Gideon scrambled backward on his hands.
“You know me,” Shane said, herding him, keeping him cornered. “You’ve always known. You hide it away, you deny it. But you have felt it. You have tasted its call. The fury that feeds you. The thirst for the kill that hums in your blood. You understand who you are. This Kin-child lied to you. She speaks in untruths. She draws fictions out of air. She is not your friend. She is not your kind.”
“RUN!”
“Do you know what her kind did? What her Kin did to the girl you loved? They opened her veins. They gave her to the earth and let it gorge. I will gift you something in return. I’m going to give you vengeance. I am going to give you back your wrath.”
I struggled to my feet. Unthinking, uncaring, I hurled myself toward them.
Shane caught me one-handed, lifting me from the ground. “Your blood is not required, Kin-child.”
He tossed me backward. I hit the floor hard.
I rolled, trying to pull myself up onto my hands and failing. My arms buckled. My hands wouldn’t hold me. Something sharp sliced into my palm. I raised my head, and in the darkness of the basement, across the distance of the room, my eyes met Gideon’s. Our gazes locked.
Everything stilled. For a moment, there was no sound, no sense, no feel of the floor beneath me. I no longer saw Shane’s blood-crusted jeans or his bare feet. I saw only Gideon. In reality, it measured no more than a heartbeat, a blink, but in that moment, time was elastic. It drew us backward, across years, across memory, into a long ago morning and a sunny classroom that smelled of licorice and crayons. We were eight years old, and I was making my slow way through the door, pausing as I stepped. Gideon was there at his desk, turning to face me. I saw the light that clung to him, that beautiful, burning light, clean and shining. He smiled. I smiled. And I knew, right then.
We’re connected, I thought now. We are bound. By the blood of my father, and by the light of the Astral Circle, blazing so brightly around him. A thread drawn between us. And we would stay there, in that single stopped second. The rest of the world would go on, but we would remain. Nothing would touch us. Nothing would change.
But the heartbeat passed. Time sped forward once again. Gideon sucked in a breath. I saw a flash of understanding in his eyes, truth cutting through the fiction. He knew what he was. Somewhere inside, he’d always known. And he knew that I lied. I wanted to plead, to apologize, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words. Darkness swelled across my vision. My thoughts slipped away.
The last sound I heard was Gideon screaming.
My mind slid backward into memory. Consciousness flickered and faded; I heard voices, someone speak my name. I felt arms lift me, a warm touch on my face. But I resisted. I retreated into sleep—or perhaps into Knowing. It wasn’t like a dream, drifting from thought to thought or scene to scene. It wasn’t abstract or ambiguous. Behind my eyes, images collected and took shape: thick grass stretching in every direction; insects humming in the cool, clean air; the rise of pines in the distance.
Above, the last edge of light was retreating from the night sky. I recognized the setting—the dirt road trailing off out of sight, Gram’s rusty blue truck parked in the gravel. It was our old house up north, where I’d spent the first eight years of my life in the sleepy quiet of the country. It was late summer, and the flowers that crept up toward the porch were beginning to droop and die. There was Gram, seated beside me on the porch swing. I was little, maybe six years old, my feet bare and dirty as I pulled them up onto the swing and tucked myself against Gram. She hummed a tune, stroking my hair idly. I listened to the rise and fall of the notes and the creak of our swing as it swayed.
We were watching the stars come out. Counting them, giving each a name—this one Jacky, for my grandfather, that one Lady, after our greyhound. They had names already, I knew, real names, but Gram asked why that should matter to us. The stars didn’t care. They did not belong to Earth. Some were distant suns, shining for distant planets. They were the beacons of all the cosmos, she said—pinpricks of light in the darkness, where all hope begins. And on our porch, we would name them what we wished.
“Listen, sweeting,” Gram said, her voice soft. “I’m going to tell you a secret.”
It wasn’t a secret she told me, but a story.
She had told me it before. It was about my grandfather, who had died before I was born. “I wasn’t supposed to marry Jacky,” she confided, lifting her hand to tuck a stray curl of hair behind my ear. “I was engaged to his brother, George.”
I knew the details already. A wedding had been planned, and then delayed. Gram’s white dress had been left in the closet to gather dust. Then George had been killed overseas, and for two years Gram had withdrawn into herself, barely eating, barely speaking. The world outside her window had no color, she told me; food had no taste. The turn of seasons didn’t touch her. Chords strung together had no music in them.
“Jacky,” she said. “He was my lodestar. The flame that guided me home. That’s what you do when you’re lost, sweeting. You just look for the flame.”
“But he died,” I said.
Gram only smiled. “He is in the earth now, but I’m never alone. Even when we die, we’re still a part of the people who carry us. I keep him here”—she touched her heart—“and there.” She raised her arm, pointing to the horizon. I lifted my eyes to follow the motion.
But when I looked at the sky once more, all the stars were red.
I woke in my own room, in my own bed, warm blankets tucked up to my chin. Late afternoon light streamed in around me. My window was open, letting in the sound of birds, the smell of the lawn. Everything seemed quiet and peaceful. As though nothing had occurred. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend nothing had.
Instead, I tried to move. My head swam. Groggy and disoriented, I groped toward the wall, pressing my hand flat against it until my vision ceased its spinning. Then, carefully, I climbed up out of the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I sat there a moment, evaluating. My shoulder ached. There was dirt on my shorts and tank top, a thin smear of blood on my arm. After taking a steadying breath, I stood and padded toward the door.
Downstairs, there were voices.
I made my way slowly, clutching at the railing. The stairs creaked as I stepped, and the voices went silent. I heard footsteps. My mother appeared, peeking her head out from the living room. Her mouth slanted downward.
“You shouldn’t be up yet,” she said.
“I need to know what happened.”
“You may need to be the one to answer that,” she said. She helped me down the last few stairs, taking hold of my arm and guiding me toward the living room. Mr. Alvarez stood inside, near the mantel. He glanced toward the door, frowning, when I entered. Leon was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, his expression blank. He didn’t look at me.
Mom settled me on the couch, then turned to Mr. Alvarez. “I would prefer to delay this until she’s feeling better, but it seems my daughter has other ideas.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. My voice squeaked out of me, sounding strange to my ears. I curled my hands, then felt a sharp pain. There was a cut across one palm, jagged and beginning to scab over. “How did I get home?”
“How do you think?” Leon said.
Mom’s brow furrowed. “You don’t remember? You seemed awake when I brought you up to bed.”
“No. I just remember passing out. And…red stars. A sky the color of blood. Dreaming.”
“I was in class,” Leon said. “It took me a minute to get out of sight to teleport. He was already gone when I found you.”