“I’m Michael. Clara’s father,” Dad says, extending his hand.
Funny how he says that exactly the same way, every time.
Christian doesn’t hesitate. He takes Dad’s hand and shakes it firmly.
Dad smiles. “It’s remarkable, really, how much you resemble your mother.”
“You knew my mother?” Christian’s voice is almost painfully neutral.
“Quite well. She was a charming woman. A good woman.”
Christian glances down for a minute, then up to meet my father’s gaze. “Thank you.” His eyes flicker over to me, linger on my face like he’s seeing it in an entirely new way. Then he says, “Well, I should go. I just wanted to make sure Clara was okay after she left in the middle of class today.”
Dad couldn’t look more approving of the idea of Christian looking out for me. “Don’t go on my account. I’ll leave you to talk.”
And he does. And he closes the door on the way out. What kind of Dad leaves his teenage daughter alone in her room at night with a boy and the door closed? He’s got a lot of catching up to do, parent-wise, I think. Or maybe he doesn’t really see parenting as his role. Or maybe he’s just that confident that Christian would have to be crazy to do anything inappropriate with an angel on the other side of the door.
“So,” Christian says after a minute. “Your dad’s an angel.”
“So it would seem.”
“He seems cool.”
“He is. Cooler than I ever would have given him credit for.”
“I’m glad for you,” he says.
He is. I can feel it. He’s sincerely pleased to find out that I get to have a dad who cares about me, who is powerful enough to protect me, who can be here for me now during this rough time. He also has something he wants to tell me. It’s right there, like the words are hovering on the forefront of his mind, something he thinks will connect us now more than ever. But he holds it back.
“Come on, what is it?”
He gives me this mysterious, closed-lipped smile.
“I want to take you somewhere, after school tomorrow. Will you go with me?”
I find my voice. “Sure.”
“Okay. Good night, Clara.” He goes to the window and steps out.
“Good night,” I murmur after him, and then I watch him summon his wings, those gorgeous speckled wings, and lift off.
Chapter 17
The Part Where I Kiss You
I drive myself crazy wondering where Christian means to take me, but when he shows up at my locker after school the next day, part of me hesitates. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of the steady way he’s looking at me now, warm gold flecks in his eyes.
“You ready?” he asks.
I nod. We walk out into the sunshine. There’s not even a whisper of Samjeeza here. Dad must have scared him off for good, because suddenly Mom is totally okay with Jeffrey and me leaving the safety of hallowed ground.
Christian unlocks his truck and I climb in. I try not to scan the vicinity for Tucker as we make our way out of the parking lot. He called me last night and we tried to talk about my dad, but neither of us had much to say. I couldn’t come right out and tell him that my dad’s an angel, even though he’s probably already guessed. It would be too dangerous for him, knowing that, a tidbit that Samjeeza would just love to pluck out of his head. The less he knows, the safer he is, I’ve realized, and anyway, he shouldn’t be here—he has a rodeo competition tomorrow and left school earlier than usual today to get in some extra hours of practice. He was preoccupied. He didn’t ask me what I was up to and I didn’t share.
Christian turns up a dirt road that curls up the mountainside behind town. I spot a sign, crane my neck to read what it says.
ASPEN HILL CEMETERY.
All at once it feels like everything inside me turns to stone. “Christian . . .”
“It’s okay, Clara.” He pulls off to the side of the road, puts the truck in park. He opens his door, swings down, and turns to look at me. “Trust me.” He holds out his hand.
I feel like I’m moving in slow motion as I put my hand in his, let him draw me out of the truck on his side.
It’s beautiful here. Green trees, aspens whispering, a view of the distant mountains.
I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.
Christian leads me off the road into the forest. We step around graves, most of them standard pieces of marble, nothing fancy, simple inscriptions with names and dates. Then we’re to a set of concrete stairs, stairs in the middle of the forest, with a long, painted black metal bar on one side. My heart jumps to my throat when I see them, a field of gray pressing in on the edges of my sight, something I used to feel last year right before I’d have the vision. I bite my lip so hard I taste a hint of blood. But I don’t go, don’t rocket away to the day of Mom’s funeral. I stay here. With Christian.
“This way,” he says, tugging gently on my hand. We walk, not up the hill this time, not toward the place where a hole will be dug in the ground, my mother lowered into it, but across the hillside to a small white marble bench, framed by aspens, a rosebush planted beside it, which bears a single, perfect white rose.
Christian sees that rose and laughs in this kind of choked-up way. He lets go of my hand.
“I thought you said this rosebush never blooms,” I say, staring at the inscription on the bench. LOVING MOTHER, DEVOTED SISTER, TRUEST FRIEND. There’s a plaque in the ground, too, a plain white rectangle bearing the words BONNIE ELIZABETH PRESCOTT. An etching of a rose. No birth or death dates, which strikes me as odd, but if Bonnie were even middle-aged as an angel-blood when she passed, her birth date would have definitely raised some eyebrows.
“It doesn’t bloom,” Christian answers. “Today’s the first time.”
He takes a deep breath, reaches to touch the rose gently. Then he looks at me. There is so much emotion in him at the moment that I instinctively try to close the door between us; it’s too much, but I can still see it in his face. He has something he wants, no, he needs, to say to me.
“My mother had beautiful hair,” he says.
Okay, not exactly what I was expecting.
“It was this pale blond, like corn silk. I used to watch her brush it. She’d sit at her vanity in her bedroom and brush it until it shone. She had green eyes. And she liked to sing. She sang all the time. She couldn’t seem to help herself.”
He sits down on the bench. I stand there for a minute, watching him get lost in the memory of his mother.
“I think about her every day,” he says. “And I miss her. Every. Single. Day.”
“I know.”
He looks up at me earnestly. “I want you to know, I’m going to be there. When it happens to you. I will be by your side the whole time, if you’ll let me. I promise you that.”
People are making a lot of promises to me lately. I nod. I sit down on the bench next to Christian and gaze at the mountains, where I can barely make out the white point of the Grand Teton. A breeze lifts my hair, blows it onto Christian’s shoulder.
This is the most beautiful place for a cemetery. It’s peaceful here, removed from life and all its worries, but also still connected to it. Overlooking the town. Watching over us. This is the perfect place for Mom’s body to rest, I think, and in this moment, when I imagine her here as something other than a recurring nightmare, it’s the first time I picture what will happen after she dies. Not the funeral or the graveside, or the stuff in my vision. After. We’re going to leave her here, and it’s all right. When it happens we will put her body to rest here, in this beautiful place, by Christian’s mother. I’ll come up here once in a while like he does, and lay flowers on her grave.
Christian slips his hand into mine again. “You’re crying.”
I lift my free hand up to my cheek; he’s right. I’m crying. But it’s a good kind of crying, I think. Maybe it means I’m letting go.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” I say.
That’s when he says, ?
??Clara, there’s something I need to tell you.”
He stands up. He keeps hold of my hand and moves in front of me. The afternoon sun strikes his hair and makes a golden lining around him. I squint up at him, into his eyes.
“Your dad’s an angel, and your mom’s a Dimidius,” he says, “which makes you a Triplare.”
“How do you even know what that is?” I gasp. I thought it was some kind of super secret.
“My uncle. When I was ten years old he sat me down and told me all about the Triplare, how rare they are—he believes only seven Triplare ever walk the earth at the same time—how powerful they are. How they must be protected, at all costs.”
Is that what he wants, I wonder, to protect me? Is that what the I’ll-always-be-here-for-you stuff is really about? Is his purpose to be a kind of guardian for me?
“I’ve been wanting to tell you for months,” he says. “I thought it was just going to burst out of me at times, like in Alien.”
“Wait,” I say. “You’ve been wanting to tell me what? That I’m a Triplare?”
“I’ve known since that Angel Club with the glory.” He runs a hand through his hair, blows out a long breath. “But I suspected it since the fire.”
I stare at him. How could he have known that I’m a Triplare even before I did?
“I’ve never told this to anybody,” he says. “My uncle has pounded it into my brain again and again: no one must know. No one. Not even the other angel-bloods. Especially the other angel-bloods, as a matter of fact. He says there isn’t anybody, not anybody, you understand, who we can trust.”
His hand tightens in mine.
“But he’s wrong,” he says fiercely. “Even though you say you’re bad with secrets. You didn’t tell Tucker, when you thought he was going to die. That took strength. You’re so strong, Clara, you don’t even know. You’re amazing. You’re beautiful and brave and sarcastic and hilarious and I think . . .” He takes a breath. “My visions keep telling me, over and over and over again, that I can trust you. I can trust you.”
Something shifts in his face. He’s going to tell me. He’s going to throw caution to the wind and put it all out there.
“My mother was a Dimidius. She was beautiful, so unbelievably beautiful it almost hurt to look at her sometimes. Like you. And almost twenty years ago, she was seduced by a Watcher, who thought he could collect the most beautiful angel-bloods in the world. And that’s how she ended up with me.”
I’ve had a lot of bombs dropped on me this year, enough mind-shattering revelations to last a lifetime, in my opinion. But nothing quite like this, like Christian staring me down with gleaming green-gold eyes, eyes like his beautiful mother’s, telling me that his father was a Black Wing.
“You’re a Triplare, too,” I whisper.
“Yes.” There’s relief in his voice. “Don’t you see what that means?”
He doesn’t say it, but I know. We belong together. We’re two of a very rare kind. Meant to watch out for each other, meant to join hands and walk side by side, through fire, through death, meant to guard and protect and . . .
I feel like I’m falling from far up, plummeting to earth, and at the same time, drowning in a deep pool, struggling upward toward the surface, my lungs bursting for air.
He pulls me to my feet. “I didn’t know at first, how I felt about it. I didn’t want to be forced, you know? I wanted it to be my choice. But every time I’m around you, it feels right,” he says. “I feel stronger. Braver, even. I feel the glory inside me, this power moving through me. I feel like I could do anything, face anything. With you.”
I wish he would stop talking. I wish the forest would stop spinning around me, wish I could step outside of my body right now and ask myself, So, Clara, what do you think?
But I don’t know.
I love Tucker, I think.
His eyes grow sober. “I know.”
“You do?”
“I loved Kay. Whatever that says about me, I did love her. Part of me still does. My uncle says it’s because she was my first love. He says we never really get over our firsts.”
Right. But Tucker’s not just my first love. He’s my present.
“I had to choose,” Christian says. “Last year, when I started to understand that my vision was more than a search and rescue for some mystery girl.” The side of his mouth hitches up briefly. Me. His mystery girl. “When the vision showed me how it was supposed to be, the way we took hands, and . . . touched, and how I felt in that moment, I knew then that I had to choose. It wouldn’t have been fair to Kay. So I broke up with her.”
He closes his eyes for a second, and I catch a hint of the turmoil he still feels when he thinks of Kay.
There must be something I’m not seeing in that girl. There must be.
“I had to choose,” he says again. “And it wasn’t like I had to choose between you and Kay; I hardly knew you then. I had to choose who I was going to be. But now . . . Clara, I think . . .”
“I have to go,” I say, pulling away from him abruptly. “I can’t think. I can’t choose.”
To my bewilderment, he smiles, this completely sweet, sinful smile that sends a flock of butterflies straight to the pit of my stomach.
“What?” I demand to know. “What is it now?”
“You’re not going to go,” he says.
“Watch me.”
“I’ve been having a vision of this place, too.” This stops me from my wild, cowardly (how can he think I’m brave?) retreat back to the road. I turn. He’s still standing there by his mother’s grave, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking at me with such heat behind his eyes that a tremble works its way through me from my head to my toes.
“You’re having a new vision, too?” I ask.
“It’s right here.” He walks toward me, his strides long and purposeful across the grass. “Right now. I’ve been seeing it for weeks, and it’s happening right now.”
He stops in front of me.
“This is the part where I kiss you,” he says.
And that’s when, there under the swaying pines, the trembling aspens on Aspen Hill, in the waning sunlight of that late spring day, with birds singing over our heads, traces of earlier tears still drying on my face, and the faint smell of roses in the air, Christian Prescott kisses me for the first time. He pulls me in.
I’ll never, if I live to be my full hundred and twenty years, forget the way he tastes. It’s not anything I can describe, it’s just Christian, a little sweet and a whole lot of spice, and it feels, in that moment, absolutely right. His fire and mine combine, and it’s greater than any forest fire, hotter than the hottest part of flame. Any walls I’ve tried to build between us crumble down. His heart pounds beneath my palm. He wasn’t lying to me just now. This is his vision, his dream literally coming true, and it is everything he thought it would be. More. I am more than he ever could have hoped for, ever could have dreamed. His mystery girl. The girl he was meant to find. And now I belong to him like he has always belonged to me.
It’s this thought that brings me back to myself. I reel backward, breaking the contact between us with an agonizing force of sheer will.
“I’m not yours,” I gasp up at him, and then I run. Because if I stay one more second I will kiss him back. I will choose him.
So I push away, tear off through Aspen Hill Cemetery like the devil is chasing me, and then I fly, not caring if anybody sees me, shooting like a falling star across the sky, toward home.
Chapter 18
The Alternative to Me
I stay home from school the next day, and no one gives me grief about it.
After school Angela calls me.
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m really, really, ridiculously sorry, okay? It was stupid to get jealous. I’m so over it.”
She thinks I cut school to avoid her.
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have read you. You kind of deserve what you get, when you read what somebody else feels a
bout you.”
“Still, it wasn’t cool. I shouldn’t have felt that way.”
“We can’t always control what we feel,” I tell her. Boy, is yesterday the perfect example of that. “Hey, I’ve been jealous of you, too, occasionally. And this thing with my dad was a big surprise. You’re only half human.”
This last bit was meant to be a joke. Only she doesn’t laugh.
“So you . . . forgive me?” she asks. It’s strange whenever Angela sounds vulnerable, when she’s usually so strong. It lets me see through a tiny window into her world, where I’m her only real friend. If she screws it up with me, she’s totally alone.
“Sure. Water under the bridge,” I tell her.
She sighs. Relief. “Want to come over?”
“I can’t. I have something I have to do today.”
I’m going to see Tucker.
The regional high school rodeo competition this year is being held in the Jackson Hole Rodeo Arena, one of the few times this year the team is competing at home. At the entrance the owner, Jay Hooper, waves me by when I try to pay admission. I’d almost forgotten he’s an angel-blood.
“Because you’re Maggie’s kid,” he tells me.
I don’t argue.
I pick a seat way in the back of the bleachers. I shouldn’t be here, I know, shouldn’t be away from home right now, when no one else knows where I am. But I want to see Tucker. Part of me thinks that if I can just lay eyes on him, I’ll find myself again. I’ll know.
I watch the rodeo as they start up with the calf-roping section, but I can’t concentrate. Ever since yesterday I’ve felt lost in a sea of my own guilt, and it truly feels like I’m underwater. The voices of the announcers sound muffled. I can’t see clearly. I try to breathe and I get a mouthful of guilt.
I let Christian kiss me. I can still feel it tingling on my lips, still taste him.
The thought makes me feel physically ill. This is not me, I think. I can’t be that girl who makes out with another guy when her boyfriend is this strong, amazing, wonderful, loving, honest and totally funny, hot and tumble, you’d-have-to-be-freaking-crazy-to-cheat-on-this-total-catch kind of a guy.