Page 4 of To the Grave

But Locke was different. Aside from a few training sessions at the gym, we’d hardly spoken, and even then, he was more grunts and gestures than conversation.

“You’re wrong,” Locke said.

“About what?” I’d lost my train of thought, drifted off into the abyss of my mind, something that had happened more often since Jace’s death.

“You said you don’t think anything can help you,” he said. “You’re wrong.”

“You think working out is going to help me?” He might as well have told me to click my heels three times like Dorothy inThe Wizard of Oz.

“Yes.” He eased my gym bag off my shoulder. “Grief — like every other emotion — is stored in the body. You need to move it out.”

I looked down as tears stung my eyes. “I don’t want to.”

Moving it out meant it was real. It meant accepting that Jace was dead. That I was moving on.

And I would never, ever do that.

“I know.” I thought I saw sympathy in his blue eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. “But it’s not healthy to let it sit in your body, in your psyche. You won’t be any good to anybody until you clear it.”

I didn’t want to be any good to anybody. I just wanted to sleep.

He crossed his arms over his chest, a pose that made him immediately look ten times more imposing, and that was saying something. “Listen, I got my ass out of bed at the crack and sodid you. You going to tell me you don’t want to work now that you’re here?”

I sighed. He was right. I’d done the hard part by getting to the gym. If nothing else, it would make Wolf and Otis happy.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s work.”

Chapter 6

Otis

Istared out Benji’s windshield and watched as the sun rose behind the mountains. The old-fashioned streetlamps shut off all at once, and little by little, lights came on in the shops as Blackwell Falls woke up.

In a few hours, Main Street would be crowded with expensive cars and SUVs. The leaves on the trees were a riot of red, yellow, and orange, and every weekend tourists arrived by the hundreds, driving up from the city to drink disgusting pumpkin drinks and take pictures with sunflowers and pumpkins for their social media.

I didn’t get it. Didn’t the city have sunflowers and pumpkins? Didn’t the leaves change color there? Why bother with the long drive?

Normally I’d ask Daisy. She knew all about that kind of stuff, and in the months that we’d been living with her at the house on top of the falls, she’d become a third resource — after Wolf and Jace — for all my questions about why people did the things they did.

Now there were just two, Daisy and Wolf, which felt all kinds of weird, and I’d stopped asking Daisy stuff back in July when it became pretty obvious she was in no condition to clarify the behavior of the human race.

“How long does it take?” I asked without looking at Wolf.

He shifted in the driver’s seat. “How long does what take?”

“This… thing that Daisy is going through.”

“Grief?” Wolf asked. “Mourning?”

“I guess,” I said.

It took a minute for Wolf to answer. “It’s different for everyone, I think.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Me either,” Wolf said.

I wasn’t embarrassed to admit part of it was selfish. I fuckingmissedher. I missed her smile and the way she laughed. I missed the way the house — and anywhere really — seemed to crackle when she was in it, like she made it come alive. I missed fucking her without having her cry after she came, or worse, turning away from us like we were just another reminder of Jace.

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