Shine (23 page)

“Twice.”

“Okay, twice. You hooked up with Becca,” I reminded him. Seeing her last night had torn open that old wound.

Zachary spread his hands. “And Becca’s not here. I’m no’ hanging out with Becca, like you are with Dylan.”

“I don’t know who you’re hanging out with. You’ll probably meet
tons of girls in bars and clubs, and your friends who’re in college will know college girls.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want them.”

“And I don’t want Dylan!” I stopped. “Why are we arguing?”

“Aura, maybe it needs saying.” He planted his hands on either side of the keyboard, resting some of his weight on the desk. “This is real, aye? We’re going to do this?”

My heart pounded. “Do what?”

“Be together,” he whispered. “Officially. Because right now, and for all time, I only want you.”

“And I only want you,” I said softly. “For all time.”

Zachary had to sign off soon after to help his dad. I considered seeing if Megan wanted to go to a club, but it was raining, and we had Saturday night plans, so I decided to tackle my homework.

I started with AP Chemistry first, but the structure of the equations kept bringing me back to what Zachary had said about Eowyn’s research. Newgrange was built to “serve the dead” but also to keep the living and dead apart. Eowyn thought there was a way to do both at once.

I turned the page of my notebook and drew a set of mingling stick figures—purple for ghosts, black for people. Ghosts were always badgering post-Shifters for help, which we often gave them, even if only by listening to their stories. So clearly we were “serving the dead.”

Next I drew a heavy red line separating the ghosts and the living. It made me think of BlackBox. But how could this separation
serve
the dead? As far as I could tell, BlackBox helped only the living.

I stared at the red line until my eyes crossed, making it blur and waver. Then I blinked, and it hit me.

Zachary was a walking BlackBox, the ultimate red. I was the ultimate violet, able to save shades (at least Logan, and maybe others). I helped ghosts, Zachary repelled them.

We
were the two faces of Newgrange. The power of the Shine split between his father and my mother.

But when we kissed, we changed. Was that the synthesis? Did we make something new in those moments when we were together, soul
and
body?

It was almost nine thirty—two thirty a.m. in Scotland. Zachary should’ve been asleep, but I had a feeling he wasn’t.

I switched on my computer, opened the video chat program, and saw that Zachary’s status was still set to “online.” I called him.

Less than ten seconds later, his face appeared on my screen.

“I think I’ve got it,” I told him. He listened carefully, taking notes while I rattled off my theory as coherently as I could, given my excitement.

When I was finished, he dropped his pen on his notepad. “You’re brilliant. And I’m no’ just saying that because I love you. You’re—” He smoothed his page of notes, gazing at it like it was a rare document. “Just brilliant,” he finished in a whisper.

My whole body heated. “Thanks.”

“But what is it that we make? This thing that isn’t you or me. In those moments when we …” He drew in a deep breath. “Ah, I really want to kiss you right now.”

I grinned. “For science, right?”

“Aye, purely in the name of research.” He put his chin on his hand, his head obviously heavy. “Did I just change the subject?”

“I think you did.”

“Sorry, I’m—” He waved his other hand beside his head, then dropped it back to the table with a thud.

“Not sleeping?”

“Aye.”

“Why not?”

He tensed. “I don’t want to.”

We were inching closer to what he couldn’t tell me before. “Bad dreams?”

He pulled back from the screen, elbows sliding near the edge of the desk. “Sometimes.”

By “sometimes,” I could tell he meant “always.”

I pressed on, despite his sudden wariness. “Are they about what happened this summer, when you were—”

“Look!” He sat back in his chair so hard it squeaked. “I know you want to help, but stop asking about that time. I can’t talk about it.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Can you please be the one person in my life who isn’t trying to fix me?”

I stared at him, my jaw frozen open. He’d never spoken to me like that before.

He cringed at my expression, then covered his face. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Zach.” I touched the screen with a trembling hand. “What if I
stay with you until you fall asleep? You could lie down, put your laptop on the bed so we could still talk.”

“No. No. It’d be too much like—like you’re my psychiatrist.”

He spit out the last word. I wondered if he resented psychiatrists in general, or someone specific.

“Not if I lie down with you.”

Zachary opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. “You’d do that?”

“For you, anything.”

He curled his arms around his waist, as if he had a stomachache. “Just this once. I’ll ring you back in a half hour.”

I brushed my teeth and hair, then changed into a sleep shirt—nothing too revealing, since I did want him to actually sleep. Then I got into bed and set my laptop next to me.

I turned on the video chat but still had ten minutes left, so I opened a browser and ran a search on the Children of the Sun. I had to click through several pages of results that referred to a comic book by the same name. Annoying.

Finally I came to an archived post on a blog called Druid Daily, entitled “Wannabe’s.” The blogger, according to the sidebar, was a “real Druid in the spirit of the ancients,” and the post spoke of the dangers of misconceptions about Druids.

The third paragraph cited the Children of the Sun, making my heart race. The blogger claimed that a group of teenagers calling themselves by that name were running around County Meath, Ireland, committing acts of trespassing and simulated violence. They would perform “Druid rituals” (the quotes were the writer’s), using stage knives and fake blood to pretend-sacrifice one another to the
gods. According to the blogger, real Druids had never done human sacrifices—those horror stories were rumors started by the conquering Romans.

The video chat room dinged. I closed the browser and clicked answer.

Zachary’s face appeared, this time horizontal. His room was dim, so I barely saw the contours of his head and shoulders. But the light of the laptop screen reflected off bare skin. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Hey,” I breathed. “Is that how you’re going to keep me awake for homework?”

“Sorry?”

“Being half-naked.”

“Oh.” He chuckled. “What do you mean, ‘half’?”

A wave of fire swept over me, and joy that his cheeky side was reappearing. “Are you kidding?”

“Well.” He gave an agonizing pause. “Aye, I’ll not lie t’ya. I’m wearing boxers.”

“What do they look like?”

“You’ll see in less than four months.”

“I wanna see now. Show me.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Because you’re not really wearing any?”

“I am, I swear.”

“Prove it.”

His hand snaked out from under the blanket, but only to tug it up over his bare shoulder. “Not yet. I’ve gone all … scrawny over the summer.”

My smile faded as I realized that he felt self-conscious. Anger replaced my desire, a boiling fury toward those who had diminished his seductive swagger.

“No pressure,” I said, “but you should know, I love your body, all of it. Skinny, fat, anywhere in between.”

His fingers twitched. “You don’t make anything easy, do you?”

“Nope.” I licked my lips. “I try to make everything hard.”

Zachary groaned and rolled on his back. “Now I absolutely can’t show you, because it would be pornographic.”

Every cell in my body wanted to urge him to show me everything, and let me do the same for him. But I sensed that what he truly needed was a place to feel safe.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

“Aye.” He turned his head to face me, but stayed on his back. “You look beautiful.”

I glanced at my live shot in the corner. My features were as dim as his. “You can barely see me in the dark.”

“I don’t need to see you to know that you’re beautiful.”

It was my turn to emit a whimper and twist the sheets. He could still slay me with the simplest statements.

“Why don’t you try seeing the backs of your eyelids?” I said. “I’ll stay until you fall asleep, and then I’ll sign off. I promise.”

“All right.” He closed his eyes. “Keep talking.”

“About what?”

“Something good, but boring.”

The stuff I’d learned about the Children of the Sun wasn’t good
or
boring. “I went to an Orioles game a couple weeks ago.”

“Baseball,” he murmured. “Nothing’s more boring than that.”

I told him every play I could remember, and made up what I couldn’t. I explained the designated hitter rule and the intricacies of the unassisted triple play.

Within minutes, Zachary’s hand went slack on the blanket, and he was asleep. Just to be sure, I kept talking until my mouth was dry and my throat was rough.

My finger reached out to the laptop’s touch pad, guiding the cursor over the red hang-up button. Then I hesitated.

It was wrong, but I wanted to watch Zachary sleep. I wanted to see if he thrashed and moaned, wanted to see evidence of the nightmares he denied. If he wouldn’t tell me what had happened, maybe I could steal the truth from his sleep. Only then could I help him heal.

No sooner had I thought this than Zachary’s shoulder started to jerk. Then his jaw clenched, clacking his teeth together and grinding them hard. One fist clutched the edge of his sheet, and a low growl began in his throat.

No.
I’d promised to hang up once he dozed off. The DMP had taken so much from him—all Zachary had left was his pride. If I took that, too, he’d have nothing.

I had to have faith that someday, he’d find the strength to speak.

“I love you,” I whispered, and hung up.

O
n the night of the fall equinox, Dylan, Megan, and I went to a wooded area bordering Loch Raven Reservoir, where no one would see us calling the shades. When we climbed out of the Keeleys’ car, I realized Dylan was wearing a dark-gray suit and blue striped tie.

I waved my flashlight beam over his tall, lean frame. “What’s with the dress-up?”

“I told my parents I was going to Career Night at school.” He took off the jacket and laid it carefully on the backseat. “Otherwise they’d never let me out this late on a weeknight.”

I understood why Logan’s death had made Mr. and Mrs. Keeley overprotective of Dylan, but it sucked for him.

He adjusted his tie. “Does it look that bad?”

“Dylan, you dumb-ass.” Megan faced away from us, using her
own flashlight to scan the trees around the small parking lot. “You have no clue that you can actually be cute. No wonder you’ve never gotten laid.”

I waited for him to correct her delusion that he was a virgin. But he just tugged his collar, as if it had suddenly constricted. It reminded me of prom night and his discomfort with his stunning tuxedo.

We took a short trail down to the reservoir shoreline, where we found a flat, dry area beside the water. The waning crescent moon, just past third quarter, shone silver on the placid man-made lake.

I pulled the folded list of shades from my back jeans pocket. “Which should I call first?” I had to almost shout to be heard over the cacophony of crickets.

“Start at the top of the alphabet,” Megan said.

“Or the end of the alphabet,” Dylan argued. “Those people never get to go first.”

“We’ll do random.” I counted the names. “Pick a number between one and twelve.”

“Seven,” Dylan and Megan said together, then looked at each other.

Huh. “Tell me when it’s eight forty-six.”

We turned off our flashlights and went silent, listening to the plop and rustle of night creatures in the water and woods. The
whoosh
of cars on the Baltimore Beltway seemed both too close and too far away.

“Okay.” Dylan watched his cell phone screen, fingers outstretched. “When it’s time, I’ll count down from five, silently.”

“You don’t have to be quiet, it’s not—”

“Shh.” Dylan waved his hand frantically, then folded down his five
fingers. When he got to one, he pointed at me, like I was on camera at a news station.

I took a deep breath. “Randall Madison! I can help you.”
At least, I think I can.
“This might be your only chance to be a ghost again. Your only chance to pass on.”

Silence.