“Pretty much.”
“Any chance of getting out of it?”
“Hmm. Not any legitimate chance. If it were just Mom, I could talk her out of it—but apparently John has decided that I need ‘structure.’ And Mom’s totally believing him.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been grounded before in my life. I don’t know what she’d do if I just ignored it.” I thought for a minute. “Her head might actually explode.”
Josh smiled at me and my heart thumped. “Then we’ll just have to make sure she doesn’t find out.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, the first bell rang and kids started heading off to class. Josh reached out and squeezed my hand, then sprinted down the hall toward his own first class of the day. I walked more slowly toward geometry, wondering what exactly he had meant.
When I walked into English class, the first thing I noticed was that Josh had gotten there before me. The second thing was that he and Ally were deep in conversation.
“Hey,” I said as I slid into my seat.
“Hi, Laney.” Ally said. “Josh said you got grounded for cutting out on P.E. yesterday.”
I shot him an irritated look. “Yeah. Kayla’s father’s being a real pain.”
“So how grounded is grounded?” she asked.
“I have to pretty much go straight home from selling yearbook ads every day.”
“So you can’t leave the house. Can other people come to see you?”
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “What are you two planning?”
“Nothing, yet,” Ally said. “Just gathering information.”
After class, I grabbed Ally’s arm and held her back. “I didn’t think you even liked Josh,” I said.
“I like him fine,” she said. “I just never liked him liked him. You know. And I was just a little surprised that you did. But hey,” she raised her hands in a defensive posture. “If you like him, then I’m all for it.” She raised one eyebrow, smiled, and walked away.
“I don’t know how I feel about him,” I muttered to no one in particular.
“At least you don’t hate me,” Josh murmured in my ear. “That’s a start.”
I jumped. “Oh! I didn’t know you were there!”
“Just waiting for you to finish talking to Ally, so I could walk you to P.E. Wouldn’t want you to miss that again.”
“Heaven forbid,” I said. “I might get grounded for the rest of my life if I’m late.”
He laughed and we headed to the gym.
And no, I’m not stupid. It occurred to me that this whole “I’m telling you everything” might just be a ploy to make me like him more, so he could follow Bartlef’s orders. But just at that moment, I didn’t care. I mean, it wasn’t like he could do anything about it right there in the middle of the school hall, right? So I was safe.
Or at least, as safe as was humanly possible, given that I was walking down a school hallway with a demon whose silver eyes and slow smile made my head swim.
And I swear Coach Laramie looked at me with worry in her eyes when I walked into the gym.
Then again, maybe that was because of my tendency to find the dead guys that Fairy wanted to keep hidden.
* * *
Sarah was waiting for me outside the lunchroom after class. I was getting a little tired of people lurking around doorways waiting to talk to me.
“I tried to call you last night,” she said, “but Kayla’s dad said you weren’t available.”
I felt my face turn a hot, bright red with anger. Clearly I was going to have to ask for more details about what exactly he meant by grounded. No phone? He hadn’t said anything about no phone.
“Ally told me that you got grounded for talking to Josh yesterday instead of selling ads with Mason.”
Good Lord. How did Josh’s People keep their big secret in a town where everybody seemed to instantly know everything?
I nodded. “Sorta. That was part of it, anyway.”
“But they were both there that night, right?”
I nodded shortly, suddenly acutely aware of the possibility that I could be putting her in danger—especially if something bad had happened to Quentin just because he’d told her a tiny part of what was going on. In my worry over my own impending mother-of-savior-hood, I’d totally forgotten to ask Josh about Sarah’s old boyfriend.
“So do you trust Josh?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think so.”
“What about Mason?”
“Probably not.”
“But you’re supposed to go sell ads with him today?”
I nodded. I hadn’t figured out how to get out of it.
“You want me to come with you?” she asked.
My mouth fell open while I tried to figure out what to say to her. My first instinct was to say “Yes, yes, please!,” fall on my knees and kiss her hand to thank her. But people might stare, and that’s never a good way to start the year as the new kid. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea for her to come with me. Again, the whole Disappearance of Quentin thing worried me.
“I guess not,” I finally said, reluctance shining through every word.
“You sure?”
“No,” I said. “But yeah. I think it would be better if you didn’t come with us. I think I can handle him by myself.” But only because of the ‘no date rape’ clause, I thought.
“Laney?”
I jumped about a foot into the air. “Josh!” I said. “You have to quit sneaking up on me like that!”
“I’ll see you inside,” Sarah said, and scooted into the lunchroom.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” I asked Josh.
He shrugged. “Meh. Chemistry. Who needs it?”
I sighed and shook my head. “What do you want?”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“That sounds ominous.”
“It’s just that. . . if you’re going to be spending hours every day with Mason, I really think you need to see what you’re up against. Before you spend any more time with him.”
“How?”
“I think we need to find someplace private for me to show you.”
I could almost hear a little voice in the back of my head chattering, Not a good idea, not a good idea, not a good idea.
I think it might have been the voice of reason.
I told it to shut up.
“When?” I asked. “Where? I can’t skip any more classes. John would go postal. He’d probably assign a ranch hand to follow me around all the time to make sure I didn’t break any more rules. I need some order in my life, you know.”
So sometimes I’m sarcastic. So what?
“But he can’t ground you for skipping out on lunch, can he?”
My stomach growled and I groaned. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Where are we going?”
“To the darkroom,” he said.
Of course. Because hanging out with a demon in a darkroom while he showed me all the ways his rival could use his power to seduce me was absolutely not the stupidest thing I’d ever done.
Nope.
The stupidest thing I’d ever done was let my mother move us to Fairy, Texas.
* * *
“The door’s locked,” I said, jiggling the knob.
“First lesson,” Josh said. “You can’t lock us out.” He touched the door for a moment, and I heard the lock click.
“You don’t have be, like, invited in or anything?”
He laughed quietly. “We’re not vampires, Laney.”
I didn't answer that.
We stepped into the darkened room. Josh left the light off so that just the dim sunlight filtering in through the blinds illuminated our path to the darkroom. The door clicked behind us, locked once again.
“So no silver bullets, either?”
“Well, yeah. A silver bullet could hurt us. But it could hurt anyone, right? So no, not especially. That’s werewolves, anyway.”
“Stake th
rough the heart?”
“Vampires.”
“So it wouldn’t kill you?”
“Well, yeah. But you’d have to catch me first.” And just like that, he was gone.
I spun around. “Josh?”
“Behind you.”
“Gah! What was that?”
“I just shifted into the ethereal plane entirely.”
“Oh.” Okay. That was weird.
“So, yeah. Stake through the heart could work if you could catch me, just like it would kill you.”
“What about just regular bullets?”
He stopped and looked into my eyes. “You know, Laney, I’m really hoping you don’t end up needing to kill any of us.”
“Well, I hope so, too. But I at least want to know how to do it.”
“We’re not all that different. If it would kill you, it would probably kill us.”
“Just probably?”
He sighed. “We heal faster than humans. And if we’re not too damaged to shift, we heal even faster than that in the ethereal.”
“So how could I keep one of you from shifting?”
He looked around nervously. “Laney, I could get into trouble for telling you any of this.” His voice dropped. “And you don’t want to know what happens to People who talk to norms about us without the Abba’s permission.”
“Like Quentin?”
He looked startled. “Yeah. Like Quentin.”
“You know what? Actually, I do want to know what happened to him. So does Sarah.”
His eyes took on a haunted look. “I can’t tell you that. Not right now. We don’t have much time, and I have a lot I need to show you. Just trust me, okay?”
“I don’t know if I can.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stared into my eyes.
I heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Okay. Fine. I’ll try to trust you.”
“Good.” Josh started to open the door to the darkroom, but stopped and looked around.
“Actually, I think I’d better do this next bit out here,” he said.
I blinked in confusion as his entire form seemed to shimmer for a moment, then solidify again. He stood completely still, waiting for my response
His wings stretched out on either side of him, fully extended from some point in his back, almost brushing the walls with the tips. I think that until that moment, I hadn’t completely believed what was going on. Not really.
But there was no denying the fifteen-foot wingspan in front of my eyes.
And these weren’t the horrible black leather wings that I’d seen on Bartlef.
They were glorious.
Chapter 9
Josh’s wings matched his eyes—silver, with shimmers of blue and green skating across their surface. They shone like patent leather. My breath left my body in an oof.
“Could I . . . can I . . . would it be okay if I touched one?” I whispered.
Josh shrugged a little self-consciously and his right wing lifted a bit with his shoulder. “Okay.”
I reached one finger out and stroked an expanse of the wing. It felt like silk, stretched out on a frame.
“Can you fly?” I asked, awed.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But we’re only supposed to do it in the ethereal.”
I ran my palm down the edge of his wing, feeling the ridge of bone underneath my hand. Josh shivered.
“Can you feel that?”
“Yes.” His voice was strained.
“They’re beautiful.”
“Thanks.” He closed his eyes for a moment, shimmered again, and the wings were gone.
“Wow,” I said.
“There’s more.” He held out his hand and waited for me to take it, then opened the darkroom and stepped inside. He locked the door behind us.
“I can’t imagine more after that,” I said. I looked around. Again, the smell of chemicals almost made my eyes water. “And I can’t actually imagine what you can show me in here that you couldn’t show me in the main room.”
“Nothing, really,” he said. “I just feel better having a couple of locked doors between us and the rest of the world. Bad enough I’m telling you all this. If some other norm walked in on us, Bartlef would have my head. And then you’d have to deal with Mason all on your own.”
I started to ask if “have my head” was just a figure of speech, but then decided I didn’t really want to know.
“So what else?” I asked.
“This.” Again, Josh closed his eyes and shimmered. I waited for the wings to appear again, but they didn’t. Instead, when he opened his eyes they almost glowed, they were so bright.
In fact, his entire body glowed. I felt myself drawn to the warmth of him. I took a step closer. I drew in a deep breath. The chemical smell of the darkroom was gone. I smelled something warm and spicy. I leaned in closer.
“It’s a glamour,” Josh said. “It draws norms to us.”
I held myself completely still. “Like pheromones?”
“More like a moth to the flame,” he muttered. He leaned closer, so that we stood less than an inch apart. He bent down and touched his lips to mine.
My eyes fluttered closed and I leaned closer so that we were pressed against each other. His kiss was slow, like his smile, and seeped into me until I could feel myself glowing along with him. When he broke away from me, I looked down and was oddly unsurprised to see my arm shining gently in the dark next to his.
“So you can all do that?” I asked breathlessly.
“Um...” Josh took a deep breath himself, shaking his head as if to clear it. “I don’t know. It’s not usually . . . like that.” He looked down at his own arm, which had wrapped itself around my waist. “It’s never been quite like that,” he whispered, as if to himself.
I started to ask him what he meant, but at that moment I heard the outer door to the classroom open. I spun away from Josh and stared at the darkroom door.
“No problem,” I heard Mr. Carlson say. “I’ll just get it out of the darkroom.” The doorknob jiggled.
I gasped, and Josh clamped his hand down over my mouth.
“Shh,” he hissed. Then he grabbed me and pulled me back so that I was pressed against him. I heard him mutter a couple of words, but I couldn’t tell what they were. And then, just as the door opened, the whole room shimmered. When Mr. Carlson walked in, it was like looking at him through a hazy veil of white gauze. I started to step toward him to say something, to try to explain to him, but Josh kept hold of me, and I quickly realized that Mr. Carlson had no idea we were there. He pulled a roll of film down from the shelf and left the room again, locking the door behind him. I heard his footsteps leave the classroom and the main door click shut again.
I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “What was that?” I whispered.
Josh let go of me and took a half-step back. The air around me shimmered again and my vision cleared.
Josh frowned and spoke in a normal voice. “We were in the ethereal plane. I took you through with me.”
“So is that another of your powers?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly. “No. In fact, as far as I know, no one’s ever taken a norm through to the ethereal before.” He face was chalky and pale.
“So that’s a big deal?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said, “But I think maybe we ought to stop here for today.”
“Is there more I need to know?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I think that maybe there’s more that I need to know before I tell you anything else.” When he reached for the door, his hand was shaking.
* * *
I was absolutely starving by the time I got through my next class, so I scarfed down the sandwich I’d brought for lunch between classes. Then my stomach hurt. In history class, Natalie and Scott kept teasing me about running off with Josh. Sarah watched me with worry in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. And in Spanish, Andrew kept looking at me with hangdog eyes.
It was an awf
ul afternoon, made worse by the fact that I couldn’t concentrate on anything anyone said to me. I just kept remembering the feel of Josh’s lips on mine, his wing under my fingertip. And once I felt myself starting to glow again. I clamped down on my thoughts and hoped like crazy no one noticed.
In the moments when I could quit thinking about Josh, I thought about my reaction to him and tried to figure out what it might mean. Somehow, I didn’t think my extreme reaction to him went very far toward the “Laney’s not the Yatah” theory. And when I wasn’t trying to figure that out, I was thinking about how to get out of going with Mason to sell ads.
So my thoughts chased each other around in circles and I tried to look like I was paying attention to the teachers.
I hadn’t figured anything out by the last class period.
“Hey!” Mason said cheerfully as I walked into the yearbook room for the second time that day. He just looked so normal. Like any cute high school guy. A popular football player with a great smile. I hated knowing that every time he spoke to me, he had a secret agenda.
“I hear you’re stuck with me for the next week, Harris,” he said with a grin.
I aimed for normal, too. “Yep,” I said. “You and my oh-so-cheerful home environment.” I avoided looking toward Kayla.
“Cynthia and I are leaving, Mr. Carlson,” she said loudly.
“Bye, Kayla,” he said absently.
“Ready?” Mason asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” If only he knew.
And then the rest of the afternoon went exactly as usual. Mason didn’t flirt with me any more than usual—that is, he flirted outrageously, but no more than he did with all the other girls I saw him talk to. If I hadn’t seen him in that room with Bartlef, seen the picture of him with wings, heard him talking about who I “belonged” to, I wouldn’t have believed that he was capable of being involved in a plot like that. He just seemed so open. Honest. Straightforward.
Except that I had heard and seen all of that.
“You’re awful quiet today, Harris,” he said after about half an hour of driving from one real-estate office to the next.
“Hm? I am?” I shook my head. And I thought I’d been doing so well.
“Yeah. What’s going on?”
Paranormal Magic (Shades of Prey Book 1) Page 30
