“Thanks,” I said, not quite meeting his eyes. I extricated myself from the sleeping bag and wobbled to my feet, feeling as if I was learning how to walk all over again. My muscles felt like they were on a delay. I managed to pull on pants and a sweatshirt under the blanket while Jackson studied his hands.
“The fire’s still burning,” he said. “Go warm up. I’ll make coffee.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t intend to drink any, and slipped out of the tent. There was a deep bed of glowing coals at the base of the fire, and I had to stop myself from drawing the heat right out of the flames and into my body.
“You froze the lake,” Jackson said from behind me. He set a pot of water in the coals and put a red enamelware French press down beside the fire. “And then you fell in it.”
“I did?” I looked out toward the lake and saw that he was right—there were sheets of ice thawing and breaking in the shallows, and in the center was a crater of dark water in a slab of white.
“It was pretty incredible. Why did you fall?”
“I felt you running for me, and I sort of switched off. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“I thought you’d drowned,” he said softly. He’d put on jeans, but he still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his frame was much more muscular than his dress shirts ever let on. He stepped toward me and took my hand, placing it on the warm bare skin of his upper arm. With the contact, his memory rose up in my mind.
I was screaming. I closed my eyes as I sensed his dread, saw the terrible possibilities racing through his mind. Bear attack, mental burnout, drowning. He took off running. In the distance, I was hovering ten feet above the surface of the lake. My head was tipped back; my arms and legs were spread as though I was reaching out with them. Below me, the water was freezing, ice racing out from the center in many-fingered tentacles. I could sense it as he got into my range and power surged out of him and into me. I could feel the gut-dropping intensity of it.
Jackson’s thoughts skipped to seeing me fall, the log and then my body bursting through the ice. White chunks skittered out from the point of impact. His mind strained to lift me telekinetically out of the water, but failed, and then there was shocking cold as he slid across the ice, yanked off his boots and dove down to reach me. He got me back to the fire, pulled off his clothes and mine and wrapped us both in the sleeping bag, skin to skin.
“I couldn’t lift you,” he said. “It was like that part of my brain was stunned.”
“Oh, God, no.” I stepped closer to him. “Is it back now?”
“It’s back.”
I breathed. “Thank God.”
“I wasn’t thinking about my powers,” Jackson said. My hand was still on his bicep, and he reached up to cover it with his own. “Cass.” His thumb traced the valleys of my knuckles. “I thought you were gone.”
I shook my head and said, “I’m all right now,” and Jackson closed the distance between us and kissed me.
At first I leaned into him, wanting strangely to quiet the fear I still felt in him, left over from the memory of my fall. He responded with more force than I’d expected, his hands firm on my back, his mouth slanting over mine, possessing. The heat of him was intense, his tongue searching, demanding, and for an instant, I lost myself in the kiss, wanting so badly to forget my terrifying, complicated life and pretend, for half an hour, that I was a regular woman with regular problems. And then I thought, almost casually, about the way Shane’s voice had sounded in my head as he’d pressed against me that night behind the storage shed.
Jackson went still and drew back. “You don’t want this.”
“I...” I rubbed my face with my hands. He was right. “Shit.” I hadn’t meant to lead him on.
He smiled a little ruefully. “One of the benefits of mindreading. It’s pretty much impossible to lead someone on. I just hoped... Well. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He ran his fingers through his hair, which was sticking up in odd places from being dunked in lake water. “Let’s just get some rest.”
We went into the tent, and I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t do it. The elation I’d felt when I finally got it, when it finally clicked—that had all bled away. I felt like I had back when I was a kid, before I’d known what I was, before I’d achieved the barely adequate restraint I’d spent over a decade fighting for. It was as if I was starting over.
I was six when my gift started manifesting. I’d go to sleep in a cute, girly, twin-sized bed and wake up in the morning to a disaster zone. Dolls knocked off the shelves, books thrown around the room. The first set of foster parents thought I was acting out. They didn’t even punish me; they just put everything back in order and acted as though nothing had happened. I was terrified. I had no memory of doing it myself, and I thought people were breaking into my room at night and smashing up my toys. I threw tantrums at bedtime, afraid to go to sleep. It didn’t take them long to give up on me.
By the time I was twelve, I’d been through over twenty different homes. No one kept me longer than six months, and some of them sent me back to the group home after only six weeks. I thought I was crazy, damaged. By then, I was starting to pick up stray thoughts from the people around me, and it terrified me. I knew it wasn’t normal to hear other people’s voices in my head, but I couldn’t make it stop, and I was slowly shutting down. In another few years I might have withdrawn completely. Instead, I met Shane.
He was two years older than me, so he was in eighth grade when I was starting sixth. We were both in the same public school—this was before the Weatherfields—but we moved in different circles, and not just because I was white. I was also weird, and everybody knew it. People avoided me like you avoid the smelly guy talking to himself outside the liquor store. I wasn’t normal. They could tell.
I usually ate my lunch on a bench behind the cafeteria. I’d chosen it because it was close to the Dumpsters, and no one else was likely to want it. During classes, I couldn’t help being surrounded by people, but at lunchtime, when everyone else was inside occupying their established table territory, I could finally be alone. It was the half hour of sanity that got me through the day.
That day it was raining, and water was blowing in under the eaves. I was getting wet while I ate my free school lunch from its plastic tray. Pizza. Not the good kind. When Shane came out and sat down next to me, I was sure he was there to play some sort of prank. Make the weird girl think the popular guy likes her.
“You’re Cass, right?”
Only years of practice trying to look normal kept me from dropping my tray.
It was the clearest thing I’d ever heard in my head. Usually I got garbled, incomplete jumbles, sharp surges of powerful emotion. Shane’s voice was like a voice in my ear, deliberate and strong.
I didn’t answer him. I was still afraid it was a test; I was waiting for a group of kids to pop out from behind the Dumpsters to laugh at me.
“It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.”
When I still didn’t respond, he stood up, his jeans wet from the rainwater on the bench. “You can trust me. I’m just like you.”
He walked away before I could collect myself enough to speak, but his intentions came through with his parting words. “I’m here if you need me.”
For weeks I treated the experience like a hollow egg, afraid I’d destroy it if I let it have too much importance, if I believed in it too fiercely. But then, three months later, when my current foster family predictably sent me back, I met Lionel for the first time.
I could still picture those moments perfectly; I could live in them if I wanted to. The social worker said “Thank you, Mr. Tanner” to Lionel’s face and “No white folks left to take that girl” in her head. Lionel’s beat-up blue-and-white truck smelled of chewing tobacco and sounded like it would fall apart when he drove it over speed bumps. He showed me to my room—my own room, just for me—and gave me a stack of brand new clothes with the tags still on the
m. And then, finally, he sat me down and explained everything with so much regret in his eyes that I knew he was telling the truth even before he telekinetically lifted the chair in my room and made it dance.
“You have the gift,” he said. “I can teach you how to use it.” It was like something out of a fairy tale.
Back then, I was young enough to believe in them.
* * *
Jackson and I woke up with the sunrise.
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I said that last night.”
“Don’t mention it.” His thoughts were locked down, and I didn’t pry. This was awkward enough already.
I got a fire going while Jackson took the bear canister down from the tree and speared thick slices of bread with toasting forks. We ate quietly, listening to the woods wake up around us. The sun warmed the lake, and fish started breaking the surface for flies in the shallows. I was glad I hadn’t killed them all.
It took us six hours to get back to San Francisco, and another two to inch through the traffic on the bridge. By the time Jackson dropped me off at my apartment, I was bone-tired. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner even though I wasn’t hungry, and when I crawled into bed, I fell asleep almost immediately.
I dreamed. It was like the dream I’d had the night before Shane arrived, the same strange feeling of panic, but this time, I thought I could sense someone I knew. I realized with a jolt that it was Shane. It was dark, and I was feeling for him through underbrush so dense it was like reaching through a hedge. I pushed my face through the leaves and they closed around me, suffocating me. I called for Shane, but he was running, and I realized with a shock of terror that he was running from me—and then I was above the lake, pulling. I felt Shane in the distance, felt him sag and go limp as his powers flowed into me, each surge like a tiny orgasm, exhilarating, addictive. He was screaming and screaming, and I laughed with a voice that wasn’t my own. Ice was all around me, breaking, and I heard it crack like glass. Shards of it pierced my skin and I bled, and still Shane was screaming, screaming—
I shot awake in an instant. I fought my way free of the sheets and ran for my closet. Shane. Shane was in trouble. He was dying—I needed shoes, clothes, a cell phone—I had to get to the airport—I should call a cab—oh, God it was going to take too long, I needed to be there now—
There was an awful, elevator-dropping feeling in the pit of my stomach, and all my senses went totally dark. No sight, no sound, no touch. I tried to take a breath and drew in nothing. I gave a huge, wheezing gasp as my lungs began to collapse. I was clawing at nothing, through nothing, lost in a spinning, senseless vertigo, and then I was on solid ground again, my knees pressed painfully onto something hard, and there was too much air in my lungs, too much pressure all around me. I tried to get up, fell down again, and vomited onto the ground.
Running footsteps sounded behind me, followed by a screech like squealing brakes. I looked down at the herringbone pattern of the bricks under my hands, and I realized where I was—the back patio of the Tanners’ B&B.
Chapter Fifteen
When I woke up, Shane’s face was the first thing I saw, and I nearly cried with relief. I reached for him, struggling to get up, but he put a broad hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down onto the mattress.
“You don’t need to be exerting yourself right now.”
“You’re not hurt—you’re not—” Frantic, I reached into his head. “Can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you.” His voice was soft.
“Oh, thank God.” I stopped trying to sit up. Shane’s hand gentled on my shoulder, and he sat on the edge of the bed. I looked over his shoulder. There were the yellow curtains that had been in my room since grade school. There was the antique armchair Lionel had levitated to convince me I wasn’t crazy. It registered that I really was in Louisiana. That I hadn’t been when I went to sleep.
My first thought was, Holy shit, I teleported.
My next one was, Who did I kill?
“Phone. I need your phone.”
“Sure, but—”
I yanked it out of his hand before he could ask me why and dialed Jackson from memory. He picked up before the first ring finished sounding.
“Hello? Hello? Who is this?”
“Jackson!”
“Cass! Where the hell are you? I came to pick you up and your place is a disaster zone. There are cop cars all over the street—it looks like a grenade went off in your place—what the hell happened?”
“Why are there cop cars there? Jackson, why are there cop cars there?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing someone saw the broken glass and thought there was a burglary. Every window’s blown out. There’s water everywhere—a pipe burst in the ceiling, and...it’s pretty bad.”
He wasn’t telling me everything. I didn’t need telepathy to know it.
“What else?”
“It’s hard to tell—”
“Jackson, what else.”
He paused. I could hear other voices through the phone, official voices. “The guy who lived in 3B’s in the hospital.”
3B was the unit right above mine. I went cold. He kept talking, but I only caught three words for every ten. “We’ll take care of it...sending a healer...Gordon’s handling...don’t worry.” I didn’t realize I was clenching the phone until the case cracked. I dropped it.
“Cass? Cass?” Jackson’s voice was small from the speaker.
I picked it back up. “I’m here, I’m here.”
“So...where are you? Were you practicing?”
“Not exactly.” I tried to think of a way to say it that didn’t sound crazy. No luck. “I’m in Louisiana.”
“You...”
“I teleported.”
“Holy fuck.”
It was the first time I’d heard him curse.
“How?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Are you all right? Do you need anything?”
I looked down at my pajamas. “I could use some clothes. And my wallet and cell phone.”
“I’ll overnight you a box. Anything else?”
“Just...take care of Mina, all right?”
“I will.”
I hung up and set Shane’s phone on the bed between us. He didn’t pick it up. He was watching me, and I knew he’d been listening.
“Are you okay?”
I shook my head. I was definitely not okay.
I hadn’t even known 3B’s name. I’d avoided my neighbors religiously. I hadn’t wanted to meet them, hadn’t wanted to get involved in conversations and dinner parties and cat-sitting, hadn’t wanted to answer awkward questions about where I’d come from and why. “Do you believe me now?”
“I’m sorry, I only—”
I couldn’t bear it. Not now. I ignored the tentative mental connection he tried to make and put up shields. “I need to know what happened before you found me. Was anyone here?”
“No. No one. Just me and Lionel and the guests.”
“I need to see.”
He closed his mouth and pressed his lips together. “Sure. Of course.” He held out his hand.
I didn’t want to touch him. I didn’t want to know how sorry he was for any of it—for what had happened just now or what had happened five years ago. But I needed to know what had brought me back. I covered the back of his hand with my palm.
He guided me down. You can do that when you know someone, when you recognize the touch of their mind. I was a little surprised when he didn’t force me to encounter all the emotions he was feeling. He focused in tightly on his memory of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing I was nearby.
It took him a moment to clear his head and look out the window. He saw me lying on the patio, not moving. The panic that flared in his chest was enough to make me shudder, even feeling it secondhand. He ran down the stairs in his boxers, mentally yelling for Lionel. When he got to me, he took my face in his hands and forced himself to stay calm as he sea
rched out my mind, breathing again when he felt me alive but unconscious. He carried me upstairs and sat the whole night in the chair by my bed, waiting for me to wake.
I went further back, past the events of the morning to the deep memories of his dreams. They were full of half-formed images and intense, quickly shifting emotions, glimpses of myself. He let me search where I wanted, his mind offered up and open. It was all pretty normal—or as normal as dreams ever are—and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. I gasped and almost drew back, but I managed to keep hold of him. The muscles in his arms hardened under my hands as he felt my astonishment.
Cutting through his dreams was the gasping, strength-sucking feeling of the pull. It stopped suddenly with that same squealing sound I’d heard after I’d appeared on the patio, and I knew it must have been me, scaring off Shane’s attacker.
I opened my eyes. My face was just inches from his chest, and I shifted back, breathing hard. “He came after you.”
“You can tell?”
“It was just like that night... that night we...” My face heated, and I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Shane’s eyes darkened. “Cass, please, I—”
“I have to go get cleaned up.” I swung my feet out of bed and tried to stand, but I staggered as I straightened up, my head spinning.
“Whoa, easy.” Shane took my elbow and sat me back down. I pulled out of his grip, and he raised both hands, palms out.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay. Okay.”
I got up again, more slowly this time, and Shane stayed where he was while I walked to the bathroom and shut the door.
I looked like I’d been in a bar fight. My hair was tangled and matted with blood, and the cuts on my body had dotted my pale blue shirt with brownish-red splotches, like sick polka dots. There were bruises under my eyes and a long scratch across my cheek, and when I looked more closely at my face, I saw shards of glass caught in the hair around my temples.
I leaned my elbows on the sink and tried not to cry.
Shane was still in my bedroom, sick with regret. I caught little snatches of his thoughts. —not possible, not possible, just not possible—but it must be—she’s here, she’s here—Christ, that whole time, dealing with this—God, I’m such an idiot—
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