“Give me a minute,” he calls from somewhere deeper in the shadows. His voice is stark, restrained.
“What did I do?” I realize that's another question and hope that it's his little game about it being his turn that stops him from answering me. After a full minute he walks slowly back toward the stream. I start to stand, but he holds up a palm to stop me.
“Your wails are not the only noise thatâ¦draws me. Your moans, long sighs, humming. It is all part of your song.”
Faint lines swirl around his upper arms to vanish under the T-shirt. “That's right,” I remember the night on the golf course. “No burping, either.” But the joke doesn't release the tension this time.
“Do you think you can not,” he gestures toward the cookies, “moan within five miles of me?”
“That's your question. I'm going next. And yes, I will try not to make any noise except short, succinct speech.”
Luke nods and sits back in his spot. “All right, your question.”
“Why can't I sing or hum or anything around you? What does it do to you?” He doesn't look like he wants to answer. “I'm not stupid, Luke, I can see that it makes you angry. But why?”
“It's not
me
that gets angry, Jule. It's another part of the curse.” He grabs a cookie and munches on it, but his face doesn't register any reaction to the amazing blend of ingredients.
“There's more?” God, it just gets worse and worse. “I think you need to spell this out, all of it. Like you said, this curse affects everyone involved with you, which includes me.” I won't let myself dwell on how involved I am with him. When I think about his declaration in his room, happy butterflies dance around in my stomach, but with everything else right now, dancing butterflies just might make me puke.
“Since Maximillian killed Deidre, his one true love, he has cursed us to do the same.”
“To break the curse,” I say matter-of-factly even though my pulse speeds up.
Luke's jaw clenches and I wonder if my sighs are also on the no-no list. Probably. I clamp my lips tight. “Yes,” Luke says, “killing my Siren, the girl who calls me with her voice, will break the curse, allowing me to feel love for others. If I don't break the curse, I can only ever love her, love
you
.” He stares intensely at me, watching my reaction. I don't say anything. I wonder half-coherently if he'd love me without the curse.
“Maximillian said,” Luke continues, “that as our love grows for our Siren, so does the power of his curse. It will build up inside us, inside me, increasing my strength, increasing my magicâ¦increasing my aggression, my violence.”
“Towards me,” I state flatly and he nods. “So the more you love me, the more you will want toâ¦kill me?”
“Yes.”
“Is it possible to hate someone I've never met?” I ask, meaning Maximillian. I feel tears sting my eye sockets. Eleven lifetimes without love, alone, empty, pretending for the sake of others, and now Luke will feel like he must kill the only one he can love.
Luke sits back down nearby but doesn't touch me. “I don't even get to hate him.” I look up at Luke, even though I know my eyes are watery. “Hate is nearly the same as love. Most people think of it as the opposite, but it's not. Apathy is love's opposite.”
“So, you don't hate anyone then, either?”
Luke shakes his head.
“Except for me,” I whisper. Luke doesn't respond. I clear my voice and glance at him wide-eyed, hoping the noise didn't sound like a song to him. But Luke just stares at the mossy ground beneath him. I rest my hand on his leg. “I'll hate Maximillian enough for both of us.”
He looks at me with a tight smile. A bird flaps from branch to branch overhead. The stream tinkles its own melody and the leaves flutter in small rushes with the growing breeze. The whole world continues on around us even though the landscape of my personal world has been shadowed, darkened until I barely recognize it anymore.
I've decided to believe Luke. What would be the point of fabricating something so complex that it's really ludicrous? And I felt his strength when he lifted me, saw his fistprint in the cinder-block wall by the auditorium, saw him throw around a huge football player. I've known that Luke was magical since the first time he stared me down, coiled dragon tattoos around his arms. I've apparently lived with my own magic my whole life, so the knowledge of other magic shouldn't be shocking. But it is.
Luke reaches up to comb fingers through my hair. It's tangled from the ride but he patiently works through the cascade of curls and knots. His thumb slides along my cheek and jaw. His eyes are sad, resigned, but resigned to what? A continued existence that equates to hell forever? I won't let myself consider the other option, the other scenario that would make him sad, the option that would allow him to hate the man who did this to him and his family, the scene he'd drawn on the last page of that sketchbook.
Luke's smile has faded. “I'm dangerous, Jule. Mathias and Taylin are right about that. I swear to you, I will do everything I can not to hurt you.” His eyes shut and my chest tightens with panic. “But even with the control I've been building, it would be best for you to stay away from me.”
“I can't,” I say without pause and watch a tightening in his face akin to pain. Yet his shoulders relax, as if the thought of me leaving him warred against his suggestion. “I can't,” I repeat and realize the truth in it. I've been drawn to Luke since that first day on my roof, even when I thought he condemned me for my mother's temporary insanity. “I'm the first chance you've had at breaking that cruel curse in eleven lives. I can't just walk away knowing that you'll continue to suffer forâ¦well, frickin' forever!” My voice rises as I try to comprehend what that would be like, what that would mean. Life would indeed be Luke's hell.
I stand and start to pace around the little clearing, kicking pebbles into the stream. He lets me walk off some of my adrenaline. “God, this must be alien to you,” I say and rake my fingers against my scalp. “All the feelings I'm bringing out in you. If you haven't felt anything but apathy for two hundred years and suddenlyâ”
“Love,” he says.
“And hate.”
“More love,” he raises one eyebrow at my frenzied look. “I'm trying not to kiss you all the time.”
I won't be sidetracked despite the warmth spreading through me at his words. “And what about the other side of the coin? The raging, want-to-slice-my-throat side?”
“I'm handling it.”
“Except when I sing.”
He nods slowly and steps closer. “Except when you sing.” Luke catches my shoulders so I can't pace away.
“You know I have the lead in the school musical.”
“Yeah. My mom's going to wonder why I'm failing art. I've been ditching.”
“But art is across the school.”
“Yeah, my hearing has become quite attuned to you.”
I glance down at my old sandals. “I tried to get out of it.”
Luke's forehead touches mine. He inhales slowly. “You smellâ¦delicious. Like cookies and flowers and Jule all swirled together.” He's changing the subject, but I still have questions.
But the feel of Luke's palm on my cheek, the whisper of his breath against my lips, the sincerity in his words, all wrap around me, pulling me into a world where only he and I exist. No questions and no difficult choices. Just a boy and a girl falling in love.
I step into his arms and tip my head back to study his face. Blue-black eyes hold such depth that it feels like I could fall in. I rest my hand against the beat of his heart, the movement of his breath in and out. I'm enveloped by everything that is Luke. He bends closer until his lips touch mine. Everything about him is restrained except his kiss. My pulse jumps at the intensity of his touch against my mouth and I respond, matching him, slanting, breathing in sync. I hold desperately to my concentration. No sounds. I wrap my last conscious thought around the soft moan that sits trapped at the base of my throat.
Luke pulls back and we breathe against each other. Two things happen simultaneously. “Lean on Me” peals out of my cell phone, and the distant sound of car tires on gravel grows into a squealing roar. We turn toward the immediate threat, the car. Luke blocks my body with his as a familiar old hatchback slides to a stop. The doors whip open and Taylin and Matt leap out.
I hit “talk” on my phone. “Hey, Carly,” I say and wait. Maybe Eric is borrowing her phone again.
“Where are you?” Carly asks but doesn't give me a chance to answer. “I just got the most bizarre call from Matt wanting to know where you are. He made it sound like you were in danger or something. And it sounded like Taylin was flipping out, yelling in the background.”
“Uh, they found me,” I say as the two of them rush forward. Taylin has her hands out.
“Stop!” she shrieks.
“God, she's still yelling,” Carly says. “Where are you? I'm coming.”
“Calm down, Tay,” Luke says, his hand out before him. “I'm fine. Jule's fine.” Matt eyes him critically, then me. I step out from behind Luke so Matt can see I'm not bleeding or dismembered. I wiggle my fingers at him.
“Now's not a great time, Carly,” I say.
“Of course it is. Matt's there, you're there, freaky pierced girl is there. I'm assuming Luke's there, too. Sounds like three against one. Just frickin' tell me where you are!”
I turn slightly, but I'm sure Luke can still hear me. “Some gravel road at the back of Luke's subdivision. Goes out past a cow pasture and turns into a path by a stream.” I can hear Carly's purse and keys.
“I'm on my way.” The phone goes dead.
Everyone is now staring at me. At least Carly knows where to find my body if this all goes bad. “She'd have called my dad and then the police if I didn't tell her.”
Taylin rolls her eyes. “That's just fucking great.”
“Taylin,” Luke reprimands, “calm down. I've explained things to Jule. She knows now that you two are trying to protect her from me.”
Matt raises one eyebrow as he takes in Luke's protective stance in front of me.
Taylin lets out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I guess I am. But I'm not suddenly a Jule Welsh fan. I'm just a very selfish bitch.”
“Who's picked up every foul word from every culture we've lived in,” Matt comments.
Taylin stares me in the eyes. “If the curse is broken for Luke, we lose him when he dies this time. He gets to go on to the great beyond and Mathias and I will be still stuck in this damn curse.” The anger tightening her face breaks, like part of an old wall falling off to expose something underneath. Her black-lined eyes tear as she turns back to Luke. “I may not be able to love you as completely as I did, but I don't think I can exist without you, or the hope that I'll see you again, brother. And yet I don't know how not to exist. So no, I'm not going to let you spill your Siren's blood.”
Taylin's words play through my head. Could it be as easy as “spilling” some of my blood? Like a teaspoon full? Well, I'm not going to bring it up now.
Matt studies me, though he talks to Luke. “Did you explain to her how her voice brings out the curse in you? That you can't control yourself completely when you're around her?”
“If that were true, I wouldn't have been able to break off my attack in the cafeteria,” Luke counters. I catch the back of his T-shirt in my fingers.
“My breaking spell helped with that,” Taylin insists. Was that what she was doing when she yelled stop? “I've been working on spells to mute Jule's magical influence on others.”
“Really?” I step up next to Luke. “Does it work? I have to do the show andâ”
Taylin holds her palms out to me. “I know,” she huffs. “Remember, I have to sit through drama every day with you. Your mesmerizing voice is a serious pain in the ass.”
“Yeah, it is, and much worse lately.” I smile at her and she grins back wryly.
“Since Lucas moved here?” Matt asks, and I nod. In the background, I hear the crunch of tires.
“It's our proximity,” Luke suggests. “Your voice strengthens the curse in me and the curse strengthens the effects of your voice in you.”
“Your voice incapacitates anyone who could try to save you,” Matt explains.
“Hey, everyone!” Carly yells and jogs over from her car parked behind Taylin's.
“Hey, Carly,” I say with the enthusiasm of a death-row convict. The other three remain silent.
“So⦔ she swings her arms in front of her, slapping her hands together as they meet. “What's the theme of this party?”
Luke looks at me.
What?
His eyebrows rise slightly. He wants to know if I'm going to tell Carly anyway. Darn good question. My world has changed from strange to utterly, dangerously bizarre in the space of an afternoon. Carly knows everything about meâ¦well, everything except that there's a secret room with pictures of me in her house. And this doesn't have anything to do with that. Maybe if I bring her into my new nightmare, I won't feel so guilty about keeping her out of my other one.
“It's a pretty ghoulish type of Halloween theme,” I say and turn toward my best friend. “Not for the faint of heart at all, Carly.”
“O-okay,” Carly says her lips thinning. “I'm game. What's up?”
“I'm serious, Carly. Maybe you don't want to know,” I warn.
Carly looks at me like I'm insane, her eyes wide, head tilted slightly forward. “If it has to do with my BFF-sister, then it has to do with me, too. I'm in.” She shakes her head and glances around at the rest of the dour faces.
Taylin slaps a hand against her forehead. “Fuckin' great. Let's just write it up for the Cougar Creek newspaper.” She stalks off to hurl some rocks in the creek.
“Carly,” Matt steps closer to her, but Carly moves toward me.