Heir of Earth (Forgotten Gods) (39 page)

“So I have to keep an eye on a pile of underbrush while it finishes burning. Stay with me?” I loved it when he talked to me like that. Of course, he was only asking me to stay with him for an hour or so, but my mind heard more. My mind heard forever, and I had to swallow the smile that danced at the corners of my mouth and threatened to give me away.

“Love to,” I smiled at him, thinking that was a more appropriate answer than ‘forever and always.’

An hour later we were sitting on his tailgate, sharing freshly squeezed lemonade and decadent finger cakes from Loren’s kitchen as the bonfire sent smoke rising high into the dusky, late afternoon sky.

“First star of the night,” I said as I leaned against him to get his attention and pointed to the southern sky.

“Make a wish,” he said when he spotted the first star brave enough to dance and twinkle in the navy sky.

I closed my eyes and thought about what I wanted. I thought really hard, but ever since Dayne came along, I didn’t have any wishes left. They had all come true. The tiny ones that I still had, like wanting to be a few inches taller, seemed pretty selfish and insignificant after the wish of Dayne had been granted.

So I wished for forever.

I wished that nothing would ever change and that Dayne would be by my side and as ridiculously, incomprehensibly in love with me as he was at that moment. It still didn’t make sense to me that he was mine. I figured the extra insurance of a starlight wish that nothing would ever change couldn’t hurt.

“What’d you wish for?” Dayne asked as he playfully leaned into me and knocked me over to the side.

“I can’t tell you!” I shot back, punching at his arm and landing a soft blow on his shoulder. The ice cubes jingled in my glass and he reached for the thermos to fill it back up.

“Why not?”

“Because if I tell you, it won’t come true.” I held my cup out to him.

“Well, if you want to be sure it comes true, you have to close your eyes and spin around until you fall down.”

I eyed him suspiciously.

“Um…I’ve never heard of that.” I said shaking my head.

“It’s an Irish thing. Come on, I’ll do it with you.” He took the drink from my hand and pulled me off the truck before I could say no. “Arms up.” He lifted my arms into the air. “Head back.” He kissed my forehead as my head fell back. “And spin!” He said, giving my waist a twist. It was absurd, but he was enjoying it so much I didn’t protest.

I started spinning and with the first stumbling step I started laughing and opened my eyes. I felt absolutely ridiculous.

“No, no! Keep going…until you fall down or it won’t come true!” He said, clearly enjoying a good laugh at the silliness of it all.

I kept laughing and spinning. Dayne kept laughing too, but I was pretty sure he was doing more watching and less spinning than I was.

I spun and spun, feeling Dayne’s protective hands near me to be sure I didn’t spin into any danger.

Something moved around my neck and grazed against the skin of my chest before it slipped away. I opened my eyes in time to see my necklace fly off of my neck and slide down my arm as it flew through the air away from me.

“My necklace!” I screamed as I clutched my neck where it had stayed for years. I had never bothered to take it off when I finally put it on, and I felt suddenly naked without it around my neck.

I watched helplessly as it sailed through the air and into the orangey flames of the fire licking high up into the night sky.

Without even thinking, I ran to the fire and plunged my hand in to retrieve the necklace. The flames jumped higher the moment my hand entered their midst. The force of their burning let out a great belching blast, and I turned my head to avoid the heat.

I shrieked and brought my arms up to shield my face, forgetting how dangerous it was for me to be around open flames. It wasn’t until I held the necklace up to inspect it for damage that I realized what I had just done.

With wide eyes I held my breath and watched the fire continue to consume the sleeve of my shirt and send it flowing to the ground in little droplets of red embers. I felt nothing, which wasn’t unusual given my birth defect. The fact that my creamy skin was completely untouched, despite just being engulfed in flames, was freakier than seeing the future.

My eyes caught Dayne’s, and I knew something was really wrong with me—again.

My sleeve melted away, consumed by the fire’s glowing wave, revealing my skin beneath, just as perfectly unblemished and silky white as it always was. I had never touched fire before. Not that I could remember. I had been sheltered from it and taught to fear it ever since I could remember. Because of my nerve condition, I’d always been kept away from any source of heat, protected from the danger.

I’d never questioned my parents or the doctors when they tried to explain away the fact that I couldn’t feel heat with some high level medical jargon that never really made sense to me. I didn’t bother trying to find out for myself. All my life I had been terrified of heat and fire because I thought it would hurt me.

Looking at my arm, I knew everyone had been wrong. Fire couldn’t hurt me—not even a blister puckered on my skin.

The darkness of night had settled in by the time I processed all this, and the look on Dayne’s face was illuminated in the amber glow of the fire. He wasn’t surprised at all. Standing stoically silent, his brows pinched together, rumpling his forehead in hard lines as his temples pulsed beside eyes as black as the night at his back. He looked at me with an intensity I had never seen before, like he was angry with me for discovering some secret he had tried to hide away. I reached out with my hand and quenched the flames that were continuing up my arm. The fire sizzled and hissed against my flesh. I removed my hand and saw nothing but the black residue of ash.

“What is going on, Dayne?” I asked with disbelief as I turned to him for the answers he obviously had.

“Nothing,” he said, turning away from me to hide his face.

“Nothing?” I asked, walking around to face him so he had no choice but to look at me. “I just put my hand in fire and it’s nothing? Why aren’t you surprised by this? Why aren’t you freaking out and insisting on rushing me to the hospital like a normal boyfriend would?” I asked, holding my untouched arm up in between us for effect. The tattered remnants of my sleeve billowed in the breeze.

“If I asked you to just forget it, would you?” he asked.

“Um…let me think…no!” I yelled sarcastically, crossing my arms over my chest. “This isn’t some top secret fairy stuff, Dayne. This is me we’re talking about. I’m not magic. Remember? So, no, I’m not going to leave this alone.” He walked away from me again, to the farthest edge of the darkness where he paced back and forth in thought.

I uncrossed my arms and looked down at the tattered sleeve. I couldn’t believe what had just happened, not that I wasn’t getting used to the impossible happening these days, but I was in no way prepared to believe
I
was one of those impossible things. Sure, I was well accustomed to the fact that I was dating a mythical creature that lived a life a Hollywood super hero would kill for. I was well aware that magic did exist in this world if you were willing to believe in it. But it was me who had just essentially walked through fire, not him, and I was certainly nothing spectacular or mythical.

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said with defeat in his voice as he turned back to the fire.

“Not so sure about what?”

“Not sure about you not having magic in you,” he whispered the word, like he was afraid someone might hear.

“That’s ridiculous, Dayne. There’s no way. I come from America, not some alternate reality. I can’t control things with my mind, and I certainly don’t have the ability to fly around when no one’s looking. You’re wrong. You have to be.” My head was shaking just as quickly as these words were flying out of me. Nerves were stacked on top of nerves in my stomach, reaching up my esophagus and tugging at my throat.

“Just listen to me.” He held up his hands defensively. “I know you’re freaking out right now, but I don’t think you belong to this world any more than I do.” He walked back to me, and I suddenly had to sit down. My knees buckled and I sank to the ground below.

“I don’t…how?” I was babbling like a baby. Thoughts were flying through my head so fast I couldn’t grab onto one long enough to think about it. What had he just said?

“You don’t really know who your parents are, right?”

I shook my head quickly, staring straight ahead into the fire that had just changed my life.

“Faye, I knew there was something different about you the first night I saw you, but I didn’t know exactly what it was until the night Ali was born. That was the first night you called me.” He sat down beside me.

“I knew it was your voice, but I have never, in all my years, heard the language that your soul speaks.”

“What language? I only speak English.”

“This language isn’t in your mind. Minds are easily erased. At your core, your soul is something completely different. It isn’t human, and it's not Sidhe. It isn’t any of the races I know of. And for the voice to be so strong— when the memory is washed from the mind— makes whatever it is very powerful.”

“So what does that make me? Some pathetic freak?” I wiped away a tear that trembled on my lash.

“No. I think you must be some hybrid. Some offspring of the races mixing.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to make sense of it himself.

“Great. So I’m a mutt?” I tossed my hands into the air and then crossed them at my chest.

“No.” His answer was quick and he shook his head with eyes so wide they pulled back to his temples. “You’ve got more power in you than I have ever seen in my world.”

“You’re wrong. You have to be,” I said grabbing my head in my hands, trying to keep the pieces of my world from falling around me. “I can’t be. I’m…I’m normal. There’s nothing special about me.”

“Come on, Faye, you and I both know that’s a lie you try to make everyone else believe. This is me you’re talking to. I know your secrets. I know how hard it is for you to be normal.” He tucked his head down and looked at me.

He was right. I wasn’t a normal teenager. I tried so desperately to be normal, but despite my best attempts I would never be like everyone else. All I could do was fake it. I could hide my secrets away from those around me and try to be something I wasn’t. Even if the world believed me, my life would never be anything more than a big fat lie.

I shook my head at him and curled my knees into my chest. He shifted nervously beside me, moving to rest a hand on my shoulder, but stopping in mid air and pulling it back. Crossing his arms over his knees, he sighed loudly.

“Okay, then, if it isn’t magic,
you
tell me how you managed to put your arm in the fire and not get burned?” Dayne’s words were soft, but firm, clearly not ready to give up the fight.

“I was born without developed nerve ending in my hands. I’ve never been able to feel heat.” I babbled the same excuse I had always used, the reason why I couldn’t feel the heat. There was only one problem with that.

“Okay, so science can explain why you don’t feel the heat. That doesn’t explain why it doesn’t char your flesh like a normal human, though. Does it?” He cocked his brow at me, knowing I didn’t have an answer for him. All I could do was shake my head and stare at the fire. No, I didn’t have an answer for that. Neither did modern medical science.

I reached over and picked up one of the smoldering coals that had tumbled from the pile of debris burning in front of us. I didn’t even flinch, didn’t feel the tiniest pin prick of pain when the coal began to sizzle against my skin. I crumbled the charred wood in my hands and released a smoking pile of ash spilling to the ground. Again, I opened my hand to find nothing but the black stain of soot.

Yep, I was a freak all right. A total freak.

“Can you do that?” I asked, still staring at the pile of burned wood beside me.

“Uh-uh,” he said shaking his head. “I don’t have that power. Few do.”

“What power?” I asked and turned to face him. He drew his knees up in front of him and the amber glow cast shadows across his face.

“Some people call it elemental, others would say you can talk to the earth.”

“What does that mean?”

“Most believe that the world is controlled by four main elements—the earth that shelters us, the air that gives us life, the water that makes us grow, and the fire that destroys it all. If you can talk to the earth, you can control these. If you can control these, you can control the earth.”

“Do many Sidhe
talk to the earth
?”

“None. There hasn’t been a Sidhe to wield your power in ages. Fire walking is only found in our legends, from a time before LisTirna. And I’m guessing if you have fire and air, you probably have the other two as well,” he said as he poked his finger into the pile of ash I had just created. Chills raced over my body.

“I don’t control the air and I’m not controlling fire. It just isn’t burning me for some odd reason,” I said, reaching out and holding the tip of a finger in the flames. After a few seconds I pulled my finger away and the tip of it continued to burn like a lighted match. I blew gently and the fire extinguished.