A Fractured Light (18 page)

Chapter 22

I
woke up before the sun rose the next morning and got ready for school in a fit of nervous excitement.

Instead of going right to my car, I veered left and found the entrance to my favorite trail in the woods that ran beyond our house. It was still early. I had time. I began to climb, inhaling the fresh, morning scent of the evergreen trees that lined the path.

Soon I reached the spot, halfway up the mountain, where the trail curved and the trees gave way to a sweeping view of the valley below. In that spot, in the dead of winter, Devin had saved me from slipping on the ice and falling over the side of the cliff. That day felt like a lifetime ago.

I knew he would know to meet me here this morning, and I couldn’t believe I was walking into this on purpose. But something in me propelled me forward. Something I felt like I couldn’t refuse.

The sun was peeking over the gap in the mountains when I reached the clearing, casting the trail in an orange-pink glow. Devin was sitting on the same rock we’d sat on together that winter day, staring out over the vast fields below. He turned when I stepped on a twig, the brittle crack startling both of us.

“I knew you’d come,” I said. “Thank you.”

His face was stoic and reserved. He’d probably been telling himself the same thing I had.
Behave this time. Don’t you dare lose control.

“I probably shouldn’t have,” he said.

I stepped closer to the rock, but stayed standing, kicking lightly at the undergrowth that covered the trail. He was looking at me with that calm that I found so unnerving.
What is he thinking?

“I—I have some questions.” I paused and took one step closer, but he drew back. “I know. Part of me knows I should stay away from you, for all the reasons you said. But another part of me doesn’t want to. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

“I understand,” he said. “I came here, didn’t I?” It struck me that the more time he spent here, on Earth, in River Springs, with me—the less stiff he sounded.

“I need your help. There’s so much more I have to learn, and you’re the only one who can teach me.”

He sighed heavily. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about your visions. That’s why I came to meet you. Your light powers are an undeniable part of who you are, and the sooner you can accept that, the sooner you can master them.”

“Even if I’m a Rebel now?” I asked. “I chose. I made a promise. I can’t leave them. And I won’t leave Asher.”

“You can deny it, but those are just words. You can’t convince yourself that what you’re experiencing aren’t Guardian powers.” His voice was impatient. “You can’t ignore them.”

“So what do they mean?”

“Skye,” he said insistently, leaning in close to me. “Did it ever occur to you that your visions might be telling you something important? What if they’re not just dreams? What if what you’re seeing is the
future
? Things that haven’t happened yet.”

I started. “Like prophecies?” I asked, not quite sure where he was going with this.

“Not prophecies,” he said, standing up and looking at me. “The Sight.”

“The Sight?” I tried to process what he was saying, but the words felt like another language on my tongue. “You’re telling me I can see the fate of other people?”

Devin paused for a moment, lost in thought. “Maybe not of other people,” he said. “Maybe—just your own.”

“You’re saying I can see things that are going to happen in my future?” I balked. “Is that normal?”

“No,” he said, breaking out into a small grin. “Not for a Guardian. But nothing about you is normal.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said in bewilderment. “The beautiful dress. The beach, the sand, the blood. The shoe box. Those are all things that are waiting for me in my future?” I looked at him. He seemed to know what was coming next. “You and me, dancing.”

Devin stood up abruptly. “I wondered that,” he said. “But it can’t happen. It’s more than just dangerous—it’s not right. You and Asher, and me and . . . Raven.”

“I know.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want you to think—”

“Think what?” I spoke too quickly. I could tell from the look of concentration on his face that he was trying to come up with the best and most diplomatic way to phrase whatever he needed to say.

“I guess I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.” Diplomatic, maybe, but it still stung. I tried to keep a blank expression.

“Well, give me the right one.” I sat down next to him on the rock. My arm brushed against his, and we both moved away quickly.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

“I know.”

“Asher took you away, and Astaroth forced me back to River Springs. He left me here with no word of the outcome, no indication of the status of the mission. He simply told me that my fate was sealed and I had to await the consequences. And so I waited.”

I pictured Devin waiting in his tiny, clean apartment. No word from his people. Nobody to wake up next to. How lonely he must have felt.

“Okay,” I said.

“And Raven came. She told me I couldn’t just waste my life waiting for you to come back. Even if you hadn’t died, you were with the Rebellion now. There was no way you would ever choose to join the Order knowing that they tried to kill you.” He took a breath. “Deep down I knew she was right. Even though our destinies were impossible to discern anymore, thanks to you, we always had been fated to be together. And so we were bonded.”

“Well,” I said, “now I get it.” I looked away. He was watching me closely.

“I thought you were dead,” he said again. “I didn’t think you would ever come back.”

“Look.” We were veering onto dangerous territory. “I came here because I wanted to talk to you about my visions. That was it.”

He stood up, rigid. As if one step out of line would cause his whole world to come crashing down around him. “I want to help you. But you can’t trust me with this information. I’m still under the Order’s control. I still have to report to the Gifted. I could turn on you at any second. Skye, I don’t trust them, and I definitely don’t trust myself.”

“But—”

“They made me a murderer, and I’ll have to live with that for eternity. Can you imagine what that feels like? Knowing I could have killed you and then continuing to live for centuries?” He turned to leave, then looked back at me. “If they find out about your visions . . .”

“I’m not going to tell them,” I said. “Are you?”

A long pause stretched out between us.

Without a word, his wings unfurled from his back, huge and white as the clouds above. And he took off through the trees.

I sat down on the rock and stared out at the field below me.

The Sight.
It was the very strongest of the powers of the light. Something only the Gifted possessed. So what did that mean?

School that day was a waste.

I didn’t absorb anything, which was bad, because I’d just finished all of my catch-up work and was starting to feel on top of things again. I wanted to throw myself anew into the college process, but my brain was everywhere all at once. To force myself to focus, I swung by the guidance counselor’s office between classes and signed up for an appointment later that week.

At lunch, Cassie, Dan, and Ian laughed about something hilarious that I was too spaced out to hear. They recapped events from the party in the woods that I’d been too wrapped up in my own issues to have seen. I nibbled absently on my turkey sandwich, and nobody seemed to notice. During class, I practiced building up walls and breaking them down. So far, though, I was convinced that what Gideon had said was a lie. Devin wasn’t influencing me. I was sure of it.

After school, I lost myself in ski practice, blocking out the taunts and jeers of the other girls. I focused instead on channeling the wind, making my descent to the finish smoother, sleeker. I held the clouds at bay.

But I couldn’t push from my mind what Devin had said. The Sight. There wasn’t anything in my mother’s notebook about that. I’d read the lines so many times that I had the entire entry memorized:

Guardians haunt these woods, watching us. I know they know. It’s only a matter of time.

We have to act quickly. There are too many of them. We need more recruits.

So maybe Devin was wrong. Maybe my visions were something else entirely. A result of my mental and physical exertion lately: skiing, controlling the elements, being with Asher. Or maybe, practicing to fight the Order’s mental manipulation was taking a toll on my mind, as it had done to Gideon’s.

But I didn’t want to face the thing I knew deep down, which was that these visions had been going on much longer than I’d known Gideon. They’d started right around the time I’d met Asher and Devin. My seventeenth birthday, when everything strange began happening to me in the first place.

Asher wouldn’t leave my side that week. We practiced sometimes at night, after Aunt Jo had gone to bed. When we were too tired to continue, he’d follow me upstairs in the dark, holding my hand to guide him, and we’d curl up in my bed and sleep. “You need to rest,” Asher whispered to me in the darkness. “You need to be strong.”

On Wednesday night, we followed our routine, and both of us were sleeping when I woke with a start. If my visions were glimpses into the future, then finding the shoe box in Aunt Jo’s closet was going to happen at some point. She was in there, sleeping now, but in the vision, the room was empty, and the last light of day peeked through the curtains.

Not tonight
, I thought.
Tomorrow night. Before Aunt Jo gets home from work.

There was something in that box I needed. Something that was going to help me. I let Asher curl himself around me.
What if it’s something that has to do with my
parents?
I wondered.
What if it’s one more thing that will bring me closer to my mom?

I fell asleep not knowing the answers.

The next day was the day before the race, and practice after school was tense. Rather than racing freestyle, we ran drills. Coach watched Ellie and me with close attention, his ever-present stopwatch starting and stopping with an obnoxious little beep. Once or twice, Ellie and I glanced at each other and tried not to laugh. Maybe things weren’t going to end up so bad between us after all.

On the last drill, Ellie and I went head to head.

“Step it up, girls,” Coach said. “Captain’s on the line here.”

“Like we could forget,” Ellie muttered under her breath. He blew his whistle, and we took off, weaving between a series of slaloms that were set up for the drill. We started off smiling at each other tentatively, but the more we got into it, the fiercer the competition became. At first, I was winning, making my turns with much more precision, feeling out the snow and the bumps in the ground beneath me. Then Ellie picked up speed, pulling ahead. I leaned in, focusing every ounce of my being. I couldn’t let her beat me. Suddenly my anger at her raged.

Who did she think she was? She had flirted with Asher when she had clearly seen something brewing between the two of us, even if it hadn’t been official. And when she didn’t win that round, she decided to hook up with Ian. And now she wanted to be captain.

Aunt Jo was right. People hate things that they think are a threat to them. And Ellie somehow found me threatening. It wasn’t that she particularly cared about Asher, or Ian, or even making captain of the ski team. It was just about beating
me
. But what had I ever done to her? How had I threatened her in any way? Annoyance and frustration burned through me.

For the briefest of moments, I forgot to focus.

I seemed to feel the rumble of the mountain before anyone else, and so I had a few seconds to try to stop whatever was about to happen from happening. But I was still too late. I may have prevented a full-on avalanche, but a large chunk of ice dislodged from a rock face and came rolling down the mountain. It gathered more and more snow the faster it rolled.

“Skye!” Coach called. “Look out!”

I swerved to my right, but I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. The icy snowball clipped the side of my ski, sending me careening backward. I tried to grab on to something to steady myself, but I couldn’t find a hold. Panicking, I felt myself falling, rolling head over foot down the mountain. I dug my nails and heels into the snow to gain traction and felt myself slowing.

“Skye!” Ellie called from far below. “Are you okay?”

“Skye?” Coach Samuelson yelled. “Say something!”

“I’m okay!” I called, my voice shaky as I came to a rest. But when the shock of the impact wore off, a stabbing pain ricocheted through my left ankle.

I was close enough to the bottom so that I could ski gingerly down the rest of the way. My team crowded around me, suddenly—finally—showing support.

“Skye, this doesn’t look good,” Coach said, kneeling and examining my ankle.

“It’ll be better by tomorrow,” I insisted. “I promise. I just twisted it, that’s all. It’ll be fine after I ice it. Really.” I needed to race tomorrow—so much depended on it.