The beach house was mostly as I remembered. It was a little shabbier, with a few areas of peeling paint and warped wood, but otherwise it was the same. A sprawling affair on stilts, it looked identical to the majority of the houses up and down the coast. There was an outside shower to spray off the sand and salt and a deck with chairs of weathered wood to watch the sunrise over the dunes. The ocean itself was hidden behind those same swells of sand and could be seen only from the windows on the second floor. You could hear it, however, no matter where you were . . . inside or out. I’d spent the majority of my life listening to the sound. In many ways it had been one of the few constants. Maybe now I could learn to enjoy it again.
“Can we go see?” I dropped my duffel bag by the stairs leading up to the house and gave Michael a shrug and half smile. “Why not? It’s definitely worth seeing.” The Institute hadn’t been too far from Miami, but that didn’t mean Michael had had the opportunity to see the ocean—not that he remembered.
Leaving Zilla in the car, he took off toward the dunes. I zipped up my jacket against the biting wind and followed with less enthusiasm. When I crested the slope, slipping and sliding with every other step, I wanted to turn away from the sight. Gray water under a gray sky; it wasn’t like that day. That day had been all blues. Blue overhead along with crashing waves the color of a million shattered marbles was what I’d seen then. Gray or blue, it was all the same. It was where I’d been the moment life had fallen away beneath me. Sitting on my horse’s back as the water soaked my jeans, I had watched blue meet blue as water met sky. I’d watched that instead of watching Lukas, and . . . here we were.
It was why I lived in a condo on the beach. I wouldn’t let the impulse to close my eyes defeat me. I lived by the ocean; I swam in it, because I wouldn’t let myself forget. I didn’t deserve to. Seeing the waves fall was the same as seeing Lukas do the same. I wanted to look away, this time as all times, but I didn’t.
And because I didn’t, I was lucky enough to see Michael’s expression. He stood on wet sand in brine-soaked shoes and stared without blinking. This time water met sky in his eyes. I draped an arm over his shoulder. “Big, huh?”
“Big,” he agreed softly.
We stood for a long time in the presence of that which should’ve made me feel very small. It didn’t. Standing next to Michael, I suddenly felt big, and as whole as I’d ever been. In a place that echoed the beginning of a nightmare, the nightmare finally ended. And it felt right that it happened that way, an inevitable circle.
After a while the cold drove us back to the house. Inside the smell of damp and must wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected, but I still cracked a few windows. As I worked, Michael roamed about exploring. He would stop here and there to peer at a framed picture or pick up a seashell collecting dust, although even that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe Anatoly had a cleaning service come in once every few months to keep the place from falling apart. Being what he was didn’t change the fact he’d respected Babushka Lena and, in turn, would respect her treasures. “Pick a bedroom, Misha,” I prompted. “There’re four of them upstairs.”
He looked up from the abstract pink and purple curl of abalone shell nestled in the palm of his hand. “I get my own room?”
He sounded like a five-year-old, simultaneously thrilled and apprehensive at the prospect. If he was afraid, I didn’t blame him. Jericho had decorated many of my dreams in the past week and a half, propelling me from a sweat-soaked sleep with my hand searching desperately for my gun more times than I cared to admit. And Michael had ten more years of that evil bastard to contend with than I did. The things that he dreamed of I couldn’t even begin to guess. If he wanted to bunk with me until he was ninety, I wouldn’t hold it against him.
“Maybe,” I answered noncommittally. “Tell you what. You take a look. If two of them are in good-enough shape, then take the one you want. If only one is livable, then sorry about your luck, kiddo. You’ll be stuck with me for a while.” That left him an out. If he found only one to be acceptable, we would go with that and there would be no embarrassment on either side.