by Sadie Moss
“Well.” To my surprise, he seems to be blushing a little. “You can invent as many cool things as you want, but if you can’t convince people to fund your projects or buy your product, then it doesn’t matter how good that invention might be. And then when I started getting pissed about the Unpredictable situation…” He shakes his head. “I study science, and I know that science isn’t good or bad. It just is. Magic is the same. You can use any kind of magic for good or bad, there’s not one kind that just makes you evil or anything.”
He starts talking faster like he always does when he’s excited about a topic, gesturing with his hands as he continues.
“So I had to be even more convincing than before. Even more charming. I had to convince everyone to put aside their fear and prejudice, and that’s not easy. Like I said, everyone was convinced that I was Unpredictable—that I had to be if I was so interested in them, if I cared about them so much. The idea that someone else who wasn’t Unpredictable would trust and care about these people was… crazy to them.”
He laughs, although it’s not really an amused sound. Then his expression turns more serious.
“It’s important that we get out there now and we take care of this as soon as possible, and that means keeping people calm and helping them to not panic. If people are panicking, then you can’t do your job, and as your teammate, my job is to make your job as easy as possible. It’s to help you as much as I can. And this is how I can do that.” He winks at me. “This is how I can make it easier. Not just for you, but for everyone else too. Every Unpredictable.”
I smile up at him as we pause outside his car. I like this side of Nick so much, although I’m starting to realize it’s not really a different side than the rest of him. He is who he is, and that encompasses a lot of facets. He’s one of the only people I know who can manage to be carefree and serious at the same time.
“I think that’s amazing, honestly,” I tell him. “There are so many rich and famous people out there who have all this power and influence, and they don’t do anything with it. They don’t help people. They just sit on it. You’re actually using it for something.”
Nick shrugs, still seeming uncharacteristically embarrassed. “I know it takes a lot to impress you, Rae, so thank you. That means a lot.”
My body leans toward his as if drawn by some kind of magnetic pull, moving before I even realize it. But when I do realize, I make no effort to stop myself. Instead, I grin just a little as I slide one hand up to wrap around the back of his neck, pressing up onto my tiptoes to kiss him.
His hands slide around my waist, and he kisses me back with enthusiasm. With gusto. It’s not like Saint, although it’s just as intense in its own way. And it’s nothing like Logan, although I like it just as much. I arch my body against Nick’s, wrapping my arms around his neck, and give into it completely.
Kissing him feels like letting myself be swept up by a current, carried away by it. I know it could drown me, but I actually welcome it.
I want to drown in him.
I’ve always been the type to leap in with both feet—in every facet of my life except the romantic one. But maybe that’s starting to change.
Because even though I feel like I’m leaping off a cliff, I’m not scared at all.
Nick pulls away with a final teasing scrape of his teeth against my bottom lip, smirking when I shiver in response.
It’s easy as anything to smile back up at him. Just like it was easy to kiss him.
Maybe it really is this simple to let go and fall.
Chapter 18
Oh man. I never want to leave this spot on the couch.
It’s late, and we’re at Nick’s place again. Ever since the incident on Sunday, we’ve tended to end up here after the long work days, since Nick has a lab at his place that he can use to work on stuff if we get an alert or an idea.
Not that we’ve gotten anything over the last few days. Instead we’ve just had lots of worried people hanging around at IUM and no sign of this new magic.
Logan and Nick are currently throwing M&Ms at each other, aiming for each other’s mouths from across the space as they imitate that scene in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. film where the two leads toss their spy gear at each other.
“These,” Logan says, tossing an M&M on each word, “are. Russian. Made.”
“These.” Nick tosses M&Ms back at him, and Logan manages to catch each one in his mouth. “Are. American. Made. And very low tech.”
“Your Russian accent is terrible,” I point out, laughing.
We’re goofing off, and normally I would tell the guys we need to straighten up and focus, but we’re all so tired and there’s nothing new, so I don’t see much point. Let them relax. We deserve it, honestly.
I still feel like I’m missing something. Like I should be doing better. Logan keeps assuring me that we’re doing all we can and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, but I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s just habit though. I’m used to being hard on myself, and I’m used to being on top of everything.
This is like a test that I never actually got to study for, and so now I’m scrambling.
Saint is sprawled on the couch with me. He doesn’t usually talk much during these downtimes of ours. He just sits or lies close to me, his hand in my hair or drifting over my skin in lazy patterns. He’s clearly big into touch, and I don’t mind if he’s quiet. I can tell that he’s happy to be with us. It hasn’t been that long, but he’s so much more relaxed than he was when he first got out of prison.
We haven’t talked further about his other power, about his fear projection—or how he feels about himself as a result. He’s been staying at my place though, and he smiles more often and seems to be relaxing around the other two men even more, so I count it as a win. Hopefully, he can at least accept that we care about him, even if he hasn’t yet found a way to care about himself yet.
“Hey, Saint.” Nick turns, M&Ms still in his hand. “Catch!”
He tosses an M&M at the burly man, who neatly catches it in his mouth. Nick then turns to me, wiggling his eyebrows up and down as he holds up another M&M.
“Oh no, you don’t.” I shake my head. “I’m terrible at this kind of thing.”
“I didn’t think Rae was terrible at anything,” Logan puts in, arching a brow at me. “Aren’t you the best of the best?”
He’s taunting me, damn it. I glare at him. “Nice try. I’ll make an idiot of myself. It’ll hit me square in the eye.”
“Nah.” Nick grins. “You just open your mouth and hold still, and I’ll throw it right in.”
“That’s what she said.”
“That… that doesn’t…” Logan frowns at me. “That doesn’t work for the joke.”
“Eh, close enough.” Nick chuckles as he defends my lame joke. “Come on, Rae. Just one?”
“Fine. Just one.” I open my mouth and hold still.
Nick tosses the M&M, but lightning fast before it can reach me, Saint leverages himself up and snatches the M&M out of the air, catching it in his mouth instead.
“That was mine!” I protest, lightly hitting his shoulder.
He shrugs, his light gray eyes dancing with amusement. “You didn’t even want it.”
Nick’s laughing. Logan’s grinning. It all feels relaxed and easy. And more than that, it feels right. Like this is how things should be. If nothing else, at least this is going right in my life. This is going how I feel like it should, all the puzzle pieces falling into place.
I feel like I should say something. Maybe talk to them about this? I haven’t spoken about it with anyone, really. Logan and I have an understanding, I think, but although the other two seem to have picked up on the… the something that exists between all of us, nobody’s saying anything.
Maybe they’re waiting for me.
I run my fingers through Saint’s soft, short hair—I think he wants to let it grow out a bit now that he’s not in prison—and he grins up at me. It feels like we’re in a small bubble of
peace.
Logan checks his phone for alerts. Mine’s on the coffee table, out of my reach, but I haven’t heard it go off.
“Any word?” I ask.
Logan shakes his head and puts his phone back. “No new developments.”
“There has to be something that we missed,” I insist.
He grimaces. “Sometimes there’s nothing to miss. It’s just that we can’t see the whole picture yet.”
“Or it could be something we missed,” Nick concedes. “But it’s like science, you don’t know what you’re missing until you do.”
“That made no sense.”
“It made sense in my head, and that’s all that matters.”
“All that matters is that it makes sense to you?” I shake my head in faux disbelief. “You’re the worst.”
Nick grins at me. “I really am, aren’t I?”
“What’s to miss?” Saint grumbles. “This magic makes people insane.” He pauses. “Kind of like my magic.”
“It doesn’t work like yours,” I reply. “Yours just feeds people fear, but how they respond to it is still based on who they are as a person. This is different. It’s almost like the person develops some kind of split personality. They become more aggressive.”
“The mage in the mountains was definitely the most aggressive,” Nick notes.
“I think he had it the longest,” Logan says. “Whatever it is.”
“He was more aggressive in his attitude,” I reply, “but not in his magic. The third man was the most aggressive in that way. I think the mountain man just had those magical blasts, but this guy had blasts and was controlling and growing those plants. He had telekinesis or something similar that allowed him to move the concrete—”
A gleam comes into Nick’s eyes, like someone’s literally flicked on a light switch inside his brain, and he jumps to his feet. “Wait! It’s mutating!”
We all stare at him.
“Come again?” Logan asks.
“It’s—come with me.” Instead of stopping to explain, Nick rushes through the penthouse toward his lab.
Saint groans in reluctance as if he doesn’t want to get up, but he rises to his feet and helps me up, and the three of us troop after Nick.
Whatever it is, I hope it’s good.
Chapter 19
“See?” Nick says as we enter his lab. He’s already stationed at a microscope when we enter the room, moving slides back and forth underneath it. “Come here.”
He waves me over and positions me in front of the scope. I peer down, with Nick’s arms around me and my back pressed to his chest as he moves the slides for me.
“Okay, this one is for the mage. This is the sample we got from him. You see the new magic there? I used a simple coloring solution to highlight it, took me forever, but—”
“I see it.”
“Okay. Now, we’re going to skip over Mary for a second…” Nick switches right to the third slide. “Do you see anything different?”
I peer down.
Hmm. At first I don’t see any difference. The magic looks different from anything I’ve seen before in science classes at Griffin, so I’m so busy trying to catalogue that difference that I don’t realize there’s another difference in there. One between the new magic in the mage and the new magic in this third victim.
“There’s more of it,” I say out loud. “Not more in the person itself, but like it’s got more substance to it in the first place. There’s a spiny looking thing…”
“Right. It’s more complex now. It’s evolving.” Nick steps back, and so do I, turning around to look at him. “Like a virus mutating.”
“So it is a virus?” That’s been our working theory, could this prove it?
“I’m still not a hundred percent sure,” he admits. “I’m not even seventy-five percent, which is what I like to be on most anything science-y because it’s hard to be one hundred percent on science. It likes to trick you.”
“You will never make sense to me,” Logan admits, sounding fond.
I have to agree with him. Nick’s science stuff is never really going to make sense to me. But I love it. Or rather, I love watching him talk about it. He’s so enthusiastic and he loves it so much.
“But this is another piece of the puzzle,” Nick goes on. “And that’s always goo—”
My phone goes off in the other room with a familiar buzzing sound. So does Logan’s, in his pocket. He pulls his out. “Shit. We have another flare-up. That was Ben.”
“Damn it.” I dash out of the room to grab my phone, and then we’re on the move again.
We don’t even bother stopping by the lab this time to get it from Ben. Logan calls him while Nick drives to the location where the magic pinged.
“Are they in another public space?” I ask, already worried and trying to figure out if I need to call the local Circuit to ask them to seal off the area, get people out of there. We can’t have civilians getting in the way.
“Sounds like they were in a laundromat,” Logan replies.
Okay. Okay. That’s better than a park, better than a big, open space that anyone could stumble onto, that maybe even a non-magical person could see. The laundromat is still a public space but it’s an enclosed one, so that’s better than nothing.
“Saint, you go in through the back.” I start coordinating in my head. “Nick, I want you to try to use your devices to trap the person again, it almost worked last time. Logan, coordinate with the rest of IUM and with the Circuit, you’re the best at that.” I’d have Nick do it, but he’s still technically a civilian, so I’m not sure I want him to have been the one giving orders if things all collapse on us. Logan and I are the official agents, so we’re the ones that need to shoulder the responsibility if this goes sideways. “I’ll distract and be on the frontal attack.”
The men don’t look happy with the idea of me putting myself in the most vulnerable position, but damn it, this is my team. I’m the leader here. And it would be wrong of me to put myself in a safer position while my teammates risk their lives under my orders.
I couldn’t do that to them.
We pull up in front of the laundromat, where Circuit officers are already on the scene as first responders.
“What’s the situation?” Logan asks the one who seems to be in charge as we get out.
“Got a report of someone acting erratically, same as the previous incident,” the officer reports. “She stopped answering her roommate, started staring into space, then began to have some kind of argument with herself. Then she blasted a hole in the wall. Her roommate and some others called us and ran out.”
“Good.” I nod. The fewer civilians who are stuck inside a dangerous situation with this person, the better.
“Set up a perimeter,” Logan says, beginning to instruct the officers. Saint silently slips off without a word, and I know he’s looking for the back entrance.
I look over at Nick, who nods, pulling out a couple of devices.
Turning into a jaguar, I pad into the laundromat. Cats have much better eyesight in the dark, and it looks like that blast the woman did knocked out half the lights in this place. Not to mention how silent big cats can be. I want every advantage I can.
“Do we have the girl’s name?” I hear Nick ask from outside.
“Her roommate said it was Chelsea.”
“Chelsea…” I hear Nick calling her name in a low voice as he enters behind me. I pad around through the rows of washers and dryers. Some of them still have clothes in them, but all of them are silent. Shut off. “Chelsea? We’re here to help.”
I can smell her. I can smell a lot of different things, but I can most definitely smell fear coming off of her. It stinks, sour, acrid in my nose. I inhale deeply, my nostrils flaring.
Okay. I can find her.
In a sudden rush, clothes come flying out of the washers and dryers and fling themselves at me, trying to wrap around me and choke me. I growl and leap out of the way, turning into a monkey as I land on t
op of one of the washers, yanking the clothes off me.
“You!” A girl, a little younger than I am, leaps out, her teeth bared.
I can’t tell what she smells like anymore but she’s covered in sweat, her eyes practically glowing.
Shit. She does not look good.
I shift back into my human form as the girl wrenches a machine out of the wall and sends it hurtling toward me. My telekinesis kicks in just in time and I manage to stop it a couple of inches from my face, grunting with the effort. I shove the machine to the side, setting it down.
How is she doing this so easily? It takes a lot of my strength and concentration to move something that big, that quickly. She’s doing all of this like it’s nothing.
All of the machines suddenly kick into gear, whirring to life, sparks flying out from the wall where the girl—Chelsea—yanked the machine out, the lights in the ceiling flickering wildly.
Electricity manipulation?
This magic is gaining powers steadily, and is using them far more strongly than even most Unpredictables I’ve seen, even though Unpredictables are notorious for having such strong magic—it’s why so many people are scared of us. But this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
This magic… holy fuck. No wonder it’s driving people crazy. Nobody can survive with this much power inside of them. It’s messing up their heads, scrambling their brains.
I have to count on Nick and Saint to find a way to take this girl down.
“Chelsea!” I can yell now that I’m in human form. I want say something like is that all you’ve got? But that would tip her off immediately to the fact that I’m distracting her. Instead, I stick to the script I’ve been using before. “You don’t have to do this. We can help you! Let me help you!”
“You can’t help anyone,” Chelsea sneers in a cold, knowing tone. It oddly infuriates me. “You couldn’t help any of the others, after all. Such a pity.”
A bolt of electricity shoots at me, and I have to dodge. I can feel the air crackling around me. Shit. I’m fast, and in certain animal forms, I’m even faster, but I can’t outrun electricity. I can’t outpace lightning.