Firelight f-1

by Sophie Jordan

  He drags a hand through his hair. The gold-brown locks feather, then fall back into place. “It’s a bit complicated, but yeah, I don’t want to get close to anyone…bring anyone around my family.” His gaze locks with mine. Grim. Resolute. “They’re poison, Jacinda. I can’t expose you to them. I wouldn’t expose anyone I care about to them.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean to lead you on. I’m sorry I asked you out, sorry that I can’t…” His fingers flex on the steering wheel until he regains his voice. “I’m just sorry.”

  My chest aches. Because he feels it, too. This thing, the connection between us. He feels it, and he would kill it, deny it. Whatever impulse brought him here, he won’t act on it.

  I suppose that’s a good thing, but I can’t muster up much gratitude.

  He motions to Mrs. Hennessey’s house. “You better go inside.”

  Angry heat tightens my skin. “Never took you for a coward,” I blurt.

  His head snaps in my direction. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You came here tonight for a reason. Why don’t you own up to it?” Before I can think about it, I lean across the center console and stare him directly in the face. “Do you always run from what you want?”

  Maybe I’m going out on a limb to imply he wants me, but the pulse throbbing at his neck tells me it’s so. And he is here, after all.

  His gaze drops to my mouth. “I can’t think of the last time I had anything I truly wanted,” he says huskily, so low I could hardly hear him. It’s more like I felt him.

  His words echo through me, striking a chord so deep that I’m sure there’s a reason for all this. A reason we’ve found each other, first in the mountains and now here. A reason. Something more. Something bigger than coincidence. “Me too.”

  He leans across the console. Sliding a hand behind my neck, he tugs my face closer. I move like fluid, melting toward him. “Maybe it’s time to change that then.”

  At the first brush of his mouth, stinging heat surges through me, shocking me motionless. My veins and skin pop and pulse.

  I rise on my knees, clutch his shoulders with clawing fingers, trying to get closer. My hands drift, rounding over his smooth shoulders, skimming down a rock-hard chest. His heart beats like a drum beneath my fingers. My blood burns, lungs expand and smolder. I can’t draw enough air through my nose…or at least not enough to chill my steaming lungs.

  His hands slide over my cheeks, holding my face. His skin feels like ice to my blistering flesh, and I kiss him harder.

  “Your skin,” he whispers against my mouth, “it’s so…”

  I drink him in, his words, his touch, moaning at his taste, at the sudden burning pull of my skin. The delicious tugging in my back.

  He kisses me deeper with cool, dry lips. Moves his hands down my face, along my jaw to my neck. His fingertips graze beneath my ear, and I shiver. “Your skin is so soft, so warm…”

  And then I grasp what exactly the tingling itch in my back means. My wings are awake. Ready and eager in a way I haven’t felt since arriving in Chaparral. They push at my back, on the verge of bursting free.

  I break away with a cry and reach for the handle. With a pained gasp, I fling open the door and stumble out, land hard on my knees on the lawn.

  I get to my feet and don’t bother shutting the door…just rush away.

  His desperate shout follows me. “Jacinda!”

  Several feet away, a safe enough distance that he won’t be able to detect any of the subtle differences in my appearance, I stop and look back, my chest rising and falling with deep, overheated breaths.

  He leans across the console, practically in the passenger seat. Something passes over his face. An emotion I can’t read. Can’t understand. “I’ll see you at school,” he calls with such decisiveness, it’s like there’s no question of this.

  Without answering him, without agreeing, I turn and storm up the driveway as fast as my legs can carry me. Right.

  “Jacinda!” he bellows my name, and I wince, hoping he doesn’t wake Mrs. Hennessey or the neighbors.

  I didn’t say it, but my answer was there, in my face, in my stumbling haste to get away from him. He heard it loud and clear, and apparently he didn’t like it. Apparently, our kiss only convinced him that we needed to pursue this thing between us.

  Except, our kiss told me the opposite. Kissing him told me what I already knew, but had been denying. I can’t risk being with him. Even if he got over his hang-ups about being around me, I still have plenty of my own. It’s one thing to draw strength from him…another thing entirely to become so swept up that I manifest in his presence. I know that now. Know what I have to do.

  At school, I won’t talk to him, won’t look at him…and I certainly won’t ever touch him again.

  If it kills me, I’ll ignore him and forever keep my distance.

  As I hurry down the path, my fingers curl inward and brush my injured palm, lightly, idly tracing the torn flesh, stroking the dampness there. Blood. My blood. Evidence of what I am.

  Panic claws my heart, squeezes tightly in my chest.

  I jerk to a stop and whirl around like I still might find Will at the curb, but he’s gone. The shirt…is gone. Gone and headed into the den of my enemies.

  Closing my eyes, I shake my head, dread clawing up my throat. He’s gone. He left with a shirt covered in my blood. My purple-hued draki blood.

  When he sees it he’ll figure it out. He’ll know exactly what I am.

  The house is silent when I slip inside, moving like a shadow through rooms that feel like they’re closing in on me. Now more than ever. Tamra is a motionless shape beneath the covers as I quietly kick off my shoes.

  The bed dips from my weight. I exhale as I pull the covers to my chin, fold my hands over my chest, and strive for a calm I don’t feel, all my thoughts tangled up in the shirt bearing my blood that’s now in Will’s possession.

  “If you ruin this for me, I’ll never forgive you.”

  Strangely, my sister’s disembodied voice stretching across the dark doesn’t startle me. Not with my head spinning with rapid schemes to reclaim the evidence that I’m not human.

  She doesn’t ask for an explanation, and I don’t offer one. It’s enough that I snuck out, and she knows it. As far as she’s concerned, I can’t be up to anything good.

  Her bed squeaks as she rolls onto her side. I can think of nothing to say. Nothing to reassure her. Nothing to make me feel less guilty, less selfish.

  My lips hum from the memory of Will’s kiss. I almost lost it back there. Almost exposed myself. Almost ruined us all.

  And that still might happen if I don’t get my hands on Will’s shirt.

  I have to get it back. At any cost.

  14

  The following day sweat traces my spine as I run the last mile to Will’s house, the hard smack of my shoes on asphalt strangely fortifying.

  I promised Mom I would be back before dinner. She likes to eat early on Saturday evenings. There’s enough tension in the house that I don’t want to upset her.

  If I’m lucky, Will uses a hamper like Tamra and I do. I picture the shirt wadded up inside it, my blood, purple and iridescent and gleaming even when free of my body, unnoticeable. Hopefully. He of all people would recognize the purple stains for what they are. Discovering I’m draki exposes us all. Puts every draki at risk, even Mom and Tamra. Just by relation to me their lives would be forfeit.

  I slow as I approach his house, spotting the Spanish-tiled roof between the trees. I memorized the directions Catherine gave me over the phone. I knew I liked her for a reason. Other than a meaningful hmmm, she didn’t pry and ask why I wanted to know where Will lived.

  The gate is open, so I run down the drive, hesitating only a moment before the sweeping portico when I notice the Land Rover parked outside the detached garage. I jerk in place for a moment, debating my next move.

  In a perfect world, the house would be vacant with a window left open or unlocked. I would slip inside
, find the shirt, and be out in five minutes. But my world has never been perfect.

  I don’t have a choice. I can’t risk another day. I just have to play it out. With an ugly mutter, I push on.

  Before I can reconsider, I’m up the front steps and knocking on the large double doors. The sound echoes, like a great cavern or abyss stretches out on the other side. I wait, wishing I had worn something other than my striped running shorts and tank top. I’d scraped my hair back into a ponytail that hangs like a horse’s tail down my back. Not my best look.

  When the door starts to swing open, that feeling sweeps over me again and I know Will’s on the other side before I see him.

  He doesn’t even try to look happy to see me. Given how fast I fled his car yesterday, it’s no wonder he looks surprised. “Jacinda. What are you doing here?”

  I toss back his explanation from the night before. “I thought I would check out where you live. You know. Just in case.”

  He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even smile at my joke — the reversal of his words last night. Instead, he looks uneasily over his shoulder. At least he’s not shouting out an alarm that a draki is on his doorstep. Clearly he hasn’t examined his shirt closely.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Will? Who’s here?” The door pulls wider. A man with Will’s hazel eyes steps up beside him. The similarity ends with the eyes. Not as tall as Will, he’s wiry, like he spends a lot of time in the gym, honing his body.

  “Oh, hello.” Unlike Will, he smiles easily, but it’s empty. Like he does it all the time without meaning.

  “Dad, this is Jacinda. From school.”

  “Jacinda,” he says warmly, reaching for my hand. And I offer it to him. Shake hands with the devil himself, see in his eyes, feel in his touch, that he’s nothing like Will. This hunter would never let a draki escape.

  “Mr. Rutledge,” I manage to say in a normal voice. “Nice to meet you.”

  His hand surrounds my crawling flesh. “Likewise. Will doesn’t bring many of his friends around.”

  “Dad,” Will says tightly.

  He releases my hand and claps Will on the back. “Okay, I’ll stop embarrassing you.” He looks at me again, his expression avid as he surveys me with obvious approval. “Jacinda, join us. We’re grilling on the back deck.”

  “Dad, I don’t think—”

  “I would love that,” I lie. Eating with Will’s dad ranks right up there with having my teeth drilled, but I have to get inside. It’s not just about me. Tamra, Mom, the pride, draki everywhere…leaving that shirt in this house puts us all in peril.

  Mr. Rutledge waves me inside. I sweep past Will into the frigidly chill house.

  “Do you like brisket, Jacinda? It’s been smoking since this morning. It should be ready soon.”

  Will falls in beside me as we follow his dad through the vast entrance hall. Our steps echo over the tiled floor. The house is coolly perfect. Lifeless art hangs on the walls and solid white fans whir down at us from the double-high ceiling as we file down a wide corridor.

  Will’s voice is a rasp near my ear. “What are you doing here?”

  And with that question, I’m struck with being here. In his home, my enemy’s lair. Is this where they bring captive draki? Before selling them to the enkros? My skin ripples, fear dangerously close. I suck in a breath and chafe a hand over my arm, reining in my imagination.

  “Are you so disappointed to see me?” I ask, finding courage. His dad rounds a corner ahead of us. “You wanted to see me last night.” I nearly choke on the reminder. Last night I almost thought he would chase me into my house.

  He grabs my arm and pulls me to a stop. Those changeable eyes of his rove my face, searching. I sense his confusion, his inability to understand me…or why I’m here. “I want to see you, I haven’t thought of anything else….” He pauses, looking uncomfortable. “Just not here.”

  “Will? Jacinda? Come on!”

  He flinches at his father’s voice. His gaze flickers beyond me, over my shoulder. “We can see each other somewhere else. I told you how I felt about my family. You shouldn’t be here,” he says quietly.

  “Well, I am here, and I’m not leaving.” I pull my arm free and walk ahead, calling over my shoulder, “Just in time, too. I’m hungry.”

  “Jacinda,” he pleads, his voice tinged with a desperation I just don’t get. I’m certain his determination to keep me out of his home, away from his family, is tangled up in the fact that he’s a draki hunter. But what does that have to do with me? He doesn’t know what I am. His family shouldn’t suspect anything just because he has a girl over to his house.

  Will catches up with me in a kitchen of gleaming surfaces and state-of-the-art appliances. I sense his anxiety as we step through the French doors onto the deck. Several faces turn to stare. No one speaks.

  Mr. Rutledge motions at me as he opens the lid to the smoker. “Everyone, this is—”

  “Jacinda,” Xander supplies, rising from a wrought-iron chair, a sweating bottle of soda in his hand. “Will, I didn’t know you were bringing a date.”

  Angus munches from a large bag of potato chips, not bothering to stand or speak, just watching with his thuggish stare.

  “Must have slipped my mind.” Will guides me to one of the patio tables and introduces me to the others: Xander’s parents, a set of uncles and aunts, several more cousins. Hunters all, I realize. At least those over thirteen. I don’t imagine the toddler sucking a juice box or the swinging seven-year-old hunts. Yet.

  They all welcome me, assessing me with the same avidity I’d endured from Will’s father. As we eat, I’m subjected to a battery of questions. Where do you live? Where did you move from? What do your parents do? Do you have siblings? Do you play sports? Like I’m being interviewed. Mr. Rutledge seems most interested that I run…that I ran the seven miles to their house.

  “She’s fast, too,” Will volunteers, almost grudgingly, like he knows small talk is expected but doesn’t wish to contribute.

  “Really.” Mr. Rutledge arches his brows. “Long-distance running requires great stamina. I’ve always been impressed with those capable of such endurance.”

  Throughout our dialogue, Xander studies me across the table, quietly intent. Will at my side gives me some comfort. That and the gentle misters spraying cooling vapor over the patio. My skin drinks it in.

  When the meal winds down, Will’s aunts rise to fetch dessert from the kitchen. I see my chance and jump up to help. In the kitchen, I break free, excusing myself to use the restroom.

  I take the stairs off the main entry. My sneakers race silently over a red runner as I open doors and stick my head inside room after room until I find Will’s.

  Even if I didn’t sense his long-imbued presence, I would have known the wood-paneled room belonged to him. It lacks the cold precision of the rest of the house. The bed is made, but otherwise it feels lived in. Books and magazines litter a bedside table. His literature book lies open on the desk, a half-written essay beside it. A framed photo of a woman with Will’s gold-brown hair sits there also, and I know it’s his mother, see him in her smiling face.

  Tearing my gaze away, I open his closet and spot the hamper below his hanging clothes. Digging through the garments, I pull out the bloodied shirt with a gasp of relief. Clutching it in my shaking hands, I close the closet door, my pulse a feverish throb at my neck. What am I going to do with it now?

  As I carefully peer out into the hall, an idea forms to hide the shirt somewhere outside, maybe in the front bushes where I can collect it later, after I’ve managed to extricate myself. The plan burns through my mind as I hurry down the hall, pleased with myself but still wary. Locating the shirt had almost been too easy.

  Gradually, a sound penetrates — thudding footsteps ascending the stairs.

  Panic flares hotly in my chest. I dive into the nearest room, closing the door with a soft click behind me. I grip the door latch, ears straining to hear the slightest movemen
t on the other side. I stave off the fiery grip of fear with sharp sips of breath and focus on cooling my lungs. Manifesting now would be the worst possible scenario.

  My gaze drills into the door, almost as if I can see through it to the other side. Releasing the latch, I ease back a step, then another. My eyes fasten, unblinking on that door as I strangle the shirt in my hands. As if I might somehow kill it, cease its existence. If I could manifest and burn it to cinders without setting off any smoke alarms I would.

  As the moments pass, and no one comes, the tension ebbs from my shoulders. Breathing easier, I turn my attention to the room in which I find myself.

  Horror strikes me full force. Cripples me motionless. My gaze flies, taking it all in with dizzying speed.

  Draki skin stares back at me…everywhere.

  The desk, the lamp shades, the furniture. All are covered in the flesh of my brethren. Bile climbs up my throat.

  My knees give out and I stagger, reach to a chair for support then snatch my hand away with a pained hiss. I drop the shirt, gazing in horror at the gleaming black upholstery I touched, onyx flesh, shockingly familiar with its iridescent winks of purple. My father flashes across my mind. Could it be…

  No! Sick fury seizes me. I slap both hands over my mouth, stifling a scream, fingers digging into my cheeks. My eyes sting and I realize I’m weeping. Tears tumble over my hands.

  Still, I look around, rotate in a small circle, choke back a sob at the pillows on the sofa covered in the deep bronze of an earth draki — the second-most common type of my kind, marked for its hyper-ability to find gems, edible vegetation, underground water…anything relating to soil. To see their remains here, in this house, in this desert, so far from the earth they love, is devastating.

  I look away, too sick to look at the vile evidence of my race’s murder.

  My gaze lands on a giant map of North America stretched out on one wall. Black, green, and red flags scatter widely across it, grouped predominantly in mountainous areas ideal for draki existence. My stomach tightens as the significance sinks in. I lower my hands from my face and inch closer, my eyes devouring the sight of all those black flags. So many. I tremble at what they might represent.