Second Glance Read online

  Lucy felt her knees shaking so hard they knocked into each other. Get lost, she thought right back at him.

  To her surprise, the ghost did exactly as she’d asked. He took two steps forward, one of which brought him directly through her, icing her bones and her blood so thoroughly that for a second she was still as these rocks surrounding her, and then he vanished.

  Lucy smiled. She even laughed a little. She looked around, but there was nobody else haunting this pit. And sure enough, the tightness in her belly was gone. Slipping into their cave again, she sat down beside Ethan, who was banging the side of the EMF meter into the slab of granite. “Well,” he said, “this is a piece of crap.”

  Lucy stared at him. “You didn’t see anything?”

  “Nah, it was a false alarm.” He glanced up. “Why? Did you?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said with wonder, and she sat down to tell Ethan all about it.

  Shelby had been saving up words for this: velutinous, sybaritic, hedonic, effulgent. She had imagined them painted across the ceiling—paroxysm, tumult, fillip, whet. Yet as Eli’s hands skimmed over her skin, as her nails dug into his back and urged him closer, Shelby found that she could not think at all.

  His body was long and lean and sculpted, his touch as light as the promises he whispered. She followed his lead through the moment when she was certain she would not recall what to do or how to do it right, and by the time their limbs were tangled together, Shelby could not remember ever having doubts.

  He kissed his way from her ankles up, calves and knees and thighs, until she was shaking for him to settle. When he did, when his mouth came over her, she arched into him and closed her eyes to see vistas of gold, glowing emeralds, scatters of rubies. They burned hotter, smaller, into quasars and novas and filled a universe. Eli moved as if he had all the time in the world. Then, just as she could not hold on any longer, he was suddenly above her, forcing her to look at him so that she would know exactly what road her life was heading down. “Where have you been?” Eli murmured, and he filled her.

  Their bodies rocked at a fulcrum; their rhythm told a story. And at the moment they both let go, Shelby lost every word she’d ever learned except for one: Us.

  When Eli fell asleep heavily in her arms, Shelby slipped out from beneath his weight and curled up against him. She tried to memorize the constellations of his freckles and the crooked line of the part in his hair. She smelled herself on his skin.

  Something bit into the soft side of her thigh, and she shifted, trying to get comfortable. But whatever it was moved with her, and Shelby reached down between herself and Eli to grab a small, sharp item. She held it up to the pink sliver of daylight that fell diagonally across the covers and frowned. This particular setting, this combination of stones, was all too familiar.

  “Hey.” Eli reached for her.

  “Hey yourself,” Shelby said against his lips, forgetting everything but Eli as she dropped the diamond solitaire Ross had once given to Aimee, and then lost months ago in a room at her own house.

  It was the prettiest thing Ethan had ever seen—the thin pinks and creeping salmons, the rosy flush that swallowed the stars, the line where the night became the day. Ethan wanted the dawn to happen all over again, right now, even if it meant that he would be another day older and closer to dying.

  Lucy had still been asleep when Ethan crept onto the ledge. He sat cross-legged, his arms held out in front of him, each degree that the sun hiked in the sky causing another blister to rise on his skin.

  But, God, it was worth it. To witness the arrival of the morning, without a pane of glass between him and it. To feel a sunrise, instead of just to see it.

  His left arm was an angry red now, itching like crazy. Lucy came up beside him, yawning, and then looked down at his arm. “Ethan!”

  “It’s no big deal.” Yet it was. Anyone could see. Suddenly something glinting on the bottom of the quarry caught his eye. A silver button—or buckle, maybe. It was a baseball cap, and when Ethan leaned over the edge of the granite ledge he could make out the writing on it. “That’s weird,” he said. But before he could point out to Lucy what he believed to be his uncle’s cap, it exploded before his eyes.

  Like every other morning when Angel Quarry blasted for granite, the computers set off the first explosion of dynamite, pausing to let the rock settle for minutes before the next charge was detonated. Boulders flew and fine particles rose in a mushroom cloud; rock dust blanketed the roof of Ross’s car. In the wake of the first blast, the second one rang out. One spike of granite smashed into the windshield, shattering it. “Oh, God,” Meredith cried, and she opened the car door while Ross was still driving, stumbling out and breaking into a dead run toward the quarry where her daughter might be.

  Great slabs of granite fell like dominoes, knocking other pillars of stone from their pedestals and sending up such a thick cloud of silver grit that Meredith couldn’t see two feet in front of her, much less into the base of the quarry. Ross came running up to her. “I can’t find Az,” he said. “I don’t know how to stop it.”

  She was breathing in rock; she was covered with residue. Meredith hooked her fingers into the chain-link fence. “Lucy!” she yelled. “Lucy!”

  The only answer was another round of bombardment, a one-sided war. The roar of rending stone was even louder than the blasts of dynamite, and rang in Meredith’s ears. Then there seemed to be a détente, several long seconds of absolute silence, punctuated by the gravel avalanche of shifting granite.

  Another person might not have heard it—the small gasp that preceded a sob—but Meredith would have been able to pick that sound out in the middle of a holocaust. “Lucy,” she whispered, and she strained to see some evidence that her ears had not deceived her. She found it, huddling on a stone ledge—the thinnest flash of color through the haze, a magenta stripe of Lucy’s T-shirt that hadn’t been covered with gray powder. Meredith leaped onto the fence and began to climb.

  “Meredith!”

  She heard Ross’s voice, before he simply stopped in mid-sentence and started after her. There was every chance that the dynamite hadn’t run its course yet, that this was a lull to let things settle. Meredith could have cared less. She set her sights on Ethan and Lucy, down in the pit and five hundred yards away, and started her descent down a ladder drilled into the quarry wall.

  At the bottom, she hesitated, daunted by fallen stone obelisks six times taller than she was. Determined, she scaled the first one and began to chart a course, the shortest distance between herself and her daughter. The rock scraped up her palms, and her own blood made it harder to grab hold. She slid down hard on one ankle and cried out, and at that moment Lucy caught a glimpse of her. “Mommy!” she heard, that and crying, and she forced herself another fifty feet forward.

  A horn went off, three long blasts. “Get back,” Meredith yelled, urging them into the hollow of the cave they’d found. She covered her head, as if that might make a difference, just as the charge went off on the other side of the pit. The explosion was far enough away from where she huddled, but reverberations made the ground shake beneath her hands and feet. She felt the stone slide beneath her, her slick fingers scrabble for purchase, and then she was falling and landing all wrong, her bad leg brittle as a twig, as it snapped beneath the weight of the granite plate that pinned her.

  Not again.

  Ross saw the dynamite burst in slow motion; he heard the scrape and drag of rubble reshifting and it echoed in his ears with his own racing pulse. He could not speed up time; he could not make his arms and legs move fast enough. The entire world was being blown to bits around him and he was hypersensitive— the blasts louder, the explosions more brilliant— yet even in this cataclysm, Ethan’s cry for help rang clear above everything else.

  Ross was not aware of the unstable ground, the oncoming detonations, the sheer odds of getting across safely to the other side of the quarry pit. All he knew was that he would not let someone he loved die, again. That Ross was