by B. T. Alive
And when he said my name, his voice dropped an octave, deep and low, and went cold as a polished gravestone.
Holy crud. Not him—
His huge hand lunged through the window and gripped David by the neck. David jolted, and gurgled, and then lurched sideways, unconscious. His head lolled onto my shoulder, and when I gasped, I tasted David’s cologne.
“Enoch,” I breathed.
He bent low and flipped off his cap, leaning in at the window with his skeletal grin. The spread of his thin lips split his pale face like a gash.
“Hello, niece,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
Chapter 26
I clawed for the button to release my seat belt, but Enoch thundered, “Stop,” and I froze.
It was stupid, but in that moment, all I could think about was that David’s chin was digging into my shoulder. He was way freaking heavier than I’d ever have guessed. But I didn’t move.
“That’s better,” said Enoch. “I wouldn’t want you to suffer needlessly from another accidental… rash. Not with your healer friend currently in jail.”
“What do you want?” I said, as calmly as I could. Now David’s spiky hair was tickling my neck.
“Summer, don’t be tedious,” he said. “Haven’t you dragged out this Wonder Springs charade long enough? They’re stifling you to death, and you know it. You’re going to seed.”
“At least they didn’t burn down my apartment,” I said.
He shrugged. “That was not my first choice, Summer. Nor is this my second.”
I realized I was breathing too fast. I forced myself to slow down. “If you’ve really been watching me so closely,” I said, “haven’t you figured out that I’m not worth your time? I can’t control my thing I do; I never have any idea how effective it’s going to be, or if it’s even going to work. I’m just not that valuable an asset. I’ll cost way more than I’m worth.”
His grin deepened, crinkling the crows’ feet at his eyes into gouges. “I applaud your salesmanship,” he said. “I agree that you have cultivated expensive tastes…” He surveyed the sports car with mocking approval. “But how do you plan to support your lifestyle, living out here in the wilderness? Do you really want to spend your prime years in scraping out the credit cards of faltering entrepreneurs?”
“What?” I said. “Nobody paid me with a credit card! I got a check—”
“From Elaine, yes,” he said. “She misled you, I’m afraid. I can assure you that Elaine could only ‘afford’ your services by making a cash withdrawal, at a most unfortunate rate, from a credit card. Her last.”
“How… how do you even know—”
“Don’t waste your life, Summer,” he snapped, with a sudden ferocity. “Don’t throw away your potential and cling to some misguided loyalty to the Merediths, or your infatuation with a young man you can’t even touch. I assume they haven’t troubled to teach you that, have they?”
“How to control the Touch?” I said. “I… we’re working on it—”
“Of course they haven’t,” he said.
“It’s not their fault,” I said. “I’m the one who doesn’t—”
“It is their fault,” he said. “Because they can’t teach what they don’t know.”
“What?” I said, but my voice caught. A cold dread twisted in my stomach.
“Have you truly not noticed that you alone are a Disruptor? How could they possibly understand a power they do not wield?”
“They will teach me,” I said. “They already explained it, there’s this whole long sequence and it’s my own fault for not doing the exercises enough—”
“Summer,” he said, and his low, cold voice bloomed with a hint of warmth. “You and I both know that this power can doom you to a life alone.”
“I’m not alone,” I snapped. My eyes were hot and moistening. “How do I even know that you know how to—”
He reached in across David and touched my cheek.
I gasped and flinched, bracing for a shock, or worse.
But all I felt was the warmth of his rough fingertips. He looked so pale that I’d have expected ice.
He drew back his hand, and I reached up in a panic to feel my cheek, terrified I’d find another bubbling rash, like when he’d gripped my wrist back in my apartment. But my skin was perfect and smooth.
“Summer,” he said, and his voice was soft. “You must learn.”
My heart was pounding.
“If you refuse to learn,” he said, “who knows what you’ll become?”
“I know one thing,” I said. “I won’t become you.”
And I grabbed the brake and slammed it down.
Enoch roared in surprise and staggered a step away, and the car hurtled backward down the steep slope.
My first thought was to remember, all at once, that as a kid, I’d had nightmares of this exact scenario: rushing down a mountain in a car that I was helpless to control. The terror seized me like a long-forgotten memory, like a prophecy finally coming true.
At least in the dreams I’d been in the freaking driver’s seat. And not plunging backward.
“David!” I yelled, as I shoved him over with my shoulder and grabbed the wheel with both hands. The car wrenched hard to the left, and I swerved the wheel and it lurched to the right. The car was rushing and thrashing like a roller coaster gone insane, and the road out the front windshield was whipping back and forth as we rocketed blindly down the slope in reverse.
Enoch was running back to his own car.
“David!” I shrieked again. “Wake up! I can’t reach the pedals!”
But his head hung limp on his shoulder, tilting out the driver’s window, with his short hair flattened by the wind.
I twisted the wheel, left and right, and with each lurch I tried to get more control. The car was weaving like I was drunk, but at least we were still on the pavement, we hadn’t smashed into a tree. Then I could almost hold the wheel straight, keeping the car on the road with tiny nudges. At this point, I had enough spare brain cycles to remember the existence of the rear-view mirror. I tried to look, but from my passenger seat, the angle was all wrong, and I instinctively started to correct the wheel, which only threw us sideways and jacked my panic again. I looked forward and corrected based on the lane lines ahead, and the car settled straight, and I breathed. The mirror had shown a clear, straight slope and road all the way down to the bridge. I wasn’t going to hit anything. I just had to keep the car straight. Maybe we were actually not going to die. In fact, maybe I could even turn the car around to face forward—
Then I looked up.
Ahead, Enoch had swung his car around and was racing down toward us. His headlights were hurtling, annihilating the gap between our cars.
“Crap!” I yelled. I’d have to freaking go faster?
With my left hand still gripping the wheel, I used my right to twist the key in the ignition. The engine howled, like a creature in agony. Had it started? Did I have to do something else? Stupid freaking stick shift!
Wait, gas. I needed gas. Speed. Forget about trying to turn around—if I tried to brake now and wrestle the car through a U-turn, Enoch would ram me.
I hiked up my knee and tried to work my foot around the gearshift to the gas pedal. Crud, with my waist belted in, I couldn’t reach.
I dug at my seatbelt buckle, my other hand still on the wheel, wasting precious seconds as Enoch bore down on us. When the belt finally flicked off, I lunged sideways, thudding into David’s unconscious mass. I had just enough extra brain space to realize I was half-sitting on the man’s lap, which I did not at all appreciate, brain, but then I forgot all about this, because as I jockeyed for the gas pedal, I bumped the gearshift wrong.
The engine screamed.
“What? What’d I do?” I cried, as the car shrieked and we started to slow down.
Wait, the gearshift… it was crooked, what gear were we even in? I tried to read the cryptic diagram etched on the handle, but it was nearly dark outside,
and I could barely make out the symbols… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, R… R! Reverse! I grabbed the stick, shoved it right and down, and hit the gas.
The car only howled in fresh agony.
“Damn it! The clutch!” I peered down into the pedals in the dark. David’s feet were limp and cluttering up the space, but I could see the third pedal.
Ahead, Enoch was closing in. He was close enough that I could glimpse his face through his windshield, twisted with rage.
I pumped the clutch with one foot, up and down, and mashed the gas with the other. I had no idea what I was doing. “Come on!” I yelled. “Come on, you freaking piece of junk!”
Then the engine roared, and the entire car kicked backward with a surge of speed.
The kick flung me forward, like reverse whiplash, and I barely stopped my forehead from mashing into the wheel before I felt that the car had twisted, that we were careening toward the side of the road, and by now we had to be near the bridge, which meant we might plunge right off the road and hurl into the water, and I was imagining that and wrestling with the wheel and trying to steer straight with the crooked rearview mirror and flooring the gas so stupid fast and Enoch was bearing down, his eyes wide and furious, like he’d ram me right off the road…
… and then we hit the bridge.
The car scraped a railing with a shriek, and I lurched us back toward the center and we careened across the water. The bridge felt so tight compared to the road, and I kept swerving back and forth, freaking out that we’d slam right over the side.
Then a horn wailed… behind me.
Crud. Headlights. At the entrance intersection, a pickup truck was right in my path. It was trying to back up out of the way, but it only had seconds and it would never move in time.
I stood on the brake. The car bucked and nearly fishtailed, but I held on and steered us to a screeching stop, scraping over the pavement less than a foot beside the truck.
Then I saw the driver. “Are you kidding me?” I moaned.
The ancient Mr. Wilbur Wilson stared back. He looked like he’d just seen his life flash before his eyes… actually, like he was still seeing it, and the show might take awhile.
Then I remembered Enoch. I braced to face him, wondered if I had any chance of zapping him out…
…but his headlights had halted on the far side of the bridge.
Really?
I slid off David (yuck) and clambered out of the convertible. In the cool night air, the bridge and the river and the mountains seemed like they should be so peaceful; the space all around me felt open and calm. Fireflies were sparkling in the mountain trees.
But on the far side of the bridge, beneath the dull roar of the crickets, the car was idling, and the headlights were glaring, like a beast fuming at a fence.
Why wasn’t he coming? What was holding him back?
Oh, right. The Shield.
I remembered when my Aunt Helen had first told me about the invisible shield that surrounded Wonder Springs. The Shield does keep us safe, Summer. It repulses almost all of our known enemies. Enoch, for instance.
They hadn’t told me how it worked yet; that was one secret you really didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. But the Shield was the reason I’d been “safe” in Wonder Springs.
I should have felt safe now. But I only felt dread.
A bridge and a river at night were supposed to be normal. That car might be prevented from entering Wonder Springs, but it was crashing new craters through the walls of my mental world.
And inside that car was a monster.
A monster like me.
But a monster with the freedom to touch.
Chapter 27
I considered ditching David and just walking away, but the dude was still passed out, and his car was sideways in the road.
“Mr. Wilson?” I said. “Hi. I don’t suppose you know how to drive stick?”
He stared.
“I’m really sorry about… just now,” I said. “We had kind of an issue with…” I glanced back across the bridge.
Enoch was gone.
Mr. Wilson licked his lips. “A storm draws near…” he croaked.
“Oh, crud,” I said. “You’ve really got to get that looked at.”
I really, really didn’t want any more lap time with David, so I put the roof back down and managed to shove him over into the passenger seat. He was heavy, and I quit as soon as he was physically off the driver’s seat, even though his dress shoes were sticking up in the air like flags on a golf course. He was definitely going to wake up with a crick in his neck.
All I could think to do was bring him back to the Inn. I managed to get the car into first gear, eventually, and we growled our way through the quiet streets. The car seemed awfully loud, even for this macho model, and I had a needling worry that I was supposed to change gears at some point, but I’d stalled so many times getting the dumb thing to first that I wasn’t going to touch anything until I got there. Including the brakes.
When I finally pulled in at the Inn’s parking lot, I got hit with a major dose of deja vu. This was how I’d first arrived in Wonder Springs—pulling in at night into this very lot, confused and freaking out after a run-in with Enoch.
Then I startled hard. Because there on the porch, also like on the first night, sat Aunt Helen and Uncle Barnaby, watching me with care.
The difference was that this time, seeing them made me glad.
“Aunt Helen!” I said, shoving my way out of that stupid car. “Aunt Helen, it was Enoch—”
“I know,” she said, standing. Unlike her brother Barnaby, who flaunted a copious white wizard beard and walked around in a Gandalf robe and hat because he claimed it helped him focus, Helen dressed pretty much like a normal middle-aged mom. Yet as she fixed me with the gaze of her wide, dark eyes, so utterly serious compared to her daughter Tina, she radiated an intensity that was far more unnerving than her cosplay companion. “I felt him. Enoch,” she said, and her voice was unusually deep. “Where is he?”
“Across the bridge,” I said. My hands were trembling. “I mean, he’s gone now. But he was chasing me… and then, when he got to the bridge…”
Uncle Barnaby nodded. “The Shield is not breached.”
“But why did you cross?” Helen said. “You knew the peril.”
“Actually, no,” I snapped. “I did not expect the dude to be parked out there waiting for me. I just wanted a break, and this guy offered me a ride—”
“Ah! Nice wheels,” Uncle Barnaby cut in, with a low whistle. He rustled over in his robe and eyed the interior with fervent admiration. Then he gasped. “You were driving in first gear? Didn’t you hear the engine gnashing its teeth like a lost soul—”
“Barnabas!” Aunt Helen snapped.
Barnaby sighed, opened the passenger door, and hefted David out onto his shoulder as if he were a sack of beans.
Eep. I’d had no idea that Uncle Barnaby was so strong.
As Barnaby carried David back into the Inn, Helen came toward me. Up close, her gaze was even more unsettling. “Are you all right?” she said.
“Sure,” I said, clenching my trembling hands. “Nobody died. I needed practice driving in reverse anyway—”
“Good,” she said. “You must go. At once.”
“What? Where?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself,” she said. “A storm draws near.”
“You heard about that?” I said. “That wasn’t me—”
“Vincent and his minions creep upon us unawares,” she said. “I feel them in the shadows, in the secret rifts between.”
“Between what?” I said. “And what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Ambrose,” said Helen. “Even now, he lingers in his office, alone. You must speak to him. At once.”
“Now? Why?” I said. “Another prophecy?”
“No,” said Uncle Barnaby, turning back toward me at the Inn door with David dangling down his back. “Because Ambr
ose is working late, but he’ll want to get home by ten, and once he starts watching TV you’ll never get him to talk.”
“I mean, why Ambrose?” I said. “Do you think he killed Una?”
Helen shook her head, uncertain, and she paced past me in a slow, dreamy walk. “He knows and feels far more than he has said. I felt him walking that night… he roamed abroad… such turmoil…”
In the months that I’d been here, I’d never seen Aunt Helen act anything like this. She was usually so… mommish… almost aggressive in her common sense.
“Where was he walking?” I demanded, trying to wrench her back into normality. “To Una’s house?”
“Perhaps,” she murmured. “Such turmoil in his heart.”
“What kind of turmoil? What happened? Murder?”
“I know not.” She shook her head. “The link was broken. That night, there were so many attacks…”
“Helen! Come!” called Barnaby, standing in the back doorway. The warm light from within the Inn washed around him and the heap of David, then seeped outside to die in shadow. “We’ve been away too long.”
“He is wily,” Helen said. She drew close and eyed me with concern. “Be on your guard.”
Then she turned and swept off to the Inn door.
“Wait!” I called. I tripped after her up onto the porch. “Seriously? You guys can’t come talk to the guy yourself?”
“We have graver duties,” Barnaby said, and he strode off into a hall.
Helen’s face softened. “You are not alone,” she said, and she closed the door.
“Hey!” I called. “I am too alone! I’m out here on this porch, by myself!”
“Not exactly,” said Tina.
“Holy crud!” I blurted, lurching away from Tina, who was standing right there by the railing, smiling. “How did you do that?”
“There’s another door, see?” she said. “Mom told me you’d need help.”
On her shoulder, Keegan chirped, “Oh, no. Not the parrot.”
“I thought you said we couldn’t use the parrot on locals,” I said. “Especially Ambrose, that’s what Cade said.”
“I’m sure he did,” she said. She frowned. “But from what Mom said, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”