“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. See, right there in black and white.”
“Thank you for the Sunday school lesson,” I say. “Don’t you find it a little silly that you’re quoting the Bible to somebody like me, who receives divine instructions straight from the source? Tucker, come on, you know it’s more complicated than that.”
“No, it’s not,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be. What we have, that’s divine. It’s beautiful and good and right. I feel it….” He presses his hand to his chest, over his heart. “I feel it all the time. You’re in here, part of me. You’re what I go to bed thinking about and what I wake up to in the morning.”
The tears start to slip down my face. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and crosses the room toward me, but I stumble back.
“Tuck. I can’t,” I breathe.
“I like it when you call me Tuck,” he says, smiling.
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Sudden understanding dawns in his eyes. “That’s what this breaking-up business was all about for you, wasn’t it? You thought I was going to get hurt. You pushed me away to protect me. You’re still pushing.” He shakes his head. “Losing you, that’s the worst kind of hurt there is.”
He reaches out and touches a strand of my hair, tucks it behind my ear, then backs off a little, tries a different approach. “Hey. How about this? You’re home for a couple more days, right? I’m home, as usual.” I see the news of his college situation rise up in his mind, but for some reason he doesn’t tell me about it. “Let’s go fishing. Let’s climb a mountain. Let’s try again.”
I’ve never wanted anything so much.
He sees the uncertainty on my face. “I should have fought for you, Clara, even if I would have had to fight you to fight for you. I should never have let you go.”
I close my eyes. I know that any minute now he’s going to kiss me, and my resistance is going to melt away completely.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper. And then, out of self-protection more than anything else, I bring the glory. I don’t warn him or anything. I don’t damp it down. I bring it. The room fills with light.
“This is what I am,” I say, my hair ablaze around my head.
He squints at me. His jaw juts out a little in pure stubbornness. He stands his ground.
“I know,” he says.
I take a step toward him, close the space between us, put my glowing hand against his ashen cheek. He starts to tremble. “This is what I am,” I say again, and my wings are out now.
His knees wobble, but he fights it. He puts his hand at my waist, turns me, pulls me closer, which surprises me.
“I can accept that,” he whispers, and holds his breath, and leans in to kiss me.
His lips brush mine for an instant, and an emotion like victory tears through him, but then he pulls away and glances toward the front door. Groans.
Christian is standing in the doorway.
“Wow,” Tucker says, trying to grin. “You really know how to cramp a guy’s style.”
His legs give out. He falls to his knees.
My light blinks off.
Christian’s clutching a DVD copy of Zombieland in one hand, the other hand clenched into a fist at his side. His expression is completely shut down.
“I guess I’ll come back later,” he says. “Or not.”
Tucker’s still catching his breath on the floor.
I follow Christian to the door. “He just came over. I didn’t mean for you to—”
“See that?” he finishes for me. “Great. Thanks for trying to spare my feelings.”
“I was trying to prove a point to him.”
“Right,” he says. “Well, let me know how that turns out.”
He turns toward the door, then stops, the muscles in his back tensing. He’s about to say something really harsh, I think, something he won’t be able to take back.
“Don’t,” I say.
Dizziness crashes over me. I hear a strange whooshing sound, like wind in my ears, accompanied by the distinct smell of smoke. Christian turns, his face all scrunched up like he’s confused by what he sees in my head. He looks suddenly worried.
That’s when I pass out.
The black room is filling up with smoke.
I jolt into future Clara in the exact instant that the darkness explodes into light, and in that moment I understand: This light’s not glory. It’s fire. A fireball streaks over my shoulder and strikes the wall somewhere off to the side, behind me. Then Christian screams, “Get down!” and I drop just in time for him to literally leap over my body, his glory sword out and bright and deadly, blinding me. Everything’s a jumble of black-and-white flashing: Christian and the figures circling him, the swift movement of his blade against the dark. I scramble backward until my back hits something solid, glance over my shoulder to see what’s happening with the fire.
The flames lick up the side of the room, igniting the velvet curtains like tissue paper. This place is going to be an inferno in about five minutes. My heart’s hammering, but I swallow and push myself to my knees, then to my feet. I have to help Christian. I have to fight.
No, he says in my mind. You’ve got to find him. Go.
The high-pitched noise comes again, thin and reedy, frightened. Smoke chokes me, the air in here close and hot and heavy in my lungs, but inexplicably I turn away from Christian and what I think must be the exit and stumble toward the fire, coughing, my eyes watering.
I hit the edge of something hard and wooden right at chest level, hard enough to knock the wind out of me if I had any wind in me to begin with. I figure out what the barrier is at the same time that my eyes finally decide to adjust.
It’s a stage.
I look around wildly to confirm what I already know, but it’s so crazy obvious I can’t believe I never figured this out before. It all falls neatly into place: the slanted floor of the auditorium, the ghosts of white tablecloths along the front, the rows of metal-backed seats. The velvet curtains and the smell of sawdust and paint.
We’re in the Pink Garter.
And in that instant, I figure out what the noise is.
It’s a baby crying.
“Clara!”
I open my eyes. Somehow I ended up on my living room floor, and I don’t quite know how. Two sets of eyes are staring down at me, one blue and one green, both insanely worried.
“What happened?” Tucker asks.
“It was the black room,” Christian says, not a question.
“It was the Garter.” I struggle to sit up. “I need my phone. Where’s my phone?”
Tucker finds it on the coffee table and brings it to me, while Christian helps me over to the couch. I still feel out of breath.
“There’s going to be a fire,” I tell Christian.
Tucker makes a disbelieving noise. “Oh, great.”
I dial Angela’s number. It rings and rings, and each second that ticks by where she doesn’t pick up makes the sense of dread in my stomach grow stronger. But then, finally, there’s a click and a faint hello on the other end.
“Angela!” I say.
“Clara?” She sounds like she’s been sleeping.
“I just had my vision again, and the black room is the Garter, Angela, and the noise I hear—do you remember me telling you?—that noise, which is what gives us away, it’s a baby. It’s got to be Webster. You need to get out. Now.”
“Now?” she says, still half-awake. “It’s nine o’clock at night. I just got Web to sleep.”
“Ange, they’re coming.” I can’t help the frantic squeak in my voice.
“Okay, slow down, C,” Angela says. “Who’s coming?”
“I don’t know. Black Wings.”
“Do they know about Web?” she asks, starting to comprehend some of what I’m saying. “Are they coming for him? How would they know?”
“I don’t know,” I say again.
“Well, what do you know?”
“I know something terrible is going to happen there. You have to leave.”
“And go where?” she asks, still not fully getting it. “No. I can’t go anywhere tonight.”