But given that he’d shown up twice since then to save my life — or at least I suppose that’s what he thought he was doing — I’d assumed he’d forgiven me.
Yet his eyes weren’t showing the slightest flicker of warmth, let alone remorse, for what he’d tried to do to me. So I guess I’d been wrong.
“Look,” I said, my voice a little gruff with some anger of my own. He had no right to be so rude. Sure, he’d surprised me, so I’d screamed.
But he’d known this whole time I’d been on the island and he’d never once stopped by to say hello? Not that I wanted him to, since every time he showed up, someone seemed to get hurt. But still.
“I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come by to make sure everything between us was, you know.” I realized I’d really dug myself into a hole with this one. Why hadn’t I listened to Mom and just stayed on my bike? “That there were no hard feelings.”
He continued to stare at me. “No hard feelings,” he echoed.
“Right,” I said. This was going even more horribly than I could have imagined. And clearly, I had a reputation for being able to imagine quite a bit. “I’m over what you did to me. And I just wanted to make sure that you understood that what I did to you…what happened when I…you know. Left. That it wasn’t personal.”
“Oh, I understand,” he said. His tone was as cool as his gaze. “You were extremely impersonal about it. You made your decision. Then you acted on it.” He shrugged and folded his arms. “Without any regard to the consequences.”
Stung at his pointed reminder of my behavior that day — You were extremely impersonal about it. You made your decision. Then you acted on it — I felt tears well up.
Oh, God. Now I was going to cry in front of him? Mom wanted everything to be perfect? Well, this was perfect.
“I was fifteen,” I said, trying not very effectively to get a grip on myself. I had rehearsed this conversation so many times in my head, I should have had it down cold by now. The problem, of course, was that conversations with him in real life never went the way they did in my head. “Who’s ready for that kind of commitment at fifteen?”
“Seventeen’s better for you?” he asked pointedly.
Horrified, I cried, “What? No!”
“Well,” he said, “for someone who keeps claiming she’s not ready to die, you have an interesting way of showing it.”
I stared straight into those dead eyes. “What does that mean?”
“Only that most people who place any kind of value on their lives don’t go wandering around in cemeteries after dark. But then again, it is you we’re talking about.”
Isla Huesos Cemetery’s nineteen acres were completely without security cameras or guards. The cemetery sexton went home promptly at six o’clock, as he’d testily informed me one night after kicking me out (and scolding me for using “a place of public veneration as a thoroughfare”) while locking the cemetery gate.
So if he did decide to take me back with him to his world — which I was fairly certain he had the power to do — unless there was some drunk who was sleeping it off behind a tomb somewhere who’d heard me scream and gone to call 911, no one was going to come to my rescue.
Good evening. Tonight marks the ten-year anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera, who vanished without a trace from the tiny Floridian island of Isla Huesos while taking a seemingly innocent bike ride one hot September night.…
“Are you threatening me?” I demanded, putting my hands on my hips, trying to appear braver than I actually felt. Because what I felt was utter terror.
I didn’t realize he’d been moving closer as he spoke — I’d forgotten he possessed the ability to step as lightly as a cat when he chose to. This time, the dried-out poinciana blossoms hadn’t made a sound beneath those steel-toed boots — until he was standing six inches away from me.
The closer he came, the harder my heart began to hammer. Not just because of what I was afraid he might be planning on doing to me, but because I was noticing all those little things about him that were so aggravatingly attractive. Up close, his eyes were as light as mine were dark…only mine, I knew, were a warm brown, with spots of amber and honey in them — as he himself had once informed me, in a tenderer moment between us.
Which isn’t exactly a compliment if you think about it, since both amber and honey are sticky, gooey substances that bugs get trapped in.
His eyes were filled with the exact opposite — flecks of steel, one of the hardest metals on earth.
A fact that was hard not to notice, with his face just inches from mine.
“Threatening you?” he echoed, looking down. “With what? What could I possibly do to you? You’re not dead. At least, not anymore.”
I sucked in my breath, willing my pulse not to pound too loudly, since suddenly it was obvious what was about to happen:
He was going to kiss me…
…or maybe, I realized, my heart giving a disappointed little flop, not.
I’d mistaken the focus of his attention. It wasn’t my lips he’d been staring at, but something farther south…the place where my dress had gapped open, thanks to my having undone the buttons in the front. I’d have liked to think he was attracted to my feminine form — and I had reason to believe that he was.
But tonight it was what lay inside that gap, dangling from that gold chain I hadn’t removed since the day I died, that had him so interested.