Ignite (Midnight Fire Series Book One) (24 page)

She slowed as she neared Luke’s home,
suddenly regretting her rashness, hoping Luke was awake and that
she wouldn’t be bothering him over nothing. It was just a book, and
she was sure there were other copies available in mint condition.
Kira stopped the car, turned off the lights and sat quietly,
totally unsure of what she was doing there, until she noticed a
figure walk up Luke’s front sidewalk and knock on the door. She was
still down the street a little, too far away to be noticed, but
also too far away to hear anything or really see anything. But when
the porch light turned on and the front door opened, Kira
recognized Tristan’s tall, muscular build and imagined the shock on
Luke’s face.

When Tristan sauntered inside, and the door
shut behind him, Kira imagined the shock that must have been
displayed on her own face at that moment. What were the two of them
possibly discussing? Kira thought, instantly intrigued.

She realized there was only one topic Luke
would tolerate talking to Tristan about, and that was her safety.
Something must have happened with Diana, who had been mysteriously
absent for weeks, hidden in the shadows planning something to ruin
the happiness Kira had managed to build.

Kira silently opened her door and traversed
the lawn. She crept around the house toward a side window that
looked into Luke’s living room. She let her sneakers sink in the
muddy, unkempt garden while she lifted her head, just high enough
that her eyes could see through the blinds. Kira thanked God for
the cover of darkness, because she could see into Luke’s house
perfectly, but it would be far more of a challenge for Luke or
Tristan to notice her.

She spotted Tristan as he leaned against the
wall with his hands in the pockets of his typical dark jeans. His
eyes were darting around the room nervously. He straightened as
Luke walked in, and Kira just had to laugh at Luke’s ensemble,
which consisted of full on flannel pajama pants and an old Marvel
comics t-shirt speckled with holes from overuse.

Luke sat on his couch, not offering Tristan a
chair, and Kira felt the tension even through the glass window.
They stared at each other, not speaking, until Tristan finally
pulled a wooden chair from the dining table and sat opposite
Luke.

Kira couldn’t make out any of their words,
but could tell Tristan was frustrated by the way he kept running
his hands through his hair and shaking his head. Luke responded in
a similar fashion, concern covering his features as he nodded along
to Tristan’s words, and then stood up to start pacing around the
room as he sipped what Kira imagined was hot coffee.

Their movements became more animated as the
conversation progressed, and at one point, Luke gripped the back of
his couch with both hands and shouted what Kira assumed was a very
bad four letter word in Tristan’s direction. He in turn stood up,
pointed at himself, then outside, and then spread his arms wide
like some sort of act of surrender. Luke started pointing
aggressively at the door, jerking his whole body and Tristan moved
like lightning, running from Luke’s house before Kira even had time
to go inside and demand to know what was happening, something she
had planned to do when the conversation seemed less heated.

Now it was too late, so she settled for
talking to Luke alone, and she knocked on the window to get his
attention, standing fully upright so he could see her. Kira watched
as he noticed her, cursed, rolled his eyes, and headed for the
door.

"Kira, you have unbelievable timing," he said
when he opened the door.

She shrugged, smiled and said, "It’s one of
my many charms."

He shook his head, led her inside and
disappeared into the kitchen to make her some coffee too.

When Luke emerged, Kira got straight to the
point. "So, what just happened? And don’t even try to pretend like
it was normal to have Tristan come over to ‘hang out’." Kira made
air quotations around the word, emphasizing how ridiculous of an
explanation it would be.

"Relax, I was going to call you tonight as
soon as he left, but you were already here." He sat down next to
her on the couch and leaned all the way back, releasing a long
exhale as his head came to a rest. Luke rubbed at his eyes and
pressed the skin along his nose, letting another sigh escape.
"Their plan is so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Kira,"
he turned to look at her finally, with a pained expression, "it
will be all my fault if something happens to you. I should have
seen this. And I yelled at Tristan, but I’m really just angry with
myself."

Kira reached for his hand, holding his warm
fingers, trying to give some comfort. "Luke, what is it? What did
Tristan say?" He tightened his grip.

"When we’re young, conduits are taught our
one major weakness. It’s something out of our control, but we need
to be aware of it, always, that’s one of the rules you do not
forget, and I did."

"Luke, just tell me." Kira was dying from the
not knowing. Finally, the fears she had pushed to the back of her
mind during these few weeks of blissful oblivion were coming to the
forefront. She didn’t want to see Diana ever again, didn’t want to
face her, especially if Luke was this scared too.

"A total eclipse. That’s the only thing that
can take our powers away, being in the eyes of a full eclipse makes
the sun inaccessible and makes us vulnerable to a vampire’s attack.
We lose all our strength. And Kira," he grabbed her shoulders,
driving the point home, "the eclipse is today."

He let his hands drop away as Kira’s entire
body slumped back against the couch. She felt as though all the
life had been knocked out of her. Today? She thought, noting how
time seemed to slip through her fingers like sand, when there had
been buckets of it just moments ago.

"What do we do?" Her voice came out like a
whisper, nearly silent and completely foreboding.

Luke abruptly stood up. "Let’s leave, right
now. We’ll drive for a few hours—get out of the eye of the eclipse.
Diana won’t be able to touch you." He grabbed her arm, trying to
pull her along.

"No," Kira said, resisting. "Luke, think for
a moment. I have a family, my parents, Chloe. They would be
defenseless. I can’t abandon them." He sunk back down.

"You’re right."

"How much time do we have?" Kira asked. She
assumed it was around three, maybe four, in the morning. The sun
would rise in a few short hours.

"About eight or nine hours. It’s supposed to
happen around midday, a pure total solar eclipse. They only last
for about fifteen minutes, and we will only totally lose our powers
for maybe five minutes, but that’s more than enough time for a
vampire to kill you."

"So, how do we fight? Do we even have a
chance to stand against Diana?"

Luke shook his head and bit his lip, hiding
the sadness in his eyes. "I don’t know. Tristan didn’t know what
her plan was—he just sensed her and the others in the area. He knew
they were up to something and then we both realized the eclipse at
the same time. It’s what they’ve been waiting for, why they’ve
taken so long to move into action. And, Tristan has got to be part
of their plan."

Kira grabbed her phone and dialed his
number—straight to voicemail. She tried again, hoping it had been a
mistake, but the same thing happened. "He’s not answering his
phone. Do you think they took him? Are they hurting him?" Luke just
shook his head. Neither one of them had any answers.

Kira let her eyes wander around the room, as
though the answers were written on the wall somewhere, until her
eyes came to rest on her handbag. The book, she realized, the whole
reason why she came here. It seemed stupid now, learning about
mystical prophecies as if some ancient conduits had all the
answers, but Kira realized she didn’t know how much time she would
have left to ask Luke about it. And, even when the end of her life
seemed horribly near, she was curious about those damn missing
pages.

"Luke?" He gave her his attention as she
pulled the old book from her open purse. "It seems silly now, but I
stole this and I wanted to give it back, and ask–"

"Ask about the missing pages? I actually
thought you’d notice it sooner. You stole the book a while ago." He
interrupted. She shrugged her eyebrows and half-smiled at him,
hoping he wasn’t actually angry she took it. "They’re all
missing."

"Huh?" Kira questioned, not
understanding.

"The councils from each conduit society met
one year and decided that knowledge was no longer useful, so they
cut the pages from every copy of that book and burned them. I have
no idea what it said. No one does, this happened a long time
ago—two hundred years ago maybe."

"But why?"

"The rumor was that there had been uprisings,
across both the Punisher and Protector societies, urging for a
reunited race, and the councils overturned it. They believed the
prophecies were egging people on and giving them false hopes. But,
all of that is just hearsay now."

Instantly, Kira’s curiosity was further
piqued. What did that book say about mixed breeds that would lead
to a revolt? It must have been something huge, something that could
change everything. Maybe it had been about her ability to heal
humans and conduits, surely a power any vampire fighter would want
to have. But the price, of potentially giving a vampire total
immunity, was too dangerous.

"Kira?" Luke distracted her from those
thoughts. "I need to call the council. They’ll know how to proceed.
Why don’t you go home for a while? Have breakfast with your
family?" Kira could read it in his eyes, even though Luke was
trying so hard to hide his fear: he worried that this could be her
last meal. Kira knew he wanted to run, that he didn’t care about
her family as much as he cared about her, but when Kira thought of
sweet, innocent Chloe, she knew there was no other option.

Kira hugged Luke, pulled him in tight enough
to lose her breath in the process, and closed her eyes against the
emotion threatening to brim over. There was no time left for
tears.

Kira drove home quickly, ignoring stop signs
and racing past the speed limit. Suddenly, being home was the most
important thing in the world. She knew Luke wouldn’t sleep, that he
would be working on a solution for all the time they had left. He
was going to meet her at her house at eleven, an hour before the
eclipse. Plenty of time to sit and wait and be terrified together.
She hated pulling him into this. It was her fight with Diana. Luke
had done nothing to deserve any part of the scorn, but she knew
there was no way to stop him. He would never let her go down
alone.

After she parked, Kira tried to slow her
racing heart. Her parents couldn’t know anything was wrong. She
wanted them to live in blissful oblivion. There is time, she kept
thinking; time to work out a solution. The answer would come
eventually. All she could hope now was that Tristan was working on
a plan of his own and was trying to save her as well. Kira feared
his plan was to confront Diana before she could confront Kira, but
deep down Kira knew it wouldn’t work. Three to one odds were too
large and Tristan had probably been caught already.

The sky was lightening when she finally went
inside. Kira could only sit in the car and ruminate for so long.
Being afraid was no way to spend the potentially last few hours of
your life. So she went inside, straight to the kitchen. Cooking
always calmed her, and Kira grabbed the pancake mix from the
pantry, cracked open some eggs and let the serenity of
concentrating on whisking distract her.

When her mother walked down the stairs, Kira
had a feast ready. Stacks of fluffy pancakes, bowls of fresh
whipped cream, candied berries of all kinds and freshly squeezed
orange juice decorated the table. She had gone a little overboard,
Kira knew it, but she was also extremely satisfied with the way
everything turned out.

"Kira, my goodness. What are you even doing
awake?"

"I just couldn’t sleep." Kira shrugged,
feigning indifference, and pulled out a chair for her mom. Not a
second later, thumps signaled her dad was descending into the
kitchen too.

"Smells amazing honey. What’s the occasion?"
Her father asked, sitting down next to her mother to dig into the
food.

"Nothing, I just couldn’t sleep. Can’t a girl
do something nice for her family once in a while?"

"Not on a school day. This is more of a
Sunday morning thing for you," her dad said with a mouth already
full of food. Kira assured him she was just in a good mood and
happy for the amazing, even if adoptive, parents she had. They
talked lightly while they ate, until Kira’s mother went to wake up
Chloe. Within half an hour, Kira was hugging everyone goodbye,
holding on for just a second too long, and assuring her parents
that she was just going to quickly clean up and be on her way to
school.

When the door closed, Kira raced back to the
kitchen, splashed water on her face, and tried her best not to cry.
She leaned over the sink, one hand on either side, looking out at
her sunlit backyard, and decided to just let the tears come anyway.
Once started, they were impossible to control. She moved slowly,
picking up the dirty dishes, putting them in the dishwasher,
finishing the orange juice and putting the leftovers in a Ziploc
bag. The mundane tasks gave her something to concentrate on, but
when they were done, she went up to her room and actually put her
focus on what would happen.

Diana would come and would attack her. That
was certain. That Kira would not be able to stop her for what might
as well have been hours was another certainty. The only unknown was
Tristan. Had Diana managed to turn him? Would he come looking for
her blood or Diana’s?

Kira sighed and reached for the drawings of
his she had kept hidden in her bookshelf. All were of her. She had
a collection of these portraits now. Kira looked through them until
she reached the one Tristan had crafted when he had been secretly
watching her in Battery Park. She took note of the flowing skirt
and tank top she had worn and searched for them in her closet. She
opted for a long sleeve shirt instead, because even in South
Carolina, December brought cool air.