The Ylem (23 page)

Tristan stepped in front of me, as if to
cover me. “Mind your own business, Vince.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. I
used the moment to untie the hoodie from my hips and put it on,
zipping it all the way up. “Since when is being honest a
crime?”

Tristan moved aside, giving me an apologizing
look.

I smiled, thankful.

“There’s a big difference between being
honest and brutally honest, Vincent,” Lamia told him.

“What, saying your chest is more on the flat
side than on the fuller, like Kalista’s, is brutal?” A stunned
silence answered him. I almost choked. “Oh, come on. I'm not the
only guy in here who thinks that.”

“Nobody is denying it, Vince,” Lamia said
with a shake of her head. Surprisingly, she didn’t look offended or
chagrined, just annoyed at him, as if this was something she had to
deal with day after day. Anyway, how could a girl that beautiful
feel troubled by something like that?

She glanced at me. “Excuse him, Kalista. He
doesn’t know what ‘delicacy’ means. He just blurts out whatever
that pops into his head.”

“Whatever.” Vincent shrugged. “Her boobs are
nice.”

“Vince.” Tristan said through his teeth.

Elan and Mingan chuckled.

Lamia rolled her eyes.

“And since I'm the brutally honest person
here, believe me when I say you’re not the stinky one here.” he
added, pointing his eyes at Chloe.

“You’re playing with fire, Vincent,” Chloe
said. “Do I need to remind you that I'm above all of you? That I
could—”

“Destroy our lives in the blink of an eye,
blah blah blah…yeah, yeah. We know the story,” Elan said, with a
wave of his hand.

“Only this time, the story has a spicy twist,
and everything could change for Chloe.” Lamia said, staring at her
with mocking glee. “Jealousy is a bitch, isn’t it?”

“What are you trying to say?” Chloe said.

“Maybe I could tell the IPO about how you’re
neglecting your duties lately so the Tessitors can explain to you
what I'm trying to say.”

Chloe snorted a laugh. “You can’t do that.
You know Tristan would go down the sewer, too. It’s the only reason
why I haven’t told or done anything.” She turned to look at
Tristan.

He averted his eyes.

So. He did know how she felt about him. Did
he feel the same way about her, though? I couldn’t believe I was
worrying over this when something crucial was being said. Something
that could lead me to find out the truth about them. Chloe was
involved somehow. And I didn’t like it.

“Why don’t we save ourselves all the fuss and
tell her to get out of here. Problems solved,” Mingan prompted.

Wow. He really disliked me. “Am I causing
trouble?”

“You are the very root of all our problems,”
Chloe scowled at me. “You should’ve never come here.”

I frowned. What was going on in here? Why I
was suddenly involved in this whole situation? Was there a specific
reason for Mingan to dislike me?

“Leave her out of this,” Tristan snarled at
them.

“How can we leave her out of this?” Mingan
retorted. “As much as I hate to agree with Chloe, she’s right. If
she wasn’t here, you wouldn’t have broken your oath and none of us
would be on the edge of losing our lives.”

Broken oath?

“Is she really worth it, Tristan? Is it
really worth it to endure all of this just because you suddenly
decided to be friends with this human?” Chloe pointed at me.

This human?

“This isn't the time, Chloe,” Tristan told
her warningly.

“You’re wrong,” she walked to the middle of
the room. “This is the perfect time.”

Lamia laughed. “What, do you think Tristan
only has the right to be nice to you?”

Chloe turned to glare at her.

“And as far as I remember, you’re human,
too,” she continued. “You’re no exception.”

“Are you kidding me? She’s so beneath me,”
Chloe said with her chin high.

“See?” Lamia turned to look at Tristan.
“She’s so full of crap. I don’t know why you insist on treating her
like some freaking martyr.”

“Shut up, you sucking snake!” Chloe pinned
her with a killer glare.

“Oh…is that supposed to be an insult?” Lamia
moved toward her but was held back by Vincent. “Let me go,” she
ordered him.

“As much as I would like to see you in
action, I can’t let you.” Vincent said to her, giving me a sly,
sidelong glance. “We have a guest.”

“That afraid of me kicking your girlfriend’s
butt, huh?” Chloe told him.

“You’re forgetting something, Chloe,” Elan
said. “We’re never afraid. Not even of you.”

“Is that so, Shifter?” She sneered her
contempt.

My heart skipped.
Shifter
. Then, it
was all real. I felt as if ice-cold water had been splashed into my
face. Chloe must have noticed it. Her sneer twisted into a cruel
grin, as if she’d suddenly found what she’d been looking for, as if
she’d found bright gold in ink-black waters.

“Chloe…”

She ignored Tristan and kept her eager eyes
locked on mine. “You heard right. They’re all Shifters—or should I
say ‘werewolves’? I don’t know,” she shook her head, pretending to
be confused. “I guess it’s all the same.”

Tristan stilled.

I found myself sliding away from them,
recoiling into the corner. I couldn’t help it. The weight of that
truth was too hard to process in that moment. Those medieval dark
stories of werewolves barged inside my head and panic surged in me.
I was a tangle of shock and fear.

“Don’t listen to her, Kalista,” Lamia said
with a tense smile. “She’s obviously delusional.”

“Downright delusional,” Vincent emphasized,
glowering at Chloe. His honey colored eyes looking like two
blistering suns.

“Am I?” Chloe turned around and reached for
the deer horn that served as a centerpiece for the coffee table.
She held it up, running her fingers over the curves and sharp tips.
“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe my mind is playing against me,” she said,
walking up to the wall, her eyes never leaving the horn in her
hands. “Maybe I'm the crazy one here.” She stopped and turned
around. She stood a few feet away from me, close enough to see her
knuckles had turned white. “Or maybe…” She looked at me, moved her
arm and—

And that was the last thing I saw. It all
happened too fast.

The sharp tip of the horn was suddenly an
inch away from my eyes, frozen in the air, as if it was still
waiting to break into my skin. Tristan was gripping it. He’d
stopped it.

“Maybe I'm the brutally honest one here.”
Chloe finished saying, with a smile in her voice.

Tristan jerked it away from my face and threw
the horn across the floor. It landed with a heavy plonk.

I let out a shaky breath. Even if my blood
pressure had skyrocketed and my legs felt like jelly, my brain was
working as quickly as a well-oiled machine. I knew what Chloe was
trying to do. She hadn’t planned to hurt me. She knew Tristan
wouldn’t have allowed that horn to touch my face, and she’d played
along with that. She’d done it to prove her point. He’d been
standing too far away from me and she’d been standing too close. It
would’ve been impossible for a human to get to me that fast—and
react that fast. Not to mention to stop a speeding object in midair
like that.

“He moves fast, doesn’t he?” Chloe said, as
if she was reading my mind. “A little too fast maybe.”

She also wanted me to be afraid of Tristan.
Proving that he wasn’t human, she’d figured, was the best solution
to keep me far away from him.

“What the hell are you doing, Chloe?” Tristan
snapped at her.

She turned to look at him, amused. “I think
you have some explanations to give.”

“You went too far this time, Chloe,” Elan
said with fisted hands.

“I think you should leave,” Mingan told her
severely.

“Sorry to interrupt all the love, but I think
all of you need to leave, as well.” Chloe glanced at Tristan and
me. I wondered what she was looking at. A girl with a shocked
expression plastered on her face, or a strong guy turned into a
heap of nerves.

“Let’s go,” Lamia said to everyone. “They
need, um, space.”

The last thing I heard before they left,
though, was Chloe’s voice. “Oh, and be careful. You might end up
with a bitten leg.”

I sat down on the couch with a tremulous
sigh. Tristan paced back and forth, restless. A frown seemed to
have settled permanently on his face. He stopped with a deep sigh
and turned to me.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he said in a
low voice, avoiding my eyes.

My heart was pounding. I still couldn’t
believe I was in this odd situation. “Why don’t you start by
promising you’ll be completely honest with me?”

He pulled his haunted eyes to mine and
sighed. “I give you my word.”

I nodded and paused for a few heartbeats,
deciding where or how to proceed with this whole thing. “Was Chloe
right about…you know, about your nature?” I finally asked.

“I won’t bite your leg,” he told me
immediately, as if he needed to emphasize the fact before carrying
on. “I swear it, Kalista. I would never hurt you.”

A chuckle escaped my lips.

“I mean it,” he insisted, fastening his
anguished and tender eyes on mine. “You have to believe me.”

"You don’t need to tell me that, Tristan. I
know you won’t hurt me—or bite my leg.” I smiled. No matter what
spine-tingling things that book said, deep down inside, I knew he
wasn’t like that. The old lady told me they didn’t hunt humans, and
I believed it. Chloe brought me the truth with her little impromptu
act, hoping that that same truth would push me away from Tristan.
But it didn't work. I trusted him now more than ever.

His shoulders relaxed. “Good. That’s good.”
He paused, uncertain where to go from there.

“You can sit down if you want to,” I
prompted.

He looked at me, analyzing whether to do that
or stay where he was. The first choice won. He moved around the
coffee table and sat down two seats away from me. He leaned forward
and placed his elbows on his knees. After a long minute, he finally
looked at me. “Kalista…” He never finished, though.

I decided to help him despite the nervous
waves riding through my body. “Are you really a…a werewolf?” Oh
God, I said it. My heart was racing at the speed of light.

You were wrong Einstein
.

He leaned back and shifted in his seat to
look at me straight in the eyes. His gray eyes more intense than
ever. “Yes,” he said.

A chill ran down my spine. It wasn’t the idea
of a potential scratch that scared me. It was the idea or vision of
him turning into some kind of monster that did. I wasn’t ready to
have that image haunting my mind yet.

I looked down at my feet. “So…is it true, all
that brutal stuff, I mean?”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “It hasn’t
been like that for a long time.”

I stayed silent, waiting for him to
continue.

“It’s normal for an outsider to have that
perception, I guess. Movies and books don’t help after all. Our
image has been so tainted over the last couple of centuries that it
has inflicted fear and revulsion in people. And yes, I wouldn’t
blame them. There are still a few of us who are spreading that
dread amongst humans,” he said with fierce eyes.

“A few? You mean…bugbears?”

He looked at me, confused.

What?
I didn’t know how to call them.
I didn’t want to say the word “werewolves” again. It felt too weird
to say it. So why not choosing a more subtle word, like
“bugbear”—which had been a big source of dread in my childhood.

“
The bugbear will get you.
” I
explained, with my dad’s voice in my head.

He frowned. “Isn’t that related to
goblins?”

“Yeah, but it was a big creepy thing for me
when I was a kid. I couldn’t stray too far from our building or eat
too many chocolate cookies. It was actually traumatic.” I grimaced
at the memory.

His face was still rigid, but a tinge of
amusement softened the corners of his eyes. “Okay, the bugbears,”
he said looking away, a bit of mockery playing in his voice. “We
call them Insurgents, though.”

Insurgents. It sounded like something out of
a war movie. “So…there are bad ones out there,” I continued, a cold
chill running down my spine once more. I couldn’t help but picture
those horrible movies with terrifying creatures and teeth as sharp
as knives.

“The yin yang of life—correlated opposites.”
He sighed. “How would you know you’re happy if you haven’t
suffered? Love if you haven’t hated? Or win if you haven’t lost?
It’s the same for good and evil. They cannot exist without each
other. They’re connected.”

“But you’re good.”

“How can you be so sure of that when history
tells the opposite?”

“I can see it in your eyes.”

He kept looking at the ground, but his
features were losing their stiffness, soothing the surface of his
wonderful face, making it almost tender.

“And I had some helpful information from the
old lady, too,” I added.

“The old lady?” he asked.

Shoot. I didn’t know if I was supposed to
tell him about her. “It’s a website I read a long time ago,” I
finally said, twisting the truth.

“A website named the old lady?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s a pseudonym for ‘mystical
lady’ or something like that,” I said, twisting my fingers
nervously. “It has a lot of information on…werewolves—how they move
in packs, how they…eat food during the day and hunt animals during
the night.” I turned to look at him warily.

“And you thought of me?” he asked me,
intrigued.

You are in love with one of them
, the
old lady’s voice flashed into my mind. “A lot of things I didn’t
understand about you started clicking when I made some connections
with the information on the website. And then…your hands…” I looked
down at them. Both index fingers had the same length as the middle
ones. Just like the old lady had said.