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through, the heat funneling to her hands, and she knew she would be able to escape.

Kira tried to move free of the hold but still couldn’t. The heat from her hands soon became too much. In Diana’s unfaltering stare, Kira knew she was still in danger. For a second she wondered if maybe Tristan had let her escape in the classroom, if he had known what was happening inside of her and knew how to stop it.

Diana had no such concern.

Kira started to feel as though she were burning from the inside out, as though her blood had turned to lava and was coursing through her body, destroying everything in its path. She started shaking. Diana mistook it for fear and laughed, but Kira barely heard the sound. She couldn’t stop the vibrations racking her body. The heat was excruciating. She began to scream.

Tristan cried out, struggling against John and Jerome to try to save her. Kira didn’t register him. The pressure in her body grew. She was a bomb, ticking, ticking, ticking. And as Diana sank down to take her deadly bite, Kira finally exploded.

All she felt was the release of the heat going away, seeping out of her. When the pain was almost gone, Kira opened her eyes to see fire streaming from her hands. Diana, John, Jerome, and Tristan were pressed against the back wall of the theater, held there by the light coming from her palms, unable to escape. Kira didn’t know how to turn it off. She didn’t know what was happening. Tristan's eyes filled with pain and fear, and Kira realized she was hurting him—destroying all of them. They were afraid of her. Powerless against her.

Kira couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She just stared at her hands, unable to control anything. Different hands landed on her shoulders, shaking her, and she distantly heard someone screaming her name. But she was outside of herself, watching this scene as if it were a movie. She almost wanted Diana to feel pain and to die—she almost wanted to kill her.

That thought snapped Kira back to reality.

Blinking, she realized it was Luke who was standing before her. He shook her and called her name. Somehow she knew he understood what was happening. That he was like her. Part of her was mad he had never told her, but a much more prominent part of her knew she needed his help and was overjoyed to see him.

"Kira, listen to me, you have to stop. You have to release them." He spoke calmly, with a commanding voice.

"How?" she cried, not knowing how to turn it off, scaring herself.

"Just close your fists and let go of the anger." He tried to soothe her and ran his hands up and down her arms.

Kira listened to his words and attempted to let go of the fear of knowing how close she had come to death. She tried to let go of the anger at Diana for wanting to kill her, for torturing her and Tristan to do so. She tried to let go of the resentment at Tristan for giving in, for showing her that her trust in him might not have been worth it.

But most of all, Kira tried to let go of the fury with herself, for not knowing who she was, for not being more demanding, for not being able to stop, for hurting Tristan, for feeling the urge to kill. And the fear, the fear was the worst. How could she let go of the self-fear—the fear of what she was and what she might be capable of?

When Kira admitted all of this to herself, she felt a slight release, and though it took all of her strength, she slowly brought her fingers down to curl into her palm. Kira brought her thumb around to hold the light and trap it within her hands. Tendrils of fire tried to seep through the cracks between her fingers, but Kira held steady until finally the heat died and she was able to just let it go.

She looked at the back wall where Diana, John, and Jerome jumped from the crevices they had been pressed into and ran from the room. Tristan dropped slowly down and gave her one more glance. In that instant, she realized he was right—they could never be. He looked at her one last time, with sadness and with fear, and followed his friends out the door.

Kira knew he was different—she could see the humanity in his eyes where it was absent from his friends—but that wasn’t enough to make her chase after him.

Instead, she looked at Luke—at his familiar eyes, friendly demeanor, and look of concern—and collapsed into his open arms as tears began to fall from her eyes.

 

 

Chapter Seven

 

Kira stared out at the churning waves, barely registering the body heat coming from Luke’s arm around her shoulder. He had held her while she cried and after a long time of sobbing, he had brought her to the Folly Beach Pier to let the rhythm of the water calm her.

They hadn’t spoken more than five words to each other since he carried her from the auditorium, because Kira simply didn’t know what to say. How could she ask if vampires were real and if what seemed like live fire just shot from her hands? How could she admit that she clearly wasn’t human let alone ask someone else to believe it? Most of all, how could she confess that she had started falling for the one guy her best friend told her not to and that everything he feared had come true?

It wasn’t easy to admit how naïve she had been and to admit she was wrong about everything. It wasn’t easy for her to think of Tristan, his eyes in pleasure at the taste of her blood or his eyes in pain as her power slowly started killing him. It was worse still to think of herself and what she was. Kira couldn’t ignore it, but how in the world could she face it?

How do you face it? she thought, and then answered herself. You just do.

"Luke?" She turned to him. Luke didn’t move. He just watched and waited to see what she would say. It was like he knew her perfectly, knew what was coming but also knew that Kira needed to hear herself say it before it could be true. "Luke…what am I?"

"A girl," he replied, half-jokingly and half-reassuringly. She nudged him with her shoulder.

"Seriously, no jokes," she said.

He lifted his eyebrows in response as if to say "who, me?" but then realized even his jokes wouldn’t adjust Kira’s frown. Kira could tell the instant his mood changed from protector to informer. She knew from the furrow of his brows that the jokes meant to cheer her would be exchanged for serious talk that she wasn’t used to from him. Kira's mood dropped further when he lifted his arm from around her back and turned toward her on the bench to see her face. He knew everything, and it was his duty to tell her.

"First, do you know what Tristan and the others are?" She nodded yes. "Tell me, Kira."

She breathed deeply, knowing the minute she said it out loud the scene haunting her thoughts would come true. The supernatural strength and speed. The blood and the teeth. It would all be real.

"Vampires," she whispered, words almost stolen by the wind, but Luke heard her.

"Good. Can you guess what we are?"

Kira looked at him, thankful he had told her what she had already guessed—that they were the same, that she wasn’t alone. But still, she had no idea what that was and looked at him with blank eyes.

"Kira, we’re something called conduits, protectors if you will. We’re the only living things that can hunt vampires, and I say living because we mostly believe that vampires are dead, but they frequently kill each other." She thought back to when Tristan had mentioned conduits—maybe he had been sending her a message, trying to help her.

The entire thing sounded crazy. She was some sort of vampire slayer? But it was the only explanation she had for what had just happened.

"So, we’re…conduits." Kira forced the words through her lips. Luke smiled, as though happy she had accepted the name without a fight. "To be a conduit of something, you have to like channel something, right? That was the light I’m guessing, but I just don’t understand."

He took her hands and flipped her palms up, so she could see the pale red burn marks they now held. "We channel the sun, and I know it sounds crazy, but that was the light you sent through your arms. It hurts at first, but it’ll get better."

"The sun? That’s not possible," Kira said, shaking her head. She thought back to the feeling of lava running in her veins and the light that looked almost like fire shooting from her hands. Could she even say anything was impossible anymore? "But how? Why?" she asked.

"I’ll get to that later, first—"

"No, tell me now. It’s been long enough," she yelled at him. "Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you warn me? A little 'stay away from Tristan or you’ll turn into a human light bulb', if I even am human. I thought you were my best friend. I was so scared. I could have died not even knowing that I could save myself. Damn it, Luke. Why didn’t you say anything?" She started crying again, now out of frustration.

"You wouldn’t have died. Even though you didn’t know in your head how to save yourself, your body knew danger and reacted. Besides, I wasn’t allowed to, and before you open your mouth again, listen to me for ten minutes." He reached out to cover her open mouth with his finger. "You know how I said I was from a small town in Florida, called Sonnyville?" Kira nodded. "Well, it’s not just a small town. It’s a haven for conduits, so we can grow up together and practice without normal people around and without vampires to snatch us when we’re little."

"Why wasn’t I there?" Kira asked. Why hadn’t she grown up knowing who she was?

"Because you’re different, and I was sent here to watch and protect you."

"Sent here? Like forced to be my friend. Is anything in my life real?" She ended quietly, asking more for herself than for Luke.

"Yes, our friendship is real. I was supposed to watch from afar. But I’m getting ahead of the story. To explain what we are, I have to go back to the beginning, to the stories you were supposed to learn when you were just a kid." Kira nodded, signaling she would keep quiet until he finished.

"Ever since humans have been around, vampires have been too. Do you remember on the beach, how they were in the sun?" Kira nodded. "The stories were wrong, just being in the sun doesn’t really kill a vampire. They are stronger than anything else in the world, and faster too. Their skin won’t break open unless at the hands of another vampire, which is why there are so few ways to kill them. They do live off of blood and only human blood will do. But other than that, we don’t know very much because they are incredibly hard to trap and study. All we really do know is that the sunlight is lethal, just not from the distance with which it shines."

"But I thought—"

He interrupted. "I know, I just said the sun won’t kill them, not like how it is in the movies with spontaneous combustion and dust and Hollywood effects. The sun slowly kills a vampire every time one is exposed, but the length of a year is like the length of a second to a vampire. So, it would take thousands and thousands of years for the sun’s toll to have any effect. That’s where we come along. When we channel the sunlight, it shortens the distance and makes the aging happen faster, so within minutes we can kill or harm a vamp. Are you understanding this at all?"

"I think so." Kira shrugged. She was a superhuman conduit of sunlight—a protector against vampires that would otherwise be unstoppable. In a weird way, she thought it almost made sense. The sunlight had always warmed her, not only physically, but also mentally, like she had a special tie to it. And there was no other explanation she could imagine to describe what had happened before. It was comforting to know she wasn’t a monster but a savior. "But Luke, I don’t understand how I’m different. Why I wasn’t