There was a pause. “Yeah, I am.”
“Don’t be,” I said, even though she should be.
“Easier said than done.” She played with the tab on the can. “It’s not me I’m worried about. They think you’re responsible for what happened—the crazy energy thing. What if they think you’re…a danger?”
How could I answer that? “It’s not just me, Kitten. Even if I had done that, it’s never been about me. It’s about all the Luxen.” I looked away, wetting my lips. “You know what Matthew believes?”
“No.”
A cynical grin pulled at my lips. “He believes that one day, probably not in our generation, but someday, my kind and the Arum will nearly outnumber yours.”
“Really? That’s kind of…”
“Scary?”
She tucked her hair back. “I don’t know if it’s scary. I mean, the Arum thing is, but your kind—the Luxen—freaky powers aside…you’re not very different from us.”
“What about the fact that we’re made of light?”
She smiled a little. “Well, besides that.”
“It got me thinking,” I said, going back to my point about what Matthew believed. “That if some of our kind believe this, how come the DOD isn’t worried?”
“What happens if they think you are a threat? And don’t beat around the bush about it.”
Part of me didn’t want to tell her this, but keeping her in the dark wasn’t going to help her. “When I was at the compound before, there were Luxen who didn’t assimilate. Mostly they didn’t want to be kept under the thumb of the DOD. Others I guessed were viewed as a threat because they asked too many questions. Who really knows?”
She swallowed thickly. “What happened to them?”
Several moments passed before I answered. “They killed them.”
Chapter 13
Horror filled Kat’s gaze as she stared at me. I sensed the burst of energy a second before it rolled through the room. I twisted to the side as Kat dropped her unopened can of soda. It hit the floor as the kitchen chair flew out from underneath the table. I reached for the chair, but it changed course and slammed into Kat’s leg.
Shooting forward, I caught Kat before she fell. “Whoa there, Kitten.”
Kat pushed the hair out of her face as she lifted her head. She was favoring one leg, which wasn’t surprising. That chair was trucking. “Holy crap…”
I eased a shoulder under her arm for support. “Are you okay?”
“I’m peachy.” She wiggled free and placed weight on her leg. Her lips thinned, and then she bent over, rolling up her jeans. A thin stream of blood trickled down her leg. “Great, I’m a natural disaster.”
“I might have to agree with that.”
She shot me a dark look.
“Come on, get up on the table and let me look at that.”
“I’m fine.”
This wasn’t something I was going to argue about. Moving fast, I caught her around the waist and carried her to the table, depositing her on it. When I pulled back, her mouth was hanging open.
“What…how did you do that?”
“Skill,” I said, picking up her foot and placing it on a chair. My fingertips brushed over her skin as I rolled the leg of her pants above her knee. She jerked a little at the static charge that passed between my skin and hers. There was a nice little gash just below the knee. “Wow, you really are a disaster.”
“Ugh, it’s bleeding all over the place.” She shuddered. “You’re not going to heal me, are you?”
“Uh, no, because who knows what would happen then? You might turn into an alien.”
“Ha. Ha.”
I grabbed a clean towel and dampened it. Walking back to her, I carefully blotted up the blood. The weight of what Kat had just done settled heavily. She got emotional and stuff happened. This wasn’t good. “What am I going to do with you, Kitten?”
“See? I didn’t even want to move the chair, and it flew at me like a heat-seeking missile.”
I shook my head. “When we were younger, things like this would happen all the time, before we could control the Source.”
“The Source?”
“The energy in us—we call it the Source, because it links us back to our home planet, you know? Like the source of it all. At least, that’s what our Elders say. Anyway, when we were kids and learning how to control our abilities, it was crazy. Dawson had this habit of moving furniture, like you. He’d go to sit down and the chair would fly out from under him.” I laughed as I remembered how many times he’d fallen on his ass. “But he was young.”
“Great. So I’m operating at the level of a toddler?”
I lifted my eyes to hers. “Basically.” I sat the towel aside. “Look, it’s stopped bleeding already. Not that bad.”
She glanced down at herself. “Thank you for cleaning it up.”
“No problem. I don’t think you’ll need stitches.” I ran my fingers over the cut, avoiding the angry red skin.