There was an exhilarating rush that shuddered through my body every time she touched me and also a warm, familiar sensation that I knew came from the feel of Siobhan in my arms not so long ago, the smoothness of her cheek against mine.
“We might never come back here,” she said. I gripped her shoulders. “Do you get that? We might put this dinner on and leave here and it might be the last time we walk out the door.”
I thought about Siobhan and the dinner she’d been coming home with, the last time she would walk out the door already having occurred without my knowledge. I hadn’t said goodbye properly. But even if I’d had the chance, I reminded myself, there’d have been an impossible amount of things to say.
“I don’t mean to be morbid.” She laughed, pulling away from me and wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s just been a while since I was in the thick of it. A couple of years writing about circus hamsters and yarn sales will do that to you. Make you realize that there are things at risk, important possibilities you might be about to destroy.”
She gestured to me as she said that. I wondered if I was one of those “important possibilities.” She was certainly one of mine. As I’d lain awake the night before, I’d watched her sleeping and known just how deeply I’d fallen for her already, how difficult it would be to climb back out of my desire for her. I was indeed risking Susan in my plan. I was risking everyone I cared about.
“But we have to do something,” I said, finishing my thought for her.
Doc Simeon came through the kitchen door and stood near us, frowning. I knew from the paleness in his cheeks and the tremble in his old hands that he’d done what I’d asked of him.
“Did he buy it?” I said.
“I think so,” the doctor replied. “I think we’re on.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
SQUID SAT IN the passenger seat next to me looking slightly disheveled, thinner than I’d last seen him, with bags under his bloodshot eyes; he looked like a cat who’d escaped into the wild and been found after a couple of weeks of hard living. Nick had left him in the care of his cousins and aunt in Augusta, but the boy hadn’t wanted to endanger his family and he’d wandered out into the night. Nick told me he’d found the boy hanging out with a menacing bunch of people in the parking lot behind a popular bar. He reeked of cigarettes and sweat.
Doc and Susan sat in the back seat, silent, as we followed Nick and Malone on the highway down to Boston.
“Something’s going to go wrong,” the boy said, watching the tall pine trees whiz past us on either side of the road. “I can feel it. Something bad’s about to happen.”
“I know what that feels like,” I said. The fever, hot and heavy, had been nesting in my chest since we left the house. I told myself it was just memories of Boston and my fall. Trepidation about what lay ahead on the road.
“You don’t trick Cline like this,” Squid said. “He reads minds. He’s like a fucking vampire or something.” The boy’s eyes were a little too wide. I let him rattle off the words, getting it out of his system. “That’s how he came into my life, you know. Like a vampire. Like he’d always known I was there and now it was, like, time to come get me. Bring me into the family. Make me one of his own.”
“How did you meet him?”
Squid rubbed his nose, laughed a little.
“I was stealing bags at the airport,” he said. “I had a good scam going. I’d go in dressed really nice with a suitcase full of magazines, make like I’d just gotten off a flight. I even had one of those neck pillows that I’d dirtied up so it looked like I traveled all the time. I’d find a flight that had just come in, so there were only a couple of people down in the baggage area. I’d watch the first bag come along, and if no one jumped at it, I’d grab it and walk out.”
I heard Susan give a little laugh behind me. Somehow, even with all that was ahead of us that night, Squid’s story lightened the tension in the car. We crested a hill, and I saw the cluster of lights on the