I turn to look at him. “He’s sixteen, Christian. He should be home. He should have someone taking care of him.”
“Jeffrey’s strong. He can handle himself. You really want him to come home and get arrested and all that?”
“No,” I admit. “I’m just … worried.”
“You’re a good sister,” he says.
I scoff. “I messed everything up for him.”
“You love him. You would have helped him if you’d known what he was going through.”
I don’t meet his eyes. “How do you know? Maybe I would have blown him off and kept on obsessing about my own thing. I’m good at that.”
Christian catches his breath, then says more firmly, “It’s not your fault, Clara.”
I wish I believed him.
Silence falls over us again, but this time it’s weightier.
I should tell him about the vision. I should stop stalling. I don’t even know why I’m stalling.
“So tell me,” he says, leaning his elbow on the edge of the window.
Thus I rattle off every detail I can remember, ending with my revelation that it’s him there with me, him in the dark room. Him yelling for me to get down.
He’s quiet for a while after I’m done. “Well. It’s not a very visual type of vision, is it?”
“No, it’s pretty much darkness and adrenaline, at this point. What do you think?”
He shakes his head, baffled. “What does Angela say?”
I shift uncomfortably. “We haven’t really talked about it.”
He looks at my face, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Have you told anybody else?” He reads my guilty expression. “Why not?”
I sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Why haven’t you told Billy? That’s the entire reason she became your guardian, you know, to help you through stuff like this.”
Because she’s not my mom, I think.
“Billy just got married,” I explain. “I didn’t want to spill my depressing guts all over her on her honeymoon, and Angela, well, she had her own thing going on in Italy.”
“What thing?” he asks, frowning.
I bite my lip. I wish I could tell him about Phen.
“Who’s Phen?” Christian asks with a hint of a smile, able to pick that much out of my head. “Wait, wasn’t he the angel who told Angela about the Black Wings all those years ago?” His eyes widen as they meet mine. “He’s the mysterious Italian boyfriend?”
It’s official. I suck at keeping secrets, especially from him.
“Hey! No mind reading! I can’t talk about it!” I sputter. “I promised.”
“Then stop thinking about it,” he says, which is like someone telling you not to think of an elephant, which of course is the first image that pops into your brain. “Whoa. Angela and an angel. What’s this about the gray wings?”
“Christian!”
“He’s not a Black Wing, is he?” Christian looks genuinely worried, the way he always does whenever the topic of Black Wings comes up. They killed his mother, after all.
“No, he’s not—” I stop myself. “I would have told you if—Christian!”
“Sorry,” he mutters, but he’s not very sorry at all. “So, uh … back to your vision. And why you kept it to yourself this long. Because that, I’m pretty sure, you are allowed to tell me.”
I’m relieved to be off the subject of Angela, although the vision stuff is not any easier to talk about. I sigh.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to be having a vision,” I confess. “Not right now.”
He nods like he understands, but I get a flicker of pain from him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say something about it earlier,” I say. “I should have.”
“I didn’t tell you mine, either,” he says. “For basically the same reason. I wanted to be a regular college student for a little while. Act like I have a normal life.” He gazes up through the windshield into the peach-colored sky. A vee of ducks is cutting its way across the horizon, heading south. We watch the birds ride the air. I wait for him to start talking again.
“It’s ironic,” he says. “You’ve been having a vision of dark, and I’ve been having a vision of light.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I can see is light. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Just light. It took me a few times to figure out what it is.”
I’m holding my breath. “What what is?”
“The light.” He looks over at me. “It’s a sword.”
My mouth drops open. “A sword?”
“A flaming sword.”
“Shut the front door,” I gasp.
He does his laugh/exhale thing. “At first all I could think was, How great is this? I’m wielding a flaming sword. A sword made of fire. Awesome, right?” His smile fades. “But then I started thinking about what it could mean, and when I told my uncle about it this summer, he completely freaked out. He started me doing push-ups on the spot.”
“But why?”
“Because obviously I’m going to have to fight.” He clasps his hands together behind his neck and sighs.
“Who?” I’m almost afraid to ask.
“I have no idea.” He drops his hands, his smile mournful as he looks at me. “But Walter is trying to make sure that I’m prepared for whoever it is.” He shrugs.
“Wow,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re ever going to be allowed to lead normal lives, aren’t we?” he says.
Silence. Finally I say, “We’ll figure it out, Christian.”
He nods, but there’s something else that’s bothering him, a grief that reverberates through me and makes me look up to meet his eyes. Then I know without having to ask that Walter’s dying and that it’s the one-hundred-and-twenty-years rule.
“Oh, Christian. When?” I whisper.
Soon. A few months, is his best guess. He doesn’t want me to be there, he says silently, because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to say it out loud. It hurts him so much, Walter telling him to stay away, the idea that he might never get to spend time with him again. He doesn’t want me to see him like that.
I understand. At the end my mom was so weak she couldn’t even walk to the bathroom. That was one of the worst parts of it, the indignity of it all. Her body giving out. Giving up.