I could feel her heart beating against my chest. She fit under my shoulder perfectly.
“Because I don’t want to get hurt.” She was scared, but not of Dark Casters or mutant Incubuses or golden eyes. She was afraid of something simpler but equally dangerous. Smaller but infinitely more powerful.
I pulled her closer. “Me neither.” Because I was afraid of it, too.
We didn’t say anything else. I held her close, and I thought about all the ways a person could get hurt. The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It’s hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening up felt about as wrong as stripping naked in church.
Hearts will go and Stars will follow, One is broken, One is hollow.
That had been our song, Lena’s and mine. And I had been broken. Did that mean I had to stay hollow? Or was there something different out there for me? Maybe a whole new song?
Some Pink Floyd, for a change? Hollow laughter in marble halls.
I smiled in the darkness, listening to the rhythmic sound of her breathing until it softened into sleep. I was exhausted. Even though we were back in the Mortal world, it still felt as if I was part of the Caster world, and Gatlin was unbelievably far away. I couldn’t make sense of how I had gotten to this place any more than I could measure the miles I had come or the distance I still had to go.
I drifted into oblivion not knowing what I would do when I got there.
6.19
Bonaventure
I was running, being chased. Scrambling over hedges and skidding across empty streets and backyards. The one constant was the adrenaline. There was no stopping.
Then I saw the Harley, driving straight at me, the lights getting closer and closer. They weren’t yellow but green, flashing in my eyes so bright I had to cover my face with my hands.…
I woke up. All I could see was green, flashing on and off.
I didn’t know where I was, until I realized the green glow was coming from the Arclight, now lit up like the Fourth of July. It was on the mattress, where it must have rolled out of my pocket. Only the mattress looked different, and the light was flashing out of control.
I remembered slowly—the stars, the Tunnels, the attic, the guest room. Then I realized why the mattress looked different.
Liv was gone.
It didn’t take long to figure out where Liv was. “Do you ever sleep?”
“Not as much as you do, apparently.” As usual, Liv didn’t look up from her telescope, though this one was aluminum and much smaller than the one she kept on Marian’s porch.
I sat down next to her on the back step. The yard was as calm as my aunt herself, a quiet patch of green spreading underneath a broad magnolia tree. “What are you doing up?”
“I got a wake-up call.” I tried to sound casual, instead of how I actually felt. Awkward. I motioned at the guest room window on the second floor. Even from down here, you could see pulsing green light shining through the glass panes.
“Strange. I suppose I got one as well. Take a look through the celestron.” She handed me the miniature scope. It looked like a flashlight except for the large lens fitted to one end.
Our hands touched as I took it. Not so much as a shock.
“Did you make this, too?”
She smiled. “Professor Ashcroft gave it to me. Now stop talking and look. There.” She pointed right over the magnolia, which to my Mortal eye looked like a dark expanse of starless sky.
I fitted the scope to my eye. Now the sky over the tree was streaked with light, a kind of ghostly aura trailing toward the ground not far from us. “What is that, a falling star? Do falling stars leave trails like that?”
“It might. If it was a falling star.”
“How do you know it’s not?”
She tapped the scope. “It might be falling, but it’s a Caster star falling in the Caster sky, remember? Otherwise we could see it without the scope.”
“Is that what your crazy watch is saying?”