“I dunno. We were having fun, but I’m not up for dealing with a bunch of drama, you know? Maybe it’s for the best. Anyway. I probably need to go. I was getting ready to leave when you called. I’m sitting in my car outside your house, and your mom is watching me through the window, which is getting a little weird.”
Keira closed her eyes. She was in so much trouble with her mom. This was going to be bad. This was going to be worse than bad—it was going to be another tiny apocalypse, another version of her life that was going to end. Only this time, it would be at her mother’s hands.
“You might as well come home,” Susan said. “I’ll see you when you get here.”
“I’m on my way,” she said.
And then she hung up.
Walker ran his hands around the steering wheel. “Susan told your mom that you weren’t staying with her, didn’t she?”
Keira stared straight ahead, her arms crossed tight in front of her.
“Yep. She got worried. I want to be pissed, but instead I kind of love her for it, you know? Does that sound strange?”
Walker was silent for a moment as he navigated the three blocks back to her house. Finally, he sighed, pulling the car to a stop in front of her house. He turned to face her. “Things are always strange. That’s the way life is.”
Beneath the blanket of night, Keira could see every light in her house was on, and Susan’s car was in the driveway.
“This is going to be awful,” she said simply.
Walker laughed. “After everything else that’s happened today? This is going to be no big deal. I’ll go in with you,” he offered.
“I don’t think that’s going to help. At all.” Keira bit her lip. How was she going to explain her tattered clothes?
“I guess not. We could still take off—get out of Sherwin. Have our own Great American Road Trip.” It sounded like a joke, but his voice was tentative. Hesitant.
Keira couldn’t stop her smile. This time, Walker didn’t have all the answers either.
She took a long breath and leaned her head against the window, staring up at the stars twinkling against the indigo sky.
“It sounds a lot nicer than finding out what’s going on in there,” she said, waving toward her house. “But it wouldn’t be right.” She looked at Walker. “I just have to go in. You’re right—it can’t be any worse than what I’ve already faced today.”
“I really can be right there with you,” Walker offered again. “Your mother’s wrath doesn’t scare me.”
Keira shook her head. “Thanks, but I think this is one I need to do on my own.” She smiled at him. “If you’d go with me as far as the door, though, I wouldn’t complain.”
They got out of the car, and fell into step next to each other, the concrete squares of the sidewalk slipping past all too quickly beneath their feet. At the shadowy end of Keira’s driveway, she turned to face him.
Before she could say anything, his mouth was on hers, his arms tight around her waist. It was like kissing lightning. Her skin tingled with it, her heart flailing to find its rhythm amid the electricity. She felt the Darkside wind sweep over them as the kiss sent them across the barrier between the two worlds, and then the cold squeeze as Walker pulled them back to Sherwin again.
Keira pulled away reluctantly. “We really shouldn’t do that,” she said.
“Not often,” he agreed. “But not never, either.”
“I love you,” she said.
Walker laughed. “I love you too. You don’t have to sound quite so sad about it, though.”
“My mother’s going to try to ground me for life.”
Walker leaned in, wrapping his arms around her.
“Doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “Whatever happens, I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll wait for you here or I’ll wait for you in Darkside. Wherever you end up, I’ll be there.”
“Waiting,” she said.
“That’s the idea, yes,” he teased.
In the window, over his shoulder, she could see the open top of her piano. It looked like it was waving. Like it was welcoming her home.
Maybe facing the music wouldn’t be entirely bad, after all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE OF MY GREAT regrets in life is that I never took a physics course. I didn’t care about calculating the velocity of a falling apple. Bo-RING. What I failed to realize was how much there was to learn beyond introductory physics. I didn’t understand that, right now, physicists are searching for ghostly particles and calculating just how the universe will end.
Dark matter isn’t something I made up for the purpose of writing The Gathering Dark. It’s way cooler than that.
Basically, we know there must be more “stuff” in the universe for it to work the way it does, but we don’t know exactly what—or where—that stuff is. Physicists call this dark matter. We know some force beyond the ones we understand must be driving the universe’s expansion. Scientists call that dark energy. We can’t see dark matter or dark energy—not the way we usually see things, at least. We can’t touch them. We just know they must be out there. Somewhere. Somehow.