When her gaze met his, her irises were luminous, pooling bright silvery purple, a definitely inhuman glow.
He’d awoken the beast in her.
Good.
“What are you?” she whispered.
Jesse took a step back to clear his head, to free himself from the tendrils of her sorcery. It’d be easier for both of them if he could think straight.
Right. He needed to focus. He’d waited his lifetime for this moment, but, even so, the words came with difficulty.
It was never painless to bare a soul.
“I am both less than you and more,” he said. “An alchemist, an amalgamation of two opposite realms. I’m the fabric of the stars.”
Chapter 15
There are certain moments in life when hard, hot truth shines at you like a spotlight from heaven, like the focused beam from a lighthouse on the shore of yourself, and you find yourself stripped naked in its light. You can’t hide from it. You can’t close your eyes and wish it away. It’s truth; easy truth or unbearable truth, either way, it won’t be vanquished. And there you are for all to see, stuck in its merciless glare.
One of those moments for me came that night with Jesse, there in his cottage in the island woods. I was caught in the glare of not one but three impossible truths:
I wasn’t human.
Neither was he.
And he had kissed me. On the lips.
One of those truths—I couldn’t even tell which—kept me standing in place before him with a hand pressed to my mouth, as if I could hold in the soft, lingering sensation of that kiss, the cinnamon-vanilla-rain taste of him. The last bit of heat from his body, which I was already growing cold without.
My eyes were wide as saucers as I stared up at him, so I shut them, opened them again.
I was a … what?
He was of the stars?
The candle flame continued its merry little dance, undaunted by anything but the breeze. A cricket hopped close to the door, right up close, and chirped a few bars before leaping back into the dark.
Jesse was looking down at me with that patient expression, a suggestion of worry now mixed in. This time he was clearly waiting for me to say something, so I said, “Oh.”
Brilliant. I still couldn’t bring myself to lower my hand, so I’d said it around my fingers.
“Are you breathing?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I can prove it,” he said. “My part, at least. Not yours.”
He didn’t need to prove it. I believed him. It was crazy, as wildly insane as anything I’d ever heard at Moor Gate—but I believed him.
Yet the words remained stuck behind my closed lips.
He walked to the piecrust table, threw a glance over his shoulder at me through the fall of his hair to make sure I was still paying attention. As if I’d be looking anywhere else.
He needs a haircut, I thought, my mind clinging to any sliver of rationality. He needs a haircut, but it looks so good like that.
“You don’t have to come closer,” Jesse said. “In fact, you shouldn’t. But watch.”
His arm stretched out. His hand reached down, index finger pointing, the others slightly tucked, a familiar contour both elegant and timeless, like that Michelangelo painting on the ceiling at the Vatican. He touched a single petal of one of the white flowers that he’d shaped into that half circle on the wood. Touched just the very tip of it.
And light poured out of him at the touch. Light, golden as he was but shimmering brilliant, a shower of sparkles, of glittering diamonds or gold-leaf confetti—I was processing what was happening but wasn’t; for heaven’s sake, he was shooting light. In an instant it engulfed not only the flowers but his hand, and then his arm, and then all of him, and Jesse Holms became the spotlight that I could not bear to see, and I had to turn my face away from his brilliance and truth.
Shadows cut crisp and black around me. The table, all the chairs, every tuft of the rug, every wooden plank of the floor, illuminated. I heard the air leave my lungs again. The thin whoooo of my breath, hollow as could be.
I sucked it back in, and the golden light faded.
His back was to me. His shoulders were bowed. He stood for a moment without moving, but there was something about him anyway that read pain. He stood as if he hurt, his body held smaller, tighter, than it’d been before. His face was a pale mask