Carefully I turned to face him. He was fast asleep, and it was funny to see him that way, so unaware of my presence. It made me feel closer to him, somehow. I almost didn’t want to wake him. But I knew I had to.
I nudged him gently and watched as he groggily opened his eyes. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi. . . .” He blinked then recognized me. Immediately he pulled his arm away, like I’d burned him. “What are you doing here?”
“I slept here, remember? Except when we fell asleep, I was over here, and you were waaay over there.” I nodded toward the other side of the bed.
“Oh.” He laughed, still confused, still half asleep. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.” I closed my eyes again sleepily, and when I opened them, he was looking at me. Our faces were so close together. Despite everything, I could feel my heart pounding.
Then Raven’s words echoed sharply in my ears.
I will always be watching you, Skye.
Fear suddenly gripped me. Did she know I was here right now? My body spasmed, and I sat up abruptly.
“Raven . . . what is she to you?” I asked.
He pushed himself up. “What exactly do you know about Raven?”
I decided to go with the CliffsNotes version. “She introduced herself to me.”
He buried his face in his hands and shook his head. “Raven, what are you doing?”
Crossing my legs beneath me, I turned and faced him squarely. “She’s your girlfriend.”
“No.” He lifted his gaze. “It’s hard to explain. She is . . . the one for me.”
“So you love her?”
“No. I”—he combed his fingers through his hair—“I don’t know what I feel for her. We’re destined to be together, but it’s gotten . . . complicated lately.”
“Because of me?”
“Partly.”
My heart hammered against my chest. I wanted to stay here all day. I wanted to run. I chose to run.
“I have to go,” I said, flinging myself out of bed. He didn’t protest. I got my boots on and grabbed my jacket from a chair by the door. Before I ran down the stairs, I turned to look at him. He was propped against a pillow. Watching me without the slightest hint of emotion. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the sheets were crinkling around his smooth, chiseled body. My stomach jerked involuntarily. “Bye,” I mouthed, my voice caught somewhere in my throat.
He didn’t follow me, but when I got outside and was able to breathe again, I heard the lock click into place behind me.
Chapter 28
The thought of sitting through homeroom with Asher and Devin one row behind me sent my body into convulsions, so I wandered the halls surreptitiously for a while, figuring if a teacher saw me, she’d probably think I was on my way to the nurse with an advanced case of the flu. It probably looked like it. I felt nauseous and dizzy, my mind caught between too many different things. Finally my legs felt as if they were going to give out from under me, and I found my way to the seldom-used bathroom in the basement by the music rehearsal rooms. Sometimes Cassie and I hung out in there before she went to band practice and I had skiing. Someone who spent a lot of time in those rehearsal rooms had dragged an old armchair into the bathroom by the sinks. The thing had seen better days; its mustard yellow velvet upholstery was threadbare, and stuffing burst forth in several places.
I loved that chair. I always sat in it while Cassie propped herself up on the sink to do her makeup. Now I opened the bathroom door, threw my bag on the floor, and sank into the chair. It was as if the world-weariness of the old chair opened the floodgates. I started to cry.
Vaguely I was aware of the door opening and a familiar voice saying, “Lady, you have got some serious explaining to do.”
I shook my head, hard. Cassie crouched on the floor beside the chair. “I only do this for my most special and loyal people,” she said, resting her chin on the arm of the chair, “but I think today calls for a cut day.”
I looked up, and through my tears, I could barely manage a grateful smile. “Finally someone around here who makes sense.”
Cassie lived in a small ranch-style, powder blue house with white trim that she shared with her parents and younger brothers, and everywhere, everywhere, there was evidence that a family lived there. It was the exact opposite of my house. Cassie kicked aside a yellow plastic dump truck with the gray suede toe of her bootie as we got out of the car. Instinctively I headed for the front door, but she intercepted me.
“Hey,” she said. “Remember what used to always cheer you up?” She headed toward the side of the house, flipped the lock on the ancient wooden fence, and we walked into the backyard. I smiled when I saw the swing set.
“Tire swing!” I called, claiming it. Cassie took the bucket swing, which she hated. After a few rounds of musical swings, we finally ended up side by side on the hard-seated bench swings, kicking our feet off the frosty ground for momentum.
“You’re torn between the two of them,” Cassie said. “Aren’t you? I know my best friend. I knew you weren’t telling me something.” She giggled. “Ellie’s full of shit, isn’t she?”
I laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” On one level, that was totally true. I was torn, trying to choose between two things: Asher or Devin. The Order or the Rebellion. Self-preservation or heartbreak. Control—or finally letting go. And so far, I was just as undecided as my powers were. “So perceptive, Holmes.”
Cassie smiled. “Well, I’ve had years of practice. So what are you going to do?”
“Flip a coin?”
“Seriously, Skye.” She eyed me. “You already sort of know what you want to do, don’t you?”
I thought for a moment. Did I? Cassie seemed so sure; how was it possible that I wasn’t?
“I don’t know.”
Cassie kicked off the ground, flying forward in a graceful arc. “Well, if I know my best friend, I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. I have no doubts about that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hope so.”
We swung back and forth, both of us ignoring the cold.
“Cassie?”
“Mmm?”
I stopped my swing, digging my heels into the ground, hard. “Sorry I haven’t been, you know, all there lately.”
She stopped her swing, too. “Mmm, I don’t know if I can let you off that easily,” she said. “How about a little groveling first?”
“Shut up.”
“’Kay.”
We kept swinging.
“Skye?”
“Yeah.”
“I forgive you.”
“Thanks.”
She smiled at me sideways, the way she smiles when she’s getting an idea. “Remember that time in third grade, we got into the huge fight over who would be the first one to wear the floral leggings we both got, and I accused you of copying me, and you gave me back your half of our friendship necklace?”
“Of course,” I said. “And then we both wore them on the same day, and everyone called us the Olsen Twins. And that’s when we founded the copycat club, where we had to wear the same thing once a week for the rest of the year.”
“Yeah. Well, I kept the necklaces. I knew you’d want yours back someday.”
“A Beautiful Dark”
“Totally. Come on.”
In her room, she opened her jewelry box and held up two gold chains with half of a tiny gold heart dangling from each. One said Best. One said Friend.
“I think you need this back now,” Cassie said. “You’re my best friend. Don’t disappear on me like that again, okay? I missed you.” I gulped, trying not to feel too guilty. Whatever had happened in the past few weeks, I knew it was only going to get more intense from here as my powers—whatever they were—really took shape. And I knew there was no way I could let Cassie in on that part of my life. Not really. No matter how much I wanted to.
I put the necklace on, feeling the ridges with my thumb. If I was going to listen to anyone, if I was going to trust anyone in this worl
d, it was Cassie.
We fit the halves together, the jagged edges interlocking exactly the way they used to, and it struck me as weird that the tiny heart hadn’t grown or changed in the years since we’d neglected them, even though we had.
I knew that she was telling the truth.
I would make the right decision.
Chapter 29
The house was gaping with emptiness when I got home. I deleted the voicemail from school informing Aunt Jo that I had missed classes. I felt guilty about it, but I would make up for everything starting tomorrow. I couldn’t focus on homework, obviously. So I decided to go out back to the field and see if I could make anything strange happen. On purpose, for a change.
I was already hard at work by the time Devin showed up, with Asher walking slowly behind him. When our eyes met, my stomach dropped. He looked just as bad as I did. Maybe worse.
If Devin noticed, he didn’t say anything. In fact, he didn’t look much better. “Oh, good,” he said. “You’ve been trying on your own. That’s great.”
I could have been imagining it, but he seemed tenser than he usually did. The laughing Devin from yesterday was gone. I wondered if he was thinking about last night. I tried not to—especially with Asher there—but I couldn’t shake the memory of him sitting up, watching as I scrambled to put on my shoes and jacket. The sound of the door locking behind me.
We spent the rest of the afternoon out in the field, working on teasing out my powers. They tried all kinds of things, but often they just showed me something that one of them could do and then tried to get me to do it. But as evening approached and I couldn’t really imitate either of them, it began to affect everyone’s mood.
The weather had slid down the awful slope from cold and clammy to a mix of sleet and rain, and my hands turned numb from the cold as Devin tried relentlessly to get me to fasten an icicle that had fallen to the ground back to its branch.
“You’re not trying hard enough!” he yelled into the wet, driving wind. “Use your mind, Skye. Focus your energy.”
Asher stood behind me, blasting icicles on various branches near Devin’s head. “Fasten those back,” I heard him mutter.
“I am trying!” I yelled. I had been practicing using Asher’s trick of flipping the switch but to no avail. Nothing was happening—nothing at all. Though Cassie’s encouragement had strengthened my resolve, it had also made me realize how much I missed my life the way it used to be. I would have given anything at that moment to be curled up in her room watching a movie or hanging out at the Bean and playing pool with her and the boys.
My wet hair clung to my face and neck as I tried again and again. My eyes felt wild. I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out what color they were.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Asher said. He walked over, tentatively reaching out both hands to me, and with no effort at all, a flame sprang up between them. I wanted to lean in toward the heat. But I looked away.
“It doesn’t help if you do everything for her,” Devin said, and I couldn’t quite identify the emotion in his voice. Envy, maybe—but Guardians didn’t feel envy. Wasn’t that what he’d told me?
“I think we can all agree that your approach is a dismal failure,” Asher said.
“Do you guys have to constantly bicker?” I asked.
In Asher’s hands, the fire disappeared, and the cold began to weave its way back into me.
“I’m calling it a day,” I said.
Devin left in a huff. I noticed that he avoided looking at me as he soared off through the trees with his massive wings, several of his pure white feathers spiraling down below him. They fell to the ground, where they soon turned the color of mud, just like everything else.
Asher and I just stood in the empty field facing each other.
“Skye—” he said.
I stared back at him. There was so much that I wanted to say. Instead, I turned sharply on the heels of my snow boots and trudged back to the house. I kicked my boots off when I walked into the kitchen, padding the rest of the way upstairs as the freezing wet hems of my jeans soaked through my socks, leaving little wet half-moons on the carpet. I shed my clothes in a heap just outside the bathroom door and, zombielike, stood in the shower for a second or two before realizing that I hadn’t turned it on. I let the steam fog up the mirrors and fill my lungs, and the hot water washed away my anger and sadness. Soon feeling had returned to most parts of me.
As soon as I could feel my toes again, I began to cry. Great, heaving sobs that shook my body and made it hard for me to stand. I was so tired, anyway. My legs gave way and I fell to the shower floor, where I kept crying, hugging my knees to my chest, watching the sudsy water swirl around me on its way to the drain.
I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. Was I really trying as hard as I could to manifest and control my powers? I just felt like a time bomb, ticking down the seconds until I was ready to explode. And it didn’t help that the only people who really understood, who knew what I was going through, weren’t people at all.
Stepping out of the shower, I wrapped a plush towel around me and wiped my hand across the mirror above the sink. This girl stared back at me. She had wet black hair, a swollen pink mouth twisted in confusion, a splotchy red face, and silver eyes. Not gray. Silver.
I put on my flannel boxers and T-shirt and got into bed, letting myself slip under the covers. I curled into as small a ball as possible, trying with all of my might to disappear into the soft folds. What I wanted, more than anything in the world right then, was my mother.
Early the next morning, I became aware of Aunt Jo hovering in the doorway, stepping one foot past the doorframe and then edging back into the hall, afraid to commit one way or the other. I had no idea when she’d gotten home, though it must have been sometime last night after I’d already fallen asleep. I eyed her warily through a little gap in the cave I’d made under my comforter.
“Skye?” she finally called. “Are you awake?”
I mumbled something unintelligible.
“I’ll take that as a yes. I have to head back out to the Collegiate Peaks this afternoon. I’ll be gone for ten days. How about I fix breakfast to make it up to you?” she asked brightly, as if pancakes with syrup would solve all of the world’s problems.
Ten minutes later, I was shuffling into the kitchen in sweatpants, snow boots, about four different long-sleeved shirts layered on top of one another, as well as a huge knit scarf that I’d wrapped around my neck three times. I couldn’t decide if going to school was worth it.
Aunt Jo took one look at me and her eyebrows crinkled. “Oh dear,” she said. “Are you auditioning for a horror movie after school?”
“I plead the fifth,” I muttered as I parked myself at the kitchen table and smothered a short stack in syrup.
She sat down across from me. “My late hours and all the time I’m away are getting to you, aren’t they?”
“No.”
“Guy troubles?”
I sighed. “Sorta. There are two. . . . I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Do I know them?”
I shook my head. “New guys at school.”
“The ones you mentioned before.”
I nodded
She raised a questioning eyebrow but didn’t press the issue further.
“Listen, uh, did Mom ever tell you about . . . her family?”
“Only that she didn’t have one. She was an orphan. I’ve told you that.”
Aunt Jo was an orphan, too. It was one of the reasons they’d bonded when they’d met. A common thread.
“Are you feeling a need to connect with your roots?” she asked.
Was I? I hadn’t even stopped to consider that I might have a set of grandparents on each side: one in the Order, one in the Rebellion. I wondered if they were rooting for me. Why hadn’t they made contact now that Asher and Devin had? They must have known about me.
“I don’t know. I’m just . . . thinking about a lot of things lately.”
/>
“I wish I had some answers for you, hon.”
I wondered how she’d feel if she knew some of my questions. I poured more syrup on the pancakes. “I think a lot of the answers are right here.”
I popped more pancake into my mouth.
She laughed. “They can cure just about anything.”
“Definitely,” I said.
After finishing my pancakes and giving her a big hug, I walked out the door. No one was more important in my life. As long as I had Aunt Jo, I could make it through anything.
Chapter 30
I was taking some books out of my locker that morning when a folded-up piece of paper fluttered to the floor. I bent to pick it up, thinking, reflexively, that it might be from Asher or Devin. But when I saw my name scrawled across the front in familiar, loopy script, I knew it was from Cassie. She never just texted me like any of my other friends did. She didn’t believe in texting. She believed in calling and ceremonious note writing. Say what you would about Cassie, but she did everything with major flair.
The note read:
Cassie and the Mysterious Ellipses request the pleasure of your company at our very first GIG!
Tonight! 8:30 p.m.
Love the Bean
75 Main Street
River Springs, Colorado
Kindly RSVP by returning this note to my locker by 3 p.m. SHARP so we can give Ian a head count.
Accepts with Pleasure_______________
Declines with Regret_______________
I laughed, writing my name into the “Accepts with Pleasure” slot and slipping the invite into the front pocket of my backpack. Going down the hall to swing by her locker on the way to my next class, I saw Asher leaning against the locker door. My heart jolted. He was the last person I wanted to see at that moment. I whirled around and took the long way to class, the RSVP still in my pocket.