Conspiracy Boy (Angel Academy) (11 page)

Jack started to protest, but he barely got the first words out.

With one hand, Petra grabbed at my arm, careful not to scratch me with her talons. The other swatted Jack out of the way like a discarded scrap of Kleenex. Every instinct screamed at me to fight, but it was all happening too fast. My brain burned with the image of Jack hitting the wall and collapsing onto the floor. It spun ugly shadows to life inside my heart.

“Petra.” Luc stepped forward. “You can’t take her in there alone. She’ll die.”

“Where we’re going, she won’t be alone,” Petra snapped, glancing back at the portal. It had already started to shrink, the edges sewing themselves together like a healing wound jacked up to fast-forward.

In the distance, Lori’s voice pulsed through the door, along with an ungodly pounding. “Jackson, what’s going on? Let me in.”

I opened my mouth to give the command “
Abertura,
” but Petra’s hand clamped over my throat and squeezed until I thought my face might explode.

Not much for subtlety, that girl.

As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered even if I
had
given the command, since less than a second later, the door fell in with a hard crack. A gush of air whipped over me, rippling the rift to the Crossworlds.

Things happened fast after that, faster than I could process.

Through the haze of movement that followed, I was able to register three things. The first was Jack, still huddled on the floor, launching a metal blade at the spot where Luc’s sock shelf used to be—the spot Petra’s head now occupied. The second was Petra, plucking the knife out of the air and chucking it back toward Jack.

And the third—the most frightening of all—was Lori Hansen.

In Luc’s closet.

Before the knife had even left Petra’s hand, Hansen had already leaped forward. For a second, I thought she intended to jump in front of Jack, to take the knife for him. But her angle was off. Sure enough, she crashed into Luc, sending him careening forward. Directly into the path of the knife, on a perfect collision course with me, Petra, and the gaping maw of the open rift behind me.

That’s when things got really awful.

Sometimes I think about the last lecture Professor Templeman gave before he died. It was the final class of our junior year, and he’d just concluded a section on human philosophers. He’d left us with a quote from William James: “Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”

That moment, as I pried open my eyes to the ragged huff of someone’s breath on my face, I decided half awake didn’t sound too bad.

“Luc? Is that you?”

The only answer was a soft gurgle.

I patted the pine-needled ground until I found the shattered remnants of my cell phone then waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. It didn’t take long.

Overhead, a canopy of snow-dusted leaves stretched across the charcoal-silver sky, making everything shimmer. Even the trees’ breath had condensed into an inexplicable metallic fog. High in the distance, the bright moon hovered, casting odd-shaped shadows over the uneven ground.

And over the decidedly Luc-shaped body convulsing next to me.

Yeah, I didn’t need anyone to tell me how badly I’d screwed up. Even a mentally challenged fruit fly could have figured that one out.

Civitas terrena.

City of Earth.

The words sounded pretty innocent. Not too demony. Definitely not apocalyptic. And yet, somehow, that phrase had managed to land us in the middle of an icy forest with no money, no food, and no means of communicating with any form of civilization. It almost made me regret ditching Petra inside the portal.

Almost.

“
Illuminé,
” I said, opening my palm faceup. We might be otherwise screwed, but at least we’d be able to see, right?

Wrong.

In theory, when I gave that command, a floating orb of warm light should have coalesced above my hand, changing the visual from a scary Grimm-scape to a friendly, navigable grove of trees. Unfortunately for me, what
should
happen and what
does
happen rarely have much to do with one another.

“
Illuminé,
” I called louder, flexing my fingers.

A few stray sparks danced just under my skin but died almost immediately.

“My powers aren’t working,” I said. “Luc, why aren’t my powers working?”

This time he made a few hacking noises, then fell silent. Which concerned me. Luc wasn’t exactly known for his silence in the wake of someone else’s failure, so the fact that he didn’t seize the opportunity to tease me came as a surprise. In fact, it alarmed me more than the forest or the darkness—or anything else that’d happened since I opened my eyes.

Careful not to jostle him, I shifted upright and trained my gaze on him, waiting for my vision to focus: the outline of his face, pale against the dark brown earth; the shape of his button-down shirt, blue pinstripes stretched over lean, squared shoulders; the dark smudge of red at the base of his neck.

Oh, snap.

I ran my hand up his shoulder until my fingers found the hilt of Jack’s knife. It had lodged below the collarbone, above the heart, thank heavens. Enough to cause a problem, but probably not enough to kill him. Since the blade was originally meant for Jack, I could only assume Petra hadn’t intended death when she threw it. She probably just wanted to stun him like before, so she could get away again. This time with me as her prisoner.

“Luc, try to stay calm. You might have nicked a lung, so panicking is a bad idea right now, okay? Lie still, and I can heal you.”

For a second, I thought he was laughing. Dark specks of blood stained his lips and dribbled out the corner of his mouth. His head moved side to side, but no words came out.

“Quit that,” I said. “The more you move, the longer it’ll take.”

With clumsy hands, he found my wrist, then fumbled his way up to my palm. My empty, powerless palm. He lifted it to a cut at his forehead—a tiny cut, which, despite the time lag since we’d landed, had not begun to reseal itself.

Crud, he was right.

Whatever drain had happened traveling through the portal, it had affected both of us. If I couldn’t power a light command, no way could I power a healing charm. Which meant, if he was going to heal, he’d have to do it on his own. Except that he hadn’t been able to heal the cut on his forehead. How was he supposed to mend a gaping wound like the one in his rib cage?

Yeah, we were screwed.

I leaned closer to his face, where he still struggled for breath. “Don’t freak out. I’m going to try something.”

In the moonlit half darkness, I could just make out his eyebrows cinching together as I wrapped both hands around the hilt of Jack’s knife. It felt cold and familiar between my fingers.

Yeesh. How did I always manage to be the one pulling knives out of boys? It couldn’t be normal courting behavior, could it? Lisa and I had read the
American Girl’s Dating Manual
the year we turned twelve, and let me just say, they
totally
didn’t cover this.

It was on the tip of my tongue to warn him what was coming, but I stopped. I didn’t even like knowing when a Band-Aid was about to get ripped off my knee. If I’d been the one about to get a knife jerked out of me, I probably wouldn’t want to hear about that, either.

“Hold still.”

Luc released a gurgly grunt as the knife slid out and fell to the ground.

Before he could start thrashing, I hooked a leg over his knees and flattened my palms against his wound. Maybe I couldn’t call open a channel. But when I’d tried earlier, there had been a few shreds of power bubbling under my skin—residue from that pesky bond thread. Which meant that if any power was already alive between me and Luc, I could use it to heal. And I shouldn’t need a channel to access it. Short of trying to call back his soul after he died, it was the best chance I had.

“
Salve,
” I whispered, focusing all my energy into Luc. “
Salve pacem.
”

Nothing happened. Not right away, at least.

Healing doesn’t work like normal charms. Most of the commands Channelers give are energy based, so we have to call power out of the Crossworlds to activate them. Healing is different.

My mom once described it as being similar to prayer. Except not church prayer, like when you ask some external deity to help you out. No, it was the kind that emanates from inside you. That desperate, incomprehensible need that reaches deep into your heart and asks exactly what you would sacrifice to have whatever you’re praying for. It requires you to love the object of healing in a very intimate, personal way. It doesn’t have to be all-consuming and huge, the way romantic love feels. But it does have to be
real
. Mom said that’s why I was so good at it—I wasn’t afraid to love.

Of course, that was before she’d died.

And before Lisa left.

And before Jack quit hanging out with me.

Ugh, Jack.
My chest tightened at the thought of him. He would never forgive himself for letting me get snatched. He’d probably knit me a whole new wardrobe by the time I got back. But I couldn’t think about that now. I had to focus on Luc.

Without speaking, I cast a careful glance at him, so handsome and perfect and yet so deeply flawed. If you’d asked me a week ago what I loved about him, I might have said, “Nothing.”

He wasn’t selfless.

He didn’t habitually look for ways to make the world better or send money to starving children in Africa, like Jack did. He didn’t pick up litter or buy sandwiches for homeless people. There were so many nice things the guy
didn’t
do, it’d make your head spin.

Yeah, there were issues. But backstabby family baggage and social climbing aside, Luc did have some redeemable features.

He was honest. He didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t. And after seeing him work with the SUC folks earlier that night, I had to wonder if maybe I’d been off in my estimation of him.

This time, when I pulled my gaze back to Luc, my hands were lit with a pearl glow, that single bond thread weaving over my skin like a restless snake.

“Salve pacem.”

Luc’s body responded instantly. His muscles tensed and his hands knotted into the carpet of pine needles below. I know, technically, he didn’t need to breathe the same way mortals did, but his breath quickened, nonetheless.

Beneath my skin, the bond thread stretched to a vibrating strand, weaving itself around my wrist then diving into Luc’s chest. It wasn’t the wild movement I got with Jack, and there was none of the flashy visual stuff. But it didn’t matter.

Just like Mom said, this felt real.

I wasn’t prepared for the wash of relief as he sat up, his hands clawing at the ground. It took him a second to get oriented—at least that’s what I thought he was doing. He kept looking at the sky and gasping lightly.

My hands held firm over his injury, energy knitting up the wound from the inside. I could feel his heart picking up speed, and I knew it was time to pull back. But before I could, something truly disturbing happened.

Luc kissed me.

It wasn’t the tsunami of heat like when Jack touched me. Instead, it was a smolder. Wine and honey and power—sweet and rich all at once. Light and heat skittered over my skin in a soft sigh, holding me there, urging me not to fight. It felt so weird, kissing someone other than Jack, that it actually took me a moment to react.

“Luc,” I whispered. “You have one second to get your mouth off my face, or I will channel you into four demon realms simultaneously.”

As soon as the words were out, his lips froze on mine and his fingers stilled. I could tell he wanted to say something, but nothing came out. All he could do was flop back on the scatter of pine needles and twigs, clutching at his chest the way humans do in those advertisements for heart disease.

“Sorry,” he breathed. “I’m sorry.”

Apart from nervously fiddling with my new fuzzy scarf, I honestly had no idea how to respond.

Good grief. What was he thinking? Or wasn’t he thinking at all? If Jack suspected for a second there was something happening between me and Luc, he would… Actually, I had no clue what he would do. But it
definitely
wouldn’t be good.

After a second, I stood and brushed the snow and crushed flora off my butt. Not as dignified as I would have liked, but in the middle of the woods, I’d take what I could get.

“So, that happened,” I said after an impossibly painful silence. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about it, do you?”

He glared at me for a second then shut his eyes.

Yeah, I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to talk about it, either. Like, ever.

“You are healed, right?”

For a second, I thought he was going to speak, but instead he threw a hand over his face. That’s how he stayed for another three and a half minutes.

Three and a half minutes.

It might not sound like a long time, but trust me, when you’re sitting in the ass-freezing cold surrounded by nothing but trees and potentially hungry wildlife, three and a half minutes is an exceedingly long time.

“Luc, I know you’re not in the best space right now, but we really need to move. Like, find a cave or something. Maybe build a fire.”

“You go,” he said. “I’m good here.”

“Until you get eaten by a mountain lion.”

But Luc stayed in relax-o-mode. Which I interpreted as admission that he, like me, lacked any clue how to locate a cave or build a fire with no matches and no channeling power.

“We could climb a tree,” I suggested. “But if you fall out, I’m not healing you again.”

“Brilliant,” he mumbled, his face still buried in his elbow pit. “I’d rather perish than endure that again.”

“We’re on the same page, then. Now, get up.”

It took me literally seven minutes, two veiled challenges to his masculinity, and three death threats to get him vertical and moving. Not that we even knew where we were going. The truth was, we could wander in circles and I’d probably never know.