Chasing Sunrise

Nineteen

"RU OK?" Gina's text popped up on my phone.

Corban glanced at my screen, leaning in close enough that if he were human, I'd be able to feel his body warm the air slightly, but he wasn't human. He was other, and even if he was a good kind of other, evidence of his otherness was creepy. "Gina's calm," he said. "And no, she didn't kill Pedro and his friends, or even yell at them too much."

I shot him a look of semi-confusion as I typed out the text, "Met up with Corban. He's driving me home." Because he was, whether he'd planned to or not. We had some talking to do.

"OK, cool, cool," was the reply.

"Are you an angel or a pot dealer?" I demanded. "What did you do to her?"

He chuckled at that, as if it was some incredibly novel joke. "I don't know if I can explain." He moved so that he could slump against the wall next to me, looking as if he'd had all the energy sucked out of him. Perhaps he had.

I expected his hands to be burnt, but when he turned his palms up to look at them, the skin was unblemished.

"But—" I began.

"Look, right now I'm really weak, and really starved, and you probably have all this fear and grief. Please, let me feed?"

Feed? "On my fear?"

He nodded, his face looking extra pale in the moonlight. "Yeah."

"But not my grief," I said. "No touching that." This was not the kind of conversation I thought I'd be having on a Sunday night, or any night for that matter.

"Fine. Just let me in."

"To my mind?"

"Yes, I'm not a mind reader. I just feed."

I had no idea how to let something like him into my mind, but I took a deep breath and told myself it was okay to let go of my fear of turning into a vampire. I'd generate enough to replace whatever Corban took by tomorrow night.

Sure enough, the creeping dread that loomed over me at all times bled away. My memories of nightmares about waking up in flames took on a paler, less ominous cast. The feeling like I had a cancer eating at my insides dissipated. I was just plain old Liana with some supernatural beauty slapped on over my plain old insides, and the knife-sharp grief that tore at my heart was still there, untouched.

"This," I said, "is bizarre. So you took away all of Gina's anxiety at her friend running off into the night?"

"I feed on emotions, negative ones." The color was returning to his cheeks and he pulled his gloves back on.

"Feeding doesn't sound very angelic."

"Fine, I absorb emotions. I unburden mortals from their pain. That better?" His eyes sparkled in amusement.

It was too weird of a situation for me to joke about, though. I tucked my hands into my pockets to keep them warm, though my core was losing heat while I sat on the frozen ground, and now that my body temperature was rising again, I was going to start melting whatever snow was under me. "So you can also read minds," I said. "Maybe not the actual thoughts, but you know whether or not someone's being made sad, or embarrassed."

"Hey, I'm not any better at figuring out why people feel how they do than a perceptive human, and the older I get, the harder it is for me to remember what makes people tick. In your case, you've shut me out since that first moment we met. Humans have the final say in what my kind can and can't do to them. That's the deal, right? Between humanity and divinity? Divinity is here if you'll let it in, but it's up to you to accept it."