Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

“You have questions,” he said.

I opened my mouth to start asking them, but he placed two fingers over my lips, and the words stilled on my tongue.

“There are three kinds,” he said.

Three kinds of what? I wondered. Three kinds of questions? But his fingers were still on my lips, his touch electric enough that I couldn’t bring myself to break away.

“There are Guardians. There are Heralds.” He dropped his hand to his side. “There is the third kind.”

“The third kind,” I repeated dumbly. Ariel inclined his head, but he didn’t blink—he never blinked.

“The third kind,” he said again. “By their sword, darkness bleeds. They are the arm and the fire. They are the beginning of the End.”

That should have sounded insane—or at the very least, eccentric—but I couldn’t shake the niggling sensation that these were words that I’d heard before.

Guardians. Heralds. Third kind.

The End.

Each phrase that left Ariel’s mouth felt like it had been carved in stone, etched into the surface of the earth a thousand years before I’d ever drawn a breath. There was an element of ritual to his speech, as though each gesture, each word, each second was sacred.

I didn’t understand it, any of it, but my mouth wouldn’t open. Questions wouldn’t come. So I just stood there, frozen in silence—like that was my role to play while Ariel was playing his.

“Guardians protect. Heralds deliver messages. The third kind is the third kind.” Ariel stopped talking, as if he knew that my puny little brain needed time to process.

I could still feel the touch of his fingers on my lips.

“Heralds deliver messages,” I repeated, feeling like I had to say something. “Like the girl at the gas station?”

Ariel did not nod. He did not reply. He didn’t even blink.

“And Guardians, like Walter . . .” I trailed off and finished the thought silently. Like Kissy.

“She protects you,” Ariel said, lifting the thought from my brain with an ease that made me feel like every thought I’d ever had or ever would have was laid out for his inspection. “When it’s called for, there are others she protects as well.”

I thought of everything Kissy had ever done because of a ’pulse: the random acts of kindness, the senseless errands, the night she’d gotten the two of us out of our parents’ house. Most of the time, it had all seemed so random, but now I had to wonder if she’d inadvertently saved other people, the way she’d saved me—if there was some big plan, and she’d played the role of the butterfly, flapping her wings in one hemisphere and causing a hurricane in another.

“How do Guardians know what to do?” I asked, my mind spinning with the implications. “Their . . . orders . . .” That seemed more official than calling them ’pulses. “Who sends them?”

“They come from where they come from,” Ariel replied. “They are what they are.”

I got the sense that Ariel wasn’t beating around the bush, that to him, that really was the answer.

“What about the other people?” I said slowly. “The ones with the blue-black eyes?”

“Their orders,” Ariel said, the muscles in his jaw tensing, “come from elsewhere.”

“They’re trying to kill me.”

Ariel shrugged, as if this was no more significant than the fact that my favorite color was red.

“That’s it?” I said tersely. “All of this—getting us up in the middle of the night, running us ragged, blowing up our truck— and that’s what you have to say for yourself? Nothing?”

“You needed to be here,” Ariel said. “This is where it must begin. It starts with you.”

“What starts with me?” I felt desperate, but sounded POed and chalked it up as one of those things that you just can’t help. “What starts with me, Ariel?”

He moved like lightning, closing the space between us and then some. His blue eyes stared at and into mine, and for a moment, I was certain he was going to snap