Chapter 12
When he set her down on the ground, the air felt warm. Even the ground felt warm, and she knew she was in trouble if the cold night air felt tepid against her skin.
“Am I going t—t—t—to d—d—d—die…” she asked. Her memory had gone bleary on her again, but the water had evidently sobered her up. “Wh—wh—what—happ—happ—happened?”
“You fell in the water,” Acton said gently.
The game was done, and despite what others had said of him, his cruelty did know bounds. There was no reason for Ember to have to remember the torment. Joseph’s trick had seen to it that they were friends again, and Acton refused to admit that it was anything more than necessary.
“Here. Put these on.”
He threw a plastic bag at her. It had a large, warm, dry sweat suit in it. Ember was shaking so hard that all she could do was curl into a fetal position on the blessedly warm ground.
“Your body temperature is dropping, Em.”
Ember rolled onto her back, trying to let the heat of the ground soak into as much of her as possible, and for the first time, realized that Acton was soaked from head to toe. He had taken off his jacket and his shoes before going in after her, somehow, and was now perched on a large rock several feet away. His hair was dripping and his shirt was sticking to him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at her, unblinking, as she laid on the ground like a drowned rat.
When Ember finally managed to sit up, and found her hands shaking too hard to be of any use, he slid down from his rock and helped her. Staring at her useless hands, she wondered at the fact that she could still control them at all.
“Aren’t…you…fr—fr—freezing?” she managed as he pulled her shirt over her head. It was full overcast that night, and there were no stars. He wrung her hair out with his hands before grabbing the sweatshirt and yanking it over her head, going about every step of it with the procedural ambivalence of making a sandwich.
Ember undid the button and zipper on her jeans, and laid flat on the ground as Acton pulled at the cuffs to get them off.
“You’re not the brightest, Em,” he mumbled, struggling to unhook the fabric from her ankle as her foot flopped numb and uncontrolled. “Most people fight for their lives. You walk into life threatening situations like it’s your job.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, it was an accident. I just fell in on accident,” she said, gritting her teeth to keep them from clapping on her tongue again, and curling her bleeding hand around the edge of her sleeve. “At least, I think it was…”
“You bet Asher that you could walk into the water up to your neck. You don’t remember?” Acton snorted, throwing the sweatpants at her. “I think you can manage the rest.”
She shakily pulled them on, and he returned to his perch on the rock. She eyed him cautiously. “And you let me? I must have been drunk.”
“I’m not your keeper,” he said. “I’m just the guy who has to keep fixing you up after you do dumb stuff that could kill you.”
Ember scoffed, glad to be warm, and ignored his quip. “Do I have nerve damage, or is it actually warm out?”
Acton went back to staring out toward the water, shifting his bare feet on the rock; he looked like a vulture. “There’s a spring nearby. It’s the only place out here where you can keep warm outside at night.”
Ember nodded, looking back to the stars. So many, and they made her feel so small. “You’re kind of a jerk. Why aren’t you cold? I’m freezing.”
“And you’re kind of suicidal,” Acton replied. “And attention hungry, and desperate, and annoying. And under the right conditions, dangerously flirtatious with the wrong people. I’m not cold because I’m not a weakling like you.”
“Liar,” Ember retorted. As his words sank in, she shrugged. “About me being a flirt, at least. Why are you so mean tonight?”
“I have been nothing but tolerant of you since your arrival,” Acton snapped. But when he looked over at her, his expression softened. “I suppose that was uncalled for. I apologize, Em. Are you warm enough?”
“Will you sit with me?”
Acton climbed down from his rock, and walked over to compose himself in a lounging position next to where Ember was laying in the tall grass.
“Better?” he asked.
Ember shrugged. “You could lay down with me. I’m cold. I need the body warmth.”
“I’m wet,” Acton replied. “And you just got into dry clothes. I don’t want to make you cold again.”
“Oh. Right.” She eyed him suspiciously. “…and you aren’t cold? Really?”
“No,” he said with a casual smile. “I never get cold.”
“Never?” she said again, incredulous. “Well, thank god I have you. Thanks for pulling me out.”
“Always,” Acton said, stretching out next to her. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Em. My nights would be boring.”
Ember laughed, turning over to face him, and smiling as the warmth from the ground hit her cold side. “You’re so full of it. I’m nothing special.”
“You’re actually quite engaging,” Acton said. “You tell some great stories, you don’t mind my eccentricities, and you have an amazing capacity for forgiveness. I’ll miss you when you go back to Pennsylvania.”
Ember cringed. “I wish I wasn’t leaving.”
Acton raised his eyebrows, nonplussed. “You should be happy. I would give just about anything to not be trapped here.”
“Trapped?” Ember said. “Then just leave. You can go wherever you want.”
Ember’s eyes were fixed on the stars, so she didn’t notice the fleeting expression of disappointment that crossed Acton’s face. Somehow, every time after he pulled her from the water, the conversation circled back to this point. He had found it cathartic at first, but the more nights they had this same conversation, the more depressing it became.
He didn’t know why he kept it up.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Because of your mom?” Ember pressed. “I like your mom. I like your brothers, too, and Kaylee. They’re all so nice. You’re lucky to have them. Acton, are you sure you’re not cold?”
She reached over to touch him, and he let her. His skin was like ice. He laughed at her appalled expression.
“Acton, you need to get dry, you’re going to freeze to death!”
He laughed as he grabbed her hand and held it to his cheek. His fingers were colder than the night air, sending a shiver up her spine. “Em, I’m not cold. I’m different. You don’t remember?”
Ember quietly analyzed him, everything from his freezing skin to his intense eyes that never seemed to smile. She knew that Acton was different; he was exciting, and accepting, and kind. He had brought adventure into her life. “Different how? Don’t you feel pain?”
“Everything feels pain,” he retorted, laying back on the grass to stare at the stars with her. “I have talents. I can do things normal people don’t do.”
Confused, Ember rolled onto her side, once again trying to determine if he was pulling her leg. “Like what? Like walking into freezing water without going into shock?”
Acton only smiled. “Other things, too. I can control people, and make them do what I want.”
“Prove it.”
“Well, it doesn’t work on you. It adds to the challenge,” he teased.
“No proof, no truth,” Ember said flatly. She hadn’t really believed him to begin with, but she was slightly disappointed.
“I don’t sleep.”
Ember rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah…because I’m totally going to buy that. You sleep during the days, like me.”
“I’m not actually human, even.”
“Uh huh. Sure,” Ember said, yawning. “And I’m a sleeper agent planted by a foreign government, but I can’t prove it to you because I haven’t been triggered yet.”
Acton rolled closer to her, onto his stomach, so that he could look down at her face. “You’ll never bel
ieve me, even if I give you proof, will you?”
Ember stared up at him sarcastically. But as she watched his eyes, she noticed that they were reflecting light. One of her teachers back at school owned a Siamese cat whose eyes reflected red when they caught the light just right, and right then, Acton’s eyes were doing the same thing.
Ember frowned. Human eyes didn’t reflect light like that.
The hair on her arms stood up on end, but she wasn’t cold anymore. At the same time, a broad smile had spread across Acton’s face.
“So you believe me, then?” he asked. Ember nodded.
“What are you?” she asked.
“I’m your friend,” he said, lying back down. “That’s all you need to know.”
Ember shook her head. She wasn’t tired anymore. “Is that why my mom hates you? Why she’s so afraid, and why she can’t make you leave the island?”
Next to her, Acton was taking slow, steady breaths. The only other sound was the ocean, and nearby, the little trickle of the spring. He took his time in answering, and Ember was on pins and needles.
“Yes, that’s why she hates us,” he started. “But it’s not that she can’t make us leave. She kills the ones that do leave, Ember. We’re prisoners here. She’s a hunter, and she believes it’s her place to keep us all in line. So we stay here, or she kills us.”
Ember glanced over at Acton’s unmoving form, and then gave him a long, hard look. “She’s one woman. There’s…well, you, and your mom, and your brothers, and…”
“Everyone,” Acton finished for her. “Well, almost everyone on the island.”
Ember shook her head. “So if there’s so many of you, and one of her, then why do you let her do it?”
She stared at the moon, waiting for his reply; it was full that night, and casting a lot of light. Most of the stars were hidden; there had been two shooting stars so far, but no borealis.
“Acton?”
Acton’s voice sounded irritated. Always the same conversation, night after night. “I stay because I choose to.”
Ember’s brow furrowed in confusion. “But earlier, I thought you said—“
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Acton said firmly. “Family is that important to you. You would stay here, even though it makes you miserable?”
Ember heaved a sigh, her thoughts racing as she thought about Gina, so strong and firm in her resolve. She was a prison warden. She mothered Thalia like a grizzly, and in turn, Thalia was as weak and helpless as a dove. Nan was only half there, and when she was lucid, the sharp edges of her unrestrained and rampant opinions weren’t always easy to be around.
To Ember, none of them were easy to be around.
“They aren’t my family,” she said quietly. “Family is more than blood, but blood is all I have. I can’t love them. Maybe that’s why they can’t love me.”
Acton nodded, very slowly, listening to the sound of something digging at a stump several yards off. “Family is more than blood. That’s true.”
There was a long silence, and Ember’s breathing had become so long and regular that Acton thought she might have fallen asleep.
“If it makes you so miserable, why do you stay?” she asked suddenly.
Acton closed his eyes, trying to think of something she would believe this time around. Every time he lied to her, and every time, she knew. “It’s all mine, Ember. It belongs to me. Your mother has just temporarily usurped it.”
Breathing slow, Ember’s voice was beginning to sound tired. Soon, he was going to have to take her back to her mother’s house. “That’s sad.”
“No worse than life without a family. Or life with one that doesn’t want you, I suppose.”
Ember let out a slow breath through her nose, shutting her eyes and squeezing out a tear. It was probably because she was so tired, but she was suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of the world. When she left the island, she would never see any of them again, because she knew this place would leave a gaping hole in her life that would never heal. She would never come back to see her mother, and no one would visit her over the holidays. There would be no more birthday cards, and she wouldn’t ever have a sister to call over the phone for advice about boys or babies or fighting with her husband. She was going to go home with a cut up hand, and even with three other people in the house, no one would be there to be concerned for her hurt, or help her with the peroxide and the bandages.
And whenever she thought about how other people had those things, and she didn’t, the memory of this one summer on Tulukaruk would hurt like a new, bleeding hole in her life.
“I should just kill myself. I don’t want this life. I don’t deserve this,” Ember said absently. Tears suddenly started streaming down her face. “But the stars are just so pretty.”
Acton sat up suddenly, looking at Ember with pain and a touch of anger in his eyes; he’d been a little heay handed with the hypnotism that night, and it made her overly emotional as often as not. He didn’t understand why it bothered him.
It wouldn’t do to grant her wish, but Gina was going to know about the water, and the cut on Ember’s hand from where she had slipped on the rocks this time. She had sobbed like a little girl when she had tripped and cut it.
But as she cried at the sight of her blood on her hand, he had looked at her, so small and pathetic and alone in the world. Her past had been stolen, her future was going to be a string of bad memories and loneliness, and her only friend in the world wasn’t her friend.
He knew what physically damaging Gina’s daughter meant. Acton had been planning her death for weeks, and now that the night was finally here, he could only think that letting her live would be worse.
His time on the island was done now. Freedom, or nothing, awaited him tomorrow.
He had slowly lifted her chin so that he could look into her eyes, and lifted her injured hand. He knelt down before her, the way that Zinny had done to him when he was little. She said it was supposed to make the hurting stop. Those were the words that he repeated to Ember, hoping that she believed the act.
As she sniffed and wiped at her face with her good hand, he lowered his lips to kiss the cut, long and slow.
Zinny had warned him about hunter’s blood. She said it was lethal to demons. One of only a very few poisons that were, and arguably the hardest to come by.
Ember laughed through her tears, pulling her hand back. “Acton, you shouldn’t wish that you were dead. You’re a good person, and a good friend.”
He didn’t remember when he had said that to her. He said a lot of things to test her emotional depth—that was all they were for, of course. He hadn’t taken to sharing pieces of himself the way she shared herself.
Certainly not.
“It’s me,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m a bad person. That’s why no one loves me. I wish I was dead.”
Acton coughed, licking the blood off of his lips and settling back onto the ground. He felt sick, but she was right. The stars were beautiful tonight.
When Ember awoke the next evening, and saw her little spider dangling above her bed in the organic dream catcher that he had carefully spun, it took her a moment to gather her thoughts. Her body ached everywhere, and she had the fleeting notion that cold water could do that to a person.
She got up out of the bed and started pacing, but her legs were too stiff. She went to the bathroom and filled the tub with hot water, stripping out of the sweat suit that Acton had given her. It was too big for her, and must have been one of his. She set it by the door and got into the bathtub, letting the heat soak through her as she planned her next move.
Not human. The words rang in her head, and she couldn’t decide how she felt about it. She thought she had seen his eyes glow, like an animal’s eyes, but that could have been a trick of the light. He had made her see things—lights, and beauty in the night and the forest—but that could have been anything from alcohol to something he had put in her drink.
Ember sank
lower into the tub, dunking her head under to get the ocean smell out of her hair.
Acton had pulled her out of the freezing water, and it hadn’t affected him at all. He had just hung out in the night, and the wind, in his soaking clothes, and he hadn’t even looked cold—it should have put him into shock, at least.
That one was harder to explain away.
As Ember tried to puzzle it out, she washed her hair, and when the water in the tub was too cold, she stood up to shower off. When she got out and started to towel off, a different question crossed her mind.
Acton would be expecting her that night, and she wasn’t sure if it was safe to go with him. But he was her friend, and he wanted her. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she tried to smile. It was something to hope for, at least.
She wondered if she should dress up or wear something fit for hiking across the island. As she bandaged her injured palm, she hoped she hadn’t ruined the sheets with blood. She should have wrapped it when she got home, but she didn’t remember coming home. It was odd, because forgetting that one detail, she remembered more about the previous night than she did almost any other so far.
Butterflies erupted in her stomach when she thought of Acton’s lips on her hand, and the sad look in his eyes as he had kissed her. She hadn’t really thought of him as anything more than a friend, and now she wasn’t sure what he thought of her.
As Ember quietly puzzled, walking back to her bedroom as she contemplated the thought that she might not die alone, she had no warning for what she was about to see.
The room was empty, and it stopped her in her tracks. Her suitcase was gone, and the clothes, and the bed sheets and blankets and pillows. Even the mattress was gone. Her drapes had been stripped from the window, and as Ember walked forward, frowning, she saw the blaze going in the backyard—a pillar of fire that stretched clear to the second story of the house. Tendrils of red and orange curling into the darkening night as sparks drifted like deadly fireflies from every hot wisp.
And down in the yard, pitching in one item after another was Gina, working in a frenzy to empty Ember’s suitcase into the blaze before throwing in the bag itself. She hurled in the bedclothes, and finally, a small, bundled wad that looked uncannily like Acton’s sweat suit.
Ember stood slack-jawed, now with nothing to wear but a towel as she watched the rest of her things burn up. Gina raised her hands to grab at her hair before lowering her clenched fists to her sides, screaming into the fireball in front of her.