by Jena Leigh
He smirked. “Not the way you and Nate know each other.”
She flushed, shrugging one shoulder. “Nate and I spent more time training together. And, to be honest, you’re a lot closer with Ca—”
Alex cut herself short.
“Closer with…?” he prompted.
“Spoilers.” Alex appeared to be biting back a smile. “Probably better if I let you find that one out for yourself.”
Aiden’s brow furrowed as he puzzled over her reply.
“Aiden?” she asked slowly. “What city are we in? Is this Newport?”
“Newport?” he echoed. “Why the hell would we be in… You know what? Never mind. No, Alex, we’re not in Newport.”
“Are we still close to the place where I appeared?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said. “When you arrived we were 150 miles offshore, fishing for Alaskan King Crab in the Bering Sea.”
“Then how did we end up back on land?”
Aiden shrugged. “Our captain took one look at you and sent us back to the docks at Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands. Soon as we made port, he ordered all three of us off his ship. At least he was kind enough to arrange for a jump back home. God knows that was one chartered plane, ferry ride, and bus ticket I wouldn’t have wanted to pay for, otherwise.”
“And your home is where, exactly?” she asked, squinting out the glass doors again. “You still haven’t said.”
Aiden got to his feet. He could interrogate her later. Right now he was curious to see her reaction to their current location.
As he approached the couch, he held out a hand to Alex. “Come and see for yourself.”
Tentatively slipping her fingers across his open palm, Alex allowed Aiden to pull her from the couch and back onto her feet.
He guided her toward the back of the apartment, out onto the darkened patio and into the icy chill of the evening.
Alex’s eyes grew wide as she stepped closer to the railing and drank in their surroundings.
Aiden pointed out across the water. “That strip of land you see in the distance? That darker bit of black against the sky, with the scattering of lights on it? That’s Bainbridge Island. The mass of water between us and the island is Elliott Bay, the heart of Puget Sound.”
He guided her to the far right side of the balcony, at the very corner of the building. From this height and angle, they could look back and see a large part of the city, only partially obstructed by the nearby buildings.
One landmark in particular stood out amongst the rest.
Aiden nodded toward it. “And I’m assuming you recognize that.”
Alex gaped openly at the Space Needle where it towered in the distance, bathed in the pale yellow glow of its exterior lights.
“We’re in Seattle?” Alex’s voice was breathy, either from amazement or exhaustion, Aiden wasn’t sure.
“We’re in Seattle,” he confirmed. Stepping back into the warmth of his apartment, Aiden smiled. “Welcome to the Emerald City, Alex Parker.”
“Order up!”
The barked comment drew Nathaniel’s attention away from the case of pastries he’d been staring at, unseeing, for the last few minutes.
Behind the long counter positioned at the back of the restaurant, a waitress retrieved three piping hot plates of food from the kitchen and shuffled them out to one of the waiting tables.
Not his order, then.
Nate’s gaze drifted back toward the refrigerated case of desserts.
He’d seen a lot of impossible things in his eighteen years—teleportation, control over the elements, psychic predictions, telekinesis—things that the norms would have had a field day trying to rationalize away.
And for the first time ever, he felt like he could empathize.
Time travel.
Insane? Absolutely.
But the girl…
It wasn’t just the story she told. The photograph and the details she knew about his mother’s gravesite were compelling, but that wasn’t what convinced him of her sincerity.
It had been her eyes.
Those steel gray eyes he remembered from his childhood. The desperate sincerity Nate saw in their expression was what finally forced him to accept her impossible story.
Unfortunately for Nathaniel, acceptance came with an entirely new set of problems.
How were they supposed to help her? How were they going to find Declan? Was it even possible to fix their future, without going back to the very beginning of their story? And supposing they could find Declan, how would they get his brother and Alex back to their own time, if the girl’s ability had faded?
And how, exactly, did a Variant ability just fade out?
“Crazy, isn’t it?”
Nate blinked. “Sorry?”
An older gentleman clad in a fedora and a pea coat stood beside him at the dessert case. The man gestured with the tip of his closed umbrella to a rack of newspapers positioned at the end of the counter.
The paper’s headline read SEATTLE SCIENTIST STRIKES AGAIN: Fourth Victim Found Downtown.
Frowning, Nathaniel pulled a newspaper from the top of the stack.
Seattle Scientist?
“The murders,” said the man. “Crazy to think we live in a world where something like this could happen. Used to be, a man wanted to kill ya, he’d use a gun. Nowadays they kill ya with science.”
“Murders?”
“You been living under a rock or something, son?” asked the man. “Seattle has its very own serial killer on the loose. Been all over the news for the last two weeks.”
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes as he skimmed the details of the article, mumbling, “I’ve been out of town,” by way of an explanation.
The man harrumphed. “Lucky you.”
According to the Seattle Tribune article, police were at a loss to explain this recent outbreak of grisly killings. Over the last few weeks, three men and one woman had been found murdered in different Seattle neighborhoods, each in various states of decomposition. Though not in anything that could be considered a natural state of decomposition.
Each of the victims had been injected with some unknown substance that killed them within minutes, inexplicably causing their skin to dissolve, their muscles to liquefy, and their bones to become so brittle they broke beneath the slightest pressure.
An expert that the Tribune journalist consulted for the article described it as a “particularly gruesome, cruel, and inhumane” way to go.
Nate cringed, suddenly grateful that the only picture attached to the report was one taken during a press briefing given that morning from outside of the police station.
With no connection to be found between the victims and no witnesses to the murders, the cops were stymied. As a result, the city’s denizens were up in arms.
“To-go order for Nathaniel?”
He stepped up to the register and dropped the paper on the countertop. “I’ll take this, too.”
After paying the girl, Nathaniel gathered up the packages of food and made for the exit, once again lost in his thoughts.
Eight
Letting go of his sister’s waist, Brian leaned back on the Ducati’s seat, scanning their surroundings through the gap in his helmet.
“Is he here yet, Kenzie?” he asked over the rumble of their borrowed motorcycle.
Kenzie cut the engine and Brian slid clumsily off the bike. In the ensuing silence, the gravel crunching beneath his tennis shoes seemed to echo through the empty lot.
He removed his helmet and slowly approached the building, listening for the sounds of conversation, searching the darkness for a light through a window.
The glass panes were dark; the lot and the surrounding forest, utterly still. The handwritten hours tacked up beside the door stated the bar had closed for business over an hour earlier.
Brian frowned. His vision would have taken place after the bar had closed, he was certain of it. There was still a chance that he could be inside.
Declan.
A future Declan. One that didn’t belong in this time. One who was going to need Brian’s help, if he ever wanted to make it home again.
Behind him, Kenzie sighed and engaged the Ducati’s kickstand before yanking off her own helmet. Her matted red hair descended to a chaos of tangles across her shoulders.
“Is who here yet, Bri?” She ran a hand through her hair as she slid off the bike and joined him at the bar’s front entrance. “Who is it we’re looking for here, anyway?”
Brian hummed a noncommittal reply and adjusted his glasses. “Can you do a scan to see who’s nearby?” he asked. “See if maybe there’s someone still inside?”
Kenzie gave him a look—one that caused her brow to scrunch together and her lips to form a thin line. It was a look he was familiar with. One that told him she wanted details, ASAP, and that he wouldn’t be wheedling any other favors out of her until he’d spilled his guts.
With a tired sigh, he reinforced his mental barrier, ensuring that his sister wouldn’t be able to see the particulars of his thoughts.
If she only knew.
For the last six months, Brian had been working endlessly to decipher the most complicated puzzle of his young life.
The rest of his family assumed that his choice to distance himself meant that he was still dealing with the horror of having his mother brutally murdered.
For the first few months, that assessment was true enough.
Lately, however, he had been throwing everything he could into tying together the separate threads of information he was being bombarded with, morning, noon, and night.
The fleeting thought of his mother caused Brian to pause in the parking lot. He shook his head to clear it, swallowing his frustration. His anger. His tears.
This wasn’t the time.
He was on a mission. He could revisit the pain later. Right now he needed to concentrate.
Brian scanned the empty gravel lot, the woods that lined the property, the exterior of the building. The night was cold, the wind was soft, and the world was absolutely silent.
Empty.
Certain kinds of trauma like extreme stress or physical injury could trigger the early emergence of a Variant ability as a sort of defense mechanism.
After the initial shock of his mother’s death began to dull, a new trauma greeted Brian—a seemingly endless torrent of images, sounds and impressions.
He’d inherited his father’s ability to glimpse the future.
Any other eight-year-old might have been crushed beneath the weight of all the extra information. Brian, thankfully, wasn’t your typical eight-year-old.
He didn’t know what evolutionary benefit there was in bombarding an already stressed-out kid with the burden of a barely controlled super-human ability, but who was he to argue with Mother Nature?
One thing he would say, however, was that she had a really sick sense of humor. Where was this ability when he had needed it the most? When it could have saved his mother’s life?
He sighed. Kenzie had folded her arms across her chest and continued to stare at him expectantly.
“I thought that Declan might be here,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Decks was ten shades of dead to the world when we left the cabin. You knew that. So what am I doing standing outside a bar at three in the morning with a stolen bike and my kid brother?”
Deciding it would probably be safer for everyone involved if he didn’t answer that question, Brian turned and began making his way around the side of the building, a borderline irate Kenzie trailing after him.
A lone streetlamp was positioned next to the road at the front of the building, illuminating the parking lot, but little else. With no exterior lights coming on in response to his movement and no moonlight to see by, Brian inched slowly forward, trailing his fingertips along the side of the building to gauge his progress.
“Where are you going, Bri?” Kenzie asked.
The roughhewn wall fell away from his fingers. He turned a corner, took three steps, and stubbed his toe against something solid.
Cement steps.
He’d found the back entrance.
Kenzie shuffled awkwardly after him through the darkness, mumbling a steady stream of complaints under her breath.
At the top of the short staircase, Brian found what he’d been looking for—the cold metal of a door handle.
He tugged.
It opened.
Brian smiled as he was rewarded with a rush of warmer air and the sight of a short hallway. He walked inside.
“Brian!” Kenzie hissed. She stood at the top of the stairs, propping the door open with her hip, but refusing to take a step inside. “What the heck are you doing? Get back here right now!”
Ignoring her, he turned a corner at the end of the hall. Walking past an unlit office, Brian found himself in a large room filled with tables, chairs stacked atop them for the night.
The neon lights behind the bar had been left on. Brian scanned the bar area, the rows of pool tables, the dart boards along a side wall.
The room was empty.
I missed him, he thought.
This last-minute outing had been a long shot. Earlier that night, when Brian glimpsed a vision of Declan’s arrival, he’d already known in his heart he’d never make it here in time.
Still, he had no choice but to try.
The trouble with Brian’s visions was that there was seemingly nothing he could do to narrow his focus—to streamline the massive amount of information he received, or to hone in on a specific time or place.
Most of the things he saw were completely useless.
Snippets of idle conversation. An image of an old-timey diner, location Anywhere, USA. The sensation of a cold, damp breeze. A view of dark gray water. The repeated image of a long, carpeted hallway, with doors numbered 1101 through 1109.
Out of context, those images could mean just about anything. From the sensations that came along with them, he could always tell when they pertained to the future Declan—or to the girl on whose shoulders so much hope was about to be placed—but that didn’t mean such images were in any way helpful.
Brian sighed as he walked further into the room.
He stopped short when he noticed that something in the game area was amiss. The pool tables had all been racked for new games and left ready for the following day.
All of them, except for one.
Curious, Brian approached a pool table whose billiard balls where scattered haphazardly across the green felt top, as though a game were already in progress.
The toe of his sneaker bumped a red-striped ball on the floor and sent it rolling toward the wall. It bounced off with a soft clunk that seemed unusually loud in the empty room.
Giving in to a sudden urge, Brian reached out and grasped the eight ball… and the world around him vanished.
Red hot pain, searing through his right side as the breath was ripped from his lungs.
Declan coughed involuntarily, coming to his senses long enough to dig the offending object out from beneath him.
An eight ball.
He dropped it back to the table top—and his surroundings began to shift as someone pulled him upright by the lapels.
Surprise.
Confusion.
Disbelief.
Brian bit back a wave of nausea as he was rushed through a rapid, blurry recounting of Declan’s movements within the bar.
The violet flash of a jumper’s teleport registered in his peripheral vision. Trapped by what he was seeing in his mind’s eye, Brian remained motionless, unable to react.
Was it Declan? Had he returned to the bar?
“What the hell are you doing in here, kid?!”
The sensation of a heavy hand on his shoulder yanked Brian out of the vision so fast he nearly blacked out from the unexpected transition.
“Not yet!” he heard himself say.
But it was too late. He’d been snapped back to reality in the very instant h
e glimpsed Declan teleport from the bar, his tattooed friend in tow. A few more seconds, and he might have seen their destination.
Instead, he found himself looking at the Corner Pocket’s resident guard dog, a full-time MMA fighter and part-time bouncer here at the bar.
He had a third job, Brian knew, as the owner’s errand boy, delivering various contraband items all over the world as part of a small, but profitable, Variant-centric black market.
Of course, he wasn’t supposed to know about that. It was just one of the many interesting—albeit useless—facts Brian had learned about his brother Declan’s associates over the course of the last few months.
Clenching the eight-ball in his fist, Brian scowled up at the towering, leather-clad man.
The man scowled back.
“Aren’t you a little young to be committing a B & E?” asked Jesse. “Where are your parents, kid? How did you get in here?”
Brian shrugged, partly in reply to Jesse’s question, and partly in an attempt to slip out from beneath the man’s brawny grasp.
Jesse’s hand held firm.
“Brian! There you are!” Kenzie’s voice was full of faux relief as she jogged into the main area of the bar and addressed the man looming over Brian. “Thank you so much for finding him! I’d been looking everywhere! Seriously. I take my eye off you for one second and you get yourself lost. Come on, Bri, dad’s waiting outside in the car. Sorry for my brother, mister, he’s too curious for his own good sometimes.”
Jesse smirked and quirked a brow. He wasn’t buying it.
Not surprising. Kenzie had laid it on a bit thick.
Seizing on Jesse’s distraction, Brian slipped the eight ball into his coat pocket.
This was the first time an object had ever triggered a vision. What’s more, it was the first time Brian had summoned a vision of the past. Of events that had already happened. The chances of it happening again—and with the same object—were probably infinitesimal, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep trying.
“Hang on,” said Jesse, squinting at Kenzie as though something were nagging at him. “You remind me of someone. Your eyes…”