Pushed

by Corrine Jackson

  I didn’t want to go home.

  Parked outside our house, I studied the white New England–style cottage. Hot sunlight set the bits of sea glass hanging in the windows aglow. My stepmother, Laura, loved to collect the glass when she walked on the beach that curved below at the edge of the marina. I loved our house. I loved the woods that cradled it, and the sea grass that bowed to the salty air when it blew through the sand. No concrete in sight, but this place felt more real to me than the city I’d grown up in.

  Ben and Laura would be in the living room watching TV, or Laura would be in the back garden while Ben caught up on work he’d brought home from his shipbuilding office. If I walked in the house, they would drop whatever they were doing to hug me and ask me about my day. I soaked up their attention, my craving for it unending after so many years of starvation. Today, though, they would wonder why Lucy was mad at me, and I didn’t want to lie.

  Clambering out of my red Mustang, I paced myself until I reached the entrance to Townsend Park’s labyrinth at the edge of our backyard. Standing still, I listened for a sign that the park sat empty of bird-watchers and kids who liked to play in its maze. I heard nothing but the tittering of birds and leaves bristling in the wind.

  Excited now, I shook my hair out and dropped all pretense of human speed. I couldn’t stop the laugh that escaped when my feet raced over the uneven path, my body bending around curves a moment before I slammed into this tree or tripped over that fallen log. The lingering headache disappeared. Too soon, I stood in the circular clearing at the center of the labyrinth, my hair swirling at my waist as my body came to a sudden rest.

  “It’s exhilarating, isn’t it?”

  Asher sat on one of the stone benches, the sun splashing over his skin. He had a way of guessing my next move and had obviously been waiting for me. His ability to peek into my mind didn’t hurt. He smiled, and an answering smile curved my mouth.

  “I never get tired of it,” I admitted. “The speed. It’s freeing somehow.”

  Striding toward him, I planted myself on his lap, and his arms surrounded me.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better now that the bells have stopped ringing in my skull. My powers have been slow to kick in this morning.”

  I traced the white scar slashing through one of his eyebrows to the top of his cheekbone in a light touch, and he turned his face into my palm. More rugged than his brother, the sharp angles and square, shadowed jaw were pure Asher.

  “Mad at me?”

  “No. Why?”

  He grimaced. “Usually you think of how handsome Gabe is when you’re mad at me.”

  I wrapped one hand behind his neck, letting his heat sink into me. His internal body temperature ran hotter than any human’s, as if it burned through energy faster to keep his heart beating at its abnormal pace. “That’s because he’s the one image sure to get you out of my head when I need a little privacy. If you’d been paying attention, though, you would have noticed that my thoughts today were not on Gabe at all.”

  “No?”

  His voice sounded hoarse when I began trailing nibbles along his jaw. “Hmm . . .” I said between kisses. “Listen closely.”

  I pulled away a few inches so I could meet his dark green gaze. We stared at each other, and I let my thoughts spin free and land on Asher. The way his skin felt against mine. The way his muscles shifted under the hand I rested at his back. How the whiskers on his chin rasped against my fingertips.

  “Asher?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re not on a crowded dance floor.” I love you.

  I expected him to pick up where we’d left off last night. A kiss that would take my breath away. He surprised me by dropping his head to the curve of my neck, his breath tickling my neck as he inhaled.

  “Lemons,” he growled.

  I pushed him away so I could see his face. The smug satisfaction in his grin told me what he hadn’t.

  “You smell me?” I asked.

  At his nod, I shrieked and threw my arms around his neck. He let himself tumble back into the grass, cushioning my landing with his body. His laugh rumbled under my ear, and I rested my chin on his chest to see how his face lit up. His ability to feel my touch had never gone away, even when I’d made him an immortal again. His sense of smell and taste, though, had disappeared. We’d both wondered if they would ever return. Now, it seemed time and proximity to me had begun to work their magic for a second time.

  Which meant he could become mortal once more.

  I didn’t realize I frowned until Asher reached out to smooth the wrinkles on my forehead.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m okay.”

  “For how long, though?” I asked.

  An image of Asher dying from a bullet wound filled my mind. He’d been more mortal than Protector when Dean had shot him. An injury that should have had no lingering impact had nearly killed him.

  He tugged on the end of my hair to get my attention. “We knew this might happen again if we stayed together. We made a choice.”

  I sighed. “I know. I just can’t stand the idea that you might be hurt. Or worse.”

  “Then you know how I feel watching you heal injuries that could kill you.”

  A fight tangled in his words. The peaceful moment disappeared, and I shoved away from him to sit up, propping myself on one arm.

  “Not you, too,” I said, irritated. “I’ve already had it out with Lucy and Brandon.”

  He tensed, and a fire snapped in his eyes. “Brandon?”

  “He doesn’t know anything for sure,” I rushed to reassure him. “But he saw and heard enough to be suspicious. We’ll have to be careful for a while.”

  Asher swore in French before switching back to English. “Damn it, Remy! This is exactly what I was afraid of. It only takes one person knowing for the whole thing to come down on our heads.”

  “Are you pissed because I healed Marina or because Brandon saw something?”

  “Both,” Asher snapped.

  He sounded so petulant, I couldn’t help it: I laughed. My reaction was all wrong, and I knew it. I understood his anger. My actions had put us in danger. There was nothing funny about any part of this situation. And yet . . . He glared at me, and any effort I’d made to sober up dissolved in flames. Between giggles, I said, “I’m sorry. Oh, Asher, I’m sorry.”

  He watched me with a bemused expression. “I knew you would snap one day, but I thought it would take longer.”

  “Hey, watch it! That’s just mean.”

  Asher reached over and pulled on my supporting arm until I fell against him again. “Me? You’re the one with the whacked sense of humor. What is so funny?”

  “Nothing, I guess. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Actions and reactions. Consequences. “We’re always waiting for hell to come raining down on our heads.”

  “If the other Protectors find out about you, hell will seem like a pleasant vacation.”

  Torture and death awaited the Healer captured by Protectors. They would do anything to feel human again, and I could be their rechargeable battery. And if they found out about my unique ability to heal their immortality, death wouldn’t come fast enough. Most Protectors didn’t want to be mortal again.

  Asher’s heart beat steady and fast under my palm. “You can’t ask me not to use my powers. It’s who I am.”

  “Remy, look at me.” He shook me slightly until I looked up. “I don’t want to change you. I love you. But I want a lifetime with you. I’m asking you to be more careful. Think before you react. Please, promise me.”

  I nodded. He shook me again, and I laughed. “Okay, okay. I promise. I’ll be more careful.”

  We lay together again, his deep breaths lifting me, and I exhaled with him, pressing him into the ground. I wished we could stay like that forever with the sun warming my skin from above, and his fingers trailing liquid heat in lazy circles down my spine.

  Then he said, “About that song last night . . .”
r />   I groaned, my forehead thumping his chest, and his laugh rumbled through me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I hated lying to Asher about my plans, but I knew what I had to do.

  Something in my mother’s recordings had stuck in my mind. She’d said I had the power to make the Protectors mortal again. It’s why she’d kept me hidden from them. But how had she known that? Because if I was the first, how could she have guessed the extent of my power? Someone, somewhere had to know something.

  If Asher could become human again, I needed to understand the extent of my Healer powers. I couldn’t stop using my ability, and no matter how careful I was, I wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret forever. My mother had understood that. It was why she’d provided me with the clues to find my grandfather. She’d known she wouldn’t be around to help me, and that someday I would need to go to the Healers, even if it meant hiding my Protector half from them.

  My mother had chosen Dean over me a thousand times. A thousand times he’d hurt her, and I had picked up the pieces by healing her injuries and hiding my own. The cigarette burns and the broken bones had threatened to break me—but the old scars strengthened me now, coiling steel around my spine.

  I could never forget Dean shooting Lucy, or the way his face had twisted with pleasure when he held me hostage, torturing me to see how my powers worked. The way he’d looked at the end with terror in his eyes as he fell from the cliff at the Edge of the World, with every injury he’d inflicted on me transferred to him, lived in my nightmares. Dean’s body would never be found and my injuries had healed, but the memories had burrowed so deep that my guts were now made entirely of scar tissue.

  I would never be a victim again. My friends and family would not be victims because of me. My grandfather might be able to help. At least my mother had told me to go to him if things turned dangerous. Maybe he knew another way I could keep my family safe from the Protectors. At the very least, I could learn more about Healers. Gabe had been so sure they would want to use me or see me dead if they knew the extent of my powers. My mother thought the same. Time to find out, and stop living in status quo. Status quo was too easy and could leave everyone unprepared when the danger landed on our doorstep.

  So when I left Asher in Townsend Park and returned home, I wrote my grandfather a long e-mail. My mother’s people had set up codes and ways to communicate to each other long ago, and the rules had been ingrained into her as a child. She’d been taught how to reach her parents through the personal ads if she was separated from them during a Protector attack. I couldn’t imagine a childhood that would have required such precautions. I’d doubted her when she said he would respond. After all, she’d run away from him and his anger. Why would he still have been checking the ads? Yet, the proof was in his response. And now I was glad that she’d passed this information on to me in her final recording.

  I used what I’d learned as I explained who I was and that I had inherited my grandmother’s healing powers. It took me hours to figure out how to tell him about my mother’s death. He’d blamed her for my grandmother’s death. My mother had blamed herself, too. She’d told the wrong person about my grandmother’s abilities, and the Protectors had found her. My grandfather had watched his wife get tortured to death. And now he’d lost his only child.

  In the end, I couldn’t think of a way to cushion the news, so I wrote about it matter-of-factly, hoping he wouldn’t be offended by my bluntness. I had enough strikes against me, considering that I was half-Protector.

  I just hoped he never found out about my mixed blood.

  Ben woke me by waving a chipped ceramic mug of coffee under my nose. I opened one eye, and my dad grinned, his salt-and-pepper black hair tumbling over his forehead. “I waited as long as I could. Laura told me to let you sleep.”

  Graduation day. Yay. I sat up to take the mug. Our fingers brushed, and I sensed the irregular beat of his heart. I’d given up trying to heal it a month ago. Every time I did, it simply returned. My father didn’t know it, but he had Protector blood running through his veins and it affected the internal workings of his body. From what I knew about his parents, they’d passed away when he was pretty young. Like my mother, my father didn’t have any powers. They skipped generations, and both he and my mother had been part of the generation sans power. Lucky me.

  I moved over to make room for Ben, and he sat next to me with his back against the headboard, and his long denim-covered legs crossed at the ankle. I tipped my head to lean against his arm, as I sipped my coffee.

  “Morning, Dad.”

  He turned to mush, the way he did every time I called him Dad. The experience was still so new to both of us. We were strangely alike despite our years apart, right down to the way we looked and certain expressions we shared. My height mimicked his tall stature, and I shared the warm brown shade of his skin. My mother’s contributions—the dirty blond shade of my hair, the haphazard freckles sprinkled across my skin, and fragile bone structure—reminded everyone that I’d been a latecomer to the O’Malley household.

  “Hey, kid. How’re you doing this morning?” he asked.

  He’d been worried about me since March when he’d arrived at the hospital in New York and found me broken from the latest confrontation with Dean. It was as if Ben had seventeen years of worry to make up for in a few short months. I didn’t mind. His worry felt like a balm on the wounds caused by his abandonment and my mother’s betrayal. Ben hadn’t known what he’d abandoned me to, but sometimes that didn’t make a damn bit of difference when the old feelings of betrayal nipped at me.

  For now, inhaling the scent of wood shavings that always clung to Ben, I studied his bare feet and loved that he sat beside me and worried about me. “Ask me again when I wake up,” I grumbled.

  A long moment of companionable silence passed, and then Laura’s voice trailed up the stairs. “Ben O’Malley, you’d better not be up there waking that girl up!”

  He studied me from the corner of navy blue eyes. I stared back at him from eyes like his, until we both laughed.

  “You’re in trouble now.”

  “Only if you tell on me,” he said. “You ready for today?”

  “You mean the whole cap and gown thing? Not my best look, but I think I can pull it off with Lucy’s help.”

  “Smart-ass. I mean, the whole cap and gown thing without your mom there.”

  He nudged me with his foot when I didn’t respond right away. I tried to find the right words. My feelings for my mother were a crazy mixture of love and hate and sorrow. Sometimes there weren’t words, so I shrugged.

  “It’s enough that you guys will be there.”

  Ben didn’t push for more. “Everything okay with Asher and Lucy? Things have seemed a little tense between all of you the last couple of days.”

  I shrugged again. “High school stuff. Nothing we won’t get over in a few days.”

  It hurt that I couldn’t tell the truth. That Lucy was still mad at me for putting myself at risk. That my lie of omission had strained things with Asher. I’d been blocking him from my mind constantly for the last couple of days so he wouldn’t learn about the e-mail I’d written my grandfather. The constant tension had affected both of us.

  “I love you, kiddo. I’ll get out of your hair so you can get ready.”

  Ben dropped a kiss on my forehead when I glanced up, and I smiled. He rose, and I followed, stumbling to my feet and over to my dresser.

  “Remy?” He stood at my bedroom door with his hand on the doorknob. “I’m proud of you. You know that, right?”

  Warmth flooded through me to hear him say it. He turned to leave, and suddenly I wanted to come clean about one thing. It was the least I could do.

  “Dad? You never asked what my plans were. After school, I mean.”

  He nodded, his hesitation palpable. “I didn’t want to push. I thought you might want to take some time off after everything that’s happened this year.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to say a
nything when I didn’t know if I would be sticking around, but I applied to a few colleges last year. Premed. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t get any scholarship money. I feel stupid for even applying when I knew I couldn’t afford to go, but I got into Columbia. I—”

  Ben cut off my air when he picked me up and crushed my ribs in a bear hug. His shout threatened to deafen me, but I couldn’t stop grinning at him.

  He looked at me with awe when he set me down. “We’ll figure out the tuition. Damn, my kid’s going to be a doctor.”

  Lucy appeared in the doorway to our shared bathroom in her pajamas at the same time my stepmother burst in from the hall with her short red curls swinging.

  “What happened?” Lucy grumbled.

  Laura thumped my father in the back with the dish towel she had in one hand. “Ben, I told you to let her sleep in.”

  He turned to face both of them with an arm thrown over my shoulder. “Listen to this. Tell them, Remy.” Before I could do more than open my mouth, he blurted out, “Our daughter got admitted into Columbia University’s premed program.”

  Laura’s shout was louder than Ben’s, as she rushed to embrace me. I watched Lucy over her shoulder and saw her struggling to resist the pull of family when she wanted to stay mad at me. I knew the feeling because I’d tried for weeks to not care about any of them when Ben first brought me here, and I’d failed.

  Lucy wasn’t any stronger than me. A small smile curved her stubborn mouth when her eyes met mine. I held out an arm, and she settled next to me in our small circle.

  Only I heard her whisper, “You’re still a jerk, but I love you.”

  It was tougher than I thought to get through graduation. My eighteenth birthday had been a quiet enough event a few weeks ago, but then we’d been caught up in the aftermath of Dean’s attack. I’d been so busy worrying about my grandfather and the consequences of the e-mail I’d written him that I hadn’t thought about how graduation would affect me.