Reborn (Altered) by Jennifer Rush Page B

on the smell of his coat, dreaming up another life, another scenario, where I wasn’t this girl slowly dying on the forest floor.
    We waited so long, I swear I saw the moon tick through the sky. Until it was nothing but a speck of silver far below the tops of the trees.
    Without warning, Nick scooped me up, his arm tight around my waist, the other sturdy beneath my knees. I cried out. Tears leaked from my eyes. I wanted to die in that moment.
    “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
    I capped the glass bottle, and the images flashed away. The pain was a distant memory, but the hopelessness, the need for the whole ordeal to end, was with me still to this day.
    In my closet, I ducked down and pulled out an empty bottle from the box Aggie bought me the last time we’d been at the New Age store. I grabbed my treasure trove of oils. Some high-grade essential oils, some cheaper fragrance oils.
    The new bottle needed a base of musk. I filled it halfway and added the rest on top of it. A third of the bottle was vanilla. Then bergamot. Pine. And finally, lavender. I stirred it with my glass stick and took in a breath.
    Perfect.
    Last to go on the bottle was a label. I wrote Nick’s name on it in cursive, then plugged the neck with a cork.
    I set it on the shelf behind the GABRIEL bottle.
    A knock sounded on my door. Aggie ambled in. “Brought you some cookies.” She put a plate with three cookies on my desk.
    “Thanks.”
    “They turned out better than the last batch. Nice and gooey in the center. Just how I like them.”
    She paused in the middle of my room, and I got the distinct feeling she wasn’t here to share cookies.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “This boy…”
    “Nick.”
    “Nick.” She sat on the edge of my bed. I leaned against the desk. “You don’t really know him from school, do you?”
    I shifted and looked at the floor. “No.”
    “He a good kid?” she asked in a way that said she already knew the answer, but wanted to hear my opinion. Aggie was a fan of letting me make my own decisions. Freedom to grow and make your own mistakes, she’d often said. At first, I’d felt constricted by the freedom, as if there were too much of it, too many choices, for it to actually mean something.
    “‘A good kid’?” I echoed.
    Hearing someone refer to Nick as a kid seemed silly. He might have been under twenty, but he seemed further from a kid than a house cat from a cougar.
    “Yes,” I answered, even though I didn’t know if it was true.
    She eased off the bed, wincing when she made it upright. Her hips had been bothering her for a long time. But she didn’t like to complain about them. In fact, I couldn’t recall Aggie ever complaining about anything.
    “Just be careful, huh?” she said, and winked at me as she shuffled past. “Oh, and…” She turned around briefly, to wag a finger at me, “he’s not allowed in your bedroom with the door shut.”
    Okay, so maybe she drew the line at some freedoms.
    A giggle burst from my throat at the thought of what she was implying.
    Aggie wagged her finger a second time, a smile on her face. “I’m serious!” she said.
    “I know. Of course, Aggie. No closed-door escapades.”
    She shook her head as she left, chuckling to herself.
    But when I was alone again, I couldn’t help but picture Nick in my room, sitting on my bed, here among my things. The door closed. His ridiculously blue eyes on me and only me. What that might entail.
    The fire in my face said it all.

19
    NICK
    I WATCHED TREV ENTER THE BAR FROM across the street, hidden in the shadow of an alcove. I didn’t want to find myself cornered inside if he arrived with Riley or any other Branch agents. At least here I could keep an eye on the street.
    Trev had arrived alone in the same black Jaguar he’d been driving a few months back. He’d done something weird to his hair, though. Half shaved, half long, like someone had started buzzing it