“True. Wouldn’t it be nice if the breeze was moving in the opposite direction…”
I nodded.
With a sigh, I gazed out at the most barren stretch of land we’d stumbled across yet. There was less scrub brush, fewer trees and cacti. Instead, jagged, crumbling rocks and cavernous mountains seemed to stretch out as far as I could see.
A deep humming and what sounded like yodeling startled me. I turned to Tavis. His eyes were closed, his legs crossed in front of him, and his palms were facing up.
“What are you doing?”
He opened one eye and looked at me. “It’s a rain chant the Aborigines used back in the day when they thought the gods would hear their pleas.”
“A rain chant?” I listened more closely. “What are you saying?”
“I’m calling to the rain, asking it to come and replenish our bodies, to provide the sustenance we need to thrive and continue on our journey.”
I looked at him askance. “Really? It sounded more like gibberish to me.”
Despite Tavis’s efforts, he chuckled. “It was. I was just joking.”
I hit his shoulder. “That’s not funny.”
“Ouch,” he groaned and rubbed his arm, but he was grinning.
“Well, then stop joking around.” I nearly started laughing as his smile grew. “This is serious stuff.”
“Yeah? More serious than everyone dying of the flu? Of the world coming to an end? Of Crazies and Re-gens and—”
“I get it,” I said. “But yeah. A little bit. This could be it for us.”
Tavis shook his head. “We’ve all weathered worse. We’ll figure something out.”
Although I wasn’t sure how Tavis could be so certain, so upbeat, he was. For a man who had absolutely no idea of his family’s fate back home in Australia, he had an ever-optimistic air about him.
He climbed to his feet. “Come on, let’s go see if we can help the others.”
Standing, I dusted off my backside and straightened, affording one last glance behind me. It was probably my imagination, but I could’ve sworn the wind had shifted.
“Come on,” Tavis called, and I followed after him.
~~~~~
A thundering rumble startled me from sleep. I sat up and peered around at the rest of the group as they too began to stir in their sleeping bags.
“What was that, Babe,” Sarah said groggily.
Another, not-so-far-off rumble shook the ground beneath me.
Nobody said anything for a heartbeat…a breath.
“Is that thunder?” Dani said, scrambling as best she could with one hand to get out of her sleeping bag.
“Easy, Red,” Jason said as he climbed out after her.
I sat still in my sleeping bag, listening, too scared to hope amid everyone else’s mounting excitement that our prayers had been answered.
Sam ran by me, Cooper running after him toward the sliding barn door. With a grunt, Sam helped Jason and Jake push the door open.
Becca and I simply looked at one another. After another rumbling peal of thunder, a cacophony exploded in the room as everyone chattered and clambered to their feet, me included.
We crowded in the doorway, one by one, and stared into the early morning, waiting with bated breath.
“There’s no rain,” Becca said, and she stepped outside, staring up at the inky sky. Jason and Dani followed, then Tavis and Sam, Sarah and Biggs. Soon everyone was outside but Jake and me; he sidled up beside me, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Come on,” I breathed. “Maybe you need to do another rain chant, Tavis,” I called half-jokingly, but remembering the way the wind had shifted hours before, I couldn’t help but wonder if his ancestors had really been listening.
Tavis only shrugged. “Rain,” he jestingly commanded the clouds overhead.
There was another deep rolling of thunder and the whistle of the breeze zipping past my ears, but there was still no rain.
Plip. Plip-plip.
I heard the hollow sound of raindrops on the roof, and those standing out beneath the clouds held out their hands.
“Oh my God!” Dani cried. “Jason, it’s raining!”
Everyone stood there in silence—in disbelief—as they stared up at the sky.
After a flash of lightning, everyone seemed to stir from their stunned trances. Jason wrapped his arms around Dani, lifting her feet off the ground and laughing as he twirled her around. As the rain poured more steadily, Dani howled with laughter.
Hooting and laughing resounded, and I could see the outlines of my friends in the predawn light, streaming raindrops glittering all around them. Jack and Cooper frolicked in the quickly forming mud puddles, barking and yipping.
Jake stared down at me. “What are you waiting for?”
“Oh, I’m fine, I’d rather watch—” Before I could finish, Jake crouched down and heaved me over his shoulder, eliciting squeals of laughter and shouts of profanity I hadn’t meant to let escape my lips as he stepped out into the rain.
“Such language,” he admonished, and I only laughed. Despite my reservations, the rain felt good, rejuvenating. As was usual when touching Jake, I saw a collage of memories, most notably one of him tossing me over his shoulder down by a lake and carrying me into a large, plantation-style home while I squealed and wiggled in his arms.
“I think I’m going to be sick, Jake.”
“You always say that,” he said, and as he loosened his hold on me, I pushed against his shoulder and slid down his chest. The fabric of our shirts bunched between us, but I was too excited and relieved to care. Jake grinned down at me and tucked a strand of stringy, wet hair behind my ear.
I saw the memory of us in a creek, of me in his arms, skin against skin, and I took a step away from him. “One of these times I’m actually going to throw up on you,” I joked. Then I caught a glimpse of Tavis and Sam on the outskirts of our early morning celebration, staring up at the clouds. Tavis was dumbfounded, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Jake, placing my hand on his arm as I stepped past him and weaved my way through my jubilant friends. “Tavis,” I called to him.
He turned to me and shrugged.
I widened my smile. “You did this,” I said loudly over the rain and pointed skyward.
He shook his head. “I made up that rain chant, it wasn’t real.” I could hear the confusion in his voice and felt it muddling his mind. “It wasn’t real,” he repeated. “It’s just coincidence…”
I knew Tavis didn’t fully believe that. “You sure about that?”
He sighed and shrugged.
“You did a rain chant?” Sam seemed confused.
“Not really, no.” Tavis held out his hand, pouring rainwater collecting in his palm.
“I felt the wind shift, Tavis. I saw the water move when you walked by it back at the retention pond…I know you did this.”
I could see Sam’s head whipping back and forth between us. “Try to make it stop,” he said. “Then we’ll know.”
Tavis’s eyes remained locked on mine.
“Let’s wait a little while,” I said. “Just in case you can’t make it start back up again…”
And that’s exactly what we did. After our water jugs were filled, the troughs overflowing, and we’d played in enough water to satiate our fear of dehydration, Tavis made the rain stop, leaving everyone in complete, awed silence.
“She was right!” Sam said. “You’re not a Crazy after all.”
I laughed at Sam’s quick tongue, and before I knew what was happening, Tavis was hauling me up into his arms for a giant bear hug, so relieved he’d been able to help save us all.
“I’m not sure I would’ve put two and two together,” he said, a renewed lightness to his voice I appreciated.
I laughed. “That’s what friends are for.”
12
DANI
APRIL 27, 1AE
Great Basin Desert, Nevada
I sneezed, th
en blew into a red and white paisley hankie, expelling mostly rust-colored dust, and grimaced. “Dusty brains…” And my brain already felt dusty enough without all of the added, well, dust. Slipping into animal minds at night wasn’t quite as rejuvenating as sleeping, but sleeping wasn’t nearly as comforting, and I craved the deepened telepathic connection I shared with whichever animal I was merged with even more after losing some of the horses.
“What was that?” Jake asked, glancing my way. He was on “Dani duty”—akin to guarding me while most of my attention was funneled into splitting my own consciousness among my avian scouts—and had been riding nearby on Highway 50 all morning. The task was usually Jason’s, but he’d been convening en route with Sanchez, Chris, Grayson, and Harper all morning and had asked Jake to take his place before we’d packed up camp.
We were still moving through the Great Basin Desert, the endless expanse of parched earth and sagebrush stretching out on either side of us, but we’d managed not to repeat our near-catastrophe via dehydration of a week earlier.
Jake guided his horse, a robust sorrel gelding whose reddish-brown coat looked overly vibrant in the sun-bleached high desert, closer to Wings’s side.
“What? Dusty brains?” I laughed as I stowed the hankie in my jacket pocket. “It was just something Grams—my grandma—used to say to me whenever I sneezed.” Adopting her age-roughened tone and Irish accent, I said, “Bless you, child, you and your dusty brains…” With a quick look around, I added, “Though it seems particularly appropriate here.”
Jake’s lips twitched, and a faint smile cracked the usually austere set of his face. “Dusty brains…I knew someone who used to say that.” Jake stared ahead at some point beyond where Ky and Ben were riding, his eyes distant as he spoke. “But that was a long time ago.”
I watched him, watched the way nostalgia altered his features, softening them. “Another life,” I said softly.
Jake’s eyes met mine, his gaze intense in a way that made me self-conscious. “It seems like it sometimes, doesn’t it?”
Feeling my cheeks warm, I shifted my attention to the road ahead. The highway was empty of all but a few vehicles—some abandoned, some not—making the passage of the cart, wagon, and herd fairly easy.
“Your grandma,” Jake said, his voice tentative. “She’s the one who raised you?”
Surprised by the personal question—I didn’t know much about Jake, but a prier he was not—I looked at him, head tilted to the side and eyes wide. “She is…Grams.” I forced myself to smile, automatically raising my right hand to touch my fingertips to Grams’s Claddagh medallion through my shirt.
Seconds passed with nothing but the sounds of horse hooves on pavement and cart and wagon wheels rolling along behind us.
Surprising me again, Jake said, “Zoe used to talk about her. Said she was like a mother to her.”
Running my fingers through the streak of white hair at the base of Wings’s mane, I nodded, recalling the countless days Zoe had passed at my house under Grams’s attentive, motherly watch. During middle school, when the tension at home between her dad and Jason had escalated to an unbearable level, Zoe had spent more nights at Grams’s house with me than at her own.
Lifting my right hand, I brushed my fingertips over the part of my cast that covered the tattoo on the inside of my left wrist; it was the Celtic knot that symbolized the unbreakable bond between sisters. Zoe had the same tattoo on her hip, though she neither knew what it meant nor remembered the day we’d suffered through their creation together.
Staring ahead at nothing, I cleared my throat. “I miss her.”
“She raised you,” Jake said evenly, and I had the impression that it was his way of saying that he understood…that he could relate. Of course, he didn’t know I hadn’t meant Grams; I’d meant Zoe.
I blinked a little too rapidly. “Yeah, uh…my mom died when I was born, and I guess my dad didn’t want to stick around”—he hadn’t even written his name on my birth certificate, and he’d been gone by the time Grams arrived—“so Grams moved to the States to raise me.” I laughed softly, a ward against the decades-old sense of rejection. “I used to daydream about what my life would’ve been like if she’d taken me back to Ireland and raised me there.”
“You were lucky.”
Brow furrowed, I sent Jake a sideways glance.
He smiled, just a little, and shook his head. “Not about your mom and dad; you were lucky to have your grandma.”
My eyebrows lowered, and I frowned, sensing that I’d just stumbled upon a kindred spirit in the least likely of places. “What about you?” I asked, not really expecting much of a response. Jake wasn’t known for his verbose insights into his past…or for being verbose at all.
Grip tightening on his reins, Jake stared ahead. “My dad left when I was six, but not before he nearly beat my mom to the point of miscarrying.”
I glanced over my shoulder, seeking out Becca. I found her on the cart, sharing the bench seat with Camille. “Becca?”
In my peripheral vision, I saw Jake nod.
I returned to facing forward. “Did he ever come back?”
Jake looked at me askance. “Nah.” He shot a quick glance behind us at Becca. “He didn’t want us in the first place, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to come back to take care of us once she was gone.”
I didn’t think he meant that his mom had left him and his sister, too. “How’d she die?”
“Overdose,” he said, the single word a blade. After a quiet, tense moment, he added. “Becca found her.”
“Jesus…how old was she?”
“Four.”
I brought my hand up to my mouth, covering my horrified expression.
“Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be for the best if she never remembers her life before,” he said quietly.
“That’s not your decision.” My voice was sharper than I’d intended, making the words sound like a reprimand. When Jake turned widened eyes on me, I rushed to say, “Sorry—didn’t mean to snap at you.”
He said nothing, just stared at me, his expression wary. There was something wild about him, like a mustang who’d been broken but still remembered the days when he could run free through endless rolling hills and prairies. Cracking his shell was going to be a challenge. I smiled on the inside; I’d always liked challenges.
Finally, after neither of us spoke for some time, Jake broke the silence. “What if Zoe doesn’t want to remember?” There was a challenge in his eyes.
I stared at him, refusing to look away. “If we find a way to fix—I mean, to return her memories, it’s her choice,” I lied.
Jake raised his eyebrows the barest amount.
Snapping my mouth shut, I sighed. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. There’s no way in hell I’d let her choose not to remember. One way or another, I’m getting my Zo back.” I gave him a sidelong glance. “How’d you know?”
Again, he chuckled. I never would’ve pegged him as a chuckler, but if the shoe fit… “You’re the only person who loves her as much as I do.”
For a long time, I simply watched him, assessing. I hadn’t known things were quite so serious between them before the Clara-induced mind-wipe.
His horse, a few steps ahead of Wings, veered a little bit closer to us. Wings swung her head to the right, extending her neck.
“Don’t,” I warned before she could nip at his shoulder.
With a snort, she shook her head. “Spoilsport” was the general gist of her response.
I caught Jake splitting his attention between me and my horse, a quizzical expression on his face. “Wings considers herself my second-in-command of the herd, and she gets a kick out of keeping her”—I raised my right hand and made air quotes—“‘charges’ in line.”
Jake looked like he was trying not to laugh. “So she was trying to show Brutus who’s boss?”
I nodded. “Pretty much, yep.” Squinting, I looked over the sorrel from nose to flank. Only a tiny white star on his f
orehead and white socks on his hind legs broke the unrelenting red-brown of his coat. “So…Brutus, huh? Are you, um, expecting him to stab you in the back?”
Jake smiled and shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “Don’t laugh.” He was quiet for a moment, and I was about to badger him for more of an explanation when he said, “Our neighbor, Joe, he took us in for a bit after our mom…” Jake raised one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “I used to watch college football with him. Ohio State was his favorite team, which didn’t ever make sense to me because he was from Indiana…but the mascot’s name was Brutus.” He met my eyes briefly, a self-deprecating half-smile on his face. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”
“It’s sweet,” I reassured him. “What was he, anyway—Brutus the mascot?”
“A Buckeye—it’s a nut.”
I snorted. “You are such a geek,” I said without thinking. Worrying I’d gone too far, I peeked over at Jake. He was smiling.
~~~~~
Carlos pulled his hands away from almost touching Mase’s head and shook them out. It always amused me when he did that, because every time his fingers touched, they emitted a faint crackling sound, and when he did it in the dark, little blue sparks accompanied the crackle. I smiled.
Mase stood from his perch atop a knee-high rock and stretched his thickly corded arms over his head. It was late in the evening, and Mase, Camille, and I were sitting by the stream near our camp—a freshwater supply like that wasn’t one we could pass up—“washing dishes.” Which was code for helping Carlos hone his electrotherapy skills in semiprivacy. He was still reticent, bashful even, to show this new facet of his Ability to the others, but I didn’t think we could make much more progress without a certain member of our group’s help.
Camille took Mase’s place and closed her eyes, a small smile curving her lips. Both she and Mase seemed to enjoy the sensations caused by Carlos’s version of electrotherapy, which was utter lunacy to me. Not that I said so out loud. Often, anyway.
Mase moved several yards upstream to crouch beside me and grab a plate from the stack of dirty dishes I’d been working through for the past fifteen minutes. “He’s getting really strong,” Mase said quietly, his eyes flicking toward Camille and Carlos. “And his control—” He shook his head. “The way he can focus it so precisely…contain it…”
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 100