“It’s okay,” I said, unsure why the girl was so afraid of me but not wanting to cause any trouble.
But Cindy shook her head and said, “No, it’s not okay. She needs to learn.”
I looked toward the doorway again. Alia was standing there, silently looking at me, her face rigid with fear. She looked really small in her over-size cotton shirt and pants, and I guessed she was about four or five years old. I smiled again, trying my best to look harmless. She took one small step forward, then another. Ever so slowly, she crossed the kitchen until she was almost close enough to shake hands with.
“That’s right, sweetie,” Cindy said softly, “say hello. This is Adrian Howell. Adrian, this is Alia Gifford.”
“Hello, Alia,” I said as gently as I could.
Alia tensed up, but she didn’t back away. I could see her lips quivering slightly.
Then, in a barely audible whisper, she said, “Ha-ow.”
“Hi,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.
Cindy stage-whispered to us, “Shake hands!”
I stretched out my right arm, but a little too suddenly. Alia jumped back like a frightened cat. She surveyed me with infinite caution before finally stepping forward again and slowly putting her arm out. As her trembling hand reached mine, I didn’t squeeze it or shake it, but just let our fingers touch for a moment.
“Good girl!” said Cindy, crouching down and opening her arms wide. Alia jumped into them, and Cindy gave her a big hug, saying, “That was a pretty good hello, sweetie.”
Picking her up, Cindy said to me, “Alia has a lot of trouble speaking with her mouth, so usually she’ll just talk into your head, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging. Judging by the way the kid was clinging to Cindy, I seriously doubted she was ever going to speak with me anyway.
Cindy carried Alia into the living room, which was spacious and clean, with a rectangular coffee table and two long sofas. There was also an old-fashioned redbrick fireplace with fake firewood in it. There was no TV, but instead there was a long bookshelf built into one of the walls. A stairway led up to what I assumed were the bedrooms.
Cindy tried to set Alia down onto a sofa, but Alia refused to let go, so Cindy sat down herself, keeping the girl in her lap.
Cindy then closed her eyes, as if in prayer. I watched her, wondering what she was doing, but then I noticed that my staring was making Alia really scared, so I looked away.
After a few minutes, I heard Cindy say, “Listen, Adrian, I’m really beat. My shift starts tomorrow, and I have to get some sleep. Like right now. Let me sleep for a few hours.”
I turned to her. “Yeah, okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Just stay put. Don’t leave the house. Our protection has gotten smaller. I’ve reinforced it just a bit now, but it still might not even cover the whole street. I’ll restore it completely as soon as I sleep some. Sit here. Read. Do whatever.”
“Okay, sure. What about…” I nodded toward Alia, who was still clinging to Cindy for dear life.
“Oh, this little monkey?” Cindy smiled, and then said to Alia, “How about it, Ali? You want to stay here and make friends with Adrian?”
Alia looked up at Cindy and frantically shook her head.
Cindy laughed, saying, “Yeah, didn’t think so. But he’s going to live here too now, you know. Sooner or later, you’ll have to get used to it.”
After a quick glance in my direction, Alia buried her face in Cindy’s chest.
Cindy stood up and grinned at me. “She says later. She looks like she’s ready for a nap anyway. I usually try to get her to sleep in her own bed, but today I think we’ll make an exception.”
With that, Cindy carried Alia up the stairs and disappeared.
My first order of business was exploring the house. I wasn’t going to climb the stairs, accepting that the second floor was a designated Adrian-free-zone until Alia said otherwise, so I took a tour through the rest of the first floor.
There wasn’t much, really. The only other large room on the first floor was the dining room, which could be entered from either the living room or kitchen. It contained a heavy oak table, set with an expensive-looking flower vase on a lacy white tablecloth, and surrounded by four sturdy straight-back dining chairs. There was a large calendar hanging on one wall. Seeing it, I realized that I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I’d have to ask Cindy later.
As for the rest of the first floor, there was a hallway that led to the front door, as well as a toilet and a moderately spacious bathroom. I noticed that the front door had an additional lock near the top. I could just reach it, but I briefly wondered whether Alia was a guest or a prisoner here.
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and was shocked at how grimy I was. I thought I had been washing myself well enough with bottled water these past weeks, but apparently not. I smiled to myself as I remembered how Alia had jumped when she saw me. I would have been a bit scared too!
I hastily undressed and stepped under the shower. Even before using any soap, the steaming water swirling into the drain turned dark gray. I could feel the dirt coming out of my hair, and out from between my toes. It felt wonderful. It made me feel like a normal person again.
After toweling myself dry, having no change of clothes, I had no choice but to put my dirty stuff back on. At least I was clean underneath now.
Then I went back to the living room and looked through Cindy’s bookshelf. I was half-expecting to find titles about supernatural powers, strange religious cults and ceremonies, or vampires and the devil, but there was nothing of the sort. There were a few cookbooks, various magazines, quite a few novels including several (ugh!) romances, a big black leather-bound Bible, and a full set of very thick encyclopedias. Cindy had yet to discover the internet. I pulled out a nature magazine with a cover title that read Paradise Lost and flipped through it, looking more at the animal pictures than reading. Time passed slowly, but at least I was inside a house as opposed to on top of it.
Cindy came down by herself at about five o’clock.
“Hey, I see you cleaned up,” she said, looking me over.
“Yeah,” I said, self-consciously fingering my dirt-stained left sleeve.
“I’ll get you some new clothes tomorrow.”
Cindy’s eyes stopped on my hands. I glanced down at my rough and uneven fingernails. During my first week on the run, I had bought and tried using a proper nail cutter, but the steel drained my strength too much for me to hold it to my fingertips. I had been using my teeth ever since.
I gave Cindy a sheepish look. “I’m not a nail-biter, Cindy. I just can’t cut them by myself.”
Cindy smiled. “I’ll trim them for you later. Your toes too.”
I almost shook my head. After all, what kind of twelve-year-old would let someone cut their nails for them?! But Cindy obviously understood about metal draining and I felt it impolite to refuse her offer.
“Thank you,” I replied, feeling utterly embarrassed.
“It’s no problem.”
“Just out of curiosity, what day is it?”
Cindy laughed. “Sunday. We’re a week from October. You really were out of it, weren’t you?”
I ignored the assessment. “You said that your shift was starting tomorrow, Cindy. What does that mean?”
“Oh, I’m a nurse at the general hospital near here. I have to be there for the day shift tomorrow,” said Cindy, and then suddenly switched to a really fake game-show-host-like cheerful sing-song tone as she added, “And that means you get to spend the whole day alone with Alia tomorrow! Isn’t that nice?”
I rolled my eyes. “How is she going to survive that?”
Cindy dropped the game-show voice and said grimly, “Oh, you’d be surprised at what Alia has survived. She’ll manage.”
“I hope so.”
Cindy gave me a concerned look. “Adrian, Alia isn’t a controller. You know that, don’t you? She’s just telepathic. That’s all.”
“I won’t hurt her, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know you won’t. But Adrian, I really would like you to try and be her friend. She needs that right now.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Seven and a half. I know she’s small for her age.”
Like me, I thought to myself, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud. Instead, I said, “She doesn’t look much like you.”
“She’s not related to me, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Cindy. “She’s just borrowing my last name. Not that she’s ever needed it.”
Cindy picked up the telephone and started dialing, saying to me at the same time, “Sorry I didn’t do this earlier, but I wanted to catch him at home.”
Guessing what it was about, I got closer to the phone, hoping to listen in if I could. A moment later, I heard a click and then a male voice at the other end probably saying hello, though I couldn’t quite make it out. Cindy took on a business-like tone that I hadn’t heard before, but guessed was her work voice at the hospital.
“Hey, Brian, it’s me, Cindy… Yeah, great… Listen, I’m calling in a big-time you-owe-me… I need you to do a check on a missing juvenile report. Well, two of them, actually… I know that’s public, but I don’t want to attract any attention to my interest in this case. You have to do this quickly and quietly… Yeah, I know I’m on the phone! Don’t worry so much! Their names are Adrian and, um…”
“Catherine,” I mouthed.
“Uh, yeah, Adrian and Catherine Howell. Siblings, twelve and ten, respectively. They went missing a few weeks ago. I just want to know when the reports were filed and whether or not they were found… No, not here. They lived in…”
Cindy relayed to him my hometown address, told him how to spell our names, thanked him and hung up.
Then she turned to me and said, “Well, all we can do now is wait. Brian said he’ll get me the information tomorrow, during his break. He’ll probably bring it directly to me at the hospital. The police station is right across the street from where I work.”
“He’s a cop?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“So, um, what was the ‘big-time you-owe-me’?”
Cindy giggled and said, “Well, among other things, I once helped pull a bullet out of his butt.”
I laughed too, and Cindy asked brightly, “Hey, Adrian, are you hungry?”
“Oh yes!” I answered truthfully.
“We’ll remedy that in a moment. Alia’s still asleep, though I’m afraid she might not sleep well tonight, the way she’s out now. I’m guessing she stayed up really late last night. I’ll wake her just before dinner, and then maybe she’ll go right back to bed.”
I gave Cindy a disbelieving stare, but she shrugged and said, “I’m an optimist.”
Then Cindy looked me in the eye and, in a slightly over-serious tone, asked, “Do you want to learn a new power, Adrian?”
“Sure,” I said. “Is it possible?”
“Yup. I’m going to teach you how to cook.”
We made lasagna together. In truth, I didn’t learn much about cooking, blindly following Cindy’s directions, but I did make another important discovery.
“Here, hand me the knife, Adrian,” said Cindy, busily mixing something, her back turned to me.
I reached out for the kitchen knife lying on the counter. It had a black wooden handle, and probably because I wasn’t expecting it, it took a moment for me to realize that I was being drained. I fumbled the knife, tried to catch it, but instead sliced open my left thumb before dropping the knife back onto the counter. My senses were too dimmed for there to be much pain, but I could feel the blood trickling slowly down my hand. I covered my bleeding thumb with my right hand, putting pressure on the wound.
Looking carefully at the knife, I could just make out the dark little circles on the wooden handle, which were the ends of metal bolts running through it and connecting to the blade. Those were what had drained me. My head was still swimming, and I leaned against the counter for support.
“Adrian? What’s the matter?” said Cindy, turning around. She didn’t know I had cut my thumb, but saw me steadying myself against the counter and asked, “What did you get drained on?”
“The knife handle,” I answered, still tightly holding my injured thumb.
“I had a feeling about you when you had trouble with the seatbelt,” said Cindy, “but I didn’t think it was this bad.”
I didn’t understand why, but my head wouldn’t clear. It was like I was still being drained. I slumped down on the kitchen floor.
Cindy looked at me anxiously. “Hey, hey, hey, are you going to be alright?”
“It’ll pass,” I answered weakly.
“Honestly, Adrian! Even Alia doesn’t get nearly this bad.”
“Oh, thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically as I forced myself to stand up straight.
A drop of blood hit the floor, and Cindy stared at me, horror-struck. “You’re bleeding!”
“It’s nothing,” I told her. “It’s not deep. I just need a Band-Aid.”
I didn’t care about my thumb. Something else was much more wrong. Why couldn’t I recover my strength after dropping the knife? I wasn’t touching metal anymore, was I?
“You need to wipe the blood off,” said Cindy.
She grabbed my arm and dragged me to the sink, where she showered the blood off of my hands. I instantly felt better, my head clear again, but the pain from the cut came back to me in full force. Cindy popped out of the kitchen for a moment and returned with a small first-aid kit. Opening it, she pulled out a bottle of antiseptic and a box of Band-Aids.
“You have to be careful about bleeding, Adrian,” she said, cleaning my cut. “You know that there is iron in your blood, right? It doesn’t drain you because it’s inside your body. But if you start bleeding, the iron coming out of your body will drain you, like it did just now.”
“I had a nosebleed once, a few weeks ago,” I said, remembering Cat and her frying pan, “and it didn’t affect me very much.”
“Well, that was weeks ago, right? Your power has grown since then, and your body has become more sensitive to draining. A little blood is usually not as bad as touching a bigger piece of metal, but, well, you know how it feels now.”
I wrapped the Band-Aid around my thumb as Cindy picked up the kitchen knife, holding it delicately by the blade to examine the metal bolts in the handle. Looking closer at the blade’s edge, I noticed that it had only the slightest trace of my blood on it. The knife must have been razor-sharp, and I was lucky that I hadn’t cut my thumb off. Cindy was a serious cook.
“I have knives with plastic handles too, but please be careful with them,” said Cindy as she deftly flipped the knife in the air and caught it by the handle.
“Cindy, why does the metal affect me like this?” I asked.
“Oh, it affects all of us in the same way, though to different degrees,” said Cindy. “I’m actually very sensitive to metals. Even a little contact can drain me completely.”
“But you don’t…”
“Fall down when I touch it?” Cindy smiled. “That’s because I have my power properly balanced.”
“And what does that mean?” I asked, irritated at how easy Cindy looked holding the knife in her hand. I also remembered how Ralph didn’t seem to have any trouble handling the chain that he put around my neck.
“It means I know how to keep my power from taking over my physical body,” said Cindy.
My continued lack of understanding must have shown on my face because Cindy crouched down in front of me and said slowly in a concerned voice, “Adrian, I want you to listen to me very closely now, because this is important. I’m not worried about the metal draining your psionic power, as long as it’s just that, and not your whole body. You are being physically overrun by your power. This can happen to people when their power comes too early or too suddenly, which in your case is both, and they haven’t had time to lea
rn how to separate it. If you don’t learn balance, you will lose yourself in your power.”
“Lose myself?” I asked.
“Your power has already started to support your bodily functions, Adrian. You’ve let your body rely on your power too much. That’s why you get dizzy when your power is drained. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
Cindy continued, “Once you learn how to balance your power and keep it from supporting or replacing your physical strength, you’ll be able to freely touch any metal without feeling dizzy or tired, even if you can’t fly or telekinetically knock things over.”
I thought back to the berserker attacks. If I hadn’t been physically and emotionally drained by touching metal, I might have seriously hurt or killed Cat even without my power. And what about Ralph? Could I have escaped him without draining my emotions on the pen tip? I realized that I might not be alive now if I didn’t have this weakness. Still, Cindy had a point: I couldn’t go on feeling faint every time I touched a piece of metal, especially if there was metal in my own blood. I was lucky not to have been injured until now.
“And you can teach me how to balance my power?” I asked.
“Even Alia could probably teach you a thing or two,” Cindy said with a chuckle, and I scowled at her.
I decided to shift the topic, asking, “Can you also learn to resist metal? I mean, so that your power doesn’t get drained at all?”
“As far as I know, that is impossible.”
“And what if I can’t learn to separate my power from my body?” I asked, needing to hear the worst.
Cindy looked at me for a moment, perhaps contemplating how, or how much, to tell me, before answering, “Well, the sad truth is that some people never learn balance, and their bodies slowly decay. Like a degenerative disease, your muscles will deteriorate and you will age faster. It can turn into a vicious cycle, with your body needing more and more support from your powers as your muscles and organs get weaker. And if you were drained in that condition…”
“I could die,” I said quietly.
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