“Your eyes,” her dad said.
Cole stepped closer; his chest brushed her shoulder, and his hand settled on the small of her back. He surveyed the others with a look that clearly warned them to tread lightly.
She trusted everyone in this room with what she’d revealed. Orin was an asshole of the highest order, but he would keep her alive. And not just to bring down the Lord, but also because of Cole. The two of them were like oil and water, but if something happened to her, it would destroy Cole, and Orin wouldn’t allow that.
She didn’t know Varo, but if Cole believed in him, then so did she.
“Were my mother’s eyes like this when you met her?” she asked her dad.
“No,” he said. “She had beautiful brown eyes and hair the same shade as yours.”
“Oh,” Lexi whispered as sorrow for the woman she’d never met stabbed her heart. Her hand instinctively went to her hair.
“You looksomuch like her,” her dad whispered.
Lexi blinked away the tears pricking her eyes. Now was not the time to let her emotions get the better of her. She still had so much to learn, and her father was the one who knew the most.
“Maybe she didn’t look like this because you found her at night,” Lexi suggested.
“I found her during the day. She was fully exposed to the sun when I carried her out from under the willow.”
“So that means I should be able to control it eventually. I mean, if this is happening to me, it had to have happened to all the arach, right?”
She couldn’t keep the hope or desperation from her voice. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being locked away from the sun for days, weeks, ormonthsit took her to control herself better.
Okay, death was worse, but if she had to spend the next fifty years locked in the tunnels, she far preferred death.
“I would guess so,” her dad said and looked to Sahira.
“I would assume so too, but I don’t know for sure,” Sahira said. “If your mother wasn’t glowing like this in the sun, and those other changes weren’t visible, then there is no reason to believe you won’t gain better control of it over time.”
“What if only an arach could show me how to do that?” Lexi asked.
“We’ll have to hope that’s not true. Wecanfigure this out, and we will, Lexi. You’ll walk freely during the day again, I promise.”
“We’re not sure about moonlight either yet,” Cole said.
Lexi’s spirits deflated further. If she couldn’t have the day, she needed the night, but what if she couldn’t have it?
Then, she would have to get through it. She wouldn’t let her morose thoughts bring her down. Shewouldlearn to control this. Shewouldfigure it out, because there was no other alternative.
“I still don’t know what powers I have,” Lexi said.
“You’ll learn with time,” Cole said.
“And that time is coming soon,” Orin said.
“Too soon,” Cole agreed. “It’s time to take the clones to the Lord. The sooner he stops breathing down my neck about Orin and Varo, the sooner we can work on Lexi learning to control her abilities.”
* * *
Lexi was trying notto be creeped out by the bodies lying on the floor, but she was failing. She kept looking from Varo, to his duplicate and back again before shifting her attention to Orin and his clone.
She couldn’t find any differences between any of them. If the idea of it didn’t freak her out so much, she’d kneel beside them and pull up in their eyelids to see what color their eyes were.
Lexi half expected they would be the opaque color of a dead man’s eyes, or worse, their freaking eyes mightmove.She’d run screaming from here and never look back if that happened.
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as she tried to ease the goose bumps breaking out on them. It did nothing to help her bone-deep chill as she waited for one of the bodies to sit up and come after them.
