Run to You Part Two: Second Glance

by Clara Kensie

  My eyes suddenly burned with tears. “You’re disappointed.”

  He reached for a tissue and wiped my eyes. “I’m surprised, not disappointed. I don’t care that you’re not psychic.”

  “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,” I added. “I get enough of that from my family. They treat me like I’m this helpless, weak, breakable thing.”

  “I hope I’ve never treated you that way.”

  “No, and that’s one of the reasons I like being with you,” I said. “And I liked being equal with someone. But now, every single person I love is more powerful than me. You’re all members of a club I can never join.”

  He kissed my shoulder. “Now I wish I wasn’t psychic.”

  “Don’t say that.” I chuckled. “Your warning premonition saved my life yesterday.” Tucking myself into him, I nestled my head on his shoulder. “Sometimes I stare at something and try to make it move, or try to see through someone else’s eyes. But nothing ever works. Jillian and Logan’s abilities first appeared when they were babies, but my mom said her own PK didn’t show itself until she was twelve. So I waited. I turned twelve, thirteen, fourteen...and nothing.”

  Tristan said nothing, just rubbed my back.

  “A few years ago I convinced myself I was adopted,” I said. “But I’m not. My mom told me I’m just like her mother. She was four foot ten, same as me. She was left-handed, just like me.”

  “Was? She’s no longer alive?”

  “She choked to death on a dried apricot when my mom was eighteen.”

  “Oh. That’s horrible.”

  “My grandma wasn’t paranormal either,” I added. “Only normal, like me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being normal.”

  “In my family there is. Jillian and Logan used to call me the runt of the litter.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I try not to be jealous, but sometimes I am. Mostly, though, I just feel...useless.”

  He tucked my head under his chin, his breath stirring my hair. “I’m so sorry, Tessa. That sucks.”

  “It’s Jillian and Logan you should feel sorry for, not me,” I said, my lip trembling. “Jill wants to be a doctor and use her PK for heart surgeries. Logan wants to compose symphonies. But we won’t live much longer, and she’ll never be a surgeon. He’ll never be a composer. They’re the ones you should feel sorry for.”

  Tristan went rigid. “What did you say?”

  “You should feel sorry for them, not me.”

  “Not that. The part after that. ‘We won’t live much longer.’”

  Oh. Oh no. I’d gone too far, said too much. Even one word was too much.

  Oh God, what had I done?

  In one fluid motion I slid out from his embrace. “I need to stop now.” Then I ran from the room.

  Tristan pounded after me as I raced down the steps. “You can’t tell me you’re not going to live much longer and then run off. Are you all sick? What happened?”

  He caught me right before I made it to the bottom step, seizing my arm and whipping me around to face him. “Everyone in your family has a fake name. You have to move all the time. I know you’re hiding from something. Are you hiding because of your paranormal abilities? Why would that make you think you won’t live much longer?”

  I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say it.

  “Tessa!” His eyes blazed with fear.

  I closed my eyes. Took a breath.

  Licked my lips, swallowed.

  Then I forced myself to tell him. “We’re being hunted, Tristan.”

  He gripped my arms even more tightly. “What?”

  “And when he finds us, he’ll kill us.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ve been running for eight years. My father’s mobile eye is the only thing keeping us alive.”

  He stared into my eyes for a long moment, looking stricken. “Oh my God. It all makes sense now.”

  And then the sobs came, painful, dry, rasping sobs, so strong they brought me to my knees. He sank to the floor with me and only after my sobs lessened to tears, and my tears lessened to sniffles, did he release me.

  He wiped my tears, then pulled his hands through his hair. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Everyone we’ve gone to for help is dead,” I whispered. “I won’t do that to you. I can’t risk—”

  “Don’t worry about me.” He tapped his forehead. “I’ll be fine. Now I need you to tell me everything.”

  Tell me everything. Three little words that spoken separately would be weightless, but together were heavy enough to sink the whole world.

  I glanced across the foyer. Ten steps, I could be out the door. Two blocks, I’d be home. Five seconds to tell my parents I’d slipped up. And one minute after that, we’d be gone forever.

  Instead, I took Tristan’s hand and led him back upstairs.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Tristan sat me on his bed and wrapped a blanket around me like a cocoon. Then he sat behind me, drawing me against his chest. Whether he held me to comfort me or to keep me from running away again, I didn’t care. I belonged there, in his arms.

  He would keep me safe. I could tell him anything.

  So I told him everything.

  “My dad really is a writer,” I said. “But he doesn’t write books. He used to be an investigative journalist for a newspaper in Washington, D.C. He made a lot of enemies because he exposed politicians doing unethical things, so he used a pseudonym. Xander Xavier. You can probably find his articles on the internet. My mom was the head event planner at a fancy hotel. They invested in some businesses and stocks and made a lot of money. We lived in a big red brick house, and my siblings and I went to a private school. We went on vacations to the beach and to Disney World. I had friends. I went to birthday parties. I had birthday parties. We had a nice life. It was perfect.” I sniffled as homesickness hit me. It’d been years since I allowed myself to remember my life in Virginia, before Dennis Connelly took it all away.

  Maybe I’d started shaking, or maybe my voice had quivered. Whatever the reason, Tristan tightened his arms around me, gently, protectively. “Tell me what happened.”

  Leaning my head against his shoulder, my gaze landed on his tennis trophy across the room. His name was engraved on the bottom: Tristan Walker. I focused on his name, wrapped my emotions up in a blanket of fog, and the room became blurry and hazy.

  From far away, I heard myself tell the story, easily remembered because I relived it in my dreams every night.

  “One day, when I was eight, Jillian and Logan and I were playing at a park down the block. I fell from the monkey bars and hurt my knee, so I came home. My mom gave me an ice pack and sent me back outside with a book, and I sat under one of the big trees we had in the front yard. I’d read a couple of chapters when a man came up to me. My parents taught me about stranger danger, and I knew I should get up and run, but I didn’t. He didn’t seem scary. He smelled a little like cherry cough drops, and his eyes were kind. I liked him.

  “He told me his name and said I must be Tessa. Before I could answer, he put his finger to his lips and told me not to talk, that he could hear my answers in my head. So without speaking, I told him, yes, my name was Tessa. He said he’d heard I was eight years old, but that couldn’t be right because I was much too small to be eight. To prove it to him, I thought about the cake my mom made for my eighth birthday. He said he’d never seen a cake shaped like the number eight before, and it looked like a very yummy cake.

  “He’d ask me questions out loud, and I’d answer in my head. Then he’d repeat what I thought. I imagined silly things, like a purple elephant jumping on a pogo stick, and he’d laugh and tell me what I was thinking. He was right every time. It was fun. Then his eyes turned mean, and he held out his han
d and told me to come with him. That’s when I knew that he was bad, that I shouldn’t have been talking to him, that I should have run away the moment he came into our yard. I tried run away from him then, but I couldn’t. I tried to call for my parents but he grabbed me and covered my mouth.”

  Tristan grabbed me too, wrapping his arms around me as if he was afraid the man would materialize right there and take me away again.

  “He threw me in his car,” I continued, “then he ran back to my house and sneaked inside. I tried to get out. I pulled the handles, pounded on the windows, kicked at the doors, but they wouldn’t open. I screamed, but no one heard me. There was a cigar somewhere up in front, and the car was smoky, and it smelled like, like burning cherries...”

  “You’re about to panic,” Tristan whispered, bringing me away from the memory and back to his room, back to now, back to safety. “Breathe.”

  I obeyed and took a deep breath, realizing only then how my lungs burned for air.

  “Again,” he said, and I took another shaky breath. “Do you need a break? We can stop.”

  I couldn’t stop now. “I want to tell you everything.”

  He tensed a little, bracing himself. “Okay, then. The man went in your house. Why?”

  “The politicians my dad had exposed in his articles,” I said. “One of them, or some of them, or all of them. They hired that man to kill us.”

  “All of you? For what, revenge?”

  With a shudder, I nodded. “Revenge. Retribution. Payback. Maybe as a warning to other reporters.”

  “What did he do?” he asked. “Did he have a gun? He tried to shoot them?”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t need a gun,” I said. “But there was fighting, and blood. A lot of blood. My dad got a big cut on his chest, and my mom got cut down her back.”

  “He had a knife?”

  I shook my head again. “No knives, either.”

  “Then how—”

  “My mom finally threw a chair at him with her PK. It stunned him long enough that they were able to run out of the house.”

  Even now, years later, I clearly remembered my parents bursting outside, bloody and wild-eyed, as I cried for help from the back seat of Dennis Connelly’s car.

  “My dad used his mobile eye on me and found me in the car, just as the man ran out after them. He was limping, but he still came for them. My mom used her PK to throw him to the ground and hold him down while my dad tried to get me out of the car. But he couldn’t get the doors open. He shouted to my mom for help, and she used her PK to shatter the windows, all of them at once, and my dad dragged me out. But the man, he...he...”

  The words had been tumbling out of my mouth, so when I suddenly stopped talking, the silence was deafening.

  “What did he do?” Tristan’s words were whispered and laced with fear.

  I closed my eyes. Took a breath.

  Licked my lips, swallowed.

  Then I forced myself to say it. “He cut me too.”

  “He cut you?” A fearful whisper no longer, his words boiled with possessive anger.

  I tried to take his arms from around me, but he resisted. “Let me go. I’ll show you.”

  He slid his arms away and I stood. I turned to face him, then, shaking, lifted my sweater to reveal my stomach and the five thick, jagged scars that ran from my breastbone to my pelvis.

  He drew in his breath. “That man did that to you?”

  “Without even touching me,” I said. “He was across the yard, on the ground. That’s...that’s how he kills people.”

  Gingerly, he ran his fingertips over the puckered, raised skin, tracing them one by one. “Oh, Tessa.”

  “My father still can’t look at me without his eyes going to my stomach first.” I pulled my sweater down and returned to his lap, then pulled his arms around me even tighter than before.

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No.” Showing my scars to Tristan was difficult, but before today, I’d felt like I’d been broken into a million pieces. Now, each word I spoke put one of those pieces back into place.

  “Everything was a blur after that,” I said. “My dad ran me to the garage and threw me in our car, then my mom jumped in and we raced away. The last I ever saw of our house was the man running after us. I don’t remember stopping at the park to get Jillian and Logan, but I do remember Jillian screaming when she saw how bloody we were. I remember hearing a big explosion and seeing a ball of fire in the sky and bricks and rubble flying through the air. It was our house. That man blew up our house.”

  I told Tristan what else I remembered of that horrible day.

  How my dad drove as fast as he could while my mom found Logan’s old sweatshirt in the car and pressed it hard on my stomach.

  How she couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t stop screaming.

  How when we finally had to stop for gas at a truck stop, they bought all the first-aid kits and elastic bandages they could find, and how they had to peel the shredded, blood-soaked clothes from my skin before they could clean me and wrap me up.

  How they made me drink an adult dose of that sleepy cold medicine, and when I woke up, it was nighttime and we were in a motel with my mom pacing the room, objects flying uncontrolled around her, and my dad standing guard by the door, rubbing his temples.

  I continued, not really seeing the room around me, not really hearing myself speak, but still feeling Tristan’s heart beating against my back, his shallow breath on my neck, and his arms around me, keeping me safe. “We drove around for weeks, buying food from gas stations and sleeping in a different motel every night. I started having nightmares and waking everyone up with my screams. One night my mom, she...um...”

  “What?” Tristan breathed.

  “She didn’t mean to do it. And anyway it was my fault. She was so stressed and so tired, and she couldn’t ever sleep because I was screaming all the time. She just lost control.”

  “What did she do?”

  I closed my eyes. Took a breath.

  Licked my lips, swallowed.

  Then I forced myself to tell him. “She flew me across the room and slammed me into the wall.”

  He hissed in a sharp breath.

  “She said if I didn’t stop screaming she would let that man get me. And even though I still have nightmares every night, I have never, ever screamed again.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She cried the whole next morning,” I said, scrambling to apologize on her behalf. “She promised she’d never hurt me again and said she would never let that man get me. She was so upset that I gave her flowers. They were just dandelions from the cracks in the parking lot, but she held those dandelions in her hand for three days before my dad finally threw them away.” I inhaled a huge lungful of air. “And that was when my parents decided to stop running.”

  It took Tristan a long time to respond. “Where did you go?” he finally asked, his voice strained.

  “My dad watched for the man almost constantly, and realized he could only see him when they were close to each other, within a few hours. We were in Utah, and my dad hadn’t seen him in a few days, so my parents thought we might be safe if we stayed there.”

  I told Tristan how my parents took out as much cash as they could from their bank accounts and how they found someone to forge new IDs and birth certificates for us. We became the Perry family, and an old, rickety rental house became our new home. My mother hated that house. She’d taken such pride in our big red brick house in Kitteridge, Virginia, but this one was tiny, with peeling white paint and floors that creaked with every step. She said it reminded her of the trailer she grew up in.

  But we were alive—and together—and that was all that mattered, and all that still mattered.

  I told Tristan how the wounds my parents rece
ived during the attack had healed completely by then, but my own cuts were much deeper and took a lot longer to heal.

  I told Tristan how, just as we’d gotten used to life in Utah, just as we thought we’d be okay, my parents pulled us from our beds and told us to get in the car. My dad had seen the man with his mobile eye. He’d found us, and he was close. A few days earlier my parents had gone to a police detective for help, but the man tracked us down through the police report. As we sped away down a dark highway, my father had watched, horrified, as the man cornered the detective and sliced him open.

  I told Tristan how, a few months later, the same thing happened when my parents asked an FBI agent for help. My dad had watched the man kill the agent in Pennsylvania as we refueled our getaway car in Ohio. After that, we’d stopped seeking help from others. We could do nothing but drive to another state, rent another house, and get new names.

  A few months later, we did it again. And again. And again.

  “It’s been eight years,” I said. “We’ve lived in thirteen different places. We’ve had thirteen different names. He keeps managing to find us, and every time we escape he gets angrier. Dad’s getting weaker. I’m scared his mobile eye will kill him before the man does. Mom’s PK is strong, stronger than ever, but emotionally...she’s falling apart. We all are. Every day, we fall apart a little bit more.”

  I stopped. I was done.

  Tristan was quiet for a long moment, his heart beating against my back. “What about your friends and neighbors?” he whispered. “Didn’t they wonder why your whole family just disappeared?”

  “The police reports said they found our bodies in the rubble when our house exploded. There was a memorial for us and everything. My parents decided it’s safer to let everyone believe we’re dead.” With a small sigh, I added, “My friends from Virginia...they were the only real friends I ever had.” I twisted in his lap so I could look at him. “Until now. Until you.”

  He lifted my hair and planted a small kiss on my neck, right over my collarbone. “There has to be something else you can do,” he said. “You can’t just keep running and hiding your whole life.”