don’t have to be afraid of me,” she added.
I swallowed hard. “I’m not afraid.”
Freaked out wasn’t afraid. It was freaked out.
“If Bishop says you can resist your hungers, then I’m perfectly fine accepting his assessment. To me, you’re the same as any other human. Just a little more interesting.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said again, firmer.
She smiled at that. “If you say so.”
I needed to gain some sort of control here—even if I was only fooling myself. This was going to be a long walk and I’d spent all my bus money on the plate of nachos at the club as well as the cover charge to get in. I’d had no idea I’d be needing to find another way home other than with Sabrina and Kelly.
But here we were. Me hoofing it home on uncomfortable high heels with my new housemate, Cassandra the Perfect Blonde Angel.
“Zach tells me you’re a host,” I said. I was making the assumption it wasn’t a secret. He hadn’t said it was.
She raised an eyebrow. “And do you know what that means?”
Yeah, that I should watch you carefully for your hidden agenda. “You weren’t human first. You were created as an angel.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. No parents. No siblings...not that I have siblings. But, I mean, most people do.” Like Bishop and Kraven, who came immediately and vividly to mind.
She crossed her arms, keeping her gaze on the sidewalk stretching before us. “It’s not as sterile an existence as you might think. I have a sibling—or someone I consider my sibling. She was created at the same time as me. We’re like sisters.”
“Oh.” Yes, that was my fabulously snappy comeback.
There were some people you felt totally comfortable around. Like Carly, for instance. We knew each other so well we could basically finish each other’s sentences. Also, we didn’t have to be constantly talking. It was a comfortable silence.
I didn’t have that with Cassandra. With her it was uncomfortable silence. One that pressed in on all sides like those collapsing rooms in sci-fi movies, threatening to squish the heroine into something the width of a piece of paper.
“Your supernatural intuition has helped the team,” she said. “I’m grateful that Bishop found you.”
“More like the other way around.”
She looked at me with surprise. “You found him?”
I nodded, thinking back to that night—which was wonderful since I’d met Bishop, but also horrible because, well...I’d met Bishop. He represented the best and worst moments of my life, all in such a short time.
“He was having difficulties keeping his thoughts under control.” That was putting it extremely mildly. “Our paths crossed. We realized that when I touched him his mind cleared.”
“Incredible. You must be an asset to the team.”
I shrugged. Kraven’s earlier words echoed in my head: don’t try buttering me up now, Blondie. “I want to help if I can.”
“Now he’s taken to inflicting pain on himself to get the same result.”
I grimaced. “He has to stop that.”
“I agree. It’s barbaric. But I do have to wonder how he realized such a thing would work for him.”
I’d wondered it, too, at first. But I think I’d figured it out.
Bishop must have realized that pain from the dagger helped clear his head when he’d been tortured by the Source of the grays—who just happened to have been my demon aunt, Natalie, my birth father Nathan’s sister. This was another fact that nobody on the team knew but Bishop.
My aunt was anomalous—a demon with a scary glitch created in the conversion from human to infernal being. She had a disturbing taste for human souls and had been branded a problem that needed to be dealt with, especially since souls, both light and dark, were essential to helping keep the universal balance. She was tossed into the Hollow still alive as her punishment. Nathan, too, had an anomaly—according to what Natalie had told me, he could kill with a touch by absorbing life energy.
Seventeen years later, Natalie escaped and arrived here in Trinity. Her strange ability had evolved. Now she was able to create more creatures with her hunger through the “kiss.” And they could do the same. Like a contagious disease. That was why there was a barrier up, so none of us “infected” could spread this disease to the rest of the world. It was an invisible citywide quarantine that would be here till we were all gone.
Natalie had known who I was. And being that I was the daughter of a demon and an angel, she thought that my nexus abilities could help her on her path of destruction and revenge. To do so, she got Stephen to remove my soul in a single kiss. She’d used the metaphor of removing a lid from a box. The soul was the lid keeping my supernatural abilities closed off to me. As soon as it was removed, the contents of this strange and scary box were finally revealed. She’d also promised that she was the only one who could lead me to my birth father, who still existed...somewhere. I figured he was still trapped in the Hollow.
And yet, even though she presented this “upgrade” to me as something good and beneficial, I still had to deal with the hunger of a gray. She’d told me she believed these hungers would fade for me since I wasn’t totally human to begin with.
The evil woman was a liar about many things.
A week had passed since she’d been killed, and, if anything, my hunger was even worse than before.
So Natalie failed. She died before I could learn more information about my birth father’s whereabouts. But before she was killed she’d used Bishop’s dagger to carve him up as duress to get me to do what she wanted. It nearly worked. I’d been very close to doing anything to make her stop torturing Bishop. That must have been when he’d realized that injuries from the dagger would chase away his growing confusion.
“Are you all right?” Cassandra touched my arm, snapping me out of the horrible memory.
“Yeah, fine.” I inhaled shakily and looked up at the sky. It was clear and black and studded with stars. My eyes burned, but I swallowed back my tears.
I tried to put on a brave face, but this was all still very new to me. I’d gone from being a normal high school student trying to keep a high average in order to ensure a bright future—to not knowing if I’d have a future at all.
Fear was not a friend. All it did was weaken me. I couldn’t let myself be weak.
And I flatly refused to be afraid of this angel. I refused to be afraid of my future. I was in control here. I’d find Stephen and everything would be better again. My life would never revert completely to what I’d thought of as normal, but it would give me time to figure everything out. And it would give me a chance to find Carly again. If my aunt had managed to escape from the Hollow, then she damn well could, too.
I
