Page 9 of The Last Lost Girl

“Hey!” she shouts, indignant. “Those are mine!”

“Not anymore.”

I shift things around in her drawer to make sure she’s not hiding anything else and then quickly search her dresser before moving to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Fortunately, I don’t find any other stolen pharmaceuticals.

“Seven, Belle? Did you bother to read the label?” I walk back through the apartment to grab my bag, then sling it over my chest with a huff.

“Two seemed like far too few,” she answers before adding a horribly fake yawn.

I narrow my eyes.

She quirks a brow. “You’re going to be late.”

“Promise me that you won’t leave the apartment.”

She heaves a sigh in reply. “I’m going to sleep,” she says like she believes it and wants me to, as well.

“Promise it, Belle.”

“I promise,” she reluctantly repeats.

I hold my arms out for a hug. She squeezes me tightly, tensing when I tell her, “I believe that you will keep all of your promises to me.”

She slumps against me like I’ve crushed her hopes and dreams in my fist and tossed the bits in her eyes.

I breathe in her honeysuckle scent and squeeze my eyes tightly closed to hold back the tears that clog my throat. Because I can’t imagine a life and world without Belle in it. “Please don’t make me stop believing you, Belle.”

She hugs me tighter, then mutters against my shoulder. “I’ll go straight to bed.” When she pulls away, her eyes are clear and golden and she is my sister through and through. I just wish there was a way to keep her like this. “Wake me when you get home?”

I nod. “Of course.”

She crosses the room and throws open the curtains, then points to the sky. Her golden eyes swirl a few shades darker as her delicate features brighten with excitement. “The Second Star might shine tonight. We could go for a walk on the beach when you get back,” she suggests.

I wonder if Belle sees something in the night sky I don’t. Perhaps something no one and nothing else can detect. Because she has pointed to the same place in the heavens for as long as I can remember and has told me the story about the star that was made to enforce the boundary of a terrible curse more times than I could ever count.

I’m about to call Devin to see if he can fill in for me tonight when she gives another yawn – this one much more convincing than the last. If it’s fake, it’s a good one.

As she stares out the window with her eyes fixed on a patch of sky with nothing unusual in it, I watch her carefully for a moment. “Do you want to see that star, Belle, or does the shadow?”

A dark swirl cuts through her golden gaze again as if threatening me, daring me to speak about it one more time…

There are times when she and the shadow seem like they’re one and the same, and other times, like this one, where they are so distinct, I wish I knew a way to excise this darkness from her.

She closes the curtains and holds onto their inside edges for a long, difficult moment. “I need you to stop talking about it,” she quietly begs, her voice wavering.

“Okay,” I quickly soothe. The tension cinching her shoulders eases immediately.

Without telling me goodbye, she walks to her room. When I hear the mattress springs squeak as she lays down, I step out of the apartment and quickly shut the door before the nosy Mrs. Jennings can see inside. The crone is leaning against her door frame, pursing her lips at having craned her neck for no good reason. Her thin gray hair is held hostage, twisted and bound, by at least thirty pink foam curlers. She pinches the neck of her robe closed as if to preserve her precious modesty. “I need to have a word with you,” she says tersely.

“No.”

“No?” she repeats, already offended.

I’m already late and will be much later if I pause to entertain her vitriol. I start down the steps, then pause to meet her eye. “No. And keep Garfield away from Belle.”

“Is she allergic?” she shouts after me as I resume my descent.

“Keep him away from our door, or you’ll find out just how allergic she is to him.”

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