“Hold on a minute.” Scott held up his hand. “Firuz is telekinetic? Since when?” he demanded.
Kelly smiled. “We all have our secrets, Raleigh.” He looked at Megan. “And to answer your question, telekinesis is my strongest ability, though I can communicate psychically.”
She nodded. “Okay, good. While I’m working my healing magic on Julian and focusing my remaining energy on keeping his sorry ass alive, Scott is going to do a mental scan that’s going to cover a lot of ground. He needs to go into full freak mode.” She shot Scott an apologetic look. “No offense.”
Scott shrugged. “None taken. It’s true.” He looked over at Kelly. “Short version of her long winded novel is that she needs someone to watch my back and communicate with me if needed.”
“Roger that. We’ve got this, Nox. Go save our friend.” He turned to join Scott.
Megan turned to Max. “Cortez, this is going to sound like an odd question, but bear with me here. Do you feel comfortable touch my essence”—she winced, chuckling—“and moving Julian up into the hayloft so we can lay him down?” She giggled, touching his shoulder. “I’m sorry. That sounded so wrong. It’s okay if you say no.”
Max shook his head. “Nah. It’s cool.”
He walked over to Julian. Without hesitation, he reached out to touch his partner’s arm. The white energy crackled louder and turned an angry shade of red.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, yanking his hand away. He blew on his burning hand, shaking it out.
Megan raised an eyebrow, placing her hands on her hips.
“Yeah, uh, good luck with that,” Scott said right before his ocean colored eyes went completely white and he disappeared into his own mind.
“C’mon, Cortez. Let’s see it. I showed you mine. It’s only fair you show me yours.”
“See what? What just happened?” he asked innocently.
“Don’t try and bullshit me, Max. I am so not buying what you’re trying to sell me. It’s time to man up and fess up. My energy only acts that way towards an unfamiliar energy.”
Max hung his head. “Shit.”
“You, my friend, are busted.”
He sighed in resignation. Stepping away from Julian, he waved his right hand. Clear sparks flew off his finger tips and surrounded her light without touching it.
He shook his head, swearing with every step as he came back to stand by her side.
The clear dancing dots reached out and stroked her energy—yes, that’s right. His energy petted hers like it was a freaking dog. Her energy popped louder, rubbing against Max’s like a long lost lover. She watched in complete awe as her energy essentially rolled over, exposing its belly to Max’s energy as they blended together like they were old friends.
Her jaw dropped as Julian’s body slowly lifted into the air, maneuvering itself so that he was laying horizontally suspended in the air. It then proceeded to float up and over the wooden railing at the edge of the loft and into the hayloft itself.
Megan looked a Max.
Max shrugged.
“I only have one question. Does my father know?”
Max shook his head. “As Kelly said. We all have our secrets.”
CHAPTER 28
July 2000
Akron, OH
She was going to die of heat stroke.
If the lies weren’t so freaking complicated from the events of the last year, and if Shanna would just pull her big girl panties up and tell the truth, she could have been doing this in the early morning or early evening when it was considerably cooler. As it stood, she was stuck dying in the afternoon sun if she wanted to be outside in a swim suit.
As she leaned back in the lounge chair, she flipped her sunglasses, which had been sitting atop her head, down over her eyes and focused on not frying like an egg in the summer heat. She sipped ice cold lemonade through a straw as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the relative peace and quiet.
She was the only one home, so she had taken the opportunity to don her favorite blue and green bikini and sunbathe on the back deck, thankful for the six foot wooden privacy fence that surrounded the backyard.
Well, Del was around somewhere, but she wouldn’t question the scars like the guys would. As far as Del was concerned, the scars had always been there. She had a few scars of her own she didn’t want to answer for, so she didn’t ask and Shanna didn’t explain. It was why their friendship worked out so well.
Shanna set the glass of liquid heaven down on the small glass table beside the chair, pulling the rubber band from her long, wavy hair. She pulled it back into a ponytail at the center of her head, twisting it into a bun as she replaced the rubber band. She sighed in contentment as her neck began to breathe again.
As the July sun beat down on her, she closed her eyes again, letting the rays tan her already dark skin as she thought about the last few months.
She and D had officially been together for six months with no major hiccups. Him not knowing about the incidents back in April and the results of them had a lot to do with that blissful happiness.
What were a few more secrets and lies between them?
Danick had turned eighteen last week with D following suit two days later. Thankfully, both of them were currently at work. Rhyder was currently over at his girlfriend’s.
Shanna opened her eyes as the back door slammed shut. She hid a smile as Del dropped into the lounge chair beside hers with a dramatic sigh. She studied her best friend out of the corner of her eye. Del had short straw-blonde hair, straight as a board, sparkling blue eyes, and a healthy athletic build that was currently covered by a little yellow bikini that left little to the imagination.
Shanna pulled her sunglasses off. Thank God Danick and Rhyder weren’t home. They drooled over Del when she was fully clothed. Del in a bikini? Yeah, they’d never find her brothers’ bodies.
“So much for girls’ day in,” Del muttered, flinging an arm over her head.
“Wait. Why did you make that statement past tense?”
“Danick’s home,” Del replied, shattering Shanna’s hopes of a peaceful afternoon. “I saw him pull up before I headed out here. Looks like he has D and Rhy in tow.”
Before she could respond, the screen door slammed open and all three guys spilled out onto the wooden deck. Rolling her eyes, Shanna pushed off her chair, crossed the deck to the grass, and climbed into the round pool the Tiern’s set up every summer.
“My face is up here,” Shanna heard Del comment dryly as she broke the surface, pushing her hair out of her face.
Rhyder absently nodded, not bothering to move his eyes up from their current position. “And what a beautiful face it is.”
Shanna snorted.
“How would you know? You haven’t seen it yet,” Del responded dryly.
Shanna noticed that Del made no effort to cover up or shift out of Rhyder’s line of sight.
“Seen it before.”
Shanna raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend’s comment. She watched him skirt her drooling twin and head in her direction. “And what is it you have seen before, exactly?”
“Her face.”
“Clarify which face for the class please.”
“The one with blue eyes, thin eyebrows, pointed chin, slightly crooked nose, and a mouth that never shuts up. Oh, yeah. It has two ears attached to it somewhere.”
Shanna swam to the edge of the pool to meet him, a grin on her face. “Nice save, Tiern.”
He leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I’ve only got eyes for you.”
“That’s bullshit, but it’s a decent sales pitch.” She grabbed the front of his T-shirt, pulling him into the cool water with her.
D broke the surface, sputtering and cursing. Glaring at her, he advanced towards her as she quickly swam to the end of the pool giggling.
“Oh. I’m so going to enjoy paying you back for that.” He reached down, pulling off his tennis shoes one by one. He tossed them over the side of the pool. He pulled his shirt over his head,
tossing that haphazardly over the side, too. “You have no idea how much. You think you’re cute. That’s okay. I’ll show you where cute gets you.”
Shanna took a second to admire his bare chest. He shifted. She shrieked and dove underwater.
A few minutes later, a laughing D and Shanna emerged from the pool, dripping a trail of water from the pool to the towels that had mysteriously been spread out on the deck. Everyone else had disappeared inside.
Shanna laid flat on one of the oversized towels, raising her hands over her head in an exaggerated stretch as the sun began to dry the small droplets of water off her skin.
She noticed her mistake too late.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught D studying her side with an avid interest that couldn’t bode well for her. His eyebrows were drawn together in concentration, a confused look on his face.
Shit!
She grabbed an extra towel off the table and covered herself up with it. She had completely forgotten about the visible new scars left over from her last encounter with Kai and his crew. In her haste to escape hormone central and in the excitement of wrestling in the pool with her boyfriend, she had spaced the entire reason she had been sunbathing when no one was home.
Double shit.
Yeah, she so did not want to explain how she had gotten those scars when she was supposed to be at home that night. It was bad enough they had to come up with a cover story for her cover story. The cover story was to explain her funky walk. The cover story’s cover was to explain how she was even in the position to get hit by a car when she was supposed to be at home with a migraine.
She was so not going into how she had been out with another guy—not what you think. The guy had been gone by the time she had been ambushed by Kai, but that wasn’t the point.
D had no idea about that part of her life and she wanted to keep it that way for a while. She would tell him when it was safe to integrate her two worlds without all of the truth having to come out.
She had very good reasons for playing the things she did close to the vest. Just because her life was screwed up and straight out of a science fiction novel, didn’t mean she had to drag the people she loved into the fray and potentially endanger them further.
Shanna stood up, planning to escape to the safety of her room before D recovered from his shock.
She made it into the disturbingly quiet kitchen before he grabbed her arm, spinning her around to face him. She avoided meeting his eyes and pulled her arm roughly from his grasp and continued her mission downstairs to her room.
He caught up to her in the common room, this time wrapping a muscular arm around her waist. He lightly slammed her against her closed bedroom door.
Well, now, this was frighteningly familiar.
She met his angry blue eyes with her frightened green ones.
“Don’t. Move,” he ordered through gritted teeth.
She freaking lied to me.
Again.
That was all D could think. He was absolutely mystified that it had once again gotten to this point. He had honestly thought things had been going well.
He should have known better. Deep down, if he was honest, he had known that them being past this whole keeping things from him to “protect him” phase was a pipe dream.
“Don’t,” he said through gritted teeth, “move.”
D pinned Shanna’s arms over her head with one hand, ripping the towel away from her body with the other. He ran his eyes over her slender body, settling his gaze on the smooth scar underneath her ribcage, the one from last summer when Kai had stabbed her.
Above the scar, to the left, closer to her stomach, was a jagged scar, about three inches across.
What…
There was a similar, though skinnier, scar on her left thigh, a few inches below the shorts of her bikini.
That hadn’t been there a few months ago, just like the second scar on her ribcage hadn’t been there. He knew because, while they hadn’t had sex since that night last summer, they’d had some PG-13 rated fun the night before her so called “accident”. And, well, he had sort of memorized every inch of her body.
The…
His eyes rested on the third new scar, the tip of it protruding from the top of the bikini shorts. He pulled her bikini bottoms down another inch, his breath catching in his throat. There was a scar that ran from one side of her lower abdomen to the other.
Fuck.
D brought his gaze back up to her face. His eyes bored into hers. She glanced away, studying his bare chest, swallowing hard. “How did you—”
He cut himself off, taking a deep breath to control the anger in his voice. “How did I not know about—” He hissed out a breath, tightening his hold on her wrists as he realized she hadn’t let him near her, at least in that way, since that night.
His eyes narrowed. “You know what, never mind. A better question is, when did you get these?”
Shanna’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth, closing it again as she continued to stare at his chest.
“How about you look me in the eye as you lie to me, Shanna? That would be an awesome change of pace from you stabbing me in the back.”
She raised her eyes to his and mumbled incoherently, “When I opted out of the Jankin’s party.”
Oh. My. God.
Had she just told him the truth? He waited for the angel’s to sing, a heavenly light to appear, the earth to move, anything really that would give him a sign that he wasn’t imagining this moment.
“What was that? Would you like to try that again? This time without the whole mumbling routine?”
Shanna heaved out a pained sigh. He watched her pulse beat rapidly in her throat. “”Fine. Since you are hell bent on knowing something that I know you really don’t want to know, I will tell you. I promise I won’t tell you ‘I told you so’ later on when you realize I’m right. I got them the night you guys went to the Jankin’s party without me.”
Hot damn. So she was capable of the truth. Granted, she was only capable of spitting it out when backed into a corner and busted beyond a shadow of a doubt, but still. Who knew?
D raised an eyebrow. “If memory serves, you said you weren’t feeling good that night and that you were going to lie in bed and watch a movie. Next thing I know, Dad was telling us that you had been hit by a car. Granted, you were sore for weeks afterward, but”—he shot her a dubious look—“unless the car that hit you had spikes equivalent to a porcupine, or horns rivaling a bulls, he pulled that story straight out of his ass.”
“Well, you, uh, see… I sort of, um, exaggerated the whole not, er, you know, uh, feeling well scenario,” she stuttered.
No shit. He had figured that one out all on his lonesome.
He feigned a shocked look. “No? Really? You don’t say?”
Shanna flinched at the sarcasm dripping from each word. “After you all left, I decided to go for a, um, run through the park.”
And the million dollar question of the night was… “Alone?”
Her eyes shifted slightly, returning to his. “No,” she whispered.
D sighed, releasing her arms. He stepped back and dropped onto the worn out couch with a groan. “Yeah, I kinda arrived at that conclusion on my own. The way you looked guiltily away and whispered the answer sort of gave it away.” He raked a hand through his hair. “I take it—now, mind you, this is me going out on a limb here—that, since I haven’t heard about this mysterious running partner before now, they are male.”
She pulled the towel around her midsection again, shivering despite the humid temperature in the basement. She didn’t answer. Instead, she slipped into her room like the slimy, elusive snake she was.
He took that as confirmation of his suspicions.
Shanna emerged from her room a few minutes later, dressed in a white halter top and cut off jean shorts. Her hair was pulled up into a haphazard bun on top of her head.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
She shrugged, plopping
down on the armrest of the recliner across from him.
“And the scars come into play…?”
He let the sentence trail off into a half ass question. She would answer or she wouldn’t. He was done playing her games. They were playing by his rules now and he was done pressing her for answers he should have already had.
“Last chance to let this drop,” she warned. At the look he shot her, she sighed. “Fine. I was jumped on my way home that night and, please, can we just leave it at that?”
“By…?”
Before Shanna could come up with a suitable lie, the basement door opened.
“Shanna, an Officer Loftgreen is here to see you!” Danick called down. “Oh, and Lisa is with her and says she needs to talk to about that appointment you asked her about.”
The door promptly shut again, leaving them alone once again.
Shanna groaned and hung her head.
“No one knew about this and the cops are involved?” D ground out, glaring accusingly at her. “And I was just supposed to drop the whole subject like it doesn’t matter?”
She stood up. “You’re father knew. Keeping it from you was his brilliant idea. Why don’t you take it up with him?”
With that little informational bomb, she headed up the stairs.
Well, wasn’t that just the icing on the informational cake they had made for him as a surprise?
“I’m fine.”
Shanna dropped into the chair across the kitchen table from Officer Sandi Loftgreen, rubbing her seemingly bare forearm as it heated up like a slow burning fire. Shanna had known Sandi for years. She had made the unfortunate mistake of dating Kai for a short while back when they were in high school. Shanna didn’t hold it against the woman. Mainly because, when Kai found out that Sandi wasn’t exactly human, things didn’t end well.
Shanna had thoroughly enjoyed watching the fairy wipe the floor with Kai.
Sandi shot her a dubious look. “And I’m a Hunter.”
Shanna winced. Even though her tattoos were cloaked, and creatures of the mythical type couldn’t sense her, Sandi knew who and what she was. Still, that was a low blow. She didn’t chose who she was born to, or what she was born as, any more than the fairy in front of her did.
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