I clicked the phone off and turned to Nick. “What if she’s still knocked out?”

His eyes tightened. “I didn’t hit her that hard.”

I slumped to lean against the wall. It was painted an icky brown and didn’t go with anything else. Nothing in Nick’s apartment went with anything else, so it kind of fit—in a warped sort of way. It wasn’t that Nick didn’t care about continuity, but that he looked at things differently. The time I found him wearing a blue sock with a black, he had blinked at me and said they were the same thickness.

His books, too, weren’t cataloged alphabetically—his oldest tomes had no title or author—but by some ranking system I had yet to figure out. They lined an entire wall of his living room, giving me the eerie feeling of being watched whenever I was there. He had tried to get me to store them in my closet for him after his mother dumped them on his doorstep early one morning. I’d kissed him soundly and refused. They creeped me out.

Nick leaned into the kitchen and grabbed his keys. The sliding sound of metal pulled me from the wall and to the door. I glanced over my outfit before following him into the hall: blue jeans, tucked-in black cotton T, and the flip-flops I used when we swam in his apartment’s pool. I had left them last month and found them washed and hung up in Nick’s closet.

“I don’t have my bag,” I muttered as he gave the door a firm tug to lock it.

“You want to stop at the church on the way?”

His offer didn’t sound genuine, and I hesitated. We’d have to cross half of the Hollows to get there. It was after sundown. The streets were getting busy, and it would take forever. There wasn’t much in my bag in terms of money, and I wouldn’t need my charms—I was only going to my mom’s—but the thought of Ivy flat out on the floor was intolerable. “Could we?”

He took a slow breath, and with his long face twisted into a stilted expression, he nodded.

I knew he didn’t want to, and the bother of that made me almost miss the step out of the apartment house and onto the dark parking lot. It was cold. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the stars were lost behind the city lights. My feet felt drafty in their flip-flops, and when I clutched my arms about myself, Nick handed me his coat. I shrugged into it, my anger at his reluctance to check on Ivy easing at the warmth and lingering smell of him on the thick fabric.