by Amber Kizer
Other Books About Meridian
MERIDIAN
WILDCAT FIRELFLIES
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Amber Kizer
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Chad Michael Ward
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kizer, Amber.
Speed of light. / Amber Kizer. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Wildcat fireflies.
Summary: Meridian and Tens continue to grow closer and explore their relationship of Protector and Fenestra, while sixteen-year-old Juliet Ambrose, grasping at any hope of finding her parents, considers accepting the help of Ms. Asura, a proven Nocti.
eISBN: 978-0-375-98428-0
[1. Angels—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction.
4. Good and evil—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.K6745Spe 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011044331
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Barney Wick:
GODFATHER
UNCLE
FRIEND
RACE FAN
HAND-HOLDER
CHEERLEADER
CONFIDANT
BELIEVER.
I love you.
Semper Fi.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Memorial Day: One Year Later
Faye’s Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Acknowledgments
About the Author
If I die it is but a part of some vast Life which does not cease with the last breath.
—Keith Green
I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead.—He is just away!
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land.…
Think of him still as the same, I say:
He is not dead—he is just away!
—James Whitcomb Riley, “Away”
Every morning lean thine arms awhile on the window sill of Heaven and gaze upon the Lord.
Then, with that vision in thy heart, turn strong to meet the day.
—Unknown
PROLOGUE
What if a young woman was both a girl to the living and a portal to the dying? I know the answer because I am. Look at me. If you see a girl on the edge of womanhood with shoulder-length curly brown hair and features tilting more classic than trendy, then congratulations—you are alive. If you see light, as if I am standing in front of the sun, then say your goodbyes—your time is coming. If all you see is light, you’re moving on, dead, and probably not coming back.
We are Fenestra, human beings made angel Light by those of the many names and faces. Just as recessive genes emerge unexpectedly, bringing forth red hair and green eyes to a brown-haired, brown-eyed couple, the angel genes that constitute a Fenestra stay hidden until the right baby, the right family, and the right generation. We appear human to the living; to the dying we are Light. We are windows to the afterlife, shepherds of all life’s energy.
Before there were presidents and kings, before there were religions and sciences, before history books were written and the dinosaurs roared, there was Light and her companion, Dark. Day and night. Positive and negative. Beginning and end. Neither existed without the other.
We call this source-light the Creators. You may call it God, Allah, Buddha, Fate, science, Yahweh, or the Way. It answers to many names and has many forms and followers.
I answer to Meridian Sozu. My first name belonged to my great-aunt Meridian Laine Fulbright. Auntie taught me all she could in the few sunrises between my sixteenth birthday and her death. And my last name, Sozu, belonged to my father, who is out there somewhere, hiding with my mother and little brother. Hiding from me and from the Aternocti who hunt me. The Aternocti are the Dark who extinguish the Light. My light. Your light. Any and all energy can be hijacked by them. They kill innocents easily, without remorse.
My destiny was set in stone at my birth, on December twenty-first, at midnight, on the winter solstice when I entered this world, carrying forth my family’s lineage. I was not just a girl born into a family who carried Fenestra genes, but I was also a girl who could change the course of death, a girl who could shelter a soul and pass it back to the Creators, back to the Light.
I found Juliet Ambrose, a sister of the Light, with the help of my soul mate, Tens Valdez. Aided by a fledgling coalition of humans who chose to follow good and thwart evil, we pushed back against the Nocti with a small victory. Juliet’s destiny began on March twenty-first, the spring equinox. We survived Juliet’s transition from a Fenestra girl to full Window on her sixteenth birthday. Much like Auntie did with me, I taught her what little I knew in the hopes she wouldn’t be pulled across. She made it through. Barely. But her already wounded heart continues to bleed for the family she doesn’t know and for the children of Dunklebarger who she was unable to protect from the Nocti. I lose more sleep over her future than I do over my own. I have Tens. She seems lost and unwilling to trust. Angry beyond reason.
Hard to imagine that only five months before this, the Nocti wanted me dead and Juliet’s light turned into darkness. Preying upon greedy, entitled humans, the Nocti built a machine of oiled precision that tested children for Fenestra genes and for
ced their obedience. The torture and sacrifice of children without families was hidden from the world by a “charitable” institution by the name of Dunklebarger Rehabilitation Center. Here the children were housed until the Nocti were able to ascertain whether they were only human or part angel as well. We are still trying to find all the generations of children who were killed or who disappeared, in the hopes of finding more of us alive. Auntie told me Fenestras who aren’t transitioned by other Fenestras are lost to the world. We need to find them all, any souls the Nocti didn’t drag down into the void. Each person who lives needs love. In a world where love is harder and harder to find, this new mission layers upon our duties to the dead.
Throughout, the one thing the Nocti didn’t count on, that they couldn’t begin to understand, was the bond formed between good people. The radiation of heart-lights united in common purpose reflects greater in the darkness than anything man-made ever can. Together we’d proven formidable. We’d broken the Nocti reign at Dunklebarger, DG, and a Creator’s tornado did the rest of the demolition. We’d held off Ms. Asura and wounded her. But we all know she’s still out there.
Tens is my Protector and was described by Auntie as a rare gift, a soul mate who has always known my feelings, even when miles separated us. I don’t have to lie to him about being a Fenestra. At some point we’re supposed to be able to communicate without words, but so far that hasn’t happened. Human in all other regards, he’s got my back; we’re each other’s sidekicks, not halves of one soul but amplifiers of each other.
We’re joined by creatures of the Creators. A wolf-dog named Custos, her name meaning “guardian,” is Tens’s best friend. She’s been with him since he trekked from Seattle to Revelation to find Auntie. Custos comes and goes as she pleases, doesn’t eat much, and seems to give her opinion in tail wags and tongue licks. It’s clear I’m lower on the ladder than she is, at least in her mind. On the journey as well is a long-haired, short-tempered Maine coon named Minerva, or Mini. Minerva is named for the goddess of knowledge, and her expression says it all.
Mini arrived at Dunklebarger months before we did. She kept Juliet going, easing the ache of souls using Juliet’s window without her knowledge. Mini saved Juliet’s sanity, and maybe her life, more times than I care to count. She is the Fenestras’ creature and favors Juliet over me. I’m waiting. She’ll like me. Eventually.
But since our battle at Wildcat Creek, the Nocti are quiet and invisible. Evil never gives up.
Auntie gave me a journal in which each generation of my family’s Fenestra had written their experiences and pieces of our puzzle down for the next. Its cover is made of thick, cracking leather, embossed with all things alive. The penmanship is tiny and cramped. But I read it. Tens read it. We decipher more daily. Looking for ways to fully defeat the Nocti. To free Juliet’s mother, Roshana, who seems trapped at the window. To help ourselves.
If the writings of my ancestors are any indication, Ms. Asura, a Nocti and Juliet’s bogus social worker, will be back. Stronger. Determined. And bringing her own contingent of soldiers. It is only a matter of when, where, and what they’ll exploit.
How many innocents will die before we stop them?
If we stop them.
CHAPTER 1
A carpet of violets rose beneath our feet, dancing to the tune the May winds strummed. Cherry trees lifted pink petals in offering. Paved paths wide enough for cars wound around the grassy hills, linking one section to another. Stone guardians and perpetual mourners of all sizes populated each plot. Benches made of granite but fashioned like tree limbs invited the weary to rest awhile. Whole tree trunks of limestone towered above, twined with ivy, calla lilies, and anchors. Up on a hill, sturdy stone monuments belonging to prominent families overlooked the best view of the Indianapolis skyline. Below us, an angel with unfurled wings held her hands out in invitation, her eyes closed as if she, too, saw beyond this life and into the next.
Cemeteries were my universal comfort place. I’d learned over the last five months that any burial place felt safe. In Colorado or here in Indiana. Wherever we went next, I knew I’d find the same peace at burial grounds. Their irrefutably homey feeling filled my heart with quiet contentment. Standing in Riverside Cemetery picking out two lots in section forty-six, one for Auntie’s grave marker and one for Juliet’s mother, Roshana, I wasn’t sure if I felt this safe because of all the dead or because the living worked so hard not to forget them. There, surrounded by monuments of draped obelisks and marble lambs, my grip relaxed. Maybe it was because the only souls coming to me were long since deceased and knew exactly what they were doing. Or maybe any earth dedicated to memories and the past was my temple, my church, my sacred ground—I didn’t know, didn’t question.
“Earth to Merry?” Tens brushed my hand with a half smile and a teasing glint in his eyes. “You okay?” His lips, too full and pink to be masculine, added to the beauty of his face and contrasted with his rugged, razor-sharp cheekbones and strong jaw.
I knew what those lips were capable of and my stomach knotted a silent answer. I’d like to lock us in a room, simply the two of us, pause the world so I could stop worrying, stop thinking, stop being a Fenestra and just be a girl in love with a boy. Just for a moment or two.
“Here comes Rumi,” I said as our giant friend, whose heart was larger than his frame, marched toward us beside the cemetery’s sexton. Rumi blew glass, acted like a self-appointed human watchdog, and threw around rare, antiquated words the way most of us said stupid things like cool and sick. His bald head was offset by a multicolored and intricately braided beard, his eyes sparkling with ever-ready laughter and capable of seeing the world painted in vivid colors.
“Merry?” Tens frowned at my half answer. He took his job of Protector seriously, even when I didn’t need him to. Was it possible to balance being entwined without being smothered? If only we could share thoughts without words, like we were supposed to. Protectors didn’t seem to have angel genes, but when paired with the right Fenestra, they shared memories and experiences from a very early age. In the beginning, Tens’s uncanny ability to feel what I felt unnerved me. Now I found comfort in not being alone. However, that didn’t mean I needed him to take care of me. I might not have superpowers, but I wasn’t helpless. I wouldn’t diminish myself to placate his sometimes overbearing sense of duty.
I snorted. In short, we were still working out the kinks in our relationship. “I’m fine. Just breathing.” Rumi brought me to this cemetery on a whim before the Feast of the Fireflies to visit his mother’s grave. We’d found grave markers chiseled with windows, like ones I saw shifting souls to the other side. They were also reiterated in the artwork Rumi’s ancestors passed down.
I hadn’t noticed the trees in February, but now the leaves unfurled like sails in late-spring breezes heading toward summer; it was as if the trees, too, had stories to share. The gentle wind whispered over us, raining petals and rustling the violets.
I glanced over at Tens. To think we were connected, entwined, destined to be together blew my mind. He was taller than most men, and his shoulders used to be straight planks and right angles but now subtly curved and rounded. His legs ate up the ground beneath him with the grace of rushing water—purposeful, intense, impossible to refuse. His deep black hair was shot through with shades of blue and purple and rust as the sun struck it. Forever too long, it fell over his ears and winged eyebrows, into his eyes. Eyes that appeared black, too, but flecked with a rich coffee brown, his pupils and irises blended. And it was as if he saw things most people missed. Maybe he did, not because he was a Protector, but because he was awake and aware of the world around him. He listened with every cell, every breath, knew the intention of every word of the people around us.
Rumi’s booming voice carried on the breeze. His odd accents and vocabulary made watching conversations with him a spectator sport. No one knew half of his words; I figured out the context and tried to look them up later. “Lass, this is Thomas. Are you sure this be t
he spot for your cenotaphs, your empty graves?”
“Merry, you’re sure you want to do this?” Tens leaned down into my face, cupping my cheeks. His breath was flavored by the cinnamon gum he preferred.
“Yes, they need stones and we need earth to visit.” Auntie’s remains had been in her house in Revelation when Perimo and the Nocti burned it down. If there was anything left, we had no idea when, or if, it would ever be safe enough to return there. She taught me that Fenestras are finite—if a Fenestra dies and isn’t transitioned by another Fenestra, then they are lost to the world. Which is a very good reason for the Nocti to hunt us to change or kill us. I’d helped Auntie over the window, but she couldn’t go to the Light beyond. She seemed stuck and the only thing we’d been able to figure out was her bodily remains weren’t marked, weren’t rested.
So although I could only mark ground for Auntie, we hoped to find Juliet’s mother, Roshana, somewhere nearby. Please be where we can find you. I feared Juliet would never relinquish the tight hold on her grief if we were unable to bury Roshana’s remains. It was as if Juliet couldn’t hold on to her actual mother, so instead she clung to the pain of not having a mom. Roshana had been taken by the Nocti, probably by Ms. Asura, years ago, and we had no idea where she might be buried, or if she was at all. “I won’t be back to Revelation soon to bury Auntie near Charles, and Juliet’s mother was a local, right? It makes sense to mark this ground, where Rumi’s family rests, before more time passes.”
We knew Rumi ordered plain stones for his family; mysteriously, the suspected Fenestras and Protectors had been re-marked with much more elaborate stones. We hoped to lure whoever was responsible for changing the grave markers into the open. Who are they? Can they help us find more Fenestra? Assist us in uncovering Juliet’s father’s identity? Why change the stones? Did it keep the Nocti from desecrating the remains of Fenestra, or were they mere decoration?
I rubbed my aching forehead. Too much thinking. Not enough knowing.