Lightning Kissed

  ***

  Three days after the funeral, I’d decided to tell Theo the truth about my visit with the Synod. He needed to know and I desperately needed to get it off my chest. If they would kill my grandmother for my failure to show up at a summoning, then they would kill him or me for not giving them what they wanted—whatever that was.

  I strolled through the gardens, focusing on his location. He was back in those gardens. I’d begun to call them the keyhole gardens. Ari had begun to call them the butthole gardens. Theo was always there and the day before, when I found him, his head was in his hands. Slumped over in what seemed to be pain, he rocked back and forth. Whatever was consuming him never let him rest.

  “Theo?” I called to him. There was no answer. He was on his knees on the circular plate of marble next to the pedestal. He didn’t hear me, but clearly he heard something.

  The atmosphere was different in this garden. I’d thought I had imagined it during the funeral—chalked it up to an air of sorrow. It was something more. Looking around, mentally comparing this garden to the rest, I realized the difference. The grass wasn’t growing here. In the past days, the greenery in the other parts of the vast property had grown up a bit, but the grass in what I was now calling the keyhole garden wasn’t. Through the holes in the topiaries that towered over us like giants, butterflies fluttered and danced in the neighboring areas.

  But no insects or butterflies meandered through this place.

  “Theo,” I yelled this time. He never budged. I ran to him, desperate to relieve him of whatever I could.

  I reached him just as he’d raised his hands to cover his ears—as if he could squelch the voices inside with the act. Kneeling down beside him, his reaction to my touch was immediate.

  “Thank you,” he covered my hand lying on the side of his neck with his own, keeping it there. “I don’t know how you can get rid of them, but thank you.”

  “Are they getting worse?”

  He shrugged and consulted the sky before answering, “No. Yes. There are more of them and they’ve gotten louder. They get louder and instead of demanding that I help them—they demand that I come here over and over again. So here I am, but they are relentless. What do they want from me?”

  A new voice entered our conversation then. I missed that voice. “They want what we all want in death, Eidolon. It’s simple, really.” Collin came to perch on his haunches near the marble circle, but not touching it. “There’s some correlation between the Prophets and those who are stuck in the fray. Some have said that the Prophets giving their wisdom was actually words straight from the mouths of the soldiers of God. The Eidolons in the past have heard the voices from the other side—and in order to quell them, visited the fray to help them find their way to heaven. Before, being the Eidolon was a gift.”

  As I listened to Collin, I should’ve been amazed at his knowledge. I should’ve been grateful that finally we were being given straight truths, or what I hoped were truths, about what Theo really was.

  Instead, anger pulsed behind my closed eyelids and drummed between my temples.

  How could he keep such information from us?

  “And now?” No matter my level of anger, we needed to know what we were up against.

  “During the time of Eivan, the Synod, through the torture of Sevella, found out that Eivan was traveling from the fray and then to Heaven and back to Earth, bringing back stories and revelations that the Prophets were no longer able to give.”

  Theo was focused on Collin and twitched as he eagerly waited for his chance to propose a question, “So what? Why did the Synod care?”

  The more Collin spoke, the lighter the air became around us.

  “Why did the Synod declare the Prophets’ revelations void?” Collin shot back at him.

  Theo hesitated, but I didn’t. “They wanted to make their own rules. The Prophets spoke of an Earth where humans had full knowledge of our gifts—and we lived in peace.”

  “Yes,” Collin switched from a crouch to a sitting position. “And the Synod wishes for us to remain elite. Which is why, when a weak link is discovered, they simply remove it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Theo and I both spoke at once. What was he trying to tell us?

  “There is no difference between the Synod and the Escuro. They are one in the same. Didn’t you ever wonder how Demetrius was killed by Sanctum when that was before there even was an Escuro? The Synod and the Resin council came about at the same time, during the rise of Eivan. So what happened to Demetrius? Sanctum was Demetrius’ brother.”

  I was more confused than ever. All these history lessons were fine and good, but the only thing I really was concerned about was Theo and how to relieve him of the madness that was slowly consuming him.

  “Just tell him what to do!” Screaming at Collin wasn’t what I intended. But it happened anyway. The last two weeks made me feel like I was constantly teetering on the edge of sanity myself.

  “The Synod want to enter Paraíso —not for the gift of seeing the Almighty, but rather to ‘borrow’ the Army of God for a sole purpose.”

  My hands moved him along with a paddlewheel motion.

  “They want to annihilate the human race.”

  Even though I was supposed to be strong for Theo, the information overload made me lay down, resting my head in Theo’s lap. I still didn’t understand Theo’s place in all of this. And more than anything, I needed to know. After all, the former Eidolon’s didn’t fare so well.

  A groan of complete frustration erupted from me. Collin was vomiting out a lot of things, but none of them were actually helping.

  “Where’s Pema?”

  I turned to face Collin, hoping that the fierce expression on my face would make him spill his guts and her whereabouts.

  “In Tibet.”

  “Call her, please. Tell her we need to see her.” I pointed at the Viking. “And don’t even think about telling me that you don’t know how to contact her. We all know better.”

  “Theo,” I implored him, dragging him out of another deep thinking session. I’d itched for days to flash but I felt guilty traveling when my grandmother could no longer. “Let’s go somewhere far away. Just come with me. By the time we get back, Pema will be here and we can get some answers.”

  He didn’t answer, so I took control of bringing him back to sanity. Enveloping his waist in my arms, I flashed us to the first place I thought of—the Haiku Stairs in Hawaii. I was so careless, I didn’t even think about the time difference or about anyone spotting us—I just needed to get Theo away from it all.

  He needed to be reminded that he was the Eidolon, but the Eidolon wasn’t all he was.

  When we arrived, it was right before dawn and thankfully the only people awake that I could see were eager surfers who probably thought that a storm was now brewing from the sighting of the lightning. The entire island could be seen from that vantage point. It ranked in my top ten places to see the sun rise.

  “Do you remember this place?” I asked him, framing his chiseled jaw with my hands.

  After a few minutes, he shook himself free of the depths and met my eyes. “Hawaii, when we were fifteen.”

  “Welcome back,” I grinned and as he mirrored my smile, it became apparent how long it had been since we were happy. It seemed like decades past.

  We stared at the ocean for hours as the sun rose. I missed the sun rising. I missed my gift. Lately it had just been used to run from the Resin or the Synod, whichever one they were.

  “Can you promise me something?” Theo asked with an attitude of lament. His hair was out of control now, blowing this way and that. High School Theo would’ve offered him some gel and a comb. He lay back as he spoke, taking a more relaxed stance against one of the steps behind him.

  “I will promise you anything.”

  He blew out a breath, heavily laden with sorrow. “Sometimes I can’t pull myself out of it—like today. It’s like the voices anchor me to that spot in the garden
. Can you promise to get me away from there if it gets too heavy?”

  “How do I know when? Is there like a code or are you going to knock twice and whistle once?”

  It was a lame attempt at a joke, but hearing him laugh proved it was worth the shame.

  “Use your intuition. It worked pretty well today.”

  Who knew I had intuition. That little attribute may have come in handy all the times I’d stepped out of line.

  “Come here,” he commanded, patting the spot between his legs. “You’ve been taking care of me when it should be the other way around.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just always been that way.”

  I tilted my head back so that I could see his face upside down. “Maybe that was the problem, Theo. Maybe all the time you were taking care of me, we should’ve been taking care of each other.”

  He lowered his face down so that his lips barely grazed my forehead. Outlining the perimeter of my face, he whispered, “I think you’re right. But do I still get to spoil you?”

  “Absolutely. What? Just because you’ve got super powers, you think I don’t need shoes? Please.”

  What started out as an easy laugh evolved into an all-out, doubled over, tears running down his face laugh—every time he stopped, we would begin again.

  A text brought us back down to Earth. It was Collin, informing me that Pema was back.