Velocity: The Gravity Series #2
Page 4
My blood heated and my pulse beat faster when I thought I may have been taken advantage of.
I slunk on my bed, allowing the damp air to fill the room. It felt good to feel the elements. To just be.
“Whoa, watch out there.” A hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back two inches. Two inches that saved my life as a yellow school bus went hurtling past. My coat fluttered in the tail wind.
“Holy crap.” My pulse beat a deafening beat which echoed in my ears as I looked at my saviour. If it wasn’t for him I would be a pancake on the road. My life ended by a kamikaze school bus, laden with screaming children on their way to elementary. I breathed out a long breath to steady my nerves but then forgot how to breathe back in as I looked up into his face. He was grinning, eyes of the most extraordinary colour shining as he held onto my arm. No one looks that good. No one. Black hair stood at angles and a straight nose lead into a breathtaking smile.
“I’d say.” He leaned in a little closer and my already empty lungs ceased to exist. “You really should look before stepping out into the road.”
I gave my head a small shake. I would be late for my lecture, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to move on. There was something about him. Something I could have looked at all day. Something spectacular. “Yes. I should.”
“Good thing I was around to save you. It’s one of my many superhero talents.”
I cringed. Everyone was talking about superheroes since Superman had flown onto the big screen. I groaned. It was all my brothers could talk about.
“Clearly one of your other superhero talents is to talk total cheese to a stranger.”
He nodded. “That’s true.” The smile spread again, and I found my own lips twitching in response. He leaned even closer, his breath fluttering across my face. “I’ve got others, do you want to know them?”
I flushed. “I’m late for class.”
“What class?”
He laughed. “Never you mind.” I stepped away ignoring the strange tug that tried to pull me back in the pit of my stomach. “Thanks for saving my life.”
His oddly coloured eyes glinted and he nodded. “Always.”
With a small wave, I checked for passing cars and stepped across the road to the campus and the lecture hall I was late for.
After I’d squeezed through the rows of chairs and desks I slipped down into a seat and tried to tune into the lecture. But I couldn’t. The other students were nodding at the chalkboard and scribbling notes. All I could think of was his hand on my elbow. I shook it away. I couldn’t afford to waste time.
A tap on my shoulder called my attention. I spun slightly in my seat, craning my neck to see who wanted me.
He was grinning. “Do you have a pen I could use?”
“What are you doing here? This isn’t your lecture.”
He laughed silently and held his hand out for a pen. “Now it is.” Automatically I handed him my Berol pen, our fingers brushing. “I’m Nick,” he said.
“Grace.” I replied and I grinned as our fingers met around the barrel of the pen.
A loud crash woke me from my sleep. Startled, I sat up, trying to find my bearings. I hadn’t planned to doze but sleep had pulled me under. I was ill. My heart was racing, waking from the dream had been a painful extraction that stung like an angry wasp. I ran a hand across my brow; these weird dreams were messing with my head. I was sure I hadn't suffered like this before we moved. Since we'd been here, I'd been pulled in night after night. Was I succumbing during the day, too? Dreaming Eighties Rom Coms of all things. It had been a good Rom Com though. I wondered if maybe I’d seen the film somewhere before.
Another crash caused me to fling the duvet back and place my feet on the floor. The house was in darkness and no light filtered through the doorway, but then I heard the voices. Shouting.
Another nighttime visitor? What was going on? Maybe dad was in the mafia? Or a drug dealer? Honestly, I was at a loss to know why so many people would need to drop by in the depth of night.
“You shouldn't have done this.” There was another crash.
“Calm down and we can talk, I’m sure you will understand when you let me explain.” That was my dad, he sounded like he was soothing a petulant child.
“You can’t keep her from me.”
“Yes I can.” Dad was firm.
“I’d do anything to save her, you know that.”
“No. You’d do anything to be with your soul. But you can’t.” What on earth were they talking about? “The only way you can help her is to stay far away, keep her energy some place she will never find it.”
There was a bitter laugh. “This has worked out mighty convenient for you hasn’t it, Kale?”
There was a splinter of silence. “I never knew this would happen.”
“She will remember me. You know that. Everyone knows that. We can’t fight destiny.”
There was a deep sigh. “This isn’t your destiny anymore and you have to step back. Your time is over now. Bow out, before you get hurt.”
“Never.” The anger was palpable. It bounced up the walls of the hallway to where I stood trembling by my bedroom door.
“Do the right thing and keep her safe.” There was another pause, and I wondered if it was getting physical, but eventually, dad broke the silence. His words softer, “The council has spoken. Your punishment will be extreme if you break the rules.” He sighed. "You know that."
“Aren’t I being punished anyway?”
“Yes.”
There wasn’t a reply, just the shattering bang of the patio door.
I crept back into my room, unwilling to let dad know that I’d been eaves dropping, again. One thing was becoming clear. There was something going on that I didn’t know about. That I wasn’t allowed to know about. I had an urge to track down whoever dad was talking to. I had a crazy feeling he might be the only person who would tell me the truth.
Before I could think it through, I ran for the window and slid it open. My room was second story but I knew there was trellising leading between the windows on the old house. I ignored my shaking fingers as I swung out onto the window sill. I tested my foot on the wooden frame meant to hold wisteria not a slightly overweight teenager. It seemed secure enough so I flung my right foot over and held on as I worked my feet down, using the diamond shaped holes to hold my footing. I was nearly at the bottom when the trellis shifted sharply to the right. I gasped out loud, but then tried to stifle my partial scream. The last thing I wanted was dad coming out to investigate and to find me hanging off the building.
I hung there, suspended for a few seconds while I worked out what to do. Measuring the distance between where I hung and the floor, I debated jumping. But it was still too far. The lower story window sill was a more reasonable jump, but I didn’t know if I would land on it. I ran through the scenario's in my mind, weighing up a broken foot vs a broken back. I went for foot.
On the count of three, I sprung for the ledge and missed. My ankle bent into a crooked shape as it shuddered against the dense stone. I couldn't help it, I screamed in pain. I fell to the floor, my body instantly rolling onto my back as I grabbed my knee and held my ankle close. I’d never broken anything in my life, but I was sure that the agonising, shooting, splintering pain was what it felt like.
Black dots crowded my vision and I blinked a few times as a violet glow loomed by my side.
“What have you done?” This was a bit rude . . . I was the one rolling around on the floor with a broken leg. It was the same voice that had been arguing with my dad. I couldn’t see anything. It was just a voice in the darkness and a hazy violet glow. It must be a flashlight, I told myself through the crippling pain.
“I was trying to find you.” I stuttered through the pain.
The voice tutted in the darkness. “You mustn’t. You mustn’t try to find me.”
A deep sigh melted my intact bones to jelly. “Come on, Bronte.” A soft touch lingered on my face and my last thought was who the hell is
Bronte? I wished I could be her, if it meant he got to be the one that sighed her name.
I woke on my bed and laid still—waiting for the agony to return. I should have been in pain, but I wasn’t. I should have still been out on the grass, clutching my leg. But I wasn’t. I was in bed. No aches, no pains, no nothing. Nothing except a sprig of heather laying on the bedside table. My fingers trembled as I grabbed it and held it to my face. It was fresh and soft. I knew it meant something, but it meant nothing to me.
My alarm clock beeped and I frowned, dropping the flower onto the bed. I had no recollection of setting an alarm. Alarms weren’t my thing. I banged at it until it quit screeching. Tentatively, I slid my leg out from under the blanket. My ankle was fine.
This all felt like it had happened before. But then couldn’t that just be one of my deja vu’s?
I didn’t know. All I knew was that I’d have to go to school and face Celeste and Connor again. Worse still, I had to go downstairs and see my dad. My dad who'd been having secret conversations in the middle of the night, again—possibly about me. Although not a single word he’d said had made sense.
I slipped out of bed and made my way to my bathroom. I stared in the mirror, but then did a double take at what I saw. I looked different. Was it my eyes? My hair? I leaned a little closer and stared harder. I didn’t look like myself—I mean, sure I still had the crazy brown curls and the waist that wasn’t quite curved enough, but underneath that there was a change.
Maybe I’d matured overnight? I snorted to myself as I stepped into the shower. That was some wishful thinking if ever I’d known it.
Showered and downstairs, I looked for dad but he wasn’t about. The strange voice in the night had called him Kale, but that wasn’t his name. He was Kevin Bell. Maybe I’d misheard. Or maybe I was crazy and had dreamed the whole episode. After all, my ankle was fine, and I had been subject to random intense dreams since we’d moved here.
I shoved a cereal bar into my bag with no intention of eating it and swung for the door. My bag was still on the sofa from the previous afternoon. I frowned at it. Hadn't I left it with the flap closed and the contents inside?
On the drive was Connor’s car. My stomach dove. I halted my feet and eyed him leaning against the car’s bonnet. He held a sign. On it was scrawled in thick marker pen I’m sorry.
Celeste was stood on the other side, a metallic helium balloon in hand.
“Are you guys joking?” I didn’t move any closer. “This isn’t the way to convince me you aren’t all demented New Girl Murderers.
Celeste gave a snort, sounding ridiculous and sloped over towards me. “We won't murder you, Tara.” She eyed me closely, taking in my hair and face. “Not yet anyway, we wait until the second week for that.” She chuckled a little and I couldn't help but smile.
Connor stepped forward, his step unsure, hands shoved deep in his pockets. His attention was far away, in a distant place. Celeste nudged him hard. He snapped his blue eyes onto me. “No, we aren’t going to kill you, yet,” he added with a wink. Then he sighed and handed me his scrawled note. “It’s just, Cel and I know what it’s like to be new and we were trying to help, but we made a hash of it.”
I wasn’t sure I could trust them, but at the end of the day, I didn’t exactly have a line of people queuing up to be my friend. “Okay. Apology accepted but you guys can’t argue over me, it’s weird.” It was more than weird.
Celeste laughed and yanked open the passenger door. “I call shotgun,” she trilled. I rolled my eyes and pulled on the rear door. Maybe yesterday had all just been a misunderstanding?
But it didn’t explain the strange man talking to my dad. Nor, the fact I thought I’d broken my ankle but couldn’t find any evidence of it. Nor that the strange boy, arguing with my dad had called me Bron, a name I’d been hearing repeatedly in my dreams.
There was something fundamentally wrong and there had been since we'd moved to Cornwall. I just didn't know what.
Darkness filled the corners of the room and an alarm in the recess of my mind rang a jangling refrain. What was that?
My skin prickled with the cold touch of panic as I sat and stared into the gloom. There was something I was supposed to do. Wasn’t there? Something I had to do because if I didn’t . . ? I sighed. The thought escaped me before I managed to pin it down.
I sat for a long moment, calming my breath. It had felt so real? This sense that there was something I should be doing. This was crazy. My dreams were out of control and keeping me on edge. Before the darkness had pulled me from sleep I’d been chasing the unknown entity that was out of my touch. The smudge of black I searched for in my dreams. For a moment, just before I’d woken, I thought I’d grasped it. My fingers had contacted a surface, making my skin tingle with recognition. Now I looked at my fingers and wondered why they felt so disappointed. Why I was so disappointed.
Reaching for the bedside lamp, I pulled on the chain and the room illuminated with the soft glow of violet. Dad always found me the tinted light bulbs wherever we went. I’d had them since I was a little girl and the soft flicker of a heather hue always made me feel comforted. Except now. No tinted glow could remove the painful ache of longing my chasing dream had left. It reverberated around my chest like an empty hollow. A chasm where my heart was forgetting to beat.
I considered getting up for water to settle my nerves. However I didn’t want to hear another of dad's secret conversations, it would only piss me off more—sometimes ignorance was bliss.
Dad was cagey. I knew that. Whenever I tried to think of what he did for a living, I could never remember the exact details. But then when I asked him again, it made perfect sense. Dad was an enigma. When he'd turned up after mum had died it had been a surprise. I had still been young enough I could have slipped into the welfare, but they'd called him and without hesitation he'd come and got me. Accepted me, even though we'd hardly known one another, and since that day we'd been muddling through together. Secret conversations and all.
Pulling the covers over, I tucked my legs up snug to my chest and wrapped my arms tight around my knees. A hollow ache was radiating from my ribcage and it was sinking to the pit of my stomach. Low in my belly, a vibrating emptiness made me slip into the sea sick sensation which gripped me in the dark. I was back on that ship again, lost in a stormy sea.
Bronte.
The word whispered into the air of the bedroom and I scrambled into a sitting position. Goosebumps made the hair on my arms stand on end.
What the hell was that?
My pulse marched a staccato beat in my veins making my ears ring. I searched the room from under the safety of my duvet. Was I hearing things now? I wanted to blame the old house. Maybe it was the whistle of the wind down the chimney? But there was a loud voice in my head which told me it wasn’t the wind, nor the chimney.
Who was Bronte?
I tried to settle back down around the thumping of my heart, and studied the shadowed shapes the curtains created on the ceiling, waiting for sleep to claim me.
It didn’t.
When Connor’s horn split the morning mist with a loud toot I was ready, but exhausted. I wanted to lose myself in a dreamless sleep for at least a decade.
How he'd talked me into accepting a lift I didn’t know. He had a gift of persuasion I was unable to fight. On the way home from school the previous afternoon he'd cruised behind me in his car as I'd walked in the rain. I'd told him he would get arrested for curb-crawling but he'd just laughed and asked when I would accept a lift.
I’d relented and climbed in, steaming up his windows with my damp clothes. By the time we'd pulled up outside home I'd smelled like a damp dog and my hair had dried into twisted rat’s tails.
“I’m going to school.” I shouted and ran down the stairs hoping by the time dad heard I would be halfway down the driveway.
No such luck.
“Where’s the fire?” he asked. It sounded familiar, but I was sure he’d never said it to me before.
“Who’s giving you the lift?” His tone was light.
I cringed. “Connor, just a boy from school.”
Dad laughed. He actually laughed. “Well, tell Connor, Just the Boy from School, to drive safe.”
I groaned. “Sure.” Although now I wanted to tell him to drive faster just for the fun of it. I turned to him expectantly. “Is that it?”
Dad grinned. “Yep, I think so.”
Connor threw open the passenger door as I ran down the drive. “Just to point out,” I said. I didn’t even bother with a hello. “This won't become a thing.”
“And a good morning to you, too.” He laughed. “And why can’t it become a thing?” he asked.
I breathed in deeply, hoping he wouldn’t notice. He smelled of salt and fresh air, tinged with sunshine. He smelt of summer holidays—odd in Autumn when constantly surrounded by rain and fog.
“Because.” I fumbled with my seatbelt. Not that he waited, the car was already cruising by the time the catch had snapped into place. “I don’t want to be that new girl.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What new girl?”
“You know, the one who tries to steal the good-looking boy away from the other girls.”
Connor slammed on the brakes and turned in his seat, one arm falling along the back of my chair. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Did you say I was good looking? You did, didn’t you!”