Page 1 of White Lights
THE LAST THING RAFE NEEDStoday is a gorgeous girl pointing a video camera at him. Well, not athim, exactly. She’s capturing the scene: the crowded pier, sunlight glinting off the ocean, seagulls mimicking angels above Ventura Beach.
Angels mimicking humans, strolling down the pier …
If someone were to write a book about Rafe’s weaknesses, this woman might as well be on the cover—and on every other page. And sure, titillation is a dime a dozen in this world, and Rafe is a well-resourced guy … but sparks like her are rare. It almost hurts to look at her, but Rafe can’t make himself stop.
She’s setting up a shot like it’s a matter of life and death. He watches her look through the viewfinder, slide her tripod up and down with slender fingers. He likes her chipped nail polish, which he feels suggests a complex mind. He could lose himself in her dark, wind-tangled hair, worn loose down to her waist. The curves of her shoulders remind him of the Sicilian shoreline. And that stern expression? He’d love to use his mouth to melt it off her pretty face, if only everything were different …
Alas.
He’s late to meet Sam. He feels this internally, without any watch. Even after all these years, meeting his mentor makes Rafe tremble. Sam doesn’t like to wait.
Rafe heads up the pier, toward the ragged, beachfront seafood shack Sam chose for their meeting place. When he draws near the woman, Rafe clenches his jaw, smiles with his eyes. What’s more natural than posing for a camera?
But right as he’s about to pass her, about to place her in the world-class museum of his mind, the woman looks up from her camera. And directly at him.
It stops Rafe in his tracks. A river of warmth winds through him. Damn if it hasn’t been a while.
But here it is: chemistry. Sudden. Soul-affirming.
And absolutely impossible.
The woman seems as stunned as Rafe. She looks back into her viewfinder. Where she can’t see him, where human-made technology won’t pick up any trace of him.
She furrows her brow in disbelief. Rafe’s heart begins to pound. By the time she raises her eyes again, he’s gone.
“Hey,” a voice calls out.
No way she’s talking to him. No way she even saw him. Mortals can’t see Rafe’s kind. For good reason.
No, what he’d taken for eye contact—for chemistry—was only an illusion.
Rafe doesn’t let himself look back. He hurries up the rotting plywood stairs and through the swinging saloon doors of the restaurant. He’s out of breath when he slides into the wood-paneled booth across from Sam. And then the sight of his old friend sends the bombshell on the pier light-years from Rafe’s mind.
“Salutations,” Sam says, not looking up from the napkin where he’ssketching something with a pen. “I was starting to think you had better things to do.”
Sam is wearing jeans and a ripped black T-shirt, a gray baseball hat slung low over curly russet hair. He looks the same yet is completely different than Rafe has ever known him to be. Something unseen has shifted.
“What happened to you?” Rafe asks.
“I wanted you to be the first to know,” Sam says, holding out his arms. “I’m done.”
A fearful abyss opens in Rafe. He speaks carefully. “What do you mean,done?”
“You know what I mean,” Sam says, resuming his sketch. “I’m free.”
Rafe has never known Sam to lie, but what he’s saying now is insane. If it’s true—it can’t be true, but if it is—it changes everything.
“Aren’t you going to ask, ‘What happens now?’” Sam says.
Rafe looks around the restaurant, at the other diners digging into fish and chips, oblivious to the enormous event unfolding in their midst. A development that will touch every single destiny on earth. What must it be like to be them, so ignorant of the cosmos, how desperately fragile it is?
“All right,” Rafe says to Sam, a tremor in his voice. “What happens now?”
“That’s someone else’s problem. Play your cards right, and it could be yours.”
A surge of hunger, of hope, lights through Rafe. Is this the moment he’ll look back on? The moment when he was finally given the chance to redeem himself?
“Are you … offering it to me?”
