Boundless (Unearthly, #3)(49)

“I want you to know,” he says.

“Why? So you can rub it in my face that you had a supposedly passionate love affair with my mother?”

He shakes his head, the two layers of him, body and soul, form and formless, blurring with the motion. And then I realize: He wants me to know because there’s no one else to share it with. No one else cares.

“Good-bye, Sam.”

“Until next time,” he calls after me.

I walk away without looking back, the image of my mom wearing a red dress, a silver charm bracelet tinkling against her wrist, singing and smelling of roses, bright in my head.

“So tomorrow’s it,” Angela informs me. We’re doing her laundry in the Roble laundry room, me helping since it’s getting harder and harder these days for Angela to bend down, the noise of the churning washer and dryers the perfect mask for a secret conversation about destiny. Which is apparently happening tomorrow.

“How do you know?” I ask her.

“Because that’s when I told him to meet me,” she says, “in the email.”

“How do you know he got the email?”

“He replied and said he’d come. And because that’s what happens. He comes because I see him there.”

This is circular logic, but I go with it. “So you’re going to just march up to him and say, ‘The seventh is ours.’” This idea worries me. A lot. I’ve been going over and over the scenario in my head, and I can never imagine it turning out well. It’s not just Phen’s wings that are gray, but his soul—his very being. And Angela always gets kind of crazy when it comes to him. He’s bad news, in my opinion.

Angela catches her bottom lip in her teeth for a few seconds, the first sign of real nervousness that I’ve seen since she put the whole seventh thing together. “Something like that,” she says.

I do believe her when she says it’s her vision. So it must be destined to happen, right?

I don’t know. I never did figure out why Jeffrey had a vision of starting a forest fire and then saving someone from the same fire. Or why I was supposed to meet Christian in the forest that day. Or what I was doing at my mom’s funeral.

Ours is not to reason why, I suppose. Ours is but to do or—well, crap.

“And then what?” I ask. “You tell him, and then—”

“He and I will deal with this thing”—she rests her hand lightly on her belly—“together.”

I mull this over. Does she think that she’ll tell him and then they all—nineteen-year-old college student, thousands-of-years-old gray-souled ambivalent angel, and bouncing bundle of Triplare joy—will be a happy family? I guess stranger things have happened, but still …

She reads the doubt on my face.

“Look, C, I’m not expecting a fairy-tale ending here. But this is my purpose, don’t you see? This is what I was put on this earth to do. I have to tell him. He’s …” She takes a quick breath, like this next thing she’s about to say takes all her courage. “He’s the father of my child. He deserves to know.”

I’m familiar with that gleam of certainty in her eyes. Her faith in the vision, and how she feels in the vision, her faith in the way things work. I felt that way myself once, not long ago.

“If this is a test of some kind, my moment of spiritual decision,” she says, “then I choose to tell him the truth.”

“So tomorrow. Big day,” I say, like, I get it. I understand.

She smiles. “Big freaking day. Will you come with me, C?”

“To see Phen? I don’t know, Ange. Maybe this is between you and him.” Last time I had one-on-one interaction with Phen, I sort of told him to leave Angela alone, that she deserved better than he could offer her. And he called me a hypocrite and a child. We’re not exactly best buds, Phen and me.

Angela leans against the dryer. “You’re going to come with me,” she says matter-of-factly. “You’re always there, in my vision.”

I had forgotten all about that. Or maybe I thought she made that bit up so that she could coerce me into coming to Stanford with her. “Right. And where am I, exactly, in this vision?”

“Like two steps behind me, most of the way. For moral support, I think.” She bats her eyes and pouts at me.

All of a sudden this feels like a test for me, too. As an angel-blood who’s supposed to believe in the visions. As her friend.

“All right, all right. I’ll be there, two steps behind,” I promise.

“I had a feeling you were going to say yes,” she says gleefully.

“Yeah, don’t push your luck.”

She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a sheet of wrinkled paper, unfolds it for me. It’s an ultrasound.

“You went to a doctor?” I ask. “I would have gone with you, if I’d known.”

She shrugs. “I’ve been a bunch of times. I wanted to make sure it was okay.” She corrects herself: “He. It’s a boy.”

I stare at the picture, part of me stunned that this is really a tiny person growing inside my friend. It’s grainy, but I can clearly make out a profile, a tiny nose and chin, the bones that make up the baby’s arm. “Are they sure? That it’s a boy?”

“Pretty sure,” she says with a smirk. “I think I’m going to name him Webster.”