Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

She turned abruptly and left, but when she was about halfway to the château, he ran out of the barn. “You’re an angel of the night, Giselle,” he called to her.

She turned and stared at him, the moonlight sprinkling silver on his dark hair. It was an odd way for him to say thank you for her kindness, but she liked the sound of it anyway. An angel of the night. She smiled.

“Tomorrow then?” he called.

Did she say they would meet tomorrow? He waited for an answer.

“Yes, tomorrow, Étienne.”

The Third Kind

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

e have to go to San Antonio.”

My sister Kissy said those words with all the aplomb of someone announcing that they were fixing to drive down to the Sonic for a cherry limeade. Like she hadn’t just woken me up at four o’clock in the morning to deliver the statement in question. Like going to San Antonio was no big deal. Like I’d already passed my driver’s test and she hadn’t been forbidden to climb behind the wheel of a truck ever again, or at least until she turned thirty.

Forget the fact that San Antonio was a nine-hour drive from our slice of just-outside-of Grove, Oklahoma—big sis wanted to pick up and go, just like that.

“Kissy,” I said sternly. “We’re not going to San Antonio.”

I was the reasonable sister. That was my job. I figured I owed it to Kissy to keep us out of trouble, since it was my two-year-old self ’s creative pronunciation of her name that had kept her from being a run-of-the-mill Kristy for all these years.

I deeply suspected that Kristy Carlton wouldn’t have needed nearly so much looking after.

“No, Jess. We have to go.”

I froze, suddenly aware of the fact that despite the aura of calm about her, my sister’s eyes were a pale sea-foam green, colored like stained glass with a light shining straight through.

“Well, crap,” I said.

Kissy and I both had mud-brown eyes—depressingly average—except when Kissy got the ’pulse, and then her eyes went stained-glass green, eerie and pale and borderline incandescent, depending on how long she’d been feeling it and how urgent the directive was.

“Do we have to go to San Antonio now?” I asked.

Kissy gave me a look that resembled the expression on a dog’s face when it proudly dumps a dead bird onto your feet. “Yup.”

This was highly unfortunate.

It’d been years since Kissy’s last ’pulse, when I was twelve and she was fourteen. Three whole years since she’d woken me up in this very bed and told me, eyes shining, that we had to get out. Three years since someone had broken into our old farmhouse and killed our parents in their sleep.

“It’s not like last time,” Kissy said, following my thoughts with the ease of someone who’d shared my secrets and my room for fifteen years. “Nobody’s going to hurt us or Nana or Grandpa Jake. We just have to borrow the truck and drive to San Antonio, is all.”

Somehow, I didn’t think our grandparents, who’d moved in with us after Mom and Dad died, would consider this venture the teensy little thing that Kissy was trying to pass it off as. Which meant, of course, that we couldn’t tell them. And wasn’t that just fine and dandy?

“Don’t be mad.”

If I’d been the big sister, Kissy might have sounded vulnerable right then, but since she was older, the words came out bossy by habit.

“I’m not mad,” I replied, and I wasn’t, truly. Kissy couldn’t help getting ’pulses any more than I could help having twice as much hair and half as much chest as the other girls my age. I was flat as a board and had an unruly mass of gargantuan curls, and my sister occasionally woke up knowing that something had to be done, without having the least little clue as to why. I could hardly complain (about my sister’s quirk, not about the hair or boobs, which I complained about just fine), given that whoever or whatever sent my sister these strange compulsions—be it a misfiring in her brain or God Almighty—had already saved my life at least once.

“Fine,” I said, looking out the window and gauging how little time we had until Grandpa Jake rose with the sun. “I’ll get dressed, you throw us each a change of clothes into a bag. There should be some cash in my sock drawer.”

Just enough for gas, if we were lucky.

But as I stripped off my pajama top and eyed my sister and the irises I hadn’t seen looking back from her face in three long years, I couldn’t help but wonder if our luck had run out before we’d even hit the road.

San Antonio, here we come.