When his father got home that night and found them still alone, found the money in the canning jar gone, it was as though he, too, vanished.
“She died.” He’d never said those words. “My mom died.” His eyes stung. Smoke.
Corinthe sat so quietly he thought maybe she hadn’t heard. Then she reached out, very slowly, and laid her hand on his. They were warm now, and Luc swallowed against the lump in his throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said haltingly, as though these words, too, were unfamiliar.
Luc cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, shit happens.” He detached his hand from hers, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “So what about you? Mother? Father? Sisters and brothers?”
Corinthe shook her head. “We have no family,” Corinthe said. “I did have sisters, but it was different from in your world.” Corinthe bit her lip. “Still, I miss them.”
Your world. The words reminded Luc that Corinthe was different; that he didn’t know what she was. He wanted to ask her to explain but he found he couldn’t. He was almost afraid of what she might say. He wasn’t ready to hear her speak the words: she wasn’t human.
But he understood, too, that he and Corinthe had one thing in common: Corinthe wanted to go home. She wanted to go back. Luc knew the feeling.
“So why did you leave?” Luc asked,
“I didn’t leave. I … I made a mistake.” Her voice cracked and he had to strain to hear it over the crackling fire. She looked so lost all of a sudden. He wanted to put his arms around her and keep her safe.
“What kind of mistake?” he asked instead.
She looked at him quickly, then looked back at the fire. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Luc had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Try me,” he said. He knew all about mistakes. God, look at his mother. His sister. Hell, even he had more than his share of screwups. The first year at Bay Sun, he almost got kicked off the team. The opponent’s right fielder had tripped him—deliberately, Luc was sure of it—and all of a sudden he’d been filled with a blind rage. He didn’t even know what he was doing, didn’t remember anything until Coach was hauling him backward and he saw that the other guy’s nose was bloody.
“I did something no one else had done before. Something terrible.” She shifted again. Now their knees and thighs were touching. He had that insane urge to put his arm around her, but he didn’t have the excuse this time. She wasn’t shivering anymore.
He settled for leaning back a little and resting his arm just behind her, enough that he could feel the heat from her body and shield her from the cold. There was that smell again. Flowers. It seemed to be getting stronger, seemed that as she got warmer, her skin exhaled it.
“So what?” Luc said. “They … like, kicked you out or something?”
Corinthe nodded. He waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he prompted, “So why do you want to go back so bad?”
She turned her head to look at him. A fine line had appeared between her eyebrows. “It’s … safe. Everywhere else hurts.” She frowned, and he could tell she was having trouble putting her feelings into words. “When I first came to Humana … to Earth … I hurt all the time. Now it’s more of an ache. But in Pyralis I feel right, and warm. Like I belong.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s my home.”
Home. Just that word started a slow ache in his stomach. How many times had he wished he could go home, back to how it used to be? When he was younger, he’d bury his head in his pillow and shout until his throat was raw, but it never changed anything.
Luc rubbed his forehead. He was trying to make the pieces of Corinthe’s story slot together. “And to get back there, you have to … do certain things? Is that it?”
Again, Corinthe nodded. She picked up a handful of those strange pine needles, and fed them one by one into the fire.
Luc licked his lips. He was closer to understanding but wasn’t sure he wanted to. “Like kill people?” Must be a real nice place to live.
“I’ve never killed anyone,” she said fiercely. “I just … I help. I make accidents. What you would call accidents, anyway. Coincidences. And chance events.”
Luc thought of how he had first seen her: the car, the woman slumped on the steering wheel, the way she had run. As the meaning behind her words sank in, he felt as if he might be sick. He closed his eyes and reopened them. “You tried to kill me,” he said.
“This is the first time I’ve been tasked with a killing,” she said, and for a moment, she looked troubled. No. More than that. Angry.
“Why? I’m not that important, so why kill me?”
Corinthe slid her hand away and tucked it into her lap. “I don’t know why.”
“If you don’t know why, how can you just do it?” It would be like dribbling the ball down the field as fast as he could, with the goal nowhere in sight. What was the point? “How can you follow orders if you don’t understand them?”
“The point is not to understand,” she said simply. “The point is that it needs to happen. It’s fated.”
“Was that woman in the car a task?” He braced himself for the answer.
“Yes.”
He was glad that she had admitted it. It was a relief, in a weird way. And something else became clear to him. At Karen’s party, she’d been so determined on the boat, as if she knew exactly where to go. She’d been talking to Mike, too. He’d seen her.
“You set up Karen and Mike, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, softer this time. “I am sorry about that.”
He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. The thing was, he wasn’t really mad about it.
“I’ve done good things, too,” Corinthe said. “Beautiful things. Births and meetings and discoveries … I’ve given people happiness. Your people.”
“What about you?” Luc asked, without knowing where the question came from. “Have you been happy?”
Corinthe turned to him. The question had obviously surprised her. The fire lit up crazy colors in her eyes—threads of silver and gold, that wild violet color—and for a second, he felt as if he was consumed by her eyes, lost in them.
“I … I don’t know,” she responded in a whisper. “I’ve never thought about it.”
She looked totally vulnerable, totally lost. Alone in the universe. The phrase occurred to Luc suddenly, and he didn’t know where it came from. Unthinkingly, he reached out and pulled her hand back into his.
It felt good to touch her.
Too good. He felt a surge of energy, and he lost his breath, as though he’d been running sprints for an hour. The world around them seemed to swirl away. There was only her: her eyes, her smell, the softness of her lips. Her skin burned under his fingers, and after a second’s hesitation, she leaned into his touch and closed her eyes. He brought his other hand to her waist; he could feel the soft line of flesh just above her jeans.
They were both breathing hard. Heat radiated between them. Corinthe hesitated, then walked her fingertips over his cheekbones, to his jaw, to his neck.
“I’ve never … ,” she said.
“Never what?” He could hardly breathe. He would die if he couldn’t kiss her.
She shook her head. Then her expression relaxed, and she smiled. She leaned in closer, and simply laid her head in the crook between his neck and shoulder.
He hooked one arm under her legs and shifted her until she was cradled in his lap. She rested one hand on his chest, right over his heart. He didn’t want to move, was afraid she’d pull away. Wanted to go further and didn’t want to, too.