My stomach cramped. He was asking for me to trust him out of a circle, and it was the scariest thing I’d ever had to do. “Okay,” I whispered. “You got it.”

Al looked at the bubble of ever-after over his head and tugged the lace of his cuffs down. “Come here.”

At that instant, light spilled over the rim of earth surrounding Cincinnati. My scratched circle was still there, but Al no longer was. Shaking, I dropped the barrier of ever-after and brought my second sight into focus. Taking a breath, I stepped into the line to find him standing right where I’d left him, smiling with his hand extended. Around him, or us, rather, slumped the broken city, grass-choked chunks of pavement standing at odd angles thrusting upward from the earth. There was no bridge or ponds. Just dead grass and a red haze. I didn’t look behind me to the Hollows as the wind blew grit into my face.

I was standing in a line, balanced between reality and the ever-after. I could go either way. I wasn’t his yet. “One day a week,” I said, knees wobbling.

“I give you Newt’s mark, you give me my name,” Al said, then wiggled his fingers as if he needed me to take them to finish the deal. I reached for it, and at the last moment, Al’s glove melted away, and I found myself gripping his hand. I stifled my first impulse to jerk away, feeling the hard calluses and the warmth. It was done. Now I only had to roll with the surprises.

“Rachel!” came a call with the slamming of a car door. “God, no!”

It had been my mom’s voice, and my hand still in Al’s, I turned, unable to see anything.

Al pulled me into him, and numb, I felt his arm curve possessively about my waist. “Too late,” he whispered, his breath shifting the hair about my ear, and we jumped.

Thirty-three

The jump through the line hit me like a bucket of ice water, an uncomfortable slap right from the start with the shock turning into the sensation of being wet where you don’t want to be and left dripping. I felt my body shatter—that was the shock—and then my thoughts tightened into a ball around my soul to hold it together—that was the miserable, dripping-wet part. That I was holding my soul together and not Al was a surprise to both of us.

Good, came Al’s grudging, almost worried thought rippling over the protective bubble I had somehow made about my psyche. And then came the push back into existence.