Opal (35 page)

Heart racing, I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. It seemed impossible to forget all that was coming, but as his hand traveled over my knee and up under the hem of my dress, it really was only us and nothing else.

Chapter 36

Like the last time we made our trip to Mount Weather, I spent the bulk of Sunday with my mom. We went to a late breakfast and I filled her in on all the prom details. She was misty-eyed when I told her about Daemon’s surprise by the lake. Heck, I got misty-eyed and my chest fluttered as I told her.

Daemon and I had stayed out there until the stars had faded from the night and the sky had turned dark blue. It had been simply perfect and the things we’d done in those late hours still made my toes curl.

“You’re in love,” Mom said, chasing a piece of cantaloupe across her plate with her fork. “That’s not a question. I can see it in your eyes.”

Red swept across my cheeks. “Yeah, I am.”

She smiled. “You grew up too fast, baby.”

Didn’t always feel that way, especially this morning when I couldn’t find my other flip-flop and I’d been, like, two seconds from kicking a fit.

Then her voice lowered so that the packed church crowd couldn’t hear. “You’re being careful, right?”

Oddly, I wasn’t embarrassed by the change in conversation. Maybe it had to do with the “naked baby Katy stripping off her diapers” comment yesterday. Either way, I was glad that she asked—that she cared enough. My mom may be busy working like most single parents, but she wasn’t on the absentee list.

“Mom, I’d always be careful with that kind of stuff.” I took a sip of my soda. “I don’t want any baby Katys running around.”

Her eyes widened with shock and then they watered again. Oh, dear… “You have grown up,” she said, placing her hand over mine. “And I’m proud of you.”

Hearing that felt good, because on the whole parent side of things, I wasn’t sure what she could feel proud of. Sure, I went to school, stayed out of trouble—mostly—and got good grades. But I’d failed on the college thing 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. “
You
do it for me.”

“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 blinding all of us.

Blake’s words lingered in my head.
That’s what I’m counting on.
I was probably being paranoid, but they settled like sour milk. Of course he was counting on us to pull off the near impossible. He had just as much as us to gain.

And then I thought of Luc’s warning: never trust those who have anything to gain or lose. But that meant we couldn’t trust either him or our friends. All of us had something to gain or lose.

Daemon reached over the center console and squeezed my fidgeting hand.

Thinking these things right then wasn’t the best route to travel. I was getting myself all worked up and spazzy.

I smiled at Daemon and decided to focus on our afternoon. We didn’t really do anything. Just cuddled together, both of us wide awake, and somehow that was more intimate than anything else. Last night or early this morning had been a different story.

Daemon was a creative fellow.

My cheeks were stained red the rest of the trip.

The two SUVs arrived at the little farm at the bottom of the pitch-black access road with five minutes to spare. As we climbed out, Blake got his confirmation text from Luc.

Things were a go.

Instead of limbering up, we all stayed still, conserving our energy. Ash, Andrew, and Dee remained in their SUV. The rest of us moved to the edge of the overgrown field.

I hoped I didn’t get infested with ticks.

With one last look at the Luxen in the vehicle, it was time to go. Letting the Source flow through my blood and bones and ripple over my skin, we took off into the darkness, without the light of the moon on the cloudy night. Like last time, Daemon stayed beside me. The last thing anyone needed was my tripping over something and rolling back down the hill.

Things were quiet and tense when we reached the edge of the woods, waited to see that only one guard manned the fence.

It was Daemon who took him out this time. Then we were at the fence, keying in the first code.

Icarus
.

Taking off across the stretch of field, the five of us moved like ghosts. Visible in one’s peripheral vision, but gone when looked at head-on.

At the set of three doors, Dawson entered in the second password.

Labyrinth
.

And now it was do or die time. All these months had led up to this. Did our onyx training mean a damn thing? Daemon glanced at me.

I slipped my hand into my pocket, wrapping my fingers around the opal.

Going through the onyx spray would still hurt like the fiery bowels of hell for the others, but it should be manageable if Blake had been right.

The door slid open with an airlock sound and Daemon was the first through.

Air puffed and he flinched, but one leg moved in front of the other and then he was through, on the other side. He stopped, glancing over his shoulder, and smiled that half smile.

All of us let out a collective breath.

We filed through the onyx-shielded door. Each of the guys took the spray with a wince and grimace of pain. I barely felt a thing.

Inside Mount Weather for the first time, we fell behind Blake, who knew most of the way. The tunnel was shadowed, with small lamps placed every twenty feet or so on the orange walls. I searched for those murderous emergency doors but it was too dark to see them.

Tipping my head up, I noticed something terrifying about the ceiling. It was shiny—like it was wet or something, but it wasn’t liquid.

“Onyx,” Blake whispered. “The whole place is covered in onyx.”

Unless they did a massive remodel recently, that couldn’t be something new to Blake. Feeling the opal against my skin, I pulled on the Source and waited for the extreme rush of energy as we flew down the tunnel.

There was a tiny spark of extra energy, but nothing like it had been when Daemon and I had tested it out. My heart sunk as we neared the end of the long tunnel. It had to be all the onyx, somehow weakening the opal.