Chapter Twenty – Stephanie

 

“Ryder?” I whispered into his shirt as I pulled myself closer. The words were as much a statement as a question, though, and all I could think about and feel were his arms as they gripped me more tightly.

God, he felt good. Warm, strong, and dependable. Like he could fight his way through a whole army of those cat-things, of witches and ghosts and who knew what else, and still get home to change your car’s oil.

I squeezed him more tightly and could feel my heart at the back of my throat as it hammered in my chest.

“Stephanie,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “We need to…”

As he trailed off, I slowly peeled myself away from him, fighting my own arms’ unwillingness to let him go. Carefully, I explained to them that we were in a life-or-death situation, and this was only a minor reprieve.

And, on top of that, what had been that tingle throughout my whole body? Throughout both of our bodies?

Finally, my arms complied with my instructions, enough at least that I could take a small step back from him. I tilted my head back, gazing up into those dreamy, half-lidded eyes of his. “Is it safe to step out of the circle, yet?”

He blinked slowly, his thick eyelashes nearly batting at me. “I don’t know. I think so.” Even as he spoke, his words thick and slurred, he was bending his head down to mine.

I stood on tiptoe as I closed my eyes. Our lips met halfway. His were as soft as I’d imagined, full and welcoming as they pressed to mine.

Another tingle, this one completely mundane, passed over my body as his arms went back around me, as they pulled me tighter and closer to him. His big hands covered my lower back.

I shivered again, warmth flooding through me as I opened my mouth a little, grazed his lips with my tongue. His tongue was hot and wonderful as I tasted him for the first time, as our tongues danced together, and we held each other so close we might as well have been one person.

We stayed like that, enclosed in our circle of salt and hope, shut off from the trials of Camelot, for one long, infinite moment.

Despite all that had happened, I was still on the fence about whether magic was real. Disappearing Jeff, Stephanie, and Andy? Cat-people? But this, this did it for me. Because, no matter what, I felt something unlike I’d ever experienced from a kiss before. Like we were two people separated across a lifetime of differences, but there was this single embrace and moment to bridge that gap.

Finally, though, that moment came to an end, and we had to come back up for air. Come back to reality, no matter how strange that reality had become over the last twenty-four hours.

“Hey,” he said in a raspy voice, his fingers brushing a stray hair from my face, the tips tracing fire down my skin as they barely touched my face.

I turned into his hand, breathed deeply of his smell as I kissed his palm. “Hey,” I whispered back.

“I think we’re okay now,” he said, his arm still holding me tightly against him.

It was like a dream. A strange, wonderful, wild dream. “I think so, too,” I replied, my voice still mirroring his own.

He cleared his throat, and, as if he were more reluctant to release me than he would be to walk into a firefight, he broke the circle with the toe of his boot. “We should go.”

“Yeah,” I said, agreeing in spirit, but holding him more tightly in reality.

He put a finger beneath my chin, tilting it up so my eyes could lock with his. “Come on,” he said, his voice so quiet only I could have heard it even if the room had been filled with a crowd, “let’s go save your friends.”

I took a deep breath and let out a long, sorry sigh. He was right, I knew. Slowly, I nodded, forced my arms from around his body. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Together, Ryder and I stepped out of the circle.

“What was that?” I asked as we wandered into the living room.

His brow furrowed, and he shook his head. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I think there was some kind of spell on us from the background.” He reached up behind his ear, scuffed at it a little bit with the tips of his fingers. “No clue how long it’s been there, or what it was, though.”

“We should probably check on Chad,” I said. “Before we do anything else. Make sure he’s actually asleep.”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a nod. “Then, we need to get back to my car and head up to the event.”

“Why there?”

“Well, like Tabitha said, there’s some kind of pattern. And they’re the only outside variables in all this. So we should start there.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding as we headed up the stairs, our fingers only inches away from each other. “About what happened down there…”

“The kiss?” Ryder asked, a smile breaking through his dour expression.

I reached down, grabbed his hand again. “Was it…?” I tried to ask, but my words failed me. Instead, I entwined my fingers with his and squeezed them.

“God, yes,” he said, gripping my hand more tightly as we set foot on the top landing.

We rounded the corner to the room where we’d stuck Chad, the faces of all the founding townsfolk of Camelot staring down at us with their watchful gazes. This little stretch of Christina’s house had always unsettled me in some way, with the faces of the dead seeming to judge the living with their formal dress, and their intense eyes as they stared out unflinchingly from the pictures of days long past.

“Hold up,” Ryder said. “Before we go in there, I wanted to tell you something.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, turning back to him.

He looked down at me with the most conflicted expression I’d ever seen. His lips pressed tightly together, his brow furrowed, but his eyes wide and staring. Like whatever was on his mind was difficult, but he was willing to face it head-on.

“There’s something…something about me that…I’m guarded about. I know we just met, and what happened downstairs was just a kiss…”

Just a kiss? If that was just a kiss, I wanted to see what the rest of it would be like. I gripped his hand more tightly and smiled up at him. “Ryder, it’s okay.”

The look in his eyes, though, mirrored his words perfectly. “No, it’s important,” he said. “Really.”

My smile faded from my lips. This was important. And, maybe, bad. I glanced away from his eyes for a moment, almost completely unable to handle that look of indecision as he tried to force his words out. Maybe he was married? Or had a girlfriend, back in St. Louis? A family he hadn’t told me about. As he came closer and closer to telling me what was wrong, my eyes fell on a picture hanging from Christina’s wall.

A picture I must have already seen a million times before. A picture that was as part of my life as the ground beneath my feet, or the smell of beer and whiskey in my nose. A picture that seemed to represent my town in its entirety. A reproduction of a photo of a woman with raven black hair, and features like she was ripped from a true master’s painting. A woman that, for maybe the first time in my life, I recognized.

“I don’t know—”

“Ryder,” I said, cutting him off as I stepped past him and up to the picture. I leaned in close to it, to make sure I was certain of what I was seeing. “Look.”

“Stephanie, I’m trying to—”

“No, Ryder,” I said, my words more forceful. “Look at this photo. Who is that? Don’t you recognize her?”

He stopped trying to speak. He leaned in close, his face next to mine as we both glared at the yellowing reproduction of a portrait of Winifred O’Bannon. A portrait taken over a century and a half ago, back when she was alive and well in Philadelphia.

“Holy shit,” Ryder breathed, barely moving a muscle. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?”

“What are you seeing?” I asked, not wanting to nudge him one way or another with my guess.

“It’s Esther. It’s fucking Esther, the woman at the hotel. And the one I hit with my car.”