Page 57 of Strange Lights

“Yep, and motorcycles,” he says, hesitating slightly before asking, “Have you ever driven in a car before?”

“Yes. I can drive. Took a virtual driver’s ed course and everything,” I say smugly. I don’t say that while I have all the rules for driving memorized, I’ve never driven on a paved road with other cars, just around the nearby desert on dirt trails behind tall fences.

Then I spend much longer than I need to down in the dungeon with him, trading facts and conversation.

“I’m collecting background. History of the subject is important for experimental procedure,” I try to justify aloud.

“I’m a person, not a subject,” Luca says coldly.

“I didn’t mean that. I just mean, I have to justify my time. Adele will ask for an update soon. If I don’t meet her expectations, you might have my company down here a lot more often.” I gesture toward the cell next to his.

The tightness in Luca’s face loosens by an increment. “And here I thought I had crappy parents.”

He tells me about his life, neatly covering tragedy in a matter-of-fact tone. He’s an only child. His father died from an overdose when Luca was five, and his mother was an alcoholic who was sloppy about covering the bruises she gave Luca. After a teacher noticed, he bounced from foster home to foster home, seminomadic. He ran away from his last foster home when he was sixteen, couch surfing until a friend’s uncle took pity on him and gave him a job in a garage. Luca thinks he would have liked to be an engineer if he’d had the opportunity and money for a degree.

A dark pit of shame spreads through my stomach as he speaks. I’ve never wanted for physical comforts, and I’m four years older than he was when he struck out on his own, and I’m still here. I have enough cash squirreled away from my runaway attempts to pay for at least a year or two of college.

“What’s your name?” Luca asks me in the silence that follows his story. “The one you actually like to be called, not Kingsley.”

“Reggie,” I say.

He nods. “It suits you.”

“Give me your old clothes,” I say before I leave.

Luca hesitates.

“I’ll take care of them. I figured I’d wash them for you,” I explain.

He hands them over, then. They smell like him. Like fresh air and freedom.

“Ask your mom to let me out,” he pleads. “I won’t tell anyone about this place. Let me go.”

“I can tell you right now what her answer would be.”

“Please? Try?”

I promise nothing. I tell myself that it’s because I know what the answer will be, that Adele would stop my visits to the dungeon. I pretend it has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve already started to wish impossible wishes. For Luca to want to stay here, with me. For him to escape and want to take me with him when he goes.

Later, in the privacy of my room, I bury my face in Luca’s shirt before I hide it in a wash load of my own clothing. The feeling of loss for something that isn’t mine to lose fills me as I throw the laundry detergent in the washing machine and start the cleaning cycle.

25

A Little Bit of Necromancy

“What magic do you have?” I ask Luca.

“Besides being a charismatic, devastatingly handsome genius,” Luca says, “whose potential is being squandered in an underground prison in the middle of Nevada?”

“What magic did you get after the lycanthropy virus infected you?” I press.

“Get me a glass of water,” Luca says. I’m already used to the little favors he asks for in exchange for cooperation. The favors are traded as easily as all the little facts we trade about our lives.

I open the hatch and hold out the glass of water, expecting him to step close to take it. He doesn’t, staring at the cup hard instead. The water rises. At first, it becomes a wriggling amoeba, an amorphous mass. Then it writhes and rearranges into a bird shape, feathers and all, gliding in place. The bird melts away; a flower grows in its place⁠—a snapdragon, I think. I reach toward it, and suddenly it’s shaped like a hand and clasps my own in a ghostly cool caress before splattering to the ground.

I draw my hand back, inspecting it, only to find it completely dry.

“I’m a Pisces,” Luca quips.