Stolen by Erin Bowman Page A

still, she wanted to forgive everything. She wanted to make excuses for him. Lock was watching his life burn out like the last embers of a dying fire. Of course he was desperate to feel something—anything—as often as possible.
    She wished she knew how to draw the line between protecting her heart and letting it have what it craved.

TEN
    BREE WOKE BEFORE THE SUN and instantly knew something was wrong. It weighed on her chest, a suffocating, heavy blanket. Death .
    She threw off her sheets. Hands shaking, she found a candle and lit it. “Heath?” she whispered. The silence in the hut was sharper than a knife. “Heath?”
    The glow of the candle fell on him, pale as a ghost, mouth an open slit. His chest moved, and Bree buckled to her knees. His skin was still clammy, but he was breathing. Bree let out a sigh, but the pressure on her chest did not lessen.
    And she knew.
    Blood pounding, she held out the candle. At the far end of the room, Chelsea lay still asleep. The mattress between her and Heath was empty. Bree stumbled from the hut. “Lock?” The town was quiet, the world murky in dawn’s first light. Her feet moved faster. Across the town, beyond the empty bonfire pit, and toward shore. Somewhere within the trees she dropped the candle so she could run.
    She was yelling his name now. Loud enough that the waves couldn’t swallow her words or the wind whip them away. The air tasted like tears, and when the sea came into view, it was angry; choppy waves and gray surges. The horizon burned as brightly as the fear in Bree’s chest.
    Halfway down the sloped rock, she spotted his slumped form facedown in the shallows, the waves lapping over his shoulders. She fell twice on the way to him, cutting open her palm. Then she was on her knees on the froth-slicked rocks, rolling him onto his back. Vacant eyes stared at her, and she lost all composure.
    “You stupid idiot!” she screamed, clenching the front of his shirt into her fist. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” She hit his chest, her own tears mixing with the salt the waves threw into her eyes.
    The bronze skin she’d run her hands along just days earlier was now tinged a dull silver, like he wore a sheen of the ocean on his limbs. His lips were as cold as the shell of an oyster. Lock looked clumsy and dense, certainly not capable of hauling fish from the ocean or cracking a smile. The thought of dimples appearing on his cheeks seemed ridiculous, but it was his eyes that destroyed Bree most. Those green eyes that used to feel as lively as the ocean itself, as mischievous and scheming and magical. They were nothing now. They were holes. They were an empty, bottomless reminder that Lock was gone. That this was just a pile of bones and flesh and cold, bloated muscle. Her Lock was lost. Drowned hours ago in the water she could never escape.
    Fingers grazed Bree’s shoulder and she bolted to her feet.
    “You woke half the town,” Keeva said.
    Behind the woman, a crowd had gathered. Chelsea and Heath were not present, and Bree felt the tiniest pinch of relief. They didn’t know. Their world had not yet been shattered.
    “So foolhardy,” Keeva said, gazing at the horizon. “Each thinks he will be the first to reach it, even though none before ever has.”
    “Well, he was Lucky Lock.” It took Bree a moment to find the speaker. A boy named Kent just months from his own Snatching. He kicked a stone toward the corpse. “Not too lucky now, is he?”
    Bree didn’t remember deciding to do it. One moment she was standing over Lock’s body, and the next she was towering over Kent’s, her knuckles throbbing from the punch she’d delivered right to his mouth. Like she could force the words back into his throat. Like she could make them unsaid.
    She was winding up to deliver another when she was yanked away. Not knowing who held her, and not caring, Bree turned and swung. Keeva grabbed her wrist, cutting the blow short.
    “Compose yourself, or you’re heading