E.T. to Mars Attacks!
A different shelf system held several video game consoles and hundreds of games. Again, space themes seemed to dominate. Not a speck of dust covered any surface. Either the servants cleaned regularly but skipped making his bed or Haden himself liked things neat.
The room was almost eerie and it broke my heart. All Haden wanted was to be a regular lad. Yet he’d barely been allowed to participate in the world he longed for. This bedroom seemed a sham, a bandage to cover the scrape but never heal the wound.
There were no dirty clothes on the floor. Even if he cleaned his own room, he probably needed a valet to take care of his clothes with all the cravats and starchy collars. And while I will freely admit to finding his tight jeans and tees sexy, his formal wear did something special to my insides. Knowing that beneath the refined, old-fashioned clothes was a young man of desire and passion—passion for me—made his distinguished and respectable appearance even more rakish.
“What are you doing here? Wake up.”
Haden stood in his doorway, looking pale and unkempt. So unusual for him.
“Hello, Haden.” The word stuck in my mouth strangely. More cotton. “I don’t feel so good.”
Everything shifted into waves and shapes, like the room was underwater. My legs turned to noodles, and I started going down.
“I’ve got you.” Haden’s voice sounded so far away, but I realized he was carrying me. “What have you done?” he asked. He sounded so worried.
“I’m fine,” I sighed. “I just wanted a little visit.” No matter how hard I tried to form the words, they came out slurred. I opened my eyes and blinked at my Prince Charming. “Hello, Haden.”
Despite the concern lining his brow, he laughed. “Hello, Theia.”
“Your bed is very nice.”
“Why, thank you. How kind of you to notice.”
“Oh, I notice lots of things. You have dimples. Did you know that?” Oh, my head was so heavy.
“Yes, I knew that.” He opened a terrace door and took me outside. “Are you drunk?”
“Noooo.” The fresh air was so lovely. “I’m just very well marinated.”
“Marinated?”
“Wait, no, that’s not right. It’s an ‘m’ word, th
ough.”
“Try to take a few deep breaths, lamb.”
“Medicated! That’s the word.” I bet we were so pretty, standing on the terrace. I would have liked to open my eyes to make sure, but it was really hard suddenly. I kept trying until I finally got a blurry vision. Haden was wearing all black and was carrying me like I weighed nothing at all. He was so hot. I think we were on a mountain. It looked very rocky around us. “We’re very high up here, aren’t we?”
“Well, you certainly are. Theia, I need you to wake up.”
“Did you know that I have never seen a penis?”
He laughed again. “When you wake up, you are going to hate yourself.”
Something wet plopped onto my nose. First I thought Haden was crying, but then I realized it was rain. Each drop that touched me brought with it a little more consciousness. “You know how to make rain?” I asked him.
“No, love, it’s not me.”
My vision cleared a little more and I realized he looked stricken. I traced his lips with my fingers. “You should kiss me,” I said.
“I should never have kissed you,” he replied, but did so anyway.
Raindrops began falling harder, plopping on us like tears from heaven. As it fell steadily, we lost ourselves further into the exploration of a perfect kiss. The water soaked our clothes to our skin, and we dripped and sloshed as we held on tighter, sinking like stones into abandon. It grew colder and I shivered in his arms. I didn’t care. There was no place I’d rather have been.
And then I felt him fading. I clutched at him, trying to grasp his shirt but unable to grip anything but air. “Haden?”
His lips moved, but his voice was gone from me. We were slipping away from each other, no matter what I did. The pain in his eyes pierced me.
“Haden, what’s happening?”
He mouthed the word “good-bye,” and I knew he meant forever.
Something held me firmly, though nothing I could see or fight as it yanked me farther away from him, my heart. I pushed and pulled to free myself as everything turned white but the rain continued dumping on me relentlessly.
