While her expression was probably not the equivalent to utter horror, Amber was pretty sure it came close. But Lulu got her way. Before Amber could argue, she was lying back in a padded chair with cold goop covering her face and a ridiculous cap on her head to keep the other goop on her hair contained. She imagined if Gabriel saw her now that he would not only check her pulse, but would howl with laughter that would make her want to punch him in the head.
In an effort to keep her stress contained, she closed her eyes and allowed the hum of the machines and the senseless chatter to calm her. When she slipped into sleep, she once again had The Dream.
She opened her eyes, and he was there. The handsome male with dark hair and intense gray eyes. The one who loved her.
Saraqael.
The unusual and seemingly powerful name floated through her mind…though Amber knew it wasn’t truly her mind experiencing this encounter. This memory belonged to another.
He reached out and took her hand where it rested on her sickbed. “Did the doctors have any news?” he asked.
She shook her head. It took tremendous effort. The battle against her rare genetic disease had been long and arduous, and she was tired. So tired. But she made the effort of bringing forth a smile for him. He had stood by her for more than a year now, offering her support first through his position as a deacon at the community church, and then as her friend.
For a long moment, he didn’t speak. He simply stared at her. His emotion was obvious. Then he gently brought her hand up. He brushed that hand with his lips before holding it briefly against his cheek. It was as though he knew she would have caressed that cheek if she had only possessed the strength to do so. The tender action had tears flooding her vision.
“I love you more than it should be possible to love another,” he said, his voice hoarse now as he battled his grief. “You know that, right?”
She nodded and communicated with her eyes what she was unable to speak.
“I know you feel the same, my dearest heart.” He gave her a brief smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “There are many things that I wish I had told you before. But now, because I believe it is possible the truths I hold could save your life, I would tell you everything.”
Her breathing quickened. Hope and fear of the unknown had her blinking back more tears. She managed a nod. She had to know.
So, holding her gaze, he spoke his first truth…
“Amber?”
Blinking as The Dream faded, Amber looked up and caught Lulu’s stare. The stylist was using a special puff to remove the facial goop. Amber made a noise in her throat to indicate she was awake.
But her heart drum-rolled in her chest as the last words spoken in her sleep state echoed in her mind.
“I am not human.”
Chapter Two
Gabriel leaned under the hood of the 1984 Nissan 300ZX he shared with Amber and withdrew the dipstick from the engine. Standing and holding it in the sunlight, he assessed the level and color of the oil. Finding it satisfactory, he reinserted the dipstick and moved on to changing the air filter, idly wiping the sweat from his brow with the rag from his back pocket.
He loved working on cars, especially this one. He took great pride in the fact that he had turned the ZX into a rather impressive machine after spending many long hours refurbishing the rusty heap he and Amber had purchased two years before. They had gone together to pick the new parts that would make the car truly theirs, from the black leather bucket seats to the beauty of a V-6 turbo engine. Now, complete with a spectacular custom paint job, the car was a jewel.
Green Day’s “Welcome to Paradise” filled the air, generated by a transistor radio that was older than he was. The song was one of Amber’s favorites, and made him wonder where she was as he removed the old air filter and tossed it into a nearby trash can. She and Mrs. B should have been back from the karate class by now. Normally, he would have gone with them, as he helped Amber train for her tournaments and attended every one. But Mrs. B had asked him to take care of the yard work today since he and Amber would be at the pool party the next day.
He didn’t imagine they had gone shopping since Amber hated that particular activity. He wondered if she had an appointment with her DFCS worker and hadn’t told him about it. The thought concerned him. Those appointments always caused her a great deal of anxiety. She never admitted it and wouldn’t be happy to know he was aware of it, but he knew her very, very well.
Ever since the day he met her nearly six years ago, he’d felt an overwhelming need to look out for her. She had a tough outer shell, but he knew the girl inside that shell was terribly vulnerable. Years of bouncing from foster home to foster home until she joined him at Mrs. B’s had left Amber scarred and leery of forming emotional attachments. Outside of him, in point of fact, she had no close friends at all. He supposed that was why, in part, he did things like convince her to attend the end-of-the-year pool party at Devon Brewer’s house with him when he knew she would rather be just about anywhere else, alone.
As he secured the last of the four bolts to the lid over the air filter housing, the sound of a vehicle turning into the drive caught his attention. His mood lifted as he wiped more sweat from his face and stepped out from under the hood, expecting to see Mrs. B’s car.
Instead, the hot, early-June sun glinted on a silver Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder convertible with the top down. Gabriel’s smile faded as he stifled a groan. Michelle Moran.
Or, as Amber said, “Michelle Moron.” Michelle had asked him out on a date earlier that year. He still regretted having said yes. He could only chalk his lapse in judgment up to the fact that she was the cheerleading captain and last year’s Homecoming Queen, after all. That, and her long, brown hair reminded him a bit of—
“Hi, Gabe!” she called as she shut the engine off.
She was the only one who called him that. He supposed she thought it made her special to use the nickname. He knew it made Amber want to sew Michelle’s lips shut with fine stitches, a thought that now made his own lips twitch in amusement.
Having celebrated eighteen birthdays under Mrs. B’s tutelage, he pushed aside his inherent qualms and turned to his southern, hospitable upbringing. Walking over to her car, he opened her door for her. “Hey, Michelle. How’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s goin’ perfect,” she said as she stepped out of the car, lowering her sunglasses a bit to give him a closer study with her dark eyes. “Especially now.”
“Uh-huh. Can I—” the words lodged in his throat when she leaned in close as he shut her door, all but pinning him against the side of her car. Her flowery perfume seemed cloying and inappropriate in the humid heat. He cleared his throat. “Uh, would you like to come on up to the porch and get out of the sun?”
“Sure,” she said, not stepping back. “That’d be nice. It’s awfully…hot. Ain’t it?”
He winced over the grammar, hearing Mrs. B clucking her tongue in his head. As he was covered in sweat and automotive grease, he figured a response was unnecessary. Of course, he had also figured his condition would repel her out of fear he would stain the white halter top she wore tied just beneath her breasts. It didn’t. Indeed, she leaned a bit closer, giving him a snapshot of her robust cleavage.
It was all he could do not to clear his throat again. “Right. Well, the porch is that way.”
“I know,” she said. Then she finally stepped back and sauntered up the porch steps, her rhinestone-covered flip-flops clicking and her denim miniskirt riding up with each step she took.
Turning from her, he sighed. Then he moved over to the ZX and slowly lowered the hood, trying to figure out how he could possibly get rid of her with the least amount of drama. He suspected if Amber got home while Michelle was still there that the sparks would fly, and he sure didn’t want to get caught in the resulting explosion.
As Lulu continued with her persistent beauty treatments, Amber considered the intensity of The Dream. It had never progressed that far before.
Nor had it ever been so vivid. And that name…Saraqael. That was new, too. What in the world kind of name was that?
Well, she had been obsessing lately about having an incident. She guessed it was only natural that when The Dream decided to make another appearance, it ended in such a weird way.
With more pressing concerns at hand, The Dream faded to the back of her mind. In a weak moment that she barely remembered through the haze of perplexing styling products and Lulu’s repeated assurances, she even allowed the woman to wax her eyebrows and apply some makeup—though she had made her swear on her grandma’s grave it would be subtle.
And subtle it seemed to be, as she didn’t detect any raccoon smudges under her eyes or bloody red paint on her lips when she finally looked in the mirror. Instead, she acknowledged that whatever Lulu had done to her usually unremarkable brown hair had given it much more life, leaving behind what Amber could only think of as a kind of shimmer along with the stylish cut. Her light brown eyes now stood out, highlighted by mascara-enhanced lashes and a touch of neutral-toned eye shadow on her lids. The lip gloss Lulu had used was understated but becoming.
Mrs. B returned just as Amber was settling herself under the nail dryers. She gasped, came to a halt in the room’s doorway and brought a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, Lulu—what a wonderful job!”
Amber felt her face reddening as the ladies hugged and talked about the changes Lulu had managed to implement. The attention was just a step above torturous, to Amber’s thinking.
“We’ll take all of the products you used today, Lulu, from the gloss to the hairspray,” Mrs. B declared.
Amber opened her mouth to protest, but when she glanced up and saw the look in her guardian’s eyes, she snapped her jaw back shut.
After Mrs. B made her purchases and Amber had been cleared for departure, they headed up the basement stairs to the car. Mrs. B kept glancing over at her and shaking her head, making Amber want to run her painted nails through her hair. It occurred to her that she couldn’t remember ever having her nails painted by someone else.
What a strange day. But at least she had managed to escape this experience incident-free.
They reached the car and Mrs. B placed the bag of styling products in the back seat along with what Amber saw were a number of plastic Walmart bags.
Mrs. B grinned at her over the roof of the car. “Just wait until he gets a load of you.”
“‘Til who gets a load of me?”
Raising her eyebrows, Mrs. B studied her another moment, then gave a throaty laugh. “Lord, child, you have so much to learn! Now let’s get in this car and get you home.”
Gabriel approached the front porch, knowing Amber and Mrs. B could be home at any moment. While he wanted to spare Amber the headache of dealing with Michelle, he was also facing the uncomfortable fact that he had used Michelle as the reason for Amber to attend the pool party with him. He had insisted that by serving as his date, Amber would help him avoid going with Michelle. That was certainly true enough, even if it wasn’t his real motivation. By framing it as a favor to him, he had gotten her to agree to it when she otherwise never would.
Michelle hardly knew that, however.
“Come on up here, Gabe.” She sat on the porch swing and rubbed the seat next to her.
He considered and instantly dismissed the idea of offering her something to drink, though he sure could have used a tall glass of sweet tea himself. “So, what brings you by?” he asked, wiping his hands on the rag as he took the three steps up onto the covered porch. He stuffed the rag back into his pocket and leaned against the porch railing rather than sit beside her.
Her red lips moving into a pout, she twirled her ponytail with one hand and lifted the other one to rest on the back of the swing. She lifted one of her tanned legs to the porch railing to give herself a little push, exposing enough of herself to have him flushing uncomfortably.
Smiling knowingly, she answered, “I wanted to share the good news that I found a way for us to attend the pool party together.”
He stilled. “Come again?”
“Well, you said you couldn’t go with me ‘cause you had to take your sister.”
His jaw clenched. Slow anger replaced the flush in his face as he realized what she was doing. And he was suddenly quite all right with shoving the gentleman to the side.
When they arrived home, Mrs. B had to park on the six-foot wide strip of grass near the street since Michelle Moron’s convertible blocked the driveway. Amber recognized the vehicle with a curl of her upper lip. Michelle had been the bane of her existence throughout high school. She had taken every opportunity she could to get under Amber’s skin. And she had always saved her best insults and snide remarks for whenever Gabriel wasn’t around to hear them.
As Amber and Mrs. B got out of the car, their across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Porter, called out to them in greeting from where she knelt weeding her flower beds. Amber assured her guardian that she would take a load of bags up to the house and recruit Gabriel’s help for the others so she could chat with the neighbor. Then she made her way around the tall, lush Italian Cypress trees separating the house from Highway 29 and approached the familiar front porch.
Gabriel faced away from her, his tall, muscular frame supported by the porch railing. She spotted a stained rag hanging from the pocket of his shorts and knew he’d been working on the ZX, one of his favorite weekend chores. A quick glance at the front yard told her he’d also fulfilled Mrs. B’s request to cut the grass. Sweat stains covered his gray T-shirt and glistened on the back of his neck, dampening the dark brown waves of hair that curled there. That didn’t seem to be any kind of deterrent for Michelle, whose split-legged pose would have done any Maxim spread proud.
Amber snorted in dry amusement. If Michelle thought she could capture Gabriel’s interest by acting like a skank, she was impossibly clueless. He may have been one of the most popular guys in school, but he had high standards when it came to the people he hung out with. In her opinion, Michelle didn’t even rank high enough to live in the same zip code as he did.
“Well, you said you couldn’t go with me ‘cause you had to take your sister,” Michelle said when Amber got within hearing range.
Oh, Lord. She rolled her eyes in annoyance, realizing Michelle had come to make another pitch in her attempt to attend the stupid pool party with Gabriel.
“Amber isn’t my sister. She’s my best friend,” he replied in clipped tones.
That brought an unexpected smile to her face. Until she heard Michelle’s next words.
“Whatever. I know that you didn’t want her to go to the party by herself like a loser. And she’s hardly likely to get a date on her own. She hasn’t even got any friends.”
Amber flushed hotly. She stood in rigid fury, staring at Michelle with the distinct desire to chop her in the throat with a hard knife-hand strike.
Then Gabriel responded, “Is that so?”
She guessed Michelle missed the warning in his tone when she said, “I mean seriously. You’ve looked at her, right? I guess since y’all live together you probably don’t notice how she looks. Anyway, I got Jason Harrison to do me a favor. He said he’ll take her.”
Amber battled dueling waves of humiliation and anger. Then an unexpected surge rushed through her, this one much more disturbing than mere emotion. Much more powerful.
Much more dangerous.
“I figure she’ll be beside her little ol’ self,” Michelle continued. “Jason’s so popular that he could go to the party with any girl he wants, but he’s willing to go with her.”
As Amber fought to control the tremors in her arms as well as her rising panic, she watched Michelle get up and approach Gabriel, giving him a head-to-toe study. “Which means you’ll be free to take me.” And now, she ran a fingertip down his bicep, looking up at him over the top of her sunglasses. “And I will most certainly let you. Take me, that is.
“So…what time will you pick me up tomorrow?”
Gabriel caught and held Michelle’s gaze until she finally realized how he was reacting to her words. She lost her smile and wisely took a step back.
“It seems you misunderstood,” he said, his tone degrees beyond cold. “I didn’t say I had to take Amber to the party. I’m taking her because I want to. And if you think that it would’ve been any kind of inconvenience to Jason to go to the party with her, you’re dead wrong.”
She blinked rapidly at that, but then seemed to collect herself. Tossing her head so her ponytail flipped over her bare shoulder, she sniffed. “You just feel sorry for her.”
“Amber’s hardly the one I feel sorry for,” he said, watching the remark hit home. Her jaw flopped open. “Quite frankly, you can’t hold a candle to her. And I’m quite sure you know it.”
“Gabriel.”
Jerking away from the railing at the sound of Amber’s voice, he turned and saw her in the driveway. A grin pulled at his mouth, despite the awkwardness of the situation. Then he noticed that she wasn’t moving and her arms were stiff at her sides. The plastic bags in her hands shook.
Instantly alert, he hurried to her side and took the bags from her. “Hey, Am. You okay?”
She took a deep breath. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but he feared they were more gold than her usual brown. Like last time.
Then she whispered, “I just had a surge.”
“You mean…a surge?” His voice was equally soft and intense. They hadn’t discussed this at all in the past three years. Since the last one.
“Not a full one. Maybe a, um, prelude.”
His jaw tightening briefly, he nodded. “Okay. We’ll both be on alert. You’re okay now?”
“I think so. Yeah.”