“It’s him!” I said to Lionel, not bothering to mindspeak. I banged on the partition behind the driver’s seat. “Stop the car!”
She didn’t hear me. She was yelling into her radio, asking for backup, and then the ambulance hit us again, hard, and the whole car slammed sideways into a tree.
The airbags went off, but they didn’t keep the deputy from smashing her head against the driver’s side window. She slumped over, unconscious. A lick of flame appeared under the hood as the ambulance stopped behind us, sirens still blaring. I scrabbled at the door for the handle, but it was locked.
“Shit!” Lionel and I exchanged a glance as a figure got out of the back of the ambulance and started coming for us. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel. The second cop car was nowhere to be seen. I fought down dread. My hands didn’t seem to be working.
“Open them from the outside,” Lionel said, impossibly calm. I reached out for the handle, but the crash had warped the door, and it wouldn’t open.
“I can’t!”
Lionel shook his head. He was trapped, too. In front of us, the deputy moaned and lifted her head. Voices were shouting out of the radio. Behind us, Ryan was getting closer. The flames under the hood were multiplying, and heat radiated through the ruined windshield. If he doesn’t kill us first, we’re going to burn to death, I thought, and then I remembered the day on the lake with Shane. The campfire.
“Cover your head,” I said to Lionel. He saw my intentions, and his eyes widened. He put his head between his knees an instant before I blew all four doors off of the car.
“Get her out of here!” I yelled, and I rolled out of the car onto the grass. I’d drawn a lot of energy for the blast, but the fire under the hood was still going, and the more distance they put between themselves and the car, the better.
Ryan had danced back in shock when I blasted off the doors, but he recovered fast, and I knew I only had seconds before he focused on me again, and I couldn’t let that happen. If he incapacitated me, we were all dead.
Even as I thought it, the force of his pull hit me in the chest.
I doubled over onto the ground, gasping. His power wrapped around me like a snake. Each beat of my heart was a struggle, something I had to consciously work for. My skin was exploding with pain like a hundred cigarette burns, power bleeding out of me. I tried to put up shields, but the connection had already formed. There was nothing I could do.
Ryan saw me struggling and laughed.
“Ryan, stop!” I yelled it in his head, drawing power to strengthen my shields from the fire, from the wind, from Ryan himself. If he heard me, I couldn’t tell. He kept advancing. Behind me, I was vaguely aware of Lionel pulling the semi-conscious deputy out of the driver’s seat and dragging her away from the car. He saw what was happening and ran at Ryan, but Ryan saw him coming and sent him flying back into a tree with an awful cracking sound. Lionel hit the ground and didn’t stir. I thought, it doesn’t matter now; he’s going to kill us all, and then the gas tank exploded.
The force threw Ryan off his feet, and his connection to me snapped. Luckily, I was already on the ground, and I flattened myself into the grass and as the shock wave rushed over me. When Ryan reached out for me again, I was ready.
I hadn’t taken enough from him before. The force I’d used to stop the bullets would have been enough to kill a converter. Ryan it had only knocked out. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Before he could recover, I sank a pull into him with everything I had.
Ryan gasped as a thousand needle-thin lines of force sliced into him, drawing energy out of him in pinpricks. As I took more, the threads combined and thickened into ropes, dark and heavy. He struggled against me, but I was stronger now by far, and I didn’t hesitate. It was frighteningly good, the feeling of his power surging into me. Fear crept into his eyes like wine soaking a tabletop.
I got to my feet and advanced on him, sinking deeper into his head as I drained him. He was awash with memories of the church, reliving a whole string of murders. Homeless men, drug addicts, prostitutes. How many people had he kidnapped and killed? Fury rose up in my chest and my hold on him tightened until all of his thoughts were drowned by a single desperate impulse—getoutgetoutgetout—
I realized what he intended seconds before it happened. Ryan flickered on the ground in front of me, and I felt the answering echo in my bones, connected as we were through the lines of the pull. There was no time. I couldn’t disengage. When he gathered his remaining power and made the leap through the void, I went with him.
Chapter Thirty
I was ready for it this time. The airlessness, the absolute dark. It seemed to last for hours, my body grappling with Ryan’s in the void, both of us blind and fumbling. When we came through, we hit a wooden floor in a painful tangle, rolling. Air rushed back into my lungs, and I choked. I barely had time to get to my feet when Ryan kicked me in the gut and knocked me back down again. More blows landed on my ribs, my temple. I curled up, wheezing, and he ran for a doorway on the other side of the room.
The floor beneath me was made of unfinished wooden planks. Through the spots in my vision, I saw screened windows above me. Wherever we were, it wasn’t a hospital, and I felt a surge of hope that Shane would be safe. There was no telling how far from civilization we’d jumped. No one would come to save me.
Or him.
I struggled to my feet and went after him, bent double against the pain in my side. It hurt to breathe, and I was sure he’d broken one of my ribs. Slamming sounds came from the doorway, as though he was shifting furniture.
I staggered into the next room. Ryan was crouched on the floor, an unfinished pine chest pushed aside to reveal a trap door in front of him. He rooted through the opening, cash blooming out of it like socks from an overstuffed dresser drawer. Bills drifted across the floor, hundreds of them, but he didn’t pay attention to them. He came up with a gun.
He hadn’t noticed me yet. He was checking the chamber, cursing, hunting for ammo. Still curled over from the pain in my side, I reached out with my power and flung the gun away from him. It went skidding through the open doorway to the porch and over the edge. I heard a splash as it hit water.
“Bitch!”
Before I could react, he came at me, knocking me back down, straddling me, locking his hands around my throat. I tried to buck him off, but he had sixty pounds on me and a lot more upper body strength. My broken rib was on fire. Ryan slammed my head into the wooden floor and I scrabbled at his wrists, frantic until I remembered I didn’t have to fight him with my hands. He saw the realization in my head, and his grip tightened on my throat.
“Fuck you! No!” His voice was shrill with fear. Tears caught in his eyes.
I was starting to see black spots in my vision. I knew I didn’t have much time.
Ryan might have been able to block me if he hadn’t made the jump, but the teleportation, combined with the power I’d taken from him moments before, had weakened him too much. I was stronger than him, and we both knew it. There was nothing he could do. The lines of my pull wrapped around him, sinking into his body like thick, blind worms. He jerked against the pain of it, but I didn’t relent. I had to make sure he would never heal. Deep in his head, the invisible linkages that connected his shadowmind to the world around him loosened and unwound. They were free, seeking, and I drew them to myself, taking everything I could. His grip on my neck loosened.
When I killed Andrew, I’d been focused on stopping Cindy’s fall. I hadn’t paid attention to what was going on in my own head. This was different. When a stream of unfamiliar images rose up my mind, I knew that they were Ryan’s.
His first bike. His first gun. His first kill—a white-tailed deer, Mac by his side. Scattered, disconnected images of him in high school, at baseball practice. Running with guys from his team. Flirting with the cross-country girls. I saw Shane, and Mina, and myself. So many people I recognized and loved. It was Ryan’s life, flashing before his eyes.
Memories weren�
��t like books. There was no story written out in people’s heads, each word as clear as the next. Some moments had more weight than others—getting yelled at by your boss, meeting someone new and feeling that first spark of attraction, having a near-miss when you ran a stop sign—things like that rose to the surface. They got replayed over and over until you fought them down or they faded on their own, but they were always there.
I’d seen dozens of memories like that, sometimes of things so mundane, I never would have believed how important they were if I hadn’t recognized that telltale clarity that always came with a life-changing event. So when Ryan’s mind called up a view of a pine forest over an unfinished wooden windowsill, and I could see the way every leaf in every tree fluttered and shook, I knew instantly that the memory I was about to ride was important.
“Let’s do some target practice.” It was his brother Brandon’s voice, and Ryan’s field of vision shifted to look at him. I’d never known Brandon well, and I was shocked by how much he resembled Ryan. The same dark hair, the same easy good looks. But Brandon was taller and broader-shouldered, and his eyes were green, like his father’s.
“No way,” Ryan said. “You always win.” The memory was from his perspective, so I could only see his forearms and his calves, but I could tell he was much skinnier than he was now.
“Don’t be such a chickenshit.”
“Fuck you, man,” Ryan said, but there was no heat in it.
“Come on, best two outta three.”
“Ah, whatever, fine.” Ryan dragged himself to his feet and picked up his shotgun. The handle was warm, as though he’d just been holding it. The air had the fresh, earthy smell of a recent rain shower.
“Twenty bucks,” Brandon said. “Make it interesting.”
Ryan sighed, but didn’t protest. He went to the window, and I could see every splinter in the wood, every rusty nail hole. If I’d wanted to, I could have counted the damp pine needles on the ground below them.
I knew what they were about to do. Shane said he’d tried it once with a BB gun when he was ten and his mother was still alive. It was the only time she’d laid a hand on him in anger, he said. She’d been so scared, she’d cried in front of him, the only time that had happened, too.
The game was simple. A regular converter wasn’t strong enough to stop a bullet, but it was easy enough to deflect one. You had to be fast, and you had to have control, but it could be done. The problem was, a deflected bullet was likely to go wild. You couldn’t predict where it would hit, and there was always the chance you’d send it flying off into the woods to kill someone you didn’t know was there. The Tooley boys had grown up half their lives in deer stands with their father. They should have known better.
Brandon tossed an empty beer can out into the underbrush. It landed in a thicket of blackberry bushes, but it was still visible, reflecting the sunlight.
“You first,” he said, and Ryan took aim. Three times, the slugs went wide, hitting pine trees and dirt. Brandon smirked and took the gun.
“My turn,” he said.
He centerpunched the can on the first shot, and the lead made a plinking sound as it hit. I could feel Ryan’s frustration. It was just a game, but this was Brandon. Two years older, better at everything, beloved. Ryan’s memory was soaked with anger and regret, and I couldn’t help knowing what was going to happen next. His mind was so focused on the incident that it skipped ahead to the moment Brandon fell and then back again, a sick loop of his brother firing and then falling to his knees.
Brandon pulled the trigger, and Ryan was overcome with jealousy. He wanted nothing more than to keep that slug from hitting that can, but even he could tell that he was too late to deflect it. As he focused on the projectile’s path, for the first time in his life, he tapped into his latent powers.
Ryan hardly knew what he was doing, but he stopped the slug inches before it hit. And it didn’t simply stop—it melted into a misshapen lump of lead and plastic and dropped, setting the dead leaves below smoking. Shock and triumph rushed through him, and then there was something else, something I recognized. The ecstatic jolt of a pull. Whooping, he turned around in time to see Brandon hit his knees as the life rushed out of him and soaked into Ryan like water into sand.
Ryan didn’t realize what had happened, at first. But as he shook his brother and pounded on his chest, he understood, the way I’d understood, that the surge he’d felt must have come from somewhere. As understanding dawned, so did panic. I watched with helpless horror as Ryan hefted his brother’s body and threw it over the side of the deer stand. Brandon’s neck snapped as he hit, but he was already dead.
Ryan stayed in the stand for hours, rocking with his head in his hands and trying to pull himself together. It grew dark. He went and picked up the beer can and crushed it, then buried it along with the spent slugs. He swept pine needles over the charred spot on the ground and threw the misshapen slug into a river fifty yards off. He went home and called the police. He told his parents that he’d gone into the woods to take a piss and returned to find his brother on the ground.
I remembered now how Ryan had gone silent after Brandon died. No one had pushed him. His brother was gone—it was natural for him to avoid mindspeaking for a while. Lionel had told us to let him grieve. No one had seen how deeply he was hiding what happened.
The surge haunted him. Barely knowing what he was, he sought the feeling out again, trolling the Quarter after dark, picking a fight outside a strip club. This time no one died, but the man he’d beaten ended up in a coma. Even then, it wouldn’t have been too late. Maybe if he’d gone to Mac and confessed...but he hadn’t.
The secret bred. It spawned small deceptions that crept through his life like weeds through cracks in a sidewalk. He slowly taught himself how to pull on demand. He sucked power from bums sleeping on the street, telling himself it didn’t matter, that they’d die of drug overdoses anyway. He lied about his grades to his parents. He sapped power from Evie, a telekinetic he’d dated while I was in college. I remembered her, how they’d broken up over Christmas one year. I hadn’t known she was pregnant, or that she’d miscarried. Little things. I saw him cheating at cards on the rig, getting fired and telling no one.
Then there were the debts his mother racked up playing video poker and buying jewelry from home shopping shows. His father’s expensive back surgery. Ryan’s first encounter with the church in Briny Point came through clear and complete. He walked in late and saw Geary working cheap magic tricks for the crowd. He killed Matthew Green, realized he needed another source of power and kidnapped a whole string of helpless people, addicted to the high of pulling and the money that flowed in from the miracle-seeking crowds. He saw Mina on the riverbank, a hazy figure through the trees, coming upon him just as he dumped the dead man in a shallow grave. He attacked on instinct, saw that it was her and panicked, afraid Shane and Lionel were close by. He shoved her body under the shack and fled. He kissed Mary Ellen in a cluttered bedroom that must have been hers, then threw her into that awful cell in the church, drained her to work miracles while Geary played his part onstage, and dumped her unmarked body in a Dumpster behind a bar.
And then there was Mac.
A moan escaped me as I saw his father come to him. His face was tight with anger, but his eyes were soft with hope, and I knew he hadn’t wanted to believe. The scene played over and over and over again.
“Where’s the money coming from?”
“It’s keeping you in fishing tackle, isn’t it? Keeping Mom in her rings and shit from those shows. What do you care where it comes from?”
Ryan’s memory skipped ahead. He cast his hand out like he was throwing a punch, and then his mind cycled back to watch his father open the door again.
“Where’s the money coming from?”
Mac fell and Ryan called his mother. “Heart attack,” he said. “It’s too late.”
“Where’s the money coming from?”
Ryan sobbed over the sink in his tiny ba
throom.
The remains of Ryan’s shadowmind flickered and went dark. I knew, on a bone-deep level, he was past healing. I was in so deep I could feel how the electrical impulses tying his gift to the world faded. Power sang through my body. It was ecstasy, and just in reach was the stabbing release of his death. If I pushed a little bit further, it would all be over.
I could do it. I could make sure he never hurt anyone again. There would be no way for anyone to tell that I’d killed him, and even if they could, my broken ribs and the marks on my neck would make it easy to claim self-defense. He’d tried to kill Mina. He’d killed Mary Ellen, killed his father. He’d tried to kill Shane. Twice.
The problem was, I knew that I could stop.
When I killed Andrew, I hadn’t known what I was. I hadn’t known how to initiate a pull, much less stop one, and in the years since, the best I’d been able to do was suppress what I was, keep my powers battened down so they couldn’t whip out of my control. It was different, now. This time, maybe for the first time, I had a choice.
With a huge effort, fighting instinct and desire and pure inertia, I disengaged my mind from Ryan’s. Every step of the retreat was painful, and I longed to push forward, to finish it. Ryan slumped over me, one arm stretched out across my chest. I could feel his heartbeat. It was a moment before I felt steady enough to shove him off and get up.
I was in the Tooleys’ fishing camp. The unfinished wooden floor was all I’d taken in earlier, but now I saw that one wall was lined with fishing poles and tackle. The camp wasn’t wired for electricity, but it had a plastic sink in one corner, the kind that draws from a roof reservoir. Still shaking from the surge of power, I walked to it and splashed my face with water.
Ryan had brought us down on the back porch, which overlooked a dense stretch of deserted swampland. I went through the doorway to the front porch, which was screened and looked out over the river. Camps stretched out along the weedy bank on both sides, but they were dark and empty. It couldn’t have been past 3:00 a.m., if that. The first fishermen wouldn’t show up for hours. There was no one around.
Twisted Miracles Page 23