The Brightest Night Read online

  “It’s okay,” he said, keeping my hand in place. The tendons of his neck begin to stand out. “Just focus on my breathing.”

  My gaze darted from my hand to his neck. Even in the low light, I could see the skin around the collar of his shirt turn pink. Understanding dawned. “I’m hurting you.”

  “I’ll survive. Just don’t let go. Focus on my breathing—”

  “No!” Breaking his grip on my wrists, I tore my hands away from him, but I saw the pulsing, twisting mass of the Source wash over his chest in a wave.

  Horror punched through me as I stared at him.

  “Listen to me.” Faint white lines started to appear under Luc’s cheeks, forming a network of veins, but he reached out, grasping me once more by the shoulders. “The way the Source builds in a Luxen or a hybrid is different from how it does in an Origin. When we start to tap into it, summoning it but not using it, we have what is like a critical breaking point. It’s like a pressure cooker—” He sucked in a sharp breath. “If you can get it under control, you’re going to have to let it out.”

  Use it, or it will swallow you whole …

  I zeroed in on the energy coming to the surface of his skin as wetness trickled out of my nose. The power in me? Luc said it was a part of me, but it felt like a separate entity, and it was waking up. It wasn’t the Source, that much I could tell. It was tied to it, though, and it was stretching and stretching, curling itself around organs and invading my limbs. It …

  It wanted.

  Shaking, I shoved it—whatever part of me it was—back as white dotted Luc’s skin. “Let go of me, Luc. I’m hurting you.”

  White lines bracketed Luc’s mouth as he slid a hand around to the back of my head. His fingers curled into my hair. “You’re hurting yourself.” He trembled—his tall, strong body trembled. “You’re bleeding.”

  Pain flared along the back of my skull. The energy inside me felt like a bomb. These frail walls and old floors weren’t going to withstand it, and neither would Luc. It was possible that the houses nearby would be knocked down. That was how big the power felt, and if I let it out, it would destroy everything. I didn’t want that to happen—

  “Then don’t let it take control of you.” He leaned in then, past the aura surrounding my body, and tipped his forehead against mine. I shuddered at the contact, at the way this foreign, new part in me yearned, not just to be let out but for him. That didn’t make sense, but that was how it felt.

  If I couldn’t let it out and I couldn’t get it under control, what would happen if I let it swallow me? Instinct or perhaps hidden knowledge told me that all this power would go inward, and I had a feeling that wouldn’t end well for me.

  But others would be safe.

  Luc would be safe.

  “You can’t do that.”

  He was wrong. How I knew that, I didn’t know, but I could suck it back in, pull it into me until it had nowhere to go.

  “I won’t let you do that, Evie.” His hips pressed into mine, and there was nothing separating us. “You’re not going to turn this back on yourself.”

  “You have to let go of me.” An icy burn pricked along my skin.

  “Never,” he swore, brushing his lips over the curve of my cheek.

  Another shiver whipped through me. Two reactions happened simultaneously. One was familiar. That warm, tight buzz of attraction that threatened to turn my body to liquid, even right then, when things were falling apart. The other was … different. The new part Luc claimed was me shivered with anticipation, too, but a different kind I had no experience with before.

  It wanted …

  And it hungered.

  “Let go,” I begged as this thing poured into my chest. “Please. I love you, and I can’t hurt you like this. Let go.”

  “Evie.” Luc’s voice barely rose above the thundering of my pulse. “I will never let you go. Not again.”

  Muscles coiled tight to the point of fiery pain, jerking my arms. The pressure kept building and building—

  “You can do this.” His nose slid along mine as he said, “You just need time to learn how.”

  Before I could respond, Luc kissed me.

  The feel of his mouth on mine was a shock to the system. It was a brush of the lips. Once. Twice. A soft caress that sent a rush of hot, shivery sensation from the roots of my hair all the way to the tips of my toes. I tensed, and it was nothing like the bitter burning anger, the icy fear or the slippery otherness that had been spreading inside me. Everything—everything—stopped out of shock, and all I felt was the sweetest burst of agony and wanting, and all of me went soft. My lips parted on a breath, and he shuddered against me, his hand fisting in my hair as the kiss deepened. His kiss was a demand, and I sank into him, my hands returning to his chest. The kiss ended on a ragged groan.

  The sound …

  My eyes fluttered open, and I caught just a glimpse of the pained grimace twisting his beautiful face.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, recapturing the distance between us, catching my lower lip with his teeth. He soothed the sweet sting with another kiss, and a gasp left me just before his mouth moved over mine again, causing another shock to the system.

  I’m sorry.

  As impossible as it was, it was his voice I heard in my mind, and I didn’t understand what he was apologizing for when it was me hurting him.

  One of Luc’s hands skimmed up my waist and over my stomach to settle on the center of my chest. His palm flattened, fingers spreading wide as his other hand left the back of my neck. He curved his arm over my shoulders, holding me—

  Luc broke the kiss, snapping his head back as he tore his hand away from my chest. The overwhelming strength of power pulled taut and then snapped.

  I saw it.

  Strings of white and black pulsing, twisting light streamed from my chest, attached to Luc’s fingers. Pressure peeled back from my skull and my insides. Sweet, cool relief washed over me, so potent and so sudden, I cried out.

  The pulsing mass washed over Luc, covering him completely until I couldn’t see him at all.

  Oh God.

  Luc did it so I wouldn’t. He’d taken the catastrophic power into him, letting it swallow him before it swallowed me.

  4

  The house stopped trembling, and above, the ceiling fan slowed to a lazy churn driven by the outside breeze. On one last creak, the bedroom door halted half-open. The threat of critical mass was over for me, but for Luc?

  All around him, the whirling mass of shadow and light was like a battle between dawn and dusk. It consumed Luc, until he was just an outline of a man.

  “Luc!” Panic exploded deep inside me, triggering a surge of the Source. I felt the ends of my hair lift from my shoulders in warning, and I tried to stamp down the power before it grew too big, too strong.

  The streaks of white light around Luc pulsed intensely. Out of reflex, I threw out my arm, shielding my eyes from the glare as the moonlight shade of energy flared outward, licking and flicking over the darker, more turbulent shades until it became a rolling wave, the only thing that surrounded him—all of him.

  His entire body was encased in the white glow of the Source, just like Luxen appeared in their true form.

  Luc was as bright as a hundred suns, turning night to day. Anyone who was awake and within a block of this house would’ve had to have seen the light pressing against the windows and leaking out into night. Static charged the air around us, crackling over my skin.

  I’d never see anything like this from him before. Normally, when he was really tapping into the Source for more than a few moments, it was only a whitish aura that outlined his body, and that was typically a sign that things were about to get froggy. This? This was totally different.

  But he was alive and not ash and dust, something I knew wouldn’t have been the case for me if he hadn’t stepped in. The knowledge that it would’ve been deadly if I’d let the Source erupt inside me was instinctual, something I couldn’t explain.
/>   Tiny hairs raised all over my body, and it had nothing to do with the bursts of the Source still firing deep inside me. He was standing, but he wasn’t moving.

  “Luc.” I repeated his name, reaching for him only to realize I was sitting on the edge of the bed. My legs had given out at some point.

  There was no response from within the intense light.

  I leaned forward, and the glow of light around him reacted to my proximity, flickering rapidly. I halted, fingers inches from the arm encased in the Source. “Please,” I said, heart thundering. “Please say something.”

  Silence greeted me—cold, eerie silence.

  For a heart-stopping moment, I didn’t think he was going to respond at all, and that moment was one of the scariest seconds of my life, because I had no idea what he’d done to himself, and if I lost him? God. My heart cracked. I didn’t know what I would do without him, because I couldn’t lose him. Not again.

  “I’m okay.”

  Relief caused my breath to lodge in my throat, but there was something wrong about his voice. His tone was thicker, the timbre deeper, and even I could hear the hum of unbelievable, uncharted power in those two words. The kind of power I doubted even the Daedalus had seen before.

  And the alien part of me didn’t know how to react to Luc. I could feel it, reaching out and pressing against my skin in waves as if it were sensing that Luc was a threat, like it had done in the woods, but it didn’t take over this time. It withdrew into my core, seeming to give off the signal that it knew it would not be wise to go toe to toe with Luc while he was this … whatever this was.

  And it reminded me of the inexplicable bad vibes I sometimes picked up from a person or strange place even if I hadn’t known them or had never been there before. It was primal instinct warning me that the place or person was bad news, and that kind of intuition was never wrong.

  That primal instinct was telling me right now that there was something very, very off about Luc.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Luc stated.

  “I know that.” And I did. Well, at least I thought I did. My eyes started to water from the intensity of the light surrounding him, but I couldn’t look away. I pulled my hand away, though, curling it against the space between my breasts, where he had pressed his palm.

  He remained where he stood, a brilliant, utterly otherworldly being. “I had to stop you before you killed yourself. You would’ve died. There would’ve been nothing left of you to even mourn.” He confirmed what instinct had been telling me, but there was something different about his voice that went beyond the threads of power in his tone—something off about how he chose his words and even in how he stood there. “You would’ve taken down this building and everything around it.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, still unsure of what to make of it since he was, well, alive and all, but definitely not right. “How did you do that?”

  “I took it from you,” he stated as if he’d simply taken a coat from me and not a deadly mass of chaotic power. “And then I took the surge of the Source inside me.”

  I blinked the watery haze from my eyes. “Did you know you could do that?”

  His head tilted, and then he nodded.

  “Is it common knowledge that you can?” A tremor coursed through me.

  “No. I’ve only done it once before.” A pause as his head straightened. “With Micah.”

  I shivered at the mention of the Origin that had nearly ended my life. Micah had belonged to the last batch of Origins, but those kids had turned sour. Given God only knows what to increase the speed in which they’d physically developed, they’d become aggressive and dangerously violent. They’d thrown Kat through a window over a cookie, and eventually they’d killed a human. Luc had tried to intervene, but nothing he did seemed to have any impact on them, and he did what he had to do, putting them down, all except Micah, who then returned to terrorize the city of Columbia later.

  It was another stain on Daedalus, but also one that Luc carried with him. What he had to do with those Origins was something he’d carried with him until the end.

  “You didn’t tell me you could,” I said finally.

  “It wasn’t something you needed to know,” he replied without hesitation. “It’s not something anyone needed to know.”

  My brows lifted, and I struggled not to be offended or a bit hurt by his cool statement since now was not the time for achy feelings. There was something wrong with Luc, like scarily wrong. “Are you really okay?”

  “Yes. I feel … invincible.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it. How did one respond to that?

  “It’s strange,” he continued in a way that was almost clinical as he took a step toward me. I tensed. “I thought I knew what that felt like, but I was wrong.”

  “I wish I were recording that statement.” I watched him warily as I pulled my legs off the bed, tucking them against my chest. “But no one is invincible, Luc.”

  “I was the closest thing to invincible. Before you, that is,” he amended rather factually. “Now that I know the extent of your power, I have concluded that I was not, in fact, invincible.”

  I was really beginning to wish for something I’d never had before: that Grayson was still around.

  Luc took another step closer, and the heat of his body reached me. “But right now?” He lifted his radiant arms, his head turning to the left and then the right arm. “Even if you could control your abilities, you’d be no match for me.”

  “Congrats?” While he was busy checking himself out, I scooted back about an inch or five, freezing when the glowing mass of light that was his head snapped in my direction. My heart rate tripled. “Do you think you can, you know, dim down the light show?” If I could see him—his face and especially his eyes—I’d feel a hell of a lot better. Actually, I would probably feel better only when he returned to a little scary but normal Luc, and not this completely terrifying, inhuman Luc.

  I glanced to where the pet rock sat on the nightstand. Above the eyes drawn in black marker, there was a Harry Potter lightning scar. Diesel was a goofy, senseless, and vastly useless gift, something that Luc would find great humor in.

  This version of him standing in front of me would not.

  “It has to run its course.”

  I swallowed. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Once I absorb the Source, it will fade and I will be…” A pause. “A little scary, but normal, and not this completely terrifying, inhuman version of myself.”

  “Get out of my head.”

  “I can’t help it. You’re in me.” Two incandescent hands pressed into the bed, a mere foot from my feet.

  “That sounds … slightly disturbing.”

  “It is … different,” he said, his voice still tinged with unfamiliar undertones. “The Source has an imprint of what drove it. I can’t see what you were dreaming, but I feel it. I can taste your emotions.”

  I locked up, eyes going wide. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. While I’d wanted him to understand why I’d lost so much control, I didn’t want him to gain such intimate knowledge of that choking, suffocating heaviness.

  “It tastes like blood and terror,” he said, and my breath caught. “Humiliation and defeat.”

  I was so caught up in what he was saying, I hadn’t realized he was closer, on his hands and knees, prowling up the length of my legs.

  “I can taste the residue of hopelessness,” he continued. “What caused those feelings are still hidden from you—from me. Whatever he made you do during the time you were with the Daedalus does not matter. Only this does. I won’t kill him, Evie. There will be no simple, quick death for him.” Luc’s hands were at my hips, and my back was pressed to the mattress. His head and shoulders were level with mine, and when he spoke, his words dripped fire. “I will flay his skin from his body and then shred his muscles and tendons until he cannot even lift a finger. I will slowly tear him apart, at the most sensitive parts, limb by limb, and
then, when he sees death looming, he will see you. You will be the last thing he sees before you deliver the killing blow.”

  I shivered, a little scared by his words.

  And I was also sort of … turned on. That probably meant there was something wrong with me. Okay, not probably. Most definitely there was something twisted and disturbingly wrong with me.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Luc said. “It’s not the idea of violence that makes you feel that way. There’s no one who deserves it more than Jason Dasher.”

  He was correct, but I shouldn’t wish that kind of death on anyone. I should be better than that or some crap, and besides that, I shouldn’t want to kiss him after hearing him say that.

  Luc’s head gave that odd little tilt again. “It’s also because you know I’d do exactly what I said, that I would do all of that for you, and you also know how badly I want to be the last thing Jason Dasher sees.”

  Breathing turning shallow, I knew he was right.

  “Humans are messy, Evie. Complicated and layered beings who sometimes find themselves in that uncomfortable, moral gray area,” he said in that strange, power-heavy voice. “Just because you aren’t exactly human doesn’t mean you’re not just as messy.”

  I wet my lips as my pulse pounded. It hurt my eyes to stare into the light, but as close as he was, I could see he looked nothing like a Luxen, who in their true form reminded me of liquid glass. Beyond the intense glow, I saw the almost perfect lines and planes of the face I still itched to capture to film like I’d done one afternoon in his club. “And you?”

  “I am the mess,” he stated.

  I didn’t understand what that meant, but he spoke before I could ask. “I wish you did not fear me now.”

  “I don’t fear you.”

  “Your mind is completely open to me. I know what you think.”

  My watering eyes narrowed. “For the millionth time, it’s rude to read people’s thoughts.”

  “It does not change what I know,” he replied.

  “Okay. Yes. I’m a little freaked out. Can you blame me? You’re speaking weird, and you haven’t called me Peaches once since you sucked all that power into you—”