He squeezed me to him and then bent over the carrier. Beep took hold of his finger, and he laughed, as amazed as I was.

Kim looked down at her, too, her face aglow. Literally. She was no longer the stressed, nervous, skittish woman she used to be. As painful as it was to think about, death suited her.

I looked back at the Loehrs. “Her soul is made up of a million sparkling lights. Of stars and galaxies and nebulas.”

They exchanged fascinated glances, then I realized something else.

“Reyes, she’s a portal.”

He looked closer at her. “You’re right. But to where?”

“I guess we’ll find out someday.”

“May we hold her?” Reyes asked Mrs. Loehr.

I seconded the question with a nod, my brows raised.

She looked at us like we’d just escaped our padded cells and said, “Of course.”

With Mrs. Loehr’s help, we gathered her up, certain we would break her, it’d been so long. I pushed her into Reyes’s arms and then wrapped my own around them both.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

He touched her tiny chin. “I asked Osh.”

I tore my gaze off my daughter. “You asked?” My voice rose an octave. “Osh?”

He nodded.

“So, you saw him?”

“You mean in the fetal position you left him in?”

He saw him.

I knew I had to get back sooner rather than later. But I just kept thinking, one more minute. One more minute.

“And he just told you where I was?”

“He didn’t want to, but I applied pressure,” he said. “He was already in a lot of pain. It didn’t take much.”

“Reyes,” I said, appalled and feeling more than a little guilty. “Is he okay?”

“Define ‘okay.’”

Kim put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s time.”

I panicked. “Just one minute more.”

She only smiled at me, and that was all the convincing I needed. She was right. We were risking our own daughter’s life by being here. Not to mention the Loehrs’.

A painful sigh shuddered through my chest as Reyes handed her back to Mrs. Loehr. And then something amazing happened. Beep looked at her as though she recognized her. She looked at her lovingly. There was no mistaking it, and I almost cried.

“Thank you so much,” I said to her. “You will never know how grateful we are.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “You don’t know what this means to us.”

I hugged her to me again, deeper this time, and I could smell Reyes in her clothes and on her skin and in her hair. A part of him truly was human. The good part. The loving part. The important part.

She bounced Beep in her arms. “We owe you everything.”

They both watched us go, Mr. Loehr with his arms wrapped around his girls, and I could only hope Mrs. Loehr didn’t drop Beep when we dematerialized before their eyes.

28

The fact that there’s a Highway to Hell

and only a Stairway to Heaven

says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers.

—MEME

By the time we got back to Garrett’s apartment, seventeen minutes had passed, thanks to how much we’d manipulated time. Osh lay on the floor, writhing in agony, his head thrown back, his teeth welded together. The fissures in his body had cracked open and were leaking vast amounts of light, the unimaginable energy melding the molecules in his body together. It was like watching a nuclear reactor in a meltdown.

Reyes was right. Osh had only seconds.

I straddled him, pulled him upright, grabbed his jaw, and placed my mouth on his. Taking back my light, my energy, was comparable to swallowing a hydrogen bomb. I drew it out of him as quickly as I could before it killed him, and the atoms in such an excited state burst inside me. It was like brain freeze times a billion.

I wrapped him tighter in my arms. Held his head as he went limp. Took as much of me back as I could. I kept drawing out energy, sucking venom as though he were a bite victim, but he didn’t wake up.

“Dutch,” Reyes said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You’re killing him.”

“No,” I said with a sob, pulling him to me and placing tiny kisses on his face. “I’m sorry, Osh.”

My light was out of him, but what was left was much worse. He was covered from head to toe in deep gashes, long lesions where the light had crackled across his body, trying to escape. His face, his skin normally so perfect, was a garish replica of the original as though an artist had decided to sculpt what he would look like in a horror movie.

And yet he was still so beautiful. So intrinsically handsome. So supremely broken.

I held him for a long time, rocking him.

“Dutch—”

“We need to get him to a hospital,” I said, cursing myself for not having thought of it before. “Hurry.”

Reyes kneeled beside me. “Sweetheart, look.”

The wounds were already beginning to heal, the skin closing at the tips of the lesions, leaving dark red trails in their wakes.

I looked at Reyes. “He’ll be okay?”

“Unfortunately.”

I laughed softly, knowing he didn’t mean it. They’d started out as enemies but had become very close. Like prizefighters who were friends outside the ring. Fair-weather friends, but friends nonetheless.

Pulling Osh to me again, I held him close, reveled in the heat of his body because that meant he was alive.

“There’ll come a point,” Garrett said from a few feet away, “where this will be considered a form of molestation. I might have to call this in.”

I looked at him. “How many beers have you had?”

He grinned and raised his current bottle of Corona in salute. “Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry, Garrett. I didn’t even think of what this might do to you.”

He shook his head. “All’s well that ends—”

“I didn’t particularly care at the time, but looking back…”

A throw pillow hit me square in the face. I giggled, almost giddy with relief that Osh would be okay. Or at least alive. He may never be the same again, but he’d live.

“We need to take him back to the apartment.”

Reyes shook his head. “I don’t want to risk anyone seeing us carrying an unconscious body into the building.”