hair in a ponytail and was holding a neat stack of books, looking like a pretty, serious eighteen-year-old. She stared down as Luke locked his car and hustled toward the front gate.
“This is the day?” Lena asked.
“Yes,” Aurora said faintly. “Today.”
Lena shot a troubled look toward Aurora. “Are you sure...?”
Beside her, sixteen-year-old Aurora only had eyes for Luke. Dressed in a white sundress with her only ornament her dazzling, tumbled hair, her eyes followed his every move. Her heart was beating so fast she couldn’t speak. She pressed her lips together and nodded.
“Oh, Aurora,” Lena said.
“I have to go,” Aurora managed.
And despite her misgivings, true to form, Lena reached to brush Aurora’s hair away from her face and told her, “Good luck.”
* * *
Luke passed through the front gates and headed automatically toward the B wing for his World History class before he remembered: he was starting tutoring that morning, that’s why he was here so freaking early. He reversed direction toward the central quad and crossed the brick courtyard to greetings from passing students he wasn’t sure he knew.
“Hey, Luke.”
“What’s happening, Mars?”
It was weird how everyone knew him, or thought they did. It made it look on the surface like he had a whole slew of friends, when actually he didn’t have any one close friend at all. Besides dating, which admittedly he did a lot of, he usually hung out with groups of guys, mainly the team. So he was never alone. But that could get kind of lonely.
Some of the team were gathered in the center of the quad already, the ones who had zero period, the one before school started. Luke had never understood why anyone in their right mind would want to start school any earlier than they had to. But now he had to, all because of his crap history teacher.
History wasn’t his favorite subject, anyway, but this year the teacher was just out to get him. Jenks was notorious for hating the jocks and Luke was sure he lay awake nights looking for ways to penalize them. Not that some of Luke’s teammates didn’t deserve it. No doubt Jenks had been one of those kids that naturally got picked on in school, and grew up to be one of those teachers that kids liked to torture. But Luke had never participated in any of that; the pranks were almost always instigated by Tomas Tomasson, a swaggering, egotistical halfback on the team who Luke privately disliked at least as much as Jenks probably did.
As Luke came up on them, the guys looked surprised and then amused to see him as they razzed, “Hey, is that Mars?”
“Someone set your clock ahead?”
“Mars, up before eight? Is the world ending or something?”
Luke scowled and slowed to talk. “Damn Jenks,” he muttered.
It was a testament to the general hatred of Jenks that the guys actually made sympathetic noises. “Oh, Jenks,” Tanner said knowingly. “What’d he get you for?”
“Who the hell knows?” Luke grumbled. “I’ve turned in every paper, on time, and I’m barely pulling a C. He’s making me get tutoring to stay on the team.”
“Sucks, man.”
“Don’t sweat it. Not like they can kick you off.”
“Well, they’re not going to,” Luke swaggered, but inside he was not so sure. He was just going to have to make this tutoring thing work.
“So...Val? Homecoming?” Stu asked him in that verbless way he had.
Homecoming. Luke knew there had been something he was trying not to think about. And Val.
Val was his personal cheerleader; every guy on the team had his own. Luke’s was a dark-haired and fiery beauty. The personal cheerleaders brought cookies or gifts for their team member on Game Day, wrote encouraging little notes and cheered them by name on the field. Some of the more feminist girls and teachers in the school were rumbling about abolishing the tradition of personal cheerleaders, but with the team on a winning streak that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
And it’s not like Val was what anyone would call subservient; her Game Day gifts always had an edge to them that was both exciting and unnerving, a sexy game that she was playing that only she seemed to know the rules of. Luke and Val weren’t going steady but they were an item. He just wasn’t so thrilled with the idea that she expected him to ask her to Homecoming—that in fact everyone did. Where were these things written, anyway? It was like he had no choice about it.
He felt irritated and a little lost.
He knew he had a good life, but there were times that he felt strangely unfulfilled. He couldn’t have said what more he could want, and yet, something felt lacking, some purpose. And then he’d score the winning touchdown and hear the cheers of the crowd, and see Val cheering just for him...
“Would that be a yes or a no?” Tanner prodded.
Luke thought of Val, those legs that went on forever and the way a sweater clung just like skin to her perfect breasts, and that black hair and those black, sultry eyes...and that mouth...
Well, hell, who wouldn’t ask her?
“I guess,” he said nonchalantly. The guys gave one another knowing looks.
“Later,” he told them, and headed toward the library.
* * *
Aurora walked down the locker-lined hall, headed toward the library. She was still getting used to her teenage body and she was so nervous; she really felt sixteen, something she hadn’t felt since—well, since she had been playing sixteen, at this very high school.
The Norns didn’t have to live as mortals, of course; it was just more fun to interact that way. Gods and Norns alike had a long history of intermingling with humans. It had always been a kind of charming game.
But with Luke it had been different. It wasn’t a game at all. Aurora wanted to see the world through his eyes, feel what he felt, explore what he explored—taste, touch, hear, see, smell, sense everything that he did. And it all felt new because she was experiencing it with him.
She wasn’t sure when her feelings had changed, when she started losing her objectivity. Norns weren’t supposed to fall in love with their human charges; it was wrong, it was forbidden. But fallen she had.
She’d cried for him when his parents died, and watched hopefully as his grandmother had picked him up at the hospital to bring him back to what would become his home. That was the first day she’d appeared to him in real life, in the form of a little neighbor girl who could cry with him and laugh with him and hug him for real when he was sad. And more and more Aurora found herself not just watching over Luke but empathizing with him in a way that was different than it had been with her other mortal charges.
She was immortal, of course, but she felt like she was his age, that she had the same feelings he did. Was excited by the same things, was scared by the same things, saw the same colors, wanted the
