Betrayals in Spring (The Last Year, #3) Read online

  BETRAYALS IN SPRING

  By

  Trisha Leigh

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2012 by Trisha Leigh

  Cover art and design by Nathalia Suellen

  Developmental Editing: Danielle Poiesz

  Copy Editing: Lauren Hougen

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used factiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  BETRAYALS IN SPRING

  Trisha Leigh

  For my parents. For everything that I’ve asked for and a million more things that I didn’t have to.

  CHAPTER 1.

  For the first time in my life, seasons flow into one another in the proper order and take me with them. No skipping summer, no short autumns or long winters. The air outside the cabin where we’re hiding burns my cheeks with cold, and snow dusts the earth as far as I can see. But it’s late March, which means spring gusts toward us in a steady advance. Even within the safe walls of the cabin things are shifting.

  Something has changed between Lucas and me.

  I don’t know whether it’s him or me who’s changed more. All I know is that I’m not the girl I was six months ago. In fact, I barely remember her, and wonder how it could be any different for Lucas.

  What’s stayed the same is that Pax hasn’t woken since being impaled by a jagged piece of metal in the fight against the Others.

  Every time I look at him, fevered and unconscious, fear sucks sound and light from the room. I would not be this new, better, stronger version of myself without his influence. What Cadi said about finding Deshi, about time running out, tugs at my patience, but there’s nothing I can do. We need Pax as much as we need Deshi, and he’s not going anywhere.

  If we lose him, we lose everything.

  We only have the four of us. We can’t trust our Element parents to help, even if they did save our lives outside Portland. Lucas and I haven’t discussed any of these things. Not the way we would have before. We haven’t talked much at all, really, passing the hours with only Pax’s labored breathing and Wolf’s light snores breaking the silence. We tiptoe through the hours like strangers, even though we were—are, I think—friends. We might have been on the path to being more once, but now I’m not sure.

  Despite that uncertainty, happiness digs its fingernails under my worries at just the sight of Lucas, at his company. Every time I look up and meet his gaze, glimpse his shaggy blond curls, air catches in my lungs. The feeling is strong, stealing my breath instead of coaxing it away like it used to.

  Maybe we only need time to readjust to being together.

  Or perhaps Lucas needs time to remember how to not be alone. There wasn’t anything I could have done to find him sooner, but it still twists my heart to know that while I had Pax and Wolf at my side most of last season, Lucas had no one. Again. To be thrust back into that lonely existence may have Broken me.

  I’ve wanted to ask what happened, how he survived, where he’s been, but he folds in on himself whenever our rare exchanges turn serious. When I met him and we figured out the two of us were different than regular humans, Lucas held himself wide open. Anything I wanted to know would be painted across his face and in his smile, written in those bright blue eyes.

  Now he’s like a black hole, sucking all of the candor out of his face and into somewhere inaccessible to me. Part of me hasn’t pushed because I’m afraid to know why he changed. Even last winter, the one thing I’d been sure of was Lucas. A small doubt sits in my stomach now, suggesting that maybe the alterations in him sink deep below the surface—that maybe what’s shifted are his feelings for me.

  Tonight the fire crackles happily in the wall, bringing me out of my worries and into the cozy living room. Wolf stretches out on a multicolored rug in front of the flames, the tip of his nose resting on his front paws. His back legs hang off the rug, splayed onto the wood floor. Lucas lounges in a brown leather recliner, bare feet and legs draped over the footrest, reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time. It’s hard not to ask him what part he’s at every two seconds, so I flutter around Pax, checking his bandages and changing the wet washcloth on his forehead. He’s still burning up, the skin around his wounds red and angry even though we clean them three times today.

  “You let him call you Summer.”

  Lucas’s gruff voice startles me out of my thoughts, and I taste blood. My teeth have worried all the way through the skin on my bottom lip while concern for Pax flayed my heart as expertly as any knife. A quick glance toward Lucas reveals a practiced disinterest on his face, an expression akin to the studied neutrality we both depended on while living among the humans. The sight of it settles the implication of his statement around me like a cold, wet blanket.

  I’ve always been adamant with Lucas about calling me Althea, nothing else. A lump jams in my throat, and I have to wait until it dissolves before answering. “I know you’ve just met Pax, but I don’t actually let him do anything.”

  There’s more I could say, about how Pax does what he likes or that we’ve had bigger issues to deal with than my silly name preferences, but further explanation feels defensive. It lights a flicker of betrayal inside me that Lucas would assume…what? That I let Pax use a nickname because I like him better? Because Pax is special somehow?

  Lucas and I are friends, and even though he kissed me and made me feel safe, we never promised each other a future. We might not even have one.

  This entire planet might not even have one.

  The thought immediately drops my heart into my stomach. After spending the last few months with Pax, I’d started to believe my feelings for Lucas weren’t what I remembered. But the instant I saw him standing in that Observatory Pod, staring at me as though he would swallow me whole just so we’d never have to be apart again, I knew I hadn’t misremembered anything. And suddenly the thought of not having a future scared me more than ever.

  “He’s bossy, that’s true.” Lucas puts the novel down, his leg holding his place. His eyes reflect more wariness now, perhaps less trust. He’s aged these past months, and the expressionless look on his face scares me all over again.

  The idea that I might not know him anymore, that maybe he doesn’t want to let me, makes me want to explode. There’s no way to make him, or to go back to the way things were. Maybe the answer is simply to face whatever turned him older and sadder last season. Even though the thought of asking heats my palms. If I want things to be okay—or more than okay—I can’t ignore what happened to him during our separation.

  “How did Pax find you?” I nudge.

  Lucas looks away, staring into the fire as though the flames hold the secret to unlocking the universe. Tension filters into the room like a ghost, through the cracks around the windows and underneath the front door. A muscle jerks in Lucas’s jaw and he crosses his arms. When his eyes return to mine, fire has leapt into them as well. “Is he why you didn’t find me?”

  His strangled, harsh tone slaps me in the face.

  I slide from the couch onto the floor, wanting to go to him, to make this better, but not knowing if it’s even possible. “Lucas, I—”

  “Don’t bother. You had Pax. I was alone. The two of you could have traveled and you knew I couldn’t, not on my own. But you didn’t come.” Lucas’s hand trembles as he picks the book up off his sweatpants and holds it in front of his face, betraying his anger for what’s underneath it. Sorrow, hurt, abandonment. And fear.

 
; The combination floods me with hot regret, but I remind myself that nothing that happened was my choice, either. Or my fault. My earlier question, about where he had been when Pax found him, has been tossed aside in favor of hurt accusations. He clearly thinks I could have fought harder, that Pax might have agreed to help me find Lucas if we promised to go to Portland with him afterward.

  Except I asked, and Pax said no.

  “I wanted to try to find you, Lucas. But it was winter and I couldn’t figure out how to travel on my own. After Pax showed up…Well, it was either stay with him or go it alone. Either way wouldn’t have changed things for you.” When he doesn’t answer, the spark of indignation in my center fans into flames. Does he think so little of me, of what we had, to believe I could just forget him? “We’re together now. That’s going to have to be enough.”

  The words snap out, and the surprise and chagrin in his eyes chills the room. It cools the anger bubbling in the back of my throat, too, and a deep breath lowers my voice. “Maybe you think I could have done more, but you weren’t there, Lucas. I did my best.”

  He stares at me for another minute and I don’t look away, letting him read the truth in my face. When he gives a small nod and flashes me a hint of his old smile, it’s a little tighter, unsure of itself. He doesn’t apologize, but I let the flash of confrontation fade to embers, anyway, and scoot across the hardwood floor on my pajama-clad knees. Lucas pretends not to notice, returning to his reading instead.

  We need one another. We’re going to have to nurse Pax back to health, and then the three of us are going to figure out how to rescue Deshi and get the Others off this planet before it disintegrates or blows up or freezes or whatever happens when they leave a place they’ve used up.

  More than that, Lucas and I need to be okay. Even if he doesn’t want things to go back to how they were, we can’t keep going this way, both unsure and angry.

  Lucas was my first real friend, the first boy who kissed me and made the world spin around, and I missed him so much it felt as though my arm had been ripped off.

  I reach up and take the book out of his hand, tugging hard when he resists relinquishing it. He stubbornly refuses to meet my gaze, but I pull his hand to the arm of the chair and lay my cheek against it. The rapid thrum of his pulse fills my head with waves of contentment until it swims.

  After a while his arm relaxes, then I sense the rest of his body go limp as a slow breath leaves his lungs. Lucas shifts in the chair until his free hand wriggles underneath mine, and he lays his head on the arm of the chair, our noses almost touching.

  For a long time he keeps his eyes closed, and the sound of the fire and the feel of his cold breath moving strands of hair around my face lull me, make me forget how horrible everything is.

  I study the familiar crinkles at the sides of his eyes, the way his curls tangle atop his head. My heart aches with the desire to turn the moment into something more, but I can’t. It’s not the time, and it wouldn’t be fair to Lucas. He doesn’t know about everything that’s happened since we disappeared from Danbury. If he did, would he even still care about me?

  But everything that happened last winter, those heat-filled moments with Pax, seem a distant memory. Now, with Lucas’s hand in mine, his crisp scent filling my head, it’s so incredibly clear to me that I would have searched for him forever.

  “I missed you. I thought about you all the time,” I whisper, my lips moving against his icy hand. His fingers tighten around mine and his breath hitches in his lungs, but he doesn’t respond. Sorrow bubbles up from my center and past my lips. “I’m sorry you were alone.”

  I’m not apologizing for any wrongdoing, but knowing he hurt makes me hurt. His blue eyes, the perfect twins of my own, open and we stare at each other for several moments.

  Or an hour, I’m not really sure.

  “They found me in Atlanta. Pax and Griffin. Pax guessed I was there because you two had already been in Danbury, Des Moines, and Portland and hadn’t seen me. Really, I think Griffin knew. He’s been watching all of us.”

  Griffin. I’d give my eyeteeth to know what his angle is in all of this. He found us this cabin, got Lucas back, but I still don’t know if we can trust him.

  “When I first woke up there, in summer, I panicked. I didn’t know you had gone to winter, and only had Cadi’s message assuring me you’d made it out of autumn, too. First I escaped into the Wilds and found a canyon with a lake in the middle. I had enough provisions from the Kendrick’s house—my summer family—to make shelter and fire, and keep myself fed. I tried traveling, too, but it didn’t work.” He pauses, his eyes searching mine. “I wasn’t scared for me, but I worried a lot about you.”

  The words trail away as though he simply runs out of them, as though maybe there aren’t enough to describe the emotion of it all. We were alone so long—our whole lives, essentially. The memory of those desolate days in the cabin outside Des Moines, before Wolf arrived and eased the loneliness, scatter through my mind like autumn leaves. To the three of us, sometimes I think being alone again would be more painful than dying.

  The rattle of Pax’s breathing worsens, and when it doesn’t settle back down after two or three minutes, I reluctantly leave the perfect temperature Lucas and I create and go back to the couch. When my hand rests on Pax’s chest, his breathing returns to normal and the crease between his eyebrows smooths away.

  Cold air hugs my back, letting me know Lucas stands over us. “You care about him.”

  “We’ve been through a lot. We care about each other, I think.” There’s no point in lying, even though the admission scrapes the back of my throat a little. Maybe because Lucas could hear a different kind of confession in the words, all of the things I should tell him, or maybe because the possibility of losing Pax frightens me.

  Lucas leans over me and presses a hand to Pax’s forehead, his chilly touch eliciting a violent head spasm. “It’s not good, the fever. Maybe we should give him more of those pills.”

  “Okay.”

  We were lucky to have found bottles of medicine behind the mirror in the wasteroom. One of the labels promises temporarily reduces mild pain and fever. I doubt Pax’s pain is mild, but it’s the best we can do.

  Lucas leaves, then returns with a bottle of water. He lifts Pax up gently, though not perhaps as gingerly as I would have, and together we manage to get him to swallow four more of the pills. Double the recommended dosage, but the container is jumbo sized, so there are plenty. I absently pull my thick, dark red hair into a bun on top of my head while waiting for Pax’s muscles to relax, for the sheen of sweat on his upper lip to evaporate.

  Night falls outside the curtained windows, and my eyes grow heavy despite the potential terror of sleep. The Prime Other knows how easily he can get to me through my mind, and sleeping is the fastest way to vulnerability.

  The first night we arrived I rebuilt the wall to my sinum—my own alcove in the Others’ hive mind—figuring it was best to get at it right away while they were still dealing with the chaos in Portland. It’s not a very strong structure; I slapped the bricks together in less than fifteen minutes. They’ve already been working on knocking it down, but at least the pieces aren’t tumbling into my bones this time. My ribs and back still ache from the beatings, and the deep, partially healed cut that runs from my hairline past the outside of my eye throbs through its scab. I need more time to heal, and the wall feels strong enough to keep them out for a couple of days, at least.

  Lucas tries so hard to protect me, or at least he used to, that I’ve tried my best to hide my winces and grimaces. We haven’t spoken in detail about what happened to me in the Observatory Pod, about Ko or Greer, or that Natej said the Broken might still be alive. I’ll have to tell him everything soon, and the thought spreads dread through me. Talking about what happened between Pax and I, and about everything I went through, will hurt Lucas.

  I lower the flames for the night as Lucas crawls back into the recliner and pops up the footrest. I c
url into a mat made of blankets next to Wolf, taking what comfort exists from his companionship and the earthy scent of him.

  The loneliness in my center yawns wide. The desire to be held close, for Lucas to tell me everything will be okay, tries to turn into words and push past my lips. I swallow them and snuggle closer to Wolf.

  I do want Lucas’s arms around me. I want to feel the crisp coolness of him, smell the pine needles on his skin, and for us to be as we were in the autumn. But even if Pax’s worsening breathing hadn’t interrupted the moment earlier, doubt stops me from telling Lucas how I feel about him. He’s hesitant, and the things he might be secreting away worry me.

  Not to mention the things I’m keeping from him.

  It’s going to be hard enough to be together in the same house, wanting to touch him all the time just to make sure he’s really here. It would be unbearable to reveal those wants aloud and have him turn me away.

  So I say nothing, and as the sun rises on the third day, I sleep.

  CHAPTER 2.

  “Althea, wake up.” Lucas’s rough voice shakes me out of a dreamless sleep. At least, no memories of dreams follow me into daylight.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  His lips pinch as he looks away, tightening worry in my chest. “No. But the fire’s about to go out, and it’s probably best for him to stay warm.”

  Him. Lucas doesn’t call Pax by name if it can be avoided, but the fact that he’s concerned for our third’s safety speaks volumes. His obvious jealousy annoys me, but when I put myself in his shoes, if our fourth was a girl and she and Lucas had spent last season crossing the planet together, I wouldn’t be any happier about it.

  I crawl to the fire and heat the fresh, frost-covered logs Lucas must have brought in until they crackle and pop. Lucas settles back into the recliner, reading what appear to be the final pages of A Wrinkle in Time.