Unearthly (25 page)

“I'm sorry,” I say. I watch the color slowly come back into his face.

“I don't know what . . . ,” he tries, and then stops himself.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—”

“What
are
you?”

I flinch.

“I'm Clara.” My name, at least, has not changed. I take a step toward him, put my hand out to touch his face. He shies away. Then he grabs my hand, the one with the cut. I gasp as he jerks the bandage away.

The wound is completely healed. There isn't even a scar. We both peer down at my palm. Then Tucker's hand falls away.

“I knew it,” he says.

I'm flooded with a strange mix of panic and relief. There's no explaining this away. I'll have to tell him. “Tuck—”

“What are you?” he demands again. He staggers back a few steps.

“It's complicated.”

“No.” He shakes his head suddenly. His face is still so pale, greenish like he's about to throw up. He keeps backing away from me, and then he's at the door of the barn and he turns and runs toward the house.

All I can do is watch him go. I feel disconnected from myself, shaky with the shock of what's happened. I don't have a ride home. And Tucker could be in the house getting a shotgun for all I know. So I run. I stumble toward the woods at the back of the ranch, grateful for the cover of the trees. It's starting to get dark. Once I'm a little ways in, my wings snap out without me even having to summon them. I fly carelessly, getting completely lost before I can sense the way home, instantly soaked by clouds and so cold I'm shivering hard enough to make my teeth chatter, tear-blinded and half panicked.

I cry as I wing my way home. I cry and cry. It feels like the tears will never stop.

Mom discovers me in my room sobbing into my pillow a few hours later. I'm scratched and scraped and tear-streaked, but what she says when she sees me is “What happened to your hair?”

“What?” I'm desperately trying to get it together so I can decide how much I'll tell her about the whole Tucker thing.

“It's back to its natural color. The red is completely gone.”

“Oh. I brought the glory. It must have zapped the color right out.”

“You attained glory?” she says, her blue eyes wide.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, my darling. No wonder you're upset. It's such an overwhelming experience.”

She doesn't know the half of it.

“Rest now.” She presses a kiss to my temple. “You can tell me more about it in the morning.”

When she's gone I send a frantic email to Angela:
Emergency
, I write, hardly able to make my fingers and brain work well enough together to get out a simple message.
Call me
ASAP
.

There's no one to talk to. No one to tell. And already I miss him.

I give in to the need to hear his voice and call Tucker on my cell. He answers on the first ring. For a minute neither of us speaks.

“Leave me alone,” he says, and then he hangs up.

Chapter 17
Just Call Me Angel

Three days pass, three agonizing days where I don't call him again or try to see him, reliving the kiss until I think I'll go bonkers and tear all my feathers out by the handful. I keep telling myself this is all for the best. Okay, so not the
best
, since I've essentially revealed myself to a human and I don't even know what the punishment for that will be, if anybody ever finds out. But maybe it's for the best that Tucker rejected me. So he knows there's something weird about me, sure. Can he prove it? No. Will anybody believe him? Probably not. It doesn't seem likely that he'd even tell anyone. If he did, I could deny it all. We could go back to the way things were before, him accusing me of stuff and me pretending like I don't have a clue what he's talking about.

Right.

I'm not that good a liar, even when I'm lying to myself. I wish Angela would call me back and I could ask her what to do.

As if the daytime wasn't bad enough, I dream about him. Every night for three nights in a row. I can't get out of that moment when I was in his head, feeling what he felt, hearing his thoughts as he kissed me. I can feel him loving me. And it kills me, that moment when I feel his love shift into fear.

The third morning I wake up with tears streaming down my face, and when I stare up at the ceiling, wallowing in my misery, a thought occurs to me.

He
loves
me. Inside his head, his every thought and reaction was born of love, love inside and out, crazy, irrational (and sure, a bit lustful) love. He loves me, and that's also what terrified him when he saw me all lit up like a Christmas tree. He doesn't know what I am, but he loves me.

I sit up. Maybe I should have figured this out a long time ago. I shouldn't have needed to read his heart in order to see it. But when I felt all that love rising up in him, I didn't know I
was
inside his head. I didn't notice that the feelings weren't mine. And why is that?

Easy.

It's all me, the human part, the angel part. I love Tucker Avery.

Talk about revelation.

So that's why I'm waiting now outside the Crazy River Rafting Company, sitting on the sidewalk outside of his workplace like some creepy stalker ex-girlfriend, waiting for him to come out so I can ambush him with love. Only he doesn't come out of the building. I wait for more than an hour past when he usually gets off, and nobody comes out but a blond woman who I assume is the secretary.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“I don't think so.”

She hesitates, not quite sure how to interpret my answer. “You waiting for someone?”

“Tucker.”

She smiles. She likes Tucker. Everybody in their right mind likes Tucker.

“He's still on the river,” she says. “His raft overturned, nothing serious, but they'll all be in a bit late. You want me to walkie him, tell him you're here?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I'll wait.”

Every few minutes I check my watch, and every time a truck drives by I hold my breath. A few times I decide that this is all a very bad idea and get up to leave. But I can never make myself get into my car. If anything, I just have to see him.

Finally a big red truck pulls into the parking lot towing an open trailer loaded with rafts. Tucker's sitting in the passenger seat, talking with the older guy I met before who led the rafting trips. Tucker called him Murphy, although I don't know if that's his first or last name. When they announced the rules of the raft that time he took me down the river with him, he'd called them Murphy's laws.

Tucker doesn't see me right away. He smiles the way he does when he delivers the punch line for a joke, a wry, knowing little flash of teeth and dimple. I melt seeing that smile, remembering the times when it's been aimed at me. Murphy laughs, then they both hop out of the truck and circle back to the trailer to start unloading the rafts. I stand up, my heart beating so fast I think it's going to shoot right out of my chest and hit him.

Murphy rolls open a huge garage door, then turns back toward the truck, which is when he sees me standing there. He stops in his tracks and looks at me. Tucker is busily unfastening the rafts from the trailer.

“Tuck,” says Murphy slowly. “I think this girl's here for you.”

Tucker goes completely still for a minute, like he's been hit with a freeze ray. The muscles in his back tighten and he straightens and turns to look at me. A succession of emotions flashes across his face: surprise, panic, anger, pain. Then he settles back on anger. His eyes go cold. A muscle ticks in his jaw.

I wilt under his glare.

“You need a minute?” Murphy asks.

“No,” says Tucker in a low voice that would break my heart if it wasn't already in pieces around my feet. “Let's get this done.”

I stand like I'm rooted to the spot as Tucker and Murphy drag the rafts from the trailer and into a garage on the side of the office. Then they inspect each one, work through some kind of checklist with the life vests, and lock the garage up.

“See ya,” says Murphy, then jumps into a Jeep and gets the heck out of here.

Tucker and I stand in the parking lot staring at each other. I still can't form words. All the things I planned to say flew out of my head the minute I laid eyes on him. He's so beautiful, standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, his hair still damp from the river, his eyes so blue. I feel tears in my eyes and try to blink them away.

Tucker sighs.

“What do you want, Clara?”

The sound of my name is strange coming from him. I'm not Carrots anymore. My hair is back to blond. He can probably tell even now that I'm not quite what I appear to be.

“I'm sorry I lied to you,” I say finally. “You don't know how much I wanted to tell you the truth.”

“So why didn't you?”

“Because it's against the rules.”

“What rules? What truth?”

“I'll tell you everything now, if you'll hear me out.”

“Why?” he asks sharply. “Why would you tell me now, if it's against the rules?”

“Because I love you.”

There. I said it. I can't believe I actually said it. People cast around those words so carelessly. I always cringe whenever I hear kids say it while making out in the hall at school.
I love you, babe. I love you, too.
Here they're all of sixteen years old and convinced that they've found true love. I always thought I'd have more sense than that, a little more perspective.

But here I am, saying it and meaning it.

Tucker swallows. The anger fades from his eyes but I still see shadows of fear.

“Can we go somewhere?” I ask. “Let's go somewhere off in the woods, and I'll show you.”

He hesitates, of course. What if I'm an alien invader trying to lure him to a secluded place so I can suck his brains out? Or a vampire, ravenous for his blood?

“I won't hurt you.”
Be not afraid.

His eyes flash with anger like I've come right out and called him chicken.

“Okay.” His jaw tightens. “But I drive.”

“Of course.”

Tucker drives for an hour, all the way out to Idaho, into the mountains above Palisades Reservoir. The silence between us is so thick it makes me want to cough. We're both trying to look at each other without getting caught looking at each other. At any other time I'd find us hilarious and lame.

He turns down a dirt road that's marked as private property and heads past the log cabins tucked back in the trees, up the mountainside until we come to a big wire fence. Tucker jumps out and fumbles with his keys. Then he unlocks the rusty metal padlock that holds the gate together, gets back in the truck, and drives through. When we reach a broad, empty clearing, he puts the truck in park and finally looks at me.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“My land.”

“Yours?”

“My grandpa was going to build a cabin here but then he got cancer. He left the land to me. It's about eight acres. It's where I'd come if I ever had to bury a dead body or something.”

I stare at him.

“So tell me,” he says.

I take a deep breath and try not to focus on his eyes staring me down. I want to tell him. I've always wanted to tell him. I just don't exactly know how.

“I don't even know where to start.”

“How about you start with the part about you being some kind of supernatural being made of light.”

My breath catches.

“You think I'm made of light?”

“That's what I saw.” I can see the fear in him again, in the way he averts his eyes and shifts slightly to put more space between us.

“I don't think I'm made of light. What you saw is called glory. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's this way of communicating, being connected to each other.”

“Communicating. You were trying to communicate with me?”

“Not intentionally,” I say, blushing. “I didn't mean for it to happen. I'd never done it before, actually. Mom said that sometimes strong emotions can trigger it.” I'm babbling. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to freak you out. Glory tends to have that effect on humans.”

“And you're not human,” he says flatly.

“I'm mostly human.”

Tucker leans back against the door of the truck and sighs in frustration. “Is this a joke, Clara? Is this some kind of a trick?”

“I'm a Nephilim,” I say. “We don't usually use that term, because it means ‘fallen' in Hebrew, and we don't like to think of ourselves as fallen, you know, but that's what we're called in the Bible. We prefer the term
angel-blood
.”

“Angel-blood,” he repeats.

“My mom is a half angel. Her father was an angel and her mother was human. And that makes me a quarter angel, since my dad's an average Joe.”

The words tumble out of me fast, before I can change my mind. Tucker stares at me like I've grown an extra head.

“So you're part angel.” He sounds exactly the way I did when Mom first broke the news to me, like he's making a list of mental institutions in the area.

“Yes. Let's get out of the truck.”

His eyes widen slightly. “Why?”

“Because you won't believe me until I show you.”

“What does that mean? You'll do that light thing again?”

“No. I won't do that again.” I put my hand down lightly on his arm, trying to reassure him. My touch seems to have the opposite effect. He pulls away quickly, opens the door, and hops out of the truck to get away from me.

I get out, too. I walk to the middle of the clearing and face him.

“Now, don't be afraid,” I tell him.

“Right. Because you're going to show me that you're an angel.”

“Part angel.”

I summon my wings and pivot slightly to show him. I don't extend them or fly, the way Mom did to prove it to me. I think seeing them, folded against my back, will be enough.

“Holy crap.” He takes a step back.

“I know.”

“This isn't a joke. This isn't some head game or magic trick. You really have wings.”

“Yeah.” I walk toward him slowly, not wanting to spook him, then turn my back to him again so that he can see them completely. He lifts a hand like he's going to touch the feathers. My heart feels like it will stop, waiting. No one else has ever handled my wings, and I wonder what it will feel like, to have him touching me there. But then he pulls his hand back.

“Can you fly?” he asks in a strangled voice.

“Yes. But mostly I'm a normal girl.” I know he won't believe that. I wonder if he'll ever treat me like a normal girl again. That's part of what I love about being with Tucker. He makes me feel normal, not in a plain Jane, nondescript way, but like I'm enough, just being me, without all the angel stuff. I almost start to cry thinking I'm going to lose that.

“And what else? What else can you do?”

“Not much, really. I'm only a quarter angel. I don't even know all that the half angels can do. I can speak any language. I guess that comes in handy for the angels when they're delivering messages.”

“That's how you understood the Korean lady at Canyon. And how you talked to the grizzly bear?”

“Yes.”

I glance down at my feet. I'm too afraid to see his face and know that it's all over. The kiss was three days ago, but it somehow feels like another person's life. Another girl, standing in the barn, kissing Tucker for the first time. Another girl he loves. Not me. Not little pathetic me humiliating myself by starting to cry.

“I'm sorry,” I choke out.

He's quiet. Tears drip off my chin. He lets out a slow, shaky breath.