so far, and I knew that bothered her. And everything else that I struggled and dealt with, she didn’t know.
But she was still proud of me, and I didn’t want to do anything to let her down.
When we arrived back home, Daemon stopped over for a little while and it took everything in me to keep Mom away from the photo albums before she went to grab a few hours of sleep, leaving Daemon and me to our own devices, which would sound like a really fun thing, but I was strung too tightly as the hours crept by.
Once I’d changed into the black sweats, Daemon asked for the opal. I handed it over.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, sitting across from me on my bed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin, white string. “Instead of keeping it in your pocket, I thought I could make a necklace out of it.”
“Oh. Good idea.”
I watched him wrap the chord around the piece of opal, adjusting it so there was enough string left on either side to fit comfortably around my neck. I sat still why he tied it and slipped the stone under my shirt. It rested slightly above the piece of obsidian I wore.
“Thank you,” I said, even though I still thought we should’ve risked shattering it.
He grinned. “I think we should skip out of lunch tomorrow and go to the movies.”
“Huh?”
“Tomorrow—I think we should make it a half day.”
Making plans to skip afternoon classes tomorrow wasn’t on my priorities list and I was about to point that out when I realized what he was doing. Distracting me from the possibility there might not be a tomorrow that I wanted to see, keeping things normal and, in a way, hopeful.
I lifted my lashes and our eyes held. The green hue of his burned extraordinarily bright and then turned white as I rose to my knees, cupped his face, and kissed him—really kissed him like he was the very air I was thirsting for.
“What was that for?” he asked when I sat back. “Not that I’m complaining.”
I shrugged. “Just because. And to answer your question, I think we should definitely skip and play truant for the day.”
Daemon moved so fast that one second he was sitting and the next he was over me, his arms like bands of steel on either side of my head and I was on my back, staring up at him.
“Did I tell you I have a soft spot for bad girls?” he murmured. His form blurred at the edges, a soft white as if someone had taken a paintbrush and smudged an outline around him. A lock of hair fell forward, into those astonishing diamond-like eyes.
I couldn’t find my breath. “Truancy does it for you?”
When he lowered his body, it thrummed with a low charge and where our bodies met, sparks flew. “
“Always?” I whispered.
His lips grazed mine. “Always.”
…
Daemon left sometime later to meet up with Matthew and Dawson. The three of them wanted to run through things again, and Matthew, being the anal-retentive planner at heart, wanted to take a few more shots at the onyx.
I stayed back, hovering around my mom like a small child as she got ready. Feeling exceptionally needy, I even followed her outside and watched her back out of the driveway in her Prius.
Alone, my gaze went to the flowerbed skirting the porch. The faded mulch needed replacing and it could use a good weeding.
Stepping off the porch, I went to the small rose bushes and started pulling off the dead petals. I’d heard once that it could help the flowers bloom again. Wasn’t sure if that was correct or not, but the monotony of carefully picking out the leaves eased my nerves.
Tomorrow, Daemon and I would skip out at lunch.
Next weekend, I would convince my mom I needed to do an overhaul on the flowerbed.
At the beginning of June, I would graduate.
Sometime that month, I would get serious about filling out the paperwork for University of Colorado and I would drop that bomb on my mom.
In July, I would spend every day with Daemon swimming in the lake and getting a Jersey Shore tan.
By the end of summer, things would be normal between Dee and me.
And come fall, I’d move on from all of this. Things wouldn’t ever be mundane. I wasn’t fully human anymore. My boyfriend—the guy I loved—was an alien. And there may become a point where, like Dawson and Blake, Daemon and I would have to disappear.
But there was going to be a tomorrow, a next week, month, summer, and fall.
“Only you would be out gardening right now.”
I whipped around at the sound of Blake’s voice. He leaned against my car, dressed in all black, ready for tonight.
This was the first time since our confrontation that Blake had come around me while I was alone, and the alien part of me responded. That roller-coaster feeling was swelling inside me. Static pricked along my skin.
I held my ground. “What do you want, Blake?”
He laughed softly as his gaze fell to the ground. “We’re leaving soon, right? I’m just a little early.”
And I was just a little bit of a book nerd. Yeah, right.
Brushing the dirt off my fingers, I watched him wryly. “How did you get here?”
“Parked at the end of the road at the empty house.” He gestured with his chin. “The last time I parked here, I’m pretty sure someone melted the paint on the hood of my truck.”
Sounded like Dee and her microwave hands. I crossed my arms. “Dee and Andrew are next door,” I felt the need to point out.
“I know.” He pulled a hand out, ran it through his spikey hair. “You looked really good at prom.”
Unease unfurled in my belly. “Yeah, I saw you. Did you come alone?”
He nodded. “I was there only for a few minutes. Never did the high school dance thing. Kind of disappointing.”
I said nothing.
Blake dropped his hand. “You worried about tonight?”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“Smart girl,” he said, and smiled a little. It was more of a grimace than anything. “No one that I know of has infiltrated one of their facilities before or even gotten as far as we did last time. No Luxen or hybrid, and we can’t be the first to attempt it. I bet there’re a dozen Dawsons and Beths, Blakes and Chrises.”
Muscles tightened in my neck and shoulders. “If this is supposed to be a pep talk, you completely fail at it.”
Blake laughed.
“I don’t mean it that way. Just that if we do this, we’re the strongest, you know. The best out of their hybrids and out of the Luxen.”
Funny or maybe just ironic, I thought, that what Daedalus wanted so badly was the only ones who could go up against them.
I reached into my pocket, feeling the warm, smooth edges of the opal. “Then we’re just awesome, I guess.”
Another pained smile and then Blake said, “That’s what I’m counting on.”
…
We were all dressed like a ragtag group of reject ninjas. My skin sweated under the long-sleeved black thermal. The idea was that the less skin exposed, the less the onyx impacted us.
Didn’t really pan out that way last time, but we weren’t taking any chances tonight.
The opal was burning a hole in my pocket.
Driving to the mountains of Virginia was a quiet affair. This time around, even Blake was silent. Dawson was a ball of energy beside him. Once, luckily not when cars surrounded us, he slipped into his true form, nearly
