The Veil (16 page)

I was genuinely touched by the efforts they both made on my behalf.

After lunch, as Luc and I headed to chemistry, we passed Principal Chatsworth in the hall. Judging from the glares our tall, bald, and slightly potbellied principal shot at each student who dared walk past him, he appeared to be seeing code of conduct violations running rampant throughout the school. That was his usual way.

But when Luc walked by him, with me just a pace behind, Principal Chatsworth’s glare softened and he gave Luc a respectful head nod, the kind exchanged between colleagues on equal footing with one another.

I stared in disbelief as Luc nodded back, and the hallway light above our heads blinked crazily.

“What was
that
?” I asked after Principal Chatsworth had turned a corner, out of sight.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? He’s an Annorasi.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“Shhh.” Luc looked around in alarm. He brought me away from the classroom door and behind a row of lockers, just as the light above our heads finally calmed down. “It’s no big deal.”

“But does he know about me?” I demanded.

“Shhhh,” he said again. “Relax. He doesn’t know anything he shouldn’t. All he knows is that you’re somehow important and I’m your Guardian. He thinks you’re fully human, Addy.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and then noticed Luc eyeing me thoughtfully.

“What?” I asked.

“You really had no idea he was an Anno-
ahem
,” Luc cut himself off and coughed as a group of senior girls walked by close enough to hear our conversation. “That he was an . . . ‘
A’
until I just told you?”

“No. Should I have?”

He shrugged as we began walking toward chemistry again. “You’re the first of your kind, Addy. I’m in no position to tell you what you should or should not be able to do. But, in general, we
As
can sense other
As
.”

“Sense—how?”

His forehead creased in thought. “It’s hard to say exactly. It’s like radar, I guess. I can tell when another
A
comes within about a half mile of me. It’s nothing I can see or hear. It’s just something I’m aware of. If there was a crowd of people in front of me, all humans and one
A
, I could pick out the
A
with only one guess.”

His uncannily accurate description of my Luc-radar intrigued me and I almost told him about it, but embarrassment made me hold back. Besides, if my radar hadn’t picked up Principal Chatsworth, I was pretty sure it was Luc-specific.

“What about me?” I asked him. “You can’t sense me, can you?”

“No, I can’t. Not even now that I know you’re half
A
. I know it intellectually, but I don’t
know
it the same way I knew Principal Chatsworth was an
A
the instant I met him.”

I pondered this. Was my human half shielding my Annorasi half?

This made me think of something alarming, and I paled. “If he knows you’re an . . . an
A
, but he thinks I’m fully human, then what does he think of
us
? What about the rule against
As
and humans in relationships? Are you going to get in trouble?”

“No. I explained to him that our pretending to date was necessary to allow us to spend so much time together, and he agreed. He knows it’s all an act, Addy. I’m fine. You’re fine. Everybody’s fine.”

“Okay.” I had never particularly cared what the principal thought of me before, but I was suddenly mortified to know that
he
knew I had a fake boyfriend.

“So,” I went on, slowing down as we approached the door to the chemistry lab. I was most definitely not eager to get to class. It was difficult to concentrate on school when there were much more interesting things—
A
things—to think about and discuss. “Is that my
A
ability? That no other
As
can sense me?”

“It might be one of them,” Luc moved to let two other juniors into the lab ahead of us. He didn’t seem any more excited than I was to get to class. “Whether it’s an actual ability or just a function of your being . . . what you are, I can’t say.”

“If it’s an ability, then it’s pretty boring,” I said, pouting a little bit. “I was hoping I’d be able to do something similar to what you can.”

“You haven’t seen
everything
I can do,” he informed me with a cocky smile.

“Then maybe you should show me,” I suggested.

To my surprise, he shook his head. “Actually, I’m not going to show you. Not yet,” he said, teasingly. “There is a school of thought among Anno—I mean, among
A
—parents, that they shouldn’t influence their children’s growing abilities by showing them specific things they may or may not be able to do when they get older. The idea is that it’s better to let their abilities develop naturally. That way, the kids won’t strive to do things their parents can, while ignoring other, different abilities no one thought to tell them about.”

“But you’re not my parent,” I reminded him, shaking my head at the rather unpleasant analogy. “And I’m
not
a kid.”

“In
A
terms, you kind of are,” he said apologetically. “Developmentally speaking, you’re roughly on par with an
A
three-year-old at the moment.”

“A
three-year-old
?” I exclaimed, crossing my arms defiantly over my chest. “That sucks.”

“I have a hunch you’ll grow into your powers fairly soon—much faster than a little kid would.”

“I doubt it. Not if it took me seventeen years to get to age three.”

He laughed, and I frowned again.

“Now I feel like I’m just sitting around, waiting for something strange to happen. How am I supposed to know what to look for if I have no idea what other
As
can even do?”

He shrugged his shoulders with irritating, exaggerated slowness. “Be patient. We’ll both just have to wait and see what happens.”

——

T
HE NEXT FEW WEEKS
went by somewhat uneventfully.

Luc and I settled into our fake relationship. He picked me up every morning for school (we stopped going by Sully’s after Nate wasn’t there that one morning—I missed the coffee and the morning buns, but I missed Nate more), and he was by my side for the entire day except for the periods when we had different classes. I had Sonya those times; I sometimes caught myself petting her in the middle of class, forgetting no one else could see her. Luc brought her tuna every day, and she soon took to purring and batting her cat eyelashes whenever she saw him.

She still refused to purr for me.

The stares and the whispers eventually died down as people found other things to talk about. Karinda Walsh even showed up back at school, safe and mentally sound; it turned out she had just been on vacation with her family. She reacted to the news of Paul and Emily not as I’d envisioned (machete rampage) but by declaring emphatically to anyone who would listen that she’d been on the brink of dumping him anyway. Nobody really believed her, but everyone moved on (including Karinda, with an
impressionable little freshman who worshipped her).

After school, Luc would drive us back to Gran’s. We would hang out, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes late into the evening.

Sometimes we went out to various places around Novato and even San Francisco. However, I was disappointed to learn my newfound knowledge regarding the identity of Gran’s boys did not result in the repealing of my curfew. When I asked Gran about it, she explained, “I made a contract with my boys. They agreed to be responsible for your safety, but only on the condition that every night at ten, half of them are given leave to return to the Annorasi world, while the other half stay and guard you at the house. They have lives too, Addy. And I cannot ask them to alter our agreement now.”

Luc used our time together to tell me more about the Annorasi world, but just as often we did our homework or talked about perfectly normal things—the kind of stuff I used to talk about with Nate. Luc was surprisingly easy to talk to; we honestly enjoyed each other’s company.

It occurred to me that as the only Annorasi in the entire school (besides our principal), Luc had probably been fairly lonely until I came along. Even when he’d had Emily to talk to (and to do God only knows what else with—I could hardly bring myself to think about that, let alone ask what had actually gone on between them), he hadn’t been able to talk to her about Annorasi things. He could be himself around me; I wasn’t sure how that measured up to Emily’s charms, but it had to count for something.

Olivia sat with us every day at lunch, and we usually saw her on weekends too. She remained convinced Nate would come around and worked hard to get along with Luc, as if consciously trying to make up for Nate’s bad behavior. Not that Luc was difficult to get along with—he seemed to like Olivia, and she was very enthusiastic about telling me how perfect she thought he and I were together.

Sigh.

Luc
was
the perfect boyfriend in almost every way, except for the ways I wanted most. We remained strictly platonic, although he gave me enough attention at school to convince our gossipy classmates there was more where that came from behind closed doors.

But other than the occasional awkward moment when I found myself lost in his eyes or unable to breathe because he accidentally brushed my hair with his hand or leaned across me to get another slice of pizza, there was never even a hint of romance between us.

The voice inside my head that had reminded me from day one that our entire relationship was
fake
,
fake
,
fake
never totally shut up, but I learned to ignore it. Sort of.

The only semi-weird thing that happened during the three weeks after I first found out about Principal Chatsworth was the occasional appearance of a tall, skinny figure ringed in silver. At first, when I caught sight of the flashes of silver out of the corner of my eye, I assumed it was just Sonya, wandering around the school as usual. But then one day, I caught a glimpse of it in the rearview mirror of Luc’s car and saw, to my surprise, that it was walking on two legs. It was definitely not a cougar, but when I turned around to get a better look, it was gone.

I never saw the figure clearly again, but I could have sworn I nearly caught it several other times, dancing around behind me, just outside of my field of vision.

I didn’t mention it to Luc. After all, there were a lot of strange creatures running around the Annorasi world. It started becoming increasingly easy for me to see that world, to the point where I sometimes found myself looking at the Annorasi world completely by accident without having to lift the veil. This made for some uncomfortable moments, especially at school, until Luc came up with a solution: training glasses. Except he didn’t tell me only Annorasi children wore them until I’d already promised I would try them.

“Think of them as a tool,” he said patiently when I accused him of treating me like a little kid—
again
. “You only have to wear them until your control gets better. And only when you’re with humans—when you’re alone with me or at home, you can use your real eyes.”

The glasses were very light and had thin, black frames. They filtered out the Annorasi world. I never saw the strange figure again after I started wearing them, and I sometimes had trouble seeing Sonya (I had to look over or under the lenses to see her; sometimes I forgot and bumped into her, which she didn’t like). But the glasses allowed me to walk around like a functioning human, and that was what counted.

I’d worn the glasses for about a week when I got my first hint of a potential Annorasi power. Actually, come to think of it, it was a little bit more than just a hint.

It was a Thursday evening, the night of the dress rehearsal for
The Last Will and Testament of Mrs. Harriet J. Goodrich
. I’d been looking forward to it for some time, not because of the rehearsal itself, but because it would give me a chance to be around Nate. He steadfastly refused to speak to me ever since our fight in the quad, ignoring my phone calls and simply walking away when I approached him in person.

But he couldn’t ignore me at rehearsal—not when I was one third of the tech crew under his command.

Well, a quarter of it anyway, now that Luc had somehow managed to charm Mrs. Grimsby into letting him join, even though we didn’t need an extra person.

After school, Terrance Seaver, Nate, Luc, and I met inside the newly completed auditorium. Even Sonya came by to check things out, or so I gathered by the way Luc’s hand started petting the air just behind his back (I had my glasses on, so I couldn’t see her myself).

“We’ve got to put up the lights before the actors go on stage,” Nate said, looking directly at Terrance and completely ignoring
Luc and me. “We only have about an hour, so we’re going to have to be quick.”

This was the first day any of us had been allowed inside of the new auditorium. It still smelled a bit like sawdust and fresh paint, but it was definitely much nicer than before; the new linoleum tiles on the floor were unscuffed, and the stage built against the north wall had a handsome, burgundy curtain. A rental company had set up thirty-five rows of folding chairs, all facing the stage.

The rental company had also constructed the lighting frame around the back of the auditorium, so all we had left to do was screw the spotlights themselves into their respective places atop the frame.

When we were all standing underneath the rickety metal structure, gazing up at the auditorium ceiling, Nate finally turned and looked at me.

“Addy? I know you’re the property manager, but do you think you could give us a hand with the lights? We’re in a time crunch here.”

“Sure,” I said lightly, although I glared at him as soon as his back was turned. I knew exactly what he was doing—he didn’t need any extra help, he just knew how much it would freak me out to have to climb up one of the huge ladders leaning against either side of the light frame.

He was punishing me.