my neck, the way Kissy had snapped that boy’s.
Instead, he brought his lips slowly down to mine and kissed me.
Blades. Blood. Light. Burning.
I saw the whole world in an instant, everything that was, everything that would ever be, and something flickered to life on the surface of my skin: a power, a knowing.
Ariel pulled back, and based on the expression on his face, I concluded that it hadn’t exactly been as earth-shattering for him as it had been for me.
“It is done,” he said, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing a girl wants to hear about her first kiss.
“What’s done?” I asked, trying not to feel too put out. I could sense the change he’d wrought, feel it rising up inside of me and washing away everything I’d been until now. “Ariel, what did you do?”
Ariel was not impressed by my desperation or my ire.
“There are three kinds,” he said.
“You are the third kind.” And then he was gone.
“What just happened? I mean, seriously, Kissy, who was he? What was he? How could he just say all of that stuff and then kiss me and then leave?”
I was indignant. Kissy, on the other hand, was in hog heaven.
“This is the best chimichanga I have ever had,” she said.
“Kissy,” I snapped. “Focus.”
“I am focusing,” Kissy replied calmly. “I am focusing on my chimichanga.”
After Ariel had disappeared, she’d dragged me across the River Walk to the closest Mexican restaurant, and the two of us had been sitting there ever since, Kissy shoveling chips and salsa like she was preparing to hibernate for the winter, and me trying my best to make sense out of chaos.
Growing up, I’d never thought much about Kissy’s ’pulses. They were the kind of thing you got used to, and I’d never wondered why I didn’t get them too, because you could tell just by looking at Kissy or talking to her for five seconds that she was something special.
Someone special.
But me?
I wasn’t anything. I could almost believe Ariel when he said that Kissy was some kind of cosmic Guardian, chosen to protect the innocent, one ’pulse at a time—but after all of these years, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that I might be the special one, that whatever made Kissy different from normal folks—maybe I had a version of it too.
Kissy was a Guardian.
The girl at the gas station had been a Herald.
And I was the third kind.
“The third kind of what?” I asked, for what was probably the millionth time.
“I dunno, Jess,” Kissy said, her voice real soft, like she was talking a stray dog out from underneath a car. “Sometimes, there aren’t easy answers. Sometimes, things are just right. The things I do when I get the ’pulse? They feel right. And this— you, me, here, Ariel—it feels right too.”
I didn’t want feelings. I wanted answers. I wanted to know who Ariel was—what he was. I wanted to know why, from the second my lips had touched his, there’d been a burning inside of me, white-hot, liquid, steady.
I wanted to know why it felt familiar.
Why it didn’t hurt.
“Sometimes,” Kissy told me, waving her chimichanga for emphasis, “you just have to have faith that everything’s going to work out the way it’s supposed to.”
Have faith?