Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
Poe’s eyes darkened, and Allie looked horrified.
“I realized I was staring at him. I didn’t want him to know, so I turned my back on him. When I turned back around, he was too far away and the mud was too—” He swallowed hard. “If I’d just looked a minute sooner, I would’ve had time to get to him.”
“Oh my god. Why are both my siblings such complete and total cabbages?” Allie bemoaned to the baby. “What am I gonna do with them?”
The baby made a strange face. Then they grinned a gummy grin, and an unpleasant smell wafted through the room.
“I couldn’t agree more, frankly,” Allie said.
“Not it!” Poe said instantly.
“Dude, you just told me you see the future, including people’s deaths. You think I’m letting you touch my baby? Gimme the diaper bag.”
Poe passed it to her and turned to Edgar. “It’s not your fault, dude.”
“Not yours,” Edgar replied. Then, “That was his birthday.”
Confused looks.
“The night he and Cam stayed over and we watched Blood Mansion. It was Antoine’s thirteenth birthday.”
“Oh, right,” Allie said. “He got those new sneakers, and he was so excited.”
“He was wearing them tonight. Same outfit he died in.”
Silence fell over the room once more, but this time, it was lighter, easier. Edgar looked at Allie, then at Poe, then at the nameless baby who might inherit any number of supernatural abilities but who was, at this moment, bare-assed and blinking gummily up at Edgar. He smiled back.
“Is anyone else hungry?” Allie asked sheepishly. “I feel bad interjecting something so mundane into the conversation, but—”
“I’m famished, actually,” Jamie said.
“I could eat,” said Poe.
Edgar could too. “Do you have anything, Al?”
Allie gestured vaguely toward the kitchen and said, “Use whatever you find to concoct something edible.”
“I’ll do it,” Poe said, standing. “I’ve been working in a restaurant lately.”
“Was that a genuine sharing of information about your life?” Allie asked.
Poe stuck his tongue out at her and went to the kitchen.
“You know,” Allie said as he rummaged through the cupboards. “Now that we know about the whole touching issue, you don’t have to wear that thing inside anymore.”
Poe tugged his leather jacket closer and looked at Allie as if she’d suggested removing his skin. Then he shrugged, shoulders almost to his ears.
“Yeah, okay,” he said.
He peeled off the garment, draped it over the back of a barstool, and started pulling ingredients from the refrigerator. His arms were lean and toned against his black T-shirt. Scars crisscrossed his arms like a child’s game of tic-tac-toe. He held himself as if he’d brutally punish anyone who asked about them.
Soon, Poe handed around bowls of pasta with lentils, feta, and capers, grumbling about Allie not having any fresh herbs.
“Grow some, then,” she said.
Poe’s childish, nonsensical comeback—“I’ll grow you”—gave way to chewing and then murmurs of appreciation.
“Honestly, when you said you’d cook, I was expecting nothing,” Allie said. “But this is damn good.”
“Agreed,” said Edgar.
“I don’t know you well enough yet to have expected nothing from you,” Jamie said lightly, giving a thumbs-up to the food.
Poe winked at that.
Edgar didn’t know if he liked the idea of Jamie and Poe being friends. God knew what trouble Poe would get Jamie involved in. Then he reminded himself that his brother wasn’t a child anymore, and Jamie could certainly take care of themself.
“Can I just go back to the previous topic for a minute?” Allie asked.
Poe rolled his eyes. “I suppose it was too much to expect that I might drop the whole seeing the future thing and hope there would be no follow-up questions.”
Allie said, “Because, okay, I suspected the ghost thing just a little bit, but—”
“Wait, you suspected?” Edgar demanded. “What? Why? How come you never said anything?”
“How’d you know?” Poe grumbled at the same time.
“Er, I mean, I didn’t know know,” Allie said. “But you never talked about seeing them until someone else did. And when you were little, you always wanted to do whatever Edgar and I did. So occasionally I wondered if you didn’t see them but didn’t wanna feel left out. And I suspected, a little, that was why you left. Because maybe it was easier if you didn’t have to keep up the act.”
Poe shoved food into his mouth so he couldn’t answer.
“But what I don’t get,” Allie said. She looked at Poe, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She looked at Edgar, and he could see how close she was to tears. “Is why you didn’t tell us.”
Poe shook his head.
“We were all so close,” she went on. “We told each other everything. I thought.” Her voice broke. “If you’d just said something—”
Poe sighed and looked at her. “Allie. I was a freak even in a family of freaks. And I couldn’t tell you because you’d ask me to use it.”
She stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “What?”