The bottle fell from my hand and smashed.
I should have known. I should have figured it out as soon as my head started buzzing over breakfast. “How the hell did you know I was here?”
“How do you think?”
“Dammit, Shane, haven’t you heard of phones? I thought my head was going to split open in there.” I slammed my hands into his broad chest, shoving him back, shoving him away, but he caught them and held them.
“You didn’t leave a number.” His voice had gone dangerously low. I stepped back, coming up hard against the side of the Dumpster, and he pursued me, hands still covering mine. “No address, nothing. What the fuck was I supposed to do?”
Our gazes locked, and I went still. We both knew my number wasn’t listed. We both knew I hadn’t wanted to be found.
My breath went shallow. It had been five years since I’d seen him, but ten times that wouldn’t have been enough for me to forget. I still remembered what it had been like to share thoughts with him as easily as breathing. I still knew his mind the way I knew the planes of his cheekbones and the café au lait color of his skin. The last night I’d spent with him went tunneling through my head before I could stop it—one hand clasping my waist, rough fingers tracing circles on my shoulder as I lay on top of him. Shane’s teeth light on my bottom lip. His eyes dilated, and I knew he could see it.
For a moment, I thought he was about to lean in. He was that close. It would’ve been that easy. My heart pounded, but I closed my eyes and turned my head, and he dropped my hands. “Jesus, Cass.” He stepped back and ran his hands over his close-cropped black hair and down his face.
“What are you doing here?” It was easier to look at the garbage on the ground than at him.
“I know you don’t want to see me.” He paused long enough that I had to look up. “It’s important.”
It finally registered that there was more in his voice than five years of anger. It took me a moment to place his emotional state amidst my own panic, but once I did, it was unmistakable. Grief. I couldn’t voice a question. I was too afraid I should be asking who was dead.
“It’s Mina,” he said, and my heart stopped. “She’s missing.”
His sister. It took all I had not to reach for him. Shane noticed, or maybe he read my thoughts. His lips went thin.
“How long?” I asked.
“Almost thirty-six hours. She went out fishing and didn’t come back.”
Thirty-six hours with no contact. Already I suspected the worst.
“Look,” Shane said, “you’ve got more range than the rest of us. And you were like a sister to her. Maybe you’ll pick up something I missed.”
I sensed the hint of desperation beneath his words. For Shane to leave the search to come and find me, they must be running out of hope.
My throat tightened with held-back tears. Mina, who’d taught me how to mindmove, how to light candles and matches from yards away. Who’d helped me sneak out of my foster parents’ house to go listen to bands in the Quarter, who’d known about my feelings for her brother almost before I had, and who’d helped me pick out a shirt for our first real date.
Mina, whom I’d never told goodbye.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ve just got to make an excuse to get out of here.”
“Who’s the guy in the bar? Jackson.”
I didn’t ask how he knew. His voice didn’t betray any emotion, but I could tell it was there. Not jealousy—more like resignation.
“Just a friend. Coworker. It won’t be a problem.”
Shane nodded, still expressionless, and I went back through the alley door.
When I got to my spot at the bar, Jackson was gone, and the bartender was guarding our seats from an angry-looking crowd holding their drinks. At least the woman I’d knocked into was gone.
“Jack’ll be right back,” the bartender said. “He just got a phone call.”
“Oh.” Perfect. “Well, could you tell him I caught a cab home?” I started backing away. “I’ll see him at work.”
“Hey, wait, he’ll be back in a second...”
“I really have to go,” I said, and darted for the back door. As I turned away, the goth fairy I’d beat out earlier claimed my seat.
* * *
Shane was waiting for me, leaning against the cinderblock wall of the defunct car dealership next to the bar, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans. Now that I was over the shock of seeing him, I noticed that he hadn’t shaved, and his dark eyes were bloodshot. Not that it made much difference. He’d always been hard to mess up.
“We can catch a cab on Market.” I led the way down Mission. He hadn’t dressed for the damp, chilly weather, and there was gooseflesh on the brown skin of his arms. He’d put on weight since I’d seen him last, mostly muscle. It showed through the tight T-shirt he wore, in the way he walked. He caught my eye and I flushed, hoping he hadn’t noticed me noticing. I hailed a cab at the corner.
“Our flight leaves at ten o’clock,” he said as we got in. “Red-eye.”
“You already booked tickets?”
“Call me an optimist.”
I didn’t reply. When we got to my building, I asked the driver to wait. I unlocked the security gate and led Shane up the two flights to my place, wishing I’d cleaned it up that morning. As the door swung open, he stepped back.
“Holy shit, Cass. What happened in here?”
“I had a nightmare.” I walked in without looking at him and threw my keys on the table in the hall. He followed slowly, no doubt taking in the empty walls. Picture frames were a liability. I went straight to my tiny closet and started yanking T-shirts and sweaters out of the overstuffed drawers. It was fall, and I knew the weather in Louisiana could go either way.
“A nightmare?” Shane was standing in my bedroom doorway, looking at the mess. The books that used to be on my ceiling-height bookshelf were jumbled on the floor, some of them open, pages torn out. My robe was hanging from the light fixture above the bed, and broken glass from a smashed mirror was all over the floor rug. I knew from experience that some of the glass had been pulverized and shoved deep into the fibers. There was no getting it out. I was going to have to throw it away.
“It’s happening again?” His voice was soft, and I didn’t dare look at him.
“No.” I shoved underwear and two pairs of jeans into my carry-on. “Not that often.” There’d been a time when I lost control in my sleep nearly every night. I was past that now. Mostly. The dream came back to me, the panic still fresh. I’d been drowning, fighting a current in muddy water, a voice I couldn’t quite recognize screaming at me in pursuit.
The shields around my mind faltered, and I felt Shane’s concern, tinged with that same protective edge he’d had when he was training me. I knew he was about to ask more, but I pushed past him to the cramped bathroom in the hall. I shut the door and stuffed toiletries into my bag, taking a moment to brush my stick-straight hair into a ponytail. It was too short for it, and blond wisps snuck out of the band. I leaned my head against the mirror and closed my eyes.
It’ll just be a few days, I told myself, knowing it probably wasn’t true.
It had been five years since I’d been in New Orleans, five years since I’d used my powers—consciously, anyway. It had taken me three of those years to start living anything close to a normal life, and I still trashed my bedroom in my sleep every time I had a bad dream. Going back, letting my abilities loose again—was I going to have to start all over? Don’t think about it. Just don’t think about it.
I stayed in the bathroom until the panic ebbed away. I don’t know how long I was in there, but when I came out, Shane was still waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall. He must have heard everything I’d been thinking, but he didn’t comment.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“Then let’s go.”
* * *
We didn’t talk much on the plane. Shane gave me the window seat, and I was grateful. I didn’t want to sit with my leg
crammed next to the guy in the aisle seat, who was playing some sort of first-person driving game on his phone. I’d never be able to block out his thoughts if I was touching him, and I sure didn’t want to hear them. Men really did think about sex every seven seconds.
As it was, I was working as hard as I could to avoid Shane’s mind. He took up too much space in the seat beside mine, his thigh brushing my leg, his arm grazing my shoulder. We shifted away from each other in silent mutual agreement, but each brief contact was enough for me to catch a flash of his mood—anguish like a deep pit of black water, spikes of white-hot fear, ripples of anger and annoyance. I didn’t know what was for Mina and what was for me.
I wanted to know more about what happened, but I knew better than to mindspeak. It took practice to keep your mental voice from wandering. It took practice not to pick up things you’d rather not see.
Eventually, I fell asleep slumped against the bulkhead with a flimsy airplane pillow wedged under my neck. I don’t know whether Shane slept, but when the plane started its descent at 4:00 a.m. and I woke up with stiff joints and a cottony mouth, he was watching me. I looked out the window at the oil refineries lighting up the swampy land to the west of the airport, sodium lamps and occasional flames decorating the blackness. Neither one of us spoke.
When we landed, Shane carried my bag through the airport. Everything was closed up and dark—the praline shop, the frozen yogurt stand, the fried chicken place. Even the security guards were quiet. In the long-term parking garage, Shane’s red ‘67 Camaro was the only car in the lane.
Christ, I’d managed to make myself forget that car.
We’d had our first kiss in it—my first kiss. Spring of my junior year of high school. Shane was fixing the Camaro up himself at the body shop where he worked, and every week something new showed up—vinyl upholstery on the seats, a fresh coat of paint, the trash bag on the back right window swapped for glass. The night it was finished, I snuck out to see him. We parked on the lakefront, mentally warming the air inside until we had to take our jackets off.
“See?” he said. “It’s easy.”
“Sure, once you know how.”
“You picked it up fast.”
I traced a line through the condensation that collected on the cold window glass. “You’re a good teacher.” For once, I hadn’t looked away when he met my eyes.
That was the night my adolescent crush gave way to something bigger, something I hadn’t dreamed he shared. It was everything those moments usually are, all lust and fumbling, but with Shane there was more, his hands and his mind both running over me hard and fast, me gasping and pulling him closer, feeling the first twinges of real desire in the pit of my belly. I’d been certain I’d never feel that way again. Turned out I was right.
I looked up to find Shane watching me where I’d frozen in the middle of the walkway.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Embarrassment made my tone sharp. I followed him to the car.
“We don’t know.” He stowed my bag and slammed the trunk a little harder than necessary. “She went out fishing. I dropped her off at Ruddock before sunrise on Thursday. I was supposed to pick her up that afternoon, but I never heard from her.”
“You tried to contact her?”
“Every half hour. Nothing.” His voice was even, but fear and exhaustion were whipping around him. Mina was his twin sister. They could hear each other through sleep, through storms. She’d gone off on her own before, sometimes for days, and no one would worry, but if she wasn’t answering Shane, something was wrong.
“Where have you looked?”
“We’ve been all over the Northshore. But you know how much ground there is to cover.”
I thought of the spiderweb of rivers and creeks that fed Lake Pontchartrain from the north. So many isolated places, so many ways she could have been hurt. Mina’s powers kept her from minor troubles, but being telekinetic wouldn’t help you if you got hit by a speedboat or had your leg torn off by an alligator. Gruesome images flooded my mind.
I shut them down. “I’ll help however I can.”
“I won’t ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.” His voice was hard. He pulled out of the parking garage and headed for Veterans Boulevard.
“You know I’d do anything for Mina,” I said, stung. I owed her that, at least. When I’d been fumbling through the first surges of real power, she’d taught me how to recite the ABCs to keep my errant mind occupied. She’d even shown me how to lock my feelings for Shane away. Back when I was fourteen and hopelessly in love with him, I’d needed that more than I’d needed food.
Shane just nodded and kept staring straight ahead, one hand on top of the wheel, the muscles in his jaw tense. The skin on his knuckles was scuffed and scarred, and grease blackened a crack in the pad of his thumb. I still remembered everything he could do with those hands. I turned to look at the houses rushing past the passenger-side window, and it took me ten minutes to notice we were headed in the wrong direction.
“Aren’t we going to the B&B?” Shane’s uncle Lionel, my former foster father, had a place in the Quarter, Tanner’s Bed and Breakfast. Shane and Mina still lived there and helped run the place.
Shane shook his head. “We’re going straight to Ruddock. Janine’s meeting us.”
“Hasn’t she looked already?” I asked, surprised. Janine was like me and the Tanners—a shadowmind—but she wasn’t a converter; she couldn’t move things with her mind or create light or heat. You could never tell how the gift would manifest in different people, and Janine had an ability none of us had. If she had enough of a connection to something—a person, an object—she could pin down its location within inches. She was like a human GPS tracker with unlimited targets, a little like what used to be called a dowser. If she’d lived a few hundred years ago, she might have been finding water sources or oil deposits. Now there weren’t enough people who believed those kinds of things were possible, so she married a converter from New Orleans, raised two kids, and never lost her car keys.
“She’s searched three times now, but Lionel thinks it’s worth trying again with another set of memories.”
“Of course I’ll try,” I said, but I was fighting down panic. I’d known this was coming, but I’d thought I’d have more time to prepare. The sedatives I’d taken the night before were still in my system, and they’d make my powers sluggish, if I could use them at all.
Shane must have felt my anxiety, but he didn’t say anything. His hand rose as if he was going to reach out and take mine, but he checked himself and put it back on the wheel.
It took us another half hour to ride out to Ruddock as the sun came up over the elevated interstate, the Spanish moss-draped cypress trees lining the road dark against the lightening sky. As Shane pulled into a dusty parking lot just off the exit, I saw Lionel there, leaning against his blue-and-white pickup.
Shane parked the car on the edge of the lot and looked over at me. “If you don’t think you can do it, it’s all right. Just tell me.”
I looked back at him. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and got out of the car.
Chapter Two
Lionel walked up to meet us, and before I could say hello, he had me in a bear hug. I stiffened automatically at the contact, but being near Lionel was as comforting as always, and I relaxed as I breathed in the smell of him—soap and coffee.
“Welcome home, sugar,” he said, pressing a rough kiss on my cheek. The lines around his mouth were deeper than I remembered, and gray stubble showed starkly against his dark skin. “How’s California?”
“It’s okay.” I blinked back tears. Shane was hanging back, leaning against the side of his car, giving me a moment with his uncle.
“You can tell me about it later, yeah?”
“Yeah, okay.” I pressed my lips together and looked toward the boat ramp. Janine Tooley was there, helping her son Ryan get their aluminum-hull fishing boat into the water. I waited until they were done to walk up and greet th
em.
“Been a long time.” Janine pulled me into a fierce hug. “I wish the circumstances were better.”
“Me, too.”
Janine was one of the first shadowminds I’d met after Lionel. She had the plump, comfortable figure of a woman who loves good food, and her light brown hair was always a little unkempt. The sight of it coming loose from its ponytail was so familiar I almost cried. Janine squeezed my arms. “Well, I’m glad you’re back anyhow. We’ve all missed you, hon.”
An awkward silence followed, and I tried not to look at Shane. I was relieved when Ryan came up and passed out faded orange life preservers, breaking the tension. When he got to me, he lifted his baseball cap to kiss me on the cheek, and his mind brushed against mine, handshake-casual. It was just common courtesy for a converter, but I stiffened and shut down. I realized belatedly that Shane and Lionel must have known not to make mental contact with me.
“You doing all right?” Ryan asked. He was a full foot taller than his mother, lean and tan from working on the rigs, and I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes. He was looking at me with concern, no doubt confused by my response. We’d had whole conversations in mindspeech. I shrugged and pulled on my life vest. Hopefully he’d chalk up my reaction to the news about Mina.
We packed into the boat, me a little unsteadily as it rocked under our shifting weight, and Janine took the wheel while Ryan telekinetically coiled the prow line and started the motor. He stayed on idle. The channel was lined with dusty fishing camps on wooden stilts, and we had to keep our wake down.
“When will the police get involved?” I asked as we moved through the channel, water shushing against the sides of the boat. “Shouldn’t they be out here searching by now?”
“Oh, they put her in the system,” Shane said. “They just don’t think she’s in danger. They insinuated she went off on purpose.” I could feel his anger, sharp and hot.
“It’s not like you can tell them how you know she’s in trouble,” Ryan said, smiling humorlessly.
Shane grumbled, but it was the truth. Even if the police believed us—doubtful—it was too risky to reveal ourselves. I could count on one hand the number of normals we’d trusted with the knowledge of our existence.
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