by Meg Cabot
“I’ll keep my hands to myself,” Paul had assured me.
And so far, he’d been true to his word.
“What I don’t get,” I said as the rain pelted down outside, with occasional flashes of lightning, though the thunderstorm portion of the evening seemed to be mostly over, “is what you’re doing here. Aren’t you supposed to be looking for Felix Diego? To stop him?”
“Yeah.” In the darkness of the loft, I could only make out Paul’s profile by the light that crept in from chinks and knotholes in the wood that made up the barn walls.
“So… why aren’t you? Unless”—my blood ran cold— “you already found him. But then why—”
“Relax, Simon,” Paul said. “I didn’t find him. Yet. But we both know he’s due to show up here tomorrow, same as Jesse.”
I did relax then. Well, just a little. So Paul hadn’t gotten to Diego yet. Which meant there was still time…
To do what, though? What was I going to do when I found Jesse? I couldn’t tell him not to stay at Mrs. O’Neil’s boardinghouse or he’d be killed, because the truth was, I wanted him to be killed. How else was I ever going to get to meet him—okay, date him—in the twenty-first century?
I was just going to have to stick to Paul, was all. Stick to Paul and keep him from stopping Diego. Maybe I wouldn’t even see Jesse. Which would probably be just as well. Because if I did, what on earth was I going to say to him? What if he, like Mrs. O’Neil, mistook me for some random hoochie mama? I didn’t think I could bear it….
Which reminded me…
“Are people going to notice we’re gone?” I asked. “In our own time, I mean? Or when we get back, will it be like no time has gone by?”
“I don’t know.” I got the feeling Paul had been trying to get some sleep when I’d shown up. He seemed to be attempting to get back to it now and my endless questions were only serving to irritate him. “Why didn’t you ask my grandfather? You two are so close and all….”
“I didn’t exactly get a chance, now, did I?” I stared at him—or tried to, anyway—in the darkness. I still wasn’t sure why Dr. Slaski had chosen me as his confidante and not his own grandson. Well, except for the fact that Paul is a user. And a thief. And, oh yeah, had possibly purposefully drugged him.
“He’s not who you think he is, Paul,” I said, meaning Dr. Slaski. “He’s not your enemy. He’s just like us.”
“Don’t say that.” Paul’s blue-eyed gaze suddenly bore into me from the darkness. “Don’t ever.”
“Why? He’s a mediator, Paul. A shifter. He’s probably who you got it from. He knows a lot. And one thing he knows is that the more we play around with… with our powers… the better our chances of ending up like him—”
“I told you not to say that,” Paul snapped.
“But if you’d just give him a chance, instead of calling him a gork and purposefully—”
“We’re not like him, all right? You and I? We’re nothing like him. He was stupid. He tried to tell people. He tried to tell people that mediators—shifters—whatever—that we exist. And everyone laughed at him. My dad had to change his name, Suze, because no one would take him seriously, knowing he was related to someone they all said was a quack. So don’t you ever—ever—say we’re like him or that we’re going to end up like him. I already know how I’m going to end up.”
I just blinked at him. “Oh, really? And how’s that?”
“Not like him,” Paul assured me. “I’m going to be like my dad.”
“Your dad isn’t a mediator,” I reminded him.
“I mean I’m going to be rich, like my dad,” Paul said.
“How?” I asked with a laugh. “By stealing from the people you’re supposed to be helping?”
“There you go again,” Paul said, shaking his head. “Who told you we’re supposed to help the dead, Suze? Huh? Who?”
“You know perfectly well it was wrong of you to take that money. It wasn’t yours.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “Well, there’s more where it came from and, unlike you, I suffer no moral compunctions in taking it. I’m going to be rich someday, Suze. And, unlike Grandpa Gork, in control.”
“Not if you kill all your brain cells flitting in and out of the past,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, well,” Paul said. “This is a one-time trip. After this, I shouldn’t need to go back again.”
I stared at his profile. Only our sides were touching beneath the horse blanket we shared. Still, Paul radiated a lot of heat. I was getting a little hot under the blanket.
That was when I realized the only other guy I’d ever lain this close to was Jesse, and that the heat he gave off? Yeah, a lot of that was in my mind. Because ghosts can’t give off heat. Even to mediators. Even to mediators who happen to be in love with them.
“It’s wrong,” I said quietly to Paul as I looked at his closed eyelids. “What you’re doing to Jesse. He doesn’t want it.”
Paul’s eyes opened at that.
“You told him?”
“He heard us talking about it,” I said. “And he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want you to interfere, Paul. He was going down to the Mission to stop you when I left.”
Paul looked at me for a few seconds, his blue eyes unreadable in the darkness.
“Are you sleeping with him?” he asked bluntly.
I gaped at him, feeling heat flood my cheeks. “Of course not!” Then, realizing what I’d said, stammered, “N-not that it’s any of your business.”
But Paul, rather than grinning over his so fully discomfiting me, as I would have expected him to, was gazing down at me very seriously.
“Then I don’t get it,” he said simply. “Why him? Why not me?”
Oh. That.
“Because he’s honest,” I said. “And he’s kind. And he puts me ahead of everything else—”
“So would I,” Paul said. “If you’d give me the chance.”
“Paul,” I said. “If we were in an earthquake or something, and you had a chance to save me but it was at the risk of your own life, you would save yourself, not me.”
“I would not! How can even you say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“But you’re saying that your perfect Jesse would save you, at the risk of his own life?”
“Yes,” I said with absolute certainty. “Because he has. In the past.”
“No, he hasn’t, Suze,” Paul said with equal certainty.
“Yes, he has, Paul. You don’t even know—”
“Yes, I do know. Jesse could never possibly have risked his own life to save yours, because in all the time you’ve known him, he’s been dead. So he hasn’t been risking anything, all those times he’s saved you. Has he?”
I opened my mouth to deny to this, then realized that Paul was right. It was the truth. A screwed-up version of the truth, but the truth just the same.
“What have you got to be so bitter about?” I demanded instead. “You’ve always gotten everything you’ve ever wanted your whole life. You’ve only had to ask for it, and it was yours. But it’s like it’s never enough for you.”
“I haven’t gotten everything I’ve ever wanted,” Paul said pointedly. “Although I’m working to correct that.”
I shook my head, knowing what he meant.
“You only want me because you can’t have me, Paul,” I said. “And you know it. I mean, my God. You’ve got Kelly. All the guys in school want her.”
“All the guys in school,” Paul said, “are idiots.”
I ignored that.
“You would be a lot better off,” I said, “if you’d just be happy with what you have, Paul, instead of wanting what you’ll never get.”
But Paul kept right on grinning. Grinning and rolling back over so he could sleep. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, if I were you, Suze,” he said in a tone that sounded way too smug to me.
“You—”
“Go to sleep, Suze,” Paul said.
“But you—�
�
“We’ve got a long day ahead of us. Just sleep.”
Amazingly, I did. Sleep, I mean. I hadn’t expected that I’d be able to. But maybe Dr. Slaski was right. Traveling through time DOES wear you out. I don’t think I’d have fallen asleep otherwise… you know, given the hay, the horses, the rain, and, oh yeah, the hot-but-totally-deadly guy lying next to me.
But I laid my head down, and next thing I knew, lights-out.
I woke with a start. I hadn’t even realized I’d been asleep. But there was light streaming through the slits between the wood planks that made up the sides of the barn. Not the gray light of dawn, either. It was full-on sunlight, revealing that I’d slept way past 8:00….
And kneeling in front of me was Paul, with breakfast.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, sitting up. Because in Paul’s hands was a pie. A whole pie. Apple, from the smell of it.
And it was still warm.
“Don’t ask,” he said, pulling, of all things, two forks from his back pocket. “Just eat.”
“Paul.” I could hear movement below. Paul had been speaking in hushed tones. I knew why now.
We were not alone.
A man’s voice said, “Git along there.” He appeared to speaking to the horses.
“Did you steal this?” I asked, even as I was taking the fork and digging in. Time travel doesn’t just make you sleepy. It makes you hungry, too.
“I told you not to ask,” Paul said as he, too, shoveled a forkful of pie into his mouth,
Stolen or not, it was good. Not the best I’d ever had, by any means—I don’t know if, out in the Wild West, they really had access to the best sugar and stuff.
But it satisfied the rumbling in my stomach… and soon made me aware of another urge.
Paul seemed to read my mind.
“There’s an outhouse behind the barn,” he informed me.
“A what house?”
“You know.” Paul grinned. “Watch out for the spiders.”
I thought he was joking.
He wasn’t. There were spiders. Worse, what they had to use as toilet paper back then? Let’s just say that today, it wouldn’t be considered fit to write on, let alone… you know… anything else.
Plus I had to hurry, so no one would see me in my twenty-first-century clothes and ask questions.
But it was hard because once I’d slipped out of the barn, I was flabbergasted by what I saw….
Which was nothing.
Really. Nothing, in all directions. No houses. No telephone poles. No paved roads. No Circle K. No In-N-Out Burger. Nothing. Just trees. And a dirt track that I suppose passed for a street.
I could, however, see the red dome of the basilica. There it was, down in the valley below us, with the sea behind it. That, at least, hadn’t changed in the last 150 years.
Thank God plumbing has, however.
When I crept back up to the loft, there was no sign of Mr. O’Neil. He appeared to have taken his horses and gone off to do whatever it was men like him did all day in 1850. Paul was waiting for me with an odd look on his face.
“What?” I asked, thinking he was going to tease me about the outhouse.
“Nothing,” was all he said, however. “Just… I have a surprise for you.”
Thinking it was another food-related item, although I was quite full from the pie, I said, “What? And don’t tell me it’s an Egg McMuffin, because I know they don’t have drive-through here.”
“It’s not,” Paul said.
And then, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move before, he took something else from his back pocket—a length of rope. Then he grabbed me.
People have, of course, tied me up before. But never somebody whose tongue was once in my mouth. I really wasn’t expecting Paul to do something so underhanded. Save my boyfriend’s life so I’d never meet him, yes. But hogtie my hands behind my back?
Not so much.
I struggled, of course. I got in a few good elbow jabs. But I couldn’t scream, not if I didn’t want Mrs. O’Neil to show up and go running for the sheriff or whatever. I wouldn’t be able to help Jesse from jail.
But it appeared I wouldn’t be much help to him for the time being, either.
“Believe me,” Paul said as he tightened knots that were already practically cutting off my circulation. “This hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.”
“It does not,” I said, struggling. But it was hard to struggle when I was on my stomach in the hay, and his knee was in the small of my back.
“Well,” he said, going to work on my feet now. “You’re right, I guess. Actually, this doesn’t hurt me at all. And it’ll keep you out of trouble while I go find Diego.”
“There’s a special place for people like you, Paul,” I informed him, spitting out hay. I was getting really sick of hay.
“Reform school?” he asked lightly.
“Hell,” I informed him.
“Now, Suze, don’t be that way.” He finished with my feet and, just to be sure I wouldn’t get it into my head to, I don’t know, roll out of the hayloft, he tied one end of the rope to a nearby post. “I’ll be back to untie you just as soon as I kill Felix Diego. Then we can go home.”
“Where I’ll never speak to you again,” I informed him.
“Sure you will,” Paul said cheerfully. “You won’t remember any of this. Because we won’t have gone back through time to save Jesse. Because you won’t even know who Jesse is.”
“I hate you,” I said, really meaning it this time.
“You do now,” Paul agreed. “But you won’t when you wake up tomorrow in your own bed. Because without Jesse, I’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you. It’ll just be you and me, two shifters against the world. Won’t that be fun?”
“Why don’t you go—”
But I didn’t get to finish that sentence, because Paul took something else out of his pocket. A clean white handkerchief. He’d told me once that he always carried one because you never know when you might need to gag someone.
“Don’t you dare!” I hissed at him.
But it was too late. He wadded the handkerchief into my mouth and secured it there with another piece of rope.
If I had never hated him before, I did then. Hated him with every bone in my body, every beat of my heart. Especially when he gave me a pat on the head and said, “See ya.”
Then disappeared down the ladder to the barn floor.
Chapter
fifteen
I don’t know how long I lay there like that. Long enough to start wondering whether I could just close my eyes and shift home. Who knew where I’d end up? Somewhere in the backyard, anyway. Possibly in a big bunch of poison oak, since there was no barn there now. But anything had to be better than lying in a very cramped position on the floor of a hayloft, with who knew what crawling through my hair and the blood pounding in my temples.
But a world without Jesse? Because that’s what I’d be guaranteeing myself if I gave up now. A world without my one purpose for living. Well, more or less. I mean, I know women need men like fish need bicycles, and all of that. Except…
Except I love him.
I couldn’t do it. I was too selfish. I wasn’t going to give up. Not yet. There were still plenty of hours of daylight left, or at least, there had been when Paul had left. The shadows, I couldn’t help noticing, were growing longer.
Still, if Mrs. O’Neil had told Paul the truth, and Jesse was expected that night, there was still time. Paul might not find Diego. He might have to come back with his task unaccomplished. And when he did, and he untied me…
Well, he was going to learn a lot about pain, that was for sure. Because this time, I’d be ready for him.
I don’t know how much time passed while I lay there, plotting my revenge on Paul Slater. Death was too good for him, of course. An eternity as a ghost—floating shiftlessly through this dimension and the next—was what would suit him best. Give him a little taste of what it had bee
n like for Jesse all of these years. That ought to teach him….
I could do it, too. I could pull Paul’s soul out of his body and make it so that he could never return to it…
…by giving that body to someone else. Someone who deserved a chance to live again….
But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t kiss Paul’s lips, even if I knew it was Jesse inside them, kissing me back. It was just too… gross.
It was as I was lying there thinking this that I heard it, a sound my ears had become so finely attuned to over the past year that I could have been at the Super Bowl, a million rows away, and I still would have heard it.
Jesse’s voice.
He was calling to someone. I couldn’t hear what, exactly, he was saying. But he sounded, I don’t know. Different, somehow.
He was getting closer, too. His voice, I mean.
He was coming toward the barn.
He’d found me. I don’t know how—Dr. Slaski hadn’t said anything about ghosts being able to travel through time. But maybe they could. Maybe they could, just like shifters, and Jesse had done it, he’d come back through time looking for me. To save me. To help me save him.
I closed my eyes, thinking his name as hard as I could. This worked, more often than not. Jesse would materialize in front of me, wondering what on earth was so urgent.
Only he didn’t. Not this time. I opened my eyes, and… nothing.
Only I could still his voice below me. He was saying, “No, no, it’s all right, Mrs. O’Neil.”
Mrs. O’Neil. Mrs. O’Neil could see Jesse?
The barn door opened. I heard it creak. Then…
Footsteps.
But how could Jesse have footsteps? He’s a ghost.
Wriggling as far toward the edge of the hayloft as I could, I craned my neck, trying to see what I could only hear. But the rope Paul had used to tie my feet to the post wouldn’t let me wiggle more than a few feet from my original position. I could hear him now, though—really hear him. He was speaking in a soft, soothing tone to… to…
To his horse.
Jesse was talking to a horse. I heard it whinny softly in reply.
Which was when I finally knew. This wasn’t Ghost Jesse, come to rescue me. This was Alive Jesse, who didn’t even know me. Alive Jesse, come to meet his fate in my room tonight.