He sat, the covers falling off his chest. Right then, I wished I had my phone readily available. I’d take a photo and entitle it Pissed Off Man in the Morning. “Kendall, are you serious with this shit?”
I got out of the bed and hurried to my dresser to get on clothes. “Yes. So which is it? I don’t tell you, or I lie to you?”
“The only reason you’d lie to me would be because you know I won’t like what you’re going to do.”
I tugged a tank top over my head. To do what I was going to try to accomplish meant leaving my skin showing. I couldn’t be naked outside. This would have to do. “Do you trust me? Because I trust you.”
“Trusting you doesn’t mean I don’t know you might try to do something stupid to save me. Levi helped us. It’s going to go a long way. I believe I have a realistic shot.”
I ran over to the bed and kissed him on the lips. “I know you do. I’ll be there. Trust me, Malcolm. Please.”
“If you kill yourself or hurt yourself or whatever because you’re trying to save me, I’m going to be seriously pissed.”
I winked at him. “I know. Besides, it’s good for you to be angry and annoyed with me. You can’t be happy, baby. I won’t be responsible for making you weak.”
“Couldn’t you just burn my dinner or something?”
“Well, maybe. If I was ever planning to cook for you.”
I texted Levi on my way out the door. If this worked—and I really, really hoped it did—then I was going to need a lift to the duel. I couldn’t count on the others not to tell Malcolm what I was going to be doing.
He wrote back that he’d be there to get me at four. That should leave me plenty of time to get to Malcolm right before the battle began.
I drove out to Mount Bonnell. A small hike to the top of a low hill of cliffs gave some of the best views of the city. No one would think it strange if I sat all day in one spot and seemingly stared at the city. Groups of meditators used the spot for their meetings all the time. I needed to get as close to the sun as I could, and since I didn’t have time to drive out to the mountains, this was going to have to do.
When we fought shadows, we took light and we burned them with it. The shadows needed light to exist in our plain of existence. Yet it was also their kryptonite. A solid blast and they disappeared. For just a second, as we used the light, we took it into ourselves and expelled it back out. Malcolm’s blast of light was better than mine because he was stronger than me.
Normal light couldn’t take out Top Hat anymore. He was a powerful son of a bitch. What scared me even more was that he wasn’t even the baddest shadow out there. They’d not sent their top brass yet. He was just the beginning. And if we couldn’t beat him, what would we do?
I had to take the sunlight inside of me until I was filled with it and then hold onto it long enough to get it to Malcolm so he could use it inside the house. He’d take it from my body where I held it, and the burst would be close to the equivalent of what Rafael dished out the day he’d pushed Top Hat out of my house.
I was the lightbringer. I was going to bring light.
I couldn’t fill up at once. The light burned. It was hot inside of me. Inch by inch I had to let it fill the cauldron that was my body until I couldn’t fit anymore. It was going to take all day to accomplish. Somehow, I had to breathe and not think about the possibility it might, in fact, scald my insides so badly I wouldn’t recover from the experience.
I had to be able to do this. I just did.
I closed my eyes. At least it wasn’t raining.
My mind drifted. Sitting still and doing nothing but absorbing sunlight was long, dull work. I could feel it come into me slowly. I let some light in and let other bits of it go. Bit by bit, piece by piece. My phone dinged, and I looked at it.
Chase had texted. I went out with Annika again last night, and I really like her. So I told her the truth. Expected her to run for her life. And she didn’t. She actually believes me. Of course I met the perfect woman days before I’m going to die. Thanks for that.
I sent him back a heart emoji. Better to have found her than not? Besides, I think Malcolm has a chance. Why did she believe you? Is she a sensitive?
Not that I can tell. She’s open-minded. Sees a lot of bad shit at the hospital. Makes her believe anything is possible. Where are you? Malcolm’s hanging out with Block at the movies. Figured you’d be together.
I put away the phone. The nice thing about having that form of communication was I could sometimes ignore it. I didn’t want Chase to know where I was, so I was going to simply ignore the question.
I let my mind drift again. Time passed. Eventually I hit a state where I wasn’t really asleep—the light inside of me was too uncomfortable to let me rest—but I wasn’t fully present in my body either.
I could remember being in the Other place so clearly as I sat on the bench at Mount Bonnell. Usually, the memories felt far away, like a dream I could recall really intensely.
We’d only just agreed to our destiny, saying yes to Michael when he asked us to join in his fight. I stood inside what would be my home for the time I was there. The best description of the space was that it closely resembled a bungalow. I’d lived my whole life in my parents’ van. The space looked huge. I’d stood in the center of it and cried.
Big, sobbing tears rushing down the sides of my face. I wanted to go home. I wanted my mom. I wanted not to have been shot by the ice cream man. Arms came around me. Menkaura, Malcolm by his real name, had been slightly taller than me, even then.
I turned around to face him. Nine years old like me, he was so skinny. I’d told my mom I wanted to feed him all my food. She’d promised me when he came with us, we’d make sure he ate.
I sniffed and tried to stop crying. I didn’t want him to think I was a baby. “We died.” I stated the obvious, having no idea what to say to him.
He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I wanted to save you.”
“I wanted to save you, too. I tried.” I felt at my belly. It was okay. There was no hole in it. “You said yes, too?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you.” He hugged me again. “I’m sorry.”
Why did he keep apologizing to me? “Don’t be sorry.”
“Okay. Okay.” He let me go. “What are they going to do us?”
“I don’t know,” I took his hand. “But we’ll do it together.”
“Together.” He nodded, his eyes lighting up.
That memory passed like a breeze. I saw Victoria as she’d been as a child. We sat together overlooking the purple waterfall. There were strange touches of things in the Other space. Most everything seemed as it would on Earth, but a purple waterfall had been one of the things that was really different.
Our legs swung over the side, and we gazed at it. She spoke, her accent thicker than now. It had taken her some time to learn the English the rest of us spoke. It had always seemed to me that beings who could regrow bodies should be able to implant the understanding of language into her head. Still, she was super-smart, and she’d eventually caught on.
“I can make the waterfall stop.” I looked at her like she had two heads, and she laughed. “I can.”
I held up my hand. “I’m sure you can. But why would you want to?”
Mary ran up and plopped down next to us.
Poor Mary, who had been killed before I even remembered her in the present day. Chase would never really get over the death of his sister. She’d been a ghost clearer like me. Only Rafael used to call her sloppy. He had never complimented me, but at least he hadn’t criticized.
“What are you doing? The boys are setting things on fire. I don’t want to watch. Chelsea is reading. Again.” Something about Chelsea’s choice of leisure activity drove Mary nuts. “Can I ask you something, Kendall?”
If any of us had a tendency toward mean girl behavior, it was Mary. She’d never have gotten away with really being outright rude. The Others had ways of punishing us, sometimes setting our skin on fire for
a few seconds so we could feel the burn, before healing us from the pain. They weren’t gentle, time-out parents.
“I guess it depends on what you’re going to ask me.”
Victoria rolled her eyes. Mary had been less than patient during the time when Victoria had struggled with language. “Don’t answer her at all.”
“Do you let Malcolm”—he’d started insisting on using the name his foster mother had wanted to call him to distance himself from the pain of his previous life—“sleep in your bed?”
“Where did you hear that?” I did let Malcolm sleep in my bed. But we didn’t discuss it with anyone. I liked the way it felt to have him on the other side of the covers. He was warm. He was safe. For his part, he liked to know I was there when the nightmares overtook him. Neither one of us saw our deaths anymore in our sleep. That had passed. It was the other things in his life—his mother dying, the beatings, and the starvation. They kept him awake sometimes. He liked knowing I was there for him to reach out to if he was scared.
And none of it was Mary’s business.
She shrugged. “I overheard the Others talking about it. Michael said to Gabriel if he wanted to find Malcolm at night, he had to go to your room to get him since he slept there with you. He asked Gabriel if you two should be made to stop that. Gabriel said no, to leave you alone. I think that’s gross. Boys are dirty. They’re loud. I don’t want one in my bed, not even my brother.”
“Where Malcolm sleeps is none of your business.” Victoria flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I can make this waterfall stop. Can you?”
Like the memory before, this one faded. As my body filled with heat from the sun, the visions came more easily. One jumped into another.
“Henry is always looking at me.” Victoria leaned over to me. A teenaged beauty. I was jealous of how her hair shined in the sun. She’d become what a Gabriel called a masterful witch. And she was right. Henry stared at her. A lot.
“He likes you. It’s obvious. Do you like him?”
Her cheeks turned pink. “I do.”
“Are you going to let him kiss you?”
“If he tries.” She practically glowed. “I don’t want to make a fool of myself. It’s not like we have a lot of places to go and hide if I tell him I like him and he doesn’t like me. I have to be careful.”
Henry walked over to where we ate our oatmeal. Everything tasted like oatmeal; it just depended on the version. Sometimes it was strawberry-flavored oatmeal; sometimes it was banana. I could barely taste it anymore.
“We can see the moon tonight.” Henry addressed Victoria. “Would you come for a walk and look at it with me?”
She jumped to her feet. “I’d love to.”
“Great.”
I was alone at the table, which was fine by me. I didn’t mind quiet, and time spent doing nothing was becoming rarer and rarer. Malcolm shoved himself next to me. He was sweaty. If I had to guess, I’d say he’d once again played football with Chase and the others. Chelsea and Mary liked to cheer them on. I was surprised they weren’t right on his heels. Except for the hours he slipped into my room to sleep, I never saw Malcolm alone. I missed him. Only it seemed kind of pathetic to tell him.
“Where’s Victoria?” He looked behind him. “I thought you’d be eating together.” Malcolm grabbed my spoon and took a bite of my oatmeal. “Oh good. Strawberry sludge.”
“Hey.” I yanked the spoon out of his hand. “I didn’t say you could do that. Go get your own dinner if you want some.”
He held up his hands in front of him. “I took one bite. Relax.”
“You relax.” I was done. Seriously finished with this conversation. I got to my feet, my hands shaking.
“Why are you so mad at me all the time?”
“I’m not mad at you.” Frustrated, lonely, and feeling more and more alone in my adoration of him. Mad? Not so much. Presenting as mad was easier than the other stuff. I didn’t have any right to be jealous of anything he did or didn’t do. We were friends; that was it.
He grabbed my arm. “We fight all the time.”
“If you don’t like it, go spend time with someone else.” I wrenched my arm away.
“I don’t want to spend time with someone else. I want you to stop yelling at me.”
I took a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll never yell at you again. I’ll treat you just like I treat everyone else. I’ll be perfectly nice to you. To answer your question, Victoria is somewhere in the moonlight with Henry. Probably kissing.” I didn’t know that for sure. I suspected. “I’m going to go back to my room and sit on the bed and read. Maybe if I’m lucky, when they put us back on Earth, there’ll be someone there who wants to kiss me under the moonlight sometime.”
Malcolm’s eyes were huge. “He’s kissing her?”
“That’s right.”
I walked away from him so he wouldn’t see me cry. Lately I’d needed to escape him a lot. I did yell too much. The problem was my feelings had changed. When he came into my room at night after everyone had gone to bed, as he always had, I felt frustrated, not relieved. He was so cute, had always been. I wanted him to kiss me. And he thought of me as his sister.
I was going to have to tell him to sleep in his own space. It had been five years. It was probably way past time for us to stop clinging to each other. Or at least it was for me.
When I got to my space, I stared at myself in the mirror. My long brown hair hung limp and messy. I quickly ran a brush through it. My eyes were very blah, and I had birthmarks on my skin I’d always hated. When they regrew me, couldn’t they have left them off?
The door to my bungalow slammed open, and I jumped. “What the hell, Malcolm?”
“Why did you run off like that?”
I wiped at my eyes. “Because I’m crying, and I didn’t want you to see. I’d like to finish alone. Get out.”
“No.” He shook his head and closed the door behind him. “Why are you crying? Why don’t you want me to see? We tell each other things. That’s how this works with you and me.”
He wasn’t going to leave until I explained. I took a deep breath. The time had come. As Victoria had said, there was no good place to hide when he laughed in my face about my feelings. It would, however, mean he’d go to his own room at night and leave me to obsess alone until I got over it. Surely, someday, I would.
“I’m jealous of my best friend.”
He stepped closer. I could feel his temper. His eye twitched when he got mad. “Why? Because you want to be kissing Henry in the moonlight?”
“What?” Where had he come up with that? “No. Not at all. I’m jealous she’s getting kissed.”
“Who do you want to be kissing?” Malcolm outright yelled now. He’d only minutes ago been mad at me for hollering? “Chase? Ross? Logan? Keith?” Malcolm hadn’t given Block his nickname yet. We still called him Keith. “Troy? One of the girls?”
I sat on my couch. “This is hard, and it’s going to change things. You’ll want to go to your own space and stay away from me. I know. You don’t feel the way I do. I thought I could keep it to myself, and we’d be fine. I want to kiss you. So you should go.”
He didn’t say a word. Malcolm stood very still in the way he alone could do. I turned my back on him and walked into the bedroom. I heard the door open and close when he left. At least he hadn’t laughed at me.
The sobs that wrecked my body came quickly. I let them out. What choice did I have? I was stuck in this place, readying for a war, technically dead, and in love with a guy who didn’t feel the same way. Some things in life were worth crying about.
I fell asleep, worn out and done.
The bed shifted, and I opened my eyes. I’d gotten really used to Malcolm coming and going. I hadn’t expected him then. He couldn’t sleep with me. It was too hard.
“You have to go. I have feelings, okay? They’re stupid, but they’re mine. I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
He pulled me against him, wrapping his long legs over me to pin me in
place. He’d never done so before. It felt … nice. I tried to shove him off, but he wouldn’t budge. What was he doing? “You’re being cruel now.”
“Stop.” He brushed my bangs off my forehead. “Of course I want to kiss you. I wanted to kiss you when I was nine years old. I’ve always wanted to kiss you.”
He’d never said as much. “I—”
Malcolm tapped the end of my nose with his pointer finger. “I’m afraid. I can’t only kiss you. I wake in the middle of the night—you have no idea; you sleep through it—let’s say, wanting. I wake needing and wanting you. I don’t know if I can just kiss you, enty hhabebtee.” Sometimes he spoke to me in Arabic. I didn’t know what he said. “You have to stop me, okay? You have to say no more. You set the rules. I’ll follow them.”
What did he mean? I knew the basics of everything. A very horrible day spent listening to Gabriel explain the birds and the bees had been enough for me. Only …
Malcolm’s mouth met my own. His lips were soft. His hands caressed my back. Soon, he kissed me harder, tugging me further against him. The quiet of the room engulfed us. We could do anything we wanted, and no one would ever know. He pulled away, caressing the side of my face. “Just kissing you is going to be hard.”
From the close vicinity of our bodies, I could feel how much he wanted me. “Kendall, you’ll tell me when. All of it. Okay?”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure I’d ever know when I was ready. Would he get tired of waiting?
He rolled over. “I left so I could get this for you.” Malcolm stuck a flower in my face. In the darkness, I couldn’t tell what type.
“Ah, thanks.” I took it from him and smelled. It was a rose. He’d had to cross the whole homestead to find roses. “Why did you think I needed this? I’m not complaining. It’s beautiful. I just want to know.”
Phoenix Everlasting_A Paranormal Romance Series Page 19