"I just got a feelin'," he said, rubbing one hand over his chin. "And this feelin', it said, 'Get in your car, drive your car, pick up them girls.' So that's what I did."

Like Kissy, Walter was no stranger to "feelings," but he wasn't particularly given to philosophical pondering, so all he'd say about them was that some itches needed scratching and if you had the sense God gave a goose, you'd scratch them.

Not exactly illuminating, if you asked me.

Still, we made it from Dallas to San Antonio in record time- no stops, no explosions, no black-eyed people gunning for my throat. Walter pulled up next to the River Walk, and as he put the car into park and let us out, the unnatural sheen faded from his eyes, until they were hazel, as ordinary and down-home as the rest of the man.

"You girls take care of yourselves," he said.

Kissy smiled. "We will."

I wasn't feeling quite so optimistic, because even though we were in San Antonio, even though we'd done exactly what the 'pulse had told Kissy to do, her eyes were still shining, so bright that the sunglasses weren't really doing the job anymore.

"C'mon, Jess!" Kissy sounded giddy and free and, if I'm being honest, just a little bit drunk. "We have to go this way!"

She ran down a stone staircase. I followed, and the closer we got to the River Walk below, the more adrenaline flooded into my system, my heart skipping like a stone across water. My breaths were shallow and hot in my chest, and I prepared myself for what might come.

What I wasn't prepared for was Kissy sidestepping the second we got to the bottom and me running right smack into something that felt like an anvil and looked like a guy. He caught me by the elbows and steadied me on my feet. For a moment, I stopped breathing altogether.

His hair was the color of desert sand, his features symmetrical and sharp. He wasn't particularly big or small, and I couldn't pinpoint his age, but there was something unspeakably perfect about his body, his face, the way he stood-so perfect it sent a chill creeping down my spine.

It hurt to look at him. It hurt not to.

This is it.

I wasn't sure if it was good or bad, the beginning or the end, but every bone in my body was certain that this was something, that he was something. Beside me, Kissy pulled her sunglasses up onto the top of her head and blinked.

Her eyes were brown.

"I'm starving," she said. "There any place good to eat around here?"

"Kissy." I hissed her name. "All of this, everything we've gone through to get here, and you're thinking about food?"

Kissy had the decency to look a tiny bit ashamed of herself. "I never got to eat my Egg McMuffin," she mumbled.

Given the whole people-with-black-eyes-keep-trying-to-kill-us thing, I really didn't think that should be her primary concern, but what did I know?

"You're safe here, Jess." Those were the first words our companion had said to me, and his voice washed over my body, leaving goose bumps in its wake. He didn't sound as alien as the girl at the gas station had, but there was a heaviness to his words, like he'd been waiting to say them for longer than I'd been alive.

I looked into his eyes. They were blue: light and crystalline and inhuman in ways I couldn't begin to explain. For a split second, those eyes looked away from mine and spared a glance for Kissy.

"You've done well," he told her.

She preened. I rolled my eyes and waited for the flirting to start up, but the next second, the boy with the light-blue eyes was looking back at me.

"My name," he said, "is Ariel."

A dozen offhand comments about The Little Mermaid sprang to mind, but I figured it would be in poor taste to say any of them out loud.

"I'm Jess."

"You have questions," he said.

I opened my mouth to start asking them, but he placed two fingers over my lips, and the words stilled on my tongue.

"There are three kinds," he said.

Three kinds of what? I wondered. Three kinds of questions? But his fingers were still on my lips, his touch electric enough that I couldn't bring myself to break away.

"There are Guardians. There are Heralds." He dropped his hand to his side. "There is the third kind."

"The third kind," I repeated dumbly. Ariel inclined his head, but he didn't blink-he never blinked.

"The third kind," he said again. "By their sword, darkness bleeds. They are the arm and the fire. They are the beginning of the End."

That should have sounded insane-or at the very least, eccentric-but I couldn't shake the niggling sensation that these were words that I'd heard before.

Guardians. Heralds. Third kind.

The End.

Each phrase that left Ariel's mouth felt like it had been carved in stone, etched into the surface of the earth a thousand years before I'd ever drawn a breath. There was an element of ritual to his speech, as though each gesture, each word, each second was sacred.

I didn't understand it, any of it, but my mouth wouldn't open. Questions wouldn't come. So I just stood there, frozen in silence-like that was my role to play while Ariel was playing his.

"Guardians protect. Heralds deliver messages. The third kind is the third kind." Ariel stopped talking, as if he knew that my puny little brain needed time to process.

I could still feel the touch of his fingers on my lips.

"Heralds deliver messages," I repeated, feeling like I had to say something. "Like the girl at the gas station?"

Ariel did not nod. He did not reply. He didn't even blink.

"And Guardians, like Walter . . ." I trailed off and finished the thought silently. Like Kissy.

"She protects you," Ariel said, lifting the thought from my brain with an ease that made me feel like every thought I'd ever had or ever would have was laid out for his inspection. "When it's called for, there are others she protects as well."

I thought of everything Kissy had ever done because of a 'pulse: the random acts of kindness, the senseless errands, the night she'd gotten the two of us out of our parents' house. Most of the time, it had all seemed so random, but now I had to wonder if she'd inadvertently saved other people, the way she'd saved me-if there was some big plan, and she'd played the role of the butterfly, flapping her wings in one hemisphere and causing a hurricane in another.

"How do Guardians know what to do?" I asked, my mind spinning with the implications. "Their . . . orders . . ." That seemed more official than calling them 'pulses. "Who sends them?"

"They come from where they come from," Ariel replied. "They are what they are."

I got the sense that Ariel wasn't beating around the bush, that to him, that really was the answer.

"What about the other people?" I said slowly. "The ones with the blue-black eyes?"

"Their orders," Ariel said, the muscles in his jaw tensing, "come from elsewhere."

"They're trying to kill me."

Ariel shrugged, as if this was no more significant than the fact that my favorite color was red.

"That's it?" I said tersely. "All of this-getting us up in the middle of the night, running us ragged, blowing up our truck- and that's what you have to say for yourself? Nothing?"

"You needed to be here," Ariel said. "This is where it must begin. It starts with you."

"What starts with me?" I felt desperate, but sounded POed and chalked it up as one of those things that you just can't help. "What starts with me, Ariel?"

He moved like lightning, closing the space between us and then some. His blue eyes stared at and into mine, and for a moment, I was certain he was going to snap my neck, the way Kissy had snapped that boy's.

Instead, he brought his lips slowly down to mine and kissed me.

Blades. Blood. Light. Burning.

I saw the whole world in an instant, everything that was, everything that would ever be, and something flickered to life on the surface of my skin: a power, a knowing.

Ariel pulled back, and based on the expression on his face, I concluded that it hadn't exactly been as earth-shattering for him as it had been for me.

"It is done," he said, which isn't exactly the kind of thing a girl wants to hear about her first kiss.

"What's done?" I asked, trying not to feel too put out. I could sense the change he'd wrought, feel it rising up inside of me and washing away everything I'd been until now. "Ariel, what did you do?"

Ariel was not impressed by my desperation or my ire.

"There are three kinds," he said.

"You are the third kind." And then he was gone.

"What just happened? I mean, seriously, Kissy, who was he? What was he? How could he just say all of that stuff and then kiss me and then leave?"

I was indignant. Kissy, on the other hand, was in hog heaven.

"This is the best chimichanga I have ever had," she said.

"Kissy," I snapped. "Focus."

"I am focusing," Kissy replied calmly. "I am focusing on my chimichanga."

After Ariel had disappeared, she'd dragged me across the River Walk to the closest Mexican restaurant, and the two of us had been sitting there ever since, Kissy shoveling chips and salsa like she was preparing to hibernate for the winter, and me trying my best to make sense out of chaos.

Growing up, I'd never thought much about Kissy's 'pulses. They were the kind of thing you got used to, and I'd never wondered why I didn't get them too, because you could tell just by looking at Kissy or talking to her for five seconds that she was something special.

Someone special.

But me?

I wasn't anything. I could almost believe Ariel when he said that Kissy was some kind of cosmic Guardian, chosen to protect the innocent, one 'pulse at a time-but after all of these years, I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that I might be the special one, that whatever made Kissy different from normal folks-maybe I had a version of it too.

Kissy was a Guardian.

The girl at the gas station had been a Herald.

And I was the third kind.

"The third kind of what?" I asked, for what was probably the millionth time.

"I dunno, Jess," Kissy said, her voice real soft, like she was talking a stray dog out from underneath a car. "Sometimes, there aren't easy answers. Sometimes, things are just right. The things I do when I get the 'pulse? They feel right. And this- you, me, here, Ariel-it feels right too."

I didn't want feelings. I wanted answers. I wanted to know who Ariel was-what he was. I wanted to know why, from the second my lips had touched his, there'd been a burning inside of me, white-hot, liquid, steady.

I wanted to know why it felt familiar.

Why it didn't hurt.

"Sometimes," Kissy told me, waving her chimichanga for emphasis, "you just have to have faith that everything's going to work out the way it's supposed to."

Have faith?

Somewhere out there, someone or something wanted me dead, and we had no guarantee that the black-eyed guardians would back off now that we'd completed Kissy's mission. I had no idea what Ariel had done to me, or what he expected me to do now that it was done. I could feel the change, feel it spreading like wildfire through my body, inch by inch and bit by bit.

I felt older, stronger, connected.

I felt like this was just the beginning.

The beginning of the end.

"Seriously, Jess. Just relax. Que sera, sera. Have some guaca-mole."

I closed my eyes and started counting silently to ten, so as to decrease the chances that I'd leap across the table and beat my sister to death with a chimichanga.

One, two, three . . .

The images I'd seen when Ariel kissed me flashed through my mind, and this time, they felt like memories. I saw a flaming sword, a desert, an army.

Four, five, six . . .

I saw people as cold and inhumanly beautiful as Ariel. I saw their faces twist into something pretty-cruel.

Seven, eight, nine . . .

I saw black eyes and shadows and rivers running with blood.

"Ten." I finished counting and opened my eyes. I tried to remember everything Ariel had said about the third kind, everything the black-eyed boy in the McDonald's had said about why I had to die.

It starts with you.

The third kind-by their sword, darkness bleeds.