Chapter Forty-Eight

I WAKE UP LONG BEFORE DAWN to the sound of soft rain hitting the window. For a moment, my mind is a perfectly blank slate, awake, but not yet aware. I am nothing but a breathing thing in the pitch-black. Nameless and floating. A lone bird in the night sky, weightless and free. But a few moments pass, and I feel my weight in the mattress, pulling me back to earth. I realize that the window I’m looking at isn’t my own, and gravity—reality—finds me again, grounds me. I’m aware of the bare arm wrapped around my ribs. A larger hand wrapped around my own. Liam’s warm breath is on the back of my neck. Oh, right. We’re sleeping together. Nothing happened, we just wanted to be near each other.

I haven’t slept this soundly in ages. No nightmares. No creaks or noises to wake me up, to make me wonder if this is the night something really bad happens. I lie in Liam’s bed, studying the shadows of his room, trying to remember what they were in the light. Now sleep is the winged thing, just out of reach.

We aren’t alone.

I slip out of Liam’s hold and step to the window, barefoot on the cool hardwood floor. Joe sits in the tree outside Liam’s window. He is facing the street and looks almost like a statue of a bird instead of the real thing. I wonder if he has been there all night. I wonder if he’s been there for a hundred years, watching. He looks frozen in time. But just as I think it, his head tilts, and I can see his black eye, his gray feathers, his scissor-sharp beak highlighted by the street lamp’s light.

“Good night, Joe,” I whisper, and let the shade fall into place.