Intangible (28 page)

“I
knew
there was something different about him,” he said, catching the ball again. “That’s an interesting gift he’s got. I’m sure it must be disorienting sometimes.”

“Yeah.” Sera stood back from the wall to get a better look at what she was painting. “Marc said it actually became a problem a couple of years ago, which is why he dropped out and got his GED. He couldn’t be around people at all because it was just constant noise in his head. He takes some kind of medicine, I guess, that keeps it under control.”

“That would suck.” Luke looked over at her. She was painting minute details on another replica of their
fleur-de-lis
. “You’re getting really good at that. Is yours still there?”

Sera looked down at her wrist. “Mostly. It’s just starting to fade a bit. Fey must have used permanent ink. How’s yours?”

“Same.” Luke launched the ball in the air over his face again and caught it. “He really can’t hear our thoughts, though?”

“Nope. That’s what he says.”

“Weird. I wonder why.”

Sera paused, considering her work. “Maybe because we’re gifted too. Because we’re different. Maybe there’s something that puts us off his radar? I don’t know.”

“Yeah, but you said he can’t hear Fey either. And, though she is aesthetically gifted—stop rolling your eyes, you know she is and I’m just saying—she is not gifted like us.”

Sera was quiet for a moment and Luke turned to look at her. Her head was tilted to one side, a pensive look on her face. “How do you know?”

“What?” Luke stopped tossing the ball.

“How do you know? We didn’t know this about Marc but, as you said, there was something different about him that clicked with us. The same could be said for Fey.”

Luke couldn’t speak for a moment, then he shook his head slightly and said, “But we would have noticed.”

“She told me once that she can’t lie, and she always knows when I’m being less than truthful. Always. Like she can smell it.”

“I’m not sure that’s the same,” Luke said. “And besides, we would have seen something. She would have told us.”

“We haven’t told her.”

“I would have Seen it?”

“Ha!” Sera snorted. “Like you Saw Marc’s ability?”

Luke was silent for a moment. Sera went back to painting her wall, and he eventually started tossing the tennis ball up again.
Thwock
silence,
thwock
silence,
thwock
silence. “Do you really think she is?” There was wonder in his voice.

“I don’t know.” Sera didn’t turn to look at him. She was painting what looked like a large red stone. “But there is something different about her. Which is why we love her.”

“It’s kinda fun having someone else around like us, huh?”

“Yeah.” She turned to Luke again, her eyes sparkling. “I really like him, Luke.”

“I know. I can tell.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Just be care—”

“Luke.” She cut him off. “Don’t.”

“I just—”

“I know. But don’t.”

He pressed his lips together and gripped the tennis ball tightly in his hand. He didn’t want her to get hurt. He wanted to save her from that. And he was failing.

Which meant that even with something as minor as a broken heart, he couldn’t change the future. Luke closed his eyes and lay one arm across them.

So Sera was going to get her heart broken. Big deal. He certainly didn’t want it to happen, but she’d live, it wasn’t the end of the world. But her death? That
was
the end of the world.
His
world.

Luke suddenly needed to move. He needed to go for a run, clear his head. Figure this out. He swung his legs off the bed, and stood up.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to go for a jog. Fresh air.” He stood next to her and admired her wall. With his haywire senses, the colors were crazy intense. He reached out to touch one small blue and white swirl on the wall, and the room disappeared.

Fire from torches in wall sconces flickered across the blood red stone walls, giving the illusion of dancing shadows in the corners. At least, Luke assumed it was an illusion. The shadows were the darkest he’d ever seen and they almost seemed to move of their own will rather than as an effect of the light.

He was back in hell, or wherever this place was. He looked around. Where was the psycho woman?

There. She was magnificent. Again. He felt a pull toward her, as if his body was no longer under his control. But then a moment later she was hideous, the spell was broken, and he backed away from her.

The black stone floor shone in the torchlight, and Luke could make out more people this time. He searched the cavern frantically and didn’t see Sera anywhere. Maybe something had changed. Maybe she was no longer in danger.

“Jonas!” the woman said and laughed—it was a sound that sent shards of ice into Luke’s heart. “You’ve brought me a gift!”

Luke turned to look where she was gazing. Sera and Jonas walked into the room. His shoulders slumped. It didn’t look like anything had changed after all.

But maybe this was a clue, Luke thought. Maybe the person he needed to stop was Jonas. Because if Jonas was the crazy lady’s minion and Luke could somehow remove him from the equation, then Jonas couldn’t take Sera there and she’d be saved. At last there was something concrete he could do to prevent this vision from coming true.

He was not going to let Jonas sacrifice his sister.

But as he watched, Jonas glared at Lilith and stepped in front of Sera. Luke closed his eyes, collapsed to his knees. Jonas was protecting her, not delivering her. Luke was back where he started. Nowhere.

Luke gasped and was back in Sera’s room, touching her painting wall.

Sera looked over at him. He knew he had to look as distraught as he felt. Luke could feel droplets of sweat skidding down his back and his heart beating at breakneck speed. Goose bumps covered his body, and he was gasping for breath as if he’d been running for his life.

He
felt
as if he’d been running for his life. For a moment he wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.

“Luke, what’s wrong?” Sera’s eyebrows knit together in concern.

He looked at her and didn’t have a clue what to say. He couldn’t answer that question. His mind was swimming. It didn’t make sense for Jonas to take Sera there if he was trying to protect her. Why would he do that? Luke was suddenly angry with himself. He wasn’t doing enough, he wasn’t figuring it out.

“It’s, uh…I’m fi—it’s okay. I just need to go for a run.” And Luke bolted from the room. He grabbed his running shoes by the front door and quickly laced them up. Then he was out the door and running.

For Sera’s life.

TWENTY-SEVEN

S
era waved to Marc as he drove away, her lips still tingling from the goodbye kiss. And the kisses before. And after. She ran her fingers over her lips as she slowly made her way up the front walk to her house. Luke and Fey had gone to the coffee house without her. She had homework she wanted to finish early so she’d have the evening free for Marc.

Her mom was gone for the week—had left this morning on a business trip. She and Marc planned to take full advantage of that by seeing each other every night. He was coming over that evening, and she envisioned lots of time on the couch in front of some movie they wouldn’t watch. Her stomach fluttered just thinking about it.

Something shimmered in her peripheral vision, and she looked quickly to the left, into the dense shrubs. A short, dark-haired guy stood there. Flickering. He was one of them. Whoever
they
were. She had a feeling she was about to find out.

She halted just feet from the front porch steps. Her heart beat furiously, and she had a hard time taking a breath. She didn’t like that these shimmery people were following her to her house. What if he wanted to…she didn’t want to even form the thought, but unwelcome images flashed on the screen of her mind.

“What do you want?” Sera tried to make her voice sound strong, hard.

He took a step forward and held his hands out, palms up. “Your help.”

Her eyebrows shot up and then knit together. She hadn’t expected that answer. She looked toward the street for a broken down car, but there was none. Looking back at the guy again, she said, “Is your car—”

“No.” He didn’t even let her finish her question.

“Do you need to use the pho—”

“That’s not the kind of help I need.” He took another step toward her, and though she was still wary, she didn’t get a creepy, evil vibe from him. “I want you to change me.”

That’s when she noticed his fangs.

Sera could feel the color drain from her face as her mouth hung open. She could not form words. Only thoughts.

He. Is. A vampire.

Oh. My. God.

Vampires. Do. Exist.

For a moment, in the midst of her shock, she had a brief flash of Jonas, who, it turned out, wasn’t insane after all. He had been telling her the truth and she felt strangely glad for that. Then it occurred to her that perhaps it wasn’t a step up for him to actually
be
a vampire rather than simply delusional.

“Change you?” All she managed was a whisper, not loud enough for him to hear. And yet he had.

“Like you did for Meghan. I want to be human again.” He was almost out of the shadows and in the late afternoon sunlight, but he stopped. “Please.”

He knew about her. He knew what she could do. She gasped, suddenly realizing why all those flickering people were watching her.
They were all vampires and they all knew what she could do.
That idea was almost more unsettling than the fact that vampires were real.

Almost.

She looked at the house. Only a few more steps and she could be inside. She couldn’t do this. Couldn’t have people—
vampires
—coming to her house. She didn’t want this.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have me mistaken for someone else.” She turned to go up the steps.

“I’m not mistaken. You know I’m not.”

Instantly he was in front of her, several feet away, at the top of the stairs. She jerked backwards and almost tripped over her own feet. She made ready to flee—as if that would work, but she didn’t have any other options, really—when he spoke again.

“Please,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I just need your help.” His black eyes held a deep sadness.

“I don’t know how,” Sera said, her voice small. “With Meghan I didn’t know it was happening. I thought I was healing her, not changing her.”

“Would you try?”

It was such a simple request. How could she say no? She couldn’t.

“Where do you want to do it?”

He shrugged, and so Sera set down her book bag on the front steps, and walked up to where he stood on the porch in the shadows. She assumed he probably didn’t want to venture into direct sunlight, because hadn’t she read that vampires burst into flame or something? She cringed and hoped he didn’t do that in her yard. Or while she had her hands on him.

She stood in front of him, fingering her necklace, and wasn’t sure what to do, where to put her hands. He wasn’t hurt, so it was different. She wasn’t even sure if it would work.

Well, she wasn’t going to find out until she tried. So she carefully placed her hands on him—one on his forehead and one on his heart. They seemed as good a place as any.

His eyes followed her hands, and he stared at the inside of her wrist for a moment. She followed his gaze and was surprised to see the
fleur-de-lis
so stark against her skin.

He met her eyes. “I see you’re protected.” He indicated the Mark with a nod.

“What?” she said. “Oh, that. No, that’s—just something we did for fun. I thought it had almost washed away.”

“That kind of Mark doesn’t ever wash away,” he said.

She squinted at him. He must think it’s a real tattoo, she figured. No sense in arguing about it. He could believe whatever he wanted to believe.

She closed her eyes and drew the energy down into her body and let it flow out her arms and hands into him. Her ring glowed as white light raced out of her hands and into his body, centering in his core. The brightness was blinding, just like it had been with Meghan, and Sera closed her eyes and turned her face to the side. She could feel the power of the energy surging through her. Transforming apparently took more energy than healing.

She could think about it objectively while she was doing it, but still her heart thumped wildly at the unfamiliarity of the feeling.
Human.
She pushed that idea into him. She didn’t know if it would help, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. Hopefully.

“Wow,” the guy said, closing his eyes and smiling. Sera took a sidelong glimpse at him and could see him almost softening around the edges. Weird that she could see that.

The energy pulled more and more strongly, anchoring her hands onto the guy’s head and chest. She again felt the impulse to pull away—the intensity of it scared her—but she stayed with it, understanding better this time what was happening. The light changed to light purple, the transforming energy.
Human.
Her ring glowed purple with the change.