“Oh,” she murmured. These weren’t just sketches. Rae could somehow draw emotions. It wasn’t until Alex set down the paper and saw it from a distance that she noticed an outline hidden in the scribbles. The spirals took form of two arms cradling the chaos. In realizing this, Alex felt two rings of warmth; one tightened around her shoulders and one around her abdomen as though there were arms holding her. She gasped.
Rae smiled.
Chapter Ten
Lucia Duvall had been alive a long time, long enough that things didn’t surprise her anymore. But Rae surprised her, more specifically, the way Rae attached herself to Alex Ash. She drummed her fingers on her desk, scowling at her thin, bony fingers. It took so much effort, so much mind power, to keep up her appearance. Her mind kept aging and thus it fought to project her appearance accordingly. It wanted to hunch her shoulders, tighten her joints, and wrinkle her skin. If she didn’t keep focus, she’d sag into an old hag. It became increasingly more difficult to remember how she felt during her youth. She always loved a challenge though. Her brilliant mind—with the help of secret herbs and minerals—always came through. She concentrated and watched her skin repair itself.
Now stay that way, she commanded. With creamy, smooth fingers she held up a glass flask to inspect her tired reflection.
No stone was left unturned in her search for the link between Alex and Sephi. The conclusion, as she suspected, was that the Anovarks were extinguished. Those damn Havilahs had made sure of it. Bastards. That family harbored so much hatred for the gifted.
If there was one thing Duvall learned in all her years, it was that with as much love as there was in the world, there were equal parts hatred. Chalk it up to nature’s annoying need to maintain balance. Sometimes one outweighed the other, good over bad, bad over good, but like an old brass balancing scale they always found their way back to neutral.
She glanced out the window. She could feel the presence of the gifted out there somewhere. Their dissension with the laws of the afterworld grew thicker by the day, and Alex’s death had given them hope. They’d waited a long time.
Surely Duvall would know more if she had the courage to leave Brigitta, but with the exception of the haunted house and the occasional trip to the Dual Towers, she rarely left her office. She created the ABC club because it allowed her to gather the goods she needed without putting herself in the path of hatred, from both the spirited and the gifted. One could never be too careful.
She stretched across her desk and scooped up an aragonite stone, squeezing it in her hand and waiting for something to happen. Few things in life and death were absolute, but minerals never failed. She sensed Rae before the child came trotting in like a pony. Alex strode at her side and not far behind followed her handsome friend. The Lasalle boy, the one who caused so much trouble last year.
This boy never accompanied Alex during her visits, but as they entered the room together, Duvall had to brace herself on her desk. She blinked several times and rubbed her eyes, which could see more than most because she embraced the odd and the impossible. These two had a visible energy undulating between them. Such a thing was rare. And dangerous.
“I think Rae wanted to visit you,” Alex said, holding up a paper. “She kept showing this to me.”
Alex presented Duvall with a sketch of the classroom. It included every miniscule detail, right down to the positioning of the flask Duvall set down and the stray pen on the table in the back right corner. Gray pencil lead streaked Rae’s face, and she wiped the hair from her forehead with a dirty hand. The possibility existed that, yes, Rae wanted to see her, but more than likely she drew the picture because she knew she’d be coming to the room later. Her mind was an open door of possibility.
Rae wasn’t the problem here. Duvall purposely walked in between Alex and the boy. As she suspected, she floated through a levitating pool of pleasant electricity causing her hair to stand on end. This was unfortunate.
“Here.” She opened a drawer at the bottom of her desk where she kept a stash of charcoal pencils for Rae when she showed up.
Rae did a little dance as she took them before wrapping an arm around Duvall’s leg. Duvall felt a tug in her chest where she once allowed a heart to beat.
Alex placed the classroom sketch on Duvall’s desk. “Professor, why will Rae leave if she likes it here so much?”
“You’re attached to her already?”
“It’s hard not to be.”
Duvall glanced down at the fair-haired angel. Rae appeared every few months or sometimes every few years. “She’s too smart to stay. Spirits categorize Lost Ones with the gifted, and the gifted are outcasts in our society. Even if for some reason one of them was accepted, they would be put to use.”
Like me. Duvall was a prisoner of this campus. She didn’t know which was preferable. Moving every few weeks like the Lost Ones, or being stuck in one single setting forever. She couldn’t complain about her treatment though. She knew of gifted spirits or Lost Ones living under horrific circumstances.
The vials above Alex’s head clanked together. “What would they do to her?”
“You’ll discuss this in sociology.”
Duvall did her best to remain calm, but the energy between Alex and the Lasalle boy disrupted her thoughts. To test her theory, Duvall pretended to rearrange the jugs on the shelf but took the aragonite stone she still carried between her fingers and tossed it into the current as she passed between the two of them. Sure enough, the rock suspended like a secret between them.
She always thought the calm bubble of energy surrounding Alex felt like longing; she should have realized she tasted the same air when she had the Lasalle boy in class. Chase. That was his name. In three hundred years, she’d only seen energy like this once before. The electricity between this pair buzzed in a happier tone than the last two who carried such a burden between them. Sephi and Raive. That didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t change, however. Energy, like everything else, was temperamental.
Alex gathered Rae’s hair in her hands and let it fall through her fingers like shiny tinsel. “Why are the gifted treated like outcasts?”
“It dates far enough back that the reason has been lost. People don’t change. The Legacy families felt strongly about the separation between the spirited and the gifted.”
Alex continued to comb her fingers through Rae’s silky hair. “Why would they want to be separate from something like this?”
Being extraordinary is a double-edged sword. Even Duvall herself once wondered what it might be like to be on the other side of normal. Once upon a time, she left her life of gifts and tried to be a common human. And it killed her.
“Because that would be mixing the living and dead. The gifted can make things happen, manipulate reality. Losing the ability to distinguish what’s real and what’s not is terrifying. The gifted can be charming and lovely, but like everything and everyone else, they aren’t always good spirited.”
“What can they do?”
“It’s all tricks of the mind. The gifted are people who are able to use the full extent of their minds even while the body protects it. Most are innocent, but some use their gifts to punish people or scare them by changing the appearance of things around them. Or make them think they’re sick or dying.”
She watched Alex shudder and tried to ignore the fact that a moment before it happened, Rae already placed her hand on Alex’s arm to calm her. Rae died so young, but even back then she already had the weight of the world on her fragile shoulders.
Chase Lasalle cleared his throat. He stood off to the side like an onlooker.
“Professor, it seems to me that the spirited and gifted are more similar than different. Why the separation?”
“It’s funny. People usually have difficulty getting along when the similarities are greater than the differences.” She motioned to the space between Chase and the rest of them. “Why do you stand so far away from us, boy? With the pull between y
ou two, you’re likely to slingshot forward at any moment.”
Chase Lasalle shared a look with Alex.
Yes, I can see your secret, Duvall answered. Appearance was not the only thing Alex and Sephi shared. They both shared their minds with their respective soul mates. Another rarity. Sephi claimed history would repeat itself, but Duvall hadn’t realized how much.
The boy took a step forward, and she was then able to read his emotions. He carried his caution where most people carried their secrets, in his eyes. It wasn’t because of her. Was it Rae? She inspected his projection, especially his baby blues.
Yes, her intuition answered for her. He wasn’t scared of Rae herself but the effect Rae had on his Alex. He worried for her. He loved her.
Love. Duvall exhaled so heavily the vials rippled overhead. Love rarely turned out well when it was so strong. Mild emotions were much easier to control.
Chase must be the one who tried to read the letters. Duvall entranced that box too well. She attempted to keep a few letters last spring, separate them from the box to see if it would weaken their allegiance, but it did no good. Only the people who were meant to read the words on the page could see them. The stubborn, self-righteous box kept the words to itself because Alex hadn’t known the rules. Duvall should have known better than to tamper with the emotions of things, even inanimate objects.
“I found something today about my family.” Alex’s tone lowered, buckling under a weight of importance. “Actually the Darwins found it.”
Duvall perked up. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
“I didn’t really know what to say. But Rae kept waving around that sketch of your classroom.” Alex snatched a handful of her hair and twisted it into a coil. “I am connected to a Legacy family. You were right about that.”
Duvall had to reach out a hand to steady the vibrating waves of energy around her. “Which one?”
“Pax said a founding family. The Darwins even showed me the tree.”
Where had this information been hiding? She drained every single one of her resources trying to find a link to Sephi and … “The Kindalls?”
Alex shook her head. “The Havilahs.”
The name struck a horrific chord, a triad of three notes: anger, confusion, and disappointment. The chord floated throughout the room, traveling toward her, stretching into a horizontal line before tightening itself around Duvall’s neck.
“ … you know them, right?”
Duvall clawed at her neck but found no release. How could this girl be related to the hunters who made it their mission to eradicate the gifted? When Alex said she was from Parrish, Duvall assumed she was a prisoner there.
Duvall bent at the waist, nose to nose with Rae. Answers! she demanded, but the child offered none. Blank. After mention of the Havilahs! The reason Rae was dead!
Duvall tried to scream, but only a choking noise escaped her throat. She scurried over to the wall shelves and tipped over a large brown vase. Mullein leaves fluttered to the floor. She snatched up a few and rubbed them on her neck.
This explained the mystery of the letters. Alex had not studied her family tree very well or she wouldn’t be smiling about it. Perhaps certain names had been removed considering the events of the past. Family ties could be severed as easily as sawing off the branch of a tree.
“Yes,” Duvall finally croaked, sinking her nails into her own arm to keep from shrieking. “I know that family.”
She didn’t dare say the name again.
Her mind couldn’t focus enough to telekinetically extract what she wanted from the topmost shelf of her wall. Her trembling hands reached for the rolling ladder. When she grabbed the spray bottle and crawled down, she moved about the room like a tornado, cleansing her sacred space.
Chase watched the air around her as she moved.
Rae held her gaze and shook her head, lifting a shoulder as if to say, It is what it is.
The aragonite stone shattered.
Chapter Eleven
Alex felt stupid. She should have wondered why the other legacies—in particular, the Darwins, who were so fond of ABC—hadn’t already told Duvall about the Havilah family tree. No one wanted to detonate a bomb. After Duvall spritzed the entire classroom with foul-smelling drops of green goo, she overturned the bottle to douse herself. She whimpered as she escaped into her office and slammed the door without another word. The misshapen doorway trembled long after her departure. Rae took Alex’s arm, patted it, and led her away with a look that read, I expected this.
Since death, Alex never had trouble sleeping, but that night she tossed and turned, sweating under the blanket of her own anguish. It made her feel feverishly ill, which, of course, made her feel distorted. Alice in Wonderland syndrome. She worried that she would break her bed.
When she woke to find darkness, she wondered if she even slept at all. Her fatigue continued to pound its fists against the walls of her aching mind. The whispers returned. This time, they merged into one single voice and began to sing. The harmony smiled, curling its edges into recognition like seeing an old friend, and it eased the heat in her head. It was the kind of sound Alex wanted to reach out and grab because she knew each cool, somber note would not last long. The singing faded, replaced by the sound of staccato whishing.
She turned to find Chase asleep on top of the blankets. He faced her with one of his arms draped over the comforter and still wore the jeans and T-shirt from earlier that day.
The brusque strokes of pencil to paper changed tempo. Alex sat up, holding Chase’s arm in place so he wouldn’t move, and leaned over the edge of her bed. She found Rae sprawled on the floor, knees bent and the soles of her tiny feet upward, dancing on air. Rae’s distraught face hovered above her drawing, which was emitting a cloud of frenetic distress. Or it’s possible she sketched quickly enough to produce an exhaust. No picture popped from the mess of shadows she created on the page, but undeclared meaning hid in the chaos like innuendos, none of which felt positive.
Alex observed Rae long enough for the day to announce itself, and the world began to lighten. And as Rae continued her frenzy, the shadows on the paper took the shape of two downturned eyes. The impact of the image grew until Alex could physically feel the pain resonating from them. It was sadness and loss. The hairs on her arms stood on end, or at least her mind made it seem that way.
Rae sighed and flicked the pencil to the floor, finished with her latest masterpiece. She collapsed into a sudden slumber, her white hair fanning out as her head lobbed to the floor. Despondence rose from the page next to her in rings, polluting the room.
Chase scrunched his face in his sleep, and Alex slid down to face him, pressing her lips to the lines on his forehead. Chase tilted his chin upward and brushed her mouth. A current of light waved around them. It killed the air of despondency Rae created. Grief couldn’t withstand happiness; Alex knew this all too well.
He opened his eyes, two jewels that could see so many colors. Did he realize that they were the most incredible color of all? Was that why he could see so much?
She lifted the blankets. A silent offer. He slipped in next to her, reaching for her waist. She couldn’t get close enough. The more she pressed herself against him, the more the energy buzzed, and the more alive she felt. He said something that sounded like “you,” but it was lost as she pulled his lips to hers. She no longer remembered skin-on-skin contact. She was too aware that their bodies no longer existed, but it was so much better to be blanketed in the electricity they created. Chase cradled his hand around the back of Alex’s head, turning it to move perfectly with the cadence of the kiss. She pressed her hands into his back and felt the light surrounding them like their own personal sun. He kissed her harder, and the light brightened. Every piece of her reenergized.
She never wanted it to end, so she gripped him even harder. She rolled on top of him to keep it going, and they fell to the floor without breaking the kiss. They climbed back up, heads
still turning, mouths smiling into one another.
When Alex couldn’t take the brightening of the light any longer, she pulled back. And the room was free of negative emotions.
Chase lifted her up to adjust the pillow under her head.
“When did you come in last night?”
“I don’t know. I hate clocks.” He rested on his elbows and admired the sketches. “Did you see the new one?”
Rae had sketched Alex’s bedroom in Parrish, but how did she know what it looked like? Alex touched the drawing and felt the smooth lacquer of the wood on the sketched bedframe. It made her feel cold and empty like her room had during life. At the drawn window, snow fell thick as sugar cubes, sticking to the eyelashes of the boy crouched on the tree branch outside. A ten-year-old Chase held out a cinnamon bun, dripping with icing.
The sketch was as clear as her memory of a snow day filled with sleds, snowballs, forts, and cocoa. She loved that day, even the part when Chase carried her home because she dislocated her shoulder.
“How did Rae see that?”
“When I came in, she was sitting on the floor next to your bed, holding your hand.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I almost left, but she jumped up and waved me over. I kind of felt like she was waiting for me so she could hurry over to the corner and begin drawing.”
“You think she saw my dreams?”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“Yes, actually,” she said, watching Rae. Alex decided to pick her up and put her on the bed, charcoal and all.
Chase got up and headed toward the French doors of the balcony. “See you downstairs.”
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