“Yeah, the engine died. She doesn’t have the money for the repairs, and he offered to fix it for her.”
He furrowed his brow. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s being nice?”
He shook his head. “No. It doesn’t work that way. He has no free will. He can do only what the Order tells him to.”
Not true! I’d wanted to shout. He’d let me sleep in his bed. That was him, not the Order, who wanted me there.
“You can’t trust him, Skye. If he’s messing with her car—”
“He’s not messing with it. He’s fixing it.”
“Not unless the Order told him to. And why would they do that?”
“Maybe they want him on my good side. To influence me to choose them? I don’t know. He’s doing us a favor.”
“You just don’t get it. Something’s not right about this. I need to find out what’s going on.”
“I think you’re overreacting. You’re just trying to make him out to be the bad guy.”
“I hope you’re right.”
With a final look at me, he walked away. My heart sank. Why couldn’t things just be normal between us, for once?
“Okay,” Cassie said, coming up behind me. “Since I don’t have to pay for car repairs, I’m buying two new tops and springing for frozen yogurt.”
As we sat at a small table in the food court, I could almost pretend that we were back in the pre-angel days, when everything was so much simpler.
On our way to the car, swinging our bags, that’s when it happened to me for the first time.
The clouds swept in so suddenly, covering the parking lot in darkness even though it was still early evening. I wavered and then pitched forward, falling hard against the concrete. “Skye?” I heard Cassie calling as if from far, far away. “Skye!”
And then I couldn’t hear her anymore. It was so black that I couldn’t see a thing. The wind howled and the ground moved underneath me as if it was liquid. And then it all stopped.
I wasn’t in the parking lot. I was on the ground still, but nowhere near where I’d been only minutes before. The clouds had dissolved into a cold blue sky, and I lay on my back, staring at the lush, green leaves on the soaring trees above and the verdant forest surrounding me. I wasn’t in Colorado anymore. That was the first thing I noticed.
The second thing I became aware of was a voice, calling my name from somewhere above me. “Cassie?” I tried to say, but it was like when you try to talk in a dream and you can’t make any sound come out. But it wasn’t Cassie’s voice, I soon learned. No.
It was Asher’s.
“Skye?” He was shouting. “Skye? Stay with me. . . .”
“Asher?” I tried to say, but the same thing happened to my voice again. “Asher? I want to. I want to stay with you. Please. Help me.” Nothing came out. “Help me!”
His face swam in and out of focus, and I noticed cuts and bruises that I’d never seen before. “Are you okay?” I tried to ask.
“We’re going to find help. We’ll be okay, now that we’re here. They’ll help us. They want you to live.”
Then the sun grew bright, too bright, washing out everything around me. “Asher!” I yelled. “Don’t go!” But I knew he couldn’t hear me.
And before I knew it, I was back on the blacktop of the parking lot at the mall, heaving forward as if I might be sick.
“Skye!” Cassie was kneeling beside me. “Are you okay? You just passed out, like, in the middle of the parking lot! Are you still hung over? Do you need something else to eat?”
“No,” I said, trying to move. Cassie gave me her arm, and I leaned against her as I stood. “I’m fine.” Was I fine, though? What had I just seen? What had happened to me?
“Come on,” she said soothingly. “Let’s get you home.”
Chapter 33
As Cassie drove, I leaned back against the leather seat and closed my eyes. I knew the past twenty-four hours had been too good to be true, too easy to forget about what was really happening to me. Had the vision been one of my powers trying to emerge? The only thing was I didn’t know what sort of power it could possibly be.
When we got to my house, we saw Cassie’s car sitting in the drive but no sign of Devin.
“Think he’s finished with it?” Cassie asked.
Either that or Asher had chased him off.
“Try it and see.”
She climbed in and turned the key, which was in the ignition. The car responded by purring to life. We cheered as she pulled it out of the driveway a little ways. She leaned her head out the open window. “Devin is a saint. This is amazing! I don’t think the engine has ever been this quiet.”
“Who knew he had it in him?” I had to admit, I was impressed. Sometimes he could really surprise me. Asher had painted him as a villain, but Devin had a good heart. He’d shared it with me during small moments. I made a promise to myself to find him at school on Monday and thank him.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Cassie asked. “Want me to come in with you?”
“No, really, thanks,” I said. “I just need water and sleep. I’m probably just dehydrated.”
“Okay, well, call if you need anything?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
But I knew I wasn’t as fine as I pretended. Something was happening to me, something scary.
Cassie took off, and I headed back into the house. I felt more alone than ever. A draft was blowing in from the sliding door, and I grabbed a heavy wool throw from a chair in the living room and, wrapping it around myself, walked through the sliding door onto the deck.
The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and the sky was just fading from a velvety blue to a darker, inky smudge. The moon was rising, but it wasn’t yet dark enough for it to shine as brightly as it would later. It was the in-between time.
I recognized the silhouette sitting in the Adirondack chair as soon as I stepped outside. He didn’t see me at first—he had his back to me, looking up at the first stars of the night. Watching, as he had been the night before.
I knew, suddenly, what I wanted to do. I walked over to him and climbed into his lap, wrapping the blanket around the two of us. He seemed surprised, but he smoothed my hair back with one hand as he let me tuck my head under his chin.
“Did you chase Devin off and fix Cassie’s car?”
“No. He was gone when I got here, but I did check out the engine. Appears he fixed it.”
“You sound baffled. He healed me. Why couldn’t he want to fix a car?”
“The Order just doesn’t work that way.”
We sat in silence for several long moments. I simply absorbed his nearness.
“Asher?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. You’d be stupid not to be.”
“But what am I becoming?” His arms tightened around me. Protecting me from what he was about to say next.
“Your powers are sporadic and choppy so far—and none of us know how they’ll develop—if they continue to at all. Not for nothing, Skye, but I think they will.” He leaned in and whispered in my ear, “I think you’re strong.” I shivered. “All of this has been to prepare you. And if I can do anything to help prepare you for what’s to come, then I promise that I will. The Order is ruthless. They don’t care about you. They only care about the power they stand to gain—or prevent us from gaining—and that they are able to keep manipulating destiny at will.” He shifted my weight so that he looked into my eyes, and for a moment, I felt a longing so sharp, I thought I would stop breathing. “And I think the one thing both sides agree on is that you’re going to be different from anything we’ve seen before. And that we haven’t even seen half of what’s to come.”
I wanted to tell him about what had just happened in the parking lot of the mall. But something about it scared me too much. I wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
“So I was thinking,” he said, playing with a strand of my hair.
<
br /> “Again?” I asked.
“Do you want to hear it or not?” He looked up at me.
“Amaze me.”
I could tell he was fighting not to laugh.
“Well,” Asher said slowly. “Have you ever been so close to something you’ve wanted for as long as you can remember, something you never thought you could have, and been afraid to reach out and just . . . take it?”
“Yes,” I said, my heart racing.
“The whole point of the Rebellion is so that we can live by our own rules. That’s the entire reason we jumped,” he said. “Right?”
“If my history lessons have served me correctly,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “then yes. I do believe you’re right.”
“I know that Devin doesn’t have any choice,” he said, “and I see how much that hurts him. And I know you’re stuck between two choices, and you don’t exactly have a conscious say in the matter. Your powers will take over when it really counts.
“But I have a choice, Skye. I have the power to choose whatever I want. And there is nothing that I’ve ever wanted more.” He gulped. I could feel it beneath me.
We were quiet for a few minutes. I leaned my head on his chest and listened to the sound of his breathing.
“You don’t have a heartbeat,” I realized.
“Does that bother you?” he asked.
“No.” I thought for a minute. “As long as you can feel things and care about things.”
“It’s a misconception that you need a heart to love,” Asher whispered into my hair.
I looked at him, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners even though his mouth stayed so serious. He had a little dimple near the left side of his chin.
I kissed him, and he wrapped the heavy wool blanket tighter around us as the moon rose brighter in the sky.
Chapter 34
I usually slept late on Sundays, but something woke me up that morning. I was out of bed and halfway to the bathroom to get ready for school before I realized that what woke me wasn’t my alarm clock at all. It was sirens passing on the road. I got back into bed.
The sunlight filtered through my curtains and sliced its way across my face, making it hard to fall back asleep. I couldn’t make my eyes stay closed even for a second. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck up there as a kid looked so different in the light than they did in the dark. Now they just looked like stickers.
I felt like a different person from the one who’d stuck them up there all those years ago. I’d changed so much, even in just a few weeks.
Turning over in bed, I wondered if maybe Asher was right, that whatever was in me had always been there in some form. I had obviously awakened it. I now needed to learn to control it, to figure out if it was the powers of the light or the dark. I hoped that was something I could do.
I got up and wandered down to the kitchen to make coffee, reveling in the little things that I had always loved but taken for granted: the smell of the wooden staircase, the smooth banister as my fingers glided over it, the geometric pattern that the light made as it filtered through the big plate glass windows in the open living room behind me, the feel of tile under my bare feet, the crunch of coffee grinds as I scooped them from the pouch, the earthy smell as the steam plumed from the pot, and water through the filter sounding like soda being sucked through a straw. The quiet as I poured coffee into a mug. The light clink of spoon against ceramic as I stirred in milk.
I brought my mug back up to my room and sat in the big overstuffed armchair by the bay window, pulling my legs up underneath me.
The light filtered in the window at a certain slant just at that moment, catching something metallic that glittered at me from my bookshelf. I stood up and walked over to it.
It was my birthday present from Cassie and Dan—the one I’d never opened. I reached up to the top shelf and took it down. Happy Birthday, Skye! was still scrawled across the top in goopy-looking glitter glue. For some reason, looking at it now made me inexplicably sad. I took a letter opener from the mug of pens on my desk and carefully slid it through the tape that was keeping the tinfoil in place. I smiled, picturing Dan wrapping this thing, not having a clue as to what to do.
The tinfoil fell away, and I finally saw what was inside. It was an iPod plug for my car. It was such a thoughtful present—I was the only person we knew who still listened to the radio. My heart fluttered in my chest. I knew my life would never be that simple again.
Restless from the coffee, I went back down to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast and try to clean the house a little bit. How long had it been since Aunt Jo had left? I had completely lost track of time.
I’d managed to pick up all the empty red cups and mop the kitchen and hallway before taking a break to make myself a bowl of cereal. I was reading the back of the box when the phone rang.
The drive to River Springs County Hospital wasn’t one I’d ever made on my own. In fact, the last time I’d been there was when I was six, and that time, I was in the back of an ambulance. A memory flooded through me as I passed road sign after road sign.
“Stay with me, Skye. Come on, stay with me, girl.” I was lying on a stretcher, and I couldn’t move any part of me. I was crying, but my tears kept running in between my cheeks and this plastic thing that was covering my mouth and helping me breathe. I was breathing very fast. I kept trying to ask where my parents were, but my words got trapped in the plastic thing, too. The nurse held my hand next to me and told me I had to calm down. I had to stop crying. She said, “Stay with me, Skye. Come on.” I wondered how she knew my name.
“Skye!” Dan was waiting for me in the lobby. He jumped up when he saw me run through the automatic doors. He looked devastated, his eyes bloodshot with the hint of tears. “I’m so glad you’re here. Hospitals freak me out.”
“Is she okay?” I asked hoarsely, feeling tears begin to swell in my own eyes.
Dan looked crestfallen. “She’s unconscious. The doctors say they think she’ll be okay, but she hasn’t woken up yet.”
We walked to the reception desk, where I signed in.
“I hate hospitals, too,” I said, shivering.
There were gurneys everywhere. “Where’s my mom?” I asked frantically when I figured out that all I had to do to be heard was pull the plastic thing off my mouth. “Where’s my dad?” I was sobbing and sobbing. All I knew was what the nurse had told me: they were in a different ambulance right in front of ours. They were on stretchers, too. The nurse reached for me and held the plastic thing in place. I tried to breathe normal like she told me, but it was hard. “Where are they?” I wanted to scream. “Which stretcher is them?” But no one could hear me. My words got trapped in my breathing, which stayed in the plastic thing and traveled away down many tubes.
Cassie was in room 512. All down the hall, there were people in wheelchairs, people hooked up to oxygen tanks, people with IVs stuck in their arms. There were gurneys everywhere. My breath caught in my chest, shallow and quick. I knew I was sweating, and I was starting to see black spots in front of me. I pushed open the door. I’d had a room just like that one. Eleven years ago, almost exactly.
Cassie’s mother, Evelyn, looked as though she’d aged a hundred years. I hugged her tightly.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
When we separated, she explained that Cassie’s two brothers, Charlie and Matty, were upset and rowdy, so Cassie’s dad had taken them down to get Jell-O in the cafeteria.
As I moved toward the bed, I cringed, trying not to let it show. Cassie had a black eye and bandages all over her arms. One leg was covered by a thin white blanket while the other hung suspended from the ceiling in a cast. She was asleep.
“Cassie,” I whispered. “What happened to you?”
Evelyn placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“Her brakes weren’t working,” she whispered. “She spun out and hit a lamppost. That damn gas station did a hell of a job fixi
ng her car!”
“The gas station didn’t fix it,” I said, something dawning on me. “I’ll be right back.”
I knew they were somewhere in the hospital. If I was there, they couldn’t be too far behind. I scoured the halls. I took the elevator to each floor, searching for any hint of feathers, dark or light hair. Anything.
Devin was a Guardian. Devin had the power to heal. Devin could heal Cassie. He could make her better. I would make him do it.
I found them in the lobby, hovering by the reception desk. Asher looked worried. Devin’s expression was harder to read. Did he already know her destiny? No, I wouldn’t believe that. I wouldn’t allow her to die.
When Asher saw me, he ran to me and let me throw myself against his chest. “Is she okay?” he asked. “Is she badly hurt?”
“She’s in a coma,” I said. “Or asleep, or unconscious. I don’t know. She hasn’t woken up yet. Devin! You have to heal her! You have to fix her, okay? Come on!”
Devin looked confused. “What?”
“She’s in room five twelve. Come on! Why are you being so slow? Let’s go!”
A strange look crossed his face. “I can’t,” he said awkwardly. “I can’t heal her. I haven’t been given the order to do so.”
“The order?” I repeated.
I haven’t been given the order to do so.
The Order.
“Yes,” Devin said warily as if I might hurt him. “I can’t heal her unless the Gifted command me to.”
His words reminded me just how much of a puppet he really was. I could never align myself with the Order. Never. Not if that’s what it meant. I’d choose to become a Rebel right now, whether or not my powers agreed.
“There’s nothing you can do?” I asked slowly, pointedly. “You got her car to start, after all. Did the Gifted command you to do that?”
“The Gifted have circuitous ways of working sometimes, Skye,” he said emphatically. “It’s not always immediately clear what their intentions are. We have to trust them. It will all come to light soon.”
“But what if Cassie doesn’t wake up?” I asked, horrified. “What if she . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. What if she died, just like my parents had? What if Cassie left me, too?
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