by Jamie Loeak
she told you,” he said, worry creasing his brow. He shifted, moving to the edge of the bed. “She shouldn’t have told you, but now that you know I need to know how you feel about the whole thing.”
“I don’t feel any different anymore,” Kate said. “At first I felt betrayed. I was shocked but now I can see the signs that were right in front of me all along. Adriana mentioned falling in love like she had done it a hundred times. Donovan was too young to be her father. All three of you are perfectly beautiful, unearthly almost.” Kate stopped there, frightened of saying too much.
“You aren’t afraid of us?”
“No. I don’t have a reason to be afraid of you.”
Rico seemed to accept her answer. He nodded then stood.
Kate could sense that he wanted to leave, but she didn’t want him to leave yet. She had to know who he was, who he had been before Adriana, before Kate.
“Wait,” she begged.
Rico turned and waited for her to speak.
“Please tell me about your life. I don’t care what you have to say. I just need to hear it from you. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering who you are, who you were. I have to hear the truth; it can’t be any worse than what I could make up in my mind.”
Rico shook his head, his raven hair falling into his eyes. “It is worse, Kate, much worse.” His cobalt eyes seemed to fade. He looked at her, hardly alive as he relived his past once more. Kate began to sense that this caused him pain, but part of her was too stubborn to care; the other half of her hated herself for hurting him for her own selfish reasons. Still, she pushed forward.
“I don’t care,” she said. She moved closer to him. She looked into his eyes and reached out her hand until she was touching his face. “I just need to know who you are. Nothing you say will scare me. I don’t think anything could make me stop liking you. I just need to know what you did and who you were. I want to know what experiences led you up to this point. To me, you’re good. You will always be good.”
Rico pulled away from her touch, and Kate lowered her hand. She blushed fiercely and turned away from him.
“Kate,” he said, reaching out to grab her wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I can’t touch you.” He released her wrist then. Kate could tell he was changing the subject, but she let him.
She turned around slowly. “You can’t touch me?”
He shook his head in response to her question.
“Why?” she asked again.
“Have you ever noticed that my skin feels warm when it touches you?”
“Yes, it feels like you have a fever.”
“It’s because my skin is burning yours. I have no soul to keep me warm. My body temperature is below freezing, but to you it feels warm. When I touch you, when any demon touches you, your body temperature is lowered. It’s a way to disarm the humans we attempt to possess. It’s sort of like a built in weapon.”
Kate thought a moment, remembering that her mother had told her that her skin was like ice after the man had attacked her the night that they ate at The Beach House. She felt a feeling of dread. If he had held her for another moment, would she have survived? How long did it take to completely destroy a human body?
“What’s wrong?” Rico asked.
“I was thinking about the night I was attacked. The first attack from the demon that you fought below my window. My mother said that my body was freezing when I reached her. He didn’t hold me for very long, Rico. How could he have cooled my body temperature down that much?”
“It doesn’t take long, Kate. How long did he hold you? Do you know?”
“No more than thirty seconds.”
Kate watched as Rico’s eyes turned to stone. He began muttering and whispering to himself, and then stood up suddenly, his eyes determined.
“Look, I’ll be back later. I need to go talk to Adriana,” he said. He got up and walked toward the window.
“Wait,” Kate said. “I need to come with you.”
Rico nodded. “I’ll meet you outside,” he said before jumping out the open window.
Kate rushed downstairs, her lavender skirt floating around her. By the time she made it to the back door she had to rearrange her cream tank top, tucking it back in to her lace skirt.
“Honey, where are you going?” her mother called from the kitchen.
“I’m going to show Adriana my nails and tell her about the movie,” she called before walking outside.
Rico stood there waiting, his hands in his pockets. He wore dark sunglasses and a grim expression. They walked in silence all the way to Adriana’s house.
Adriana was sitting on the deck out back, listening to soft indie music while flipping through magazines. She shut the magazine and turned off the music when she caught sight of Rico’s expression.
Rico dove straight into the story that Kate had just told to him. Kate watched Adriana’s eyes get bigger and bigger with every word. She wondered, absently, where Donovan was. Did he really work at the bait shop?
“This is worse than I thought,” Adriana said. “I can’t believe that this mystery demon is somehow stronger than we are. I didn’t know it was possible.”
“It gets worse,” Kate said. She looked as Adriana and Rico focused their gazes on her face. “I have a few things to tell you,” she said.
They nodded.
Kate told Adriana and Rico about Kern’s house. “It’s him, isn’t it?” she asked them when she finished.
Both Adriana and Rico agreed. “Now we just need to find out whether he placed Kate and her family there on purpose. I have a feeling that he did,” Rico muttered angrily.
“Why?” Kate asked. “Why would he choose my soul? I’m just a sixteen-year-old girl. I don’t know how he could find my soul so appealing.”
“That’s what we need to figure out next,” Adriana said. “What else did you have to tell us? You said you had some things, right?”
Kate nodded. She looked down at her lap and straightened out her skirt. She knew that Adriana and Rico would wait patiently, but she knew she couldn’t put it off forever.
“I remember the alternate reality,” she admitted. She waited for Adriana to stick out her tongue or sing an I-told-you-so, but neither happened. Kate went on. “It showed me the things I desired most. It showed me with my family; then it switched to a different version of me that was surrounded by hundreds of people that begged to be my friends, and then you,” she said looking at Rico. “It showed me you.”
Rico blushed and Adriana flashed a smile. She elbowed Rico and looked at Kate out of the corner of her eye. Rico muttered something to her that sounded like “stop it” and Adriana stopped grinning at him.
“I know that alternate realities are tangible. It’s out there somewhere. I know it is. I just want to know why Cole took me to that reality and not another one.”
“Is that all that you saw, Kate?” Adriana asked, knowing that Rico wouldn’t push anything more at the moment.
“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t ready to tell her friends about the burning world quite yet. It was easy for her to accept them for who they were; their deepest desires didn’t center on the world catching fire. She wasn’t sure what they would say when they found out about Kate’s hidden desires. She wondered, briefly, if it meant that she was the evil one here.
“Thank you for telling us, Kate. It was very brave of you,” Adriana said sweetly. She reached forward and squeezed Kate’s hand.
It would be braver of me to tell you everything, Kate thought.
“Kate,” Adriana started, “Rico and I need to figure this out.” She gave Kate an apologetic look for being so sudden, but Kate understood. “Let me walk you home. We’ll contact you when we find some news. I promise.”
Kate nodded and let Adriana lead her home.
Once at home, Kate milled around the house, hanging out downstairs with her parents. She was beginning to appreciate them. She had parents, whereas Adriana and Rico had never had any. They were cre
ated, these gorgeous and immortal creatures, to appear as young adults their entire lives, but they were never given the opportunity to be children. They were never given the chance to fall in love and grow old together. Kate wondered vaguely if they could ever have children.
That night Kate lay in bed thinking about the dream she had the night before. She wondered if she could fall back into that dream world on purpose. She had to find out what it was she wanted with the burning world. What did it mean? Was it actually going to happen or did it symbolize something? And Kate couldn’t shake the real connection she had with it. She had actually drawn it in the sand. The images that she saw in her dream were exact replicas; there were just more of them.
Kate also thought about the unknown demon; she kept trying to pull details from the shadow that had grabbed her. She remembered that he was strong but didn’t have large muscles like Cole. She remembered his deep, rough voice, taunting her. She remembered feeling stubble press against her soft cheek, clawing and tearing at her delicate skin. Try as hard as she might, she still couldn’t put a face with that rough voice. Kate lay there exhausted. Her head hurt from thinking so much, and she let herself drift off into an uneasy slumber.
Kate was back. This time she found herself standing in the street in front of her house. She began to turn toward it but felt a pull from another direction. She began to walk toward Adriana’s house, assuming that the pull was going to take her there.
She walked past the familiar houses: the one with the red door and the
