Hallowed (22 page)

“Mind your own business, Kay,” I say then, pissed, and storm out.

And plow straight into Christian. Just as another slow song begins to play.

I’m starting to think that prom is forever cursed for me.

“Hi,” he says. “Dance with me, Clara?”

We belong together,
springs to my mind. I can’t tell if it’s him or me who thinks it.

Insert fluttery panicky feeling in my chest.

“What . . . I . . . God,” I stammer, then sigh in exasperation. “Where’s Ava?”

“Ava’s not my date. I came stag.”

“Stag. You. Why?”

“So my date wouldn’t get offended when I wanted to dance with you,” he says.

That’s when I notice Tucker about five feet away, listening. “You’re forgetting one thing,” he says, moving to my side and slipping his arm around my waist. “Clara has a date. Me.

So your tough luck.”

Christian doesn’t look fazed.

“It’s one dance,” he says. “Clara and I are friends. What’s the big deal?”

“You had your chance,” Tucker replies coolly. “You blew it. So go step on someone else’s toes.”

Christian hesitates. Looks at me.

Tucker shakes his head. “Dude, don’t make me knock you around in here. I don’t want to mess up my tux.”

A muscle ticks in Christian’s cheek. I get an I-could-kick-your-sorry-butt-if-I-wanted-to vibe from him, clear as day.

God. Men.

I step between them.

“No offense, Tuck,” I say, turning to him, “but I am not a piece of meat, okay? Stop growling over me. I can handle this myself.”

I turn to Christian. “No,” I say simply. “Thank you for the offer, but I have a date.”
I decide where I belong,
I tell him silently.

He nods, takes a step back.
I know.

Then I take Tucker’s hand and lead him away to the dance floor, leaving Christian standing there alone.

The dance isn’t much fun after that. I expend a huge amount of energy trying to block Christian out, while at the same time trying not to think about him at all, which turns out to be impossible. Tucker and I are both tensed up for the rest of the night, quiet, pressing close as we dance, holding on like we’re afraid we might slip away from each other.

We don’t talk on the way home.

Before I moved here, I never got the whole love-triangle thing. You know, in movies or romance novels or whatnot, where there’s one chick that all the guys are drooling over, even though you can’t see anything particularly special about her. But oh, no, they both must have her.

And she’s like, oh dear, however will I choose? William is so sensitive, he understands me, he swept me off my feet, oh misery, blubber, blubber, but how can I go on living without Rafe and his devil-may-care ways and his dark and only-a-little-abusive love? Upchuck. So unrealistic, I always thought.

Joke’s on me, I guess.

But Christian and I were kind of assigned to each other. He’s not interested in me because of my devastating good looks or my winning personality. He wants me because he’s been told to want me. I feel things for him because he’s like this big mystery to me, and because I’ve been told to want him, and not by just my mother but by the higher powers, the people upstairs, the Big Guy. Plus Christian’s hot, and he always seems to know the right thing to say and he gets me.

Joke’s really on me.

And why—this is what I can’t understand—do the people upstairs care about who I love when I’m seventeen years old? Tucker is my choice. My heart, making its own decisions.

I suddenly feel the urge to cry, the biggest surge of sorrow I’ve felt in a long time, and I think, God, will you just leave me alone?

“Everybody okay?” Wendy says, nervously, from the backseat.

“Peachy,” I say.

And then Tucker says, “What’s that?”

I stomp on the brakes and we screech to a stop.

Someone’s standing in the middle of the road. Waiting for us, it seems. A tall man wearing a long leather coat. A man with coal-black hair. Even from fifty yards away, I know who is it. I can feel it.

Not my sorrow, then.

Samjeeza’s.

We’re toast.

“Clara, who is that?” Tucker asks.

“Bad news,” I mutter. “Everybody buckled in?”

I don’t wait for an answer. I don’t know what to do, so I go with my gut. I slowly take my foot off the brake, and move it to the gas. Then I floor it.

We pick up speed fast, but at the same time we are in slow motion, creeping along in some alternate time as I clutch the steering wheel and focus on Samjeeza. This car, I figure, is my only weapon. Maybe if I knock him into next week with it, we’ll be able to get away, somehow.

It’s our only chance.

Tucker starts to yell and clutch at the seat. My head gets cloudy with sorrow, but I push through. The beam from the headlights falls on the angel in the road, his eyes glowing like an animal’s catching the light, and in that last crazy moment, as the car bears down on him, I think I see him smile.

For a second everything is black. There’s white dust floating around my head, from the air bags, I think. Beside me, Tucker suddenly comes to, inhales deeply. I can’t see him too well in the dark, but there’s a bright silver web of cracked glass on the passenger window. He groans.

“Tucker?” I whisper.

He lifts a shaky hand to his head, touches it gingerly, then looks at his fingers. His blood looks like spilled ink against the sudden whiteness of his skin. He moves his jaw back and forth, like someone punched him.

“Tucker?” I hear the note of panic in my voice, almost like a sob.

“What the heck were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry, Tuck. I—”

“Man, those air bags really hit you, don’t they?” he says. “How about you? You hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Wendy?” he calls.

I crane my head around so I can look toward the backseat, but all I can see from this angle is a bit of her long hair in front of her face. Tucker starts wrenching on the door, trying to get out, to go to her, but it’s partly crushed and refuses to open. I try my door—same problem. I close my eyes, try to clear my head of the fuzzy cobwebs that are collected there.

Do this,
I tell myself.

I grasp the door handle firmly and pull it, then press my shoulder into the door and push as hard as I can. There’s a pop, then metal shrieking, giving way, and suddenly the door comes completely off its hinges. It falls to the ground. I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out, hurry to the other side of the car, pull the door smoothly off for Tucker, throw it into the weeds at the side of the road. He stares up at me for a second, his mouth slightly open. He’s never seen me do anything like that before.

I’ve never seen me do anything like that before either.

I hold out my hand. He grabs it, and I pull him out of the car. He moves straight back to Wendy’s door, which opens easily. He tries to pull her out, but something’s keeping her there.

“Her seat belt,” I say.

He curses, still dazed, and fumbles around for the latch, then lifts her out. She doesn’t make a sound as he carries her to the side of the road, lays her gently on the gravel at the shoulder.

He takes off his tuxedo jacket and slips it beneath her head and back.

“Wake up, Wendy,” he orders her, but nothing happens. I kneel down next to him and watch the rise and fall of her chest. I listen for the beating of her heart, slow and steady, the most welcome sound in the world.

“She’s breathing,” I tell Tucker. “Her pulse is strong.” He bows his head in relief. “We have to call 9-1-1. Right now. Where’s your phone?” Back to the car I go. It’s totaled, the whole front end completely mangled like I hit a telephone pole at eighty. No sign of the angel. Maybe he poofed himself back to hell. I go back to the driver’s side and start digging around in the mess for the small black clutch with my phone in it. I can’t find it anywhere. This feels so surreal, like it’s not even really happening, a bad dream.

“I don’t know where it is,” I cry. “I know I had it when we left.”

“Clara,” Tucker says slowly.

“Just give me a minute. I know it’s here.”

“Clara,” he says again.

Something in his voice stops me. It sounds like it did that day in the mountains when we hiked to see the sunrise, when the grizzly bear came out of the brush.
Don’t run,
Tucker had said, exactly that way. I move like molasses back out of the car, straighten up, look toward his voice, and freeze.

Samjeeza is standing next to Tucker. There’s not a scratch on him. My car looks like it’s been through a compactor, but here he is, smiling slightly, his posture all casual, like he and Tucker are merely hanging out at the side of the road. He’s holding my cell phone.

“Hello, little bird,” he says. “Good to see you again.”

That name sends a jolt of fear and revulsion straight to the pit of my stomach. My entire body starts to tremble.

“You hit me with your car,” he observes. “Is this your boyfriend?” He turns to Tucker as if he wants to shake his hand, but Tucker looks away, at the ground, at the car, anywhere but into the angel’s burning amber eyes. His hands clench into fists.

Samjeeza gives a short laugh. “He’s considering whether or not he should hit me. After you struck me with your car, he still thinks that maybe he should fight me.” He shakes his head.

The motion has that strange blur to it, like there are really two of him, one laid on top of the other, a human body, and some other creature. I’d almost forgotten about that. “Humans,” he says with cheerful amusement.

I swallow so hard it hurts my throat. I refuse to look at Wendy lying there. I can’t look at Tucker, either; I can’t be afraid for him right now. I have to be strong. Find a way to get us all out of this. “What do you want?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice steady.

“An excellent question, one I’ve asked myself for a very long time. I was angry with you, little Quartarius, since you . . .” He turns his head and lifts his hair to show me his ear, which even in the dark looks misshapen. It’s growing back, I realize. I pulled it off last summer, when I had the glory in my hands, and all this time he’s been growing it back.

“I didn’t try to . . . ,” I say. “I didn’t mean . . .”

He waves his hand at me dismissively, turns back. “Of course you did. But it’s not worth getting upset over.”

“Why are you here?” I ask. “Let’s just skip to that part, okay? If you’re going to destroy me, do it already.”

“Oh no,” he says, like the idea offends him, like the last time I saw him he didn’t try to do exactly that. “I want to talk to you. I’ve been watching you, and you seem unhappy, my dear.

Conflicted. I wondered if I could help.”

“You don’t want to help me.”

“Oh, but I do,” he says. “I’ve found you very interesting, fascinating even, ever since I first came upon you. There’s something your mother’s hiding about you, I think.”

“She told me all about you,” I say.

His eyebrows lift. “All about me? Really. Well, that’s a good story, but not so relevant to you. What interests me more is what you’re expected to do. Your purpose. Your visions. Your dreams.”

“My purpose doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

He shakes his head. “Or is it something else?” I feel him prodding around in my brain.

“She hasn’t told you,” he says, disappointed. “I would feel it on you if you knew.” The dumb thing is, I’m curious. I want to know what he’s talking about, and of course he knows that, which is why he’s smiling, and now I’m playing right into his hands because I’m thinking about what he’s saying instead of how to get us away from him.

I can’t help it. “She hasn’t told me what?” I ask.

He holds out my phone. “Let’s ask her.”

Do something!
I need to come up with a strategy, bring the glory, which feels impossible with the heavy cloak of his sorrow around me
.
The cobwebs in my head won’t go away, his sorrow clouding everything.

Think.

“Is this some kind of plan to take me hostage? Because I’m sure Mom will think that’s super romantic.”

His expression darkens. “Don’t make me do something I’ll regret,” he says, and steps closer to Tucker.

I meet Tucker’s eyes. He swallows, a jerk of his Adam’s apple. He’s scared. Samjeeza’s going to kill him, I think. This is why he’s not in the cemetery. It would be so easy for Samjeeza—it would only take a moment, a flick of his wrist. Why am I so stupid? Why didn’t I see this? All those months I spent trying to think of how to protect him, then dismissing it all when I found out about my mom, and now it comes to this.

I wish I could tell him I’m sorry to have drawn him into my insane life.

“Go on, call her,” Samjeeza says.

I nod, then walk toward him to take the phone, one step and then another. I try to block the sorrow as I suddenly reach that invisible radius around him, this bubble made of pain. Tears burn my eyes. I blink them back. Keep walking. Stand right in front of him and look him in the eye.

Samjeeza puts the phone in my hand.

I press the number two. It rings for a long time, so long I think it’s going to go to voice mail, but then I hear Mom’s voice.

“Clara?” I know by the sound of her voice that she knows something’s wrong.

“Mom . . .” For a moment I can’t make my throat work to form the words, the words that will bring her here to Samjeeza and who knows what kind of fate. “Samjeeza’s here.”

“Are you sure?” she asks.

I feel Samjeeza’s eyes on me, his presence in my head poking around, not pushing me, exactly, but trying to read me or listen in or something. “He’s standing right here.” Silence on the other end. Then she asks, “Where are you?”

“I don’t know.” I glance around, disoriented. I can’t remember where we are, and all I see are dark fields, telephone poles stretching out into the distance.

“Coltman Road,” Tucker says under his breath.

I tell her. “I crashed the car,” I say, because some stupid part of my brain needs to confess just how much I’ve screwed up.

“Clara, listen to me now,” she whispers. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “You know I can’t come to you.”