“TRISTEN, DON’T,” I begged when I saw his hand hesitate. My backpack slid from my shoulder, thumping to the floor, and I stepped closer. “Please. Let’s talk first.”
“How did you even get in here?” he asked, confused, fingers wrapped around the throat of a flask that was filled to the brim. He looked to the door. “I locked that . . .”
“I just picked it,” I said, opening my hand to show him the paper clip. “Like you taught me.”
“Oh, hell,” Tristen groaned. “I should never have shown you—”
“What’s in there, Tristen?” I edged even nearer, terrified that he would tilt the flask to his mouth and drain it dry before I could reach him. “What’s in the formula? How is the salt altered?”
He didn’t answer the question. “I think you should go now, Jill.”
A cold knot formed in the pit of my stomach. “Tristen . . . what is in there?”
He still didn’t answer but set down the flask and came around the table, stopping me with two firm hands around my upper arms. “Jill,” he said, boring into my eyes, “you really need to go.”
I knew then that whatever Tristen Hyde was about to drink, it wasn’t just dangerous; it was probably deadly. He didn’t look scared. He looked resigned and determined, and that expression tipped me off more than raw terror would have. I’d seen that look on Tristen’s face the day he’d first asked me to help him with the experiment. The day he’d promised to commit suicide if he couldn’t cure himself.
“Tristen, you don’t really believe this will help you, do you?” I asked, fighting back emotions that were about to overwhelm me and make me irrational. Fear at the prospect of seeing somebody actually die. And something more. Terror at the prospect of losing Tristen. Forever. I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Because even if he didn’t love me back, I loved him.
Loving him was stupid and pointless and maybe wrong. He was dangerous and arrogant, and he broke every rule that I followed, and lured me to break them, too. But I knew in that moment that it was true: I had somehow fallen in love with a guy who was about to take his own life. “You’re killing yourself, aren’t you?” I asked, hating that my voice broke.
“Perhaps,” Tristen admitted. “Of course, I hope that the formula will save me. But there is a strong chance that I might not survive drinking it.”
Although I’d suspected that, hearing him say it made my blood run cold.
“Why now?” I asked, trying to reason with him. “Why not wait, Tristen? You’re not even sure the beast is real. Not one hundred percent!”
“I’m sure, Jill,” he said evenly, still holding my arms. His fingers tightened slightly around me. “I am positive.”
I searched his face, almost like I was looking for some hint of the monster in his eyes. But all I saw was Tristen: complicated, sometimes frightening, occasionally violent, even. But also capable of great good, great warmth, a willingness to sacrifice his life for others. For Becca, in particular, if my suspicions were right. “How do you know?”
“I dreamed last night,” he said.
“You’ve dreamed before.”
“This time I concluded the dream,” Tristen confided. “I finally saw the outcome . . . the actual murder.”
“That doesn’t mean anything!”
“I saw her face, Jill,” he continued, loosening his grip on my arms, not so much restraining me as just holding me. “I saw her face as she died. As the monster killed her.”
“I don’t understand . . . You knew all along who it was.” Becca. How in that awful moment could I be jealous again? But I was.
“No, Jill,” Tristen said, brown eyes miserable, “I was wrong. He didn’t kill a silly cheerleader.”
“No?” My voice sounded strangled in my throat, because somehow . . . some clue in the way he was looking at me gave me the answer to the question I was about to ask before I could even voice it. “Who—who was it, Tristen?”
“You, Jill,” he said. “I—he—murdered you.”
Not Becca, but me . . .
We stood together in the lonely classroom: me and a guy I loved who swore that something inside of him wanted to kill me. Yet I wasn’t afraid of him.
Trust me, Tristen had said.
And somehow I did.
I was scared, but not for me. Just for him—even when Tristen, pinning my arms, revealed very matter-of-factly, “He wants to kill you right now, Jill. And not just in fantasy.”
And how could I describe the way it felt when Tristen pulled me closer—voice throaty with what I thought were sadness and need—how could I ever capture how it felt when he said, “It’s been you all along, Jill. He wants you as much as I do. But I’ll be damned, genuinely damned, before I let him have you.”
It was maybe the world’s sickest declaration of affection, complete with a touch of black humor, but it rang as perfect to my ears.
Tristen cupped my chin in one hand then and bent over me, wrapping his other arm around my waist, and I had my first real kiss with a boy—a man . . . a monster and a martyr, who might very well be dead in the next few minutes.
Of course Jill Jekel wouldn’t have a normal kiss good night at the front door after a movie or a school dance.
Of course a relationship that started at the edge of one grave would culminate on the brink of another.
Of course that first kiss would not just be to say good night but probably goodbye.