The Gathering Dark (21 page)

Keira tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. “So, why can I see it, then? Why can you?”

Walker stared at her. “Because Darkside is part of you. It’s your world too. That’s why you see the marks on my skin, and now yours, too, when no one else can. You’re as much Darkling as human, Keira. Your mother’s human, but your father’s a Darkling.”

Her dad wasn’t human? Was he serious?

She shook her head, her thoughts buzzing like angry bees. “That doesn’t make any sense, Walker. If there are two worlds that can’t interact, then how could my parents come together to make a
baby
?”

Walker’s smile was sorrow-filled. “I didn’t say they
couldn’t
interact. I said they weren’t meant to. A few Darklings have a flaw in their molecular structure, like a DNA mutation. It allows them to slip between the worlds and touch humans. But it turned out to be a really, really bad idea for them to do that.”

“And you just—you just
guessed
that I might be one of their kids?”

Walker’s eyes grew stony—cold and serious. “No. I saw that you’d developed an immunity to heat.”

“What? I have? How did you know that?” She remembered the shirt, the one Jeremy had burned, that first day she’d met Walker, and shivered.

“That first time we were in the diner, the tea you had was boiling hot. You should have burned yourself on it, but you drank it without even blinking.”

Something in Keira’s mind slammed shut, like a mental security gate. “I don’t believe you.” She sounded like a petulant child, but she didn’t care. “If you don’t want to see me anymore, all you had to do was say so. Making me think I’m insane and trying to sell me this crazy story . . . ” She backed away from him. “It’s a real asshole move, Walker.”

“Keira, I’m not lying to you.” He reached for her. “I . . . look.
Look.
”

She waited. And waited. In the silence, she could hear the strangled panting of her own breath. Nothing happened.

“What?”
she finally demanded. “What am I waiting for?”

Walker’s mouth moved. She could see him talking, but there was no sound. He stepped over to her but he didn’t stop. He walked right through her.

A sound somewhere between a sob and a shriek rattled in her throat. Keira spun to face him. She reached out to touch Walker’s face, but her hand slid through his cheek.

Her voice was barely a whisper. “No.” It was too much
to take in. It couldn’t be. It
wouldn’t
be. As long as she didn’t believe it, it would all go away.

She stepped away from him and ran straight into the merry-go-round. “I don’t believe you.” Her voice grew loud. Shrill. “I don’t
believe
you! Just leave me
alone.
”

Someone else appeared behind Walker in the gloom of the church. Beneath the figure’s hooded robe, Keira saw a guy with a crooked nose and she recognized him in an instant. It was the disappearing pedestrian. From the day of her car accident. He was here.

And it turned out it hadn’t been any old pedestrian. It was Smith.

Her panic anchored her to the ground.

Smith was Walker’s cousin. That made him a Darkling too.

A Darkling who was dating her best friend.

Walker spun and his expression hardened. He said something to Smith. Keira could see now that it was a robe, and not a coat that Smith wore. Walker looked back at Keira.

Keira turned away from Walker’s stricken expression. She watched as the church disappeared and the damp, gray park sprang up to fill the vacant space. As fast as she could, Keira ran. Walker’s voice rang through the park.

“Keira! Keira,
wait.
Please, you have to listen to me!”

She ignored him.

She’d taken the footpath home from this park a thousand times. In ten minutes, she’d be home. She’d be inside the familiar
walls of her familiar house, which felt a lot safer than the empty church that appeared and disappeared inside the park with no warning.

She wasn’t going back there. Not to the park and not to the church. Not ever.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

H
ALFWAY TO THE HOUSE
,
Keira’s phone started buzzing in her pocket. After three calls in a row from Walker, she turned it off. She raced up the driveway and into the house. Inside, the door to the front hall closet hung open. Keira could see the wedge of emptiness inside, where her father’s coats had hung that morning.

“Hello?” she called, her voice half-choked, hoping her dad was still home. She wanted—
needed
—to see someone familiar.

The only response she heard was the furnace humming through the vents.

He was already gone.

And she was alone.

Keira shrugged off her coat, trying to get rid of the damp smell of the park. She staggered over to the piano and collapsed onto the bench, resting her head against the music stand. She sat, staring down at the keyboard, waiting for her breath to even out. For her heart to slow down. A blur of things she didn’t want to examine slid through her head again and again.

She stumbled over to the ancient computer that her parents kept in the dining room. After it finally wheezed to life and plodded its way onto the Internet, she typed “dark matter” into the search engine.

The results brought her simmering headache to a rolling boil. There were university pages and online encyclopedias and astrophysics journals, but even the most simple-looking introductory sites were full of physics terms she didn’t understand and numberless equations that didn’t make any sense.

She picked through it like a dish of spoiled berries, looking for something worth eating. Here and there she caught a sentence, once or twice even a whole paragraph, that she could grasp.

Walker had been telling the truth. Scientists seemed to agree that for the universe to work the way it did, there had to be something more out there than the stuff that humans could see.

Something invisible.

Something dark.

Something that worked exactly how Walker said it had. The molecules moved through the regular world without anyone feeling them, hearing them, or seeing them.

Except Keira.

There were pages and pages about the experiments scientists were doing to find dark matter—smashing atoms together in Switzerland, arguing about theories at Berkeley—and part of her wanted to laugh, because she’d already found what they were looking for.

They might as well hand over the Nobel Prize now.

She flipped off the computer and went back to the piano. She didn’t even put her hands on the keyboard. She just sat there, looking at the black keys nestled so neatly between the white ones, the same way Walker’s world pressed up against hers. The difference was, she liked having both kinds of keys on the piano. She wasn’t at all sure she liked having an extra world in her life.

Vaguely, she heard the furnace shut off, and then later kick on again, driving out the chill that had settled in the room. The house phone rang a couple of times. Once, Keira heard her mother leave a message, saying she’d be back later that night. The other times, the line disconnected after the machine picked up.

She knew it was Walker.

Finally, his voice drifted through the living room. “Keira, please. Call me back. I know this must be hard to understand,
to accept, but—there are still things I need to tell you. Please.” There was a pause, then a click as he hung up.

Her back stiff, Keira stood up from the piano and turned off the answering machine, setting the phone’s ring volume to silent. Slowly, the trepidation seeped out of her and questions started to shape themselves around what little Walker had told her about Darkside.

If what he’d said was true, then did it really mean her father wasn’t human? Was
that
why he and her mother fought all the time? And how the hell had Walker found her, anyway?

The danger Walker’d hinted at sent a shiver through her. She had to call Susan. There must be some way to warn her about Smith without sounding completely insane.

Keira grabbed her cell phone and turned it on before she could second-guess the decision. Or, twenty-second-guess the decision, more like. As soon as the screen glowed to life, she punched the speed dial for Susan’s phone.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Keira. Oh, my God, I’ve been calling and calling. Are you okay?”

Keira’s mouth went dry. Susan knew already? Had Smith said something himself?

“Keira?” Susan’s worry poured through the phone.

“Sorry. I . . . ” She forced back a crazed giggle. “I don’t know if I’m okay or not, actually.”

“I don’t blame you. Why didn’t you call me right away?”
Susan said. “My mom ran into your mom at the mall earlier. She told her about your parents separating. Keira—I’m really sorry. I knew they fought a lot, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

Oh. Right. Her parents.

“I guess I was too shocked to talk.” Keira blew out a long breath. “But yeah. I’m ninety-eight percent sure my dad’s having an affair.”

“Oh, crap. That’s horrib—” A call-waiting beep interrupted Susan. “—ow could he do that to you g—”
Beeeeep
.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I
want
to know,” she said over another beep. She knew without checking that it was Walker, calling again. She was tempted to dump him into voice mail.

“Who’s beeping in?” Susan asked.

“No one,” Keira said a beat too quickly.

“Walker?” Susan asked, her voice cooling.

“Yeah,” Keira admitted. “We’re—he’s . . . Things got kind of complicated.”

Susan sighed. “Smith said that might happen.”

Keira finally understood what people meant when they said their blood ran cold. Her skin seemed to freeze from the inside out. “He did?”

“Yeah. I’m so sorry. But listen, Smith said something about having some friends who’d be really interested in meeting you. Guys who are way more important than Walker, he said.”

Keira leaned her forehead against the wall. What guys was
Smith talking about? Susan had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. Actually, neither did Keira.

“Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Smith’s not the guy you think he is and—” The beeping started again.

“Jesus. Is that Walker calling every thirty seconds?”

“Uh, yeah, actually.”

“Wow. Stalker much?” Susan asked, but there was genuine worry in her voice.

“It’s not that . . . ” A thread of defensiveness stitched an edge into Keira’s voice. “We’re sorting some things out.”

“Oh. Well. Whenever you’re finished dealing with him, let me know. If you want to come over here, where he can’t get ahold of you, that’d be okay. I’m leaving in a while to meet Smith, but you can come with me. We can all hang out.”

Every cell in Keira’s body felt too heavy too move. “I guess I need to answer him.”

“Fine. Call me when you shake him off.”

Keira switched calls, punching the button ferociously. “Hello?”

“Keira, thank God. Listen, I’m sorry about how things went in the park. I feel terrible. I understand why you’re scared and pissed, and you have every right to feel that way. But there’s more you need to know and—”

“You have five minutes,” Keira snapped, willing herself not to melt under his apology. “Talk fast. And if I think you’re screwing with my head, I’m hanging up.” She paced in front of the window.

“So you know that you—we—aren’t completely human. And obviously, you’ve started to see Darkside. The one thing we have going for us is that it doesn’t seem like they’ve sent any Seekers after you. But that’s not going to last long. When they realize what I’ve done, they’ll—”

The glass windowpane next to Keira shimmered, and a black-gloved hand reached into the living room, grabbing the air less than an inch from her arm. She could hear the quiet slap as the fingers curled into a frustrated fist.

For the second time that day, Keira screamed. She leapt away from the window, and the hand blurred into nothingness. The water-spotted glass looked utterly normal. The evening outside was undisturbed and calm as a prestorm sea. But her heart rattled in her chest.

Walker begged her to tell him what happened.

“Someone tried to grab me. Someone reached through the window, right through the goddamn glass, and tried to grab me!” Keira edged out of the living room, her eyes scanning the yard for some sign of her attacker. “Oh, my God. I need to call the police. What if they come back?”

A door slammed on Walker’s end of the line. “Damn. They know. Listen to me, Keira. The police can’t do anything,” he growled. “And whoever tried to grab you
is
coming back. I will be there in five minutes.
Five minutes
.” She heard the purr of his car starting. “Keep moving. Don’t stand still. And whatever you do, you stay focused on the human world. Think about your
dad. Your piano. I’ll be right there.” The line went dead.

Keira backed into the corner of the kitchen table and bit back a shriek of surprise. Her eyes darted over the room. There was no part of her that doubted what Walker had told her earlier. She still didn’t want to believe it, but ignoring this other world wasn’t going to make it go away.

It would just make it easier for them to come for her.

She edged her way around the table, crossing her arms. The light from the hanging lamp poured over her. Her forearms were bumpy with gooseflesh and marred by a series of black dots and dashes, like some kind of dark-matter Morse code.

The insides of her cheeks filled with the sour taste of bile and she squeezed her eyes shut against the marks. The second her kitchen was out of sight, terror blazed through her. With her eyes closed, she didn’t know where she was. If she wasn’t looking, she couldn’t see them coming for her.

Her eyes snapped open and she stared resolutely at the glowing numbers on the microwave clock. Four minutes until Walker would be there.

The silence of the house pressed in on her.

Three minutes.

Her skin quivered, feeling a breeze that shouldn’t have been blowing through the kitchen. Instinctively, she hurried over to the counter and grabbed a stray T-shirt her father had left on the counter, clutching it like a security blanket.