The Burning Shadow (Origin 2)

I stared at him, beyond unsettled that Luc didn’t know, because Luc seemed to know everything.

“Then maybe we’re looking at this wrong. If it wasn’t a mutation, what could have caused it?” Zoe asked.

No one answered.

But I thought of the people in the apartment complex, sickened by some sort of virus that the reporters had tried to insinuate was something passed from Luxen to human. Mom had said that was impossible, but what if she were wrong? The people in Kansas City had gotten sick and died, just like Ryan had a few weeks ago. Granted, Ryan could’ve just had the flu, but what if there were something like the flu that humans were catching from the Luxen?9No one knew what happened to Coop in the days after he spewed brackish blood all over the class before being shot with three Tasers and a bullet, but local and national news had picked up the story and speculations were wild, ranging from the belief that he had caught this mysterious Luxen virus to the possibility that he was doing some drug called ET, which apparently involved shooting oneself up with alien blood. I was almost 100 percent positive that wasn’t even a thing since neither I nor anyone I knew, including Luc, had ever heard of anyone doing that.

On the news every evening there were random, middle-aged people with some vague medical background talking about the risks of this new high sweeping the safe suburbs of America. They claimed Luxen blood, when mixed with opioids, became a powerful stimulant that could cause massive internal bleeding and death.

It all sounded like some kind of sensationalized fictional report, but people believed it.

We’d learned that Mr. Barker was going to be okay, as was the student who’d hit his head. Neither had returned by the following week, and it was doubtful Mr. Barker was ever going to come back, but they were okay.

Coop was probably not okay.

Out of all the media covering what happened at our school, out of the speculation and rumors, no one knew what was being done to Coop, and there were no answers. Not even when his parents appeared on television shortly after the incident, demanding to be allowed to see their son, and that wasn’t just weird.

There was something very wrong with that.

“You should come,” Zoe was saying to James as we walked up the hill to the parking lot after school, pulling me from my thoughts. “Everyone will be dressed up. It’s a Halloween party. Come on, it’ll be fun, and we all need a little bit of fun right now.”

“There is no way in hell I’m going to Foretoken,” James responded. “We could be in the middle of an all-out zombie apocalypse, and that could be the only safe location in the entire world, and I still wouldn’t go there.”

I snorted as I pulled my camera out of my bag, having spied the gold and burgundy leaves shimmering in the afternoon sun.

“That seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?” Zoe asked. “I mean, what if the cure were there?”

“Nope. I’d stick my arm out the window and get bitten by a zombie before I’d step foot—”

“No more Luxen! No more fear!”

Stopping, I jerked my head up and stared at the entrance to the parking lot.

“You have got to be kidding me,” James muttered beside me as we got a good look at what was going down. “Do they ever get tired of this?”

“I think the answer is no,” I muttered. “And I’m really getting tired of hearing that chant. Like, really tired.”

A group of students were sitting in the middle of the parking lot, blocking at least a couple dozen cars from leaving. The ring leader of the dumb sit-in stood in the middle, her thin body vibrating with hostility.

Ugh. April.

I hadn’t talked to her since that morning in front of the school. Obviously, the conversation had gone nowhere. Worse yet, her protest group had doubled in size since everything had gone down with Coop.

She was holding a stupid hot-pink sign with an oval-shaped alien face slashed out as she shouted, “No more Luxen! No more fear!”

Her minions chanted with her, holding their own stupid signs. I recognized my ex among them, and that was, like, double embarrassment for me.

“We will not live in fear anymore!” April shouted, thrusting her idiot sign in the air above her. “We will not be murdered in our homes and at school! We will not be made sick. We will—”

“Shut up?” I shouted, earning a few chuckles from the peanut gallery behind us, but a lot more looks of scorn.

April spun toward us, and her bright red lips thinned. “We will not be silenced!”

I rolled my eyes. “I can’t believe I was ever friends with her.”

“You know, I’ve thought that a hundred times.” James shifted his book bag up onto a broad shoulder. “I have no idea why you guys were friends with her. She was never nice.”