by AJ Larrieu
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“How can I be sure you’re really Cass Weatherfield?”
She said my name the way you’d say a celebrity’s name, as if it were something more than words I’d answer to. It made me curious, and uncomfortable.
“Who told you about me?”
She shook her head. “How can I be sure?”
I knew what she was asking. Any converter can do simple energy conversions, turn her own energy into light or heat or motion. With enough practice, a garden-variety converter could create an orb of light like the one I’d conjured up earlier, or lift the rusted gas pump nozzle and wave it around. But I wasn’t a garden-variety converter. I could pull.
I looked around the station. The gas pumps, the kiosk, the old gas company sign, yellow plastic broken and faded. I settled on Diana’s car. It was a two-door import, and it probably weighed over two thousand pounds. Way, way more than an everyday converter could lift.
I held my hand out toward the car. Not necessary, but it helped me focus. I sharpened my awareness on the weight of it, the shape and the balance, then I felt around for what was available. The easiest source to pull from was, of course, Diana. If I’d wanted to kill her. It took a huge amount of concentration and focus to pull without hurting the humans around me, but after months of practice, I was growing more confident.
It was a still night, unfortunately, but it was plenty hot. Five miles away, the muddy Pearl River meandered its way to the gulf, but it was too far off for its slow current to be much use. The heat would have to be enough. I focused on the temperature and drew it in.
Nothing happened at first. When I had to be careful like this, I was slow. As I pulled in more and more of the heat energy of the night, the chassis of the old car creaked. My breath frosted in the air around me, and feathery tentacles of ice formed where my feet touched the crumbling asphalt. The air was humid enough that water vapor crystallized in the air, grew heavy and fell. The chassis groaned and the car broke free of the earth, hovering a foot and a half in the air. Around me, it was snowing.
I held it for as long as I dared, until the ice at my feet reached the gas pump to my left and crept up the discolored chrome structure like rust. I set the car down. It landed with only the barest bounce as the tires took on the full weight of the frame again. I turned to Diana, whom I’d been ignoring for her own safety.
She said, “I believe you.”
“You said you needed help,” I prompted.
“It’s not about me.”
“That’s fine.” My fists tightened. Did she have a kid with this guy? If the bastard had hurt a child, I wasn’t going to bother with what passed for due process in our community. “Why don’t we go somewhere safe and talk about it?”
She nodded slowly and took another step toward me. I turned and led her to Shane’s Camaro. Halfway there, the sound of her footsteps stopped.
“Diana?”
She’d frozen in the middle of the driveway. Her irises had gone totally black—a sure sign of a shadowmind using her powers.
My first thought was that Shane had been right to worry. It was a trap, and this girl was about to stop my heart.
Well, she could try.
I abandoned etiquette and reached for her mind, but I came up short against mental walls more impenetrable than any I’d ever encountered. She didn’t just have shields, she had defenses, and she was actively keeping me out. I gathered my own power, ready to protect myself, but the attack never came. Diana hit her knees on the uneven asphalt.
“No...” she said, but not to me. She swayed back and forth with her head in her hands. “No, no...too late.” He eyes snapped back into focus. “You have to leave. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Diana, whoever’s after you, I’m not afraid of him. I can protect you, okay? I won’t let him hurt you.”
“You don’t understand.” She scrambled to her feet and backed away from me. “I’ve put you in danger, I’ve put you both in danger.”
“I can take care of myself, all right? Just come with me, we’ll go somewhere safe, we can talk—”
She bolted.
“Diana!”
She sprinted back to her car. I tore after her, but she was quick. By the time I got close she was already peeling out, driver’s side door open and flapping as she fishtailed.
“Stop!”
She tore out of the station and down the middle of the deserted road. I ran after her, reaching out with my powers.
If I hadn’t cared about her safety, it would have been easy to stop her. I could’ve blown out her tires and crippled the car in an instant. The other option was drawing energy straight out of the internal combustion engine, but pulling power like that was a risk. Working that fast, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to avoid draining energy from Diana, too, and there was too much risk she’d lose control of the car. So I settled for yelling and waving my arms. Like an idiot.
I ran a good four hundred yards before I gave up. She was too far away after the first fifty.
Her taillights faded into darkness, and I stopped in the middle of the road, bent double and gasping for breath. It was almost perfectly black again, and I startled when a bobcat padded out of the underbrush choking the roadside ditch and stole across the asphalt, eyes glinting green in the faint moonlight. The crickets were as loud as radio static. I turned and made my way back to Shane’s car.
The only way I had to reach her was a pay phone number and a first name. Unless she decided to call me back, I’d just screwed up my first rescue mission. I got in the car, banged the steering wheel once, and pulled onto the road.
As I drove past the cracked parking lot, I saw a pair of sunglasses and a stray hair tie lying in the middle of the road. I was positive they hadn’t been there before. I rolled down the window and levitated them into the car, turning them over in the air in front of me, careful not to make physical contact. The hair tie was tangled with straight black hair. Maybe I hadn’t failed yet, after all.
* * *
The condo was dark when I parked outside on the street, but I could tell Shane was awake. Before I even got to the entry door, his mental presence surrounded me, a wordless greeting. He’d been worried, I could tell. I sent back a mental squeeze as I unlocked the door and dragged myself up the stairs.
Shane and I had been living together for months, but I still got a happy glow when I came home to our shared bedroom. He was sitting awake in our bed, pretending to read a car magazine. The novel I was reading sat on the table on my side of the bed, and the clean clothes I hadn’t bothered to put away were stacked on a chair in the corner. Shane’s work boots stood by the door.
Shane set his magazine aside as I walked in. “How did it go?” In the glow of the antique brass lamp, the bare skin of his broad chest was warm brown against the cream-colored sheets. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to him, so I climbed into bed with my clothes on and did it.
“That bad, huh?” He snugged me against him.
“Mmph,” I said to his side, telekinetically tugging my shoes off. Even with our window unit failing to battle the Louisiana heat, the warmth of him was welcome. He curled one arm around me and stroked my hair with work-roughened hands, his biceps firm against my shoulder.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Not really.” But I told him anyway, bringing up the memory of what had happened and opening it to him. He listened while I described lifting the car, running after Diana. His presence in my mind was soothing and familiar, a well-worn river stone in my hand. I knew every crack and rough spot, every way his shadowmind spoke to mine.
“You lifted the whole car?”
I shrugged, remembering the way the ice had crept up the rusted gas pump. Shane watched the memory.
“You’re getting stronger.” There was n
othing but admiration in his voice. Another man—hell, any other man—might have felt threatened or defensive being with a woman like me, but not Shane. He shifted and pulled me on top of him, twining his legs around mine and settling my head on his chest. “It’s getting easier for you to control it.”
“Fat lot of good it did me. And it obviously wasn’t enough.”
“What would you have done if you’d caught her? Kidnapped her?”
I levered myself up and glared at him. He was smiling, the expression making his dark eyes twinkle. “She was really scared. And she said something weird.” I called up the memory and gave it to him. I’ve put you both in danger.
His eyes went black while he watched. “What do you think she meant?”
“Hard to know. I couldn’t get into her head.”
Shane watched my memory of the walls I’d found in her mind, and his eyes went wide. “That’s serious skill.”
“Yeah. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Where did she come from? Someone must know who she is.”
“We could ask around, but...” The New Orleans shadowmind community wasn’t large. If I asked around, I risked tipping off someone she didn’t want knowing she needed help.
Shane followed my thoughts. “What about the phone number? Can we still trace it?”
“Pay phone. But I got something else.” I showed him the sunglasses. I’d wrapped them in a handful of fast food napkins I’d found in his glove box.
“You’re sure they’re hers?”
“Trust me, nobody else has been at that gas station for decades.” I levitated them onto the bed beside us. “Do you think a dowser could track her?”
Dowsers were unusual shadowminds—some called them seekers. They could locate a specific object or person in their range no matter how cluttered the area might be. The best of them were better than any GPS homing beacon, but they were vanishingly rare. In fact, I’d only ever met one.
“Janine could,” Shane said, and I sighed. I’d been afraid he’d say that.
I looked at the sunglasses and the hair tie. There was a lot of tangled hair on it. Surely a less talented dowser could do something with it. “Isn’t there anyone else?” I already knew the answer, but I held out hope Shane knew of someone outside the city. Hell, someone outside the state. Janine had no reason to help me. In fact, she had more than one reason to hate my guts.
“No one I know of,” he said, and I slumped back down onto his chest.
I looked at Shane’s alarm clock. As much as I wanted to fix this, there was no way Janine would help me if I showed up demanding her services two hours before dawn. “I’ll go in the morning—it’s too late now.”
“The worst she can say is no.”
I rolled off of him onto my pillow and stared at the ceiling as if it would help. “She can say a lot worse than that.”
Chapter Two
The last time I’d seen Janine Tooley, it was to tell her that her only living son had killed a dozen innocent people and murdered his own father. Then I’d thrown him in a secret supernatural prison and refused to tell her where. Saying she didn’t want to see me was an understatement.
Ryan Tooley had been a friend. We’d grown up together, learning to handle our abilities. Neither of us had known it back then, but Ryan and I could both pull. The difference was, Ryan hadn’t learned how to control himself. He used his gift to work fake miracles for a front man at a small-town church, killing off a bunch of “expendable” people to power the show. Shane and I found out about it, but we’d been too late to bring him out of the pit he’d dug for himself. We’d just been lucky my powers were a match for his.
As we drove up to her pretty brick townhouse in Lakeview, I was glad we’d spared Janine most of the details, and that she wasn’t a strong enough telepath to hunt through those memories. It was better for all of us if I kept them hidden.
Shane parked in the street outside Janine’s house, and the familiarity of it—the number of times we’d done this to come to football parties and barbecues—filled me with regret. She’d redone the landscaping and put a fresh coat of paint on the shutters—it looked better than I’d ever seen it. There was even a bright blue welcome sign hanging on the door. It was decorated with tiny hearts. Not what I’d always thought of as her style.
We hadn’t spoken with Janine in months. She’d steadily ignored my phone calls, and eventually, the number had come up as disconnected. I assumed she’d changed it. Hopefully, by now, she’d be willing to talk to us again.
“Should we just go up and knock?” I was still a little afraid she’d slam the door in our faces.
“Would you rather lurk in the street until she comes out?” Shane gave me a small smile and turned off the ignition. “Come on.”
We walked up the brick path together, and I knocked on the door. A moment later, a statuesque brunette with a friendly smile opened it. I didn’t recognize her.
“Oh! Hello. Can I help you?” —never seen them before—did they just move in, too?—seem like a nice young couple—
“Uh...” Shane and I looked at each other. “We’re looking for Janine Tooley,” he said. “Is she—”
“Janine Tooley?” She was puzzled. “Oh! That’s the lady who owned this place before. Matt and I bought it months ago.” Her face fell a little, as though she was responsible for disappointing us. “Are you friends of hers?”
I stared at the flourishing caladiums in the raised beds along the outer wall. I should’ve known. I should’ve known the moment we drove up.
“Is everything all right?” the woman asked. I focused on her face again. She radiated genuine concern.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Shane said, and he took me by the elbow and steered me back to the car before the woman could voice her intention to ask us in for coffee.
I sat in the passenger seat and stared at the caladiums. “I guess I can see why she sold it.” Janine had raised her family in that house, spent decades with her now-dead husband. My throat tightened. “What now?”
Shane was staring at the house, too, his emotions a mirror of my own. “I’ll see if she’s listed,” he said after a moment, and took out his phone.
The curtains in the front window twitched aside, and I caught a glimpse of the woman who’d answered the door. “We should probably leave before she thinks we’re casing her house.”
“Found her.” He started the car.
“Where?”
“Not here.”
* * *
That turned out to be an understatement.
The complex housing Janine’s new apartment was a cinderblock cube with undersized plate-glass windows and rust on the stair railings. In the concrete parking lot outside I recognized her old sedan. The doors had new dents in them.
I picked up the sunglasses and the hair tie, now protected in a plastic sandwich bag, and we headed up the exterior metal stairs. Janine was on the second floor, and we knocked on the light-blue door of number 292. At first I was afraid she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment, shuffling sounds within were followed by a heavy scraping noise and a muffled curse.
Janine opened the door a crack, the security chain still locked. I could only see a narrow window of her face, one red-rimmed, green eye and a swath of skin gone pale and slack. Her eyes narrowed when she saw us, and her lips thinned. For a moment, I thought she might slam the door in our faces.
“Well, shit.” She unlocked the security chain. “I guess I can’t keep you out.”
She opened the door wide, and we stepped inside.
The place smelled like a roadside diner, and not the cheerful kind. Grease, dust and stale air. The room had thinning tan carpet, white walls with a blue wallpaper border featuring pink roses, a small window covered by bent mini blinds. The kitchen was open to the living room, but it
didn’t look as though anyone had cooked there in a while. Cereal boxes and fast-food cartons lined the counters, and the sink was stacked with dirty bowls.
Janine made a vague gesture, and Shane and I sat on the couch. More accurately, we sat on the stacks of old grocery store coupon books and piles of laundry that covered the couch. There was a coffee table somewhere in the middle of the room, but it was hidden beneath more coupon flyers, greasy fried chicken buckets, at least five remote controls and, improbably, a bunch of fat red candles with pristine wicks. Janine didn’t bother offering us anything. She shifted a collection of plastic shopping bags off an easy chair and sat in it.
She’d changed. She’d once been generously curvy, but the baggy, shapeless clothes she was wearing made her look deflated. Her hair was flat and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a week, and her teeth were stained around the edges. She had on fuzzy pink slippers so worn that the nap was matted down into something like felt.
She pulled out a cigarette. “You’re looking good, Cassie.” She turned to Shane. “How’s your uncle?” She lit the cigarette and picked up a dirty ashtray from the table next to her chair.
“A little under the weather.”
“Huh. Well. That’s a shame.” She puffed on the cigarette. Shane and I exchanged a look.
“Janine,” Shane said, “we need your help.”
“Didn’t think you were coming by to be neighborly.” She didn’t ask us to elaborate. An old tube television was on mute in the background. On-screen, a pretty brunette modeled an electric blue tracksuit. I remembered the last time I’d seen Janine in her Lakeview house, Mac at the kitchen table reading the sports section, her at the stove, stirring a roux, wearing an old Central Grocery apron cinched around her waist. It seemed like something I’d imagined.
“We need to find someone.”
“I don’t do that anymore.” She stared at the silent television. The blue tracksuit brunette had been joined by a blonde in bright lime green. Janine tapped ash into the tray. “Even if I did, why would I do it for you?”