I couldn’t finish that thought. I couldn’t think that way.
Chris walked around me and sat. He looked good. Relaxed. He’d always been closed off with me, but Cosette really seemed to change him. He was even more easygoing now. Lighter with the way he walked. He’d always been a good fighter, but I wondered if we fought again—who would win? I wasn’t sure.
Chris didn’t look at me as he swung a backpack off and unzipped it. “You do your thing. I’ll do mine.”
That was fine with me. I didn’t have any words left to say, and I certainly didn’t want to hear any bullshit about how this would all turn out okay.
No one knew that. No one. Not even Eli.
I closed my eyes, but then I heard a scratch of a pencil across paper. I opened my eyes to see him drawing in a sketchbook. I turned my head to see what he was doing, and then I looked up at him.
It was just the basic shape of her face right now, but even with that, I knew who it was. I’d know her anywhere. “Tessa?”
“I started drawing her when she disappeared.” Chris didn’t look away from the paper as he drew, but he must’ve sensed me watching him. “Well, not that day, but about four months later. I didn’t want the memory to fade. I knew I would always keep looking for her, but some people in the new council aren’t as connected to her as the rest of us. I knew they’d call off the search eventually, and when we did, you’d need help remembering so that you could keep looking. I’ve thought about giving it to you a lot over the last year, especially when they finally decided to stop looking for her. But once the time came, I wasn’t sure if having it would help or hurt.”
“Can I see?”
“I’m not done with this one, but—” He handed it over. “It’s yours. I made this for you.”
I flipped to the first page. Tessa jumping out of a window. The look on her face. I could almost hear her saying in her head—Shit. Shit. Shit.
“That’s the first time I saw her. Had to admire her guts jumping from three floors up.”
I smiled, but it was small and sad. “Yeah.” I flipped through more.
They were so many images of her. In the cafeteria. In gym class. Fighting a cave full of vampires. Turning into a wolf with everyone from the school around her. Fighting demons. The chapel where we killed Luciana. So many drawings in black pencil but drawn so real, so vivid I could almost imagine her stepping out of the page.
But those of Tessa weren’t the ones that made me gasp. Those weren’t the ones that hurt to look at. It was the drawings of us that hurt.
He’d drawn us. Laughing and training and dancing and I didn’t even know he’d been paying attention.
There was one of us sitting in the quad. She was laughing, and I was smiling at her. Looking at it felt like someone had taken one of Cosette’s flaming swords to my heart. My eyes started to burn, and I squeezed them shut to keep the tears from falling.
God. I missed looking at that face. I missed that smile. I missed the sound of her laugh.
I’d pushed away the little things I missed, but now it was a need so big I couldn’t breathe.
I wanted that back. I needed her back.
I let out a slow breath and opened my eyes to look again at the page.
She was so beautiful. She’d argue about that, but it was true. And she was kind—always giving more of herself than she should. She was strong.
And we’d been happy.
Sometimes I thought she was a dream, and that I imagined how happy we’d been. But there it was on the page. Proof.
I wanted to rub my thumb down the drawing of her, but I was scared that if I touched it that the image would smudge, and then the only piece of her that was happy would be gone, too.
“I sprayed them. You can touch it.”
I turned to him. Had I said that aloud?
He shook his head. “It’s what I would want to do if Cosette was gone. I know this doesn’t bring her back, and maybe this is worse, but if you can hold on to what you see there, then maybe you can get it back.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I didn’t. I’d never been particularly close with Chris. We’d been friendly, but I graduated before he did. I was one of his instructors. And when Tessa showed up, for a brief moment, we were competitors.
Chris didn’t look at me, but he nodded. “I heard what Eli said before we got here. He’s not a quiet guy.”