A Beautiful Dark

light.
    “Look, maybe I don’t have any powers at all. You said I might not.”
    Devin sighed. “I thought what happened on the bus . . . with the heater . . . that maybe you caused that.”
    “Could have been bad wiring,” Asher said. He blended in so well with inky blackness at the edge of the clearing.
    “You don’t believe that,” Devin challenged.
    “Doesn’t matter what I believe.”
    “Let’s pack it in for the night. We’ll resume tomorrow at three fifteen sharp. On the school roof.”
    School. I had school tomorrow. After everything I’d learned that day, I almost laughed. How could I go back there and pretend to be normal when that was anything but how I felt?
    “Skye?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
    Devin’s wings closed in a rush of movement so fast I felt the wind on my face. Seconds later, he had vanished. Whether he had simply flown away or dissolved into thin air, I couldn’t tell.
    I looked down at my hands. Could I create fire? Wind? Would I be able to heal someone else’s pain as Devin could? Did I truly have these powers churning inside?
    A few feet away from where I stood, a branch hung from a nearby tree, broken and hanging at an awkward angle. I brought my hands up and pushed the air in front of me, hard. I focused all of my energy through my fingers, trying to channel what Devin had told me about healing. Visualize the wound. Gather it to you. Feel the life force flow. Correct the balance.
    The branch swayed slightly in the wind.
    That was it.
    “Hey,” came a voice from the darkness.
    It was Asher. I hadn’t even noticed he was standing there; his wings bled into the darkness as if they weren’t solid.
    “You have to rest.”
    “I want to keep trying,” I said as I began to walk toward the tree.
    Asher walked behind me, keeping pace. “You have to stop for the night,” he persisted. “This is your first day. You don’t want to burn out.”
    I ignored him.
    “Did you get that? Just trying some Rebellion humor. . . .”
    Instead of answering him, I wrapped my hands around the split in the branch, where it hung like an arm from a broken shoulder. That was how Devin had healed my ankle. He’d wrapped his hands around the swelling, his grip intense, and seconds later, the pain was gone. What if I could make pain disappear? What a useful power that would be. Could I heal more than physical pain? I wondered if I could cure emotional pain, too.
    The branch broke off in my hand. I cursed under my breath.
    I felt hands fall gently on my shoulders.
    “Come on,” Asher said. “Let’s go.”
    My car was still on the road where we’d left it.
    We’d walked back across the field in silence; Asher held a small flame in his hand to help us find our way. I took my keys from my pocket, and before I could even press the unlock button, Asher snatched them from my grasp.
    “I’m driving,” he said.
    “I can do it,” I told him testily.
    “You’re tense and exhausted,” he countered. “Just get in.”
    I stared at him, trying to wear him down. He didn’t budge.
    “Fine,” I said. “But if you wreck my car, you’re dead.”
    I walked around and climbed into the passenger seat. When he settled behind the wheel, I asked, “Do you even know how to drive?”
    “I know how to do everything.”
    I laughed and settled back against the seat. As my mind worked to process everything I’d learned the past couple of days, Asher’s hand came to rest on mine. How was it that he always seemed to know exactly what I needed right when I needed it?
    We pulled into my driveway, and he cut the engine. Without the hum of the motor, the quiet was vast.
    “Thanks for driving me home,” I said.
    “No problem. You think I’d let you come home alone after a day like this?”
    “Devin did.”
    “Devin is his own rare species of weird,” Asher muttered. “Don’t let him play mind games with you.”
    It was obvious the topic upset him so I let it go. I didn’t stop thinking about it, though.
    Are you playing mind games with me? I wondered. It was suddenly so hard to comprehend what was real and what wasn’t. This hidden world, these magical powers—the unbelievable truth about my parents. How could they have never told me? Couldn’t they have left me a journal or something? But then they hadn’t expected to be ripped from my life so soon, either.
    “Asher,” I said in the dark. “Do you want to see something?”
    He nodded without saying a word. I opened my