And with that thought pushing her along, Kira punched the access code to the building and walked through the front door. Looking around, she realized it was an apartment building. She took the elevator to the top floor, walked down one long perfectly straight hallway before stopping outside of apartment 10.
She heard muffled voices through the wooden door. Laughter. A deep response that didn’t sound like Luke. Unable to fight the urge, Kira reached out with her mind, searching for Luke’s. After a few seconds, Kira felt it, felt him. Light, bubbly, and unconcerned despite the nature of his visit to London. There was no anger, no hint of bitterness. It was pure Luke. Kira let his confidence roll over her, hoping his ease would sink into her brain, before releasing the hold. It wasn’t really fair to spy on him when he had no idea she was there.
No longer nervous, Kira raised her hand, poised to knock, when the door swung open, catching her in the act.
A boy, blonde but not Luke, was looking at her with a confused squint. Kira opened her mouth to speak, but her eyes slid over his shoulder and the sound caught in her throat.
Luke.
His hair was disheveled and longer than Kira remembered: a mix of gold and honey that now stuck over his ears a bit. His tanned skin was spotted with freckles, from his cheeks down along his arms. He was too tall for the old English apartment. Kira saw him duck through a doorframe, bending his long torso to squeeze underneath. A smile played on his lips, teasing with a hint of laughter as though left over from a joke Kira had just missed. It made her smile, turning her lips without her realizing it.
“Who’s ther—” Luke started to say, but froze when his eyes met Kira’s. Kira caught the emerald sparkle even from this distance and saw his features lighten just a shade, but it was enough. Enough to know that he really wasn’t angry, that maybe she was even forgiven.
“Kira!” He grinned.
As if under a spell, Kira found herself pushing past the boy in the doorway to run for Luke.
“Oi!” The boy said with a distinctly English accent, but Kira was already catapulting off the ground and into Luke’s arms. She flung her hands around his neck, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder, relieved when he caught her in a tight embrace. Tears sprang in her eyes as the stress of the past couple of days caught up with her, but she was also laughing against his chest. The rumble of his body let Kira know Luke was laughing as well.
“’Suppose they know each other, then?” The other boy said.
“Looks like,” another British accent responded, but this one was higher pitched and female.
Self-consciously, Kira unbent her legs, searching for the ground with her feet. Luke set her down, but kept an arm around her waist. She didn’t have the will to push it off, but turned her head towards the voices she had heard.
A boy and girl, a little older than Luke, were standing together in the entryway, looking at Kira with mild amusement. Realizing how crazy she must look, Kira wiped at the water just below her lashes.
“Hi,” she said with a wave. “I’m—”
“Kira,” the boy supplied. “We know. Luke’s only been here for an hour and already he won’t shut up about you.” Luke’s fingers tightened on her waist affectionately.
“We thought he was a bit of a nutter, really,” the girl chimed in, “he never told us you were dating.”
Kira stepped away from Luke as Tristan’s face flashed into her head. “Uh, well, we’re not,” she said awkwardly. Two pairs of eyebrows raised.
“Anyway,” Luke coughed, “Kira this is Jack and that’s Mary Beth, the two London based conduits who agreed to host me.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kira said, fighting the heat rising on her cheeks.
“We’ll just be in here,” Luke shrugged towards the door behind him and pulled Kira through the opening… into a bedroom.
Picking the corner furthest from the door, Kira sat down on the mattress and tucked her feet beneath her.
Before Luke had time to close the door, Kira blurted out, “I’m sorry.” He opened his mouth to speak, but Kira charged on.
“No, wait, let me finish. It was torture, and I mean absolute torture, to think that something I had done made you hate me. And as soon as I sat on that plane, I knew I had made a mistake. I tried to call you, but then we took off and it was too late. And that plane ride was the worst in my life. I could barely even function, thinking I had lost you as a friend. I just—I felt lost and alone, and I hope that you can forgive me some day.” Kira paused, looking up from her hands, which were clenched in the folds of her t-shirt. To her surprise, Luke was grinning. Barely five minutes together and he was already annoying her.
“What?” Kira asked. “Do you think my total anguish is funny?”
“A little, yeah,” he said and flopped down next to her on the bed.
“Well, it was all your fault. You’re the one who said you were done and wouldn’t call me back!” Kira crossed her arms.
“Whoa, no way,” Luke shook his head at her, “no way are you turning this around on me. It was your brilliant plan to completely ditch me in the airport with no warning or explanation.” Kira could hear the slight tightness in his voice. He wasn’t totally over it yet.
“So yell at me,” Kira said. It was what she had been expecting anyway.
“Nah,” Luke shrugged and laughed at Kira’s exasperated expression. She, in turn, could feel her stubborn side coming out full force. Kira raised her eyebrows and stared him down, waiting for some explanation for his bizarre attitude.
“Well, what do you want to do then?”
“Nothing,” he folded an arm behind his head and fell back against the bed. “I’m just going to lay here and enjoy being in charge for once.”
Kira slapped his leg, “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he nodded and kept his eyes on her. Kira didn’t like the mischievous glean gathering there.
“I haven’t always been in charge,” Kira said slowly, getting a snort from Luke.
“Come on,” he sat up quickly, “first, I was the one who kept being a conduit from you. So when you found out, you totally guilt tripped me. Then you saved my life and landed yourself in a coma, putting me in your debt for life. Now, you can go inside my head whenever you want and know exactly how I’m feeling. Following Diana to Baltimore was completely your idea, and do I even need to mention this little European adventure?”
“Okay, okay,” Kira said, not liking the slightly smug look on his face. “Well, what do I have to do to make things even again?”
“I think I’m charging you…” He looked around the room, pretending to be deep in thought. His eyes landed on her sending a slight jolt down her spine. Kira put all of her concentration into keeping Luke’s mind separate from her own. She could feel excitement and heat coming from the other side of the barrier, making a slight flush rise to her cheeks.
“You owe me one kiss,” Luke said. The light-hearted grin was gone. Kira hesitated before breaking contact.
“Luke, be serious,” she said and attempted an easy laugh, trying to play it off as a joke.
“I am,” he said, and something in his tone made Kira pay attention. “You see, I realized something. Well, actually, my sister helped me out with this one. But, I finally realized that you are totally into me, you just won’t admit it.”
“How’d you get there?” Kira said, letting mirth flow into her words in an attempt to keep the mood light.
“I admit it. I was mad at you—I mean really furious—after you left me in that airport. I didn’t want to think about you or even look at you after that happened. When I finally got home, everyone kept asking where you were and why you didn’t come back with me. I told the Council that our plans had changed, made them think I was in on it, but I was really seething.” He clenched his fists with the memory. The slight movement made Kira wince. She didn’t want to remember how badly she’d hurt him or the coldness she heard in his voice little more than a week before.
“As y
ou can see,” he put his arms out wide, “that all changed. My sister knew something else was up. She’s got this like freakish sixth sense. Anyway, she pulled me aside and made me tell her what happened. I thought she would hate you—I mean, you two weren’t on the best terms during your last visit—but instead, she was happy when I finished telling her what happened. And that’s what she helped me realize. If we had just been friends, if you really didn’t feel anything for me, you would have told me what you were up to. You would have explained that it was for my own safety, you would have given me some sort of heads up, and maybe still sneaked off, but it wouldn’t have been a complete and utter lie.
“No, you weren’t afraid that telling me would make me want to follow you and come along. You were afraid that if you told me the plan, you wouldn’t be able to leave me behind. You sort of love me, and if you had told me the plan, you might not have been able to go somewhere alone with Tristan. You might have wanted me to come along instead.”
“That’s a great theory,” Kira whispered. Her ears were drowned out by the thumping of her heart.
“That’s what I thought too,” he said happily, turning to Kira in his normal teasing manner. “And, not to sound too self-confident, but one kiss ought to show you I’m right.”
“So when does this kiss need to happen?” Kira asked, looking at the wall behind Luke rather that at his face.
He looked down at his empty wrist. “I’ve got some time right now…”
Kira wanted to throw a pillow at him. But getting a pillow would mean she had to reach over his stretched out body, and she wasn’t sure if she could deal with the proximity. Something in Luke’s words rang uncannily true to Kira, but she couldn’t get Tristan out of her head. The cold, accusing chill to his words when she mentioned Luke’s name still stung. She owed it to everything she and Tristan had had to turn the conversation back to Aldrich, back to what she had actually come here to discuss.
“We have more important things to talk about right now,” Kira said softly, letting a foreboding deepness lace through the words.
“What? Did Tristan lose a fang?” He threw a playful pout in Kira’s direction.
“No,” Kira paused and took a deep breath, “but I might gain some.”
“What?” The grin was gone from his face and he reached a hand out to touch Kira’s arm. His lips were drawn in a tight line.
“Aldrich said he can turn me into a vampi—”
“You can’t be serious!” Luke interjected, tightening his grip on her bicep. “Kira, it’s not, that’s crazy, what are you even saying?” She rolled her eyes.
“Would you let me finish?” Kira said with a shaky laugh. “Aldrich said he can turn me into a vampire, but I obviously don’t want to become one.” Luke leaned back a little, loosening his hold. “That’s not exactly what I told Aldrich though,” Kira continued and began telling Luke everything that had happened since she had landed in London.
Kira started with his castle, with Aldrich’s bizarre sense of style, which got an expected grimace and “creepy” from Luke. Without stopping, Kira moved onto meeting her mother—the shock of believing she was a vampire and Aldrich’s notion that the ability to resist was the only reason conduits were never turned. Kira had to stop Luke from interrupting. He kept shaking his head and trying to explain how it was not possible for conduits to turn, how some had tried before and failed, that they had run extensive experiments with conduit and vampire bodies and blood. Eventually, Kira slapped her hand over his mouth to stop him.
“I know,” she said firmly, going on to describe the look in her mother’s eyes that had told her she was a fake. Kira skipped over the night with Tristan, wanting to keep it private and to herself. Luke didn’t need to hear about his shattered dreams or Kira’s brief belief that being a vampire wouldn’t be as horrible as it sounded. Better for Luke to think that Kira never swayed, never faltered in her desire to keep her powers.
Kira rushed past the next few days of sitting with her mother discussing the transformation and talking with Aldrich about his past.
Eventually, she reached that morning, reached the glass tunnel system within the house. Luke nodded when Kira confirmed that the woman was not her mother, but was a old vampire only pretending to be Lana. She described the dungeon she found, telling Luke that finding out Aldrich’s plan wasn’t the only thing they needed to figure out. A rescue mission was also in order. She told Luke about the female vampire, Pavia, and how she thought the girl knew a lot more than she was letting on.
But then Kira hesitated. Thinking back to the flaming red haired man and his accusation that Kira was already falling, had already taken one step toward turning into a vampire.
“What?” Luke asked, sensing that Kira was holding back.
Did she really want to hear what Luke had to say? Kira remembered the way Luke looked at her when her eyes had first turned blue, the way he’d stepped back, shocked and like a stranger. It had only lasted a second, but fear tainted his expression in those few moments after Diana’s death. What if he couldn’t deny the Punisher beliefs? What if all he did was make the possibility that Kira’s soul was blackening seem all the more real?
“Nothing,” Kira finally said. Luke put his hand on her knee reassuringly.
“You can tell me,” he said. Kira looked at him and smiled weakly.
“I’m just a little scared, you know? I don’t know what to do.” She shrugged.
“Why don’t you just leave? We can treat this as a normal rescue mission and send the trained conduits in. I promise they won’t come shooting through the windows this time.”
“I can’t. Part of me knows that Tristan and I should have both left that castle the minute I realized it wasn’t really my mother waiting for me, but a bigger part of me knows I needed to stay. I can’t fight this feeling that whatever Aldrich is planning is huge, and definitely involves me. We just need a mode of attack.” Kira started chewing on her lip, lost in thought about how they could corner Aldrich and get the information out him. How do you trap someone who can move any object in the world just by thinking about it? He would bring the house down on any conduits who tried to trap him. He could easily knock Kira out, kill Tristan and escape without straining a muscle.
“This is really important to you? Important enough to not run away?” Luke asked. Kira nodded affirmation. “Then the only thing to do is let him try to turn you.”
“What?” Kira blinked. Those were probably the last words she ever expected Luke to say.
“Delay him for one night, make some excuse, and tomorrow let him go through with whatever ceremony he has planned. When you’ve learned what he is up to and why trying to turn you is so important, you and Tristan can attack. Aldrich will be vulnerable. He won’t be expecting it and I’ll bring a team of conduits, so we can enter the house while he’s distracted. Half of us will go save the prisoners and the other half will help you destroy Aldrich. It’s risky, but I don’t see any other option.”
“But,” Kira started. It was a solid idea, and the only solution to finding out what Aldrich wanted. Tristan would be fine, Kira knew, Aldrich would never hurt him. He viewed Tristan as more of a son than an enemy. And when all of the conduits arrived and his plan was thwarted, Aldrich would probably do the smart thing and run. But there was a knot in Kira’s throat preventing her from agreeing to Luke’s idea. Realizing what her real hesitation was, Kira quietly asked, “But what if I do turn?”
“Kira, it’s not possible, I—”
“But what if it is,” Kira interjected, “What if I heard somewhere that mixed breed conduits can turn?” She still didn’t want to go into the depths of the Punisher beliefs, but if she was offering herself to Aldrich, Kira needed to be prepared.
Luke took both of her hands, forcing her to look him in the eyes. “Do you really think that I would ever suggest this plan if there were the slightest chance that you would turn? Conduits cannot become vampires. It is just not possible. I believe it with every
fiber of my being.”
What if I’m more than a conduit, Kira thought to herself, what if I really am some sort of angel? But the word sounded ridiculous to her, silly even. An angel? Who was she kidding?
Kira took a deep breath and clenched Luke’s fingers, which were sturdy and warm. “Okay then, let’s do it.”
“Excellent,” Luke said, then turned towards the door to shout, “Jack! Mary Beth!”
“Yeah, mate?” An intermix between male and female voices shouted back at them through the door.
“Get in here.”
The door opened a moment later and Mary Beth’s blonde head peered nervously around the bend. When she saw Kira and Luke sitting a comfortable distance apart, her features brightened and they walked in.
Kira looked toward Luke and could practically see the wheels spinning in his head as he started formulating a plan with Jack and Mary Beth. Paper and pens were soon supplied to all four of them, and Kira drew plans of Aldrich’s home, describing each room and remembering the secret tunnel system as best she could. To slightly shocked gazes, Kira asked them to let the vampire Pavia go free when they reached the prisoners. Vampires caught by conduits were usually bound and questioned, but Pavia had already been imprisoned for too long. And Kira had a feeling that Pavia would happily join the fight if given the chance.
Before long, conversation switched to conduit tactics and Kira lost track in the jumble of names and strategies she had never gotten the chance to study. They started talking about the part of the fight Kira wouldn’t be involved in and she turned away to look out the window at the gray London sky. Her mind began to wander, and eventually she found herself glassy-eyed and thinking of Tristan.
His presence was vital to the plan. Aldrich had to think everything was going his way, that Kira wanted to turn. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell Luke what happened, that Tristan had run away. She didn’t want to face the fact that he might not be coming back. The minute doubt in him was there—heck, had Kira and Tristan switched places, Kira probably would have run away and never looked back.
Blaze (Midnight Fire Series) Page 14
