Read Online Between the Spark and the Burn by April Genevieve Tucholke - Free Book Online Page A

“Where are we going to go this late? Inn’s End is miles from a main road, and we’ll never be able to find our way back here again. We barely found it the first time. Besides, think of the great story this will make. Think of the great art it will inspire, brother.”
    Luke stared at me for a second, and then shrugged. But I could still see it in his eyes, the anxiety. He looked at Sunshine, and then back at the town behind him, his muscles tensed, like he was trying to suppress a shiver.
    I set down the picnic basket, crossed my arms over my chest, and hugged myself tight. Luke’s unease was getting to me. This silent, forgotten town . . . the dead birds . . . that blood . . .
    Still. I wasn’t going to run. I’d wanted this, after all.
    â€œVi’s right, Luke,” Neely said, his Neely glint still flashing in his blue Neely eyes. “This should be a night to remember.”
    And he walked up the steps of the abandoned house, laughing.

Chapter 7
    November
    We found a secret passageway one night. A hidden door in the large storage room off the Glenship’s main kitchen. Chase stumbled upon the hidden latch while reading French poetry out loud to a pretty maid while she hid from the housekeeper.
    Will laughed out loud when he saw it open, the brick wall separating like a row of teeth opening to take a bite. “Atta boy, Chase,” he said. “Atta boy.”
    We followed the hallway as it grew colder and darker, colder and darker. It went on and on. We finally turned up underneath a trapdoor in the conservatory in the Glenship’s large, manicured garden. We climbed the ladder and popped out like characters on a moonlit stage. The warm humidity was exotic and sensuous after the cold tunnel, and I breathed in deep.
    â€œSo that’s how they’re getting the hooch in and out,” Chase said. “The back road leads right up to the greenhouse here. I should have guessed. All that noise in the middle of the night . . .”
    And suddenly I realized there was more to Chase’s father, and their money, than I’d thought. Chase held a flask to my lips, and the gin singed my insides, just like that first time, in the wine cellar, when it mixed up with Will’s burn and clouded the world and led us into sin. Gin would always taste like fire and Will and sin, to me.
    When the flask was gone, and we were drunk on it, and on the heady smell of the flowers, and the thick greenhouse air, we collapsed in a heap in a corner. A large green fern tickled us with its tickly fern leaves every time we moved, and it made us laugh and laugh.
    Will took our hands, both Chase’s and mine, and made the stars twinkling above the glass roof glow, glow so bright they were no longer stars, but pebbled-sized suns. And then he made them dance. And form themselves into the letters of our names.
    And the next day Chase thought it had just been the drunk in him, but I knew all along, didn’t I.
    â‰ˆâ‰ˆâ‰ˆ
    The boys gathered twigs and branches from the snowy backyard and Sunshine started a fire in the fireplace. I warned everyone about sooty chimneys and how they made you fall over dead. But no one listened because it was freezing.
    It was long past twilight. I sat down on the floor in front of the fire. My skin warmed in the heat and my hair glowed orange in its light. I wanted to keep reading Freddie’s diary, and thinking about Will Redding and his burn, and River Redding and his glow, and let the thrill and fear of it all fill me up until I started liking it.
    But not now. Later. When I could be alone. And when I wasn’t sitting in an abandoned house in a forgotten town that hated devils and ravens and strangers.
    The door to the Lashley house had been unlocked—I guess theft wasn’t a concern here, just like it wasn’t in Echo. Inside, it had been untouched, stopped in time, like Miss Havisham in her wedding