I might want for us to be together.
But nothing else has changed, has it? I’m still me, still a T-person, still Little Miss Glowworm, still having creeptastic visions that I might not survive, and if I do survive, I’m still meant for someone else. He’s still him, funny, warm, gorgeous, kind, perfectly normal and yet so extraordinary, but when I kiss him too enthusiastically, I make him sick. Because he’s human. And I’m not, mostly. When he’s eighty, I’ll look like I’m thirty. It’s not right.
Except Dad told me to follow my heart.
Is this what he meant?
I blow my nose. I wish Angela were here to tell me to take a chill pill already, to kick my butt back to okay again, but that part of our friendship seems long gone. She’s not going to be in the mood to discuss boy issues. She’d probably kill for my easy little problems right now. So you still have a thing for the cowboy, I can imagine her saying. Big whoop.
Which starts a whole new round of tears for me, because not only is my heart all confused and broken again, but I am totally, indisputably alone.
My cell rings. I sniffle and answer.
“Hey, you,” Christian says softly.
“Hey.”
He hears that something’s not quite right with my voice. “Did I wake you?”
I sit up, wiping at my eyes. “No. I was about to watch a movie.”
“Do you want some company?” he asks. “I could stop by.”
“Sure,” I say. “Come over. We could watch zombies.”
Zombies would be excellent. I scroll through the menu looking for anything zombie, and I feel moderately less devastated and worn-out.
There’s a knock on the door, and I think, Well, that was fast, but then I freeze.
Five syncopated raps.
Tucker’s knock.
Crap.
He knocks again. I stand in the hall and contemplate how quietly I can sneak out the back door and fly away. But I don’t know if I can fly when I feel this way, and Christian will be here any minute.
“I know you’re in there, Carrots,” he calls through the door.
Double crap.
I go to the door and open it. I hate that I look like I’ve been crying, my eyelids puffy, my skin all blotchy. I force myself to meet his gaze.
“What do you want, Tucker?”
“I want to talk to you.”
Cue the casual I-could-care-less shrug, which I don’t quite pull off in a convincing way. Still, I have to get points for trying. “Nothing to talk about. I’m sorry I interrupted you on your date. This isn’t a good time, actually. I’m expecting—”
He puts his hand on the door when I try to close it.
“I saw your face,” he says.
He means earlier. I stare at him. “I was surprised, that’s all.”
He shakes his head. “No. You still love me.”
Trust Tucker to just come right out and say it.
“No,” I say.
The corner of his mouth lifts. “You are such a bad liar.”
I take a few steps back, lift my chin. “You really should go.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Why do you have to be so pigheaded?” I exclaim, throwing my hands in the air. “Fine.” I turn away from the door and let him follow me inside.
He laughs. “Back at you.”
“Tucker! I swear!”
He sobers. He takes his hat off and puts it on the hook by the door. “The thing is, I’ve tried to stop thinking about you. Believe me, I’ve tried, but every time I think I’ve got a handle on my heart, you pop up again.”
“I will work on that. I will try to stay out of your barn,” I promise.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to stay out of my barn.”
“This is crazy,” I say. “I can’t. I’m trying to do—”
“What’s right,” he fills in. “You’re always trying to do what’s right. I love that about you.” He comes closer, too close now, stares down at me with that familiar heat in his eyes.
Then he says it. “I love you. That’s not going away.”
My heart flies up like a bird on wings, but I try to clobber it back down. “I can’t be with you,” I manage.
“Why, because of your purpose? Because God told you so? I want to see that written down somewhere, I want to see it decreed, that you, Clara Gardner, can’t love me because you’re part angel. Tell me where it says that.” He reaches behind him, and to my shock he pulls what looks to be a Bible out of the waistband of his jeans. “Because I want to read you this.”
He opens it, thumbs through to find the right passage.
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. See, right there in black and white.”
“Thank you for the Sunday school lesson,” I say. “Don’t you find it a little silly that you’re quoting the Bible to somebody like me, who receives divine instructions straight from the source? Tucker, come on, you know it’s more complicated than that.”
“No, it’s not,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be. What we have, that’s divine. It’s beautiful and good and right. I feel it….” He presses his hand to his chest, over his heart. “I feel it all the time. You’re in here, part of me. You’re what I go to bed thinking about and what I wake up to in the morning.”
The tears start to slip down my face. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and crosses the room toward me, but I stumble back.
“Tuck. I can’t,” I breathe.
“I like it when you call me Tuck,” he says, smiling.
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Sudden understanding dawns in his eyes. “That’s what this breaking-up business was all about for you, wasn’t it? You thought I was going to get hurt. You pushed me away to protect me. You’re still pushing.” He shakes his head. “Losing you, that’s the worst kind of hurt there is.”
He reaches out and touches a strand of my hair, tucks it behind my ear, then backs off a little, tries a different approach. “Hey. How about this? You’re home for a couple more days, right? I’m home, as usual.” I see the news of his college situation rise up in his mind, but for some reason he doesn’t tell me about it. “Let’s go fishing. Let’s climb a mountain. Let’s try again.”
I’ve never wanted anything so much.
He sees the uncertainty on my face. “I should have fought for you, Clara, even if I would have had to fight you to fight for you. I should never have let you go.”
I close my eyes. I know that any minute now he’s going to kiss me, and my resistance is going to melt away completely.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper. And then, out of self-protection more than anything else, I bring the glory. I don’t warn him or anything. I don’t damp it down. I bring it. The room fills with light.
“This is what I am,” I say, my hair ablaze around my head.
He squints at me. His jaw juts out a little in pure stubbornness. He stands his ground.
“I know,” he says.
I take a step toward him, close the space between us, put my glowing hand against his ashen cheek. He starts to tremble. “This is what I am,” I say again, and my wings are out now.
His knees wobble, but he fights it. He puts his hand at my waist, turns me, pulls me closer, which surprises me.
“I can accept that,” he whispers, and holds his breath, and leans in to kiss me.
His lips brush mine for an instant, and an emotion like victory tears through him, but then he pulls away and glances toward the front door. Groans.
Christian is standing in the doorway.
“Wow,” Tucker says, trying to grin. “You really know how to cramp a guy’s style.”
His legs give out. He falls to his knees.
My light blinks off.
Christian’s clutching a DVD copy of Zombieland in one hand, the other hand clenched into a fist at his side. His expression is completely shut down.
“I guess I’ll come back later,” he says. “Or not.”
r />
Tucker’s still catching his breath on the floor.
I follow Christian to the door. “He just came over. I didn’t mean for you to—”
“See that?” he finishes for me. “Great. Thanks for trying to spare my feelings.”
“I was trying to prove a point to him.”
“Right,” he says. “Well, let me know how that turns out.”
He turns toward the door, then stops, the muscles in his back tensing. He’s about to say something really harsh, I think, something he won’t be able to take back.
“Don’t,” I say.
Dizziness crashes over me. I hear a strange whooshing sound, like wind in my ears, accompanied by the distinct smell of smoke. Christian turns, his face all scrunched up like he’s confused by what he sees in my head. He looks suddenly worried.
That’s when I pass out.
The black room is filling up with smoke.
I jolt into future Clara in the exact instant that the darkness explodes into light, and in that moment I understand: This light’s not glory. It’s fire. A fireball streaks over my shoulder and strikes the wall somewhere off to the side, behind me. Then Christian screams, “Get down!” and I drop just in time for him to literally leap over my body, his glory sword out and bright and deadly, blinding me. Everything’s a jumble of black-and-white flashing: Christian and the figures circling him, the swift movement of his blade against the dark. I scramble backward until my back hits something solid, glance over my shoulder to see what’s happening with the fire.
The flames lick up the side of the room, igniting the velvet curtains like tissue paper. This place is going to be an inferno in about five minutes. My heart’s hammering, but I swallow and push myself to my knees, then to my feet. I have to help Christian. I have to fight.
No, he says in my mind. You’ve got to find him. Go.
The high-pitched noise comes again, thin and reedy, frightened. Smoke chokes me, the air in here close and hot and heavy in my lungs, but inexplicably I turn away from Christian and what I think must be the exit and stumble toward the fire, coughing, my eyes watering.
I hit the edge of something hard and wooden right at chest level, hard enough to knock the wind out of me if I had any wind in me to begin with. I figure out what the barrier is at the same time that my eyes finally decide to adjust.
It’s a stage.
I look around wildly to confirm what I already know, but it’s so crazy obvious I can’t believe I never figured this out before. It all falls neatly into place: the slanted floor of the auditorium, the ghosts of white tablecloths along the front, the rows of metal-backed seats. The velvet curtains and the smell of sawdust and paint.
We’re in the Pink Garter.
And in that instant, I figure out what the noise is.
It’s a baby crying.
“Clara!”
I open my eyes. Somehow I ended up on my living room floor, and I don’t quite know how. Two sets of eyes are staring down at me, one blue and one green, both insanely worried.
“What happened?” Tucker asks.
“It was the black room,” Christian says, not a question.
“It was the Garter.” I struggle to sit up. “I need my phone. Where’s my phone?”
Tucker finds it on the coffee table and brings it to me, while Christian helps me over to the couch. I still feel out of breath.
“There’s going to be a fire,” I tell Christian.
Tucker makes a disbelieving noise. “Oh, great.”
I dial Angela’s number. It rings and rings, and each second that ticks by where she doesn’t pick up makes the sense of dread in my stomach grow stronger. But then, finally, there’s a click and a faint hello on the other end.
“Angela!” I say.
“Clara?” She sounds like she’s been sleeping.
“I just had my vision again, and the black room is the Garter, Angela, and the noise I hear—do you remember me telling you?—that noise, which is what gives us away, it’s a baby. It’s got to be Webster. You need to get out. Now.”
“Now?” she says, still half-awake. “It’s nine o’clock at night. I just got Web to sleep.”
“Ange, they’re coming.” I can’t help the frantic squeak in my voice.
“Okay, slow down, C,” Angela says. “Who’s coming?”
“I don’t know. Black Wings.”
“Do they know about Web?” she asks, starting to comprehend some of what I’m saying. “Are they coming for him? How would they know?”
“I don’t know,” I say again.
“Well, what do you know?”
“I know something terrible is going to happen there. You have to leave.”
“And go where?” she asks, still not fully getting it. “No. I can’t go anywhere tonight.”
“But Ange—”
“How long have you been having the vision? Almost a year? There’s no need to rush off all panicked and clueless. We’ll think it through.”
“The vision was different tonight. It was urgent.”
Her voice hardens. “Well, sometimes the visions are like that, aren’t they? And you think you know what they mean, but you don’t.” She sighs like she realizes that she’s taking her issues out on me, and she’s sorry. “I can’t go running off in the middle of the night on a whim, C. I have Web to think about now. We need a plan. Come to the Garter in the morning, and we’ll talk about your vision, okay? Then I’ll decide where to go from there.”
There’s a high-pitched wail in the background. The sound of it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Oh, great. You woke him up,” she says, annoyed. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She hangs up on me.
I stare at the phone for a minute.
“What was that all about?” Tucker asks from behind me. “What’s going on?”
I meet Christian’s eyes, and he knows what I’m thinking. “We can take my truck,” he says.
We start moving toward the door. “We’ll go over there and I can put my hand on her and try to show her what I see. Maybe she’ll be able to receive it. We’ll make her understand. Then we’ll pack her and the baby up and take them to a hotel.” I sling my coat over my shoulder.
“Wait, what?” Tucker follows us out onto the porch. “Hold on, Carrots. Explain this to me. What’s happening?”
“We don’t have time.” I look at Tucker over my shoulder as I’m dashing away, and I say, “I have to go; I’m sorry,” and then I climb up into Christian’s pickup and we take off, spraying the gravel in the driveway, off to Jackson, and I get the sinking feeling that the trials my dad was telling me about are really about to begin.
14
ABANDON ALL HOPE
Just before we get to town, I get a text from Angela: trp dr, it says, and I don’t know what that means, but it makes my bad feeling get worse. Then when we arrive at the Garter, we find the front door open a crack. Christian and I both stiffen at the sight. We know that Anna Zerbino keeps this place locked up extra tight in the off hours, ever since an incident last year when a group of drunken tourists broke in and stole a bunch of costumes out of the dressing rooms and went gallivanting in chaps and petticoats all over town. Christian toes the door open enough for us to pass through, and we creep into the front lobby. The room is empty. He takes a moment to inspect the door, but there’s nothing to suggest violence. The lock is intact.
I cross the lobby to the red velvet curtain that separates the front of the house from the auditorium and push it aside. The lights are off. The theater is a pit of blackness straight out of my worst fears, and I can’t look at it for more than a few seconds before I have to turn away.
Upstairs there’s the sound of a muffled voice, a dragging noise like a chair scraping across the floor.
I glance uncertainly at Christian like, What should we do?
He gestures with his head toward the back corner, where there’s a staircase that goes to the secon
d floor. We take the stairs slowly, careful not to make any noise. At the top we stop and listen. This door is closed, a ribbon of bright light glowing beneath it.
I’m tempted by the ridiculous urge to knock, like maybe if I act normal, things will be normal. I’ll knock, and Anna will answer it all serious and ask us what we’re doing here at this late hour, but then she’ll take us back to Angela’s room, and Angela will look up from where she’s sprawled on her bed, reading, and she’ll say, Really, you guys? You’re really so paranoid that you couldn’t wait until morning?
I could knock, and then there wouldn’t be anything evil on the other side of that door.
Christian shakes his head slightly. What do you feel? he asks.
I open my mind. The minute I lower my defenses—which I wasn’t even aware I had up—sorrow floods me, a deep penetrating pain, so fierce it makes me gasp for air. I lean against the wall and try to delve inside the suffering, to identify its source, but all I get is an image of a woman’s body floating facedown in the water, her dark hair spreading out around her head. The angel—oh yes, definitely an angel—is not Samjeeza, that much I know. His sorrow is different from Sam’s, angrier, a rage caught up in an agony that’s centuries old and still red hot, but it’s also more controlled than Sam’s, less self-pitying, like he’s channeling his emotions into something else: a purpose. A desire to destroy.
There’s a Black Wing, I say to Christian silently, careful to keep the words flowing only between us, the way Dad taught us to do. Grade-A sorrow. That’s about all I can get—it overwhelms everything else. What about you? Can you tell what somebody’s thinking in there?
There are at least seven people in that room, he says, closing his eyes. It’s hard to sift through.
“I told you that you’re not welcome here,” a voice says suddenly, low and frightened. “I want you to leave.”
“Come now, Anna,” responds another voice—an older man, from the sound of it, with the slight lilt to his speech that Dad has. “Is that any way to treat an old friend?”
“You were never my friend,” Anna says. “You were a mistake. A sin.”
“Oh, a sin,” he says. “I’m flattered.”
“I rebuke you,” Anna says. “In the name of Jesus Christ. Begone.”