by Melissa Marr
Kissy slammed the knife sideways, slashing her own hand in the process. Her sunglasses fell off her face, and the color in her eyes began to bleed outward the same way my assailant’s had, shining brighter and brighter until I had to look away.
“I can’t let you hurt her.” The voice didn’t sound like my sister. It didn’t sound like her at all. “I have to stop you.”
There was a flash of light and a sound like the snapping of twigs, the popping of knuckles. And then there was silence. I glanced at the boy behind the counter, who was now cowering against the far wall, and then turned slowly back toward my sister.
Toward the stranger who wanted me dead.
Kissy was standing. Below her, my attacker’s body lay still, his head twisted at an unnatural angle to his body.
She snapped his neck.
This just did not compute. Kissy couldn’t even swat flies. She couldn’t play chess, because knights looked like horses and she couldn’t bare the idea of sacrificing even a one.
She snapped his neck.
Her right hand was bleeding. Her hair was disheveled. She bent over, picked up her sunglasses, and put them back on. She brought her hand to her lips and licked the blood from the wound, then glanced at the boy behind the counter.
“Forget this ever happened,” she told him. “You hear?”
He nodded dumbly, and Kissy turned back to me. “C’mon,” she said, sounding just the way she always had, since we were little. “We have to go to San Antonio.”
After the hullabaloo in the McDonald’s, the truck starting up again seemed like such a tiny thing, I didn’t even remember to be grateful. I was too busy trying not to chuck my biscuits all over the dashboard. My hands shook as Kissy pulled back onto the highway and put the pedal to the floor.
“Hey, Kissy?” I said finally.
“Yeah-huh?” my sister replied.
I wasn’t sure how to phrase this next part diplomatically, so I just spat it right out there. “You killed that guy.”
“Seems like,” Kissy agreed, amiable to the core.
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little, I don’t know”—I searched for the right word. Terrifying? Life-altering? Insane?—“weird?”
“It is what it is, Jess.” Kissy had never been one to dwell on the downside of things. “One second I was there, talking to the boy behind the counter, and the next, you were screaming, and that thing had a knife, and I just—I had to.”
As she spoke, the images flashed in front of my eyes again: my attacker’s dark, reptilian eyes, Kissy’s shining like a pale green spotlight, the curve of the knife, the blood. . . .
I have to kill her. I have to stop this before it starts.
That was what the boy had said, and good money was on the her in question being me.
“He was going to kill me,” I said, trying out the words to see how they’d sound out loud.
“I wasn’t going to let him.” Kissy didn’t waste a second in issuing her reply, the same way she’d never hesitated to chase off playground bullies when I was in the first grade and she was in the third. “It’s you and me, Jess. Always has been. Always will be.”
I nodded, but my breath caught in my throat. She was my sister, and I loved her, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was something else, too, that whatever the ’pulse was, it wasn’t some genetic quirk so much as . . .
Possession. The word snaked its way through my mind, all sneakylike, and as much as I wanted to quell the thought, I couldn’t quite get a handle on it, couldn’t shut it down.
“His eyes were black,” I said, sticking to the facts. “They were black the way yours go green.”
“Yup.” Kissy paused, and for the first time, the expression on her face, determined and sure, faltered. “It’s kind of funny,” she said, in a voice that just about broke my heart. “I always wondered if there was anyone else out there like me, and now I know.”
“That thing was nothing like you.” Until I said the words out loud, I wasn’t sure I believed them, but they came out so fierce and so certain that it settled the matter, right then and there. Whatever Kissy was, whatever had happened to her to make her fight like that, she wasn’t a monster.
She was my sister.
“Love you, Jess.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, unable to keep my eyes from her sunglasses. “I love you too.”
When it came to stopping for gas, Kissy was of the Russian roulette school of thought, walking on the wild side and daring the universe to do her wrong. By the time she finally gave in and pulled into a filling station outside of Dallas, the tank had been on empty for half an hour, and I was half convinced that we were going to end up stuck on the side of the road.
There was a part of me that was hoping, just a little bit, that maybe we would. Kissy’s ’pulses—even the weird ones—had always seemed so benign, but with the sound of snapping bones crackling through my memory, I couldn’t help wondering why we had to go to San Antonio and what Kissy would be compelled to do once we were there.
She killed that boy. She killed him dead.
“I’m going inside to prepay,” Kissy said, her voice cutting into my thoughts. “You want a Coke?”
I nodded.
“What kind?”
I couldn’t help but feel like every decision I made, even the tiny ones, would bring us closer and closer to disaster. “I’ll come with you,” I said, postponing at least this one decision that much longer.
“You’re coming with?” Kissy gave me a look. Even though I couldn’t actually see her eyeballs, I translated her stare to mean, You better not be coming with me because you think I can’t take care of myself.
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I was actually scared that Kissy was going to go snapping necks left and right. I was just being . . . cautious.
“Maybe I should go alone,” I said, knowing that I might as well be poking at an angry bear. “Your picture could be all over the news by now.”
“It’s not,” Kissy said simply. “Nobody’s going to find the body. Nobody’s ever going to know.”
That didn’t exactly seem what I would call likely, but Kissy sounded so certain that I couldn’t help wondering what she knew that I didn’t, what the instinct inside of her was whispering that I couldn’t hear.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll both go in.”
“Fine,” Kissy replied, and she snapped her mouth shut and didn’t say another word until the two of us were inside.
The girl behind the counter wasn’t nearly so easily charmed as her counterpart at the McDonald’s that morning, and she just gave Kissy and me a once-over before a bored, glassy look settled over her eyes.
“Hi, Molly,” Kissy said, lifting the girl’s name from the trainee tag on her shirt. “We need to prepay, thirty dollars on pump two.”
Molly was not impressed with Kissy’s personable nature—or her ensemble. “It’s your money,” she said, like the two of us were stupid for spending it on something as mundane as fuel. “Anything else?”
“A couple of thirty-two-ounce drinks,” I said, since Kissy tended to take other people’s boredom as a personal challenge. “And that’s all.”
Molly rang us up and tapped her fingernails impatiently on the counter as Kissy dug around her pockets for two twenty-dollar bills. She shoved the money across the counter, and Molly moved to take it, but aborted the action halfway through and instead caught Kissy by the wrist, her fake nails digging into my sister’s skin.
Oh no. Not again.
I took an instinctive step backward, but Kissy wasn’t perturbed. I looked to Molly’s eyes, but they were still an everyday brown, a few shades lighter than mine. Molly tilted her head to the side, and Kissy did the same. Then Molly spoke—or at least, her lips moved and words came out, which wasn’t exactly the same thing.
“They’re close.” The voice that spoke those words was androgynous and toneless, vibrating with so much power, it almost hurt to hear it. “Very close, and this time, ther
e’s more than one.”
The bland expression on Molly’s face never changed, but the words coming out of her mouth were everywhere—inside my head and out of it—until I couldn’t think or hear or even remember anything else.
“You need to trust us, Jessica Carlton. Trust your sister.” Even though Molly was holding Kissy’s arm, she was looking straight at me, and her words came out like an order. “It starts with you, Jess. Run.”
Molly dropped Kissy’s arm, and if she had any recollection of the words she’d just said, she did a real good job hiding it under a healthy amount of disdain. “What’re you staring at?” she asked me.
Trust your sister. The words echoed in my head. Run.
“We have to go,” Kissy said. “Now.”
She turned and started walking toward the back exit. My heart beating viciously against the inside of my rib cage, I turned to follow, but not before glancing back over my shoulder at the pumps. A single second stretched itself out into eternity, and then the glass on the store’s windows exploded inward, and our grandfather’s truck burst—red and blue and orange and yellow—into flames.
One second we were in the store, and the next we were out back, and all I could think was, They’re close, and this time, there’s more than one. Kissy’s hand latched on to my shoulder, and she dragged me behind her, running faster than she should have been able to run.
“We have to go to San Antonio.”
I normally didn’t have much of a temper, but these were extenuating circumstances. Someone had already tried to kill me once today, Kissy had snapped a boy’s neck, gas station attendants were dishing out prophecies, and now, someone had blown up our grandpa’s truck.
“What’s so bloody important about San Antonio?” I asked, taking solace in the British curse word, which was a lot more satisfying than anything my Oklahoma upbringing had to offer.
“I don’t know,” Kissy replied, her voice breaking. “I don’t know, but we have to get there, we have to, and now we don’t have a truck.” She dropped my arm, and her entire body stiffened, her eyes rolling back in her head.
Not a seizure, I thought. Not now.
Behind us, the door to the filling station slammed open, and men and women of all shapes and sizes began pouring out. I shouldn’t have been able to see their eyes from this distance, but there was no mistaking the darkness, the light.
“We’re going,” I said, holding my sister as tight as I could and hoping the words penetrated her trance. “We’re going to San Antonio. C’mon, Kissy. You’re okay. You can do this.”
With great effort, she straightened, and the two of us began stumbling toward the road—toward San Antonio, because the ’pulse wouldn’t let Kissy turn around.
Please, God, I thought. Please don’t let this be happening. Please don’t let this be how everything ends.
We made it to the road, maybe twenty yards ahead of our pursuers. A car slammed its brakes and swerved to avoid hitting us. To my surprise, the owner recovered quickly, leaned over, and threw open the passenger side door.
“Going to San Antonio?” he asked.
Kissy and I were in that car faster than you can say ’pulse. We didn’t question how the man had known or why he was helping us.
His eyes, shining sea-foam green, said it all.
The man’s name was Walter, and he was a perfectly nice sort, a few years older than Mom and Dad would have been if they’d lived. Unfortunately, Walter didn’t seem to know any more about what we’d gotten ourselves into than Kissy did.
“I just got a feelin’,” he said, rubbing one hand over his chin. “And this feelin’, it said, ‘Get in your car, drive your car, pick up them girls.’ So that’s what I did.”
Like Kissy, Walter was no stranger to “feelings,” but he wasn’t particularly given to philosophical pondering, so all he’d say about them was that some itches needed scratching and if you had the sense God gave a goose, you’d scratch them.
Not exactly illuminating, if you asked me.
Still, we made it from Dallas to San Antonio in record time—no stops, no explosions, no black-eyed people gunning for my throat. Walter pulled up next to the River Walk, and as he put the car into park and let us out, the unnatural sheen faded from his eyes, until they were hazel, as ordinary and down-home as the rest of the man.
“You girls take care of yourselves,” he said.
Kissy smiled. “We will.”
I wasn’t feeling quite so optimistic, because even though we were in San Antonio, even though we’d done exactly what the ’pulse had told Kissy to do, her eyes were still shining, so bright that the sunglasses weren’t really doing the job anymore.
“C’mon, Jess!” Kissy sounded giddy and free and, if I’m being honest, just a little bit drunk. “We have to go this way!”
She ran down a stone staircase. I followed, and the closer we got to the River Walk below, the more adrenaline flooded into my system, my heart skipping like a stone across water. My breaths were shallow and hot in my chest, and I prepared myself for what might come.
What I wasn’t prepared for was Kissy sidestepping the second we got to the bottom and me running right smack into something that felt like an anvil and looked like a guy. He caught me by the elbows and steadied me on my feet. For a moment, I stopped breathing altogether.
His hair was the color of desert sand, his features symmetrical and sharp. He wasn’t particularly big or small, and I couldn’t pinpoint his age, but there was something unspeakably perfect about his body, his face, the way he stood—so perfect it sent a chill creeping down my spine.
It hurt to look at him. It hurt not to.
This is it.
I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad, the beginning or the end, but every bone in my body was certain that this was something, that he was something. Beside me, Kissy pulled her sunglasses up onto the top of her head and blinked.
Her eyes were brown.
“I’m starving,” she said. “There any place good to eat around here?”
“Kissy.” I hissed her name. “All of this, everything we’ve gone through to get here, and you’re thinking about food?”
Kissy had the decency to look a tiny bit ashamed of herself. “I never got to eat my Egg McMuffin,” she mumbled.
Given the whole people-with-black-eyes-keep-trying-to-kill-us thing, I really didn’t think that should be her primary concern, but what did I know?
“You’re safe here, Jess.” Those were the first words our companion had said to me, and his voice washed over my body, leaving goose bumps in its wake. He didn’t sound as alien as the girl at the gas station had, but there was a heaviness to his words, like he’d been waiting to say them for longer than I’d been alive.
I looked into his eyes. They were blue: light and crystalline and inhuman in ways I couldn’t begin to explain. For a split second, those eyes looked away from mine and spared a glance for Kissy.
“You’ve done well,” he told her.
She preened. I rolled my eyes and waited for the flirting to start up, but the next second, the boy with the light-blue eyes was looking back at me.
“My name,” he said, “is Ariel.”
A dozen offhand comments about The Little Mermaid sprang to mind, but I figured it would be in poor taste to say any of them out loud.
“I’m Jess.”
“You have questions,” he said.
I opened my mouth to start asking them, but he placed two fingers over my lips, and the words stilled on my tongue.
“There are three kinds,” he said.
Three kinds of what? I wondered. Three kinds of questions? But his fingers were still on my lips, his touch electric enough that I couldn’t bring myself to break away.
“There are Guardians. There are Heralds.” He dropped his hand to his side. “There is the third kind.”
“The third kind,” I repeated dumbly. Ariel inclined his head, but he didn’t blink—he never blinked.
“The third kind,�
�� he said again. “By their sword, darkness bleeds. They are the arm and the fire. They are the beginning of the End.”
That should have sounded insane—or at the very least, eccentric—but I couldn’t shake the niggling sensation that these were words that I’d heard before.
Guardians. Heralds. Third kind.
The End.
Each phrase that left Ariel’s mouth felt like it had been carved in stone, etched into the surface of the earth a thousand years before I’d ever drawn a breath. There was an element of ritual to his speech, as though each gesture, each word, each second was sacred.
I didn’t understand it, any of it, but my mouth wouldn’t open. Questions wouldn’t come. So I just stood there, frozen in silence—like that was my role to play while Ariel was playing his.
“Guardians protect. Heralds deliver messages. The third kind is the third kind.” Ariel stopped talking, as if he knew that my puny little brain needed time to process.
I could still feel the touch of his fingers on my lips.
“Heralds deliver messages,” I repeated, feeling like I had to say something. “Like the girl at the gas station?”
Ariel did not nod. He did not reply. He didn’t even blink.
“And Guardians, like Walter . . .” I trailed off and finished the thought silently. Like Kissy.
“She protects you,” Ariel said, lifting the thought from my brain with an ease that made me feel like every thought I’d ever had or ever would have was laid out for his inspection. “When it’s called for, there are others she protects as well.”
I thought of everything Kissy had ever done because of a ’pulse: the random acts of kindness, the senseless errands, the night she’d gotten the two of us out of our parents’ house. Most of the time, it had all seemed so random, but now I had to wonder if she’d inadvertently saved other people, the way she’d saved me—if there was some big plan, and she’d played the role of the butterfly, flapping her wings in one hemisphere and causing a hurricane in another.
“How do Guardians know what to do?” I asked, my mind spinning with the implications. “Their . . . orders . . .” That seemed more official than calling them ’pulses. “Who sends them?”
