forty-four.
The covert.
Shine had said it was unhealthy, her being there as much as she was, and maybe that was true. But Marsden had been drawn to the woods as soon as she saw Caleb Silas hanging from the tree, by the knowledge that her father was buried in its soil. And right or wrong, Duncan Kirby’s mad blood ran in her veins, as thickly as the wild ginger that grew in the place.
Still shaken from Nina and Brom, she turned from the boardinghouse and headed for the dark heart of Glory.
She saw the truck from Evergreen before she got there. It was parked haphazardly along the shoulder of the highway, just beyond the entrance to the covert.
Then she saw Jude, and the earth pitched.
He was clutching the open door of the truck as though it were the only thing keeping him from falling. Raw and bruised and clenched white, his knuckles unfurled over the window frame, shattered, adrift. One eye was puffed completely shut, his lips split, his cheek slashed open along the bone. His dark hair looked wet from blood, freshly varnished with it. She tasted it—hot and coppery, battery in liquid form—in her own mouth as she ran up to him.
While she’d been holding a gun to the man she’d thought responsible for her father’s death, Jude had met the drunken fists of his own father all over again.
Her eyes blurred, turning his face into streaks of garish color, pinks and reds and purples. She wanted to touch him, was deathly afraid to. “God, Jude, what happened?”
He shook his head, but just once, as though he hurt inside there, too. His eyes were absolutely hollow, their depths littered with shock. “You should have seen him.” Then he attempted to smile, and his lips started to bleed again, and he swiped at them with his hand. “Damn it.”
She pulled his arm away. “No, you’re being too rough.” She tried to blot away the blood with her fingers and felt a fresh wave of disgust for his father. “How could he do this?”
Jude tugged at her hand, turned it over, and lifted it to his mouth. “What I said to you earlier, back at the river . . .” His voice was hoarse, as though it’d been beaten along with the rest of him. “I’m sorry. I was an ass. My anger—sometimes I can’t control it. Sometimes I don’t stop it from getting that way.” He took a deep breath. “Sometimes it feels good.”
In her mind, the images were ugly and raw: Adam Lytton’s note in his hand, Rigby’s last words spilling from her mouth as he faced all the lies she’d spun, Abbot in Jude’s arms . . .
Marsden fell back a step, breaking his grip. Her heart pounded its way up along her throat, and the earth was still pitching.
“I did something terrible when I kept Rigby’s note from you,” she said. “I had no right to do that. So I’m sorry for that, too.”
“That part about you not mattering. That wasn’t okay to say.”
“It was, if it was what you felt.”
He narrowed the gap between them. Up close, his swollen eye was livid, awful, his father’s nursed rage collected into a single explosion. His other eye was hot with guilt, what she recognized in too many forms. “It wasn’t what I felt. Not even close, okay? You matter.”
“And if I told you I can’t stop being a skimmer? Wynn’s getting older, and I can’t hide everything from her forever.” An image of her sister popped into her head—grin a mile wide, telling Marsden she was the best cook ever, pouring achingly sweet lemonade for the first guy who’d ever come to the boardinghouse who she hadn’t been warned away from. “I can’t hide her forever.”
“She calls you Mars for a reason. And I know why you skim now. I do.”
She felt his understanding reach out for her, try to tell her things could be all right again.
“I saw you with Abbot,” she said softly, hating herself for still wanting everything, simply unable to stop. “Outside the Burger Pit. You literally went from me to her in minutes.”
Jude shut his good eye, swore under his breath, and opened it again. “I was upset after leaving you at the river. I drove back into town, not thinking straight, and decided I’d go see Theola again, bug her some more about what Rig might have said that she’d forgotten. But then I ran into Abbot, and she was just—We’re only friends. We’ve only ever been friends, and that’s all we’ll ever be.”
“I’m never going to make friendship bracelets for you.”
His brow wrinkled. “What?”
“You guys have this history, years and years of it. I’m not saying I want it, but I’m saying it’s never going to be ours. Should I be worried about never being able to catch up? That I’ll never be her?”
He made a sound like he was still being punched and his jaw went tight. “I don’t want you to be Abbot. I don’t want Abbot, period. I just want you.”
She stared at him, heart like thunder in her chest. She’d never wanted to believe words so badly. But the smells of blood and ginger filled her head and left her confused. His fury when he’d left her along the river, his regret now—which was more real?
“You can’t just do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Say you hate me and then decide to take it away. Because whatever made you change your mind about hating me could easily change it back again.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“So what happened? What’s going on?”
Jude opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again. His eyes were dazed, defeated looking, even as they flickered with heat. “I . . . I found out something. After I left you.”
The air in the covert stirred, running through the trees, along her skin. “Tell me.”
“Did you know that you being a skimmer has actually kept Rig safe in this town? You taking his note and hiding it—if anyone else had found it, everything would have come out. Hadley would have gotten involved, there might have been an investigation, and everyone in Glory would know.”
“Know what?” She was completely bewildered. Rigby’s note—the meaning of his words, what he’d really been saying—was still a mystery to her.
“What he’d done.”
“What could your brother have done that would let you stop hating me?”
Jude swayed on his feet, pain written all over him. The sun glinted off his blood-streaked hair, and her stomach clenched.
“Marsden, I can’t ever hate you, but the thing is—” His voice broke, then split wide open like he was just as injured inside as he was on the outside. Tears turned his eyes wet as he stared at her, his expression suddenly helpless. “The thing is, after I tell you, you might hate me.”
• • •
She made him wait by the fence while she ran inside the boardinghouse for bandages. Not because she still didn’t trust him alone in the covert, but because she didn’t trust the covert alone with him. It was her woods, and she knew its trees and soil and concealed paths, could close her eyes and sketch out the entirety of the land. But hundreds of hours she’d waited for the dead to talk to her as they were supposed to, and still they never did.
The covert, sly and secretive the instant that Duncan Kirby’s mind broke and he picked up a gun. Who knew what games it would play with Jude, alone?
And now he finally had a secret. One he was compelled to tell her. Whatever it was, it had to be bad enough to make her no longer so terrible. So many responses were immediately on the tip of her tongue when he said she would hate him: What are you talking about? What do you mean? I could never hate you. But something had kept her from saying any of them before she’d stumbled away, whispering that he needed something for all his cuts. How she would be back in just few moments.
His secret terrified her.
Marsden was grateful to find the kitchen deserted, though just. A crumpled napkin and a smattering of crumbs still littered the top of the table, there was a dirty plate and fork in the sink, and the last of her raspberry crumble was gone. She imagined Nina, raging over her lost business investment, trying to drown out her bitterness by finally indulging in more forbidden dessert, and was coldly glad.
Jude was sitting against the fence when she got back. At the sound of her approach, he straightened up to face her. Beneath the bruises and cuts, she watched his skin pale with the motion, all its umber and amber tones washing away.
“You need to move more slowly.” She knew she sounded stiff, but she couldn’t help it. Her nerves rippled in preparation for what he might say. “Sorry, it’ll take me a bit to use all this stuff on you.” Unsure of what she needed, she’d grabbed towels, bandages, a bottle of water, and aspirin.
“This is all going to hurt, isn’t it?” His voice was just as stiff as hers, but she also heard guilt there, etched all the way through, and it left her cold. He rinsed out his mouth, spat into the grass.
“Probably,” she said, knowing he was stalling and not caring—she wanted to stall, too.
She poured water from the bottle onto one of the towels and began to carefully dab the blood off his face, from his lips. Her hands shook as she touched him.
He sucked in a breath, and she passed him the aspirin and the rest of the water. The smell of ginger wafted over them, spicy and barbed and dizzying. The sight of pretty heart-shaped leaves everywhere only turned Jude’s injuries starker, more painful looking.
“Wynn always runs and hides when she cuts herself,” Marsden said. “I end up having to chase her down.”
Jude stared at her as she worked, his uninjured eye blinking at her like an inquisitive owl’s, a blaze of brown flecked with amber. “You’re comparing me to an eight-year-old?”
“You did ask.” She poured antiseptic on the towel and touched it to his face gently. “I’m sorry.”
He hissed through his teeth. “Damn, that stings. Tell Wynn she’s smart to run.”
Marsden smiled, and it felt about as hollow as her stomach. She wanted to run. She also wanted to stay, to be able to kiss him and keep him from telling her whatever he needed to tell.
He picked up her hand and wove his bruised fingers between hers, and she braced herself. “Rig’s note and what it meant . . . Marsden, my brother killed someone.”
She froze. The world swelled and receded in waves as she stared at Jude in shock.
But, deep down, she’d known, hadn’t she? Had recognized in each of Rigby’s last words the signs of a guilt so great it could only come from the ugliest of crimes? Had sensed shades of that same kind of guilt when she stole from the freshly dead in her covert, when she stood over her father’s grave and wished not so much for him to come back but to be told she wasn’t at fault for him being gone in the first place?
“How do you know?” she asked, feeling her heart ache for him as the loss of who his brother had been—was supposed to have been—turned his face bleak.
“My father finally told me.” His good eye was far away; in it, she saw him replay the horrors of the day. “After I left Abbot, I went home. He was supposed to be at work; but as soon as I walked in, I could smell the booze. Turns out he knew the entire time what Rig had done and wasn’t happy with the secret suddenly seeming close to being found out. He was waiting for me, wanting to tell me that.” With his free hand, he gestured tiredly toward his swollen eye, his split lips, his raw cheek.
Marsden’s thoughts ran rampant, entered Jude’s house alongside him as it might have happened. She saw every detail, heard every sound, smelled each scent. Leo’s temper an explosion and his elegant eyes gone a red-rimmed, galvanized blue. The reach of his huge, frustrated hands. The sound of knuckles against bones and flesh, the bright cascade of broken beer bottles, the smell of wet steel.
“You asked him what Rigby’s note could have meant, and it scared him that you knew?” she asked. “And that’s why he beat you?”
“No, I never got a chance to ask him about the note. It was seeing you, when you were over, that scared him all over again. You reminded him of how he’d been hiding my brother’s secret for years, ever since science-fair night. How Rig’s secret might not stay buried forever, no matter what he did.”
Marsden was lost.
What did she have to do with Rigby while he’d been alive? Even after he’d died, she hadn’t known anything about him, other than being the one to find his body. Even now, with this discovery that he’d actually killed someone, she didn’t understand how she was connected. Rigby would have been thirteen to Jude’s nine, big for his age but still a kid. And she would have been eight, and she was still living in their old duplex, and her father was still—
A single sliver of dread, sharp and cold in her throat, hammered out a steady pulse. She could taste it, thin and metallic and of the Indigo.
And she knew.
Jude’s hand tightened around hers to the point of pain. His eye, ablaze and despairing as he watched her understand. “I’m so sorry. What happened to your dad—Rig killing him—it was an accident. Just listen.”