As I told him about Mina and how she’d collapsed, he grew slowly more serious.
“It’s someone like you,” he said once I’d finished. “Another converter who can pull.”
“Are you sure?”
“Can’t you tell?”
I thought back to the surges that had made me nauseated. They hadn’t felt anything like what had happened to me with Andrew. That feeling had been amazing—frighteningly, addictively good. I shook my head. “It felt totally different.”
“May I see?”
It took me a moment to realize he was asking permission to ride my memory, and I blushed, remembering what had happened right beforehand. Focusing on the instant before I’d felt the surge, I took Jackson’s hand. His presence was careful and polite—he wasn’t looking past what I showed him—but it was still strange, adding Jackson to the short list of people I’d let into my head. Reliving the attack made my stomach churn again, but Jackson let go before it became overwhelming.
“That’s a pull,” he said. “It was stronger than anything I’ve ever felt, though. It must feel different when you use the gift yourself.”
I wished he would stop referring to it as a gift. “How did you recognize it? Did you know someone who could...pull?”
Jackson nodded. “My half brother. He’s been dead ten years now, but I can still remember how it felt.” He looked away from me for the first time, and I knew not to ask how his brother had died.
“This guy,” I said. “Whoever he is—he’s like me. So I can stop him? Take his powers?”
“You may be the only one who can.” He paused. “Look, I can help you learn to control it. It’s been a while, but I remember what Adam went through when he was training.”
I almost said no. I wanted to. But then I thought of Mina, waiting to go back home. The helpless feeling bleeding out of Shane as he locked up the shotgun.
“Okay.”
* * *
I called Shane from the same spot by the waterfall five minutes after Jackson left. I explained everything—what Jackson told me about his brother, how I was the only one who could take this guy down, how I had to learn to control it. Shane was quiet for a long while. For the first time in a long time, I was desperate to know what he was thinking. I paced in front of the waterfall, barely avoiding the tourists and the running children, waiting for him to react.
“Cassie, we’ve been through this.”
I stopped pacing. “Shane, you don’t get it. I’m not just imagining this—Jackson’s brother had the same powers. This is real.”
“Cass, you’ve got to let this go. It was an accident. You can’t let it take over your life.”
“That’s just it—it was an accident, but I can learn to control it. Jackson’s going to help me.”
“Isn’t he the guy from the bar? The one who was there the night I came to get you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Are you saying he doesn’t have feelings for you?”
“I don’t know. That’s not the point.”
“So he says you have this thing, that his brother, who’s conveniently dead, had this thing—he manipulates you into staying, into letting him train you... Jesus, I can’t believe you’re falling for this crap.”
Heat flushed up my face. “It’s not crap. He’s not lying. You just don’t want to believe it—you’ve never wanted to believe it.”
“Because it’s not true—there’s nothing wrong with you.”
I went strangely calm. Everything around me came into blindingly sharp focus. I pressed my free palm on the top of the wall around the fountain, and the stone cracked.
“I didn’t say there was something wrong with me.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
“I just want you to get past this—you’re still letting that one day control your whole life.” He paused. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Cassie, come home.”
“I have to go.”
“Cassie—”
I hung up.
I sat staring at the empty black face of my phone for a while. I remembered again the look on Andrew Allston’s face when he’d thought about asking me out, and instead of crying, I felt calm. It didn’t matter whether Shane believed me or not. I knew, finally, that what I’d felt was real. And I was going to do something about it.
It wasn’t until I got up that I saw the flowers in the landscaped bed next to me had shriveled and turned brown.
* * *
It gets dark early in San Francisco in the winter, and when I got back to my apartment, the light was already fading. I let myself in, looking for Mina, and found her sitting on my couch, staring at the coffee table. The room was lit only by the dim, fog-filtered sunlight coming through the window. Mina was so still, for a heart-pounding moment I was afraid her attacker had somehow followed us and finished the job, but she blinked, and I breathed again.
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” I asked. She was wrapped in my thick blue bathrobe, staring at a mechanical pencil lying on the coffee table. “What are you doing?” I sat in front of her on the floor and ducked down, trying to get a look at her face. “Mina?”
She finally looked at me, and her eyes were red and puffy. “It’s gone again. I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything.” Her voice was inflectionless. It wasn’t stoicism; it was a kind of death.
I struggled to keep the panic out of my voice. “Maybe you just need more time to recover. Maybe yesterday was too much.” But then I remembered the dream I’d had last night, the state of my living room. I hadn’t been in control—and I knew what happened when I wasn’t in control. The flowers by the fountain. My blood went cold.
“Oh, God,” I said, and then I started calling hotels.
Chapter Ten
“This is hopeless.”
“It’s not hopeless. Try again.”
I was sitting on a four-top in the middle of Featherweight’s with a rosary in my hand and a crate of expensive gin on the floor in front of me. It hadn’t moved since Jackson and I wrestled it into place two hours earlier. Jackson was leaning against the bar drinking coffee. I was doing my best not to notice him.
“Try again,” Jackson repeated, probably for the thirtieth time.
“This would be easier if you were farther away. I keep thinking I’ll hurt you.”
“The whole point is learning to avoid me.”
I grumbled and fingered the rosary beads. I hadn’t said a Hail Mary since high school, but if anything called for it, the current situation did. Apparently doing something meditative was supposed to help my brain slip into the right “mode,” as Jackson put it. I was supposed to let my awareness broaden until I could feel everything in my range, from the liquor bottles behind the bar to the dust ground between the floorboards. The theory was, once I was fully aware of my surroundings, I’d be able to pull from the latent energy in the environment instead of more dangerous targets. Like people.
I gripped the beads and began again. They were warm. I ran my thumbnail over the grain of the wood, catching a rough spot where the sanding wasn’t even. I wondered how they were made. Maybe there was some machine that cut them out and sanded them all together, like a rock tumbler. Or maybe someone had whittled them by hand. I hoped so. I didn’t like the thought of them being mass-produced. But was it any better if someone had slaved over a block of wood for pennies a day just to make my rosary by hand? Maybe there was a “manufactured in” tag on the back of the cross—
“You’re wandering.”
“Goddammit.” I set the rosary down and scrubbed my hands through my hair. “Is this really how your brother learned?”
“No,” Jackson said, and I gave him a shocked and indignant glare. “He used Hindu prayer beads.”
I resisted throwing something at him. “At this point I’ll pray to anyone who wants to help.”
“Go easy on yourself. It too
k Adam years.”
“I don’t have years.” I blew out a deep breath. I prayed ten Hail Marys, and for the first time, I actually meant them. After the tenth one, I reached out into the space around me and felt the table underneath me, the chairs stacked upside down throughout the bar, the heavy crate of gin on the dusty floor, and Jackson. In his head was me.
He was remembering how I’d looked on my first day of work when we’d met for the first time, my too-dressy dark blue business suit standing out in the sea of rumpled chinos. I blushed crimson and my concentration collapsed.
Jackson looked like he was about to apologize, which would’ve only made things worse, so I slid off the table and rubbed my face. “I’m beat,” I said. “And don’t you have to go to work?”
He shrugged. “I can call in sick.”
I looked at the unmoved crate of gin. “I think I need a break.”
“One more try.”
I huffed out a sigh. “Fine.”
I closed my eyes and focused on the crate. I was tired. I was sick of feeling like a lit fuse. Shane’s words had burrowed deep into my head, and they’d been stuck on repeat all morning. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” Mina’s face swam in my mind, and my chest felt hollow. I had to master this.
That crate was nothing. It was a child’s toy, and I was not going to let it beat me. I funneled every bit of power I had at the wooden slats and thought, up.
It burst into flames.
“Shit!” I ran toward it, batting at it with a pair of table linens. The fire engulfed one side completely in the time it took me to react. Bottles of gin went up with loud pops of exploding glass, and I danced back. “No, no, no...” So much wood in this place. So much fabric. The chairs nearest the crate were already catching, and smoke filled my lungs. I was frozen in panic.
The hiss of a fire extinguisher broke me out of it. Foamy white CO2 covered the flames and doused them, and Jackson laid on another layer, just in case. Sap hissed and crackled on one of the boards.
“Well, that was impressive.”
“I don’t know—I didn’t—I’m really sorry.” One of the smoldering chairs fell apart and collapsed onto the ruined floor.
“It’s okay. Gives the place character.” He let the extinguisher fall with a clank.
“I think I need a break.”
Jackson looked at the mess of charred wood, alcohol and foam. “Yeah. I think you do.”
We walked out the alley door, and I blinked against the sunlight.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” Jackson said, locking up behind us.
“I can take MUNI.”
“It’s no trouble.”
I shrugged as Jackson levitated the keys through an open window in the abandoned used car dealership next to the bar.
“You must know the owner pretty well if you know where he keeps his keys,” I said.
“What? Oh, all the council members know where Seb keeps the keys.”
“Council members?”
“You know, local shadowminds acting important? Actually, I was thinking you should come to the meeting tonight. Someone might recognize your rogue.”
“It can’t hurt,” I said as we walked down Valencia. The commuter traffic was just picking up, and I watched a flock of bicyclists take the turn onto Market.
“Same time tomorrow?” Jackson asked.
“Why not?” I said. “It couldn’t possibly get worse.”
He didn’t disagree with me. “Look, don’t get discouraged. Everyone starts out like this and everyone gets it eventually.”
“Yeah, well, not everyone sets things on fire when they mess up.” I’d meant to sound matter-of-fact, but the words came out bitter. We’d come to his car, and I stopped, looking down at the concrete.
“Hey, Cass...” Jackson put his hand on my arm. “You can’t be so afraid of it. You’ll never get control of your powers if you don’t let yourself use them.”
I managed a humorless laugh. “Yeah, well maybe we should find another way to take care of this guy. Can’t we just keep him sedated in a basement or something?”
I’d meant it as a joke, but Jackson didn’t laugh. “You could. But that’s not the point.” His voice had gone soft. His hand was still on my arm. The beginnings of a mental request nudged at my consciousness, but he retreated and leaned back before I could figure out how to respond. “Guerrero and Sixteenth, right?” he said, businesslike again. He used the remote to unlock his car.
“Actually, uh, I had to get a hotel room,” I said as he opened the passenger door for me. I studied my hands while I told him what had happened to Mina’s powers. It felt like a confession, and I wanted to sink into the ground and disappear, go somewhere I could never hurt anyone again.
“You’ll get it under control,” Jackson said. “You will.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t believe him.
I directed him to the Paradise Hotel, which was the only thing I’d been able to find on short notice that wouldn’t clean out my bank account. Jackson took one look at the mildewed awning and the sign advertising weekly rates and said, “You can stay with me.”
“And risk doing the same thing to you? No way.”
“So send Mina over. You can’t stay in this place.”
“It’s not so bad.” But Jackson saw the image of the room—mustard-yellow kitchenette, peeling floral wallpaper and all—in my head and gave me a skeptical look. “All right,” I said, “I’ll ask her. Just...”
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Be careful with her. She’s pretty broken up about it, and she’ll need to rest her shadowmind if she’s going to heal.” I was still hoping that was possible.
Jackson gave me a serious nod. “I will.”
“I’ll give her a call.” I pulled out my phone, but before I could dial Mina, I saw that I had five missed calls from Shane. While I was trying to debate whether I should call him back or not, it rang again. I spent a moment frowning at the generic blue silhouette of a person on the screen. I’d only put his number in a week ago.
“Are you going to answer that?” Jackson asked.
I sighed and picked up.
“Cass, what the hell—why haven’t you been answering your phone?”
“I was training. With Jackson.” It was easier to be angry with Shane than to handle all the ways I’d failed in the past twenty-four hours. “Are you calling to try and convince me I’m crazy again?”
“No—Mary Ellen just turned up dead.”
Chapter Eleven
“I thought you’d want to know.”
I closed my eyes and bowed my head to the dashboard. I should’ve known. She’d never called me after the party, and I’d forgotten all about our plans to meet up. “When?”
“They found her body an hour ago. Deb Hebert’s sister-in-law just called.”
“Jesus. What happened to her?”
“That’s the thing—there’s not a mark on her. Some homeless guy found her body in a Dumpster in the Quarter and called nine-one-one from a bar. The only thing on her was her wallet and her cell phone, and the phone’s toast. Like it got microwaved or something.”
“Do they know when she died?” This prompted a sharp look from Jackson, but I shook my head at him. It was a little late to get out of the car now.
“No, but it must have been sometime last night. She and I were in Baton Rouge all afternoon talking to the local converters. Her ex lives over there—we were hoping someone would recognize that guy.”
“Oh, God...what if he knows? What if someone tipped him off and he killed her?” I didn’t say, What if he comes for you next?
“We don’t know it was him.”
I was quiet for a moment. “Come on, Shane.”
“Yeah.” He paused, and I heard the creak of a chair as he sat in it. “I think you should come back.”
“This is even more reason for me to stay and learn how to control this thing. If it’s someone like me, I might be the only one who can stop him.”
>
He didn’t say anything.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
The chair creaked again and I knew he was up and pacing. “Were you even planning on coming home? Or did you already decide to just cut and run again?”
“Why should I go back? Why should I go back when you’re acting like this?” I was yelling now.
“You’re imagining this thing—”
“No, I’m not.” I was sure of it now. I had that, at least.
“Cass—”
“I know you don’t want to believe me.”
“It’s not that.”
“Goodbye, Shane.”
I hung up, jammed my phone into my purse and shoved my purse onto the floorboard. I was breathing as though I’d been running, and I couldn’t look at Jackson.
“So, uh...should I drive you back to your place?”
“Yes. Thank you.” I buckled my seatbelt.
“Is...everything all right?”
“I’ll ask Mina if she’s okay staying with you.”
He started the car. “That’s fine.”
“And maybe we could train again tonight after the council meeting.”
“Of course. Whatever you need.” He looked at me again for a long moment before pulling out onto the street.
I stared out the window while he drove. We passed a five-story building covered entirely with a pink-and-green mural of what looked like a fertility goddess. I dug out my phone and turned it off.
“I’m sure he’s just worried about you. If you need—”
“I’m fine.”
He nodded. We pulled up to my building, and I got out and went upstairs to find Mina on the couch with the television on. She wasn’t really watching. She nodded when I asked her if she was willing to stay with Jackson, but I wasn’t sure she heard me. She might’ve had the same response if I’d asked her if she wanted to move to India. When I skimmed her mind for her emotions, all I got was a gray blank.
I packed her things for her and led her downstairs. When I introduced her to Jackson, she nodded and shook his hand as if she wasn’t bothering to remember his name. Jackson had to prompt her to put on her seatbelt.
They drove away, and I had to bite my knuckle to keep from sobbing.
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