Praying for Rain (Praying for Rain Trilogy, #1)(43)

“Fucking stop!” I yell, swatting her away as I crawl over to the edge of the porch. I hack up something black and spit it into the bushes below. My head is pounding, and my heart is too as I try to figure out what the fuck to say to her.

“I’m so sorry.” Her voice is a trembling whisper as she sits on the porch next to where my head is hanging over the ledge. “I just ran back to the bedroom real quick to get the backpack. All your medicine was in there. I couldn’t just leave it. But, when I got back, you were gone. I ran around the whole house looking for you before I realized you’d gone back inside.”

Her story soothes my anger a little bit but not the festering truth gnawing away at the pit of my stomach—the truth that love and survival are mutually exclusive in my world. I allowed myself to think, for just a few hours, that maybe this time would be different. Maybe I would finally get to have both. Maybe God doesn’t fucking hate me.

“Wes, say something. Please.”

“We should get off the porch.”

Rain jumps to her feet and reaches out to help me up, but I wave her off and use the railing to pull myself up. Stumbling down the stairs, I look for the sun, trying to figure out what time it is. I can’t even find it through the plume of black smoke billowing into the sky above the house, but based on the way the trees’ shadows are clinging to the right side of their trunks, I’d say it’s already after noon.

Fuck.

Once again, I find myself tempted to tell her to go home. To scream it at her, but when I turn to deliver the blow, I just can’t. Rain’s forehead is wrinkled in concern. Her blue eyes are rounded in remorse. And when she blinks, twin tears sparkle in the sunlight as they slide down her cheeks.

“Come here,” I demand, feeling my chest swell and crack and splinter as she leaps forward and buries herself in it.

“I was so scared,” she wails, fisting the back of my shirt as sobs rack her body. “I thought … I thought I’d lost you!”

I run my hand over her hair as her words pierce my heart like daggers, the pain more intense than my bullet wound or my soot-stained lungs.

I’ve finally found what I’ve been missing my whole life, and if I keep it, it will kill me.

No wonder Rain was wearing a black hoodie when I met her.

She’s the fifth fucking horseman of the apocalypse.





Rain


Heat scorches my back as the house goes up in flames behind me, but I can’t let go of Wes. Not yet.

Two nights ago, I had a nightmare about Burger Palace, and the next morning I got attacked inside of one. Last night, I had a dream that we burned in a fire, and it almost happened a few hours later. What if these aren’t just coincidences? What if the nightmares are coming true?

I remember what Wes said about dreaming that I was taken away from him last night, and my fists curl into his shirt.

The sound of a bomb going off behind me pulls a scream from my lungs. I bury my face in Wes’s shirt and feel his hand cover the back of my head. I try to relax, but his grip is too hard. His posture too rigid.

“What was that?” I ask without looking up, hoping it was just the stove exploding or the roof caving in.

When Wes doesn’t answer right away, I glance up at his jaw, tight and grinding. His eyes cut to mine, and his chest puffs up beneath my cheek.

Exhaling through his flared nostrils, Wes finally replies, “My bike.”

We walk around the side of Carter’s burning house, and sure enough, Wes was right. He’d parked his bike right against the house, next to the back door, and when the fire finally chewed through the kitchen wall, Wes’s gas tank got so hot that it exploded.

As we walk past the debris on our way toward the trail—a handlebar here, a fender there—the only thing I can think of to say is, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he says without looking at me. “I don’t need it anymore anyway.” His curt response gives me chills. It’s detached and automatic, like he’s said it a million times to rationalize a million different losses.

“I don’t need it anymore anyway.”

Will he feel that way when the horsemen take me from him, too?

This morning, he wouldn’t have. This morning, he said the nightmare scared him, that waking up without me scared him. But now, I don’t know. It’s like the real Wes died in that fire, and all I got back is the outer shell.

We’re silent as we enter the woods and begin our walk down the trail, concentrating on avoiding the mud puddles and fallen branches in our path.

“I guess it’s a good thing we’re not on the bike,” I say, stepping over the trunk of a fallen pine tree. “This trail is a mess.”

“Yeah,” Wes deadpans, clearing the obstacle without even looking down.

His eyes are fixed on something up ahead. I follow his gaze and feel my already-heavy heart sink even more. Wes is staring at the side of my tree house.

“Did you go see your mom last night?”

“Uh … no,” I stammer, stepping over another fallen tree. “I … went early this morning, before you woke up.”

Wes nods slowly, pressing his lips together in a hard line as his eyes drop to my hiking boots. The hiking boots he probably saw on Carter’s bedroom floor when he woke up.

Right where I’d left them the night before.