Tyler must have recognized the confused expression on my face, because he leaned forward. “It’s natural to be hungry after something like last night.”
“Right.” It was time for answers. “And what exactly was that?”
Tyler sat up straight. Falling back into more familiar conversation territory for us—facts and information—felt reassuring.
“Eve, you’re not human. If there was any doubt over your blood work, it was eliminated last night.”
“What?” I spoke around another mouthful of food as I attempted to digest the bombshell Tyler had just dropped. “When did my blood work come back? Are you saying I’m Variant? Do I have a healing power? Wait, but how would I have known that Ethan was in trouble?” My mind was racing with the possibilities.
“Slow down.” Tyler chuckled. “Your blood work came in on Friday—a little early. Since you had not presented any powers and I knew you were being truthful when you said you didn’t believe you were Variant, I was waiting until Monday to set a meeting. But we’ve suspected . . .” He threw a meaningful look in Josh’s direction.
Josh casually sipped on his own pond sludge, looking completely unfazed by the situation. “Since the night of the party. When we kissed,” he finished, his green eyes trained on me the whole time.
I lifted my chin and crossed my arms defiantly, refusing to be embarrassed. He was the one who had made it weird by throwing me out and then practically stalking me.
Ethan had stopped eating too. I shifted my gaze in his direction to find him grinning at me.
And then the memory slammed into my consciousness.
We kissed!
I gasped, my hand shooting to my mouth, my eyes going wide.
“Remembering more from last night?” His grin was mischievous, despite the adorable dimples in his cheeks.
Was he teasing me? I resumed my defiant posture and stared at him.
Tyler was thoroughly confused. “What the hell?”
Again, Josh saved me from having to answer. “They kissed. Last night, or rather early this morning, in bed.”
“What?” Tyler and I spoke at the same time. Apparently he didn’t know this piece of the story either. How the hell did Josh know that?
“I was there. One of us was in the room with you right up until an hour before you woke up. We had to monitor you and make sure you were both OK.” A serious expression passed over Josh’s face. “Ethan, you came so close . . . and Eve, you passed out and we couldn’t wake you. It was scary.”
He was worried about us. Both of us. Ethan slapped a big hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed.
“It’s all good bro. I made it. Eve’s fine. Everything’s totally copacetic.” He grinned and went back to eating. Josh rolled his eyes at him, but I caught the affectionate smile on the end of it.
Tyler cleared his throat, ready to steer the conversation back toward a more productive topic. “Well I guess that’s natural under the circumstances. But let’s focus. We have a lot to cover.”
“Right. What exactly are those circumstances?” Even though my brain had begun to piece it together, the logic and evidence undeniable, I still needed to hear it. It didn’t feel real.
“You are not only Variant, Eve.” Tyler leaned forward, fixing me with his serious look. “You’re a Vital. And it would seem you’ve already found your Bond in Ethan and Josh.”
My mind went blank for a moment, struggling to process this information and reconcile it with the fact that I’d grown up believing I was human. I blinked slowly and looked at the three guys sitting across from me, one by one. Tyler’s eyes were cautious, assessing my reaction. Next to him, Ethan and Josh were watching me with matching tender looks on their faces. Soft smiles just for me.
I’m a Vital. I tried the label on for size in my mind.
I had unbridled access to limitless power. Two people with some of the rarest and most fascinating abilities I had ever seen were in my Bond.
I have a Bond.
A Bond—a group consisting of at least one Vital and one Variant. A tight, unbreakable connection defined by the Light shared between the people in it, tethering them to each other for the rest of their lives.
I took a deep breath, pushing aside my contradicting feelings of apprehension and excitement, and chose to focus on the more immediate questions.
“So that’s why I knew Ethan was hurt? The Light was instinctively drawn to saving him. I couldn’t have stopped myself from sprinting here like a maniac if I’d tried. And Josh, when we kissed, that’s why all that stuff started flying around the room. It was you doing it, with your ability. But it was me too because I was feeding you more Light.”
Now they were all smiling. Tyler looked relieved, probably because I was allowing my curious mind to connect the dots rather than freaking out. I should have been more floored, more surprised. But as soon as the initial shock wore off, it all made perfect sense.
I hate unanswered questions more than anything, and this revelation was allowing so many pieces to fall into place. I felt strangely calm about it. If anything, I was becoming excited. Hungry to learn more about my Light access, about my connection to the boys, my mind had sprung into full curiosity mode.
But before I had a chance to start firing my million questions, Alec walked back into the room. He marched right up to us and set a takeaway coffee cup on the table in front of me. Resting one hand on the back of my chair, he leaned down, careful not to touch me, his intense eyes level with mine.
“Thank you for saving my cousin’s life. I don’t have a lot of family left. I’m glad we’ve found . . . their Vital. Ethan and Josh’s Vital. You.” He frowned at the end, looking a little unsure of what he was saying.
“I couldn’t have stayed away if I tried. There’s no need to thank me.” I bit my lip. I’d unintentionally thrown his words back in his face. After trying to thank him for saving my life several times and being repeatedly dismissed, here I was, doing the same. “You’re welcome,” I hastened to add, injecting as much sincerity into the words as I could and giving him a smile—despite the fact that he’d been a massive asshole to me.
He nodded once and straightened, walking back to his spot in the doorway, facing us.
“Love you too, bro!” Ethan piped in.
Alec smiled briefly but ignored him otherwise. “The latte is from a café nearby. Best non-American pond sludge coffee in town.”
Stunned, I looked down at the little cup in front of me. He’d gone out to get me coffee? How . . . thoughtful. I’d known the kind, gentle stranger who had been there for me in the hospital was in there somewhere. I just wished it hadn’t taken someone nearly dying to bring it out of him.
My first tentative sip of the latte got me way more excited than what could be considered normal. It was good. Really good! So good that it made me think of Melbourne—the city that had made me such a coffee snob in the first place.
“What did I miss?” Alec asked.
“Eve and Kid kissed,” Josh threw in before anyone else could speak, leaning back, hands crossed behind his head, a teasing smile on his lips. He seemed to be getting an unusual amount of pleasure from sharing that little fact.
Alec looked from me to Ethan and then sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I leave for five minutes . . . This is getting out of hand.” He turned to Tyler, speaking to him directly. “The connection is too strong now. Avoidance is futile. We’re going to have to start teaching them to control it, or the three of them are screwed and we won’t be able to do much to protect them.”
His words were heavy with frustration, and I understood why. Josh’s power could be incredibly destructive unchecked—as evidenced by the sheer volume of stuff floating around his room after our brief kiss—and Ethan’s was even more dangerous.
I sat bolt upright, a new question occurring to me, and I blurted it out without thinking. “How come we didn’t light the bed on fire?”
Alec pinched the bridge of his nose again
, sighing deeply; Tyler looked up to the ceiling, his expression decidedly uncomfortable; Josh choked on his sip of coffee; and Ethan laughed, loud and from deep in his chest.
“We still can, if that’s what you want,” he said on the end of his laugh, leaning his elbows on the table and giving me a devilish grin.
I was momentarily embarrassed at my choice of words, not to mention distracted by Ethan’s obvious flirting, but I pushed it all aside and rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean. If brief contact with Josh had all his worldly possessions floating around like we were in a scene from Carrie, why didn’t Ethan’s fire ability go haywire when we . . . touched?”
Tyler was quick to explain. “You were both weakened. He had nearly died, and you had completely drained yourself feeding him the power he needed to survive. At that point, almost all the Light was being used to sustain you, Eve, as your levels recovered. Although I suspect that even as your levels of Light rose slowly, you were still channeling small doses into Ethan.
“As soon as we put you two in the bed, you both immediately gravitated to each other, seeking out contact, despite being passed out. Eve, you began to cry in your sleep when we lifted you off Ethan—once we were sure he wouldn’t die, of course.
“Ethan wouldn’t have been able to muster even a matchstick-sized flame in his state, and you had no energy to spare for his ability. It was all being used to keep you both alive. That’s why you were so hungry this morning—your body is craving energy, from all sources. You don’t realize you’re even doing it, Eve, but right now you’re building up your stores, drawing Light into yourself, ready for when it might be needed next.”
“So last night we were simply too weak for it to be dangerous. But this morning when I hugged him, that’s why you pulled me off?”
“Yes.” Tyler nodded, and Josh answered simultaneously with a vague “More or less. Sure. That’s why.”
Tempting as it was to delve into why the boy who had kissed me had pulled me out of a hug with another boy who had kissed me, I had more pressing concerns. Such as why Ethan had been dying in the first place.
“What exactly happened to Ethan last night? Why didn’t you just call an ambulance?”
This time no one jumped in to answer. Silence filled the room as all the boys turned to Tyler.
When Tyler answered, I knew I wouldn’t get the full story.
“Basically he used too much of his ability. There was an incident, and he used his fire to . . . help someone. He used too much. We don’t have direct access to the Light like you do, Eve. We can use our abilities without a connection to a Vital, but it’s limited. If we push it too far, it starts feeding on our life force.”
I watched Ethan as Tyler spoke. His face was serious again, piercing me with his amber eyes.
“A hospital wouldn’t have been able to help him?”
“There is nothing that modern medicine can do when we overuse our abilities. There have been studies. I’ll send you links to some research. When we deplete ourselves like that, our body temperature plummets, like we’re going into hypothermia. The hypothesis is that the ability uses every bit of energy available to it—it drains the very life from our veins, the very heat from our flesh. The only chance we have is to warm the body up and hope it can heal itself. It happens so fast that even waiting for an ambulance would have taken too long.”
“Of course, having a Vital helps,” Josh added. “As you saw last night. If it wasn’t for you, Eve, Ethan probably wouldn’t have . . . made it.”
The room fell silent, everyone looking down at their hands, their mugs, the table.
I began to understand how close these four were. Even though only Alec and Ethan were actually related, it was clear they were all family. The kind that runs deeper than blood.
“The burned-out car.” The charred remains of the vehicle I’d encountered on my mad dash here had to connect with what they were telling me. Sort of telling me. Kind of alluding to without actually telling me anything.
I looked from one to the other, waiting for confirmation. Ethan and Josh avoided my eyes, and Tyler was staring into space, lost in thought. The only one who returned my gaze was Alec, his blue eyes unwavering. I raised my eyebrows and gave him a “start talking” look.
“Ty?” He surprised me by turning to Tyler, who recovered from his distracted stare and gave Alec a slight nod.
“Yes. That was Ethan,” Alec finally confirmed.
“Holy shit! What happened?”
“We can’t tell you that. It’s classified,” Tyler cut in.
“I am so sick of that word.” I rolled my eyes, flopping back in my seat. The fact that Tyler had even used that word told me this had something to do with Melior Group and Alec’s secretive, dangerous job, but Alec’s deferring to Tyler spoke volumes too. “Wait, do you work for Melior Group?” I fired the question at Tyler before he could give me any more evasive talk.
“You’re too observant for your own good.” He sighed, but it was said with affection, and warmth sparked in my chest at his praising of my intellect. “Yes. I work for Melior Group and for Bradford Hills. They’re two of the biggest Variant associated institutions in the country—they need to have a collaborative relationship. I act as a sort of liaison. My position isn’t a secret, but it’s not exactly advertised either.” He fixed me with a meaningful look, and I nodded.
“Yeah, and that technically puts Tyler’s rank above Alec’s, even though Alec is older by two years.” Josh lifted his mug up to his mouth, barely covering a cheeky grin. I was starting to think Josh was a bit of a shit-stirrer. I knew I probably shouldn’t encourage him, but the corners of my mouth twitched up involuntarily.
“Man, it’s not even funny.” The humor in Ethan’s voice contradicted his statement. “Ever since he became Alec’s boss, he’s been even bossier in all other areas of our lives.”
“I am not bossy!” Tyler sounded downright outraged.
“And Tyler is not my boss. He just happens to outrank me,” Alec finally piped in. “Can we please get this conversation back on track?”
“Look,” Tyler said to me. “There are some things happening—things we can’t really tell you about yet—but it’s a dangerous time to be a Variant. Especially one with an intimidating ability like Ethan’s. Things happened last night, and if it wasn’t for Ethan, people might have lost their lives.”
“Oh my god! Someone tried to kill you guys?”
“Eve, please! We can’t tell you more. And you can’t tell anyone what happened here. It would put you in danger too. Do you understand?” His gray eyes were fixing me with an intense look.
“Fine.” I meant for it to sound sarcastic, but it came out soft and meek.
My brain was running a million miles an hour.
The Reds had said that without his Vital, Ethan’s ability was limited to small fire-setting and visually impressive tricks. It would have taken an incredible amount of Light to destroy a car and fight off a bunch of super assassins (OK, so I was filling in some of the blanks with my own version of what happened). Ethan didn’t have that kind of power. Not without me around to feed it to him. He had endangered his own life.
Tension filled my muscles as worry and frustration bubbled up within me.
I stood up and leaned my hands on the table, fixing my eyes on the big idiot sitting across from me. Surprised and wary, he leaned away, looking to Tyler and Josh on either side for backup.
“Ethan . . .” Dammit. “What’s his middle name?” I stage-whispered to Alec.
“Terrence.” He smirked.
“Ethan Terrence Paul.” I said with as much force in my voice as I could muster. “What you did last night was reckless and irresponsible. Don’t you dare ever do that again. Don’t you push your ability past its limits. Don’t push it at all unless I’m there to give you more juice than you possess in your . . . admittedly . . . very large body.
“But that’s not the point.” The energy drained out of me, and my shoulders slumped.
“You could have died. And I felt like I was dying right along with you. Don’t ever do that to me again.”
I fixed him with one last meaningful look before grabbing my delicious latte and walking out of the pool house. With nowhere else to go, I wandered to the edge of the pool, watching the bright sun glistening on the blue surface of the water, taking a few cleansing breaths before finishing the last drops of my coffee.
After a few moments, Ethan came to stand at my elbow.
“I heard you, Eve. I get it. This is going to be an adjustment for all three of us, but I promise I will never willfully do anything that might hurt you ever again. It’s impossible now that I know you’re my Vital, now that my ability has recognized your Light. I’m sorry last night was such a mess. I’m OK now.”
I released a heavy breath and looked up at him. There was nothing but sincerity in his eyes.
I nodded, giving him a small smile. There really wasn’t much else he could say or I could ask for. This was new territory for all of us, and we would just have to do our best to navigate it together.
I was rewarded with one of his big, infectious grins.
We moved toward each other, naturally wanting to hug it out, but we never got the chance. Three frantic voices of protest piped up behind us, and we snapped away from each other, sticking our arms to our sides like naughty children caught in the act of trying to steal a cookie out of the jar.
“No hugging!” Alec shouted, stalking toward us and emphatically cutting through the air with both arms. “For fuck’s sake! No touching at all. Eve has no idea how to control the amount of Light she releases, and Ethan has never had practice controlling higher levels of his ability.”
He was right. We had no idea how dangerous it could be. We could end up lighting all of Bradford Hills on fire.
And yet I wanted to see what Ethan could do with the extra power from me. My brain was itching to learn everything about our connection, to explore it hands-on. Instead of looking appropriately chastised, I couldn’t contain the excited smile pulling at the corners of my mouth.
Variant Lost (The Evelyn Maynard Trilogy Book 1) Page 14
