Dawson drifted back, wanting to say something, but in his true form, he didn’t speak like a human. Luxen used…different paths.

At the edge of the bed, she peered up at him. In her brown eyes, he could see his reflection, and he hated what he saw.

“Dawson,” she whispered, clasping her hands under her chin. “Is that you?”

Yes, he said. But she couldn’t hear him.

When the silence stretched, became unbearable, she swung her legs off the bed and stood. Instead of running for the door like any sane person would, she reached out, bringing her fingers within inches of touching his light.

Dawson jerked back.

Bethany yanked her hand to her chest. “What…what are you?”

God, wasn’t that a loaded question? The whole telling part seemed a moot point now, but how could he explain what happened? Hey, honey, I’m an alien and apparently I just doused you with some radioactive loving! Wanna catch a movie? Yeah, not cool.

So many things were rushing through his thoughts. He’d exposed his kind — his family, putting them in danger, risking Beth. There was no stopping her if she decided to scream alien or giant light bug.

But he needed to rein it in. Her parents were downstairs, and he had a feeling the longer he stayed in this form, the stronger her trace would be.

Moving to the far side of the room, away from Beth, he willed his out-of-control emotions to stabilize. It was hard as hell, but eventually he managed to take his human form, and the room was cast in shadows again.

Everything except Beth — there was a soft halo around her.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked.

Bethany’s legs seemed to collapse beneath her. She plopped down on the bed, shaking her head again. “What are you?”

Leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes. There was no point in lying now or keeping secrets. The damage was done. All he could hope was that he could convince her not to go public with this.

“I’m an alien.” The words sounded thick and foreign to his ears, and he barked a laugh. “I’m a Luxen.”

She pulled up her knees, tucking them against her chest. “An alien? Like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” She laughed then, and it carried a sort of hysterical edge to it. When the sound trickled off, her head snapped toward him. “That’s why you like that dumb movie Cocoon so much. This…this isn’t real. It can’t be. Oh my God, I’m crazy… Schizophrenia.”

Dawson swallowed. “You’re not crazy, Bethany. I’m sorry. You weren’t supposed to know, and I don’t even know how…how this happened.”

“What? You don’t normally light up when you kiss girls? Because that could get real awkward, right?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry. Oh, God, I don’t know…alien?”

Hearing the confusion in her voice tore through him, and he wanted to somehow make it better, but how? At least he didn’t sense any fear in her anymore. Amazing.

He took a tentative step forward, and when she didn’t move, he was reassured. “Maybe it will help if I start over?”

She nodded slowly.

Taking a deep breath, he sat before her and tilted his head back, meeting her eyes. What he was about to do was unheard of. The rules he was about to break were astronomical. An image of his brother and sister formed in his head, and his chest squeezed. He knew if this went badly, it went badly for them, too.

And it would also go badly for Bethany.

All Bethany could do was stare at Dawson. That was pretty much all she was capable of. Alien? The logical part of her brain kept spewing things like, This is just a hallucination or a dream. Or, This is the onset of a mental disease. Maybe Dawson never existed, but then again, that didn’t make sense. Pretty sure she’d seen other people interacting with him. Unless her hallucinations were on such an epic level she believed she’d seen people—

“Bethany.” His quiet voice intruded.

Her heart turned over heavily. “This is real, right?”

His face contorted as if he were in pain. “Yes, it’s real.”

Crazy people probably did things like this all the time. Asked their imaginary alien friends if they were real, and of course, they’d say yes.

She placed her hands against her cheeks and then ran them through her tangled hair. Did crazy people also make out with their hallucinations? Because that was probably the only upside to all of this.

Dawson placed his hand on her knee. “I can’t even begin to understand what you’re going through. I really can’t, but I promise you that this is real and you’re not crazy.” He squeezed her leg. “And I’m so sorry for making you feel this way and for you finding out like this.”

“Don’t apologize.” Her voice sounded hoarse. “It’s just…a lot to comprehend. I mean, I never really thought about aliens. Like, okay, maybe they do exist somewhere out there, but…yeah, I don’t know if I really did believe. And you can’t be an alien.”

She laughed again and then winced. It sounded like a whole lot of crazy. “I just saw you…glow, but it was more than just glowing. You were light, right? A human form of light — arms and legs made out of light.”

Dawson nodded. “We’re called Luxen. In our true forms we are nothing more than light, but…it’s not like you think. You can touch us — we have form and shape.”

“Form and shape,” she mumbled.

“Yes.” He lowered his lashes, and in that instant, he seemed terribly young and vulnerable. “We’re from a planet called Lux. Well, it was once called that. It doesn’t exist anymore. Destroyed. But that’s neither here nor there. We’ve been here for hundreds, if not thousands of years, on and off.”

Her stomach did a twisty motion. “You’re…that old?”

“No. No!” Dawson laughed, lifting his eyes. “I’m sixteen. We — my family — came here when we were children, very young, and we age the same way you do.”

“On a spaceship?” She almost laughed again, but managed to keep it down. A spaceship — a freaking spaceship. Dear God, that was a word she thought she’d never utter. This was…wow.

Dawson shifted, clasping his hands in his lap. “We don’t have spaceships. We travel in our true form. Uh, we travel as light. And in that form, we don’t breathe like you would. So different atmospheres, yeah…” He shrugged. “When we got here, we…picked our human forms, melding our DNA in a way, but we can look like anyone.”

Bethany sat straighter. This had just gone from bizarro land into Twilight Zone territory. “You can look like anyone?”

He nodded. “We don’t do it a lot; only when we need to.”

Trying to wrap her brain around this, she tugged on her hair with both hands. “Okay, so what you look like now, that’s not real?”

“No, this”—he tapped his chest—“this is real. Like I said, our DNA adapts quickly to our environment. And we are always born in threes—”

“Andrew and his siblings — they are Luxen, too?” When he nodded, she was almost relieved. “Andrew did melt the ping-pong ball!”

“Yeah, see, we control things related to light, which is heat and at times fire.” He still hadn’t looked at her, not directly. “I don’t know why he did that. The general population can’t know about us. So, it’s important that we don’t do anything stupid. And that was stupid. Hell, what I just did was colossally stupid.”

She watched him. Now that the shock was ebbing away, her mind was starting to put things together. At least now she knew how such a small town could have six insanely gorgeous people. Go figure they weren’t human in nature. Then it struck her — the whole episode in the icy parking lot. “What else can you do?”

His features pinched. “I really shouldn’t—”

“But I already know, right?” She slid off the bed, sitting in front of him so her knees pressed into his. He jerked as if surprised by the contact but didn’t move. “What harm can it cause now?”