I can read nothing in his eyes. The dark centers are flat, a motionless black as he gazes at me. Then his voice rolls across the air, anything but flat. The rough rumble puckers my skin to gooseflesh. “We’ll talk later,” he says, a promise.
I smile innocently and hold my breath until he walks away, grateful that I’ve avoided him and any more unanswerable questions. For now anyway.
“What’s up with that?” Catherine’s drawl comforts as she leans sideways into me. Her shoulder brushes mine.
I open a book. “Nothing.”
Lowering my gaze, I pretend to read. Pretend not to care that he wants to talk to me, that we sat together in his car last Friday and kissed so intensely that I began to manifest. That he touched my leg, cared for my wound. That he protected me from his cousin in that nightmarish room where I kissed him again.
I can forget him. Turn off everything I’m feeling. I can. I
After dinner, I find Mom in her room, kneeling beside her bed, a steel lockbox before her. A car chase blasts on the television in the living room.
From outside the doorway, I watch her unlock the box and open it. Even from where I stand, I
Unable to stop, I step closer, lean forward, drawn to the beguiling voices, the soft, crooning melody of my name.
To anyone else, gems are cold, lifeless. Noiseless. Only draki can hear their voices, feel their energy. They are our fuel. Our life force.
I’ve searched Mom’s room for the gems since we moved in. With no luck. Eager for anything other than Will that might fortify me and keep my draki going.
Apparently, she hid the lockbox well. Mom lifts a stone in her hand. A piece of amber that barely fits in the pocket of her palm. She brushes her fingers over it. The gesture is almost loving, which seems odd. Wrong coming from her because she shouldn’t be affected.
A glow radiates from the box. Colors the air in shades of red, gold, and green. Calling my draki. These gems are connected to me, to my blood, the blood of all my draki family, as far back as my dragon forefathers.
I sigh, air tremoring from my lips. Mom hears me and looks over her shoulder, snapping the lid shut at the same time.
No sense hiding anymore. I step inside the room. “What are you doing?”
With a tight expression, she locks the box. Slips the key in her pocket. I watch as she rises to her feet and slides open the door to her closet. My heart thumps with need. I stare after the box hungrily as she puts it on the top shelf of her closet, glancing back slyly. And I know instantly. It won’t be there when I look later.
“Nothing,” she replies, removing her work clothes from the closet. “Just getting ready for work.”
She’s going to sell a stone.
My throat tightens, aches with this certainty. Even though I suggested she sell a gem before — as a way for the pride to track us down — I can’t bear the thought now.
“You can’t do it,” I say, watching as she removes her shirt and lifts her sequined halter top off the hanger.
She doesn’t even bother with denial. “We need the money, Jacinda.”
“Those gems are a part of us.”
Her lips pull tight as she dresses. “Not anymore.”
I try a different approach, one that will affect her. “The pride will find us. Track us down. They’ll know the minute—”
“I’m not going to sell them here.”
“Where then?”
She turns to her dresser mirror. Applies lipstick that looks raw and bleeding against her pale face. “I’m going to ask for a few days off. I’ll sell them someplace else. Far from here. We’ll be safe.”
Mom always has the answers, only never the ones I want.
I knot my hands together, trying to still their shaking. “You. Can’t.”
She looks at me then. Faces me with disappointment in her eyes. “Can’t you understand, Jacinda? This is the right thing to do.”
Her steady calm is exasperating…makes me feel even more alone. Sad.
But I’m not. I don’t. I can’t ever be that daughter no matter how hard I try. Not as long as she’s trying to kill a part of my soul.
17
The next evening, Mom doesn’t bring up selling a gem again, and neither do I. Silly, but I feel like maybe not mentioning it will help her forget that she wants to sell one of them.
While she and Tamra wait on our pizza at Chubby’s, reputedly the best pizzeria in Chaparral, I walk three doors down to pick out a movie for the night. Preferably a comedy. Anything to distract me.
It happens on the way back.
Movie in hand, I’m crossing the mouth of the alley right before Chubby’s when I’m yanked off my feet and dragged inside the narrow enclosure, hauled between twin walls of concrete, the odor of the nearby Dumpster ripe in my nostrils.
I fight, hissing and spitting steam, fire eating up my windpipe. Twisting my head, I try to spin around and face my attacker, turn him into a crackling pile of bones and ash.
“Stop!”
I recognize the smoky voice instantly and feel no real surprise. In the back of my mind, I knew if the pride ever tracked me down, found me…he would be the one leading the charge.
He gives me a little shake. “Are you done? I’m not going to turn you around until you promise not to incinerate me.”
I laugh brokenly. “Not sure I can promise you that.”
After a long moment, the large hands on my shoulders relax. I stagger free and spin around.
“Hello, Jacinda,” he says like our meeting here is the most natural thing in the world.
My eyes are slower to process, to accept, what I already know. I stare up at him. The immensity of him, a looming wall. Well over six feet. I forgot about his size. His sheer presence. Somehow, with time and distance, here in the human world, he had shrunk in my mind. Now I get all over again why he’s the leading onyx of my pride. Second only to his father.
“How’d you find us, Cassian?”
He cocks his head. Purply black strands stroke his shoulders. “Did you think I wouldn’t?” he asks.
“I don’t know why you had to try.”
“Don’t you?”
“Why couldn’t you just forget—”
“I can’t do that.”
“Because your daddy said so,” I hiss, thinking of his father.
Charcoal black flashes beneath the olive hue of Cassian’s skin, his draki flesh ready to burst free. “I’m not here for my father
As his purple-black eyes bore into me, I feel this truth. Know what he’s really saying.
I cock my head. “News flash, Cassian. I’m not looking to go home.” At least not like this. Not with him dragging me back.
