“Rheema!” Her name slips past my lips, a worthless warning.
I don’t know if she hears me, but, in that instant, she pulls her face away from the attacking bouncer, fangs dripping with deadly neurotoxin, lets the body roll to the side and notices, too late, the plummeting, car-sized disco ball that is well on its path to shatter her world into a million pieces of sparkling oblivion.
Once more, I act before I know the thought has formed in my head, overtaken by the need to act, the need to stop another tragedy, another waste of life at the hands of these beasts whose only aim is extermination and dominion.
Like a pre-programmed robot, I’m stepping away from Xave, leaving him to balance on his weak legs. My hand is outstretched, my fingers twitching and reaching and guiding. Whatever invisible force I possess flies from my hand. I can feel it like never before, a powerful tingling, full of purpose and will. It extends away from me like an unseen arm. My body quakes, writhing in a serpentine motion that seems to carry strength from every molecule in my body straight into my hand.
Suddenly, it’s like I’m right there and the weight of the massive ball is on me, on my very shoulders, crushing me down. It slows, but barely enough. My knees bend. It’s falling, gravity doing its job, like a reliable worker that never relents, never takes a vacation, never fails.
I scream with the effort, with the ache in my tendons and the electricity that seems to course through my veins. Rheema’s below me, eyes shut, tight-faced, ready for death. My back bends and I feel I’ve been at this for hours, but know it’s only been an instant, a life-saving or life-ending nanosecond.
And I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
I’m breaking under the weight. I’m crumbling.
Suddenly, there’s a whoosh and blur of movement, and I break into an infinity of shards. Bits of me slide through the floor like snowflakes caught in a strong wind, tumbling end over end and leaving a beautiful trail of dancing light and whimsy glamour. I’m all over the floor, wasted, destroyed.
Then I’m not, and I jolt back, a thousand rubber bands snapping me into place. The tension is gone. I’m whole again, not broken, but still a failure.
“Rheema.” Her name a word that, at first, spells regret, and then it doesn’t. “Rheema!”
To my shock and relief, she’s not under the shattered disco ball. She’s standing away from it, safe in James’s arms, shaking her head, disbelieving her luck and still-beating heart, then believing again. James lets her go and gives me an acknowledging nod.
I did it. I gave James enough time to pull her from under the wrecking ball. A fleeting smile touches my lips, but then it’s gone, driven into a hard, cold line by a chill racking its finger down my back.
I turn, almost in slow motion, almost wishing this second would split into two again and again, so I could keep turning forever, until the end of the world.
Xave is standing there, staring at me with wide, hazel eyes that betray so, so much. Even in the poor light of the club, I see it all, see the surprise, the doubt, the hurt. I see James’s and my secret facing the light, coming out into the open where no explanation will suffice, where the truth will mean the end of IgNiTe’s subtle balance.
But then, just as the secret shatters, so it rebuilds and hides again, retreating back into the dark, drowned by the emptiness that replaces all emotion in Xave’s eyes. I reel at the abruptness of his vacant, lost expression. He looks exactly the way I thought he would before I turned with that chill on my back.
I blink, follow his drooping gaze to his chest and lose my mind, my heart, my soul.
There’s a stain blooming on his abdomen, a wet circle that seeps and leaks what little strength was left in him.
Xave falls to his knees, a hand pressed to his middle.
“No!” I catch him before he hits the floor and lay him gently on his back. “Xave, Xave, Xave,” I call his name as if he wasn’t here in my arms.
My fingers fumble with his shirt. I tear it open. Buttons fly and fall to the floor, making small tip-tap sounds. His torso is dark, dark red. His shoulder torn. His middle seeping and spurting blood like an oil spill.
He’s been shot. I turned for a moment, left him for just a moment, and a bullet found him—a bullet did this.
I press a hand to the wound. Blood sneaks between my fingers. I press harder.
“Xave!”
I search his gaze, but his eyes are closed.
“XAVE!”
His eyes spring open, swivel from side to side, trying to find me.
“I’m here. I’m here. Please hold on, hold on.”
He takes a labored breath. His eyelids begin to close.
“Open your eyes.”
They close. All the way.
“Open your eyes. Please, baby.”
They open. He looks at me and smiles.
His lips move. “I …”
“Don’t talk. Save your energy.” I look behind me, waiting for someone to come help, for James to scoop Xave up and save him, just the way he saved Rheema. James is fast and strong. He can take Xave out of here, take him to …
“… never told you,” Xave says in a wet voice.
“No, no.” I shake my head, swat tears away with a bloodied hand. This isn’t happening.
No. No. Please.
Red rubber boots.
Cinnamon breath.
Untold love.
Xave coughs, then pushes the words he desperately wants to say out of his too-pale lips, “I love you.” For a moment, his hazel eyes fill with tenderness and something I’ve never seen in his gaze before, not in the twelve years I’ve known him. And my heart swells at this new emotion and at the intensity that, even in his weakness, he’s been able to conjure with three simple words.
A reply burns on my lips, and I bite it back. I squeeze my mouth tightly because the thought of saying “I love you” under these circumstances feels final, feels like the end to something that has barely even begun. I bite the words back because I can’t accept this terminal notion that has entered my mind, because I refuse to believe that life will do this to me.
These can’t be the terms under which we tell each other “I love you” for the first time. They can’t be. I won’t accept it.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I say, trying to smile. “You don’t need to go all gooey because you hurt a little. You’re going to be fine. You promised.”
His eye narrow, and it’s the best he can do to show me he’s actually amused. Then he blinks and his gaze drowns in sadness; a sadness deep and total that tells me he knows, irrefutably, that he won’t be able to keep his promise.
It is then that the pretense, the denial that is holding me back, vanishes and it’s replaced by soul-crushing sorrow. My bones turn to powder. My heart flattens, squeezing all the blood out and denying it further entrance. The useless muscle in the center of my chest refuses to work and my lungs fight for oxygen, pumping and pumping.
“No no no.” I grab Xave by his shirt collar. “Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Don’t don’t don’t.”
He fights to stay and make good on his promise. His eyelids blink open in slow motion, but a dark force shuts them back down.
“No, Xave. Stay with me. I need you. I need you forever and ever and ever. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll wear a dress and go out on a girly date with you.” I press my forehead to the very center of his chest, then raise it right back. There’s a flicker of light in his beautiful eyes, but it’s faint, so very faint.
Then I know. I feel it with damnable certainty. I realize that this is his last moment, the last glance over his shoulder before one last step into the unavoidable beyond.
And whether or not he’ll remember this moment once he walks across the line, I owe him better than this. So I take a deep breath and hold it until my lungs ache and burn and incinerate my rage.
I close my eyes and imagine his crooked smile and the happy-green hue of his eyes. Tears spill down my cheeks and, from the wasteland of my fury, my heart fills with tenderness for him, for my first and truest love. For Xave.
And with that, I open my eyes and look at him, hoping to give him something worth remembering wherever he’s going.
“I love you, Xave,” I say with conviction. “I love you,” I repeat, then I kiss him goodbye.