by Dune, Kyra
My mind flashed back to the empty eyes of the waitress at the truck stop. “Yes. I understand. It... it’s hard is all. To think of...” I shook my head. “But, no. You’re right. Telling her would be a mistake. I wish you hadn’t told me.”
“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, and in his eyes I could see he truly meant it. “I know you don’t need this on you right now. But I was thinking last night that maybe me and you could do something to stop the madness.
“Megara’s way is all wrong. You don’t change the world by killing everyone who doesn’t agree with you. You change it by taking the blinders off their eyes and making them see the truth. She’s everything they fear a hybrid will be, but you aren’t. You’re what happens when a hybrid is allowed to live and grow without being hunted down like a rabid dog. We can make the world see that.”
I tilted my head back and looked up at the sky. Did he know what he was doing to me? How much harder he was making all of this? “I just want to go home.”
“Abby.” He tugged on my hands to make me face him again. “You can’t go home and you know it.”
Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes with no warning. “I don’t want to know it.” Then I was crying. I mean, really crying, and I hated to do that in front of someone I barely knew.
Jonah rose up on his knees, grasped my arms, and pulled me to him in an awkward kind of hug. “I understand. I do. But you have a choice to make now. The same choice I had to make once. You can try and turn this into a way of making things better, or you can cave in. It’s all up to you. Nobody can make that choice for you.”
For a moment, I rested my cheek against the soft fabric of his shirt. But only for a moment. Then I pulled away and he let me. I got up and went to kneel beside the stream. I splashed my face with cool water. I breathed in. I breathed out. And I knew. I knew what I wanted and I knew what I needed. Only it didn’t matter. I knew that too. Sometimes we don’t get what we want. Sometimes we don’t get what we need. Sometimes we just have to make do with what we do get. No matter how crappy it is.
I stood up and turned around, pushing my hair back from my face with both hands. “Okay. Teach me how to meditate.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
As days passed, I settled myself into a routine. Up before my friends to grab a portable breakfast on my way to meet with Jonah. Training mixed in with a lot of talking about nothing much. He was right about us being friends helping.
The better I came to know Jonah, the easier it was to follow his directions. I guess it was all about trust. He stopped being a stranger and became instead someone I looked forward to hanging out with. Everything was easier when I was around him. He helped me to not think so much about the bad things. That helped too.
Afterwards, I would have lunch in the cafeteria with my friends. A quick lunch, I might add, with very little conversation on my part. I stayed mostly quiet out of fear of saying something that might give away what I was up to with Jonah.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong or bad, but I didn’t want to deal with Derek and Brandy freaking out about it. And they would. Besides, in a weird kind of way, it was kind of nice to have something that was only mine.
And then, of course, training with Megara, where I couldn’t seem to put anything Jonah was teaching me to good effect. She was so fast, and I was clamping down too tight on my emotions to strike back at her. I was improving a little, but only with defenses. I couldn’t hit her back.
No matter how far I was coming with Jonah, a little voice in the back of my mind kept insisting if I let myself go I would kill her. Like that woman at the airport. She came at me with a gun, but I could have taken it away from her without killing her. Instead, I slammed her up against a wall and smashed her head in. I didn’t mean to, but she was just as dead.
I’d take my bruised body back to our room and eat dinner there. Usually by myself. Then I’d hit the shower and fall into bed, where I’d crash out almost soon as my head hit the pillow. Only to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.
It started to feel as if I were reliving the same day over and over. Everything got blurry around me and I lost all track of time. I couldn’t have said what day of the week it was, much less the date.
I barely even noticed it when Stephanie arrived. She was nothing but another face I didn’t spend much time looking at. You may be wondering if I ever stopped to think about how I was pulling myself away from the people who mattered most to me. I wish I could say yes. I’d feel so much better about myself if I could. But I’m not going to lie. Not now.
I thought about Zack, though. At least at first. But then it got to where I didn’t even think about him. I went into this kind of daze and I did it on purpose without realizing it. The only time I felt any happiness was when I was with Jonah. When I was around my friends, when I was thinking about Zack, it was all too hard. Too complicated. My friends were safe and Zack didn’t want anything to do with me, so why think about any of it?
So imagine my surprise when on my way to meet Jonah one morning, I came around a corner and nearly ran directly into Zack. I skidded to a stop. “Oh my god!” I clapped a hand to my chest. “You scared me. What are you doing lurking around back here?”
“I’m not lurking,” Zack said with a scowl. “I was waiting for you.”
“Oh?” I pushed my hair back behind one ear. “What would make you think I’d be here? At this time? In the morning?” I laughed. Why did I laugh? I don’t know, I was nervous. Give me a break.
“Isn’t this the way you always come when you go sneaking off to meet Jonah?”
My heart leapt directly into the middle of my throat. “What? That’s” again with the laugh, “silly. What are you talking about?” I put my hands on my hips and gave my head a little toss. “I have no idea what you mean.” Oh yeah, I was super smooth.
“Cut the act.” Zack stepped in closer to me. “Every day you meet up with Jonah a couple of halls down from here and the two of you sneak off to some part of the bunker where the electricity doesn’t even run. I’ve seen you. So don’t try to tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“You’ve been spying on me?” Heat crawled up the side of my neck. “That is really creepy. Have you been sneaking into my room at night to watch me sleeping too?”
A little frown line pinched his forehead. “What?”
I rolled my eyes. “Never mind. You have some nerve, did you know that? Sneaking around. Following me. If you wanted to know what I was doing, then why didn’t you ask? Oh yeah, that’s right, it would be kind of hard to ask when you haven’t even bothered showing up once since we got here.”
“You don’t need another useless friend hanging around,” he said. “Somebody has to watch your back and I’m the only one who seems interested in the job.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be happy he was concerned about me, or angry he felt I needed watching over. “Watch my back? For what? We’re perfectly safe down here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Are you for real?” I shook my head. “If you’ve been watching me so closely, then why is it you don’t know where I go with Jonah?”
He crossed his arms. “You’re easy to follow. Most of the time you’re so far inside your own head you don’t have a clue what’s going on around you. Jonah seems a little more observant. I thought he might catch me.”
“Look, I don’t need a babysitter, okay? I didn’t ask you to follow me around, but I am going to ask you to stop. And you better not tell anybody about me and Jonah. It’s none of your business.”
“Afraid Derek and Brandy wouldn’t approve of your new boyfriend?”
My mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. Oh. My. God. Zack was jealous. It was written in every tense muscle in his body. In the way his eyes narrowed at the corners whenever either one of us said Jonah’s name. At another time I would have been positively giddy at this revelation, but right then I was too mad for that. He didn’t have a right to be jealous. H
e didn’t have a right to start acting like he cared because he thought I was into someone else.
“I’m not playing this game with you,” I said. “Not anymore. It’s gotten real old, real fast. Either you want me or you don’t.” I brushed past him. “When you get it figured out, you let me know.”
Zack grabbed my arm and yanked me back into his chest. Then he kissed me. Kissed me, as if that alone would be enough. I gathered up what little air was between us and used it to shove him away.
He stumbled into the wall. Shock registered in his eyes, but it was quickly replaced by anger. And I won’t deny I felt a little thrill of fear. As many people as I’d seen him kill, I think I had the right.
I held up my hand. “Don’t you ever touch me like that again. You don’t get to treat me like dirt and ignore me, then kiss me because you think I’m with someone else. That is not how this works. I’m not some handy pair of lips and this is not some halfway kind of thing. It’s everything or nothing from here on out. Anything else hurts too much.” That was saying more than I really meant to, but once the words got started I couldn’t make them stop.
Zack kind of slumped and then he looked at the floor. Something I’d never seen him do before. “You know I’m not any good at...” He sighed. “You’d be better off with Jonah anyway.”
Was he dense or what? “Did you hear anything I just said? I’m not with Jonah. He’s training me. That’s all.”
“Training you?” Zack gave me this puzzled look. “What do you mean?”
Did you ever want to smack someone for asking you a stupid question? Then you know exactly how I was feeling right then. “I think training is pretty much self-explanatory.”
“What kind of training could a spirit dragon give you?”
“The kind I can’t get from anyone else.” I think he flinched at that, but it might have only been my overheated brain imagining things. “He’s teaching me how to center myself and let my powers flow through my emotions the way they’re supposed to.”
“But you’re training with Megara.”
I snorted. “Megara’s idea of training is to use me as a punching bag. I am learning from her too, but I’m getting a lot more from Jonah.” Okay, that time I’m almost sure he flinched.
“If it’s nothing but training, what’s with all the secrecy?”
“Jonah is worried if Megara found out she’d put a stop to it. And I’m worried Derek and Brandy will think the same thing you’re thinking. Which is so wrong. Jonah is my trainer. He... Well, I guess he’s my friend too. But that’s it.”
Zack eyed me like he was trying to decide whether or not I was lying. “Where are you training?”
I hesitated. Breaking my promise to Jonah was something I’d had no intention of doing, but if I refused to answer Zack then he’d go right back thinking I was lying. His jealously was kind of nice, in a way, but I didn’t want him walking away thinking I was with someone else.
“Jonah found a hidden way out of the bunker,” I said. “It leads out into the woods. That’s where we train. But it’s a secret. Megara would close it off if she knew. Come on, don’t look at me like that. I feel guilty enough about it already. I know it’s not fair to keep something like that to ourselves, but you can’t blame Jonah for wanting a way out.”
“Everyone down here wants a way out.”
“I know. But if I tell not only will I lose a place to train, I’ll lose Jonah. And I need him. You don’t want to hear me say it, but it’s true. Something we’re doing is working. I feel like I’m really starting to get a handle on my powers.”
Zack scowled. “Fine. But I want you to show me this hidden exit. I want to see where it goes.”
“Why?”
“If the bunker is attacked, don’t you think it would be good if we had another way out besides through the front door?”
He did make a good point. I nodded. “Tonight, after everyone’s asleep, I’ll meet you back here. I have to go now. Jonah’s waiting on me.”
“I don’t like that guy,” Zack said. “I don’t trust him. If he’s helping you now, he’s going to want something for it later.”
“You don’t even know him,” I said. “He’s not like that.”
“You’re awful quick to jump to his defense.”
“Because he’s my friend. I defend my friends.” I started down the hall, but paused before I turned the corner. I had something more to say and I was going to have to say it quick before I lost my nerve.
“When we meet up tonight, I want an answer.” It was so hard to meet his gaze, but I did it anyway. “You want me or you don’t. No more in-between.” I hurried away before he could say anything.
My heart raced and a low, sick feeling started in my guts. I could not believe I’d just given Zack an ultimatum. What if his answer was no? How was I going to deal with that? How do you go on if the person you love doesn’t love you back?
A few halls over, Jonah was waiting for me with two flashlights like always. He smiled and I smiled, but I cut my gaze away from his as I took one of the flashlights. The feeling in my guts wasn’t all worry, some of it was guilt too.
Like Zack said, the part of the bunker we entered wasn’t serviced by the generators. It was pitch black down those halls. Our flashlights barely made a dent. If we’d turned them off we would have been in that kind of darkness where you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed.
Our footsteps echoed off the walls. Our breath puffed little white clouds in the cold. Have you ever had the feeling the air was pressing down on you? That it was alive with ghosts or something? That’s how it felt to walk those deserted halls. It was no place I ever would have gone on my own.
Finally we came to an empty, smallish room with a trapdoor in the ceiling. I used a puff of air to push the right ceiling tile out of the way and bring the ladder down. The first time I did this, the ladder made such a racket my heart nearly exploded from fear that someone would hear.
It was just as loud now as then, but I’d gotten so used to it that it didn’t scare me anymore. Yet, I still found myself pausing for a moment with my breath held, hoping no one came around to see what the noise was all about.
Jonah tucked the flashlight into the waistband of his jeans and started up the ladder. I waited until he’d cleared the opening before I followed him. No matter how many times I’d done this, it still gave me a crawling feeling as my back scraped against the opposite wall.
Whoever made this vertical tunnel clearly had no extra padding on their bodies. I was by no means a large girl, but I wasn’t a stick figure either. My greatest fear was that my butt would get stuck and I would then die of embarrassment. It hadn’t happened, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it each and every time we did this.
It was always a relief when Jonah opened the hatch at the top and the muted sunlight hit my face.
We climbed out through a screening of brush and into the woods. The dirt path leading away was getting more pronounced than it had been the first time he brought me out there. “You know,” I said, “anybody coming from the other direction wouldn’t have too much trouble following our path right to the hatch.”
“Who would be out here?” Jonah asked. “We’re deep in the woods. Deeper than anybody would ever come. Don’t worry about it.”
Of course I worried about it. I don’t know if you noticed this, but I had a tendency to worry about everything.
Once we reached the stream, we settled down on the ground and started the training session the way we started all of them, with meditation. I never would have thought I would ever say this, but I was getting pretty good at it. I didn’t even need Jonah to guide me anymore.
I closed my eyes and dropped down inside myself to a wooded place not unlike the one surrounding us in the real world. Only my woods were much quieter. Nothing lived there. No birds. No insects. Not even the wind. Only me and the trees and the pond standing at the center of my inner world.
The water of this pond was a
shade of blue no water in the real world could ever be. I’d never dipped my hand into it, but I was sure if I did it wouldn’t be clear the way real water is. It would still be blue.
I knelt on the bank of the pond and leaned over to look down into it. Nothing was reflected back at me. Another way in which the pond wasn’t like real water. Jonah called this place the well spring of my power, which sounded kind of goofy to me, but whatever.
I kept on leaning until I lost my balance and fell forward. My mental eyes closed and my physical eyes opened. I never stayed long enough to know what would happen if I really let myself hit the water.
All the tension had drained out of my body, leaving me feeling calm and relaxed. “Okay.” I got to my feet. “I’m ready.”
Jonah went over and climbed up on the boulder. “Float me on over to the other side.”
I manipulated the air around the boulder and lifted it as easily as I would have lifted a pencil with my hand. A dragon’s power is less about force than it is about will. That’s why it works better if I don’t concentrate too hard. If I tried to make the air do what I wanted it to do then nothing would happen. Instead I had let the air do what I wanted it to do. Confused yet? Imagine how I felt.
The boulder settled down on the other side of the stream. “Enjoying your magic carpet ride?” I asked.
Jonah laughed. “If I were an air dragon I’d never walk again. Bring me back.”
I returned the boulder to its original spot, then, with no prompting from Jonah, I turned to the stream. It was easy enough to pluck out ten individual drops of water and bring them to me, but what I really wanted was to make an icicle weapon out of them the way I had seen Zack and Megara do. Wouldn’t that surprise her?