Crash and Burn (1)

i was supposed to have his back

♚ ♛

THE NEXT TWENTY FOUR HOURS were a blur. A blur of searching for someone that had always been hard to find.

I knew him better than anyone else?

I wanted to laugh. I knew so little about who Soren actually was. With every place that I came up empty, I was grasping with the possibility that I didn't know him at all.

He was an enigma. He always had been. I slipped past the laundromat, unwilling to talk with Morena again after the last episode we'd been through. I dragged myself to Gowanus to check the portable that we'd been to the first night. I even forced myself to go into the strange bar that we'd gone to in Red Hook. The docks, the train stations, the diners.

I wasn't even worried about someone catching me. Now that my hair was dark again, I knew that it was dangerous. I was walking on thin ice, trying to find Soren in places that we'd ghosted through in the five boroughs. Places we'd always met.

Every memory seemed to burn me as I scoured the city, even going as far to stop in the public bathrooms that we'd been to. The bodegas that we'd stopped at.

And still, I came up empty every single time.

We'd been through this too many times. Soren could stay lost forever. I knew that. He'd been hiding for two years, he'd been sleuthing through shadows for two years.

It didn't help that I had no idea what he was doing. Adrian hadn't given any explanation before he left. I was still scrambling in the dark, merely hoping that he'd pop up at one of the places that we'd been together.

The feeling of deja vu grew through the day and into the night. It only blossomed the next morning to bring me to the edge of insanity and panic and worry. Every time I closed my eyes, I caught the panicked look in Adrian's eyes and I knew that whatever was going on was serious.

That scared me. I was supposed to have his back. Whatever crazy thing he was going to do, I would do it with him. Just as long as he wasn't walking into the fire alone.

I was his partner.

And as the morning evaporated into a cloudy afternoon, I felt like I was dying.

Soren could not be dead.

Breathe.

It was when the first raindrop fell that I finally made it to the bookstore between Lewis and Locust, remembering his words like it was yesterday.

"This is my favorite place in the city, Lace."

I sucked in a sharp breath when I slipped through the narrow store, teetering on my tiptoes to try and catch the sign of his dark curls flipping over the shelves. There was nothing. Tugging my lip between my teeth, I darted into the aisle I remembered, blindly searching for that dark copy of Anna Karenina, just for the sake of knowing that he might've come here.

When I came up empty again, worry nearly paralyzed me. This had been my last effort.

Where could he be?

"Oh, I've got a good idea. He's probably fucking dead."

Fucking dead.

My breathing hitched at all too familiar visions flashed through me. Soren Calloway, covered in his own blood. That beautiful fucking hair, matted with dirt and gravel. It didn't matter how many times the image haunted me, it all had the same effect.

It filled me with so much fear.

"No, no," I mumbled, grinding my teeth in an effort to push them back. I'd been through this already with Soren.