Lucas placed a gentle hand on my back. "Rhea was just welcoming me to the school. She told me that you two are quite close." There was a question in his tone, but I couldn't answer it in front of her.
Rhea nodded to me, almost apologetically. "I didn't mean to ambush Lucas, but I've been dying to meet your new... guest." She settled on. Even Rhea could tell that there wasn't quite a suitable label for whatever was going on between us.
I smiled, my voice tight. "I'm glad you two are finally meeting. I've been meaning to introduce you for a long time." They both raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't say anything. "Lucas is here on, uh, official school business."
Lucas hid a small smirk. Official school business? I clearly needed to leave the cover stories to him.
"Lila was chosen to show me around the school and aid me in a few errands. I completed them a few weeks ago, but couldn't quite manage to stay away." He explained with a warm tone.
I didn't know if Rhea believed him, but she smiled at his words. It was hard not to. There was a magnetic charisma about Lucas that was hard to resist.
"That seems to be happening a lot lately," Rhea commented.
"I guess this school's reputation is well earned, then." Lucas quipped.
She nodded robotically, unsure of what else to say. I took advantage of the pause and gently nudged Lucas toward the staircase. He took the hint and turned away from Rhea, but not before offering a courteous goodbye. Rhea waved, but we were already halfway down the stairs.
As soon as we were out of the dorm's wing, Lucas turned to me for an explanation.
"Rhea is one of the few scholarship students left that still has no idea about Faith Heights. She passed her final interview, but she has yet to meet her soulmate." I said.
He studied my face. "It's hurting you to keep her in the dark."
I nodded. "Before Jackson told me the truth here, Rhea and I were in this together. She feels as though I abandoned her."
"You didn't abandon her. There was nothing you could have done. Don't worry; she'll be on the other side of it all soon enough." He assured.
Lucas leaned forward, hesitantly, and brushed a loose strand of hair behind my ear. He lingered for a moment, before reaching down and taking my hand. The gesture was comforting in its warmth, but it felt strangely forced.
Still, I let him keep hold as we walked acros the lawn, skirting the edge of the forest. I kept my head faced toward him to try and ignore the blatant looks of other students.
"Thank you for what you did for Jackson." I remarked, after a while.
Lucas turned towards me, leaving the praise unacknowledged. "How is he?"
"He's back to his usual self, as far as I can tell. Theo's getting a little frustrated, though. He says that Jackson keeps dragging him out into the woods every night to go for runs. I don't think Jackson's ever truly been able to control the shift without the full moon. You really gave him a gift."
Lucas shrugged. "You asked for my help, and I gave it. I'll never stop owing you for saving me that very first day at the river."
My feet jerked to a stop. I'd tried to bring up our original meeting in conversation time and time again, but he'd avoided the topic. The most I had pulled from him were the few words in the car on our first date.
"You mean... in my first life?"
He nodded. "That's what you've been told, yes? That you saved me at the river? What else do you know?"
I relayed shortly what Jackson had to me. It was in pretty poor detail, but I thought I knew the main points. At the end, I asked, "Is that the truth?"
Lucas tilted his head. "Basically. We met, you saved me, and we fell in love in your village."
I asked a few questions about where I'd lived in the village, before venturing to the question I'd wanted an answer to since first meeting him.
"How did I die?"
His face scrunched, as if in pain.
"It was a horrible accident." Was all he said.
I refused to give in to his dismissive tone. "When was my next life after then?"
"About a hundred years later."
I frowned. "I didn't reappear until a hundred years later? Where was I?" Had my soul been in some kind of midpoint, asleep? Or had I been yanked back down from heaven when there was a body in need of a soul? How did the process work?
He confirmed my thoughts. "Your soul was in limbo, so to speak. Waiting for the right vessel on earth. I'm not sure on the finer details; it's above my pay grade." He joked.
"What happened when you eventually found me?" I assumed that we'd simply carried on from the last life, but Lucas had made it sound as if we'd never actually been wed before. How was that possible, especially in such an era? In however many lifetimes I'd had since my first 'ancient' one, if I'd been with Lucas in all of them, how could we not have been formally together at least once?
He seemed to sense where my thoughts were. "It's a little more complicated than simply locating you and picking up where we left off. Your soul's patterns are uniquely... erratic. And even for an angel, it is difficult to scour the globe every second of every day in search of one specific soul that may or may not have been reborn yet."
His reasoning made sense. But, still, it sounded like an excuse, as if he was hiding something.
He clearly wasn't too willing to talk about our past, but maybe he'd share some details of mine. "Where did I live in my first life?"
His face relaxed a little. "In a small village with your father and community. It wasn't much, but you loved it. You refused to leave." He smiled, soft eyes glazing to the point of liquid gold. "Leadership in the village was traditionally past to the male heir in a family, but you were your father's only child, and your blood was absolutely soaked with both of your parents' magic."
My mind wandered to my parents. My wild, uninhibited mother and my tiredly laid-back father. My mother possessing magic seemed almost like the next natural step in her evolution. But my father, a leader of a magical tribal village? I couldn't picture it. I knew that my parents now weren't the ones I'd had in my first life, but it was still a strange idea to comprehend.
"What kind of magic did I have?"
He paused. "I suppose it would be most similar to what is is now called shaman magic. Most of your intuition and healing abilities came from your mother, even though she was weaker than your father. He was more focused on using his power to protect the village."
"From what?"
"Other tribes, animal predators, other potential threats." He smiled slyly. "Your father had heard word that there was a new race spreading across the land, more powerful than even he could contest."
"Fallen angels?" I guessed.
He nodded. "We'd been on earth a while before your father heard of our kind. He wasn't too happy at first at the idea of having someone more powerful than him as a son-in-law, but he eventually agreed."
Son-in-law. So we had planned on being wed. "But we never married?"
He shook his head. "No, we never made it to our vows."
From the edge in his voice, he clearly wanted to change that. But soulmate or not, I wasn't about to get married at seventeen. Although, the coffee machine I'd spotted in the cabin during our last visit had greatly boosted the possibility.
We walked further along the tree line, and headed behind the back of the school. The football oval was crammed with large bodies performing suicide runs, and other scattered students were excitedly making holiday plans. Most were too busy to pay us any attention.
I changed the subject. "What do you plan on doing in town here?"
He thought for a minute. "Well, I have duties as an angel that keep me fairly occupied. But for the most part, I'll wait to continue them until you've finished school."
"Why?"
"It'll be easier to continue them once we're back in a... lesser populated region for supernatural beings. My job primarily involves aiding humans." He ruffled his hair agitatedly.
I stopped walking again, and gestured around myself. "I just found out about the supernatural. I don't want to leave it all behind the second I get handed my diploma."
He turned his head, trying to hide his clenched jaw. "I understand that. But you asked for my plans, and I'm telling you. How you feel about them is up to you."
His defensive tone took me aback. I spent the rest of the conversation mostly just nodding and agreeing in a frigid silence. I soon made an excuse to return to my room, alone, feigning tiredness, but it was almost unnecessary. Lucas looked just as ready to end our walk, and stalked away from my dorm with a bent head, his eyes covered in shadows.