Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

  “Most horses that compete are trained by professionals and cost well over forty grand,” he says. “But not Midas. Tucker raised and trained him from a colt.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  Tucker looks restless. He rubs the back of his neck, a gesture I know means he’s wildly uncomfortable with the way the conversation’s going.

  “I wish I could have seen you compete,” I say. “I bet that’s something to behold.”

  “You’ll have to catch him this year,” says Mr. Avery.

  “I know!” I exclaim. I drop my chin into my hand as I lean on the kitchen table and grin at Tucker. I know I’m making it worse, teasing him. But maybe if I just act normal everything will go back to the way it was.

  “Let’s go out to the barn and show Midas the new bridle,” Tucker says.

  With that he whisks me out of the house to the safety of the barn. The horse comes to the front of his stall the moment we go in, ears cocked forward expectantly. He’s a beautiful, shiny chestnut color with large, knowing brown eyes. Tucker strokes under his chin. Then he puts on the new bridle his parents gave him.

  “You should have told me it was your birthday,” I say.

  “I was going to. But then we were almost eaten by a grizzly.”

  “Oh, right. What about Wendy?” I ask.

  “What about her?”

  “It’s her birthday, too. I’m the worst friend ever. I should have sent her something.

  Did you exchange gifts?”

  “Not yet.” He turns toward me. “But she gave me the perfect gift.”

  The way he’s looking at me sends butterflies into my stomach. “What?”

  “You.”

  I don’t know what to say. This summer hasn’t turned out at all the way I’d planned.

  I’m not supposed to be standing in the middle of a barn with a blue-eyed cowboy who’s looking at me like he’s about to kiss me. I shouldn’t be wanting him to kiss me.

  “What are we doing?” I ask.

  “Carrots. ”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say shakily. “That’s not me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “An hour ago you thought I was some kind of freak.”

  He tugs a hand through his hair in agitation and then looks directly into my eyes.

  “I didn’t ever think you were a freak. I think. I thought you were magic or something. I thought that you were too perfect to be real.”

  I so want to show him, to fly to the top of the hayloft and smile down on him, to tell him everything. I want him to know the real me.

  “I know I said some stupid things today. But I like you, Clara,” he says. “I really like you.”

  It might be the first time he’s actually said my name.

  He sees the hesitation in my eyes. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know.”

  “No,” I say. He’s a distraction. I have a purpose, a duty. I’m not here for him. “Tuck, I can’t. I have to—”

  His expression clouds.

  “Tell me this isn’t about Christian Prescott,” he says. “Tell me you’re over that guy.”

  I feel a flash of anger at how condescending he sounds, like I’m some silly girl with a crush.

  “You don’t know everything about me,” I say, trying to rein in my temper.

  “Come here.” His voice is so warm and rough-edged that it sends a shiver down my spine.

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you really want to be with Christian Prescott,” he says.

  “Like you know what I want.”

  “I do. I know you. He’s not your type.”

  I stare helplessly down at my hands, afraid to look at him. “Oh, and I suppose you’re my type, right?”

  “I suppose I am,” he says, and he’s crossing the distance between us and taking my face in his hands before I can even think to stop him.

  “Tuck, please,” I manage in a quivery voice.

  “You like me, Clara,” he says. “I know you do.”

  If only I could laugh at him. If only I could laugh and pull away and tell him how stupid and wrong he is.

  “Try to tell me you don’t,” he murmurs, so close his breath is on my face. I look up into his eyes and see the beckoning heat in them. I can’t think.

  His lips are too close to mine and his hands are drawing me closer.

  “Tuck,” I breathe, and then he kisses me.

  I’ve been kissed before. But nothing like this. He kisses me with surprising tenderness, for all of his gutsy talk. Still cupping my face, he gently brushes his lips against mine, slowly, like he’s memorizing what I feel like. My eyes close. My head swims with his smell, grass and sunshine and musky cologne. He kisses me again, a little more firmly, and then he pulls back to look down into my face.

  I so don’t want it to be over. All other thoughts vanish from my brain. I open my eyes.

  “Again,” I whisper.

  The corner of his mouth lifts, and then I kiss him. Not so gently this time. His hands drop from my face and grab at my waist and pull me to him. A small soft groan escapes him, and that noise makes me feel absolutely crazy. I lose it. I wind my hands around his neck and kiss him without holding anything back. I can feel his heart thundering like mine, his breath coming faster, his arms tightening around me.

  And then I can feel what he feels. He’s waited such a long time for this moment. He loves how I feel in his arms. He loves the smell of my hair. He loves the way I looked at him just now, flushed and wanting more from him. He loves the color of my lips and now the taste of my mouth is making his knees feel weak and he doesn’t want to seem weak in front of me. So he draws back, and his breath comes out in a rush. His arms drop away from me.

  I open my eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  He can’t speak. His face has gone pale beneath his golden skin. And then I realize that it’s too bright in there, too bright for the shady dark of the barn, and the light’s coming from me, radiating off me in waves.

  I’m in glory. Tucker stares at me in shock. I can feel his shock. He can see everything now in all this light, glowing out through my clothes so I might as well be standing naked in front of him. I inhale sharply. Part of me twists painfully at the look of terror in his eyes, and just like that, the light goes out. His presence in my mind fades away as the barn darkens, and we’re standing a few steps apart from each other now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I watch the color slowly come back into his face.

  “I don’t know what.,” he tries, and then stops himself.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “What are you?”

  I flinch.

  “I’m Clara.” My name, at least, has not changed. I take a step toward him, put my hand out to touch his face. He shies away. Then he grabs my hand, the one with the cut. I gasp as he jerks the bandage away.

  The wound is completely healed. There isn’t even a scar. We both peer down at my palm. Then Tucker’s hand falls away.

  “I knew it,” he says.

  I’m flooded with a strange mix of panic and relief. There’s no explaining this away. I’ll have to tell him. “Tuck—”

  “What are you?” he demands again. He staggers back a few steps.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “No.” He shakes his head suddenly. His face is still so pale, greenish like he’s about to throw up. He keeps backing away from me, and then he’s at the door of the barn and he turns and runs toward the house.

  All I can do is watch him go. I feel disconnected from myself, shaky with the shock of what’s happened. I don’t have a ride home. And Tucker could be in the house getting a shotgun for all I know. So I run. I stumble toward the woods at the back of the ranch, grateful for the cover of the trees. It’s starting to get dark. Once I’m a little ways in, my wings snap out without me even having to summon them. I fly carelessly, getting completely lost before I can sense the way home
, instantly soaked by clouds and so cold I’m shivering hard enough to make my teeth chatter, tear-blinded and halfpanicked.

  I cry as I wing my way home. I cry and cry. It feels like the tears will never stop.

  * * *

  Mom discovers me in my room sobbing into my pillow a few hours later. I’m scratched and scraped and tear-streaked, but what she says when she sees me is

  “What happened to your hair?”

  “What?” I’m desperately trying to get it together so I can decide how much I’ll tell her about the whole Tucker thing.

  “It’s back to its natural color. The red is completely gone.”

  “Oh. I brought the glory. It must have zapped the color right out.”

  “You attained glory?” she says, her blue eyes wide.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, my darling. No wonder you’re upset. It’s such an overwhelming experience.”

  She doesn’t know the half of it.

  “Rest now.” She presses a kiss to my temple. “You can tell me more about it in the morning.”

  When she’s gone I send a frantic email to Angela: Emergency, I write, hardly able to make my fingers and brain work well enough together to get out a simple message.

  Call me ASAP.

  There’s no one to talk to. No one to tell. And already I miss him.

  I give in to the need to hear his voice and call Tucker on my cell. He answers on the first ring. For a minute neither of us speaks.

  “Leave me alone,” he says, and then he hangs up.

  Chapter 17

  Just Call Me Angel

  Three days pass, three agonizing days where I don’t call him again or try to see him, reliving the kiss until I think I’ll go bonkers and tear all my feathers out by the handful.

  I keep telling myself this is all for the best. Okay, so not the best, since I’ve essentially revealed myself to a human and I don’t even know what the punishment for that will be, if anybody ever finds out. But maybe it’s for the best that Tucker rejected me. So he knows there’s something weird about me, sure. Can he prove it?

  No. Will anybody believe him? Probably not. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d even tell anyone. If he did, I could deny it all. We could go back to the way things were before, him accusing me of stuff and me pretending like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

  Right.

  I’m not that good a liar, even when I’m lying to myself. I wish Angela would call me back and I could ask her what to do.

  As if the daytime wasn’t bad enough, I dream about him. Every night for three nights in a row. I can’t get out of that moment when I was in his head, feeling what he felt, hearing his thoughts as he kissed me. I can feel him loving me. And it kills me, that moment when I feel his love shift into fear.

  The third morning I wake up with tears streaming down my face, and when I stare up at the ceiling, wallowing in my misery, a thought occurs to me. He loves me. Inside his head, his every thought and reaction was born of love, love inside and out, crazy, irrational (and sure, a bit lustful) love.

  He loves me, and that’s also what terrified him when he saw me all lit up like a Christmas tree. He doesn’t know what I am, but he loves me.

  I sit up. Maybe I should have figured this out a long time ago. I shouldn’t have needed to read his heart in order to see it. But when I felt all that love rising up in him, I didn’t know I was inside his head. I didn’t notice that the feelings weren’t mine.

  And why is that?

  Easy.

  It’s all me, the human part, the angel part. I love Tucker Avery.

  Talk about revelation.

  So that’s why I’m waiting now outside the Crazy River Rafting Company, sitting on the sidewalk outside of his workplace like some creepy stalker ex-girlfriend, waiting for him to come out so I can ambush him with love. Only he doesn’t come out of the building. I wait for more than an hour past when he usually gets off, and nobody comes out but a blond woman who I assume is the secretary.

  “Can I help you?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She hesitates, not quite sure how to interpret my answer. “You waiting for someone?”

  “Tucker.”

  She smiles. She likes Tucker. Everybody in their right mind likes Tucker.

  “He’s still on the river,” she says. “His raft overturned, nothing serious, but they’ll all be in a bit late. You want me to walkie him, tell him you’re here?”

  “No,” I say quickly. “I’ll wait.”

  Every few minutes I check my watch, and every time a truck drives by I hold my breath. A few times I decide that this is all a very bad idea and get up to leave. But I can never make myself get into my car. If anything, I just have to see him.

  Finally a big red truck pulls into the parking lot towing an open trailer loaded with rafts. Tucker’s sitting in the passenger’s seat, talking with the older guy I met before who led the rafting trips. Tucker called him Murphy, although I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. When they announced the rules of the raft that time he took me down the river with him, he’d called them Murphy’s laws.

  Tucker doesn’t see me right away. He smiles the way he does when he delivers the punch line for a joke, a wry, knowing little flash of teeth and dimple. I melt seeing that smile, remembering the times when it’s been aimed at me. Murphy laughs, then they both hop out of the truck and circle back to the trailer to start unloading the rafts. I stand up, my heart beating so fast I think it’s going to shoot right out of my chest and hit him.

  Murphy rolls open a huge garage door, then turns back toward the truck, which is when he sees me standing there. He stops in his tracks and looks at me. Tucker is busily unfastening the rafts from the trailer.

  “Tuck,” says Murphy slowly. “I think this girl’s here for you.”

  Tucker goes completely still for a minute, like he’s been hit with a freeze ray. The muscles in his back tighten and he straightens and turns to look at me. A succession of emotions flashes across his face: surprise, panic, anger, pain. Then he settles back on anger. His eyes go cold. A muscle ticks in his jaw.

  I wilt under his glare.

  “You need a minute?” Murphy asks.

  “No,” says Tucker in a low voice that would break my heart if it wasn’t already in pieces around my feet. “Let’s get this done.”

  I stand like I’m rooted to the spot as Tucker and Murphy drag the rafts from the trailer and into a garage on the side of the office. Then they inspect each one, work through some kind of checklist with the life vests, and lock the garage up.

  “See ya,” says Murphy, then jumps into a Jeep and gets the heck out of here.

  Tucker and I stand in the parking lot staring at each other. I still can’t form words. All the things I planned to say flew out of my head the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s so beautiful, standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, his hair still damp from the river, his eyes so blue. I feel tears in my eyes and try to blink them away.

  Tucker sighs.

  “What do you want, Clara?”

  The sound of my name is strange coming from him. I’m not Carrots anymore. My hair is back to blond. He can probably tell even now that I’m not quite what I appear to be.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I say finally. “You don’t know how much I wanted to tell you the truth.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because it’s against the rules.”

  “What rules? What truth?”

  “I’ll tell you everything now, if you’ll hear me out.”

  “Why?” he asks sharply. “Why would you tell me now, if it’s against the rules?”

  “Because I love you.”

  There. I said it. I can’t believe I actually said it. People cast around those words so carelessly. I always cringe whenever I hear kids say it while making out in the hall at school. I love you, babe. I love you, too. Here they’re all of sixteen years old and co
nvinced that they’ve found true love. I always thought I’d have more sense than that, a little more perspective.

  But here I am, saying it and meaning it.

  Tucker swallows. The anger fades from his eyes but I still see shadows of fear.

  “Can we go somewhere?” I ask. “Let’s go somewhere off in the woods, and I’ll show you.”

  He hesitates, of course. I see something like fear on his face. What if I’m an alien invader trying to lure him to a secluded place so I can suck his brains out? Or a vampire, ravenous for his blood?