Fluorescence: The Complete Tetralogy (64 page)

“It… is?” He turned his hand over again and squinted. Then he reached his other hand across to touch his wrist. “I don’t… feel anything.”

“I can see it on you. You can hardly feel them. Trust me, it’s there.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged and continued to stare at his hand.

“Here, Alice,” I said, turning toward her and holding out one of the orbs. She lifted her cupped hands up to meet mine and I released it into them. Like the first, this one also erupted into a cloud of colorful, metallic dust. It coiled around and took its shape on her petite wrist.

“Is it… on me?” Alice asked, lifting her hand to eye level.

“Yes. Do you want to see it?” I
replied. Alice was the only person I hadn’t shared my vision with yet, and
considering how mildly Taylor reacted to the brief spell of it I had first given him, I was convinced I could lend it gently to Alice, as well.

“No, Alice,” Brian advised, raising his voice a little. “It… hurts.”

“She’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly. “I’ll be gentle, I swear.”

Brian looked uneasy even as Alice seemed to perk up.

“Can you show me?” she asked in an awed, child-like voice.

“Yes.” I tucked the last orb away into a pocket in my jeans and then lifted both of my open hands out toward the sides of Alice’s head. I noticed Brian tense up as I briefly pressed my fingertips against Alice’s temples. She closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as light penetrated her skin, making her hairline glow momentarily with a subtle pink hue.

“Look.” I took my hands away from her head.

“Oh my God!”
Her eyes grew wide. “Oh my God!” She lifted her wrist up and turned it over, staring wide-eyed at the colorful light dancing around her skin. “It’s
… it’s beautiful!” She swerved around. “Brian, you have to see this! It’s so beautiful. It’s like… fairy dust or… magic or… Oh. Ow.” She cringed and cupped her hand against her forehead. “Ugh.”

The headache had started already.

“Yeah,” Brian interrupted, putting his hand on Alice’s shoulder. “That’s the not so beautiful part.” Then he lifted his glowing blue hand toward her face and brushed his fingertips across her forehead.

“Oh my God, wow, though!” Alice continued, grinning from ear to ear now as she looked up into Brian’s eyes and then mine. “Is that what you see all the time?”

“Kind of. I mean, the stuff in you guys isn’t the same, but that’s sort of what the Prism look like to me.”

“I’d love to see them, too, someday,” she added, sighing. “They must be so… breathtaking.”

“Yeah. You can’t, though.” I shrugged. “They told me it would cause irreversible damage of some kind if one of you guys tried to look at them.”

“Oh…”

“Let’s scratch charades with the Prism off our to-do list then, shall we?” Brian said with a smirk.

His upbeat, slightly sarcastic tone made me smile.

Chapter
23

I
propped my back up against the frigid concrete wall and pulled Brian’s jacket over my knees. He’d lent it to me to help stave off the cold that kept creeping up through the floors of the
garage. It was nastier outside in the open though, and the
bitterly cold wind gust whistled through the floors, taunting us even while we stayed huddled up in the safety of an enclosed maintenance room.

“I… wonder if my mom’s okay,” Alice murmured, leaning her head on Brian’s shoulder
. The two of them sat with their backs pressed to the wall across from me.
He reached for one of her hands and pulled it into his lap.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about Peter and everyone else who may be in danger.”

“And my parents, too,” I added, almost whispering.

We all sat there with our heads hung low, like little lost a
nimals, forced to stay wherever we could find shelter. Brian had told me money was getting tight, and that they were
trying to stretch it as far as they could, even if that meant staying in less conventional places for a night or two.

“
I miss Sam,” Alice uttered in a mousey voice. Brian wrapped
his arm around her and pulled her in close. I watched them cuddle and felt my heart sink.

I didn’t know Sam very well. She was Alice’s best friend and the first person to know about her fluorescence.

“We all miss someone,” I said, folding my hands together under Brian’s
jacket to keep warm and looking away from them.

“What about David?” Alice asked.

“What?” I looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Do you… miss him?”

I twiddled my fingers. “Why would I miss him?” The question made me uncomfortable.

“I dunno,” she said, shrugging and looking off to the side.
“He seemed really worried about you when you got hurt in that building. I thought maybe you liked him.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Just beca
use we stayed in the same room for a couple of days doesn’t mean we hooked up.”
I narrowed my eyes at her to make the lie seem more legit. The truth was none of her business.

“I didn’t mean that.” She grumbled. “I just thought maybe you two might have gotten along. Sorry. Forget I said anything. Geeze.”

Brian glared at me judgmentally and I rolled my eyes.

“We have more important things to worry about right now,” I said. “Like all of the damn people the Saviors are trying to infect. It started off as a few every dozen, but now it’s like fifty percent or something crazy. Everywhere I turn, there’s a sleeper. It’s… insane. And Taylor, well, he’s totally lost his mind. At first, he was like you, Alice, and he could start people. He sucked diseased fluorescence right out of people like some kind of anti-venom magnet, but then he started getting high on it or something. I don’t even know how to describe it. First, it was a quick fix, but now, he wants to come after both of you.”

“What?” Brian straightened up. “What do you mean, come after us? Like, kill us?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. He just said he wanted to see what would happen if he could drain fluorescence from you… without stopping.”

Brian forked a hand through his hair and sighed in
disbelief. “You said you blacked out after he drained you,
right?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell would happen if he didn’t let up after that?” he asked.

“I don’t want to know, Brian.” I hugged myself and shivered.

“Me neither,” Alice said with a faint whimper, nuzzling against him.

We didn’t have a lot of options, but we had to think of something.

“I know this isn’t what you want to hear, Brian,” I began,
“but maybe if we could find David, we could use him to negotiate with Taylor. He’s powerful and maybe
he can—”

“David’s unpredictable,” Brian snapped. “We don’t need him to survive.”

“I-I didn’t mean that,” I stuttered. “I just—”

“If you want him back so badly,
you
go look for him. I’m not going to risk getting one of us hurt or exposed going on some wild hunt for a guy who obviously doesn’t want shit to do with us.”

“He helped us a lot,” I added with a huff.

“Yeah, before you ditched us and took off with Taylor,” Brian growled beneath his breath.

“You’re just pissed you didn’t think of everything he did,” I added, raising my voice. “Stop being such a stubborn ass.”

“I thought you didn’t like him,” he sneered.

“Shut the hell up, Brian!” Under the cloak of his jacket on my lap, I made fists he couldn’t see. “Shut up.” His eyes widened and Alice cowered slightly. “In the last week, I have been through more shit than you can imagine. I don’t care how rough you and Alice think you have it, you have no idea what the hell I’ve been through or what your damn brother did to me. What if it was
her
, instead?” I took my hand out from under the warm jacket just long enough to point at Alice. “What if your precious little Alice was the one being tormented by him? What then?”

Brian snapped his mouth shut and kept it that way for the next several moments. Then Alice tipped her face up toward his ear and whispered something.

His eyes met mine briefly. He nodded and muttered something quietly back to her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking me in the eye again. “I’ve been acting like a jerk this whole time because I’m angry, stressed out, and… scared. I didn’t ask for any of this… but neither did you.” He bit his lip and dropped his head back against the wall, exhaling loudly. “Sorry,” he mumbled, again.

. . .

I lay there on the floor staring up at the ceiling, my head nestled into Brian’s crumpled-up leather coat. The subtle scent of him lingered on it, taunting me and comforting me at the same time. I watched him and Alice sleeping together on the floor a few feet away. She laid her head on his backpack and he lay behind her, his arm draped over her waist and his head sharing a small portion of the pack as if it were a pillow.

Even afte
r dealing with all of this hell—sleeping on the floor of some parking garage in the ghetto—Alice’s expression was a peaceful one.

Maybe it was because she felt safe with Brian. The same way I did.

Damn it.
I don’t know why I couldn’t get over him. I just… couldn’t.

And when Taylor appeared, I thought maybe I had a chance—
that my instincts to pursue Brian weren’t in fact mistaken, they were simply misplaced. But Taylor had nothing in common with Brian. Other than
the fact that they looked a lot alike, I wasn’t attracted to anything else about him.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, squeezing my eyelids
shut while they twitched anxiously. A train passed by outside,
making the ground rumble beneath us. It reminded me of the tremor just before the earthquake that nearly took my life. I rolled over, readjusted the balled-up coat, and laid my head back down on it. My eyes shut and I tried to let my mind drift off.

Bright light hit my face and I lifted a hand to shield myself from the glare. I squinted and peeked through my separated fingers at the swirling light. A quick glance at Brian and Alice confirmed they were still asleep—unaware of the portal—so I pushed myself up off the floor and stood.

A queasy feeling roiled in my gut, but before I could step
away, a hand reached out from the spinning light and grabbed me by the arm.
I called out for help just as I was jerked through the portal.

The ground came at me fast and I scuffed my elbow against the gravel floor. I groaned in pain and pulled back against the hand that held me tightly.

“Where did you think you were going?” Taylor said, squeezing my arm so hard it was unbearable.

“You son-of-a—”

“Hey! You abandoned me. Your friends—the ones who made that portal for you—came and got you and you didn’t even say goodbye. But you know what? When you tried to
fry my brain earlier, you gave me your sight for a few minutes.
With it, I saw that portal spinning in the air just seconds after you went through it.” He smirked wickedly. “There was incredible energy radiating from it—calling for me. So I put out my hand, touched it, and… absorbed it.”

“How did you find me!?” I resisted again, but he dug his fingers into my wrist and I grimaced.

The swirling white door disappeared behind me.

“Funny you should ask. All I had to do was think about it—the portal—and the energy dripped right back out of my hands. I could barely see it without your sight, but I saw the other side just well enough to reach through… and take you back.”

A jolt of purple sparks shot into my body and I clenched my teeth.

“Wh-what do you want from me?” I stumbled onto all fours and coughed hard, my lungs straining to bring in air.

“
I wanted you to help me find the others,” he said. “That’s
all I wanted originally. Now it seems like I’m going to have
to do that alone. And for that, I’ll need the rest of your power.”

Branches of vibrant violet light sprouted and rose up from the ground, surrounding me like broken pieces of a chain-link fence. I tried to move forward, but a spark bit me and I withdrew, yelping in pain.

“Let me go, Taylor! You’ve completely lost your mind.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged and lifted his hands up over my head, closing the coils of electricity over me—caging me like an animal.

“What the hell are you!?” I shifted and bumped an arm against the sparking wall. Current ripped through, leaving a black, cauterized scar across my bicep.

“I really don’t know, Kareena,” he replied, leaning down toward me. “But I’m more powerful than you are. That’s a fact. One you made the mistake of ignoring.”

A purple bolt licked at my face, stinging my cheek. I veered away and flinched. A whirring sound buzzed in my ears. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw another portal rip open in the air. I turned my head carefully inside the flickering cage to try to watch.

A yellow light appeared inside it and then David suddenly came bursting through.

“David!” I called out to him, bumping my shoulder on another line of purple fire and burning a hole in the cap of my sleeve. The pain made me wince.

“
What’s happening? Where are we?” David asked, looking
around.

“
Nice,” Taylor said with a scoff, watching David approach. “If
it isn’t your Mexican boyfriend coming to join the fiesta.”

“
Shut up, Taylor,” David sneered, taking an offensive stance. “You
don’t know shit about me!” He glanced at me and his brow wrinkled. “Kareena!” He took a step closer.

“Hey! She’s mine now,” Taylor shouted, coming between us. “
You’ll be next if you don’t back off.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” David said, “but it’s wrong.” The amber glow sparked to life in his chest and I couldn’t stop my breaths from shuddering. I knew what Taylor could do, but David didn’t.

The electric wires surrounding me sputtered and
popped and I hunched down lower to the ground to avoid the loose particles that flitted dangerously close to me.