Page 60 of Strange Lights

I crawl into bed with Zara rather than return to my own empty one. Meredith is already asleep there.

“Stay, Reggie. Please” is all Zara says as she curls close.

“What’s wrong with you?” Luca asks within five minutes of my arrival the next day. I cannot understand how he reads me so well when he’s never seen my face.

“I haven’t made progress in my research assignment,” I say stiffly.

“But I thought you said you’d already made a new variant and figured out a vaccine. And I’ve done all the magic tricks and blood tests. I’ve done everything you want; you’ve done everything she’s asked.”

“But I haven’t,” I say, and admit the truth I’ve held in for weeks: “She never wanted a vaccine. Even the new variant isn’t good enough. She asked me to figure out a way to control you. To find a way to use you.”

“And are you going to do it?” Luca asks.

“She says she’ll take the project away from me . . .” I stumble over admitting the threat she made to kill him.

Luca draws back sharply. Pulling away, backing toward the center of the cage where I can’t follow. I sit on the floor, slide as close as I can to the glass, as close as I can get to Luca.

“Well, you’d better get to work, then,” Luca says nastily. “I’d hate to see Mommy get mad at you.”

“Luca, she said she’d ‘dispose’ of you if I didn’t. She gave me a month.”

“I’d rather die than let her control me, so that makes that easy,” Luca says brusquely.

“I don’t know what to do. Or even understand what she wants. Sometimes I think she’s actually running an experiment on me, like this is all some grand plan of hers. That she’s keeping me busy because she needs me for something she hasn’t told me about yet.”

“Then do something besides play into her little games, Reggie,” Luca snaps.

“How?” I say desperately. “It’s all I know how to do. I don’t know what else to do.”

This time when Luca looks at me again, I see pity mixed with exasperation.

“Tell me exactly what she asked you to do. Everything you know. We’ll work from there, come up with something.” He scrubs at his face with a hand, pinches the bridge of his nose, and sighs.

“She said she wants to use the permanent pathway to magic that you have access to as a werewolf. She said werewolves were a conduit. A way to ‘bring back what’s been lost to the void.’”

Luca has had no formal training in magic, has not even looked into any of the old folklore or anecdotes. He’s figured out a remarkable amount on his own, working on intuition alone. Trial and error. I’ve given him a crash course of all I know.

“‘What’s been lost to the void’ . . . Is she talking about people?”

“People?”

“You said that sometimes people go too far, get lost in the void or whatever. Is she talking about resurrecting the dead?” Luca asks.

I gasp. “The delivery. I snuck a look at a refrigerator truck that came in the middle of the night. It was filled with dead bodies.”

Luca stares at me for a long moment. “Is your mother seriously trying to get me to create an army of the dead for her?”

It sounds so ridiculous. I want to laugh. Or throw up.

“What does she need an army for? Especially an undead one?”

“I don’t know, but you just told me about a refrigerator truck filled with dead bodies and said your mother’s goal is to control a magical gateway in my mind.”

“I won’t let her find a way to control minds, especially not yours.” The very idea makes me ill, not just envisioning what she’d make Luca do, but me too. My sisters.

“I will not be made into a weapon,” Luca says. “I will die before I let her control my mind.”

He turns away from me, and I face my options clearly for the first time. If Luca stays here, I will lose him. Either my mother will kill him, or she’ll find a way to control him, and he won’t be Luca anymore. If I get him out, he might still leave me behind, but maybe there’s a chance he wouldn’t.