Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

Somewhere out there, someone or something wanted me dead, and we had no guarantee that the black-eyed guardians would back off now that we’d completed Kissy’s mission. I had no idea what Ariel had done to me, or what he expected me to do now that it was done. I could feel the change, feel it spreading like wildfire through my body, inch by inch and bit by bit.

I felt older, stronger, connected.

I felt like this was just the beginning.

The beginning of the end.

“Seriously, Jess. Just relax. Que sera, sera. Have some guaca-mole.”

I closed my eyes and started counting silently to ten, so as to decrease the chances that I’d leap across the table and beat my sister to death with a chimichanga.

One, two, three . . .

The images I’d seen when Ariel kissed me flashed through my mind, and this time, they felt like memories. I saw a flaming sword, a desert, an army.

Four, five, six . . .

I saw people as cold and inhumanly beautiful as Ariel. I saw their faces twist into something pretty-cruel.

Seven, eight, nine . . .

I saw black eyes and shadows and rivers running with blood.

“Ten.” I finished counting and opened my eyes. I tried to remember everything Ariel had said about the third kind, everything the black-eyed boy in the McDonald’s had said about why I had to die.

It starts with you.

The third kind—by their sword, darkness bleeds.

“Feel better?” Kissy asked me.

“Just peachy,” I told her.

But all I could think, over and over again was: this is the beginning of the End.

You’d think that after something like that, nothing would ever be the same, but mostly, life kept right on going, same as it had for as long as I could remember—with a few notable, should-have-been-impossible exceptions.

Probably the biggest—not to mention most impossible—of those exceptions was that after we made it back from our little road trip, every morning from there on out, I woke up with my fingers curled around the hilt of a sword. It didn’t matter what I did or how many times I tried to get rid of that darn thing, the blade always showed up again, golden and gleaming and whispering to me in a language I didn’t understand.

And for a second, a single second when I first woke up, I would remember—the sword, the battle, the fire inside. Then, just as quickly as the memories had come, they would fade, leaving me with a whole lot of questions—and weaponry I shouldn’t have known how to use.

The next biggest change in our post-road-trip life—far less remarkable, but life-altering nonetheless—was that Kissy and I were grounded for life. Nana and Grandpa Jake were old-fashioned, and they didn’t hold with any of this newfangled nonsense about “destiny” or “powers.”

They also didn’t hold with blowing up trucks.

Being grounded gave Kissy and me a lot of time to sit around and try and make some form of sense out of the things Ariel had told us, but we didn’t come up with a serviceable theory about it all until a month after we got back, when the Walmart started playing Christmas carols nonstop, even though it was just past Halloween. Listening to “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” on repeat has a way of making you hear one word and think about the other, and that got us to connecting the dots.

Herald. Angel.

Guardian. Angel.

I half expected Ariel to show up—to tell us we were wrong, to explain how it was possible if we were even a little bit right— but he never came. Kissy and I were on our own, her with her ’pulses, me with my sword, so full of questions I thought I might burst.

I wondered and I prayed and I Googled. I read everything there was to read about angels: seraphim, nephilim, watchers, beings—there were about a million different words, different mythologies, different stories.

I read about messenger angels.

Guardian angels.