“You helped us look for Tristan,” Ashley said. “Why?”
Paris frowned, and it felt like a knife in Ashley’s stomach. “It’s my job.”
Alejo slowly reached for the phone in his back pocket. “You’re gonna kill us? No one will be left in Snakebite by the time you’re done. You think people won’t find that suspicious?”
“I figure after you two, I’ll hit the road.” Paris rested his hand on the gun holstered at his belt. “John doesn’t know yet, but he’ll understand.”
John Paris was a certain kind of monster, but Ashley doubted he was the type of monster that would understand this. Tristan and Bug had been John’s friends. Until recently, John had been Ashley’s friend, too. When he learned that his father was the one who had killed all of them—when he learned that his father was the reason he was left friendless—it would destroy him. This man was miles beyond the Paris she knew, living in a different world.
He pulled the gun from his belt.
Alejo gasped.
The ThermoGeist clattered against the basement floor, echoing from the walls with a stale clap. The red light along the top of the device clicked to a startling blue, then back to red as coils of black smoke curled through the plastic shell. Alejo gingerly gripped his palm, pressing his thumb against a strip of burned skin beneath his fingers.
“What…？” Ashley started.
Suddenly, the air was heavy as though a layer of sound had dropped away, opening an endless chasm of silence beneath it. Her ears rang with the quiet. Alejo felt it, too—he stumbled back, clutching the railing along the basement stairs for balance. The ThermoGeist on the floor continued to smoke, rattling and popping with sparks. She smelled Tristan, like she always did at first. Gasoline and fresh cut grass and the quiet, indistinct scent of sunlight. There was one more thing he had to do before he was gone. He’d been waiting.
Sheriff Paris massaged the place where his jaw met his throat. His brow furrowed in quiet fury. “What is that?”
Ashley tasted electricity on her tongue. The room was charged with screaming grief. Tristan’s rage filled her up until she couldn’t breathe, until she couldn’t see through her own eyes, until she couldn’t remember her own name. She felt hands around her throat, wide-palmed and callused like leather. She saw Paris’s slate-blue eyes staring into hers, felt snow under the ridge of her spine, felt dizzy with the realization that she was going to die.
On the night he had died, Tristan was so alone.
This was the last thing he felt.
Fingers gently closed around Ashley’s wrist. Alejo leaned forward until his eyes were at her level, and his smile was bitter and warm at once. “Come back. These memories are his,” he said. “Don’t follow him.”
Ashley swallowed.
Even if Paris didn’t see what she saw, he felt what she felt. His eyes wildly searched the corners of the basement as though he might spot Tristan in the shadows; as if seeing him would stop him. Ashley wondered if he even understood it was Tristan. He backed against the basement wall, palms pressed to the concrete, but it was too late.
Tristan surfaced in the space between Ashley and Alejo and, for just a moment, he was himself. Between them, shoulders just broad enough to fill the gap, he was so much more than a memory. It was as though he’d been plucked from that last moment in Ashley’s bedroom, alive and well. It was as though, with Ashley and Alejo here, seeing him, he was strong enough to finally become real. He was honey-colored hair and bright blue eyes and dimples at the corners of his mouth.
Ashley’s chest ached because it was like none of this had ever happened. For a moment, Tristan stood next to her and turned back time.
His expression sobered. He moved across the room in a single stride, and then he wasn’t Tristan anymore. He was a blur of white, shifting across the empty space like a small hurricane. He twisted around Sheriff Paris and, just beyond the blur, Ashley saw Paris’s eyes.