and darkness brought along with them. Being on the back of his bike was freeing, and I wanted to enjoy it without the festering burn of guilt. Guilt I hadn’t felt over Faye, but that was threatening to swallow me now. Even though I hadn’t said it out loud and neither had Zayne, what was unspoken between us didn’t go away. No matter how freeing the wind tugging at me felt, it didn’t change the truth.
We’d lost sight of our purpose tonight. We’d lingered too long in that restaurant and even longer in that alley. The Harbinger had known it, and Morgan was a message that it knew what neither Zayne nor I wanted to acknowledge.
We’d messed up...and someone had died.
23
After pulling on a long tank top that doubled as a sleep shirt because it was too big to wear normally, I walked out of the bathroom and climbed under the covers. I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep, even though it was late and I was exhausted mentally and physically. I was too antsy, my mind occupied with a hundred different things,
Today had been at times wonderful and then terrible, and I’d experienced everything from apathy to horror. While that was a lot to deal with—what I’d done to Faye, how I’d felt at dinner with Zayne, and the grief and guilt surrounding the death of Morgan—I knew that Zayne was feeling a lot of these things, too.
I wanted to go to him, but I wasn’t sure if that was smart. My head lolled to the side, and I found myself staring at my mom’s old romance novel. I still couldn’t believe my father had been here without me knowing. I started nibbling on my thumbnail. Not that I didn’t appreciate the money, but it would’ve...it would’ve been good to have seen him. I had questions. Lots of them. We needed to know more about the Harbinger and why he’d spoken about it as if it would cause human destruction on an apocalyptic level. As far as we knew, it hadn’t attacked humans. I wanted him to confirm what I suspected about the spikes—that they were of angelic origin.
I turned off the bedside lamp and then scooted down, tugging the covers under my chin. When I closed my eyes, the first thought that entered my mind was, what if Zayne and I hadn’t gone to dinner? What if we hadn’t been distracted with one another in that alley?
Would Morgan still be alive? Or would he have been killed and then displayed somewhere else? There wasn’t a single part of me that doubted he’d been crucified as a message to us.
I’m right under your noses.
That’s what it said.
What I didn’t understand was, why hadn’t the Harbinger revealed itself? What was it trying to accomplish? It was like it was waiting, but for what, I had no idea.
A soft knock jarred me from my thoughts. My breath caught as I rose onto my elbow.
The door cracked open and a thin sliver of light appeared. “You awake?” Zayne asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. “You?”
The moment the word you came out of my mouth, I wondered if there were periods of time where my brain just did not function correctly.
Zayne didn’t point out the ridiculousness of my question. The door slid open, and I saw the outline of his body. A shiver of awareness rolled through me. “Want company?”
All common sense flatlined right there, in the dark. “Yeah,” I whispered.
Zayne stepped inside, closing the door partway. My heart was hammering as he crossed the dark room. He hesitated at the side of the bed, and then he was settling in beside me. I took a breath and tasted winter on the tip of my tongue.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Zayne broke the silence. “We messed up tonight.”
I closed my eyes. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Zayne had the courage to give voice to those words first. “I know.”
“But I don’t regret it. The dinner,” he added. “Any of what came after, in the alley.”
My head jerked in his direction and my eyes opened. “Nothing happened in the alley.”
“But it was going to.”
I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs as I stared at his shadowy profile.
“If we hadn’t heard the scream, something would’ve happened. Even after I said we shouldn’t be doing anything other than looking for the Harbinger, it was going to happen,” he continued. “You know that. I know that.”
Throat dry, I turned away. A huge part of me couldn’t believe