Eva covered her mouth with her free hand. “Some people were missing before you died, before Mihko had more people in the community.”
“He was feeding then,” Cole said. “He must be feeding now.”
“Don’t say it,” she said.
Cole didn’t. But he knew that taking down the facility wasn’t the last thing that he needed to do, not if Wounded Sky was really going to be safe. “People must’ve gone missing because of him, and people are going to keep going missing, whether Mihko is here or not.”
“Cole…” Eva pleaded. “…this can’t all fall on just your shoulders.”
“Who else can stop him?”
“I…”
“Medicine men, or a volunteer, in our communities, used to dream of how to defeat these things.”
“Dream?” Eva asked. “Have you dreamt of it? How are you going to kill him?”
“I’m going to rip his heart out.” Cole thought of Choch, and how he just stood there while Upayokwitigo mortally wounded him. “Maybe I was shown how…”
“And if he kills you? Then what?”
“Is it better not to do anything? If you see something that’s wrong, and you just watch, what does that make you?”
“You’ve already given this community everything.”
“Not everything,” Cole said, “not—”
“Wait.” Eva stopped Cole.
He tried to keep walking, but she pulled him back.
“I said wait,” she whispered and crouched down to hide herself in the underbrush.
When Cole didn’t crouch, she yanked him down.
“Holy shit, Eva, what’s gotten into you?”
“Shhh!” She put her index finger against her lips, and nodded forward, to the place where they were about to walk.
Cole saw a guard standing there, looking in their direction, one hand on his rifle, the other at his side. Cole and Eva sat on the ground, out of view.
“We’re near the perimeter,” Cole whispered.
“Got a plan?” Eva asked.
“What’s worked for me lately is I’ve run really fast at guards and knocked them out.”
“Wow,” she said, “intricate.”
“Last time, when I was coming through with Brady, he walked up to the guy, and I climbed up a tree, got past them, and dropped behind the guy. It worked, so…”
“And that seems overthought.”
“I’m not sure that’d work now,” he said. “They’re probably on high alert since the clinic breakout.”
“Okay, so run at the guy really fast then, I guess,” she said.
“Right.”
Cole took off from behind the bush, but as soon as he was in view of the guard he saw a spark, and there was a pop. He felt a burning sensation in his stomach just before he fell backwards. He scrambled over to Eva, holding the wound. She helped him to safety.
“Let me see.” She moved his hand away.
He’d taken a bullet. His stomach was gushing blood. She replaced his hand, added another for good measure, and applied pressure.
“I think I’m going to pass out,” he said.
“Hey you! Stand and come out with your hands up!” the guard called out.
“He can’t get up you asshole! You shot him!” Eva called back.
Jayney, Cole thought. Jayney.
“Who are you?” the guard asked.
Eva didn’t respond, she had her hands over Cole’s hands, trying to stop the bleeding with him. “Can you…die from this?” she asked.
“Kinda feels like it,” he said. Jayney! “Maybe, if I…don’t get this…” Black spots filled his vision.
“Cole!” She slapped his cheek. “Stay awake!”
“Get out here, now!” the guard demanded.
Cole’s eyes began to close, but then he saw a bright light standing over him. He knew better than to think it was the light at the end of the tunnel, although he felt pretty close to that moment. He struggled to open his eyes again, and saw Jayne.
“You’re bleedin’, Coley!”
“Remember…what you did…at the…trailer?”
“Is Jayney here?” Eva asked.
Cole nodded.
“Yeah, I remember!”
Cole looked down at his wound. Moved his hands away. Eva tried to stop him, but then didn’t. He lifted his sweatshirt up to reveal the bullet wound.
Eva gasped and covered her mouth with her bloodied hands.
“Oh no!” Jayne cried.
“Burn…it…” Cole saw spots again. More. He could almost only see black.
“But…” Jayne protested.
“Now!”
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to yell you know that!” Jayne bent down and placed her hand over the wound. Cole smelled his flesh burning first, then felt the scalding flames as the wound cauterized. He cried out from the pain.
Eva held his hand tight.
Footsteps approached. The guard was coming towards them.
Jayne removed her hand. The bleeding had stopped.
“Are you okay now?” Eva whispered.
“Need…a bit,” Cole said.
“How long?”
“I can…”
“Hands up!” The guard’s rifle lowered slightly when he saw Cole’s wound. Blood was smeared over his skin, all over the ground, but the bullet hole had been closed. “What the hell? I shot you. I know I shot you.”
Cole lowered his sweatshirt over the wound. “I got…better…”
“No,” the guard shook his head. “That’s not possible.”
Jayney, stop him. I’m too weak right now. He’ll shoot us.
Jayne’s fire got dim. She crossed her arms. “I can’t do that again, Coley. I can’t burn nobody anymore.”
“Jayney, please…”
“Are you Jayney?” the guard asked Eva.
Cole hadn’t intended to say Jayne’s name out loud. He still felt faint. He urged his body to heal faster.
“Yeah, I’m Jayney.” Eva put her hands up.
Jayney, you have to.
“I want to Coley, but it made me so sad before.”
Just…
“I’m sorry.” Jayne left in a cloud of black smoke. Left him and Eva behind, with a guard standing over them, rifle moving back and forth between Eva and Cole.
“Wait a minute.” The guard’s head tilted as he looked Cole over carefully. “You’re Cole Harper.”
“Are you…the guy who…shot me in the…head?” Cole asked, trying to keep the guard talking while his strength built up.
“No,” the guard said, “but I’m going to make sure you’re dead this time.” The guard’s pale face belied his bravado, but there was nothing Cole could do right now to take advantage of that.
“And you think a bullet is going to finish me off?” He tried to sound stronger than he felt. If anything, maybe the guard would scare, run off, and leave him and Eva to continue on to Wounded Sky.
“S-stay down!” the guard shouted. He reached for the two-way radio on his belt.
“Hey.” Eva stood up slowly.
Cole knew what she was doing. Stalling him, keeping him from calling more of Mihko’s security force, giving Cole more time to heal. But he didn’t want her to.
“Eva…”
She ignored him.
“You know what he can do,” she said to the guard.
The guard loosened, then re-gripped his rifle. Aimed it at Eva, from Cole. Blinked out some sweat.
“D-Don’t move…don’t take another step,” the guard said.
“We’ll let you go.” She looked back at Cole. “He’ll let you live.”
“I’m the one w-with the rifle,” the guard said.
“And that was so effective at McCabe’s place, right?” She took a step forward.
“I said not to take another step!”
Cole got ready to move, strong or not. If he thought for one second the guard would shoot Eva, he was ready to do whatever he could, with all that he had in him.
>
She slid her foot along the ground. “We just want our friend back, alright? Is that worth dying for?
“They’ll kill me anyway if I let you go,” the guard said.
“So you can die now or die later.” Eva took another step.
“Enough!” The guard moved too fast for Cole. He needed more time. Another minute. He didn’t have it. The guard grabbed Eva, spun her around. He dropped his rifle, took out his pistol, and pushed the muzzle into Eva’s temple.
“No!” Cole shouted.
“Now,” the guard said, his voice and hand shaking, which seemed more dangerous to Cole, “run the other way, and I won’t shoot Jayne here in the head.”
“Don’t,” Eva said to Cole. “Let me go. They’ll kill me anyway. What you have to do is bigger.”
“No,” Cole said weakly, demanding his body to fill with strength, every ounce he needed. Right now. There was only right now. There was only this moment that mattered.
“I’m going to count to three,” the guard said, “and by the time I get to three, I want you to be walking the other way.”
“I know where I’m going,” Eva tried to keep her voice steady, but it was shaking like the guard’s. “You showed me where I was going.”
“No, Eva, I can’t,” Cole said.
“You have to.”
“One,” the guard said.
Eva tried to move the guard’s arm away. She gripped both her hands around the forearm wrapped around her body. Cole saw her muscles tense. But he jerked her into submission and pushed the muzzle into her temple harder.
“Don’t you hurt her!” Cole shouted.
“Two,” the guard said. “Get moving, Harper.”
Cole got to his feet. Still dizzy. Still struggling to move. There was nothing he could do. He felt weaker doing what he knew he had to do, now. He stared at her face. Tried to memorize every single detail. Watched the sweetgrass ring swing back and forth like a pendulum.
“Cole,” Eva said. “You know what to do when…when this is over…”
He looked away from the ring, met eyes with her.
“Don’t.” A tear fell, as though shaken loose by the word. He was in a dream. In a nightmare. He pictured Eva dancing in the northern lights. A ribbon of light away from pain, a ribbon he would dance with one day. He knew it. She did, too.
“I love you.” She closed her eyes.
“I love you, too.” He got ready to move.
“Three.” The guard cocked the hammer on his gun.
Eva screamed. Cole felt like his eardrums burst. The guard staggered, dropped his gun, but grabbed onto her tighter. Wind rushed in like floodwater from all directions. So strong, so quick, it knocked Cole to his knees. The wind crashed together where Eva and the guard stood. Cole looked up in time to see Eva and the guard lifted into the air as though shot from a cannon. They rose above the trees and stopped twenty stories above the ground. Cole could see them struggle, helpless, from the ground. A speck broke loose and hurtled to the ground. The guard connected with the earth at Cole’s feet, and an explosion of blood splashed across his body. Cole stepped away, kept moving away until he backed into a tree. He looked up, wiped blood away from his face, terrified Eva would fall to the ground next.
But when he saw her, she was floating down to Earth, towards him, slow and graceful. She landed without a sound right in front of him. When she did, she looked as stunned as he was. She looked at her legs, her arms, her hands, like her body was foreign to her.
“Eva…what just happened?” Cole felt weird and weak for another reason entirely now.
“I don’t know,” she said, her hands outstretched, her eyes fixed on them. There were tiny little tornados dying out over her palms. She closed her hands into fists and held them behind her back.
Cole looked at the sky, then at Eva, then at what remained of the guard, then back at Eva. She was looking at him, too.
“Did you just fly?” he asked.
“I think I just flew,” she said.
“You flew. Holy shit!”
“I was just in the air. I didn’t even think. I was just…there.”
“You didn’t think,” he said, “but did you feel? Did you…what…something must’ve happened.” “I just…” Eva looked around, then at the sky, as though she could still see herself there. She lowered her gaze, slow and graceful, to Cole. She looked at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. Finally, she gasped, in almost a whisper. Quick and quiet. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” He asked.
“Oh, my God,” she repeated.
“Eva, what?” He reached behind her back and took her hands. They were cold.
“I know why,” she said. “I know what happened.”
She took one of her hands away from Cole’s grip and placed her fingers against his cheek. The cool touch of her skin sent shivers across his body.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“I can’t…” she shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”
26
AMBUSH
“YOU KNOW, I ALWAYS HAD POWERS, RIGHT? I mean, I didn’t know it, but I did.” Cole had been trying to get something out of Eva since they’d left the remains of the guard. Eva hadn’t budged, and still wouldn’t. “Maybe you’ve always been able to, like, fly, and you just found out? What do you think?”
Now, she was just annoyed.
“Yeah, I don’t know, maybe.”
“What does ‘Yeah, I don’t know, maybe’ mean? You just gave me three answers at once.”
“I told you; I can’t say,” Eva said.
“Can you do other stuff? What other stuff can you do?” Cole asked. “Shoot tornados out of your hands? Because that would be—”
“I don’t know, Cole,” Eva said. “Drop it, okay? Brady and I weren’t this annoying, were we?”
“Probably not,” Cole said. “It’s just, when you have powers, and then you find somebody who has powers? Totally different thing.”
They were coming to Wounded Sky now, slowly making their way to the research facility. Cole’s wound felt much better now, but he caught himself grimacing from pain every few moments. Stabs of pain inside his stomach, a low burn across the cauterized skin. Eva caught it too.
“Does Jayne come whenever you call her?” Eva asked.
“I mean, usually,” Cole said. “But she’s kind of been, I don’t know, off and on for a bit. Even before I got shot in the head. Like, seven gunshot wounds ago.”
“How so?”
“Like, before,” he said, “she was afraid of the boogeyman, which was Reynold. So she was hiding during the day.”
“But she helped today, so how is that usually?”
“I wanted her to do something about the guard, but she wouldn’t, she…”
“She what?”
“It was setting those guards on fire, when we broke out of the clinic. She’d never really done something like that before. She doesn’t want to hurt anybody again.”
“I can’t imagine doing something like that when I was seven.”
“She’s been around just as long as us, though,” he said. “It’s just, she looks seven, that’s all.”
“I can’t really remember what she looks like.”
Cole didn’t think of the fire that enveloped half her body all the time. He just pictured her how he saw her. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “She just loves everything, and I’ve asked her to do too much.”
“Sounds like she wants to help, though, right?”
“I don’t think that’s the kind of helping she had in mind.”
They came to the edge of Blackwood, to a spot where they could see the research facility. Mihko’s security force was patrolling the building and the exterior of the electric fence. Ants around an anthill. Cole and Eva sat behind a large tree.
“We should wait until it’s dark,” Cole said. “Any advantage we can get…”
He put his hand under his sweatshirt and felt around the healing wound.
&nb
sp; “You okay?” Eva asked. “We should wait just so you can get all the way better.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll be okay, when it’s time.”
“What’s going to happen?” she asked. “If everything goes how it should go?”
Cole shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I thought I’d ever get here. I’m not sure I even knew this was what was supposed to happen.”
“But you know it now?”
“I think so.” A shooting pain from his stomach made Cole wince again.
“Let me see that.” She lifted his sweatshirt and inspected the wound. Poked at it gently. “I still can’t believe you can do that. Just heal from whatever.”
“Being invulnerable to pain would be nice.”
She lowered his sweatshirt.
“What happens after all of this is over?” Eva asked.
“We recover, I guess,” he said. “Get Anna Crate into the position she should’ve been in, once Reynold and Mihko are gone. Rely on her to lead us out of this mess.”
“And what about you? What’s next for you?”
“If we do this,” Cole said, “if we actually pull this off…I don’t know…I’m kind of looking forward to just being a kid again.”
“Do you really think you can do that?” she asked. “With what you can do, do you really think you should?”
“With great power comes great responsibility? That sort of thing?”
“Yeah, that sort of thing.”
“So what does that mean for you then? You know, now that you can fly?” Cole asked, then added, “and no, I won’t ask how you can fly again.”
“I think things will be different for me, too.”
“Maybe you can be my sidekick.”
“Like hell, I’m your sidekick,” she said. “Who saved your ass?”
Cole relived the moment. Every second of it. From when he’d got shot, to when the guard stood over them, to when Eva had a gun to her temple, to when the guard fell to the ground. Cole kept going back to one moment: As the guard had counted down, Eva told Cole that she loved him. He wanted her to say it again, and again, and never stop saying it.
“Did you mean it?” he asked, expecting her to have read her mind, like that was a power she had too, along with flying.
The pause after his question made him realize that she knew exactly what he’d asked about. Maybe she’d been thinking about it, too.
Ghosts Page 19