Author: Shannon Messenger

Vane snorts. “Unbelievable.”

“What?”

“You live there?” He points to the house ahead—or rather, what’s left of it.

A fire condemned it long before I stumbled across it. But the two and a half remaining walls—one of which still has a cracked glass window—along with the scorched support beams from the former roof give me enough space to hide. I draped fallen palm fronds across the beams to provide shade from the heat, and piled more on the ground to form a place to sleep. They aren’t nearly as soft as I’d like, but they’re good enough for nesting birds. I demand no better.

“Why? What’s wrong with that?” I ask, trying to understand his incredulous expression.

“I just should’ve guessed. I came here a couple times when I was a kid—but then I stopped because I was afraid it . . .”

He stops dead in his tracks.

I turn to face him, surprised at how pale he looks in the moonlight.

“I was afraid it’s haunted,” he says. “I heard whispers in the air, and sometimes the way the trees rustled, it seemed like there was a ghost.” He hesitates, like he’s trying to find the courage to ask his next question. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

I nod.

He backs away from me. “What are you?”

“I’m the same as you,” I say, treading lightly.

He laughs and the harsh sound slices the quiet night. “Please. I saw the way you floated in the air like that, and formed out of nothing and—”

“So you really did see me?” I ask, needing to hear him say it. I’ve waited so long for him to have the breakthrough, it’s still hard to believe it finally happened.

“Yeah. So don’t feed me that crap about you being human, because I know what I saw, and humans can’t do that.”

“Vane.” I wait for him to meet my eyes. “I never said anything about being human.”

He sucks in a breath. “So . . . you’re not human.”

“No.”

His face is a kaleidoscope of emotions. Relief. Doubt. Fear. Vindication.

I don’t say anything, waiting for him to make the last, most important connection.

I can almost hear the pieces click together in his brain.

His voice is barely audible when he finally speaks. “But you said you’re the same as me.”

I open my mouth to utter the words that will twist his world inside out and upside down, but my voice vanishes.

I’d give anything to forget who and what I am. To wake each morning not having to face what I must do. Or what I’ve done. Vane’s been living that kind of blissful ignorance for ten years. Oblivious to his responsibilities. Unaware of his role. Innocent to the overwhelming challenges he’ll face.

Now I’m about to strip that freedom away from him.

The guilt and regret nearly choke me.

But he needs to hear the truth. And I swore an oath that I’d tell him. So I square my shoulders and yank his universe out from under him.

“That’s right, Vane. I’m not human. And neither are you.”

CHAPTER 9

VANE

I can’t stop laughing.

I laugh so hard I scare bats out of the trees. My sides ache and I have to gasp for air and tears stream from the corners of my eyes. But what else am I supposed to do?

This is officially entering new realms of crazy, and I refuse to be dragged there. I may not understand a few things about my life or my past, but I’m absolutely positive that I’m a human being. I mean, I look like everyone else. I feel like everyone else.

So does Audra.

Right—because she’s human too, I tell myself.

Psycho. But human.

I must’ve dreamed what I saw in my room. I’ve had plenty of other crazy dreams about Audra—why not one more?

That’s a good enough explanation for me.

“I’m out of here,” I say as I head back toward my house. “Get off our property—and stay away from me, or I’ll smack you with a restraining order so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

“I can’t do that, Vane.”

I ignore the chills I get when she says my name. “Yes, you can.”

She isn’t my dream girl. She’s a problem I’m getting rid of.

She doesn’t follow me. Instead, I hear her start whispering.

I don’t want to listen—fight to ignore her—but it feels like her voice bores into my skull. The sounds are mush, but after a second they sink in and become words.

“Come to me swiftly, carry no trace. Lift me softly, then flow and race.”

The words fill me with warmth and ache and I want to run to them and away from them at the same time. But I can’t move. I’m frozen—enchanted by the whispers swirling in my consciousness.

Enchanted.

“Are you putting a spell on me?” I yell, shaking my head, trying to break whatever voodoo she’s using.

She doesn’t answer.

Instead, a blast of wind tangles around me, and I learn what a fly feels as a spider binds it with a web. Among the chaos and torrential gusts I feel her arms wrap across my shoulders and an explosion of heat as her body presses against mine. Then we’re airborne.

I swear my stomach stays behind as we climb up and up and up. I have to keep popping my ears as we shift altitudes.

But I’m not afraid.

I know I should be. My life is literally hanging on a gust of wind that Audra’s somehow controlling—and she’s clearly some sort of witch or goddess or other impossible creature.

I don’t care.

It feels right up in the dark sky. Natural. Like scratching an itch I didn’t feel until the burning relief rushes through me. Up high, with the wind whipping around me and Audra’s warmth mingling with mine, everything else washes away.

I close my eyes and listen to the wind—and I don’t hear the thundering, whipping sound I expect. I hear the ancient language that belongs to the wind and the wind alone. It whispers of the places it’s been.

Of change.

Of power.

Of freedom.

I want to listen forever. And that’s when I know.

I’m not human.

I have no idea what I am, or what I’m supposed to do with that revelation. But it doesn’t stop it from being true.

A lurch in my stomach rips me back to reality and I open my eyes. We’re falling, fast and hard. I can’t be sure—but I have a feeling the girly scream comes from me.

“Hit the ground running,” Audra shouts in my ear as the dark earth races toward us.

Right. ’Cause moving my feet will stop me from turning into a Vane-splat.

But my options are limited, so when she shoves me away from her and whispers, “Release,” at the same second the wind cocoon unravels, I follow her lead, pumping my legs as my toes graze the hard earth.

I laugh as we both run across the rocky ground as fast as our feet will carry us.

I’m not dead. In fact, I’ve never felt more alive.

I force my legs to a stop and take in the scenery. We’re high in the foothills, with the lights of the desert cities twinkling in the distance and the freeway snaking below. Stark, pointed poles shoot out of the ground in neat rows, with tri-pointed blades spinning at the top.

Windmills.

The San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm.

I’ve driven through it on my rare escapes from this suffocating valley, but I’ve never walked among the enormous turbines. The night rings with the sound of their massive blades slicing the air as the wind shoves against them. Red lights at the top of each tower glow like evil eyes. I let my vision go out of focus as the windmills spin round and round.

Footsteps crunch behind me, reminding me I’m not alone.

“So what am I?” I ask without turning around. I’m afraid to look at her when she says the words that will change my life forever.

“We’re sylphs.”

“Sylphs?” That isn’t the answer I expected. I mean, if I have to be a mythical creature, it could at least be one I’ve heard of. “What the hell is a sylph?”

“That’s what humans call an air elemental.”

“An air elemental?”

“Are you going to keep repeating everything I say as a question?”

I spin to face her. “Uh . . . I’ll stop when you say something that actually makes sense.”

“How’s this? You’re a Windwalker. We control the wind. We’re part of the wind.”

“We’re part of the wind?”

She grits her teeth and I realize I repeated her again. I don’t care. “How can we be part of the wind?”

“The same way humans are part of the earth. When they die, they turn back to dust.”

“So—what?—when we die, we go back to being wind?”

A shadow passes across her face, even in the dim moonlight. “Yes.”

I shake my head, ready to tell her how ridiculous that sounds. But a memory knocks the words out of me: two tangled forms—a little bit like bodies, but mostly they’re just hollow, twisted masses. I don’t remember seeing them in person, but when I was ten I finally got brave enough to Google the grainy photos, hoping it would spark a few repressed memories.

“That’s what happened to my parents—why their bodies were unrecognizable when they found them, isn’t it?” I whisper.

She looks away. “Yes. It can be a slow process sometimes, but eventually there’s nothing left but air.”

So my real parents weren’t human either.

It makes sense—if I’m a sylph, they had to be too.

Would’ve been nice if they’d clued me in on that one. Hey, son—heads up, you’re a Windwalker. Though, maybe they did and I just don’t remember.

I swallow and force my lips to ask the question that’s plagued me for the last ten years. Now that the answer’s finally in my reach, I’m a little afraid to hear it. “What happened to my parents that day, in the storm?”

Audra takes a slow, deep breath before she speaks. “They were murdered.”

Murdered.

The word feels cold and foreign. I always thought their deaths were a fluke.

My hands clench into fists. “By who?”

Her voice is ice when she answers. “His name is Raiden.”

I memorize the name of the man who killed my family. Almost killed me. “Why did he kill them?”

“It’s . . . hard to explain. It involves things your mind is not yet ready to understand. I’ll tell you when the time is right.”

I open my mouth to argue, but my brain is already twisting in a thousand different directions. I’m not sure I can handle a long, complicated explanation—especially about such a painful subject.

I sink to the ground, leaning against one of the windmill bases. The soft vibration seeps through my thin blue T-shirt, and I can’t help wishing I could rewind the last few hours and go back to being the regular guy with the weird dream stalker and the blank past.

How am I supposed to go home or see my friends, knowing what I know now? How am I ever supposed to be normal again?

I’ve crossed a line. I feel maxed out. But there’s one thing I have to know. “Why am I still alive?”

“What?”

“The day my family died. How did I survive?”

“My—” She stops, like she can’t push the words out. “My father saved you.”

“Your father? But . . .”

“What?”

“I always thought you saved me.”

Her eyes drop to the ground. “I was there. But I wasn’t strong enough.”

Her voice catches, and it occurs to me that this is a painful memory for her, too. I clear my throat, struggling to find a sensitive way of wording my next question. “And your father. He’s . . .”