Ignite (Midnight Fire #1)

Chapter Seven

"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 raised with you."

"Just have a little more patience, I promise I’m almost there."

Kira swallowed her next words to let him continue and looked back out toward the ocean. The constant churn of the waves, the monotonous pushing and receding of the water, helped her maintain a sense of calm, something she figured she would need as he went on.