Gifts of the Blood (17 page)

In full color, using the sure, graceful strokes of watercolor pencils, I had drawn fighting Nephilim, facing each other across some kind of open space. Two Dark Nephilim had their backs to me. All I could see were two pairs of massive, gaping planes of darkness, and across from them stood Ethan, similarly battered, but glowing nonetheless with some fierce inner light. I frowned and leaned in closer, because in my drawing, Ethan had no planes of light on his back. His wings were gone, and he was badly injured.

In the middle of the open space, caught between them all, was me.

I held something tight against my chest. I couldn’t tell what it was, except that it was made of light, and shone so brightly I turned my face slightly away from it in the drawing, as if it was too bright to look at directly. I half-knelt, one leg flat on the ground, the other bent as if I was trying to rise with my burden. With my other hand I pointed straight at the sky, towards a line of darkness. My mouth was open as if I was screaming.

“Amazing,” Dr. Christian breathed, directly over my shoulder. I did my best to ignore him and tried to absorb every detail of the drawing instead.

I seemed to be wearing a loose dress of some kind. That was good; I didn’t own anything like that, so I would recognize it if it showed up in my future. It was also just as likely that I was pulling the line of darkness down towards me. I leaned in even closer; there was a familiar shape to the darkness, if I could just place it. Why couldn’t I place it?

“…Qualify you for a scholarship,” Dr. Christian said. He put his hand on my shoulder and I jumped, shocked back into the here and now. His hand was as cold as I had imagined his eyes to be. The classroom was empty.

“What?” I said, thoroughly confused. Where had everyone gone?

“Oh, don’t be modest, Miss Chastain. Your achievement is truly breathtaking. The committee meets at seven next Thursday. We’ll look forward to seeing you then.” Dr. Christian smiled at me. He had perfectly even white teeth. A nice smile, I thought absently. He ran his hand up my forearm. I shivered. “Are you quite alright, Miss Chastain? Perhaps you need assistance getting to your next class. You are injured, after all.”

The desks were arranged on risers. I stumbled on the very first one, on my way to get my books. I felt sleepy and confused. How had I missed the bell ringing? Why didn’t Amberlyn wait for me? His chilly hand caught my forearm instantly. “Oh, I’m fine,” I said, and stumbled again. His cold hand settled against the curve of my spine.

“I insist,” he said, scooping up my knapsack and purse. He put my drawing pad into my knapsack, and then draped it over my arm as if I was an invalid and walked me to the classroom door. “And, Miss Chastain? Do try and take care of yourself between now and when the scholarship committee meets. No more clumsy accidents, hmm?”

Wait, I thought. Wait a damn minute. “Scholarship? What about my drawing?”

“Well, you have to meet the rest of the committee, of course.” A sharp note crept into his voice then. “I have to keep your drawing to show the rest of the committee. I told you that part already.” He said the words carefully, enunciating as if talking to a toddler. “You have to come to my office for your interview, at seven next Thursday. You can have it back then.”

Looking into his chilly blue eyes, I suddenly felt tired and cold, exactly as if I had been swimming for hours in the cold water of the lake with Logan. “Seven on Thursday,” I heard myself repeat. “In your office.” I stared at him as he nodded once, satisfied, and spun on the heel of his expensive Italian shoe and marched away.

I barely managed to stagger out of the classroom and into an empty bench. I leaned back against the wall. I was so tired. I would close my eyes for just a second...

I don’t know how long I slept on the bench in the hall. When I woke, my cell phone lay underneath my knapsack. I’d been using it for a pillow. I guess that’s how I missed all four calls from home. Confused and apprehensive, I dialed back. “Logan? It’s me. Can you come get me?”

“Thank goodness, Cas. We were just about to come looking for you. I thought maybe you were with Amberlyn, but when I called, she said she thought you already left.”

I frowned at the phone. “What? Amberlyn ditched me after Dr. Christian totally humiliated me in Drawing II. What do you mean, you’ve been waiting?”

A short silence. “Sweetie, it’s late afternoon already. Your last class ended an hour ago. Amberlyn thought you left for home already, or she would have waited. Are you feeling ok?”

I stared at the phone in my hand, and at the rapidly emptying halls. What the hell had happened to me? Did I just fall asleep on a bench? I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my head. “Um, no. I guess not. So, can you come get me?”

Logan sighed, sounding cheerful and long suffering. “Well, yes. I was planning on it. There is a party on the square tonight, after all. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of ways to make me pay. Literally, of course.”

Chapter Twelve:

The Orchard

We didn’t speak much on the drive home. I knew I must have looked alarmingly bad because Logan didn’t even complain once when I played the same song over and over. He hated it when I did that. After our third listening of my current favorite obscure band, I eyed him sideways. “Aren’t you even going to mock me? I mean, I appreciate the play time and all, but I kinda miss the insults.”

He snorted but kept his eyes on the road. “You look awful, Cas.”

And that was it. I should have guessed much worse was in store.

Ethan stood in shadow at the top of the second landing, his arms crossed, body squared and perfectly still. I couldn’t see his expression, but his eyes watched me as I walked slowly up one stair after the other. I actually had to concentrate. My feet felt heavy, as if I was wearing waterlogged socks. About halfway up, I looked up at him. His blue green eyes were clouded, like the surface of a pond in early morning, skimmed over with fog. I felt Logan’s slight hand on my shoulder. “We were really worried,” he whispered in my ear.

“Oh,” I said, as the fog grew thicker over Ethan’s eyes. I put one foot in front of the other and wondered what emotion he hid from me. “I’m sorry.”

Ethan’s arms snapped down to his sides as if he were reaching for a hidden set of pistols. He threw his head back; I could see the tendons of his neck, straining, standing out. His nostrils flared. The long stairway up to our apartment was shadowy no longer. Lightening whipped across Ethan’s eyes, through the screen of fog, and twin planes of Light unfurled behind him where normal people have shadows. His fingers curled into claws. His voice, when he spoke, was underlined with the deep bass of distant thunder.

“Where. Have. You.
Been?”
he demanded, holding himself completely still.

I tried to answer him. I really did. But so many thoughts fought for dominion over my tongue that what came out was some kind of bastard pidgin dementia. He was beautiful. He was terrifying. He was furious. He would never hurt me. He wasn’t Asheroth. He reminded me of Asheroth. I wanted to paint him. I wanted him to go back to being normal and almost human. I wanted to stare at him a while longer. Most of all, I wanted things to make sense.

“I don’t know because something happened at school after Dr. Christian humiliated me in front of everyone and it made me really tired but did you know I can draw really well with my left hand and then I woke up on a bench all tired out for no reason so I called home and I wish I could paint you just like you are now even though you look like you hate me and
why are you so angry at me?”
I sat heavily down on the stairs after my last good loud yell. I hadn’t taken a breath during my whole demented tirade and was actually quite dizzy. I felt Logan’s soft, sweatshirt clad shoulder lean up against me. He’d taken the step just below mine.

“Come on,” he urged, nudging me with his tennis shoe. “Let’s go up. He’s just worried.”

“Nuh-uh.” I swept my eyes sideways at Ethan. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” His light was blinding. Someone would notice soon. But perhaps, Whitfield being what it was, that didn’t matter.

I knew Ethan moved fast. I had seen, or rather, seen the evidence of it, plenty of times before. But this was different. All at once, I was surrounded by Light. Light, and Ethan’s arms.

“Logan,” he said. I couldn’t see my brother anywhere. His Light was too bright. “Please wait for us inside your apartment. The wards are strong there; you will be safe. I must take your sister somewhere for a moment.”

“What the hell?” I pulled away from him, but he held me tight around the waist, raking me with the fury of his eyes.

“Exactly,” he said, pulling me so close against him I had no choice but to mold myself to the shape of his body. I thought of how warm he was, and how well we fit; the top of my head rested perfectly against the curve of his neck. Then I remembered he was mad at me, and had no right to be, and tried to pull away from him again, but there was nothing else but him to hold on to, nothing but him and Light in a freefall void that was like the top of a rollercoaster, forever on pause, never coming down the track. I clutched him tighter and tried not to be sick.

***

It lasted forever and it lasted for exactly one breath. It was horrible and it was wonderful. It made me want to laugh and throw up, all at the same time, and when Ethan finally let me go, gently disengaging my fingernails from his shirt, the Light faded around us and all I could see was him.

He looked a little less angry. But only a little.

“Do you want to tell me what just happened, Ethan?” I looked around to give me an excuse to look anywhere but at his angry, accusing face.

“Funny. I meant to ask you the exact same thing,” he said tightly. His voice practically thrummed with tension. I spun around so that he could see nothing except my back, taking great care to stiffen my spine even though I felt dizzy and sick, and folded my arms angrily across my chest. That would teach him not to drag me away from my brother at invisible speeds to strangely beautiful places that looked like…

When I saw where we were, I forgot to breathe.

We were standing in the back end of the Parson’s apple orchard, except we weren’t. It looked just like it, only much, much better. Brighter. Shinier. Radiant. Unreal. The trees hadn’t lost their leaves at all. In fact, every leaf on every branch was the perfect deep emerald green of summer. Fruit hung heavy and round from the branches. All colors, from the apples to the blades of grass, seemed dusted with a coat of pulsing lacquer, as if every inanimate thing breathed with color and light. My skin felt stripped down to its rawest layer, bloody tissue laid bare to soft warm breezes and the impossibly enticing smells of an orchard in full ripe summer until my poor weak senses screamed at the overload.

I did what I could. I closed my eyes and thought of home.

All the kids in Whitfield knew the Parsons. They ran the largest farm in town, or rather on its outskirts. They had the largest stall at the monthly farmer’s market on the square. They operated the seasonal pumpkin patch and the area’s only commercial orchard. It was huge, and, as kids, we all knew where the weak spot in the wooden fence was. At the very edge of the back forty, obligingly screened by a rather scraggly clump of trees, kids from Whitfield had been sneaking into the Parson’s orchard for as long as there had been a town. Sometimes we got caught and sometimes we didn’t. Oddly enough, at least in my case, that almost always depended on my intentions. Good intentions went unnoticed. Bad ones aroused immediate alarm. Escaping with friends for a bit of peace and quiet and harmless gossip went undiscovered, as did the occasional kissing session with a boy or two I really liked when I got older. I sucked in a surprised breath. I had always thought I just had ill luck. But of course, knowing what I now knew about myself and about Whitfield, I realized it probably had to do with my own nature, or the town’s, or both.

I blushed crimson, conscious of Ethan at my back, remembering one memorable occasion when I had been caught, right after junior prom, with a group of friends who’d been planning to start the celebrations with getting drunk and ending them with each couple neatly separated from the rest of the group. Old man Parsons had come himself that time, shotgun in hand, interrupting what would have been a really stupid move on my part. The boy I was dating at the time turned out to be a creep; he stalked me for weeks afterward until Logan beat him bloody.

So many signs. How many had I ignored? And at what cost?

“This isn’t really the orchard, is it?” I kept my back to Ethan, not so much because I was angry anymore, but because I was both afraid and fascinated by the shifting but familiar landscape in front of me. My head was full of embarrassing memories and strange new fears, and the apples on the trees around me glittered a deep blood red.

The color of beating hearts. The color of Asheroth’s jacket. I closed my eyes again when my senses began to scream.

“You’re frightened.” I felt him in front of me instantly, a cloud of cool mist in the middle of too much sensation. His hands on my face were cool, as well, and that frightened me almost more than anything. Never before had Ethan felt cool to my skin. I hugged myself tighter and kept my eyes closed, summoning more memories.

“It’s too much. Too much sensation. Pleasure.” I felt my lips twist on the word. “We should go to the real orchard instead. I can show you the tree I fell out of when I was nine. I broke my ankle. Logan carried me home on his back.” I felt soft warm earth beneath my knees, exactly like sinking into firm foam. “Why did you bring me here?”