Beautiful Beings (22 page)

“Look, I don’t care.” I ripped my hand from his hold and held it up to keep him at bay. “I don’t care about your reasons. I don’t care about your excuses. All this time, Moore, you’ve been playing with my emotions, playing with my attraction for you when all you’ve really wanted was to feed off my soul. Well you and your beautiful sister can go to hell.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Lux,” he whispered. “My attraction to you was playful, I admit that, and, damn it, I know the little demon in me may have been cruel at times, but beneath all that playing I knew I had growing feelings for you, strong feelings. I wanted you from the very first moment I saw you, and as the months passed, I’ve grown more fond of you than I’d ever thought possible. And now…”

“And now, it’s over.”

“No.” The softness of his voice gave way to heated passion as he shoved my restraining hand aside, pushed me back to the wall and pressed up against me. “This is not over,” he rasped into my face.

Burning with anger and fearful his passionate spell would take over once again, I ripped my crucifix from around my neck and reached up, holding it just inches from his brow.

He stared at me. “I’m not the demon you think I am,” he whispered.

“You're not human either.” My lips pressed together in determination. I had to slay him, but my fingers refused to approach him.

“You're condemning me for something I have no control over.”

“That doesn’t excuse what you are, Moore.”

“Then slay me.” He leaned in close, pressing his brow to mine. “Slay me as you have so many demons before me.”

That spellbound sensation I’d always felt around him began to resurface, slowly pushing aside all logical thought and leaving only raw emotions and the purest sense of love.

He wove his fingers through mine, leaving my crucifix to dangle on its chain.  Tenderly, but with enough force, he pushed my hand against the wall.

“I’m a product of my parents’ inability to control themselves, to avoid contact with demons. I’ve lived my life doing everything within my power to turn my back on the dark side and follow the light.” He cocked his head lightly to the side, a shy smile curving his lips. “Maybe that’s why I was so instantly drawn to you… Lux… the light…”

“All my life,” I said. “I’ve been trained to destroy demons. I was brought here, to St. James, to rid it of the demons that roam the halls. You and Shayne are two of those. I can’t close my eyes to what you are and simply allow you to continue to exist.”

“And what of the human in me? What of the angel? Don’t they matter?” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply while his fingers tightened around mine. “I need your help, Lux,” he said.

When he opened his eyes, I saw his soul for the first time; the soul of the beautiful being he was.

“The dark side tugs at me… every day. Every day is a battle as I seek out the light, but darkness is everywhere, and fighting it has become increasingly difficult. I need you. I need your light, your strength. The spell I spun wasn’t as powerful as you’ve always thought. That passion, that desire to be with me… it came from you, Lux. You really felt all those feelings for me. Whenever your blood burned for me, whenever you want to run your fingers through my hair, to kiss me, it’s all coming from within you. From deep within your soul, Lux. Don’t turn the other way now, not when I need you the most.”

Remnants of a dream. The sensations that had filled me, haunted my dreams so many times. The pull of darkness. The unfathomable desire to keep him in the light. The slip of his fingers through mine. Losing him; time and again, losing him to the abyss of darkness. “You,” I whispered. “All along, it was you.” The greatest love I will come to know…the boy in my dreams…

“Help me, Lux,” he said simply.

I knew then, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to help him, to keep him from the clutches of the dark side. If I lost him, I would lose my soul.

*******

Orta recens quam pura nites
Newly risen, how brightly you shine

Lux, Brax, Moore, Asher, and Shayne’s story continues in

Book 2 of Beautiful Beings Series

Heaven and Hell

Fall 2011

Visit kailingow.wordpress.com for exact release date.

Sneak Preview of the

New Series

************

FADE

Book 1 of the FADE Series™

By

Kailin Gow

ONE

M
y name is Celestra Caine. I am seventeen years old, which makes me a senior at Richmond High. I never thought this would happen to me, but it has… I’m one of those people you see every day, go to school with, remember seeing at the supermarket or the mall, and then one day you don’t hear about them any longer. They’re gone, and eventually, you forget them.

Not that I’m easy to forget, as much as I might occasionally wish that I were. I’m tall, about five-seven, and I’m willowy. Built for running, my mom always says. Then there’s my hair. It’s a bright blonde that always attracts attention, from men and women. The women always want to know what I’ve done with it, and some of them won’t believe that it’s simply my natural hair color. The men… like I said, sometimes I wish I didn’t attract quite so much attention. Sometimes I think it might be better if I blended in a little more.

                It’s not all bad, though. My boyfriend, Grayson, loves my hair. He loves touching it, and I love it when he’s that close to me. I love it when he gives me that look he has that says, not just that he loves me, but that he always will. That I’m the only girl for him. It’s worth standing out a little for a look like that from a guy like Grayson.

                 I first met him running track- he’s the captain of the school team, so it’s probably appropriate that I’m at practice with him on the day it starts. Then again, I’m at practice with him most days, so maybe it was always going to work out like that. We finish up, and Grayson invites me back to his place for dinner, but I can’t. I have to be home, so I tell him that I’ll see him tomorrow and get going.

                It doesn’t take me long to make my way home, since it’s not that far from the school. The house is nice enough, in a neighborhood where there’s no trouble, and there are plenty of families around. Dad’s car is in the drive, so I guess he must have gotten back early from his work as a biochemical engineer. Mom will be there too by now. She teaches kindergarten, and she’s always home before me. Even as I walk through the front door, I can picture her in the kitchen, working away at dinner, maybe yelling at my brother, Bailey, not to spend too much time online before he’s done his homework. It’s just how things are in our house.

                Except today, something is different. I know that from the moment I set foot through the door. I can’t put my finger on it for a second or two, but then I realize what it is. The house is quiet.

                “Mom? Dad? Hello?” I call it out, moving through into the living room, then the kitchen. There’s no sign of either of them. They aren’t there when I check the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, either, which is weird. By 6 pm, at least one of them is
always
there.

Still, maybe it’s nothing. Maybe the sinking feeling I have in the pit of my stomach is just an overactive imagination playing tricks on me. For all that I still can’t help feeling that there’s something wrong, it’s not like the place has been trashed, or anything. It’s not like anything has obviously been stolen, or is out of place. The opposite, if anything. The whole ground floor is neat, tidy.

Maybe Mom and Dad have just gone next door for a moment. I latch onto that thought, heading upstairs. Bailey will know. He might not pay much attention to things that don’t involve computers, but Mom and Dad will at least have told him where they were going.

“Bailey?” I knock on the door to his room, but there’s no answer. Telling myself that he probably has headphones on while he’s playing one of those online games of his, I invoke big sister’s prerogative and open the door anyway.

Bailey isn’t there either. And his room’s neat. Too neat. Bailey is, like little brothers everywhere, I guess, a one boy disaster zone. This looks like one of those occasions when Mom has finally gotten tired of telling him to clean his room and done it for him, which means that Bailey can’t have been back since.

In fact, the whole house has that feel. Like someone has scrubbed it from top to bottom, and no one has been in it to mess it up yet. That probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me, it’s enough. Enough to send me hurrying around the house, looking for clues as to what might be happening. Because there’s
something
happening. I’m certain of it.

                I go to search every room again, even though it doesn’t make sense. After all, Mom and Dad and Bailey aren’t about to leap out from behind the sofa, are they? There’s still no sign of them. More than that, beyond the car in the drive, there’s still no sign that any of them has even been home.

                I check my messages. Maybe there’s an explanation there. There’s nothing. There’s nothing when I check my emails, either. Not even the usual stuff I’d get most days, which only makes me bite my lip harder with the worry of it. I don’t like this. I
really
don’t like this.

                Should I call the cops? That thought springs into my head from nowhere. What would I tell them, though? That something doesn’t feel right in my house, and that it looks like a team of cleaners has been through the place? They’d laugh at me, or worse, accuse me of wasting their time.

                I haven’t called my parents yet, so I try that next. I get out my cellphone and call the number for my father. It doesn’t even ring. Instead, I just get this message, saying “Error, number not recognized.”

                The same thing happens when I call my mother, and when I try to connect to the number for the cellphone Bailey has ‘for emergencies’. I’ve sometimes wondered what kind of emergencies a ten year old can have. I guess now I know. I’m breathing faster now, and I know I’m starting to panic. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in D.C. Not that I know what “This kind of thing” is yet.

                I ring another obvious number. That of my Aunt Chrissie. She’s my mother’s sister, and my parents always say that if anything serious happens, and they aren’t around, I should ring her. I’m not sure what good it’s meant to do, ringing a woman we hardly ever see to come and ride in to save the day, but right now, I’m willing to try anything.

                “Error. Number not-”

                “Stupid thing!” I throw my phone and it bounces off the sofa, coming to rest on the carpet. I stand there seething with anger at it for a minute, my head spinning as I try to make some sense of all this. There has to be a logical explanation for all of it, right? People don’t just… disappear.

                Only, I can’t think of an explanation that works. Unless I’m willing to believe that my parents and brother have all chosen to call in on one of the neighbors together right at the moment when a freak fault has developed in my phone, and what are the chances of that?

                This is really starting to weird me out. So much so that I can barely breathe with it, while my stomach is tight with the apprehension running through it. Nothing good is happening. I’m certain of that now. I just wish I were as certain about what to do next. I need to calm down. To think.

                Grayson. I latch onto thoughts of him like a life preserver. He’s always been my rock; always been there for me. Whenever I panic about not getting good enough grades to make the track scholarship to Georgetown, he’s the one who talks me through it and helps me study. When I’m down about my track times or just annoyed with my little brother, he’s the one who picks me up.