Beck closed his laptop, placed his hands on the table, and looked her in the eye. “Wren.”
“Yeah?” Her eyes darted to the side anxiously.
“What is this really all about?”
It took a moment for her gaze to return to him, then she just stared at him for a few seconds, although he was pretty sure she wasn't really looking at him. She was thinking about something, gnawing on her lip until it turned red and puffy. He let her think, sat quietly until she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
“I need to ask you to do something,” she said.
“Okay. What?” He wasn't sure what he expected, but it definitely wasn't what came out of her mouth.
“I need you to come to Chloe and Miranda's house. With me.”
With all that setup he half expected her to ask him to duel for her honor or change her oil or something.
“Chloe and Miranda's?” he asked, certain confusion was evident on his face.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I need to show you something.”
“At their house?”
“Right.”
“And I don't suppose you want to tell me what that something is?” he asked.
Wren sighed. “It's really something you have to see for yourself.” She fiddled with her pen, clicking it a few times. “I swear it's not something weird. Well, I mean, it's kind of weird, I guess, but not like Come check out the severed heads in my freezer kind of weird.”
Beck snorted. “Well, that's a relief.”
Wren covered her face with her hands, murmuring to herself before sweeping her hair back and giving him a level look. “Okay, I know this is all really strange, but I swear it's important. I'm pretty sure—I think you—” She shook her head, obviously frustrated. “I can't explain it all now, but I will. Just . . . will you come with me? Please?”
Yeah, it was strange. Wren was kind of strange. Thing is, Beck kind of dug it. He dug her.
“Okay,” he said. “When?”
Wren winced. “Now?”
“Now?”
“Yeah.” She watched him, her hands clenched so tightly in front of her that her knuckles were white.
He gathered up his books and stuffed them in his backpack, not sure if he was more embarrassed or irritated. “Okay, let's go to Chloe's,” he said. “But next time you can ask me outright, you know? You don't have to go through all the hair flipping and Can we study together stuff.”
“I wasn't—”
“It's fine.”
To his surprise, Wren looked outright indignant. “It is not fine,” she snapped. “I am not one of those mindless blonde bimbos who bats her eyelashes to get what she wants.”
“I never said—”
“Yeah, you did. Maybe not in so many words, but you did.” In the silence that followed, Beck could hear her breathing shakily, but he didn't meet her eyes. He didn't know what to think. He felt like an idiot thinking Wren maybe liked him, when she really wanted something from him, whatever it was.
“I meant it,” she said quietly. “The studying and the hanging out. Beck, I . . . I do like you, okay?”
He glanced up to find her studying her pen, twisting it between her fingers, and a rush of relief swept through his chest.
“You don't sound too happy about that fact,” he said, unable to keep back a wry smile.
Wren rolled her eyes. “Well, you're kind of a jerk, sometimes.”
“Only sometimes? I'd say we're making progress.”
“Oh my God.” She shook her head. “More than sometimes. Most of the time—”
“No, no, you said sometimes. No take backs.” Beck grinned, enjoying her discomfort immensely.
“No take backs? What are you, twelve?”
“You like me. What does that make you?”
Wren stood and threw her backpack over her shoulder. “I'm regretting this friendship already. I'm regretting everything. I'm regretting my life.”
She turned to stalk away and Beck quickened his step to catch up, throwing an arm over her shoulders. She didn't shrug it off, but she also didn't look at him and her face burned bright red. He decided to give her a break and tell her the truth.
“Just for the record,” he said, leaning down to speak into her ear. “I like you, too.”
Wren didn't say a word, but her lips quirked up—just a little—and Beck slid his arm from around her and found her hand, linking their fingers.
She didn't pull away.
Beck found a parking spot in front of the Alpha House, his eyes immediately drawn to the blue Victorian across the street, for some reason. He got out of the car without looking away from it, taking in the peaked roof, front porch, and elaborate stained-glass window taking up a good portion of the first floor.
“Ready?” Wren asked, her quiet voice jolting him out of his examination. He'd been distracted, almost in a daze, and it took him a moment to respond.
“Yeah,” he said with a crack in his voice. He followed Wren up the walkway, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu, for some reason. She lifted her fist to knock, and for no apparent reason, he grabbed her wrist to stop her.
She swallowed, obviously nervous, although he didn't know why. “What's wrong?” she asked.
Beck couldn't explain it. It wasn't something wrong per se, just an odd feeling of inevitability or anticipation or something. Like something was about to change, although he didn't know what or how. He let Wren go, and his hand trembled as he stuck it in his pocket.
“I don't know,” he whispered. “Something feels—”
Wren nodded, like she expected it somehow. “It's okay. It'll be okay. I promise.”
Beck wasn't sure he believed her, but he stood back as she knocked on the door anyway. Chloe answered, looking between them both with a questioning expression.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
Wren shrugged. “I guess we'll see.”
“Did you tell—”
“I think it's better to just show him,” Wren replied firmly, despite Chloe's nervous glance in his direction.
Chloe shrugged and stepped back to allow them in. To his surprise, instead of heading to the living room, Wren started up the stairs. He hesitated, but Chloe held out a hand to direct him to follow, so he did. He heard her close the front door behind him, her soft treads on the steps as she took up the rear of their strange little group.
Wren didn't hesitate when she got to the second floor, but continued down the hall and up a ladder Beck assumed led to the attic. A muted anxiety raced along his skin, his stomach fluttering with a nervousness he couldn't explain, and he rubbed a hand over his head, just for something to do with it. He didn't ask questions, not wanting to disrupt the hush that had fallen over them. Instead, he put one foot in front of the other, climbed the ladder and emerged in the sloped-roof attic, brushing dust off his hands and looking toward Wren expectantly.
She waved a hand toward the far corner. “Do you see anything unusual over there?” she asked.
He followed the motion, his gaze sweeping over the expected contents of an attic—stacks of boxes, luggage, pieces of furniture—and settled on a wooden chest that seemed as if it belonged there, but was still strangely out of place.
“He feels it,” Chloe whispered.
“I know.”
“Feels what?” Beck's sharp words cracked in the quiet room. “What are you guys talking about?”
“You need to explain it to him first,” Chloe told Wren.
She huffed out a humorless laugh. “How?”
“He needs to know what he's getting into.”
“Again, I ask . . . how?” Wren said with a glare.
Chloe glared right back. “Show him.”
“I swear to God,” Beck growled. “If somebody doesn't tell me what's going on, I am walking out that door.”
“Okay!” Wren threw up her hands. “Okay . . . just.” She took a deep breath and turned to face him. “Look at me, all right?”
“But-”
“Look at me.” Wren reached out to grab his upper arms. “I promise, this will explain everything—or at least give us somewhere to start.”
Beck still didn't have a clue what she was talking about, but he stilled, watching her carefully. “Okay.”
She stepped back, releasing his arms. “Don’t take your eyes off me.”
“I said okay. Would you—”
But then, in the blink of an eye—less than that, since Beck didn't even blink—she was gone. Disappeared right in front of him. Poof.
He barely registered Chloe's smug look before he spun around and found Wren on the other side of the room, sitting on an old dresser.
“What the—”
Then she was gone again, appearing back where she'd been before and watching him with nervous eyes.
“How—How did you—” He couldn't even form the sentence, unable to believe what he'd just witnessed. Beck suddenly felt a little lightheaded, and he slumped into a rickety old chair, dust puffing up around him. When it settled, he bent over, head between his knees and breathed deeply. The others didn't say a word, just let him get ahold of himself, and eventually, he sat back up and looked at Wren.
“What was that? How did you do that?” he asked. “Did I just see—” Maybe he'd hallucinated. That made as much sense as anything, really.
“You did,” Chloe replied quietly.
Wren took another deep breath, like she was preparing herself. “I can manipulate time,” she said finally.
“Time.”
“Right.”
“You're telling me you can manipulate time.”
“Yes.” She shrugged. “More like freezing it for a bit. I've been working on speeding it up and slowing it down. The slowing down is easier, I guess because it's more like freezing, which is the easiest. But—”
Beck burst out laughing. “Right. Of course it is.” He leaned back into the chair and it creaked under his weight as he snorted. “Freezing is the easiest. That makes perfect sense.”
“She's telling the truth,” Chloe said, brow furrowed as if annoyed by his laughter.
“Come on, you guys. Enough's enough.” Beck wiped tears from the corners of his eyes. “What's really—”
“You almost wore a white t-shirt this morning,” Chloe said, eyeing his blue one. “You had it on, but you spilled something on it. Something red. Ketchup, maybe? So you had to change.”
Beck stilled. “How could you—how could you know that?”
“Chloe sees things,” Wren replied. “She gets visions.”
Beck swallowed. This wasn't so funny anymore. “That's . . . not possible.”
“You threw it toward the hamper, but you missed,” Chloe said. “Overshot it—guess that's why you don't play basketball.”
The lightheadedness was coming back. Beck forced himself to breathe evenly, steadily. There was no way Chloe could have known that. He was alone in the house. Alone in his room. Unless . . .
“Did you hack my webcam or something?”
Wren snorted. “Chloe doesn't know the first thing about computers.”
“Hey!”
“It's true.”
Chloe frowned. “I know, but you don't have to say it like that.”
It didn't matter. Beck knew that wasn't possible anyway. His laptop had been packed away in his backpack. He'd just run up to switch shirts—already running late—and threw the dirty one toward the hamper, no time to grab it when he missed.
“Tabasco,” he said. This was too much. It was impossible. But—
“What?” Wren asked.
“It was Tabasco. Not ketchup,” he replied. “I spilled Tabasco sauce on my shirt this morning. That's why I had to change.
“Now I think you guys need to start from the beginning,” he said. “And please, go slow.”
So they did. They told him about Chloe's house, and the window—her visions of the past, present and possible future—That seems like it would be kind of frustrating, he said. You have no idea, Chloe replied. Beck took it all in with shocked incredulity that slowly twisted into cautious acceptance after a few more examples of their unbelievable abilities. Regardless of how outlandish the story was, he could find no other explanation. It was impossible, but he slowly realized it was true. It had to be true. And as soon as he thought the words, let the doubt ease just a little, he realized he believed it. He believed them, or at least he was beginning to.
They told him about the wooden chest and Wren's gift, about the vision Chloe had of him in the middle of some great battle against a giant smoke monster—Wren's words, not his—and finally about her most recent vision: Beck sitting there, with them at that moment in the attic before opening the chest in the corner for himself.
“So, you're saying it's inevitable.” He glanced sideways at the chest in the corner. “I'm going to open it.”
“You have a choice,” Chloe replied. “You could leave right now and never come back. I only see what could be.”
“And if I open it, what then? What happens?”
Wren sighed. “We don't know for sure.”
“But you have an idea.”
Chloe nodded slowly. “It's Miranda's idea actually. She thinks the chest appears for those who are chosen.”
“Chosen by who? For what?”
“Who? We have no idea,” Chloe replied, shaking her head. “As for what? To fight, we think.” She took a seat across from him on a rolled up rug. “That smoke . . . thing . . . it can enter people. Make them do crazy things.” Chloe rubbed her eyes. “We don't know what it is. What it's going to do next. But Wren's gift helped stop it once. At least for a while.”
“But it’s not gone forever,” Wren added. “And if Chloe's vision is right, it‘s going to get stronger until, at some point, it will take more than us—a lot more—to defeat it.”
“We think maybe you've been chosen, too,” Chloe said. “For a gift. One that will help us fight.”
“And the gift is in the box?”
“That's the theory,” Chloe replied. “If you decide to accept it.”
Beck thought about that for a moment. “But if I don't open it. If I choose not to then I wouldn't be there, at that fight in the field, right?”
“I don't know,” Chloe said honestly. “Probably not.”
“And you two will.”
“Yeah.” Wren shrugged. “We've kind of accepted that.”
The idea of the two of them facing whatever that smoke monster was—what it could do—did not sit well with Beck. There was no way he'd turn and run if they were going to stand and fight. He stood up and stretched. “Well, I can't let you guys have all the fun.”
Chloe got up as well, and Wren grabbed his wrist. “Are you sure about this?”
Beck grinned. “Hey, fate has spoken . . . or whatever.”
“You have a choice,” Chloe said again.
“I know. I know.” Beck nodded, waving a hand dismissively. “And it looks like I'm making it.”
He walked to the chest and glanced at them over his shoulder. “So I just open it?”
“Yeah.” Wren gripped Chloe's hand, knuckles white.
Beck, never one to delay ripping off the Band-Aid, flipped the top open and looked inside.
“What do you see?” Wren asked, and he realized they'd both approached and were looking over his shoulders.
“Just an old glove,” he replied. “You don't see it?”
He could feel them shake their heads although he didn't look up. The glove was worn black leather, long enough to fit up over his wrist by several inches. It lay crumpled in the corner of the box, discarded and forgotten.
“So, I should pick it up,” he said—not a question, so they didn't answer. The tension in the room ramped up another level, the silence of held breath making Beck's heart pound. He reached in and grabbed the glove.
A white light shot out of the chest, enveloping him and making him squint. He only felt the soft leather in his palm for
a moment. It quickly became a warmth—a tingling melting between his fingers like hot wax—and as he watched, the glove vanished before his eyes. His right hand glowed, pulsing lightly, and he held it up to examine it with awe. A glove of light enveloped his fingers, his palm, up over his wrist to the middle of his forearm. It sparked thoughts of knights and armor—a medieval gauntlet gripping a sword or a lance.
Then, just as quickly as it appeared, the light dissipated and he was left staring at his hand, flexing it tightly against the remnants of prickling heat until they evaporated as well.
He started, looking up to find Chloe and Miranda were both watching him with mouths dropped open.
“So,” he said. “That was interesting.”
“Do you . . . feel anything?” Wren asked.
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “I don't know. Anything.”
He finally lowered his hand and took stock of his body, tilted his head, rolled his shoulders, took a few steps and raised his eyebrows.
“I don't really know what I'm supposed to feel.”
Chloe approached him slowly, but stopped at arm's distance. “Maybe it has to sink in.”
“What does?”
“It happened right away with me,” Wren countered.
“Maybe it's happening and we don't know it's happening,” Chloe replied.
Beck huffed. “Nothing is happening. I'd know if something was happening.”
“Would you?” Chloe narrowed her eyes.
“Wouldn't I?” He looked at Wren, who shrugged. No help there.
Beck's phone buzzed and he frowned, thumbing open a text from his dad. How could he have forgotten the meeting with CPS?
“I've gotta go,” he said, heading for the ladder.
“I don't know if that's such a great idea.” Chloe rushed to catch up to him. “Until we know what's going on with you, maybe—”
“I'm fine,” he replied, hurrying down the ladder and striding toward the stairs. “I've got to get over to my dad's. There's . . . stuff I have to deal with.”
Maybe it was all over. Maybe Tru was theirs, finally. He threw open the front door.
“But—”
He whirled on Chloe. “Look, I really have to go. I promise, if time stops or moves backward or I start flying or shooting lightning out of my fingers, I'll let you know right away, okay?”
Super Powers: The New Super Humans, Book Two Page 3