Chapter 78

I drove with the windows open the whole way to the spring. By the time I reached the hidden turnoff, Ethan was already there, barefoot and barechested.

He stood between the trees where shadow collected, dressed only in a pair of old baggy shorts, his body angled toward the road, and the moment I pulled in, his head turned so sharply that he looked less like a boy waiting for me and more like something that had been listening for danger.

I parked badly, half on the track, half into a cluster of wet brush, and killed the engine. For one second I couldn't move. Then his hand was on the door.

He opened it, and the smell rolled out. His whole face changed. His eyes went black so fast it frightened me.

"Ethan," I said immediately.

He didn't answer. His gaze moved through the interior of the car, over the passenger floor, the stained mat, the damp seat, the towels in the trunk where they showed through the gap I had failed to close properly. Then he inhaled. Once. Slowly. The sound barely existed, but every hair on my body rose.

"Ethan," I said again, sharper this time.

His hand tightened around the edge of the door hard enough that the metal gave a small, complaining creak. I reached for him without thinking.

"Don't."

That got his eyes back to me. They were too bright now. Too reflective, even in the afternoon light. Whatever he had seen, whatever he had scented, had already gone somewhere deep enough that words would have to fight their way down to reach him. He looked at me as if he had barely heard me speak.

"I can't." His voice dropped lower than humanly possible, bordering on a snarl.

I blinked. "You can't what?"

He stared at me, muscles in his jaw jumping furiously. "I can't scent them. Whoever did this. They must've worn gloves and this thing they put in there is at least a week dead. Its stench is covering everything." He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "It was planned." His gaze fixed on me. "Do you know anything? Have you seen anything, anyone...odd?"

I cracked a laugh that wasn't a laugh. "You mean besides every single day?"

"Kelsey." His shoulders lowered when he exhaled. "I'm serious."

"I really don't know," I said, and this time my voice broke. "And even if I did, you can't. You can't do anything obvious. You can't go after people. You can't give them a reason. Please."

His jaw flexed.

I got out of the car, and the second my feet touched the ground, the last of my control gave way in one humiliating wave.

"I tried to clean it," I said, and my voice sounded too high, too young, too close to tearing apart. "I threw it out. I wiped as much as I could. I opened the windows. But it's still there. It's all over the car. And if I go home like this, everyone will smell it. And I can't, Ethan. I can't be the reason everything explodes again."

He stepped toward me. I stepped into him before he could decide whether he should. That was the mistake, probably. Or maybe the mistake had been made days ago, weeks ago, long before either of us found the words for it.

I pressed my forehead into his chest and wrapped my arms around his waist, and for one second I felt him go rigid around me, every instinct in him catching fire at once. Then his arms came around me. Hard. He wrapped himself around me like he could block the whole world from getting another tooth into me if only he held me close enough. His breath hit the top of my hair in sharp, uneven pulls. One hand spread between my shoulder blades. The other came to the back of my head, his fingers sliding through my hair with a restraint that felt like it was costing him something.

"I'm going to fix it," he said. His voice was low enough that I felt it before I properly heard it.

"No," I said against his chest. "Not like that. Please."

It took him too long to answer. Too long. I pulled back enough to look at him, and he looked as if the promise physically hurt.

"Ethan. Please. Promise me. I'm begging you."

I watched his throat work. "Listen," he let out a pained breath. "I promise I won't act on impulse."

"That is not the same thing."

His jaw tensed. "It is the best I can offer right now." He breathed. "But I won't let this go. I'll find out who is behind this. And then I'll find a way to deal with it that won't put you in danger or spark a war." His arms tightened around me, not painfully but close to discomfort. I didn't say anything because I could feel the tremor in his muscles, the way he was straining not to crush me yet was unable to let go. That was okay, because I wasn't able to let go either.

"But you can't expect me to sit back quietly while they terrorize you like this. That stops today."

That should not have reassured me. Quite the opposite. Yet it did, far more than any lie would have.

Tears slid down my face before I could stop them. I wiped at them angrily with the heel of my hand, but he caught my wrist before I could scrape my skin raw.

"Don't," he murmured.

"Don't what? Have a breakdown? Because I think that ship has sailed."

His face twisted. Then he drew me back in. This time it was gentler, and somehow worse. His cheek pressed against my hair. His nose moved once near my temple, then along the side of my face, not in the slow, deliberate way he touched me when we were learning each other's language in the attic, but as if he were searching for every place the day had left itself on me and trying to use himself to erase it.

His breath shuddered near my ear. I felt the heat of him through my coat. He lowered his face to my neck, just for a second, and inhaled there with a sound so rough it made me shiver. His fingers tightened at the back of my head. His other hand slid down my arm to my wrist, his thumb pressing over the frantic beat of my pulse.

I should have noticed. Maybe part of me did. Maybe part of me felt the way his body hardened with a protective urgency that seemed to pour out of him through skin and breath and touch. The warmth of him grew hotter, almost feverish. The air around us filled with him so heavily that, for the length of a single breath, the rotting deer smell fell away and all I knew was Ethan: pine and earth and the dark, steady thing that always made his body feel like home.

But I was crying. And he was holding me. And the world had become very small. So I did not understand what was happening. And even more tragically, neither did he.

"I'm here," he said against my hair. "I'm here. You're not carrying this alone."

I clung to that sentence because it was the only thing in reach that did not smell like blood.

After a while, I calmed enough to be embarrassed. I pulled back with a wet little breath and rubbed both hands over my face. "Sorry."

His expression hardened instantly. "Don't apologize."

I sniffed, and wiped my nose with a hem of my sleeve, completely undignified.

"I got a deer corpse in my car and cried on you. I feel like one apology is fair."

His mouth moved, but the look in his eyes stayed dark. "First thing first," he said. "We need to clean what we can."

I managed a weak, tired nod.

We worked quickly after that, although quickly with my hands shaking and Ethan visibly fighting the urge to go on a murdering spree was a relative concept. He removed the passenger mat entirely and carried it into the trees to bury it, or burn it, or whatever it was lupines did with things that needed to disappear. He did it with the kind of stillness that somehow frightened me more than if he had snarled. He used one of Jack’s old emergency towels to scrub the floor of the car with water from the spare jug and my own disinfectant, careful not to touch more than he had to. He told me not to touch anything else, which I ignored just enough to wipe down the seat and door handle again.

Then we went to the spring.

The source received us with its usual impossible calm, water rising clear from beneath the mossy rock as if nothing ugly had ever been brought near it. I washed my hands until they burned. My wrists. My throat. My face. The ends of my hair where Ethan said the scent had caught.

He stood close, too close perhaps, watching the trees and then me and then the trees again.

"Is it gone?" I asked finally.

His jaw tightened. "The deer? Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"It's in the car more than on you now."

"But?"

He looked at me for a fraction too long. "But you are upset, and you smell like fear, and the car. Your family will know something happened. You can't hide this, Kelse. Not fully." There was sadness in the way he said those last words.

I shut my eyes. "Great."

"It doesn't mean they will know what really happened."

I opened them. He crouched beside me and brushed wet hair back from my face with fingers that were careful, warm, and still slightly trembling.

"Tell them the story. Keep it simple. You stopped because the car smelled wrong, found something caught under the undercarriage or near the wheel well, cleaned what you could, and came home."

"My family is not stupid."

"No." A ghost of grimness touched his mouth. "But they may accept an incomplete truth if it explains enough."

I looked at him. "Do you think it does?"

He was quiet for half a second too long. "I think it is the best we have."

That had to be enough.

By the time I left the spring, I had washed myself twice, scrubbed my coat cuffs, and packed the damp cloths into a plastic bag Ethan promised to dispose of somewhere no one would stumble on them and start composing an even worse story. He walked me back to the car but stopped near the edge of the trees, scanning the road before letting me cross the last stretch alone. He looked unhappy with every inch of distance.

"I'll find out," he said.

My hand tightened around the car key. "Discreetly."

His eyes met mine. "Discreetly."

I did not fully believe him. But I believed he was honest.

As I walked to the car I thought about a lie I was about to tell and went through every cleaning step one more time, just to make sure I didn't miss anything.

What I didn't know then was that the spring water had done what it could. What it couldn't touch, I carried home anyway.