worried: that was as plain as…well, day. But after the initial shock, I couldn’t work up the same level of anxiety. This energy that was growing inside of me felt too right. Too exhilarating. For perhaps the first time in my life since I was a toddler, I had to concentrate to keep from bouncing off the walls.
The only thing that worried me was what others might say or think. My family, most importantly. But Ben’s wings, most immediately.
As we walked back down the corridor, I had only one request. “Don’t tell the others. Not just yet.”
“Why?” Ben asked, brow furrowing even further as he looked down at me. He had probably been thinking of doing just that. “Kor might have some insight—”
“But first he’ll poke and prod and treat me like some science experiment. He won’t look at me like a person, Ben. Not like you.”
Nothing like Ben. Nothing like that look in his golden eyes as he kneeled in front of me and held my hand to his flameheart.
Ben hesitated, then sighed. “You’re right. But he’s going to find out eventually, and the longer you keep something from him.…”
“I get it,” I said in a quiet voice as we approached the arch leading out to the Rim. “But…not tonight. I don’t want to deal with that tonight. Besides, by this time tomorrow…we might have some answers.”
A voice purred, “Answers to what, may I ask?”
I let out a tiny scream as Kor appeared at my side the moment Ben and I stepped through the arch. As if he had been waiting around the corner, just out of sight.
“How do you do that?” I cried, fisting my hands but using all my willpower to prevent myself from punching at him. Not because I didn’t think he deserved it, but because I knew I’d look pathetic doing it. Even though he was smaller than Ben and Yvera, Kor was still six feet of more muscle than a scholar-politician-spymaster had any right to have.
Ignoring my question, Kor looked at my arms, propped one of his elbows in one hand, and tapped his chin with a gleam in his eyes. “Fascinating. It seems my hypothesis was correct.”
I looked down just in time to see a ripple of white, like sunlight on water, shimmer over my skin. And my fists were glowing.
“Ben!” I squeaked, holding up my hands as if they had become radioactive. Which…they might have. How was I supposed to know?!
“It’s OK, it’s alright,” Ben soothed, taking one of those hands in his without a qualm. “Breathe. Just breathe. You just need to slow your heart rate.”
And try not to think of punching Kor, Ben added dryly to just me. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but that will only make it worse.
Ben’s glare in Kor’s direction made me feel better. As did his hand, still twined with mine. So I could focus on his advice and take slow, deep breaths, and gradually, my heartbeat slowed, and the glow faded.
“That’s it, breathe,” Ben encouraged.
“Very nice—” Kor began with admiration, but he wisely shut his mouth at Ben’s glare and a return shimmer down my arms.
A few seconds later, the glow was gone, and I took a deep breath. “I…think I’m OK now. Thanks, Ben.”
Though I hated to let go of his warmth, I extracted my fingers from Ben’s. Kor was still watching, after all, and with eyes that were too bright and knowing.
“Alright, ‘fess up,” I said, jabbing Kor in the chest. “What’s this ‘hypothesis’?”
“First, is there something you would like to tell me?” Kor asked.
“Kor,” Ben warned.
“It’s fine, Ben,” I said with a sigh and folded my arms. “Seems like that cat’s already out of the bag. Well, Kor, all we know so far is that I seem to have…a lot more energy right now than I have any right to.”
Or knew what to do with, apparently, if only being spooked and then wanting to punch Kor gave me the bioluminescence of a deep-sea squid.
“There, don’t you feel better now?” Kor smirked. “You should be thanking me.”
I just raised an eyebrow. “Your turn.”
Kor sighed. “Did anyone else besides me think about why a gate of all things would appear, let alone be active, at night?”
Ben and I just looked at him.
Kor counted down another finger. “Or why the message left on the archival says to return to the room full of ice at night? When the moons are high? Assuming, of course, that it isn’t to lure Ben into a trap when he is at his weakest.”
At our continued nonreaction, Kor rolled his eyes. “Or I don’t know—about that?”
He thumbed over his shoulder. At first, I didn’t know what he meant. Then I gasped and pushed past him. “Ben…the waterfall.”
It had been too quiet as we had approached the central chamber, and now I saw why. The waterfall had dried up: either because the mechanism had shut down or the lack of sun meant no snowmelt, I couldn’t tell at first. That wasn’t the most shocking thing, though.
It was as if the hold had been a sleepy hive locked in a nice, peaceful winter slumber. And now it had woken up.
The bees in this case were lights. Small, glowing, featureless white orbs with an aura so bright I couldn’t tell if there was anything in the center. And they were everywhere. Hovering busily around the mouth of the waterfall, floating in and out of the tunnel, burnishing every mirror. Others zoomed through the arches and across the chamber to another arch, disappearing before I could guess their purpose. Lights skimmed along the floors like sock-sliding children, except in far too regimented formations and without the squeals, and specks of dust or bits of leaves that had collected during the day shot toward them as if by magnetism or noiseless suction and disappeared without a trace. Similar regiments of lights raced across the ceiling and around the pillars.
“No…dust,” I said faintly. Just as Yvera had said.
“Yv is losing her mind,” Kor said with a chortle. “She’s tearing through the entire hold looking for you, Ben. I’m a bit surprised she hasn’t found us yet.”
“They’re harmless?” Ben asked intently, grabbing my shoulder to bring me back to his side.
“They appear to be. They don’t respond to me at all, other than going around me to get on with their task—”
“Ben!” Yvera shouted, emerging from the eastern arch. She began racing around the Rim toward us, and man, that woman could move.
I was distracted from watching her turn into a violet streak by the glimpse of a few lights zipping toward me. With a little yelp, I skipped to the side—needlessly, because just as Kor said, the lights gave me and Ben a perfectly circular berth before zipping back on their former trajectory.
“See,” Kor shrugged. “Just like.…”
The lights slowed. Then moved in the reverse direction, gaining speed. Back toward me.
“Kor!” Ben said. He only had time to shift in front of me and raise a hand before the lights halted a few feet in front of him.
The three lights floated inches off the ground for a moment, as if confused. Then they began edging around Ben in a perfect arc, but Ben once again stepped to be right in front of me, and the lights paused once more.
“Ben,” Yvera cried as she reached us. “What the hellfrost is going on?!”
“No idea,” Ben said, his eyes never leaving the lights in front of us. “Kor?”
“Well, this may be a long shot, but I think they are trying to reach Sarah,” Kor drawled.
“You don’t say,” Ben snapped at him.
Kor looked up. “And they aren’t the only ones.”
Other lights were floating toward me, coming from all directions now. They approached more slowly than the others had, gravitating along paths that avoided Ben. When he noticed, he held out a hand behind him and backed us against the wall.
“Ben,” Yvera hissed as she positioned herself in front of him. “Get away from her.”
Either she didn’t see or didn’t care that the lights hovering over the floor parted for her, rearranging themselves in a wider semicircle as if she were oil and they water. Kor saw, because he waded into the thick of them, and they all did the same, always leaving him a three-dimensional bubble with a radius of about three feet, no matter how much they had to jostle to do so.
“You want to protect me, protect her,” Ben snapped at his rightwing. His hands flexed, and I felt a stirring—like a fluctuation in pressure—that I realized was him summoning power.
Power that he didn’t have to waste right now.
That thought snapped me out of my daze.
“Ben, calm down,” I urged. “I don’t think they mean me—or any of us—harm.”
Ben said, “You can’t know that—” while Yvera spat, “Of course you would say—”
Kor interrupted them both. “Ben, Yv, look at me. Just look.”
We all looked—which was hard to do, since he was so surrounded by lights at this point that they formed an eye-watering net around him. The mystery of how he could stand it himself was solved when I glimpsed the dark goggles he was wearing.
“They’re not being aggressive. See?” He reached for one, and it and all the surrounding ones retreated, creating a momentary bulge in their otherwise perfect hemisphere formation.
“Just because they aren’t making contact doesn’t mean they aren’t doing harm,” Yvera snapped.
“They’re not emitting any energy toward us,” Kor snapped back. “I don’t detect any off-gassing, either. They aren’t even trapping us.”
To demonstrate, Kor waded away from us. The lights parted and spilled around his three-dimensional bubble without a single token of resistance. As they were freed from his pattern-disturbing presence, they rearranged themselves in the air in a kind of hexagonal three-dimensional grid, further reinforcing the hive analogy in my mind.
Once Kor reached the end of the lights, he stepped into the clear without a single one following him. He walked a few paces further to drive the point home and then turned around and held out his hands. “You, me, Ben—we’re in the way, Yvera. Other than their directive to not touch us, they couldn’t care less about us.”
“Then what do they care about?”
But we all knew the answer. Kor pointed to me. “Sarah.”
“What do they want with her?” Ben demanded.
Kor ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I don’t know. I can’t read anything from these things. I can’t even figure out how they’re built, how they’re powered, how they function—they might even be alive. Ben.…”
He trailed off for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was a mix of consternation and grudging awe. “This is magic the likes of which I have never seen before. As foreign and indecipherable to me as those doors were to you.”
Ben’s hands clenched into fists. “Then you don’t know if they mean her harm.”
“They don’t,” Kor and I said at the same time. I did so earnestly, Kor in frustration.
“You just said you knew nothing about these things. Then how do you know—”
“Ben,” I interrupted with a firmness that surprised even me. Especially the next words that came from my mouth. “This is my home. These lights—they are mine.”
As if in confirmation, all the lights vibrated in place at the word mine, letting off a momentary hum as they did.
In that hum, I finally understood. It was as if they had spoken to me in a language so primal, the key was coded into my very DNA.
I was Moontouched. This place had been made for me and my family, to shelter and protect us as we restored the balance to the Covenants. These lights had been made for me, to help me. They were mine. Their vibration had been from…joy.
After nearly a thousand years of waiting, of caring meticulously for this place for me, all they wanted to do was to welcome me home.
Welcome home, Sarah Lind.
Unable to keep them waiting a second longer, I darted out from behind Ben and ran into them, too quickly for Ben to stop me, though I felt the brush of his hand at my back.
“Sarah!”
That was the last thing I heard from any of the drakón for a while as all the lights rushed to me, as quick as bees but as eager as puppies. I could see nothing else but light. Hear nothing else but joyful humming, which steadily rose to the pitch of exquisite, alien song. Feel nothing else but their welcoming touch and the air stirred by their rapid flights.
Their combined light should have been blinding, but though I was dazzled, my eyes miraculously adjusted, so that I could still make out individual orbs, even if I still couldn’t see into their centers. Even with the adjustment, I was awash in a sea of lights as they crowded around me, each eager to take their turn to touch me, great me with a hum, buzz against my skin with joy. They wound around my legs and arms, danced around my torso, even spun delightedly through my hair, sending it floating everywhere. I laughed—it was impossible not to be buoyed up, surrounded by such joy. I held out my hands, and two lights settled into them, letting me examine them up close with awe—and I could have sworn their pulses as I did so were their equivalent of preening.
Kor had said they might be alive, and now I knew for certain that they were. What kind of life was still a complete mystery, since I also knew with equal certainty that they had been made. They told me so, over and over again, in language more subliminal than words.
We were made for you. We waited so long for you—so very, very long. We’re so happy you’re finally here. We love you.
Tears spilled freely from my eyes. I felt that love radiating from each one, in each brush against my cheek, in each whisper, in each hummed note in the song. To be surrounded by that welcome, to feel as if I belonged, to drown in such pure, unfathomable love.…
I knew that from this moment on, I would never be the same.