I wanted to share my successes with Daemon, and he wasn’t there.
Blake eventually moved on to harder stuff, attempting to teach me how to control the more powerful things through a horrible series of trial-and-error experiments. The first time I’d attempted to control fire ended up with what I swore were second-degree burns on my fingers.
He’d presented me with a series of white candles and my goal was to light all of them at once through concentration. I was allowed to touch each of them, and after several hours of staring at them with a seriously empty stomach, I’d managed to light one by picturing the flame in my mind and holding the image.
Once I had mastered that, I could no longer touch the candle. Instead I had to create the fire just by looking at it. Blake waved his hand over the candles, and all the wicks sparked a tiny flame.
“Easy peasy,” he said, and then ran his hand over them again. The flames went out.
“How did you do that—putting them out? Can the Luxen do that?”
He smiled at me. “They can only control things related to some form of light, right? So moving, stopping things, and fire are all right up their alley. They can generate enough energy to create electricity and fuel a storm.”
I nodded, remembering how it had stormed that day Daemon had returned from the lake and Mr. Garrison had been waiting for him.
“And it’s like pulling atoms from the air around us, so yes, they can create wind. We’re just stronger than they are at it.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t understand how.”
He shrugged. “They have only one kind of DNA.” He paused, frowning. “If they have DNA. But let’s say they do for argument’s sake. We have two different sets of DNA in us. Like the best of both worlds.”
Not very scientific.
“Anyway, try it.” He prodded me with his knee.
I did exactly what I had done while holding the candle, but something went wrong.
My fingers lit up like the Fourth of July.
“Holy shit!” Blake jumped out of the way, pulling me along with him. Shock had set in as he dragged me into the kitchen and shoved my hands under a rush of cool water. It was the first time I’d heard Blake swear.
“Katy, I asked you to light the candle, not your damn fingers! It’s really not that hard. Jesus.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled as I watched my skin turn an ugly shade of pink and then red. It didn’t take long before the skin puckered and blistered.
“You may not be able to control fire or start it,” he commented, gently wrapping my fingers in a towel. “If you could, it shouldn’t have burned you. The fire would have been a part of you. But what that was? That was real honest-to-God fire.”
I frowned as my fingers throbbed. “Wait a sec. There’s a chance I can’t work with fire and you let me do that?”
“How else am I going to figure out your limitations?”
“What the hell!” I pulled my hand free, furious. “That’s not cool, Blake. What’s next? Trying to stop a moving vehicle by standing in front of it, but whoops, I can’t do that and now I’m dead?”
Blake rolled his eyes. “You should be able to do that. At least, I hope so.”
Disgusted with him, I went back to the candles. Needing to prove myself, I tried again and again. I couldn’t light the fire without touching the candles no matter how hard I tried.
The following morning I had to come up with a good excuse for my mom. It involved something stupid like placing my hand on a lit burner, but she believed me, and I even scored some weak pain pills.
Later that night, Blake explained that he’d never been able to heal anyone. When I asked when and why he’d been presented with the opportunity, he didn’t get a chance to answer. Warmth tingled over my neck and then a few seconds later there was a knock on my door.
I shot up. “Daemon.”
“Woo hoo.” Blake exuded so much false enthusiasm he could’ve been an actor.
Ignoring him, I rushed to the front door. “Hey,” I gasped, feeling hot and dizzy when I saw him. It never failed to amaze me how striking Daemon really was. “Are you helping tonight?”
Daemon’s gaze dropped to my bandaged fingers and nodded. “Yeah. Where’s Bilbo?”
“Blake,” I corrected. “He’s in the living room.”
He shut the door behind him. “About your hand…”
When Daemon had asked me about it in class earlier, I’d avoided answering, because I seriously doubted he would think how it happened was kosher. The last thing any of us needed was for him to kill Blake over my own ineptitude.
“I burned it on the stove last night.” I shrugged, looking down at the tips of his black boots peeking out from his denim jeans.
“That…is…”
I sighed. “Lame?”
“Yeah, really lame, Kat. Maybe you should stay away from the stove for a little while?”
He sidled past me and headed for the living room. I trailed behind, knowing I couldn’t leave him alone with Blake for any amount of time.
Blake gave him a halfhearted wave. “Nice of you to join us again.”
Grinning, Daemon plopped down next to Blake and spread his arm over the back of the couch, crowding the other boy. “I know you’ve missed me. It’s all right, I’m here.”
“Yeah,” Blake said, sounding real genuine.
We got started with moving stuff around for a little while and Daemon didn’t say much, not even a “Wow” or a “Congratulations,” but he watched me. Constantly.
“Moving stuff is just a parlor trick, really.” Blake’s arms were pinned to his chest.
“Wow.” Daemon cocked his head to the side. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
Blake ignored him. “The good news is you can do it on command now, but that doesn’t mean you have control. I hope it does, but we really don’t know.”
Damn. Blake was such a downer sometimes.
“I have an idea. You’re going to need to completely trust me. If I ask you to do something, you can’t fire back with a thousand questions.” He paused while Daemon’s eyes narrowed. “We need to see something amazing.”
Amazing? I was moving stuff without touching it! That’s pretty amazing in my book. But then again, there was the fire hoopla. “I’m doing my best.”
“Your best isn’t good enough.” He exhaled loudly. “Okay. Stay here.”
I glanced at Daemon as Blake disappeared into the foyer. “I have no idea what he’s up to.”
Daemon arched a brow. “I’m guessing it’s going to be something I don’t like.”
Like there was much Blake could do that Daemon would like. What he didn’t know or get was that Blake hadn’t put the moves on me. Not once since he’d tried to hug me that day in the diner. But maybe it was just plain old dislike.
While we waited, I heard drawers opening in the kitchen. There was a clank of silverware. Oh goodie, more glassware to destroy.
Blake returned and stopped in the doorway, one hand behind his back. “You ready?”
“Sure.”
He smiled and then cocked his arm back. Light reflected off the sharp edge of metal. A knife? And then the butcher knife was flying straight at my chest.
A scream caught in my throat. I threw up my hand, horrified and panicked. The knife stopped in midair. Frozen inches from my chest, pointy end facing toward me. It just stayed there, suspended.
Blake clapped. “I knew it!”
I stared at him as my critical-thinking skills slowly trickled back in. “What the hell, Blake?”
Several things happened all at once. Now that my concentration was broken, the knife fell out of the air, smacking off the floor harmlessly. Blake was still clapping. I let loose several curses that would’ve caused my mom to cry and Daemon, who’d appeared to have been knocked into a stupor by what Blake had done, snapped out of it.
Daemon shot off that couch like a rocket, simultaneously flipping into his true form. A heartbeat later, he had Bla
ke pinned halfway up the wall, swathed in an intense whitish-red light that lit up the entire living room.
I craned my neck and whispered, “Holy smokes.”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Blake yelled, arms flailing in the light. “You need to check yourself. Katy wasn’t in any danger.”
There was no response from Daemon, not one that Blake could hear, anyway, but I did. Loud and clear. That’s it. I’m going to kill him.
Windows began to shake and walls trembled. The flat-screen on the TV stand rattled. All around, little puffs of plaster filled the air. Daemon’s light flared, swallowing Blake whole, and for a horrible moment, I really thought he had killed Blake.
“Daemon!” I shrieked, darting around the coffee table. “Stop!”
But then there was a crackling sound, like air heated and charged after a lightning strike. Still in his Luxen form, Daemon jerked back and let Blake go. The boy landed on his feet and staggered to the side as he rose.
Daemon hummed and started toward Blake, but I got in the middle. “Okay. You two need to freaking stop.”
Blake ran both his hands down his shirt, straightening it. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You did throw a freaking knife at me,” I shot back. Wrong thing to say, because I heard Daemon promise, I will break him in two. “Stop.”
An arm appeared in the light and fingers brushed along my cheek. The touch was soft as silk and brief, lasting only half of a second and so quick that I doubted Blake even saw it. Then his light flickered out. He stood in his human form, trembling with barely restrained rage, his eyes white and sharp like icicles. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“She wasn’t in any danger! If I thought for a second she couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t have thrown it at her!”
Daemon sidestepped me, his large hand curled into a fist. Human or alien, Daemon could do some real damage. “But there was no way you would’ve known she could do it! Not a hundred percent!”
Turning wide, pleading eyes to me, Blake shook his head. “I swear you were never in any danger, Katy. If I thought you couldn’t stop it, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Daemon cursed again and I moved, blocking him. “Who does that?” Daemon demanded. Heat rolled off his body.
“Actually, Kiefer Sutherland did. In the original Buffy movie,” he explained. When I continued to gape at him, he grimaced. “It was on TV a few nights ago. He threw one at Buffy and she caught it.”
“That was Donald Sutherland—the dad,” Daemon corrected, much to my surprise.
Blake shrugged. “Same difference.”
“I’m not Buffy!” I yelled.
A slow grin pulled at his lips. “You are definitely cuter than Buffy.”
And that wasn’t the right thing to say. Daemon growled low in his throat. “You got a death wish? Because you’re really pushing it tonight, buddy. I’m dead serious. Really pushing it. I can hold you up against that wall until you run out of juice. Can you hold me off forever? No? I didn’t think so.”
Blake’s jaw jutted out. “Okay. I’m sorry. But if she hadn’t been able to catch it, I would’ve stopped it. Just like you would’ve. No harm. No foul.”
A whirlwind of rage was building inside Daemon and I doubted I could stop him again if he went after Blake. I tensed. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”
“But—”
“Blake, I really think you should leave,” I said meaningfully. “Okay? I think you need to go.”
Blake looked over my shoulder and seemed to get it, because he nodded. “All right.” He started toward the door and stopped. “But you did great, Katy. I don’t think you realize how awesome that was.”
A low hum rattled the floors and Blake took his cue, hightailing his behind out of the house. Only when I heard the rumbling of his truck’s engine did I relax.
“No more,” Daemon said, voice low. “Absolutely no more.”
Slowly, I turned around. His eyes were still doing the glow thing. Up close, they were sort of beautiful—odd but really striking.
“He could have killed you, Kat. I’m not okay with that. I won’t be okay with that.”
“Daemon, he wasn’t trying to kill me.”
He looked incredulous. “Are you insane?”
“No.” Tired, I bent and picked up the huge serial-killer knife. As I held it, it sunk in that I had stopped a knife whizzing toward my chest. I faced Daemon, swallowing.
He was still ranting. “I don’t want you doing any more training with him. I don’t even want you near him. That boy’s got a few screws loose.”
Freezing anything was a huge deal. It was one of the most powerful uses of the Source, Blake and Daemon had both said, with the exception of using it as a weapon.
“I’m going to give him back-alley plastic surgery. I can’t—”
“Daemon,” I whispered.
“—believe he did that.” All of a sudden, he was wrapping his arms around me, hauling me against his chest. By some miracle, I didn’t stab him. “Jesus, Kat, he could have hurt you.”
Somewhat shocked by the close contact that he’d avoided since the evening he made me a sandwich, I didn’t move at first. His entire body hummed. The hand that came up, wrapping around the back of my head, shook slightly.
“Look, you’ve obviously got some control. I can help you work on it,” he said, resting his chin against the top of my head, and God, his arms, his body was so warm and so perfect. “This can’t happen again.”
“Daemon.” My voice was muffled against his chest.
“What?” He pulled back a little, lowering his chin.
“I froze it.”
His brows knitted. “Huh?”
“I froze the knife.” I wiggled free, waving the thing around. “I didn’t just stop it, but I froze it. The thing was just hovering in air.”
It seemed to hit him, too. “Holy…”
I laughed. “God, that’s pretty huge, isn’t it?”
Daemon nodded. “It is. That’s…that’s a big deal.”
Excitement thrummed through me. “We can’t stop training.”
“Kat—”
“We can’t! Look, throwing a knife at me isn’t cool. And God knows, I’m not exactly thrilled that he did it, but it worked. It really worked. We’re getting somewhere—”
“What part of ’He could’ve killed you’ don’t you understand?” Daemon backed off, which usually meant he was really, really angry. “I don’t want you training with him. Not when he’s putting your life in danger.”
“He’s not putting my life in danger.” Besides catching my fingers on fire and the knife incident—but still, the risks were worth it. If I could control these abilities and actually use them to protect Daemon and Dee, then I wouldn’t be just a human—or just a mutated human one step away from exposing them to the world.
“We can’t stop,” I reasoned. “I’ll be able to control it and use the Source, just like you and Dee can. I can help you—”
“Help me with what?” Daemon stared at me, then laughed. “Help me to fight Arum?”
Okay. I wasn’t going that far, but now that he mentioned it, why not? According to Blake, I had potential to be stronger than Daemon. Crossing my arms over my chest, I tapped the edge of the knife on my arm. “Yeah, what if I wanted to?”
He laughed again, and I wanted to kick him. “Kitten, you’re not helping me fight Arum.”
“Why not? If I can control the Source and help, why not? I could fight.”
“I think the reasons are pretty huge,” he yelled, all the humor vanishing. “First off, you’re a human.”
“Not really.”
His eyes narrowed. “Granted, you’re a mutated human, but a human who’s a hell of a lot weaker and more vulnerable than a Luxen.”
I exhaled slowly. “You don’t know how weak or vulnerable I’ll be fully trained.”
“Whatever. Secondly, you have no business going up against the Arum. That will never happen.”
“Dae
mon—”
“It won’t if I’m still alive. Do you understand that? You will never go after an Arum. I don’t care if you can stop the world from spinning.”
I tried to push down my anger. One thing I hated more than Daemon’s douche-nozzle side was him telling me what to do. “You don’t own me, Daemon.”
“It’s not about ownership, you little nut.”
“Nut?” I glared at him. “I wouldn’t call me names when I have a knife in my hand.”
He ignored that. “Thirdly, there is something off about Blake. You can’t tell me you don’t see or sense that.”
“Oh, don’t—”
“You know nothing about him—nothing deeper than that he likes to surf and blog. Big deal.”
“These aren’t good enough reasons.”
“Because I don’t want you in danger—how about that? Is that damn good enough for you?” he shouted, and I jumped. He looked away, drawing in several deep breaths.
I hadn’t realized that could’ve been the real reason behind it all. About every part of me softened, and my temper slipped away like a snowflake melting. “Daemon, you can’t stop me just to protect me.”
His head swung back to me. “I need to protect you.”
Need was such a strong word that it stole my breath and my heart. “Daemon, I’m flattered—I am, but your job is not to protect me. I’m not Dee. I’m not another one of your responsibilities.”
“Damn right you’re not Dee! But you are my responsibility. I got you into this mess. And I will not be dragging you further into it!”
My head was spinning. His reasons for wanting me to stop training with Blake were right but all wrong. I needed to prove to him that I wasn’t a liability or something to be constantly watched over. If he felt that way and did keep putting himself in jeopardy because of me, he could lose his own life or Dee’s.
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