Christian slips his hand into mine again. “You’re crying.”

I lift my free hand up to my cheek; he’s right. I’m crying. But it’s a good kind of crying, I think. Maybe it means I’m letting go.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” I say.

That’s when he says, “Clara, there’s something I need to tell you.”

He stands up. He keeps hold of my hand and moves in front of me. The afternoon sun strikes his hair and makes a golden lining around him. I squint up at him, into his eyes.

“Your dad’s an angel, and your mom’s a Dimidius,” he says, “which makes you a Triplare.”

“How do you even know what that is?” I gasp. I thought it was some kind of super secret.

“My uncle. When I was ten years old he sat me down and told me all about the Triplare, how rare they are—he believes only seven Triplare ever walk the earth at the same time—how powerful they are. How they must be protected, at all costs.”

Is that what he wants, I wonder, to protect me? Is that what the I’ll-always-be-here-for-you stuff is really about? Is his purpose to be a kind of guardian for me?

“I’ve been wanting to tell you for months,” he says. “I thought it was just going to burst out of me at times, like in Alien.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’ve been wanting to tell me what? That I’m a Triplare?”

“I’ve known since that Angel Club with the glory.” He runs a hand through his hair, blows out a long breath. “But I suspected it since the fire.”

I stare at him. How could he have known that I’m a Triplare even before I did?

“I’ve never told this to anybody,” he says. “My uncle has pounded it into my brain again and again: no one must know. No one. Not even the other angel-bloods. Especially the other angel-bloods, as a matter of fact. He says there isn’t anybody, not anybody, you understand, who we can trust.”

His hand tightens in mine.

“But he’s wrong,” he says fiercely. “Even though you say you’re bad with secrets. You didn’t tell Tucker, when you thought he was going to die. That took strength. You’re so strong, Clara, you don’t even know. You’re amazing. You’re beautiful and brave and sarcastic and hilarious and I think . . .” He takes a breath. “My visions keep telling me, over and over and over again, that I can trust you. I can trust you.”

Something shifts in his face. He’s going to tell me. He’s going to throw caution to the wind and put it all out there.

“My mother was a Dimidius. She was beautiful, so unbelievably beautiful it almost hurt to look at her sometimes. Like you. And almost twenty years ago, she was seduced by a Watcher, who thought he could collect the most beautiful angel-bloods in the world. And that’s how she ended up with me.”

I’ve had a lot of bombs dropped on me this year, enough mind-shattering revelations to last a lifetime, in my opinion. But nothing quite like this, like Christian staring me down with gleaming green-gold eyes, eyes like his beautiful mother’s, telling me that his father was a Black Wing.

“You’re a Triplare, too,” I whisper.

“Yes.” There’s relief in his voice. “Don’t you see what that means?”

He doesn’t say it, but I know. We belong together. We’re two of a very rare kind. Meant to watch out for each other, meant to join hands and walk side by side, through fire, through death, meant to guard and protect and . . .

I feel like I’m falling from far up, plummeting to earth, and at the same time, drowning in a deep pool, struggling upward toward the surface, my lungs bursting for air.

He pulls me to my feet. “I didn’t know at first, how I felt about it. I didn’t want to be forced, you know? I wanted it to be my choice. But every time I’m around you, it feels right,” he says. “I feel stronger. Braver, even. I feel the glory inside me, this power moving through me. I feel like I could do anything, face anything. With you.”

I wish he would stop talking. I wish the forest would stop spinning around me, wish I could step outside of my body right now and ask myself, So, Clara, what do you think?

But I don’t know.

I love Tucker, I think.

His eyes grow sober. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I loved Kay. Whatever that says about me, I did love her. Part of me still does. My uncle says it’s because she was my first love. He says we never really get over our firsts.”

Right. But Tucker’s not just my first love. He’s my present.

“I had to choose,” Christian says. “Last year, when I started to understand that my vision was more than a search and rescue for some mystery girl.” The side of his mouth hitches up briefly. Me. His mystery girl. “When the vision showed me how it was supposed to be, the way we took hands, and . . . touched, and how I felt in that moment, I knew then that I had to choose. It wouldn’t have been fair to Kay. So I broke up with her.”

He closes his eyes for a second, and I catch a hint of the turmoil he still feels when he thinks of Kay.

There must be something I’m not seeing in that girl. There must be.

“I had to choose,” he says again. “And it wasn’t like I had to choose between you and Kay; I hardly knew you then. I had to choose who I was going to be. But now . . . Clara, I think . . .”

“I have to go,” I say, pulling away from him abruptly. “I can’t think. I can’t choose.”

To my bewilderment, he smiles, this completely sweet, sinful smile that sends a flock of butterflies straight to the pit of my stomach.

“What?” I demand to know. “What is it now?”

“You’re not going to go,” he says.

“Watch me.”

“I’ve been having a vision of this place, too.” This stops me from my wild, cowardly (how can he think I’m brave?) retreat back to the road. I turn. He’s still standing there by his mother’s grave, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking at me with such heat behind his eyes that a tremble works its way through me from my head to my toes.

“You’re having a new vision, too?” I ask.

“It’s right here.” He walks toward me, his strides long and purposeful across the grass. “Right now. I’ve been seeing it for weeks, and it’s happening right now.”

He stops in front of me.

“This is the part where I kiss you,” he says.

And that’s when, there under the swaying pines, the trembling aspens on Aspen Hill, in the waning sunlight of that late spring day, with birds singing over our heads, traces of earlier tears still drying on my face, and the faint smell of roses in the air, Christian Prescott kisses me for the first time. He pulls me in.

I’ll never, if I live to be my full hundred and twenty years, forget the way he tastes. It’s not anything I can describe, it’s just Christian, a little sweet and a whole lot of spice, and it feels, in that moment, absolutely right. His fire and mine combine, and it’s greater than any forest fire, hotter than the hottest part of flame. Any walls I’ve tried to build between us crumble down. His heart pounds beneath my palm. He wasn’t lying to me just now. This is his vision, his dream literally coming true, and it is everything he thought it would be. More. I am more than he ever could have hoped for, ever could have dreamed. His mystery girl. The girl he was meant to find. And now I belong to him like he has always belonged to me.

It’s this thought that brings me back to myself. I reel backward, breaking the contact between us with an agonizing force of sheer will.

“I’m not yours,” I gasp up at him, and then I run. Because if I stay one more second I will kiss him back. I will choose him.

So I push away, tear off through Aspen Hill Cemetery like the devil is chasing me, and then I fly, not caring if anybody sees me, shooting like a falling star across the sky, toward home.