When I turned back to Leon, I found he’d unbuttoned his shirt and was using it as a dripping, misshapen tent while he studied his phone’s GPS. There was a streak of lightning in the distance, and then a low boom of thunder. More headlights shone on the road, cocooned in the thick gray mist. After another minute or so, Leon returned his phone to his pocket, then strode toward me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

My spine stiffened.

He scowled. “Can I get us somewhere out of the rain, or are you going to object to that, too? Would you rather I just leave you here?”

“Don’t you dare,” I hissed.

Despite the increase in my Amplification ability, Leon had apparently learned to gauge the distance better, because we were still in Minnesota. We’d landed a few miles south of Northfield, and after a few more teleports—a vacant parking lot, another rainy field—we arrived at his apartment.

Leon didn’t have a TV, and his only pieces of furniture were his bed and an old wooden desk he’d brought from his grandfather’s house in Two Harbors. Since he didn’t have shelves, he’d piled textbooks and paperbacks in tall stacks along the walls. That was the only part of the room that appeared cluttered. The hardwood floor was spotless—at least before we started dripping all over it—and his desk was clean, organized with his laptop beside a couple of notebooks, a pencil cup set near the back. The bed was neatly made. His walls were bare, though there were a few nails jutting out of the paint. In the hall outside, two people were arguing loudly. I glanced down at my feet, to my wet sandals and the pool of water that was growing steadily around me.

The apartment was a studio, which meant Leon couldn’t just disappear into a room and avoid me—unless he planned on hiding in the bathroom for the rest of the night—but he made it clear he wasn’t interested in talking. Without a word, he left me in the middle of the room while he stalked off toward the closet. I said his name, but he ignored me.

He yanked off his tie and let it drop to his feet. Next he tugged off his drenched button-up shirt, which was soaked into the consistency of tissue paper, followed by his undershirt, and then tossed them both onto the floor. I took that as further indication of his anger, given how tidy he usually was. Still not looking at me, he reached into the closet, and then tossed a towel in my direction.

“Dry off.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t have figured that one out on my own.”

He shot me a glare. Then he turned his back again and stripped down to his boxers.

I paused toweling myself in order to watch him, then quickly looked away when he glanced over his shoulder at me.

“How soaked are you?” he asked.

“I’m about to grow gills.”

He dug into his closet again, balled up a shirt, and threw it at me.

I caught it with both hands and clutched it against me a second. It was going to be huge on me, but I didn’t particularly care. I held it out in front of me. The fabric was a faded yellow-gold, and it bore the words Two Harbors Agates in maroon script. His high school team, I guessed. I brought the shirt to my face. It was soft, and smelled like soap and clean linen.

“Are you smelling my shirt?”

Embarrassed, I let my arms drop. “I’m just in shock that you own a T-shirt.”

“If you don’t want it, give it here,” he snapped.

Instead of replying, I dragged my wet tank top over my head and added it to the heap on Leon’s floor. “You were in sports?” I asked, somewhat surprised. He’d never mentioned it. And since I knew he’d skipped a grade in school, and his response to summer break from college was to take even more classes, I’d sort of figured he’d spent his pre-Guardian free time reading encyclopedias.

Leon had turned sideways and was busy pretending he wasn’t looking at me. He hadn’t bothered to clothe himself yet. His hair was still damp and curling. “Track and field.”

“That sort of counts.”

“It counts. Are you planning to wear that or not?”

I wrung out my own hair onto my towel before pulling on the T-shirt. “You know you’re never getting this shirt back, right?”

“It doesn’t even fit you.”

“It fits fine.”

“Then I’ve changed my mind. You can’t have it.”

I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious, but considering how angry he was with me, I suspected it might be the latter. I folded my arms over my chest, hugging the shirt against me. “Too bad.”

He crossed the room in three long strides. I stood staring up at him, my heart thumping erratically. His blue eyes were dark and narrowed. A lock of hair was sticking to his forehead. He had that stubborn look on his face that usually foretold an argument. But instead of yanking the shirt up over my head, he backed me against the wall and kissed me. Hard.

I tilted my face to his, returning the kiss—but I didn’t unfold my arms, in case this was some ploy to distract me. Gradually, however, the tension left my shoulders. The kiss turned hungry, heady. I eased toward him. Without raising my arms, I moved my hands and pressed them to his chest, feeling the heat that burned through his wet skin, the rushing of his pulse. He had his own hands on my hips, lifting me against him.

And then, predictably, his phone rang.

Once again, he released me so rapidly it was almost dizzying. I was dizzy, at any rate. While Leon turned to answer his phone, I wobbled to the edge of his bed and sat down, forgetting that my shorts were still drenched from the rain.

“It’s Mom, isn’t it?” I said.

Leon didn’t reply.

“I told you: kiss radar,” I groaned, flopping backward onto the bed. His bedspread was dark blue, striped with gray. Warm cotton. I closed my eyes, taking a slow breath. For just this moment, I thought, everything was okay.

“She’s at your house,” Leon said after he’d finished the call.

I crashed back to Earth. “Is Gideon…”

“Verrick is gone. Lucy’s packing you a bag. You’re staying with Esther again.”

I lifted myself up on my elbows, watching Leon. He’d finally pulled on dry clothes and was once again avoiding my gaze. There was a tightness in his jaw that I recognized. I could never read him very well with my Knowing, but now he’d grown even more closed off than usual. He appeared to have remembered that he was mad at me. I sighed, rolling to face the wall, where through his window I could see the lights of Minneapolis pushing back the dark. Outside, the rain had finally stopped.

At the St. Croix house in St. Paul, I was given the same guest room I’d had the last time I stayed there. That had been three months ago, after Susannah had appeared in my living room, injured and angry, her human disguise fading into scales. The night she’d taken Mickey Beneath. Relocating to St. Paul hadn’t made me feel any safer then, and it didn’t make me feel safer now. But Mom wouldn’t hear any arguments. Verrick had been in our house; that meant it was now off-limits.

“Gideon knows where Esther lives,” I said. “He’s been to this house before. If he really wanted to come after me, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding me here.”

Mom only tightened her lips. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and then turned away, leaving the house to head off into the dark of the city. I lingered on the porch, watching her drive away. The sky had cleared, but far off on the horizon I could still see the edge of the storm, pulses of lightning shooting from cloud to cloud. The rumble of thunder was low and distant.

Mom had packed two suitcases for me and placed them on the floor of the guest room, along with my purse. I flicked on the overhead light and stood in the doorway, staring at the old cherrywood dresser and night stand, the gauzy drapes open to the night air, the pale green bedspread with tiny pink roses embroidered along the edge. The room had once belonged to my uncle Owen, who had died beside his wife in a car crash one rainy evening and left his daughters, Iris and Elspeth, orphans—but there was no trace of him here. His belongings had long since been packed away, furniture replaced. There was just that clinging hint of sadness that lived in the walls of the house, a sense of mourning that never fully eased. The St. Croix family had known its share of grief, I thought. I felt it now, as I pulled out the dresser drawers one by one and slowly set about filling them; a subtle weight between my shoulder blades. The memory of footfalls and shrieks of laughter that echoed through the halls. Mom had sent me from the silence of our house to sleep among ghosts.