Pulse

Chapter 37

Lucie

When Vinny and I finally returned to the house, which felt like it took a millennium, Caprice was outside Cian's door. "Well," she said as Vinny and I hurried towards her, Vinny unfazed from sprinting up the stairs, while I was trying to catch my breath. "He should be fine soon as he gets over his dignity and quits acting like a teenage girl."

I narrowed my eyes. "As a teenage girl I take offense from that."

Caprice smiled sweetly, but it was the kind of sweet that caused an upset stomach. "Oh, right. Don't worry, doll, you're different. Now, is there anything else you losers need me to do? I missed my appointment already, so thanks."

"He's alive, right?" asked Vinny. His hands were curling into fists and then uncurling again, a nervous gesture that I wondered if he'd had when he'd been alive. His eyes looked through Caprice, burning into the door. I felt as if he was trembling beside me. "Please tell me he's alive."

"If he was dead, you would no longer be wandering the earth, genius," remarked Caprice. She removed a lollipop from her purse, tore the wrapper away, and popped it in her mouth, speaking around it. "Did you forget about the deal the Order made with you two? Cian dies, you move on. That's how it works."

"Oh," Vinny replied. "Yeah."

With that, Caprice dropped a wink at us and sashayed down the hall and to the stairs, her only goodbye message a muffled, "Good luck."

A few moments later, the front door slammed shut behind her, echoing boldly into the high-ceilinged foyer. I turned to Vinny. "Where have your parents been this whole time? You'd think they'd be concerned..."

"Dad's probably at work. Mom's probably at some event, a fundraiser or a book club or something. Maybe even a baking class. Who knows with that woman," Vinny replied, then reached out a hand for the door to Cian's bedroom, hesitated, and brought it back. I looked up at him with a risen eyebrow, and his eyes met mine, the expression on his face kind. "You should go. He'll want to talk to you."

"But, Vinny, you're his brother--"

"Shh," he said, shaking his head at me. "I know. About you and Cian. It's obvious."

"What's obvious?"

He shot me a look that was both withering and suggestive, and I got the message.

"Go," Vinny said, voice more plaintive now. A string of my heart was plucked like the strings of a violin at Vinny's desperateness. "You can touch him, make contact with him, and I can't. I think this is a job for you to handle alone."

"I..."

He cocked his head at me, a silent order.

I said, "Fine," and opened the door, stepping inside.

When I closed myself inside Cian's room, I got the immediate sensation that could only come from being alone with him and knowing it--a pleasant prickling on the back of my neck, the thrum of my heart like hummingbird wings in my chest, the scent of him in my nostrils. Everything in the room was a bit of him: the posters, the unmade bed, the curtains fluttering in the afternoon wind. Everything was Cian and I felt it like a song in my blood.

He was at the front of the bed, legs dangling over the edge, toes brushing the floor. His eyes were fixed on the window in front of him, at the sunlight splitting his room into half shadow and half light. In fact, that's what he was himself: some parts of him lit up by infinitesimal shafts of light, highlighted rectangles of skin and crevices in the folds of his clothes, other parts of him untouched by such flame, hidden in the dark.