The Ylem (25 page)

“The Covenant?”

“Yeah…” His voice lowered. He stared at me, a
shadow of frustration and wretchedness fell over his face. He
closed his eyes for a second and turned around. I pushed up my hand
to hold his, but like I’d done before, I restrained myself and
pulled it back. He walked up to the tall windows, keeping his gaze
straight ahead. The night had swallowed up the sun, reducing
everything beneath to inky shadows.

I followed Tristan and stopped between the
fireplace and him, fixing my eyes on the dark sky outside. The
nearly full moon gleamed like a powerful goddess, casting her
mesmerizing light on the black velvet wrapping the skies, hiding
the tiny sparkling diamonds that paled to her splendor. I stood
hypnotized for a few breaths, watching that beauty. New York didn’t
offer these sights. The massive labyrinth of buildings, dotted with
lights that seemed to spread infinitely, sprayed a coat of hazy
light around the city, obliterating the sky’s true beauty above.
Here, everything was bare, natural. All the colors much more
intense, deep. It was like being inside an art gallery, watching
masterpieces all day long.

I lowered my eyes and found my reflection in
the window. The dark background turned it into a mirror. Tristan’s
image was next to mine, imposing and breathtaking. And he was
watching me. He was watching me with those deep eyes that squeezed
my stomach and shortened my breath. But they took on a studious
look. He was watching us now, the image of us together in that fake
mirror—a fake image, an image that could only exist in my
dreams—and his. Because that sheer surface couldn’t conceal the
longing burning in his eyes. He wanted me.

I had to blink back tears of happiness and
frustration. I had to swallow back a cry of excitement and the urge
to kiss him. Because I knew that if I did, he would kiss me back,
and the sweet memory of it would only shatter me.

The window had mirrored our truth, and now,
was giving us the chance to pull back.

As if he’d realized this, too, Tristan turned
to me and said, “We’ve given our oath to stay away from humans.”
His eyes were pained. “We can’t have any type of… closeness,
relationship with you. We can just keep it on a superficial level.
One of the reasons why Chloe hasn’t informed the IPO about the
breach is because I threatened her. I told her I would spill out
how she tried to harm you—twice—instead of protecting you.”

Something Chloe had said earlier, out in the
woods, when she’d been about to do something to me and Tristan had
stepped between us, came back to me. She’d said it was the second
time Tristan was protecting me from her. “You say twice but…which
one is the first?” I asked.

He paused for a moment and said, “The
wolfdog.”

A thought gleamed in my mind. “She was the
wolfdog?” I remembered how strikingly similar those icy blue eyes
had been to Chloe’s. The animal’s fiery behavior made more sense
now—and how she’d found out about Dean’s kiss made sense, too. “She
can transform into…different animals?” The blue-eyed bunny in my
yard. It’d been her as well.

“Not transform, more like possess animal
bodies.”

I felt as if the last piece of a huge puzzle
had been added. Chloe was powerful. There was no doubt about that.
She hadn’t been joking when she’d told me to not mess with her.
“One of the other reasons why she didn’t expose you with the IPO
was because…because she loves you and she’ll be punished for it,
right?”

He nodded, silent.

I looked down at my feet, feeling wretched.
At least, Chloe could be in his life. It was part of her duty—as it
was making sure I stayed away from him. And she certainly enjoyed
that part of the job.

He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets,
something I'd come to learn he did when he felt uneasy. “It’s
getting late. I think I’ll—” He trailed off and cursed under his
breath.

I looked up, confused by the sudden change in
him. It was as if he was paying attention to something else.
“What’s wrong?”

I heard footsteps behind me, and before I
could turn to see who it was, a voice flew into the room. “No, you
won’t!” I heard Vincent call out. His arm was pointing warningly
toward Tristan. The twins and Lamia followed. “Finish what you
started, Tris,” he added.

“I agree,” Elan said with an eager smile.
“This is way too entertaining to stop it here—especially when you
still haven’t given her the best piece of the cake.” He glanced at
me.

“Well, I don’t agree,” Mingan shook his head.
A couple of strands untied from his ponytail and fell around his
exotic face. “This is a bad idea—even if Chloe agreed to it.”

“Always the party pooper, Mingan,” Lamia told
him.

“I thought you would stand by me on this,
Lamia,” Tristan said.

“Could someone explain what’s happening?” I
asked them. Something told me feeling lost in their conversations
was normal with them.

“Tristan hasn’t been completely honest with
you,” Vincent said. I noticed a smudge of blood in the corner of
his mouth. “Sorry,” he wiped it with the back of his hand after
realizing where I was looking. “We don’t use napkins when
hunting.”

“Yeah, you should’ve seen this deer we found,
Tristan,” Elan said. “It was really fleshy and—” He stopped when he
saw my disgusted grimace. “Sorry.” He lowered his eyes.

“As Vince was saying,” Lamia continued with a
roll of her violet eyes. “Tristan forgot to tell you something
really important about him—and no,” She looked at Tristan. “I don’t
stand by you on keeping the whole truth from her. She deserves it.”
She winked at me.

Though I should’ve been angry at Tristan for
not entirely keeping his promise, I couldn’t shake off a thought
from my head. “How do you know he’s keeping something from me? I
heard you leaving. So…how did you…I mean, you couldn’t have
listened to our conversation.”

“They shouldn’t have listened to our
conversation,” Tristan said sharply.

“We didn’t at first,” Vincent said and threw
himself on the couch. “The plan was to go to Elan and Mingan’s crib
but, you know, my stomach growled and that’s something we can’t
ignore. So we decided to do a little hunting. I found a bear with
Lamia a few miles from here. But Elan and Mingan decided to go for
a deer instead and wasted a fine meal.”

“Fine by your standards," Elan said as he
bent to pick up the deer horn that Tristan had thrown across the
floor before. "Deer meat is way tender and juicier."

“Whatever,” Vincent shrugged lazily. “The
point is that we weren’t that far off from here. Just a couple of
miles. And, well, not catching your conversation was pretty
difficult.”

“Oh, stop it.” Lamia sat down in the couch,
next to Vincent. “We were curious, okay? A human finding out about
this”—she widened her eyes, as if to emphasize how rare this
situation was—“is not something that happens every day.”

“But, you were miles away…How could you hear
us?” I asked. Did they have one of those baby monitors around here
or something like that? Still, at that distance, there would’ve
been lots of static. No, scratch that. There would’ve been plain
static.

“Wolf powers, remember?” Vincent explained,
pointing his finger at himself.

“Which includes excellent hearing,” Elan
added. He placed the horn in the middle of the coffee table and
sprawled on the long side of the couch.

Of course
. They had enhanced
senses—including smell. I pulled my hoodie tighter against me,
suddenly hyper-aware of the dry sweat coating my skin. I would’ve
killed for a shower in that moment.

“So,” Vincent prompted, stretching out his
arm across the backrest, behind Lamia’s neck. “When are you going
to tell her about your mom, Tris? About what she really was?”

Vincent and Tristan didn’t have the same
mother?

Tristan’s jaw tightened furiously.

“Come on, Tristan,” Lamia said. “You started
this, now end it properly.”

“Wasn’t she a Shifter?” I said, trying to
sound casual.

Tristan softened his expression and looked at
me. “No.”

Then what? A Vampire? A Mermaid? A Fairy? An
Elf? An…Alien?

“An undine.” He sighed, his eyes tightening.
“She was an undine.”

I recalled the explanation he’d given me on
Elementals. “Like a…water nymph?” I said, arching my eyebrows.

He nodded.

“Oh,” I whispered, and behind the hushed
sound, a shocking insight. All those chiseled features, velvet
voice, entrancing eyes, magnetic scent and silky skin—they all came
from her side. The exceptional beauty wasn’t just “natural
selection through generations.” It was the inheritance of her
mother’s attributes, a nymph, one of the most beautiful and
mesmeric creatures in nature. And they were real. Tristan was the
ramification of this pristine beauty. “If your mother was a
nymph…what does it make you, exactly?”

He stared, serious. “A hybrid.”

I frowned. “Like my car?”

The hint of a smile touched his lips. “No,
more like the wolfdog you met weeks ago.” A flashback of his whole
canid-hybrid explanation flew into my mind. “I'm the combination of
both, a Shifter and an undine.”

One of them is different, though. He’s not
like the other ones
, the old lady’s words echoed in my head.
How different was he? Was his enchanting beauty the only facet he’d
inherited from his mother? “Does that make you really different
from the others?”

He hid his eyes from mine. “Remember when I
told you about the water spirit never answering to Melia’s summon?”
he asked.

“Yes.”

“Imagine the outcome if that would've
happened.”

Tristan’s words fluttered in my memories.
If the water spirit would’ve answered, he would’ve been
unstoppable
, he’d said. He would’ve had the power to control
water. The four elements!

My eyes widened. “How powerful are you?”

He lifted his head and fixed his eyes on
mine. “I'm the only one of my kind. I don’t know exactly what my
skills are. I still haven’t explored all of them. And I’d rather
stay the way I'm right now.”

“Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but I don’t get
that crap,” Vincent suddenly said. “If I were you I would've
explored all my abilities a long time ago, Tris. You’re wasting
them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,
Vince,” Lamia snorted, waving her sleek purple hair in the air as
she shook her head. “It’s easier said than done.”

“Guys,” Elan prompted. “Why don’t we just let
Tristan tell Kalista about the outage issue?”

“What?” I asked. Was there even more?

“You’re an outage girl,” Mingan said,
exasperated, as if he couldn’t wait to get done with all of
this.

“An outage girl?” Again, huh?

He took a step forward and looked at me. “I
have this kind of…ability to sense people’s feelings, and even
thoughts sometimes. Not in its entirety, but small parts of it,
like some words with a familiar resonance that give me a general
idea of the thought itself.”

I was confused. Polynomial and quadratic
functions were nothing next to his words.

He sighed. “Okay. Water crystals,” he said to
himself as if he was trying to find an easier way to make it clear.
“At the end of the talk, Mr. Harder said something about a device
that could measure the resonance of a substance. The Magnetic
Resonance Analyzer. Do you remember that?”

I nodded.

“Well, we could say that I'm more or less the
human version of that device. I can feel someone’s thought by the
resonance of its words in their body, their energy. Each word has a
specific sound wave that with time I’ve learned to distinguish. But
my resonate-lexis is not vast, so I receive just bits of the
thought. It’s like figuring out a word puzzle to formulate the
general idea.” He paused. “You’re one of the people who I can’t
sense.”

Holy crap
, I thought. If he hadn’t
said I was one of the exceptions to this—which I had no clue why,
but liked it very much—I would’ve been blazing red all over.

“How can you feel the resonance of words in a
body?” I frowned.

He pressed his lips, as if turning this over
in his mind. “Water is the mirror of the mind, and most of the
human body is composed by water…so when someone is thinking about
something, the words emitted by that particular thought resonate on
the body water, releasing different sound waves that I can pick up.
It’s like catching acoustic resonance and decoding it,” he said,
raising his dark eyebrows. “Still, feelings are a lot easier to
sense because the range is not as vast as a dictionary. They tend
to be stronger, so it’s simpler.”

“And undines can do this as well?” I
wondered.

“Yes. It’s because of the strong relation we
have with water. We don’t need a cold walk-in chamber and a
microscope to see water crystals. We can feel water’s condition
just by standing next to it or being in it.”

I couldn’t stop being amazed by this. It
sounded so chimerical, like a fantasy or a dream. “Why am I one of
the exceptions to this ability?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“You must’ve been born on a vernal or
autumnal equinox,” he said. Indeed, I was born on the twentieth day
of March—the day the vernal equinox had occurred that year.

“One of the effects of equinoctial periods is
the temporary disruption of reception circuits, because of the
Sun’s immense power and broad radiation. They call it “Sun Outage”
and normally the duration can range from a few minutes to an
hour—in regular reception circuits. Of course, I'm not included in
that group, so it doesn’t work like that for me. In my case, the
disruption is not partial, it’s complete.”

Outage girl
. I could see the meaning
now.

“Why can’t you sense outage people?” I asked,
puzzled. It wasn’t like I was the sun itself.