I couldn’t help but feel Mina two floors above, her mind present but mute. I looked at Shane and thought about what had just happened between us. Maybe I was being a coward, again, but I couldn’t think of a better way to protect Mina.
“I have an idea,” I said.
* * *
Mina and I left before sunrise.
We got a one-way rental car from a place by the airport, and I took the first shift, mentally scanning the road behind us as I drove. No one was following us, and the car was under my name. Whoever was after Mina was going to have to work hard to find us.
It was strange being around Mina without mindspeaking. On any other road trip we might have swapped mental stories or played a converter-style game of telephone, but I realized after an hour that I didn’t even need to guard my thoughts. She couldn’t tell how much I was thinking about her brother.
Then again, from the way we both avoided mentioning him, maybe she could.
Sometime after midnight, I pulled up to an off-brand fast food restaurant. Mina was sleeping slumped over in the passenger seat. I went through the drive-through, hoping not to wake her, but the intercom roused her.
“Hey.” She stretched and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
“Just outside Santa Fe. Want anything?”
She squinted at the illuminated plastic menu. “Ugh.”
“It was this or the Taco Hut.”
“Just get me a Sprite.”
I ordered myself a bacon cheeseburger and a large fries. I knew Mina would want some. When our order came, I parked under the sole working streetlight and unwrapped my burger. The overworked rental car engine pinged as it cooled.
“You want me to take over?” Mina asked. “You’ve been driving for eighteen hours.”
“I’m not tired.” It was true. Since I’d quit the pills, I was lying awake more than I was sleeping. “Fries?”
She grinned and took a few. “God. Remember that time? The milkshake?”
I laughed. I’d been in high school. Mina and I had gone to the Sonic down the block in Shane’s Camaro, and he’d made us promise to bring him back an order of fries. Of course we’d forgotten. Like a typical reckless teenager, I’d tried to mindmove an order right out of the warming tray, but I’d miscalculated and sent a milkshake soaring down the street. It had smacked right into the back of Shane’s head and dumped chocolate ice cream all over his pristine white Saints T-shirt. Mina had laughed so hard she’d snorted cherry lemonade out of her nose.
“The look on his face—I’ll never forget!”
“Me neither... Oh my God, Lionel was so mad!”
“He told me I couldn’t use my powers for a week. Just for being an accomplice.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Hey, I got off easy. I thought he was never going to let you use your powers again.”
“Ha. No such luck.”
The words were out before I caught them. Mina tried to cover the pain that flashed over her face with a smile, but I could tell it was forced. We both watched the bugs attack the streetlight.
Finally, I said, “I wish it had been me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. I don’t even want it. It should have been me.”
She turned toward me, fierce. “Well, it wasn’t.”
Neither of us said anything for a long moment.
“You’re sure...I mean, nothing’s back?” I asked. “Not even a twinge?”
She shook her head, then she rubbed her face and gave me a tired smile. “You really should get some rest. I can drive for a while.”
“Okay.” We switched places, and I looked out the window as she pulled back onto the interstate. It was five hours until dawn, and there were miles of desert in front of us.
* * *
We finally got to San Francisco at midnight on the second day. We’d slept in the car for a few hours at a rest stop outside Phoenix, but I still felt as though the only thing keeping me awake was willpower. When I unlocked the door to my apartment, I was ready to fall asleep in the hallway.
“Holy shit, Cass.” Mina set her suitcase down in my tiny living room while I went to the kitchen to see if there was anything edible. I found a box of frosted wheat squares. Hopefully the ants hadn’t found it, too.
“Yeah,” I said with my head still in the pantry. The only other option was uncooked pasta. “I guess it isn’t much.” The cereal was ant-free. I brought the box with me into the living room and started munching. It was stale. “Want some?”
“But what happened?” She was looking through the open door to my bedroom, and I groaned. I’d never had the chance to pick up the mess from my nightmare, and it still looked like the place had been destroyed by burglars. I remembered all the glass in the rug and slumped sideways against the wall.
“Nightmares,” I said heavily. “I did all that in my sleep.”
“Jesus.” She walked over to look at the pile of ripped-up books. “You can’t keep this up.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, tired and angry and thinking of the look on Shane’s face when we’d left. Mina’s eyes widened.
“What?”
“Easy for you to say.” She pronounced each word carefully, as though for the first time. I straightened up off the wall.
“What did you say?”
“Easy for you to say. That’s what you were thinking.” She stared at me. “I heard you.” Her face broke into an astonished grin. “I heard you!”
“Mina!” I grabbed her and hugged her tight. “What am I thinking now?” “Happy, so happy, so happy...”
“That’s too easy.” She smiled.
“Oh my God. Oh my God! Here—lift something! Lift that towel.” I pointed to a green-and-blue dishtowel hanging from the stove handle. Mina backed away from me, stared at it. It took a few moments, but then it rose anemically before wobbling back down again. Mina was breathing hard.
I let out a whoop. “This is amazing. This is—we have to call Shane!”
“No! No. Not yet.” She rubbed her palm. “It’s too soon—what if it doesn’t stay?”
“It will. I know it will.”
“It can wait until morning, at least,” she said, and I had to agree.
The adrenaline kept us up for another hour, but then the fatigue came rushing back. I bullied Mina into taking my bed while I made up the couch with blankets. It was comfortable enough, and I wasn’t planning on staying long, anyway. As soon as she was settled, I was going back to New Orleans to help Shane find whoever had done this to her. The implications of the decision kept my brain swirling, and after an hour of lying awake, I reached automatically for my sedatives, forgetting that Shane had never given them back.
It was for the best. It was really for the best.
When I finally slept, it was with awful dreams in which I bundled Mina into the trunk of the rental car and pushed it into a lake. Quitting the pills cold turkey hadn’t helped my brain stay quiet, and I woke up to find the living room in shambles. Luckily, there hadn’t been much glass to break, but I’d ripped the stuffing out of two throw pillows and torn big strips off the sheets I’d slept on.
I couldn’t face cleaning up the mess, so I pulled a blanket off the couch, wrapped it around myself, and headed for the kitchen to eat more stale cereal with no milk. By the time I’d finished and gotten dressed, it was only six o’clock. I had plenty of time to clean everything up and still get to work early, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I left the disaster zone as it was, wrote a note to Mina, and headed to the MUNI station.
When I got to the office, it was deserted. For the first time in years I was craving a cup of coffee, but after last night, I didn’t want to risk stimulating my overactive brain even more, so I dug through the drawers in the breakroom until I found a stash of herbal tea. It was chamomile, and ancient. Better than nothing.
What I should have done next was email my boss and tell him I needed to see him, but the thought of it made me want to cra
wl back into bed, so I decided to glance at the news headlines while I finished my unsatisfying tea. I sighed and opened an internet browser.
Then I looked up Cindy Cepello.
I shouldn’t have. My fingers typed her name in the search engine almost before I realized what I was doing, and then it was too late. The first hit was her website, and when I opened it, harp music blared from my computer’s speakers. I hurriedly hit the mute key and looked around to make sure no one had come in.
The page had angel-wing wallpaper and a long Welcome from Cindy. On the right side were links to suicide intervention hotlines and mental health resources—words like depression and bipolar disorder were written in curly purple hyperlinked script. On the left was a list of her speaking dates embellished with tiny angels. When I moused over the dates, the angels flapped their wings.
Cindy had bookings all over the South, from Texas to Florida to Tennessee. I would have thought she’d exhausted the market in New Orleans, but she had two events in the city in the next couple of weeks, plus a dozen more all over the state. I figured out the reason after a moment—she was pushing her memoir On the Wings of Angels.
I felt queasy thinking about the damage she could do convincing people she’d really been “saved.” Crackpots made claims like this all the time, right? It wasn’t as if people were going to start jumping off buildings to see if their guardian angels were on duty.
Not my problem, I told myself firmly. I closed the browser. I had all the motivation I needed to email my boss, and when he showed up an hour later, he came by my desk. It only took ten minutes for me to turn in my resignation.
I went to the breakroom while I absorbed what I’d done. It wasn’t the money—I had enough savings to last me a few months, and the lease on my apartment was month-to-month anyway. There was just a finality to quitting my job. This was it. I was going back. I rested my elbows on the cheap plastic table and played with the saltshaker someone had left sitting on it. I had to go clean out my desk, but I couldn’t make myself get up.
“So,” someone said, and I looked up to see Jackson leaning against the counter next to the coffeepot. “Are you back for good, now?” He asked as though he already knew the answer.
“No, not really.” I put the saltshaker down. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d run out on him at the bar, but he didn’t seem upset. Hopefully, he wouldn’t ask too many questions.
“Grant said you had a family emergency.” There was a conspiratorial edge in his voice, as though he knew I was lying and didn’t care.
“Yeah.” I looked at him more closely. “I’m heading back tomorrow, actually.”
“So soon?” His voice still had that tone to it, and it was making me nervous. What did he suspect?
“I should go clean out my desk.” I got up too quickly, knocking the table sideways, and the saltshaker went skidding over the edge. I winced, waiting for it to smash onto the floor.
It didn’t.
When I opened my eyes, it was hanging in midair.
The shaker and a handful of individual salt grains were all suspended motionless three feet above the linoleum. For a terrifying moment, I thought I’d lost control and done it by accident, but keeping hundreds of individual grains of salt in the air was way beyond my control. I lifted my eyes to meet Jackson’s.
“Want to go somewhere and talk?” His voice was one shade less casual than normal. My eyes widened. The shaker righted itself on the table, and the salt fell to the floor with a tiny, soft patter.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do.”
Chapter Nine
So, Jackson was a converter. Of all the firms in the city. Converters were good at visualizing spatial relationships, so they often ended up working as mechanics or engineers, but I’d never expected another one to be working five yards away.
“We’re more common than you realized, then,” Jackson said. His legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He was wearing argyle socks.
We’d left the office and walked to the park by the Yerba Buena Center to sit on the benches beside a sleek stone waterfall. At this time of day, nobody was out but tourists, and I watched a couple of kids—a brother and sister, maybe—throwing coins into the pool while their parents argued over a map.
“How long have you known?”
“A while now. I was going to tell you that night at Featherweight’s.” He paused. “So what happened? I know that was no ordinary headache.”
“You’re telling me.”
He gave me a small smile that managed to look sympathetic without being patronizing. “You want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I usually try to avoid it altogether.”
“That much is obvious.”
I glanced sharply at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“Only that it’s clear you aren’t using your powers. That’s why it took me so long to figure you out.”
“You mean you’ve—”
“Snooped? Only a little.” His mouth quirked.
We sat in silence for a while. I could tell he was waiting for me to volunteer something, but I didn’t know what to say. Last week, all I’d wanted was to forget about being what I was. Now, I didn’t know how I felt about it.
I leaned down and rubbed the back of my neck with my hands. “How long have you known what you are?”
“All my life. It runs in my father’s family.”
“Lucky you,” I said, watching the kids by the fountain. They’d given up on throwing coins and were splashing each other.
“What about you?” He cocked his head at me. “Were your parents normals?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re dead or alive.”
“That must’ve been rough.”
I could’ve blamed it on the stress of the previous week, but that would’ve been lying. Once I started talking, I didn’t want to stop. I told him about moving things in my sleep when I was a kid, how I’d thought I was crazy, how I’d been shuffled from foster home to foster home. How Shane had found me and I’d fallen for him. And then, because it would have been harder to stop than to go on, I told him about Cindy Cepello and Andrew Allston. How I’d known somehow his death was my fault, but no one had believed me. I avoided looking at him while I spoke, but when I finished the story, I turned toward him. His face was even and calm.
“So I came out here,” I said. “This friend of mine from the dorms was moving here for a job, and she said we could split an apartment. But then she met someone, and they got married and moved to Sacramento. I figured it was better for me to live by myself anyway, so I stayed. I just try to forget that other part of me exists.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Why does everyone say that?” I blinked back tears, embarrassed by how shrill my voice had become. “Who else, if not me?”
“You couldn’t have known.” He paused, licked his lips and looked down. “Cass—”
Something about the way he said my name told me he wasn’t about to offer the same old “you’re just imagining it” explanation I’d heard so many times before, but I couldn’t fathom what he would say instead. I looked up at him expectantly.
“You realize you’re not just a regular converter?” he said. “You know you can pull?”
I only stared.
“Look, the first thing you probably learned was your limits, right? Nothing heavier than what you can lift with your hands.”
I nodded. Lionel had explained it to me, teaching me to lift uncooked rice grains at the big, scarred kitchen table. I’d wanted to try bigger things—the table itself, the oversized refrigerator, his truck. “It doesn’t work that way, sugar. It’s all gotta come from here.” He’d tapped his chest.
“I’ve never lifted anything heavier than a case of beer,” I said. “Not except that once.”
“Most of us can’t. I can’t. But you can. There are stories of pullers lifting cars, telephone poles, even mobile homes.”<
br />
“How?” I wasn’t sure I believed him. It went against everything I’d been taught. But in the back of my mind, the part that relived Andrew’s death every time I closed my eyes, I already knew the answer.
“You can draw energy from the environment. Boost your powers. It’s just that the easiest source is another person. Another converter, if one’s nearby. If not...” His voice was soft, and he was watching me carefully.
“Oh, my God.” I looked down at my hands. It was true. I’d killed Andrew. I’d never doubted it, really, but it was different somehow, to hear someone else confirm it. A strange feeling expanded in my chest, relief mixed with grief. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I was close to sobbing, but I held it together.
“I’m sure they didn’t know,” Jackson said, still soft, still careful. “There can’t be more than a hundred people in the world who can do what you can do. It’s a rare gift.”
“A gift?” My head snapped up. “I just told you I killed someone.”
“Look, Cass, you were—what—twenty-one? Twenty-two? At that age, without any training, there’s no way you would’ve been able to control the surges. Most converters don’t learn how to use their abilities to the fullest until their thirties, and if you can pull, it takes even longer. You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know.” He paused. “It can be done safely, if you learn how to control it.”
“Safely?” I said, incredulous. “How can it be done safely? I don’t want to do it at all, ever. If I could cut that part of my brain away, I would.” I put my head in my hands, forcing myself not to cry. “I don’t care how rare it is. I don’t want it.”
“I don’t think you get to decide,” he said gently, and we were silent for a while. After a few minutes he asked, “So why are you leaving?”
Twisted Miracles Page 8