Sovereign Hope (23 page)

A faint line
of blood trickled down his forehead where a deep gash lay just
below the boy’s hairline. He didn’t seem fazed, though. His eyes,
the color of a wintry sky, the starkest of blues, were filled with
laughter. In his right hand he held a balled-up wad of green and
black material.

“
You ever get sick of it, bro?” he said to Daniel. His voice
bore no accent at all, or maybe it was that he spoke with a
combination of many accents. It was hard to tell. He sounded
different, but in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.

At some point
during the time I’d been staring at the newcomer, Daniel had gotten
to his feet and regained his composure. His eyes still shone a
little too brightly. His smile was ruinous. “Not really. You?”

The other boy
cracked a wide grin. “Nope.”

“
Glad to know we’re on the same page.”

Aldan coughed
and stepped between the two of them, hooking his hands on his hips.
“Are you two quite done?”

“
Quite
.” Daniel’s voice was flat but
I could see the strain in his face. He obviously wanted to rip this
guy’s head off.

The stranger
was still smirking. His gaze flickered to land on me. He held out
his left hand, the one free of the scrunched up material, and
smiled until he practically sparkled. “Hallo.”

I shot Aldan a
confused glance, but he was still too busy staring at Daniel to
give me any help. Daniel was no use, either. He was clenching his
jaw so hard it looked like he might shatter his teeth. He glared at
the other boy who, in turn, made a show of ignoring Daniel
altogether.

“
Don’t you people still shake hands when you greet someone?”
the guy asked, a puzzled look creasing his brow.

“
Uh… yeah. We do.” I put my hand in his and shook it, and a
radiating warmth shot up my arm.

“
I’m Kayden. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss
Hope.”

His formal
address threw me off guard. “Yeah… um… pleased to meet you,
too.”

“
Sorry about our little ruck there. Daniel and I like to get
into it when we see each other. Just a little tradition of ours.”
It sounded like he was apologizing for tracking dirty footprints
over an expensive rug, not for brawling in public.

“
Oh? Are your little exchanges always about the same thing, or
do you like to find new things to brutalize one another
over?”

“
We like to mix it up,” he said, giving me a wink. “For
instance, this time I borrowed some of Daniel’s threads. Apparently
he feels we’re not good enough friends for swapsies.”

“
Oh.” There was nothing else to say.

“
It was my mouth that
really
got me into trouble this time, though,” he
continued. “I may have intimated that I might like to try on
something else, too, and he didn’t like that at all. Although, I
don’t seem to recall ever having heard that this
particular
something
belonged to him.”

The words had
barely left his mouth before Daniel exploded in a blur of black and
white, and Kayden was no longer gripping my hand but sailing
backwards through the air. Two whole seconds passed before he
landed with a thud on his back five feet from where he’d been
standing. Daniel’s fists were clenched at his sides and his
shoulders hitched up and down. “You’ve delivered your message. It’s
time for you to leave,” he hissed.

Kayden laid
flat on his back, his laughter cutting above all the other noise in
the room like a brightly ringing bell. He lazily propped himself up
on his elbows and gave Daniel a regretful look. “I think you may be
right.” He turned to me and shot me another reprobate wink. “I
meant it. It really was a pleasure.”

And it was
like he vanished, inexplicably disappeared in between heartbeats.
There was no sign he’d ever been there, beyond a crumpled shirt and
a pair of jeans, which were kicked aside as another dancing couple
cantered by.

“
You do realize he wasn’t really wearing your clothes?” Aldan
said. His exasperation was all too clear in the timbre of his
words.

“
Of course,” Daniel replied.

“
Then what the hell? Because he made some cheap remark
about
‘something that doesn’t belong to
you’
?”

“
No,” he answered, staring at the ground. “Because it
does
belong to
me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Vitamin C

Morning was
announced by Agatha thrusting orange juice under my nose. The
acidic tang made my nose wrinkle.

“
What…?” I muttered, confused, pushing the glass away. Sleep
hadn’t come easily after our foray into 1860. After all the things
that transpired, it was the look on Daniel’s face as Jamie raced by
that haunted me the most. Even now it was emblazoned behind my
eyelids. He’d looked like a hollow shell of a person, a person who
had lost everything. There was the rest of it, too. Aldan’s
revelation that my hallucinations were really premonitions or
visions of some kind, and of course, Kayden. But that all seemed
terribly unimportant compared to the look of abject pain that had
been evident in Daniel’s eyes.

“
Vitamin C,” Agatha said. “Drink.” She placed the glass down
on the coffee table and then sat herself down at her desk, ready
for a day of…whatever it was Agatha was always doing on the
computer.

He
was nowhere to be seen, and that
was all for the best. I was too distracted, trying to unravel the
confused emotions that had gotten all tangled together over the
past few days, to deal with any new Daniel-related run-ins. It was
clear he hadn’t really expected to see Jamie, so why bother going
back there at all?
And why take me along
for the ride, if you’re only going to get mad at me?

He looked appalled that I’d seen him collapse in the street
outside the British Museum. Horrified that I was staring right at
him as he obviously struggled to reconstruct himself back into some
cold, hard shell of a person. There had been no hiding the
devastation on his face, or the tremor in his hands. His words,
‘
No,
of course I
don’t want to go after him!’
had been so
completely incredulous that I found myself wondering if the
suggestion was somehow really insensitive. But no, if I had a
brother or a sister and they died, I’d want to follow them no
matter the cost, even if they were just a fleeting facsimile. A
ghost.

And I still
couldn’t figure out why Daniel wanted to go dancing, of all things.
Touching me clearly made him uncomfortable, like when he helped
steady me at the clearing by Aldan’s house, or when he snatched his
hands back as we went in or out of Aldan’s mind. That kind of
dancing, proper dancing, had required him to hold me to him, to
guide me and sweep me along in the movement of his body.

I shivered.
Falling into his arms, feeling him closer than he’d ever been
before, his legs against mine, his arms locked tightly around me,
was something I couldn’t afford to think about. It was too
dangerous.

Instead, I
focused on something I knew would irritate the crap out of me: that
inexorable, emotionless expression I’d grown to resent so much.
After our run-in with Jamie, it was very clear Daniel was capable
of true emotion, which led me to believe there was a lot going on
beneath his closely guarded exterior. So why did he have to shut me
out?

A headache,
the normal, run-of-the-mill kind, began beating at my temples.
Aware of Agatha’s sharp eyes, I knocked back the orange juice and
heaved myself to my feet. “I’m not sleeping out here anymore. At
least in my room I don’t get force-fed vitamins.”

Agatha grunted
and screwed up her face. “Good. Your morning hair makes you look
frightful. And you should be grateful, anyway. I’m trying to make
you strong and healthy. I spoke to Aldan earlier, and he said—”

“
I don’t care what he said. If it has anything to do with
visions, eternal damnation, or grudge matches between Daniel and
other random, cute guys, I’m officially not interested.”

“
Cute guys, huh?” Agatha laughed. “Aldan didn’t mention
anything about cute guys.” Her eyes glittered, holding an unknown
edge to them that I couldn’t decipher.

“
Yeah. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Of course Aldan
wouldn’t mention that Daniel got into a fight with some messenger
from the Quorum. Unexpected brawling isn’t exactly out of the
ordinary for you guys. Just the visions and the whole,
oh, by the way, I think your mother is probably
in hell
bit, right?”

“
You saw a messenger?” Agatha had completely bypassed the
sarcasm in my voice. She had blanched and was staring at
me.

“
Some guy called Kayden. It was pretty clear he and Daniel
have some sort of a history.”

Agatha
frowned. “You could say that. They’ve been fighting for the last
fifty years.”

Fifty years? Okay, so I wasn’t even surprised that Kayden
wasn’t my age after all. He was too flawless to be normal. “Any
chance you’re going to tell me
why
they’ve been fighting for the last fifty
years?”

Agatha’s
expression, for once, was enigmatic.

“
You know what?” I sighed. “Don’t worry about it. I already
know the drill. None of my business. Daniel’s story, etc. Pretend I
didn’t even ask. What I
do
want to know is why you seem so shocked that a
messenger guy showed up, and not that Aldan suspects my
hallucinations are visions?” It did seem odd, primarily because it
was pretty big news. How come she wasn’t exhaustively questioning
me about my episodes again, now knowing that there could be so much
more to the things I’d seen? Agatha shrugged, rifling through
papers.

“
I
am
shocked. Aldan went on and on about the whole thing for hours
this morning, though. Kind of took the punch out of the news.
Sorry.” She raised her palms in a
what-can-you-do?
gesture. “On the
other hand, I’m surprised about Kayden exactly
because
Aldan didn’t mention it. The
Quorum only sends out a messenger if there’s an urgent,
life-threatening reason. And they would never have let you see him
unless it was really important. Aldan mustn’t want to tell me
something.” Her lips pursed into a troubled pout.

“
Kayden didn’t talk to Aldan. He came to see Daniel,” I told
her, wanting to ease her mind. Agatha’s silence was
sonorous.

“
Oh.”

“
Oh?”
Getting a reaction out of these
people was like getting blood from a stone. They could make even
the smallest words sound cryptic. Agatha opened her mouth but I
held up my hand. “Never mind. I’m going for a shower.”

******

I was clean and dressed by the time Daniel strolled through
the entrance to the hangar. He wore a purple t-shirt with a tiny
rip at the neck, exposing a flash of his collarbone, and his jeans
were filthy with mud and red dust. His hair curled around his ears
again, the way it did when he was hot or it got wet. It was weird,
the things I thought about when I was around him. Right then it
was,
I wonder how often he gets that
cut?
The altercation he’d had with Kayden
hadn’t left a mark on him, and for the first time I realized there
was nothing wrong with my hands, either. No cuts or scrapes at all.
I knew it wasn’t real, that everything had been staged inside
Aldan’s head, but I still couldn’t separate that knowledge from how
absolute it had all felt.

When he saw
me, Daniel cupped his hand to the back of his neck in a way that
looked almost self-conscious, and then pinned it to his side again.
I’d assumed he was sulking in his bedroom all morning, but he
clearly hadn’t been. I let the book I was reading drop into my lap
and scowled. “You’ve been outside?”

Why, all of a
sudden, did it feel like a betrayal that he’d gone somewhere
without me? Yes, he’d sat watch outside the hangar after the stunt
he’d pulled with Elliot, and yes, we’d spent a really perplexing
day together yesterday, but he was still hardly ever at the hangar.
He was out doing things alone most of the time.

He gave me a
bone-weary look. “Yeah. Is that a problem?”

I was about to
try and come up with something caustic to say but Agatha leapt to
her feet and marched across the hangar towards Daniel. She moved so
fast a gust of air rushed passed my head as she swept by in a
blur.

“
Why didn’t you tell me about Kayden?” she hissed, grabbing
hold of his wrist in an attempt to pull him aside. Daniel shot me
an accusatory glance, like it was me who had betrayed
him,
and pulled a
face.

“
Because there was no point.”

“
There’s always a point where the Quorum’s concerned. What did
he want? Was it about Elliot and Tobin?”

“
No. I would have told you if it was. It was…
personal.”

Tension worked
its way into every line of Agatha’s body. Her hand had turned white
with the pressure she was exerting onto Daniel’s wrist. “Are you
sure? Are you sure it wasn’t—”

“
Yes! I’m one hundred percent sure. Like I said, it was
personal. It was about me and…” Daniel faltered. He was fixed on
Agatha’s face, but he didn’t really seem to be seeing her. It was
like he was staring hard at her in order to avoid looking elsewhere
in the room. A muscle ticked at his jaw, and he gave Agatha a
loaded look. “Okay?” he said.