Walker stared at her. “Because Darkside is part of you. It’s your world too. That’s why you see the marks on my skin, and now yours, too, when no one else can. You’re as much Darkling as human, Keira. Your mother’s human, but your father’s a Darkling.”
Her dad wasn’t human? Was he serious?
She shook her head, her thoughts buzzing like angry bees. “That doesn’t make any sense, Walker. If there are two worlds that can’t interact, then how could my parents come together to make a baby?”
Walker’s smile was sorrow-filled. “I didn’t say they couldn’t interact. I said they weren’t meant to. A few Darklings have a flaw in their molecular structure, like a DNA mutation. It allows them to slip between the worlds and touch humans. But it turned out to be a really, really bad idea for them to do that.”
“And you just—you just guessed that I might be one of their kids?”
Walker’s eyes grew stony—cold and serious. “No. I saw that you’d developed an immunity to heat.”
“What? I have? How did you know that?” She remembered the shirt, the one Jeremy had burned, that first day she’d met Walker, and shivered.
“That first time we were in the diner, the tea you had was boiling hot. You should have burned yourself on it, but you drank it without even blinking.”
Something in Keira’s mind slammed shut, like a mental security gate. “I don’t believe you.” She sounded like a petulant child, but she didn’t care. “If you don’t want to see me anymore, all you had to do was say so. Making me think I’m insane and trying to sell me this crazy story . . . ” She backed away from him. “It’s a real asshole move, Walker.”
“Keira, I’m not lying to you.” He reached for her. “I . . . look. Look.”
She waited. And waited. In the silence, she could hear the strangled panting of her own breath. Nothing happened.
“What?” she finally demanded. “What am I waiting for?”
Walker’s mouth moved. She could see him talking, but there was no sound. He stepped over to her but he didn’t stop. He walked right through her.
A sound somewhere between a sob and a shriek rattled in her throat. Keira spun to face him. She reached out to touch Walker’s face, but her hand slid through his cheek.
Her voice was barely a whisper. “No.” It was too much to take in. It couldn’t be. It wouldn’t be. As long as she didn’t believe it, it would all go away.
She stepped away from him and ran straight into the merry-go-round. “I don’t believe you.” Her voice grew loud. Shrill. “I don’t believe you! Just leave me alone.”
Someone else appeared behind Walker in the gloom of the church. Beneath the figure’s hooded robe, Keira saw a guy with a crooked nose and she recognized him in an instant. It was the disappearing pedestrian. From the day of her car accident. He was here.
And it turned out it hadn’t been any old pedestrian. It was Smith.
Her panic anchored her to the ground.
Smith was Walker’s cousin. That made him a Darkling too.
A Darkling who was dating her best friend.
Walker spun and his expression hardened. He said something to Smith. Keira could see now that it was a robe, and not a coat that Smith wore. Walker looked back at Keira.
Keira turned away from Walker’s stricken expression. She watched as the church disappeared and the damp, gray park sprang up to fill the vacant space. As fast as she could, Keira ran. Walker’s voice rang through the park.
“Keira! Keira, wait. Please, you have to listen to me!”
She ignored him.
She’d taken the footpath home from this park a thousand times. In ten minutes, she’d be home. She’d be inside the familiar walls of her familiar house, which felt a lot safer than the empty church that appeared and disappeared inside the park with no warning.
She wasn’t going back there. Not to the park and not to the church. Not ever.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
HALFWAY TO THE HOUSE, Keira’s phone started buzzing in her pocket. After three calls in a row from Walker, she turned it off. She raced up the driveway and into the house. Inside, the door to the front hall closet hung open. Keira could see the wedge of emptiness inside, where her father’s coats had hung that morning.
“Hello?” she called, her voice half-choked, hoping her dad was still home. She wanted—needed—to see someone familiar.
The only response she heard was the furnace humming through the vents.
He was already gone.
And she was alone.
Keira shrugged off her coat, trying to get rid of the damp smell of the park. She staggered over to the piano and collapsed onto the bench, resting her head against the music stand. She sat, staring down at the keyboard, waiting for her breath to even out. For her heart to slow down. A blur of things she didn’t want to examine slid through her head again and again.