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“Well, what do you think is going to happen when...” Lena stopped herself. “No, never mind that now. Just tell me what I can do.”
That was Lena; no matter what, her sister was always supportive. Aurora felt a rush of love for her.
Her sister knew the intricacies of the past, and the past was where Aurora needed to go.
She looked out at two swans gliding on the pond, nuzzling each other with long necks. So happy, so peaceful...mated for eternity.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said hopefully. “There is something you can do. I think if I can take Luke back to where it all started to go wrong—I mean, where he started on this path—I think he’ll be able to choose with a clear head.”
“And when was that?” Lena looked suspicious.
“High school,” Aurora admitted.
“Oh, Aurora...” Now Lena’s face was troubled, and Aurora knew that Lena had not forgotten what had happened.
“I know,” Aurora said defensively. “But I’m older now.”
Not that she was much older; the difference between sixteen and twenty-eight didn’t mean much in terms of infinity, but she had been living as a high school girl at the time and it had always amazed Aurora how quickly you could get wrapped up in the emotions of the age you were portraying.
“But it nearly destroyed you,” Lena said gently.
“It will be different this time,” Aurora insisted. “And that’s when it happened, so that’s when it has to be.”
Lena looked across the emerald grass of the field toward the guardhouse, where Val had disappeared in a huff. “You know that...”
“She’ll be there, yes, I know. Lena, I have to.” She looked at her older sister with wide, appealing eyes. “I don’t want him to die.”
Lena sighed. “Remember, it’s his choice.”
“I’ll remember,” Aurora promised.
“Then come,” Lena said, and held out her hand, and they stepped into the wind.
Chapter 5 (#uf27960d7-36c7-57e7-b0fd-87dac80a8cdc)
The clock alarm was blaring “Oops!...I Did It Again” on the bedside table. Luke rolled over in his bed, groaning. Maybe if he didn’t open his eyes it wouldn’t really be morning.
That happy illusion was shattered by pounding on the bedroom door and Nona’s voice calling crisply. “Out of that bed, Luke Mars. Breakfast is on the table.”
“Coming, Nona,” he called through a gravelly voice, and rolled over just enough to hit the snooze alarm, silencing the song.
He’d been having the dream again—three incredibly hot women, a blonde, a redhead and a dark one, standing around his bed fighting over him. Sometimes they were his age, sometimes they were older, somewhere in their twenties: but always the same women and they were always, always hot.
Very distracting. But he couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t be late today. Too much was riding on it.
He raced through showering, dressing and breakfast, Nona scolding him about playing chicken with Time. But driving his Jeep on the way to school he finally had a moment to think, and his thoughts went straight to the dream.
He’d been having it forever. The night before the day he made captain of the team, the night before he scored fourteen unexpected points for an upset over Poly High and won the CSF championship...
He smiled at the memory; that had been an especially good night. But the smile quickly faded as he remembered that he’d also had the dream the night before his parents died in the crash. That night the red-haired girl in the middle had been crying and he’d woken with a feeling of dread that lasted all day until he was pulled out of class and told the news.
It always meant something big, the dream, something really, really good or something really, really bad.
But there had been something different about it this time. He tried to put himself back in the sensation of it. For one thing, he had been older, a man; his body had been bigger, stronger. He’d even noticed he had a couple of kick-ass tattoos. It had seemed like he was...a cop? Some kind of cop. That felt good somehow; he liked the idea of being able to fight bad guys, do detective work. He hit the brake a little too hard at the stop sign, startled at his own thought.
What was he thinking? He was a football player; all the big schools were circling. Of course he was going to play ball, that was the way it was.
He shook his head. Weird.
Luke pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of Pacific High, a sprawling, Spanish-style fortress that had been a monastery in older San Francisco days. He caught the admiring looks from other guys in their barely functional beaters. Car envy. Sure, he had a great car; it was his because his parents had died.
Trade you the Jeep for my parents any day, he thought at the boys as he grabbed his backpack from the back and hustled for the gate.
* * *
Lena and Aurora watched Luke from the second-story balcony of the main building. Lena had her blond hair in a ponytail and was holding a neat stack of books, looking like a pretty, serious eighteen-year-old. She stared down as Luke locked his car and hustled toward the front gate.
“This is the day?” Lena asked.
“Yes,” Aurora said faintly. “Today.”
Lena shot a troubled look toward Aurora. “Are you sure...?”
Beside her, sixteen-year-old Aurora only had eyes for Luke. Dressed in a white sundress with her only ornament her dazzling, tumbled hair, her eyes followed his every move. Her heart was beating so fast she couldn’t speak. She pressed her lips together and nodded.
“Oh, Aurora,” Lena said.
“I have to go,” Aurora managed.
And despite her misgivings, true to form, Lena reached to brush Aurora’s hair away from her face and told her, “Good luck.”
* * *
Luke passed through the front gates and headed automatically toward the B wing for his World History class before he remembered: he was starting tutoring that morning, that’s why he was here so freaking early. He reversed direction toward the central quad and crossed the brick courtyard to greetings from passing students he wasn’t sure he knew.
“Hey, Luke.”
“What’s happening, Mars?”
It was weird how everyone knew him, or thought they did. It made it look on the surface like he had a whole slew of friends, when actually he didn’t have any one close friend at all. Besides dating, which admittedly he did a lot of, he usually hung out with groups of guys, mainly the team. So he was never alone. But that could get kind of lonely.
Some of the team were gathered in the center of the quad already, the ones who had zero period, the one before school started. Luke had never understood why anyone in their right mind would want to start school any earlier than they had to. But now he had to, all because of his crap history teacher.
History wasn’t his favorite subject, anyway, but this year the teacher was just out to get him. Jenks was notorious for hating the jocks and Luke was sure he lay awake nights looking for ways to penalize them. Not that some of Luke’s teammates didn’t deserve it. No doubt Jenks had been one of those kids that naturally got picked on in school, and grew up to be one of those teachers that kids liked to torture. But Luke had never participated in any of that; the pranks were almost always instigated by Tomas Tomasson, a swaggering, egotistical halfback on the team who Luke privately disliked at least as much as Jenks probably did.
As Luke came up on them, the guys looked surprised and then amused to see him as they razzed, “Hey, is that Mars?”
“Someone set your clock ahead?”
“Mars, up before eight? Is the world ending or something?”
Luke scowled and slowed to talk. “Damn Jenks,” he muttered.
It was a testament to the general hatred of Jenks that the guys actually made sympathetic noises. “Oh, Jenks,” Tanner said knowingly. “What’d he get you for?”
“Who the hell knows?” Luke grumbled. “I’ve turned in every paper, on time, and I’m barely pulling a C. He’s making me get tutoring to stay on the team.”
“Sucks, man.”
“Don’t sweat it. Not like they can kick you off.”
“Well, they’re not going to,” Luke swaggered, but inside he was not so sure. He was just going to have to make this tutoring thing work.
“So...Val? Homecoming?” Stu asked him in that verbless way he had.
Homecoming. Luke knew there had been something he was trying not to think about. And Val.
Val was his personal cheerleader; every guy on the team had his own. Luke’s was a dark-haired and fiery beauty. The personal cheerleaders brought cookies or gifts for their team member on Game Day, wrote encouraging little notes and cheered them by name on the field. Some of the more feminist girls and teachers in the school were rumbling about abolishing the tradition of personal cheerleaders, but with the team on a winning streak that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
And it’s not like Val was what anyone would call subservient; her Game Day gifts always had an edge to them that was both exciting and unnerving, a sexy game that she was playing that only she seemed to know the rules of. Luke and Val weren’t going steady but they were an item. He just wasn’t so thrilled with the idea that she expected him to ask her to Homecoming—that in fact everyone did. Where were these things written, anyway? It was like he had no choice about it.
He felt irritated and a little lost.
He knew he had a good life, but there were times that he felt strangely unfulfilled. He couldn’t have said what more he could want, and yet, something felt lacking, some purpose. And then he’d score the winning touchdown and hear the cheers of the crowd, and see Val cheering just for him...
“Would that be a yes or a no?” Tanner prodded.
Luke thought of Val, those legs that went on forever and the way a sweater clung just like skin to her perfect breasts, and that black hair and those black, sultry eyes...and that mouth...
Well, hell, who wouldn’t ask her?
“I guess,” he said nonchalantly. The guys gave one another knowing looks.
“Later,” he told them, and headed toward the library.
* * *
Aurora walked down the locker-lined hall, headed toward the library. She was still getting used to her teenage body and she was so nervous; she really felt sixteen, something she hadn’t felt since—well, since she had been playing sixteen, at this very high school.
The Norns didn’t have to live as mortals, of course; it was just more fun to interact that way. Gods and Norns alike had a long history of intermingling with humans. It had always been a kind of charming game.
But with Luke it had been different. It wasn’t a game at all. Aurora wanted to see the world through his eyes, feel what he felt, explore what he explored—taste, touch, hear, see, smell, sense everything that he did. And it all felt new because she was experiencing it with him.
She wasn’t sure when her feelings had changed, when she started losing her objectivity. Norns weren’t supposed to fall in love with their human charges; it was wrong, it was forbidden. But fallen she had.
She’d cried for him when his parents died, and watched hopefully as his grandmother had picked him up at the hospital to bring him back to what would become his home. That was the first day she’d appeared to him in real life, in the form of a little neighbor girl who could cry with him and laugh with him and hug him for real when he was sad. And more and more Aurora found herself not just watching over Luke but empathizing with him in a way that was different than it had been with her other mortal charges.
She was immortal, of course, but she felt like she was his age, that she had the same feelings he did. Was excited by the same things, was scared by the same things, saw the same colors, wanted the same things.
More and more it felt as if there were no boundaries between them, that she was feeling his feelings. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but what happened when it just did?
That’s when she’d started going to school with him.
But it wasn’t until they’d hit the teen years that Aurora really felt herself starting to go out of control. All those hormones! She was as giddy as any teenage girl around Luke.
And it was right here in the school that he’d broken her heart for the first time...the heart that she wasn’t supposed to have...
Aurora shook her head and tried to pull herself together. Stop it. You only have a day.You have to focus.
She opened the door of the library and walked in. At this hour she had the whole place to herself, except for Mr. Twitchell, the librarian, who didn’t even lower the newspaper he was hidden behind at the circulation desk. She walked into the cluster of round tables and sat down at one out of the librarian’s sight. Her hands were sweating just like a mortal’s as she watched the clock and the door simultaneously, holding her breath...on the verge of tears from sheer anticipation.
Then suddenly the chair across from hers was pulled out, and a red-haired, freckle-faced kid plopped down in the seat, startling her; she hadn’t heard anyone come in at all. His hair was spiky, gelled to within an inch of its life, and he carried a skateboard bristling with stickers, which he slid under his chair.
Loki, of course, ever the shape-shifter, decked out as an adolescent skatepunk.
As she stared at him, he grinned at her. “You like?”
“You look like a redheaded porcupine.”
He looked faintly injured. “I think it’s a good look for me.”
She tried not to glance toward the library door. “Please go away.”
Instead, he tipped back in his seat and put his Converse sneaker-shod feet up on the table. “I thought you should have a chaperone. You’re only sixteen. You have no idea what these jocks can be like.”
She rolled her eyes. “I think I’m safe enough in the library.”
“How little you know, child.”
“Please leave,” she said more urgently.
Loki hauled his legs down from the table and slid forward in the chair in one sinuous move. “Seriously, you’ve been exactly here and now before. And where did it get you? Nearly kicked out of the Aesir, that’s where. Not that the mortal isn’t just fabulous, but they’re all nothing but trouble in the end. Why start a war over this one?”
“No one’s starting a war,” she began.
Loki chortled. “Are you kidding? Val is just about nuclear. She takes this gathering-warriors-for-Odin thing very seriously.”
“Oh. Val,” Aurora said, feeling a tug of worry. She was actually surprised she hadn’t seen her sister yet; that wasn’t good. She knew she’d turn up just when Aurora least expected or wanted her. “I can handle Val,” she said bravely, and Loki gave her a knowing look.
“Have it your way.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d say you have about an hour, tops, before it all hits the fan.”
“Please go,” she hissed, and he shrugged and vanished.
Aurora looked around quickly to make sure no one had seen, and nervously flipped back her hair.
Then she saw the door opening, and her heart nearly stopped in her chest.
It was Luke.
