The Veil (27 page)

A dark shape appeared beneath me, and suddenly I was shooting upward. The red leg of the north pillar appeared in front of me, and I followed it up with my eyes as I burst through layer after layer of fog until I was finally back, even with the railing I had jumped from.

Luc set me down on the balcony, between the railing and the pillar.

Before I could even take a breath, he was crushing me in a violent hug.

“Addy I am
so
sorry! Are you—? I’m
so
sorry!”

I stood there limply, waiting for my head to stop spinning. He pulled back and grabbed my face, studying it like he was afraid he would never see it again.

“Are you okay?” he asked, brushing my hair, wild and tangled from the wind, back off my face.

“Yeah . . .” I said slowly, a bit surprised to find I actually was.

He pulled me into him again. My heart was still racing and so was his; I could feel it thudding through his suit jacket. Somehow, he’d managed to fly to my rescue without rumpling so much as a single item of his clothing.

“I shouldn’t have made you do that,” he said into my hair, still holding me tightly. “It’s my fault.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, pushing him gently away. “I’m fine—really.”

I was.

And I wanted to do it again.

When he dropped his arms, I turned back toward the railing.

“Addy . . .”

“Just one more time,” I pleaded in exactly the same tone I’d used a few minutes ago when I had been trying to convince him I couldn’t do it. “I nearly had it there for a minute.”

“You
did
have it,” he said. “But that’s enough for tonight.”

“Just one more time,” I said again, putting a foot on the railing and preparing to throw my leg over.

Luc grabbed me from behind and pulled me back toward the pillar. “Whoa there, Supergirl,” he said. His expression was puzzled. “I don’t get it. You were
screaming
. I thought you were terrified.”

“I was. But I handled it. Don’t you see? The worst possible thing happened to me, and it was fine. I want to do it again.”

But he wasn’t letting me move an inch. “Not tonight,” he said firmly. He let go of me with one hand, and twisted his wrist so his watch was right in front of my face. “Almost nine thirty. And we still have a long elevator ride down, plus a bit of a drive ahead of us.”

“We’ll get down quicker if we fly,” I pointed out. “Or fall. I guess I was falling, huh?”

“Only at the end,” he assured me. “You’ve still got a few kinks to work out, but those will have to wait. And we can’t fly all the way to the ground—the fog won’t give us
that
much cover. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

He made me climb down the hatch first—I think he thought if he left me alone on the platform, I might just jump off again. He might have been right about that. I’d never felt so strangely liberated in my entire life. It was like the prison of my fear of heights had been melted away by my actual fall to my near death. Sure, it was scary, but I had survived it. How could I possibly have anything left to fear?

Luc shook his head as I leaned over the railing surrounding the elevator shaft. Somehow, it didn’t look quite as high as before.

“I think I’ve created a monster,” he said.

——

We arrived back at Gran’s at five minutes to ten. Luc walked me up to the front door, and I opened it a crack so I could hear the clock. We kissed until the first chime sounded.

I pulled away, but he yanked me back.

“We have until the tenth chime,” he reminded me.

At chime number nine, I put one foot inside the door. “There. I’m home.”

Luc laughed and pressed both of my hands against his lips. “Good night, Addy.”

He was halfway back to his car and I’d put my other foot inside the door before I stopped him.

“Luc?”

He turned back around. “Yes?”

“Best first date ever.”

He smiled that devastating smile of his and quickly saluted me before turning to walk the rest of the way to his car.

I don’t think I actually walked upstairs to my bedroom—I’m pretty sure I floated.

——

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING
in the same panic I had been in the morning before, multiplied by two.

Only one day left before my meeting with the Council.

Something odd occurred to me as I got up, stretched, and stumbled to the bathroom. I hadn’t heard anyone talking about making any kind of travel arrangements. The Council was in London—or so I thought Luc had said. It would be a real shame if I missed my appointed time to face them simply because we all assumed someone else had booked the flight.

Right in the middle of brushing my teeth, I froze.

I didn’t have a passport.

I’d thought about getting one loads of times, but it hadn’t ever seemed worth the hassle. You didn’t need a passport to go to Santa Cruz, and that was as far away from Novato as I had ever traveled.

How could I have been so stupid?

I spat out my toothpaste and ran downstairs.

There was a mountain of suitcases and old-looking trunks in the living room. Gran was supervising as her boys added still more luggage to the pile. I ran into their midst.

“Gran! Gran! I don’t have a passport!”

“Good morning, dear—a passport you say?” she cocked her head. “Why on earth would you need something like that?”

“Because we’re going to London!”

A familiar laugh came from the direction of the kitchen, and my hands flew to smooth out my hair as Luc pushed open the swinging door.

“What are you laughing at?” I demanded, shifting my feet awkwardly. Unfortunately, I was wearing yellow flannel pajamas with pictures of toast on them. I bought them because they were soft and very comfortable, but they looked utterly ridiculous on anyone over three feet tall.

Mr. Stratton came out of the kitchen after Luc, and just the sight of him made me feel ten times more absurd than I already did.

“I’m laughing at you,” Luc crossed the room to me. “Thinking you need a passport. You’re so cute when you think like a human.” He kissed me and wrinkled his nose. “You taste like toothpaste.”

“
Why
don’t I need a passport?” I demanded, of the room in general.

“We’re not going to London,” Mr. Stratton explained, still shaking his head at my pajamas. He held up a folded piece of paper—a paper that looked identical to the summons I received just days ago. “This arrived at my house last night. It says the Council is coming here. To San Francisco.”

“And even if we
were
traveling to London, it’s not like you’d need a passport to come with us,” Luc informed me, snickering slightly. “We wouldn’t exactly be passing through customs.”

I made a face at him; as I did, the pile of luggage on the floor caught my attention again. I pointed to it. “Then what’s all this for?”

“We’ll be spending tonight at Renard’s house in the city,” Gran explained, with a grin. “My boys do not travel light.”

“We should be going soon,” Mr. Stratton put in before I could ask any more stupid questions.

——

It was not the first time Mr. Stratton’s large, brick house in the Marina had held all fourteen of us—Gran, Mr. Stratton, Luc, Gran’s boys, and me—but somehow, the house seemed much smaller than it had on the night of Olivia’s play. There was no place on any of the three spacious floors of the house where I could go without bumping into someone, and I had much too much going on in my head to make small talk.

I waited, as patiently as I could, for time to pass.

At three thirty, when school was out, I called Nate to make sure he’d been able to find a ride to work. His phone rang five times before his voicemail picked up. I hung up and tried again, only to get his voicemail a second time. That was weird—Nate usually picked up his phone at all costs. He must be having one hell of a busy afternoon at Sully’s to let it just ring like that. I didn’t leave a message. Anything I said would have been a lie, and now that we were back on such good terms, I didn’t want to lie to him any more than necessary.

But I still felt weird about not talking to him. Who knew what was going to happen tomorrow? I thought about calling Olivia, just to hear her voice, but I didn’t know what to say to her either.
Goodbye
?
Wish me luck? Hey, if for some reason you never see me again, promise to look after Nate for me, and feel free to go through my room and take your pick of my stuff
?

A few more hours went by, during which time Nate didn’t call me back, and I started to get antsy to the point where I thought I was going to scream. I had to get out.

Luc sensed my mood and suggested a drive.

Mr. Stratton admonished us not to go far, so we drove just a few minutes back toward the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped off at the Palace of Fine Arts.

It was dark enough that the many-columned, Roman-style buildings were lit up for the night, but still light enough that we could see their peaceful reflections in the nearby lagoon. Luc and I wandered along the colonnade without saying much. We finally stopped inside the massive rotunda, which looked more like something you would find in a Roman ruin than smack-dab in the middle of San Francisco.

The lights on the underside of the rotunda flickered when he walked under them; he looked up at them with chagrin.

“Do you think that will ever stop happening?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I hope so; it’s annoying. But look at your Gran—you’ve never noticed any electronic things acting strangely around her, have you?”

“No,” I agreed. Although, besides the lights, we never had many electrical appliances in our house. I had always chalked that up to Gran being old-fashioned, but maybe I was wrong. “Then again, she’s been in the human world for
decades
.”

“Plenty of time for her to adapt,” Luc mused. “Or for the electricity to adapt to her—I’m not really sure how it works.”

“So . . .” I started, unsure how to begin a line of conversation I had desperately wanted to have since the night we had kissed on his father’s balcony. “So for lights to behave normally around you, you’d have to be in the human world for years too?”

“I’ve been in and out of the human world my whole life,” Luc said. “That’s why car stereos, computers, and other things don’t go haywire around me. Just the lights.”

“But it could still take years for you to get used to the lights?” I persisted.

“I guess so,” Luc frowned slightly. “Why? Does it bother you?”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m just . . . I guess . . .” I hunted for the right words, but my mind drew a total blank. “I guess I’m just wondering, assuming the Council lets me go tomorrow, how much longer will you be here?”

“And by ‘here’ you mean, ‘in the human world’?”

“Yes,” I squeaked.

He shrugged again. “Depends on how long you stay here, I guess.”

I looked up at him in shock; he was grinning at me.

“Addy, no matter what happens tomorrow, I’ll still be your Guardian. And frankly, I thought you and I had gone a bit beyond that.”

“Oh, we have,” I blurted out, then hung my head in embarrassment. “I’m just . . . I’m not sure how all of this works.”

He was still smiling when I finally looked back up at him, but by then, the mocking glint in his eyes had vanished. “I’m not leaving you. I don’t know how long it will be before lights act normally around me. But we’ll find out together, okay?”

“Okay.” I smiled up at him.

Luc pulled me into him, but before our lips could meet, the lights above our heads began to tremble violently, much more intensely than they had before.

I looked up.

The recessed lightbulbs winked rapidly on and off, creating a strobe effect on the underside of the rotunda. The lights themselves seemed to shake. I would’ve thought we were having an earthquake—we were, after all, in San Francisco—had the ground under my feet not been so solid and still.

Suddenly, something Luc had told me on Halloween, something about the Annorasi who didn’t spend any time in the human world, leapt into my head.

You should see what happens when
they
get around a lightbulb
.

The lights gave a final shudder before they went out completely. Darkness closed in around us just as I became aware of a dull yellow-green glow off to my left.

Luc moved until he stood between me and the glow—a glow which, I realized with a cold feeling of dread, was the exact color of the flames at the rally and on the island. I began to get a sinking
feeling in my stomach—a chilling, terrified sensation that was the exact opposite of my normal reaction to the Annorasi world.

“Is it the Others?” I whispered, in case the glow had ears.

“Stay behind me,” was all he said. He gripped both of my hands in his left hand, keeping me behind him as he stretched his right hand behind his back. A flash of silver light gathered between his fingers and grew into a ball about the size of his palm. I wondered, not for the first time, what type of weapons the Annorasi used to fight each other. Was that what the silver ball was? Did the Annorasi use light to fight and kill one another, as well as to build their cities?

The yellow-green cloud came closer, and a distinct laugh echoed out of its center. “At ease, Guardian,” said a voice that went with the laugh.

Luc’s hold on me grew tighter as the cloud dissipated at the edge of the rotunda. Two figures materialized out of its depths; I recognized the lanky, awkward form of Oran Tighe immediately, but the second was unfamiliar to me.

He was a man too, as much as Oran was. He looked about the same age as Luc’s dad, and his entire form seemed to resonate with the same aura of authority and importance. But this man’s presence put me on edge in a way Mr. Stratton’s had never done. I could feel my muscles tense like I was at the starting line of a race as I took in the man’s neatly groomed beard and small, piercing eyes. It was impossible to tell the exact color of his irises—the yellow-green light had collected itself into a ball that hovered inside of the man’s right hand, just as the silver light was hovering in Luc’s hand. The combination of the two colored orbs threw a harsh and uncomfortable light on the scene that made it hard to see details clearly.