by Clara Kensie
“Why?” Logan, small and haunted, asks from the bed. “Why would he do that?”
Wendy paces the room, and when she stops, determination has settled in her eyes. “Your father wrote some articles for his job at the newspaper,” she said. “He did the right thing, but those articles made some people very angry, and they sent Dennis Connelly to kill us. Dennis Connelly does very bad things to very good people, and he wants to do those bad things to us.”
He gasps. “Wendy!” Those men had come to investigate them. Possibly to arrest them. Definitely not to kill them. Everything those men had done was in self-defense. He and Wendy were the aggressors in the attack, not those men. The third man, Dennis Connelly, had told Wendy he’d put Tessa in his car only to keep her safe.
Wendy crumples, falling to her knees at his feet. “Andy, please. It’s the only way.”
His hand shaking, he strokes her hair, then slowly turns to the kids. “Dennis Connelly is a very bad man. But Mommy and I will keep us all safe.”
What has she done, what has she done, dear Lord, what has she done?
She didn’t mean to fly Tessa into the wall. She didn’t mean to threaten to give her back to the bad man. She didn’t mean to terrorize her own daughter.
She is just so tired of the screaming.
He doesn’t need to fake his horror as he tells the kids he’s watching Dennis Connelly slice open the Pennsylvania FBI agent. He hadn’t faked his horror in Utah either, when he’d narrated the murder of the Utah police detective.
His horror is real.
But the FBI agent isn’t real.
There never was a Utah cop.
Tessa kept asking why the police weren’t helping them. Jillian kept declaring they should contact the FBI, the CIA.
So he and Wendy had to lie, again. They had to keep the kids from going to the authorities. They told the kids they’d already asked the police for help. They’d tried again with the FBI. But seeking aid from law enforcement would not only lead Dennis Connelly straight to their hideout, it would also get the lawmen killed.
Now, as they huddle in their getaway car at a gas station in Ohio, he’s proving it to them again. He closes his eyes and describes the fabricated murder of a fictitious FBI agent to his terrified children.
His horror is most definitely real. He’s horrified that he let greed convert him from Robin Hood into a killer. He’s horrified by what he’s doing to his kids. He’s horrified by the whole situation.
But he can’t find a way out of it.
She yells to the kids to get in the car: Dennis Connelly had found them, and he is coming.
Andy hasn’t seen him in months, but that woman in the mall today has been following her. She is sure of it. She’d seen the same woman at the supermarket, at the drug store, riding her bicycle around their block. She must be working for Connelly. Even if she’s not, they can’t take the chance.
It’s time to run.
There he is. Dennis Connelly is close. It’d been so long, he was beginning to think Connelly had given up the search. Now they have to run again. They only have two, three hours at the most before he reaches them.
He focuses his remote vision on Wendy. She’s at the store, buying groceries. He calls her cell phone. “He’s close,” he says. Wendy wails, then tells him she’ll be right home. They’ll need to burn and destroy all their personal things before they can leave. Once that’s done, they’ll call the kids at school.
Damn.
How the hell does Connelly keep finding them?
Jillian. Piggybacking on Andy’s mobile eye. Trying to develop her own. The tiny headaches and bloody noses she’d given Jillian had stopped her rebellion for a while, but then Andy caught her emailing that college professor, just before she turned off the monitor. Thank God he checked in on Jillian sometimes. They were right not to trust her. She’d cleaned up that mess by luring the professor to Twelve Lakes and planting the aneurysm in his brain. Foolishly, they’d thought that would be the end of it.
But tonight Jillian had piggybacked on Andy’s mobile eye again.
Maybe she’d gone too far this time, giving Jillian such a debilitating headache and bloody nose. But how dare that girl disobey them again!
No, she didn’t go too far. Jillian deserved it. Maybe now she’s finally learned her lesson.
1:58 a.m. Jillian and Logan are in the getaway car, ready to go. They’d woken them up two hours ago and told them Dennis Connelly had found them and was on his way. They burned everything they’d brought into the house—clothes, books, papers, sheets and towels—in the old bathtub, then washed the ashes down the drain. The house was clean now, with no sign they’d ever lived here.
Everything has fallen apart in Twelve Lakes. They need a fresh start in a new place.
Wendy is waiting for Tessa, ready to put their plan into action, but now it’s exactly 2 a.m. and Tessa isn’t home. Where is she? She’s never been late before, not even by a minute.
Wendy calls Tessa on her cell phone but she doesn’t answer.
He concentrates on Tessa and sends out his mobile eye, but he can’t see anything. He can hear music, and maybe...muffled crying?
He feels the first fluttering of alarm.
Jillian comes back from Tristan’s house, sobbing and holding Tessa’s silver heels. She found them in a pile of snow. Jillian says she knocked, then pounded on the front door, and when no one answered, she used her PK to open the door. No one was in the house. Tristan was gone. Tessa was gone.
Someone took Tessa. Not Dennis Connelly. Whoever he is, he already has her locked up in a cell, hundreds of miles away.
He and Wendy give Jillian and Logan three large bags that hold all the cash they have on hand, about 30,000 hundred-dollar bills. Jillian is crying. Logan is trying not to.
“Don’t tell us where you’re going,” he instructs the kids. “It’s safer that way. After we get Tessa back, I’ll see where you are and we’ll come get you.”
After one last, ferocious hug, they push their children out into the cold night.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
As she drives faster and faster to northern Wisconsin, Andy groans with pain. Blood is pouring from his nose. It’s trickling from his ears now too. But he will not stop watching Tessa. Andy narrates in a tight, stilted voice what he sees through her eyes.
Tessa, aware that Andy is watching, confesses she’d told Tristan all their secrets. And in turn, Tristan had told the man with the red beard.
Tristan is dead now, Tessa says. The man with the red beard killed him.
She didn’t believe his threat at first, but that man had killed Tristan, his own colleague. She’s certain he’ll kill Tessa too, if they don’t come.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Jillian is piggybacking. He can sense her. He can feel her panic, he can hear her screaming.
Through a veil of red, he and Jillian watch through Tessa’s eyes as Wendy stumbles from the car, her hands in the air.
They watch through Tessa’s eyes as a man in a black jacket drags him from the car too.
They watch through Tessa’s eyes as the men put guns to their throats.
They watch through Tessa’s eyes as the men pull the trig-
And then he and Jillian see nothing at all.
Chapter Fifty
“Tessa. That’s enough.”
Tristan’s voice, faint and echoed, broke through the visions.
“Open your hand. Let go of the rings.”
He pried my fingers open and pulled the rings from my hand, and the half vision/half memory of my parents collapsing into the snow disappeared.
“Breathe.”
I gasped in air and opened my eyes. I was still lying with my head in his lap, but every mu
scle in my body was stiff, and my lungs burned. The fog waited anxiously for me to pull it in and escape into its dark nothingness. I called it in, but not all the way.
“They did it,” I said. I listened to my own voice say the words. It sounded alien. Old. “They’re guilty.”
A tidal wave of nausea overpowered me, and Tristan whisked me to the bathroom a moment before I threw up.
The tears came next, fierce and violent. I buried my head in Tristan’s chest and sobbed.
My parents were criminals. They stole money. They stole lives.
My parents lied to us. They made us live in fear of a man who’d only wanted to rescue us.
My parents were killers.
* * *
Tristan stood outside the doorway to my father’s cell, far enough to give us some privacy but close enough to rush in to prevent either the fog or the visions from attacking me. The warden, Mr. Milbourne, stood next to him with an angry frown, resentful that Dennis Connelly had gone over his head and convinced the board of directors to allow me this ten-minute visit. Now that I knew, with absolute certainty, that my parents were guilty, I needed to see them more than ever.
The cell was silent except for the occasional beeping of machines that monitored his comatose body. He was relaxed, his breath deep and even. But an almost imperceptible strain on his face, a tightness right between his eyebrows, showed me his unconscious slumber was far from peaceful.
I knew what that tightness was: guilt. The healers had been unable to relieve his pain, they would never be able to cure his pain, because it wasn’t caused by anything physical. It was caused by guilt.
If this were a movie, I’d be overcome with forgiveness and lean down to give him a kiss on his cheek. But this wasn’t a movie; this was my life. I had no forgiveness for him.
Pity, yes. I had endless pity for this man who got caught in an ever-growing firestorm of secrets and lies. But he was the one who lit the match.
I had love for him too. He was my dad. Regardless of the crimes he’d committed, he loved me. I was his Tessa Blessa. I could never forgive him, but I would always love him.
Whether he ever woke up or not, he’d spend the rest of his life here. I brought my lips close to his ear. “I’m sorry your life ended up this way, Daddy. I know you only wanted us to be happy.”
He didn’t respond, or even move. He had no idea I was there.
Would I be like him, should I ever choose to escape forever into the fog? Mindless, yet tormented?
I gave my dad one last look, then left his cell.
Now it was my mother’s turn.
* * *
Criminals with secret psychic abilities incarcerated in a secret prison run by a secret government task force rarely have visitors. Still, as I sat on a metal chair in the Underground’s cold, small visiting room, I kept the fog close to keep out any visions of those who’d been here before me. I didn’t want to know.
I couldn’t see him through the closed door, but Tristan was hovering in the hallway, again prepared to rush in if I lost control of the visions or the fog.
After a long, silent wait, my mother shuffled in.
Gray disheveled hair, gray sunken eyes, gray wrinkled uniform.
Mr. Milbourne himself escorted her, holding her arm just above the elbow. Her wrists and ankles were shackled. Her PK had not regenerated in several days, so after numerous tests, she’d been declared completely neutralized. She was harmless, but restraining prisoners when they had visitors was protocol.
Mr. Milbourne sat her in a chair across the table from me, then stood in the corner with his massive hands on his hips, a tranq gun nestled in a holster around his shoulders. It was also protocol that all guards escorting prisoners outside their cell, even those who’d been restrained and neutralized, must carry a tranq gun.
My mother’s eyes cleared when she saw me, and she made a high, desperate whiny sound. “Oh, Tessa. Are you all right? Did they hurt you? Did they touch you?”
So many emotions—despair, betrayal, disbelief—built a brick in my throat. “I’m fine,” was all I could manage to squeak, and that was a lie.
“Have you seen your dad? They told me he’s not bleeding anymore. How is he?”
“I saw him a few minutes ago. He’s...resting.” That was another lie, but I didn’t think she could handle the full truth right now. But I added something I was certain was true. “He wants you to know he loves you.”
She wrung her hands together and spoke in a tiny voice. “They took my psychokinesis away.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” That was true too. I knew how it was to feel so powerless.
“What are we going to do?” She started crying. “How are we going to get out of here?”
When my only reply was a cold stare, she gasped. “What did they tell you? Oh, Babydoll, you don’t believe them, do you? You can’t believe anything they say.”
“I didn’t believe it,” I said with a shrug. “I refused to believe you could have stolen all that money and killed all those people. Even after I couldn’t deny the truth anymore, I tried one last time to prove them wrong.”
Her lips trembled in a half smile of hope.
I didn’t return it. “But I ended up proving them right.”
Her smile wilted. “How?”
“Maybe it’s being in this building, around so many psionic people,” I said. “Or maybe it was the trauma of being kidnapped and held as bait.” I touched my cheekbone where Kellan had punched me. “Whatever it was, it woke up something in me that’s been hiding all these years.”
“What?” Her voice was a whisper.
“Retrocognition. I can see the history of people or objects around me.” I drew the wedding rings from my pocket and stacked them on my finger, then spun them around. “A fog, a mental fog, has been blocking the visions from me. But now I’m learning to control it, so I can bring the visions to me or send them away.”
She exhaled deeply as she sat back in the chair. “That makes sense.”
“Did you know about this?”
“No,” she said, “But when you were a baby, you cried all the time. The doctors said it was the worst case of colic they’d ever seen. We tried everything, but you kept crying.”
I concentrated on the wedding rings, and they showed me another vision—my mother, pacing while holding a tiny, screaming baby. Me. I was crying because of the visions. They came from every object in the room, unfiltered, assaulting me with piercing vibrancy and deafening furor.
“And then one day,” she said, “you just...stopped.” She drew her hands out into a shrug but stopped short because of her restraints. “You went into a daze. You didn’t respond to anything. We fed you, and you ate, but you just stared off into the distance. You didn’t cry, you didn’t smile. You looked so vacant and lost.”
That was the fog, coming to shield me from the visions. The rings showed me another image: my parents standing over me, clapping, doing a silly dance. A stuffed caterpillar cartwheeled above their heads. I wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. The fog held me too tightly.
“Then one morning I came into the nursery, and you smiled at me,” she said. “Your eyes were bright and you gurgled and you kicked your tiny feet. After that you were a normal, joyful little baby.”
The fog had lifted enough so I could come out of the daze, staying at just the right distance to suppress the visions. It had balanced itself so I could function, and it had adjusted itself as necessary throughout my life. Until now. Now the fog was allowing me to control it.
“So, this fog,” Mom said, “it protects you.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it also hid the truth from me. The truth about you and Dad.”
“Babydoll, I—”
“All the running, all the lies, of the past eight years never wou
ld have happened if it wasn’t for the fog. The APR couldn’t track us down because of the fog. The two investigators, the waitress, the professor...so many innocent people died, Mom, because your secrets were hidden in the fog.”
I flicked the wedding rings onto the table. One of them spun on its radius a few times before stopping.
Then I stood and lifted Tristan’s sweatshirt to expose my stomach. In eight years, I realized, she’d never looked at the scars, or at my stomach, even while I was wearing clothes. My father couldn’t look away, but my mother had never even seen them.
I wanted her to see them now.
Her gaze flickered to my belly, then turned away. “That was an accident.”
“But nothing else was.” I lowered the sweatshirt and sat back on the chair.
She hung her head and wrung her hands together. “All I wanted was to give you a better childhood than I had.”
A muted, fuzzy vision of her childhood floated in the fog. A pink flowered blanket, heavy panting, the stench of fish and sweat, a sense of powerlessness.
I lifted the fog a bit and placed my hand on hers, and the vision zoomed into focus with knife-sharp clarity.
Her stepfather slithers under her covers, still reeking from his job at the fish market, pawing her with clammy fish-hands, his fish-breath wet and slimy on her neck. He’d barely waited for her mother to leave for her shift before creeping into her room tonight.
She lies as still as she can. She can feel his heart pounding, and she squeezes her eyes tight and wishes it would just stop beating, that it would explode in his chest, that he would drop dead and leave her alone forever.
StopstopstopstopSTOP!
And...he stops. Stops squirming on top of her, stops panting in her ear.
He slides to the floor, clawing at his chest, his fish-lips opening and closing soundlessly.