Lightbringers.
“A soul.” Leon’s words hit me in the gut as if he had struck there with his fist.
And as he said it, I saw it. The silver layer that enveloped Jo, the texture of the star that my grandmother had turned into. A soul.
I took a deep breath, the air flowing easily into my lungs as I kept watching the flickering soul that was the essence of Jo.
“A soul,” I repeated, and beside me, Leon nodded. “I guess your Lightbringer nature is breaking through,” he said with what sounded like a smile. I couldn’t tell. I was too absorbed in the sight before me.
The delicate shine that emanated from Jo’s skin, the sensation of the room that had once been a mere living room and had now turned into a well of light and shadows, of pulsing life and hovering death. I could feel it like I could feel the blood in my veins rush faster and faster as if my body was trying to catch up with my mind, my own soul … I wasn’t sure what it was … maybe my essence.
“You can feel her, can’t you?” Leon said and placed a hand on my arm, cautioning somehow.
I nodded. It was a strange allure. Wild, calming, like water and fire all at once. A burning and drowning and being reborn.
And the soul sang to me, beckoning me to come closer, to touch it, to free it.
I took a step forward, the fear of remaining stuck in my ethereal form forgotten at the wondrous sensation.
“I should have known,” Leon murmured and followed me toward the couch where I settled down beside Jo, the soul still calling me forward. My chest felt empty as if it were a chamber prepared for something more than my thumping heart and my pumping lungs. There was something … missing in there.
Leon placed one hand on my shoulder, his touch gentle but firm enough to let me know I wasn’t going to succeed if I intended to move any closer to Jo.
“What’s wrong?” I asked without taking my eyes off the slightly pulsing silver light.
“Your Lightbringer instincts are awakening,” he said with a mixture of awe and fear in his tone. “The soul recognizes you as someone trustworthy, someone good … someone who will eventually take her to heaven. One day.” He cocked his head beside me as he watched Jo’s still shape, fascination in his words. “You are becoming one of us even faster than I’d thought.”
“That’s good, I suppose,” I tried. “The sooner I finish my … transformation … the sooner I am safe from the Shadowbringer, right?”
“Let’s let her rest.” He gestured at Jo and pulled me up by the shoulder. “We have things to discuss.”
Chapter Fourteen
I didn’t object when Leon led me up the stairs, his hand a steady weight on my shoulder. On the contrary, I was grateful to be taken away from the lure of the soul that was hovering within Jo’s body.
“Can you breathe?” he asked as he led me into the room, the heat of his palm seeping through my sweater as he guided me through the door to my room.
I nodded. It was surprisingly easy now that I had figured out what the aching in my chest was—
As I let him sit me down on my bed and watch him settle beside me—in close range that would allow him to intercept me if I darted back for the door; and God knew I wanted to—Leon fixed his gaze on mine. “You’d better get used to this,” he said with a frown, his face so different from the Leon I used to know, no cheerful smile playing on his lips, no twinkle in his eye.
“To the coughing?” I didn’t buy my own humor—neither did Leon.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he responded with more force than necessary. His hand slid off my shoulder, leaving the air cold after the warmth of his touch.
I studied him—the ristretto gaze, the sensuous curve of his lips, the tension in his shoulders as he rested his forearms on his knees and laced his fingers together.
Did I … know what he was talking about? Truly?
“Not sure,” I breathed into the space between us, wondering if I looked as different to him as he did to me. There was something to his appearance in this form—the non-corporeal one—that spoke to me on a level my best friend Leon never had. Something mysterious, something divine—
Leon cleared his throat. “I am speaking about you wanting to deliver Jo’s soul to heaven,” he said as if that wasn’t a disturbing thought and the most natural topic to converse about.
“What—” I tore my eyes away from the curve of his neck and let his words settle. “What do you mean I wanted to deliver her soul?”
“You were obviously drawn by her soul, Laney,” he said as if that was something he could accuse me of.
But I bit back the protest that normal Laney would demonstrate had normal Leon chastised her about anything.
“You felt her soul, right?”
I nodded, still feeling that tug inside my chest even if I was able to ignore it enough to not jump back to my feet and run down to stare at Jo.
“Right.” He shook back his hair and gave me a look that made the room feel very cold.
For a moment, I held his gaze, waiting to discover if I could stare down his ethereal form the same way I could with normal Leon. Then, I thought through the meaning of his words, the fact that he had never finished explaining since that first incident when he had shared about what he was, what I supposedly was.
I ground my teeth and turned away. “How does it work exactly?”
Leon sighed through his nose, something he did when he didn’t know the answer during a quiz at school. “How does what work?”
There was a richness to his voice which I had never before noticed. “Transporting the souls to heaven?” I helped him to get onto my train of thought. “How do you do it, bring a soul there?”
I had seen him breathe in the star Gran had become, but what happened from there I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
At that, Leon chuckled. “Aren’t you going to ask me the more important things first?” he asked in return. Whether to distract me from my interest or because he had more important things to share, I couldn’t tell.
So I played along, that tug in my chest still singing a hollow song. “And what would that be, Leon Milliari, Lightbringer of the umpteenth generation—” I squinted my eyes, pretending to think. “What generation are you exactly?”
Leon laughed, a hoarse sound that scraped along my body, so different from his usual laughter.
“Seventeenth,” he said, his lips curling as he measured the shock on my face.
“Really?” It didn’t bother me that I sounded stupid as I asked for confirmation.
“Really.” He nodded, a hint of that carefree smile stealing itself back onto his features. “Well, if you count the fact that only every second generation actually becomes a Lightbringer”—he tilted his head as if thinking hard—“that makes it only the ninth.” He waved a hand as if to belittle the number. My mouth, however, remained open with wonder.
“So how did you become one?” I asked, sensing that the questions I was asking now were those he was willing to share the answers to.
“When my grandfather died, I awakened,” he explained as if that, too was completely normal.
“Awakened?” I prompted and wondered if that was what was happening to me.
He gazed at the ceiling as if to read the answer there. “The essence of the messenger angel was passed on to me.”
“What do you mean, passed on?” With every answer, he was answering as much as he was bringing up new questions.
Leon gave me a long look that spoke volumes and yet did nothing to satisfy my curiosity. “Angels are not beings of solid bodies, able to walk the earth, Laney,” he explained with a degree of exasperation I had never seen on his face. “They need a carrier to walk the earth. And my family—and yours—was chosen to act as such for the divine.”
As his eyes, so dark and bright all at once, locked on mine, a shudder ran through my body, the meaning of his words settling in.
“We are possessed by angels?” I half-shrieked, for lack of a better reactio
n.
At that, Leon laughed again, this time, some mockery in his voice as he said, “Not possessed but enhanced.”
“Are we even ourselves?” I tried to ignore the sudden sensation that I was sharing my body with another being. “I mean … are we even acting on our own accord, or are the angels making us do things?”
This was worse than I had managed to dream up even in my worst nightmares. Creepy. Not what I had believed angels to be. Like a bad horror movie but not divine … nothing at all like divine—
Leon’s handsome features, however, were proof of the exact opposite. Divine.
“Nothing like that, no,” he shook his head. “We aren’t God’s puppets or the angels’ body-suits”—he laughed at his own joke; I didn’t—“but think of it rather as having some sort of energy pulsing through you.” He struggled with finding the right words, his hands fingering in the air before him as he was explaining. “The essence of the angel weaves into our bodies and makes us able to travel that path between earth and heaven while our human body provides the vehicle for the soul to travel—” He stopped, his eyes wary as he studied my face. “It sounds like bullshit, doesn’t it?”
It was so Leon to say that, that I involuntarily chuckled. “It does.” But my amusement was short-lived. I remembered when Leon had lost his grandfather years ago. He couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven. And as I let his words replay in my mind, everything he had shared with me since that moment in Gran’s room, I realized how lucky I was.
“You were only a child when it happened to you,” I whispered and as he nodded, the profoundness of that small gesture hit me like a bolt of lightning in the chest. Leon was the smart and patient and sometimes absurdly wise Leon I knew, not because of the childhood we’d had together, not because of his upbringing, but because he had been forced to live his life around death.
“And now it is happening to you,” he said instead of wallowing in what had surely left its mark on him—invisible and divine, and yet so dark that I couldn’t help but grief for the child I had played with in the sandbox.
I held his gaze for a long minute, reading in the coffee brown depths of his eyes where all the answers seemed to be buried, and found that there, under the layers of familiarity lay a person I didn’t really know, an angel of death. Even if his job was to bring souls to heaven, he was an angel of death all the same. Blond strands had shifted onto his forehead, contrasting his sun-kissed skin, and with the unearthly light that had to surely be part of that essence he had been talking about, there was a wild, sinister feel about him that I had never appreciated.
“I had my grandfather to share all this with me,” he said, his voice even as if his words weren’t at all important, but his gaze told me differently, too intense, too eager to share all this with someone … with me. “Your gran however never became a true Lightbringer, so she couldn’t share with you what every passing generation of the line should—because she never learned for herself.”
I looked at the floor to escape his gaze just for a moment, to be able to breathe. “And what is that, Leon?”
He took a deep breath, blinking for a second too long, hiding the depth of his gaze from my inquisitive eyes. “The secret of how to choose the right souls.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cas
Dull was just another of so many words that didn’t even remotely describe the farce of following the girl around like a lapdog.
It wasn’t that I was one … just that she had seen me was all but compelling me to seek out her presence.
A Lightbringer. I knew by the pulse of light under her skin that was more than that of the average soul. She was an emerging Lightbringer.
I stalked down the street, my thoughts back at the schoolyard where I had located her. And naturally, the other Lightbringer had been with her. Another Milliari. That family had been haunting this region for too long. My jaw clenched as I turned the corner to her house. I had overheard that she was going to spend the evening with her friend instead of the Lightbringer, so there was a chance that if I simply knocked on her door, she would open the door and … and that would be that for her.
A clean slice through the bonds that held her soul in her body, and I could take my trophy home. And her body … well, that would be living on in a less fortunate state than now. But what interest was the mushy brain of a human—if I had a Lightbringer soul to show.
It was rare to come across one of them when they were still manifesting and too weak to protect themselves. The moment she would take her first soul, she would become untouchable for me, and she was developing fast. I could tell by the zing in the room when she had walked into Mrs. Parker’s room. Or the funeral where she had found me even in my disguising shadows.
So the window was small until my chance would be gone.
Mrs. Parker had smelled like a Lightbringer even if she hadn’t been one. A dormant generation, they called it. The ability to let the messenger angels’ essence manifest jumped one generation, but even the ones who were meant to carry the essence, in a lot of cases, never turned into Lightbringers. All they could do was see us—if they looked closely. Not even all the time. Some were so weak they only noticed us right before their death when their souls were already trying to escape their bodies. Mrs. Parker had been one of those. And her granddaughter—
Just another mile of walking. I could see the house ahead by the next crossing, looming like a fortress of light. Around me, in the houses scattered along the landscape, souls were humming like electric lines in the brutal cold of winter. But they all lost their lure compared to that one bright and delicious soul of the girl.
I couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to let her settle in my chest and take her to the one place she could never again escape. Only that it wouldn’t be settling because, for that, she’d have to be dead, and what I was about to do to her was so much worse.
The house came closer unnaturally fast as I walked up in my ethereal form even though I could have traveled on my essence. I preferred to scout my surroundings for dangers as I circled my prey.
The other Lightbringer, the Milliari, was one of those dangers. He had been hovering around the girl like a shield since she had walked in on us at the nursing home. I remember having noticed her around him before when he had become a Lightbringer. When the essence of the angel had slipped from his grandfather to him—
There was light on the upper floor of her house, the window an old, poorly insulated wooden frame that would soon become a nuisance for a human when the icy temperatures of winter settled in.
A shape moved behind the glass—a shape that let me growl in disappointment.
The Lightbringer was with her. Again.
Behind his broad shoulders, the girl floated by, her arms over her head as she peeled out of her sweater. I ground my teeth in disappointment. And a mild annoyance that the Lightbringer did a proper job protecting the girl.
As if he’d heard me, his head flipped to the side, and his eyes pierced into the darkness of the night, right through my shadows.
I didn’t stay to see if the girl would stop at the sweater or strip down to her bare skin in front of him. It didn’t matter. Instead, I wrapped my shadows more tightly around me and traveled back to the hellhole that was my home—literally.
Chapter Sixteen
Laney
School was just as endless as every other day even with the new thrill of knowing that I might skip into my ethereal form if I didn’t watch out.
Leon had shown me how to return to my solid self that night it had happened … almost a week ago. And he hadn’t left my side for the better part of that timespan, making me feel twenty-four-seven babysat. Only during the nights would he disappear with the promise that I had nothing to fear.
I didn’t ask where he went, if he slept, how he kept up with school while keeping me safe. And when the Shadowbringer didn’t show up again after that brief moment at school, I began to wonder if I was even in any real d
anger. Or if it was all some made-up fear.
Jo yawned widely in response to Mr. Warner’s mention of another homework assignment then waved one hand at me. “I didn’t sleep much,” she whispered her excuse and I gave her a smile. Neither had I. The thought of that sensation when both Leon and I had been in our ethereal forms was something I couldn’t just eliminate from my mind. It came with a tingle in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place.
“You look seriously tired,” I whispered back.
It was true. There were purple shadows under her eyes, and her skin was pale, almost wan. To be honest, Jo seemed tired all the time lately.
Leon sat across the room, near the Avery-faction where he had a good view on the door and the windows—and on me. I glanced to the side, only to find his coffee-gaze studying me, eyes inquisitive.
I shrugged, ignoring Avery’s glare as she noticed the silent exchange between Leon and me.
It was then that at the front of the room the door opened, Mr. Warner falling silent at the entrance of a tall boy with bluish-black hair and eyes as gray as the clouds before a storm.
I felt more than heard Leon’s gasp as I noticed the attention of every person in the classroom shift to that compelling gaze of the Shadowbringer who was prowling over to Mr. Warner, a bag slung casually over his shoulder, and handed him a slip.
Torn: A young adult paranormal romance (Breath of Fate Book 1) Page 8