Between the Spark and the Burn Read Online Free PDF

breezes on hot skin. I wish I could absorb your gentle love and send it right back to you. But I can’t.
    I knew Will Redding would be beautiful. He was pretty at fifteen, prettier than me. But then he grew, and his soft angles sharpened. And now looking at him . . . I almost hate him, he’s so damn breathtaking.
    He’s using the burn more and more. It’s stealing his mind, his wits, his sanity, bit by bit. I feel the loss of them, small but tangible, like a missing button in the middle of a shirt.
    What will happen if he doesn’t stop? If we don’t stop?
    But then he kisses me, and I stop caring.
    Even when he’s done kissing me, sometimes I still don’t care, not for hours.
    Or days.
    I’d do it again. I’d do it this minute if he asked me. With or without his burn.
    I don’t even care.
    October
    Chase never knew, about Will, and the burn. Not for certain. Though if he’d been observant, like Lucas, he would have guessed that All Was Not Right. But paying close attention had never been Chase Glenship’s strong point.
    One brisk, clear night, Chase and Will had some of their friends up from New York City—other Bright Young Things. They came up on the train and we threw an All Hallows’ Eve party. The moon was big and fat and full and orange-er than pumpkins. Its bright glow made the night midnight blue, instead of boring old black. We ignored the Glenship’s electricity and lit hundreds of candles until the swanky ole place was singing with light, all the long, tall windows glowing like the harvest moon above.
    We dressed in costumes and painted the subterranean walls of the Glenship. In the lower levels, off the stone tunnels that led to the swimming pool and the bowling alley, there was a nothing room with no purpose. We splashed paint and filled up every last corner with green, blue, white, yellow, red, orange, black. Chase set up his Ouija board and gave us all the heebie-jeebies when he called up the spirits and they answered. Everyone went mad with fear and ran around howling with it. I gave myself up to three Aviations before the gin took hold and I fell into the pool. Lucas rescued me, but it was Will who helped me out of my wet clothes and into bed.
    I loved him. God help me, I loved him more than a girl has ever loved a boy. More than anyone has ever loved anyone.
    I slid out of bed. I grabbed a flashlight from my dresser, climbed the stairs to the third floor, went past Luke’s bedroom, and entered the former-ballroom-now-an-art-gallery. I went first to the painting of my grandfather, and switched on the flashlight. It was the flower-lapel-cigar portrait. Once upon a time I thought I looked like Lucas White. Just a little bit. I’d go to the ballroom and stare at him and the proud way he tilted his chin . . . I tilted my chin up just like that. Didn’t I? I had that same noble gaze. Didn’t I?
    But then I found some letters last summer, letters to Freddie, and learned some things about my grandmother, about her affair with an auburn-haired painter, and I guess those similarities between Lucas White and me were just the imaginings of an ex-wealthy, ex-grandmothered girl hoping to find blood and clan and kinship where none actually existed.
    It took me a few minutes to find the other painting. A Freddie nude, an early one. She sat on the floor, one leg up and one elbow on her bent knee, looking directly at the viewer. I hadn’t been able to place the background before—it wasn’t the Citizen, or the guesthouse.
    Two men stood near her, fully clothed. I’d never known who they were, until now. I stood on tiptoe and grasped at the bottom of the frame with my fingertips until I got it off the wall. Then I sat down on the ballroom floor and held the square, fifteen-by-fifteen-inch frame in my lap.
    The setting was the Glenship attic. I was sure of it. I’d been inside Glenship Manor since I’d last