I had to agree with that last part.
“I’m sure the Luxen appreciate you standing up for them, but you need to be careful.”
“I am.”
He folded his hand over the bruises. “This tells me you’re not careful enough.” His palm began to warm. “There are people out there who are so controlled by their hate and their fear that they will not think twice before harming someone in the name of whatever they believe in. Even people you thought you knew.”
The warmth rolled up my arm, washing over my elbow. “Are you healing me?” When he didn’t say anything, my eyes widened. “Luc, you shouldn’t do that. It’s just a bruise.” I kept my voice low as I tugged on my arm. “What if—?”
“Nothing is going to happen from a quick healing.” His other hand had folded over mine, and his thumb slid back and forth along the center of my palm. “You’re not going to mutate.”
“How do you know?”
A lopsided grin appeared as his lashes lifted. “I know all, Peaches. Haven’t you learned?”
“You’re not omnipresent.” A pleasant tingling swept over my skin.
He chuckled. “That’s omniscient, Peaches.”
“Whatever,” I murmured, letting my head fall back against the headboard. We needed to talk more about Micah and how Luc really felt, but the tingling warmth was beyond distracting.
His fingers slid away from the bruised area, and I knew without looking that the bruises were gone, but his fingers kept searching, kept caressing. “You won’t have the trace. The—”
“Andromeda serum,” I finished for him. “I remember, but just because I don’t have a trace, does that mean I can’t be mutated?”
His hand smoothed over my upper arm, sending a tight shiver down my spine. My right leg curled. “Not through me healing you.”
I turned my head to him. “Origins can’t mutate humans?”
“Correct.” His palm, calloused over, slid back down my arm. He kissed the center of my hand and then laid it back in my lap. “I remember you mentioning a couple of days ago that you like BuzzFeed Unsolved?”
“I did.” Heidi had introduced me to BuzzFeed Unsolved, and Ryan and Shade were quickly becoming my favorite two humans—well, I assumed they were human and not Luxen. Nowadays, you really couldn’t tell. Not when there were many Luxen out there, unregistered and using those contacts to hide their eyes from the RAC drones.
Human or Luxen, I could really go for Ryan’s dramatic storytelling and Shade’s hilarious wry wit.
“Want to watch a few episodes?” he asked, picking up my laptop.
“Yeah.” I reached over, pressing my finger to the reader to unlock it.
I snuggled down as Luc searched for the episode that had something to do with the Mothman in West Virginia. I struggled to ignore how close we were, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Somehow his legs were under the covers now, and the soft material of his pajama bottoms rasped against my bare legs, leaving me feeling like I needed to shove the blankets off by the time he got the video going.
I tried to pay attention, but within minutes, my thoughts took me back to one of the many things that had driven me to my knees in the bathroom. Had he done something like this with Nadia? Stayed up and watched videos because she—I—couldn’t sleep?
I peeked over at him, hating and loving the tugging motion in my chest when I saw the faint grin on his face as he watched Ryan and Shane traipsing through a forest. Somehow he’d known I was awake, and while there was a part of me that did want to know how, I was also afraid to find out.
Because what if it were some kind of bond, some weird alien bond he’d forged with Nadia that had guided him to my room tonight, because of all the times he’d tried to heal me as Nadia? Maybe he wasn’t able to mutate me, but could there have been some bond created?
How did Luc know I was having nightmares? Mom didn’t even know I was spending many nights a week like this. I didn’t want her to worry or feel guiltier than she already did.
And she already had enough to feel guilty about.
From what I gathered from Emery, repeated healings could link a human to a Luxen or an Origin on some kind of metaphysical level. I had no idea, but I really hoped Luc and I weren’t connected like that, because it seemed super-weird and invasive.
“Hey,” Luc said.
Pulling myself from my thoughts, I looked over at him. “Yeah?”
“Are you a magician?”
“What?” I laughed out loud as I glanced at the laptop screen. Shade was standing on the side of a dark road near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, making loud, weird animal sounds.
“Because whenever I look at you, everything else disappears.”
“Oh my God,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Someone needs to call the cops.”