Page 52 of All Her Ghosts

“Of course I did. Something cracked open the world and stole my other half. Jenny, what the hell else would I do?”

A laugh rips out of me, frantic and half terrified. “This is crazy. We’ve known each other for two days.”

It tastes like a lie.

I’ve known him forever. I’ve known him since the world began. Iknew him the moment life sparked into existence and winked at me and offered up his hand. I havealways known.

Outside the door, Bas hums, a tiny laugh of his own.

“It’s been nice,” he offers. “Meeting you new again for the first time.”

My soul shivers, threatening to scatter. Tears seep down my cheeks and I scramble to scrub them away, squeezing my eyes shut against the ghost sensation of his mouth on mine, the sour blue raspberry memories of the un-life we built together. The security of purpose—of shared responsibility—his calloused palms cupping my face, cradling me close in the autumn chill, asphodel blooming at our feet.

God, I feelcrazy. I am literally insane. How can I be lovesick and grieving at the same time? How can I miss him this much when he’s right outside and anyway, I barely know him? When I certainly don’t know his babynapper, currently committing several felonies to help me? And why? Because he feelsguilty?

Or because he had everything to do with the event that made me?

Balling tight, I thread my fingers through my hair, forehead shoved to my knees as outside, Cain climbs back into the driver’s seat. The door clicks shut. The engine grumbles awake.

“She sleeping?” he asks.

“Mad at me,” Bas answers quietly.

“You should try and sleep, then. Get some rest. We’ll need it tomorrow.”

“Driving through the night?”

“Hit a couple states. Hopefully throw them off the scent.”

Throw them offourscent he means. The people hunting us both now, because of what I started, what I am…

What I chose to be again.

And Cain didn’t say it, but I would bet hard cash they’re the same people he and my mother used to work for.

I can’t tolerate the stillness anymore. I throw myself off the bed, unlock the door.

“Is that an invitation, Jenny?” Bas asks.

“That’s not my name,” I grind between my teeth, staring him full in the face. “What is my name?”

“I’m not great at lying to you.” He tries to smile. “Gotta give me time to practice.”

“Sebastian. What is my name?”

But the second his name leaves my mouth, I taste the lie in it, wrong and overwhelming. It’s too small, too poorly fit, tasting as bitter as a little body, helpless fists, screaming while every precious thing in the world shatters and falls.

“I lost it,” Bas chokes, a confession, a knife in the night and a slow exsanguination. His fists ball in his hoodie pocket, pressing hard into his stomach, into a wound too old to stop the bleeding. “There’s notroomfor everything. There’s too—too much ofmeto fit inside this meat and I… lost pieces. I had to lose pieces if I wanted to keep looking for you. I had to cut them away or I’d burn this body out and you’d be alone.”

I can’t speak. His last word hits me harder than a final flower on a grave.

I want to tell him I lost his name too. To tell him that I reached for him, that I tried to save him like he tried to save me, but I was too slow, too scared, too weak. That I howled while he died and died and died andcursed the souls of everyone who laid a finger on him but only a baby cried.

I want to—but I don’t know the words. They boiled from my bones and useless meat, lost in the distillation from divine to tragedy. The enormity of its absence bears down on me, too large for the one language I have left. All that remains is the absence, the evidence that something was taken, a thin ghost of what we used to have, the things—people?—we used to be.

“You don’t remember either,” I breathe, a small agony.

“No,” he admits, “but I feel like I could”—his black eyes so hot on mine—“when I’m with you.”