Sinner (The Wolves of Mercy Falls 4)

“Jeremy, what do you want on yours?”

Jeremy had been gazing at the Rob Zombie inscription on the side of the memorial: A dedicated punk and a loyal friend.

“I’m going to be cremated. What good will this body do when I’ll already be on my way to the next?”

“Of course,” Cole said. “I’m going to have you stuffed, anyway.

Isabel? How about you? A machine gun perhaps, or a tiara?”

I could not smile because the current game required me not to smile. But I liked his version of me. I replied, “Both.”

“Leon?” Cole asked.

Leon was too kind for this, I could tell. He was the sort of earnest and pleasant man who would never let you know if you offended him, which only made me feel somehow pressured to not offend him. But he wanted to please Cole, because everyone wanted to either please Cole or kill him, so he answered, “I saw a grave once with an angel on it, and even though her head was like this” — he tucked his chin — “she was smiling. Just a little.

It was nice. I’d like that.”

“I could hook that up,” Cole said.

Sofia realized a second before she was asked that she was the next in line for this question. Distress welled in her eyes.

“That’s morbid,” she interjected in a sweet voice only audible to attentive dogs. Luckily for her, Cole was an attentive dog.

“Death’s not morbid,” he said. “Everything else is.”

“I don’t think it’s nice to talk about,” Sofia said bravely.

“There are so many beautiful things to talk about.”

“Indeed,” Cole agreed, to my relief. He grasped Leon’s arm and pointed. “There. Leon. Yonder. That is the photo op of the day.” Leon obediently plucked his phone from his slacks and framed the place Cole indicated: the palm trees, all slanted to the right, silhouetted on the glory-pink sky behind a white mausoleum.

“I took a photo with my mind,” Jeremy said.

My mind’s memory card was full. I had to delete an old mind-photo of a simpler San Diego sunset in order to take this one.

As a group of older women passed by us, laughing and gripping wine bottles, I asked, “What’s your plan here, Cole?”

“Actually,” Cole replied, “it’s Leon’s plan.”

At this, Leon looked modest. “I read about it in the weekend insert.”

Cole agreed, “The place where news happens. Apparently, they are going to project a motion picture on the side of that mausoleum over there” — he gestured to the photo op — “and we will sit like so” — he crossed his fingers on both hands — “and watch it.”

The white mausoleum he indicated was massive and featureless, ideal for film projection. “Which film?”

Cole leaned forward, looking knowing. Desire stabbed me.

“Beauty and the Beast.”

He smirked. It was not actually Beauty and the Beast.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t like it when you call me a beast.”

Cole’s grin was so wonderful that it hurt.

Leon broke in, “Folks, maybe we should find a seat?”

As Cole leaped ahead with Jeremy, Sofia hung at my elbow.

She whispered, “Oh, Isabel, he’s so beautiful.”

Only she said it like she would say terrible.

Up ahead, the boys had found a place without too many tall people in front of it. Sofia spread the blanket and served everyone sandwiches, much to my annoyance — but the others didn’t know to tell her not to. I watched her eat hers very quietly and precisely, tearing off small pieces so she wouldn’t do it wrong with her mouth open. It just made me want to punch something. Couldn’t she see that the others didn’t care about how she chewed? How they were all prepared to like her before she handed them sandwiches?

I expected (feared?) there to be alcohol of some kind, but it turned out that Jeremy was some kind of straight-edge Buddhist, and Leon had given up drinking five years before, and Cole was also abstaining, and Sofia and I were us.

Cole, sitting beside me, put his hand on my back, under my jacket. His fingers wanted me and nothing else. I was absolutely dying.

“Would you like my jacket?” Leon asked Sofia.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Sofia said, though she was clearly freezing and Leon had said it in a strictly fatherly way. Probably she didn’t remember what fatherly looked like.

“Sofia,” I said, lowering my sandwich from my mouth.

The edge of the bread had a red mark on it from my lipstick. “If you don’t take that man’s jacket, I’m going to set something on fire.”

Cole immediately came to life.

Jeremy shook his head slowly. “No, man. Not here.”

He said it with such lazy, muted humor that it suddenly seemed obvious that they’d been in a band together. That he, anyway, knew Cole in a way that those fangirls did not.

I expected to feel jealous, but I felt more like I’d found another member of a survivors’ club.

Sofia took the jacket.

The movie began. It turned out to be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which we had all seen.

At one point I glanced over to Cole, and he was just — looking at me. His eyes were narrowed like he was trying to learn something from my face. He was silhouetted by the very last of the pink sky and the tall, leaning palms. It was impossible to think that California hadn’t made him, because he looked like he had emerged from the ground here along with the palms and the peacocks and the memorial of Johnny Ramone playing his guitar.

He didn’t look away.

God, I wanted to kiss him so badly.

I wished we were alone.

But there was Sofia, who needed me, and Leon, who seemed to be Cole’s driver and date, and Jeremy, who — well, I didn’t know what Jeremy was. He seemed like he could handle himself.

Partway into the movie, Sofia excused herself for the toilets.

She was gone for too long, so I pushed myself to my feet with a sigh. I whispered, “I’m just going to go check on her.”

I found her in one of the mausoleums. The wide aisle led me under a high, domed glass ceiling. On either side of me, the skyscraping walls were divided into squares that looked like post office boxes. There were small urns attached to the front of them, because these were actually boxes of dead people.

Sofia was crying noiselessly next to an urn, Leon’s jacket still over her shoulders. My heels clicked on the floor as I marched up to her.

“This is not what grown-ups do,” I told her.

She turned her face and sniffled. “I’m not a grown-up.”

“What is even the matter?”

“I don’t know what to say to people.”

“It’s a movie. We’re not saying anything.”

“But if we were talking. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

I didn’t know the first thing about how to cure a hypothetical problem that I would have barely understood even if it hadn’t been hypothetical.

Which meant that a few moments passed, during which Sofia grew more upset and I grew more angry and thought more about dead people and how my brother was one of them, dead in a hole instead of in a clean white box in California.

“Hey,” said a voice behind me. Against all reason, it was Jeremy. He was all unthreatening and hunched over, tucking one bit of hair behind his ear. “It’s me. I came to see if everything was okay?”

“Oh, she’s . . .” upset with life.

His presence pushed Sofia over the edge. She wailed, “Now I’ve really ruined things!”

I snapped, “You have not.”

Jeremy said smoothly, “Oh, hey, no. Cole’s just on his date with Leon; they’re having a grand old time. So hey, hey, do you mind if I try something? It’s this thing I learned in, like . . .”

He’d moved around me to face her. And something about his expression must have looked more comforting than mine, because Sofia gulped down the latest batch of tears and met his eyes.

“You just get overwhelmed, right?” Jeremy asked. He gestured while he said it. He had long, long fingers. Bassist fingers.

He started to tap his breastbone with one hand, and with the other, he took her limp wrist and made her mimic the gesture on herself. “Tap here and just say something with me. Just say, like, ‘We’re all cool here. They like my smile.’ ”

What the hell.

Sofia offered him a shy smile.

What the hell times two.

“Now tap here,” Jeremy said, and started tapping his chin. I expected Sofia to refuse — I would have — but she did as he did. “And say, ‘We’re all cool here. They think I’m nice.’ ”

Times three. What. The. Hell.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Is this happening?”

“Isabel,” Jeremy said mildly, “this is a positive space.”

Sofia suppressed a startled and watery giggle. I rolled my eyes. “Will this be long?”

“Is eternity long?” asked Jeremy.

“Oh my —”

He grinned. “I’m totally kidding. It’ll be five or ten minutes.”

I pointed outside. “I’ll be out there. Are you okay with that, Sofia?”

She was. Of course. Imaginary creatures are always happy with other imaginary creatures.

I had only made it a few yards out into the darkness when Cole appeared right in front of me. His eyes were hungry.

“Isabel —”

I just had enough time to feel his fingers seize my hand, pulling me aside, and then we were around the side of the mausoleum and kissing. It was such an instantaneous thing, something I’d wanted so much, that it was impossible for me to decide if he had begun it or if I had. Everything in my brain shut down except for his mouth, his body, his fingers banded tightly around my upper arm, the other hand hitching my skirt.

His hand on my thigh was a question: My hands pulling him closer was the answer.

It wasn’t really dark enough to hide us, Sofia could come out with Jeremy and see us, I was not supposed to be getting in too deep.

It didn’t matter.

I wanted him.

A flashlight swept across our faces. A warning.

“Hey, kids,” said a guy. Standard-issue security guard. “Get a room.”

Cole stopped kissing me, but he didn’t let go.

“Yeah,” he said, flashing a tense smile at the guard, who moved on. Then he whispered in my ear, all tongue and teeth, “Come back with me.”

My pulse crashed in my stomach and my thighs. I knew what he meant, but I said, “I was on my way back.”

“Not that,” Cole said. Then repeated, “Not that. After.

Come back with me.”

He wasn’t talking about making out. He was talking about sex.

I said, “I have to take Sofia back home.”

“I’ll pick you up,” Cole said.

My body hummed an answer for me. I tried to think clearly.

“How would I get home?”

“Home?” Cole echoed, as if he had no idea what the word meant. “Stay. I’ll take you back in the morning. Isabel —”

“Stay!” I whispered, suddenly hot. It wasn’t staying that I was afraid of. It was that I might like staying, and then what happened when one of us got tired of the other? I’d seen those sorts of fights often enough at the House of Misery to know I didn’t want it. Two days ago, he hadn’t been here, and now he wanted me to spend the night with him. Maybe he was a coolass rock star who’d laid a ton of girls, but I was just a possibly ex-Catholic girl who had gotten to third base a few times.

“What do you want from me?”

“I told you,” he said. “Dinner. Dessert. Sex. Life.”

Somehow hearing him say it sort of hurt, because of how much I wanted to believe it versus how much I really did believe it. I told him, “You’re saying that because you think you look good saying it.”

Cole made a dismissive sound. “I am, but I also mean it.”

I removed his hand from my ass so I could think better.

“Slower, Cole.”

He sighed, noisy and melodramatic. Then he dropped his head onto my shoulder, breathing into my collarbone. For once not moving, not needing, not asking, not doing. Just holding me, and letting me hold him up.

It was the most shocking thing.

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

And here was what I was most afraid of: that Cole St. Clair would fall in love with me, and I’d fall in love with him, both of us human weapons, and we’d both end up with broken hearts.

Chapter Fifteen

· cole ·

Isabel didn’t come back with me, which meant I was still in the apartment alone, the giant moon observing me through the glass deck doors. I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t think.

There were an uncountable number of minutes between now and morning.

I looked at the keyboard, and it looked back. Neither of us was interested in the other.

In the kitchen, I investigated the cameras affixed to the edge of the counter, pointed at the floor. I crouched in front of one and said, “Hello. I’m Cole St. Clair. And this is my instrument.”

I straightened and gyrated my h*ps in front of it for a minute or two. The camera wasn’t a satisfying audience.

I climbed onto the counter to see if I could reach the ceiling.

I could. I kicked the toaster onto the floor to see what sort of sound it would make. Not much.

It wasn’t morning yet.

I couldn’t understand Isabel’s resistance to my irresistibility.

I could only stand being this furious with wanting her if I thought that she was somewhere wanting me, too. I longed to call her and ask her if this was the case, but even I could tell that such a phone call would violate every parameter she had set for me.