I supposed the easy answer would have been to say college was important because I didn’t want to end up like my mother, working one waitressing job after another because she didn’t have the education or skills to do anything else. But that wasn’t the entire truth — for one thing, I’d also done a lot of waitressing, and I knew it was hard work and required a decent amount of brains to be any good at it. Besides, I was definitely unlike my mother in that I’d made damn sure there wouldn’t be any “surprises” like I’d been for her. Moving around put a real damper on romance, and although there had been a couple of guys I was interested in, I’d never met anyone I thought was worth the risk of having sex. All right, I knew the pill was pretty reliable as long as you were careful and didn’t forget to take your daily dose, but still, after seeing what my mother’s life had turned out to be, I didn’t see the point in taking the chance.
And once we landed in Utah, well, let’s just say it was a lot easier to be celibate there than in some of the other places we’d lived.
Another glance at the clock. Two-thirty. Time to stop moping, get up, and go put on my game face. Not too much makeup, since Kanab was a conservative town, but just enough to look as if I’d put a little effort into my appearance.
I went in the bathroom and dutifully applied mascara, blush, and lip gloss, then brushed my hair and pulled it back into an elastic band. Luckily, the diner where my mother and I worked didn’t require a real up-do, only that my hair be out of the way. I might have been able to call clouds to a clear sky, but I was utter crap at doing anything with my hair that required more work than a simple ponytail.
The doorbell rang and I started slightly, wondering who the heck would be coming by in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. Word had gone out soon after our arrival that we were a couple of heathens, or at least definitely not interested in converting, because the Mormon missionaries had long since stopped showing up on our doorstep. We hardly ever ordered anything online, so I knew it couldn’t be UPS or FedEx.
“Can you get that, honey?” my mom called from her bedroom. “I’m getting changed into my uniform.”
“Sure,” I replied. I always left the uniform for last, just because that way there was less chance of getting makeup on it or spilling something or whatever. I only had two of them, and half the time, the second uniform would be in the hamper and not readily available in case there was some sort of accident.
Steeling myself to dispel a couple of over-zealous Mormons or maybe some Seventh Day Adventists who’d gotten blown off course, I headed to the front door. The house was small, just a little over a thousand square feet, so it didn’t take me long to get there.
When I opened the door, I blinked in surprise. No, that was no missionary, but a man probably in his late thirties, wearing a dark suit. He had short-cropped dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes, and wasn’t bad-looking, with his regular features and sharply angled cheekbones, although something about him immediately sent a chill down my spine.
Maybe it was just that he felt like a cop to me, even though he wasn’t wearing a uniform.
“Adara Grant?” he asked.
He’d phrased it as a question, but I had a pretty good idea he already knew who I was. Since I guessed that lying probably wasn’t an option, I made myself say, “Yes, that’s me. Can I help you?”
At once, he smiled, showing two rows of even white teeth. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, though, which remained positively glacial. “I hope so. My name is Randall Lenz, and I’d like to talk to you for a moment, if I could.”
“We’re really not interested in converting, thank you,” I said politely, even though I knew he was about two decades too old to be a Mormon on his mission.
That comment made him chuckle, although something about the sound felt contrived to me. “Oh, I’m not a missionary,” he replied. “I work for the government.”
“We always pay our taxes on time,” I blurted out, and he shook his head.
“I’m not with the IRS, Ms. Grant,” he said. “Really, I only need a moment of your time.”
I paused, wishing that my mother would appear and get rid of him. But her bedroom door had been closed when I walked past, an indication that she probably didn’t intend to emerge until ten minutes until three, the time when we’d have to leave for work. That meant there was no way she was going to come to my rescue.
“Can I see some identification?” I asked. That wasn’t an outrageous request, was it? I thought I’d read somewhere that it was within your rights to ask for I.D. if someone claimed to be working in an official capacity.
His smile didn’t waver. “Of course.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his suit, then got out a slim leather case containing a photo I.D. and handed it to me. His face matched the picture on the card, and it said his name was Agent Randall Alan Lenz, Homeland Security.
Homeland Security?
I swallowed, and gave him back the case with his government identification. “I don’t know what Homeland Security would want with me,” I told him. “I’m pretty sure we don’t get too many foreign operatives in Kanab, Utah.”
He didn’t blink, icy blue eyes still fixed on my face. “Just few minutes, Ms. Grant.”
Once again, I glanced over my shoulder, but the house was quiet, my mother probably putting the finishing touches on her hair before slipping on the comfortable shoes she wore for her shift. Letting in Randall Lenz seemed like a huge mistake, but I couldn’t really turn down a request from a government agent, could I? That I.D. looked pretty damn authentic. I supposed it could have been faked, but why would someone go to so much trouble to talk to a nobody like me?
“All right,” I said reluctantly. “We can sit here in the living room.”
I opened the door a bit wider to let him in, inwardly thankful that the day before had been my day off, and so I’d tidied the house and dusted and vacuumed. The place wasn’t anything to write home about, a small one-story cottage built in the late 1950s, but at least it looked neat and generally presentable, despite the garage-sale furniture.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked, trying to be polite. “Ice water, or iced tea?”
“Nothing, thank you,” he replied as he took a seat on the sofa.
So much for that stalling tactic. I reluctantly sat down on the wing chair, perching on the edge because it didn’t feel right to settle all the way back on it. “What can I help you with, Agent Lenz?”
Another of those arctic smiles, which never seemed to reach his equally cold eyes. “Did you know that you’re a very special young woman, Ms. Grant?”
Now the cold was in my spine, running down my back, making me feel as if I was going to freeze all over and then shatter into a thousand pieces. “Me?” I responded, then gave an utterly unconvincing laugh. “No, I’m pretty ordinary.”
“Was what you did earlier today ordinary?”
My fingers dug into the edge of the seat cushion. “I — I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
His lips lifted a fraction of an inch. “Oh, I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. A storm out of nowhere, wasn’t it?” He shifted slightly so he could glance out the front window and see the charred limb on the cottonwood tree. “Close call, I would think. What if your house had been struck?”
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“I want you, Ms. Grant,” he replied, the intensity of those cold blue eyes belying the crisp, businesslike tone of his voice. “Or rather, your government wants you. Talents like yours shouldn’t go to waste.”
I wanted to blink and pray that I’d wake up from this nightmare, that maybe I’d discover I’d fallen asleep after the tumult earlier in the afternoon and was only having a very bad dream. How could he possibly know a truth I’d done my very best to keep from everyone, to the point where I hardly dared acknowledge it to myself?
He must have been tracking me somehow — or rather, he’d been tracking strange weather phenomena,
and then had made a connection between those events and my presence in the places where they’d occurred. Nothing else made any sense.
Of course, if he’d been doing something like that, then that seemed to indicate he — or the government agency he worked for — was actively looking for people with these supposed “talents.” What the government needed with a person like me, I really didn’t want to know. I doubted it could be anything good.
“I don’t have any special talents, Agent Lenz,” I said loudly, hoping my voice would carry down the hall and right through the closed door of my mother’s room. Honestly, I didn’t know for sure how much she could even do to intervene, but at the very least, having her there as a sort of leavening influence might help to defuse the situation a bit. “I think you must have me confused with someone else.”
His thin lips quirked a little. “No, I don’t think so. There was that tornado in Durango, Colorado — and the rains that flooded out Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Or do you want to talk about the other twister in Cheyenne barely two years ago? I’ll admit that things seemed to quiet down once you moved here to Kanab. Do you want to explain that?”
I couldn’t have explained any of it to Agent Lenz even if I’d wanted to. As it was, I just desperately wanted him far, far away from Kanab in general and me in particular. “Weird weather happens,” I said as calmly as I could. “I honestly don’t know why you would connect me to any of those incidents.”
“Because you were living in all those places when those ‘incidents’ occurred,” he replied, looking unperturbed by my protests. “And there were no reoccurrences after you moved out of the areas in question. That tells me you had to be connected to them, even if you want to deny any involvement.”
“Coincidence,” I said, then added, “If you don’t have a warrant or anything, then I think I’ll need to ask you to leave. I have to be at work in fifteen minutes.”
As I’d feared, he didn’t move, only sat there on the couch, still wearing that faint smile, as if he found my show of bravado more amusing than anything else. “Ms. Grant, this isn’t the sort of situation that requires a warrant. It would be in your best interests if you stopped with the excuses and cooperated.”
“Or what?” I returned, inwardly a little shocked that I’d had the guts to make such a response. In general — probably because I was always worried that my strange talents would flare out of control and create a mess I couldn’t possibly fix — I tried to keep my head down and act like a good little obedient citizen. The world just worked better for me that way. However, something about this man freaked me out. He was too calm, too in control, as if he knew he had the upper hand and that it didn’t matter what I said or did.
But…did he? If this supposed talent — or curse — of mine was what had drawn him here in the first place, couldn’t I use that same talent to scare him off?
Well, maybe, except for the little part where I couldn’t control my strange powers. And even if I could, calling down the lightning to strike him where he sat would only destroy part of our house in the bargain. While I wanted to get rid of him, I also didn’t want to blow a hole in the roof and set the place on fire. That was the problem with my supposed gift — I never knew what kind of collateral damage it might create.
Agent Lenz shifted ever so slightly, just enough so I could see the dark shape of a gun in its shoulder holster against the crisp white of his dress shirt. “I don’t want to use force, Ms. Grant,” he said. “But it’s always an option.”
Just that small glimpse of his service pistol was enough to make a hard lump of fear lodge itself somewhere in my throat. I swallowed and pushed back a stray lock of hair with shaking fingers. “What am I supposed to tell my mother?” I asked, and a gleam appeared in his sharp blue eyes, as if he’d guessed that I probably wasn’t going to put up too much more of a fight.
“Tell your mother the truth,” he replied. “Your government has need of you, and you’ll be going with me to the East Coast. She doesn’t need to know anything else — and can’t. This program is classified.”
Meaning he wouldn’t tell me anything more, either. Were there others like me? The existence of this “program” seemed to indicate there were. The thought was unsettling and yet oddly exciting at the same time. Ever since those strange abilities had surfaced soon after I turned ten, I’d thought of myself as a freak, as some sort of strange genetic anomaly. But if I wasn’t alone…if other people existed with odd paranormal talents…then maybe I’d finally be able to figure out what my place in the world was supposed to be.
As I stood there, wavering, the doorbell rang again. I looked at the front door in consternation, wondering who the hell it could be this time. Considering who’d been standing on my doorstep the last time I had a visitor, I wasn’t exactly keen to answer the bell.
And it seemed Agent Lenz wasn’t eager for me to do that, either, because he said calmly, “Ignore it. You need to tell your mother you’re leaving.”
“It could be one of the neighbors,” I replied, although I didn’t sound convincing even to myself. Neither of our next-door neighbors was the type to socialize with us; I’d always gotten the impression that they weren’t too thrilled with having a couple of heathens living on their street, although they’d always paid lip service to convention by smiling when they met us or offering a half-hearted wave when they saw either my mom or me driving past in our ancient Subaru. Still, some kind of emergency could have come up, something where they needed our help.
“Or it could be a missionary,” he said in that same reasonable tone. “This is Utah, after all.”
The doorbell rang again.
Shit.
Then my mother’s voice came down the hallway. “Addie, answer the door, then hurry up and get changed. We’re going to be late.”
I shot a quick glance at Agent Lenz and saw that his mouth had tightened, the smile he’d been wearing now gone. “Um, Mom — ”
“Addie, answer the damn door!”
Years of conditioning propelled my feet forward. Before my unwelcome visitor could protest, I’d reached for the knob and opened the door.
Standing on the front doorstep was probably the best-looking man I’d ever seen in my life. He was a few years older than I, tall with dark hair and eyes, and a faint scruff of a beard covering his lean jaw. Stranger than the mere presence of this apparition, though, was the weird tingle I experienced at the back of my neck as I stared up into his face, as though simply being around him had evoked some odd physical reaction that I couldn’t begin to explain.
“Um…yes?” I asked, noting out of the corner of my eye that Agent Lenz had gotten up from the couch and begun to move toward me…and my amazing visitor.
“Adara Grant?” he responded in an echo of the agent’s words from just a few moments earlier.
What the hell was going on? I doubted the newcomer was a government agent — he was wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a brewing company in Flagstaff — but I also couldn’t figure out why all these strangers had decided to converge on my house at almost the same time.
Unless this man had also been tracking me somehow. Obviously, the strange phenomena that clustered around me had attracted way too much unwelcome attention.
“You don’t need to answer him,” Agent Lenz interposed before I could begin to reply.
At once, the stranger’s gaze shifted toward the agent and his mouth thinned, even as his dark eyes grew worried. He’d obviously taken his measure of the situation and wasn’t happy with what he was seeing.
Well, that made two of us.
I lifted my chin and said, “I’m Adara. What’s this about?”
Ignoring the glare Agent Lenz had just sent him, the man said, “My name is Jake. I need to talk to you.”
“Talk to me about what?” I asked. I noticed that the stranger hadn’t given me his last name, but maybe he’d only held back that bit of information because he didn’t want to offer it with a federal agent
standing there and listening to everything we said.
“She doesn’t need to talk to you,” Agent Lenz said. “In fact, she was just leaving. Come on, Ms. Grant.”
He put his hand on my arm, and almost at once, anger flared in me at the unwelcome contact. At the same time, the wind picked up, rustling the leaves of the cottonwood trees, keening around the corners of the house.
“‘Leaving’?” my mother echoed, and I shifted so I could see her standing in the middle of the living room, brow puckered in worry as she took in the man in the dark suit who grasped my bicep, the much more casually dressed stranger who waited on the front porch. “Addie, what in the world is going on?”
Good question. I told myself to be calm, even as the wind picked up speed and the skies overhead began to darken once again. “Mom, I — ”
“Let go of her,” she cut in, glaring at Agent Lenz. However, I hadn’t missed the way she’d sent a frightened glance upward, as if she’d noticed the way the wind had begun to howl and knew what was going to come next if she didn’t try to de-escalate the situation. “I don’t know who you are, but — ”
“I’m with the government,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“I don’t care who you’re with,” Jake retorted. “But it sure looks to me like Adara doesn’t want to go anywhere with you.”
Agent Lenz’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, but otherwise, he didn’t appear concerned by the other man’s interruption. “It’s none of your business, son,” he said, his tone almost kind, and yet dismissive at the same time. “Let me do my job, and no one will get hurt.”
Rain began to fall, pounding onto the already wet lawn, dripping off the eaves. I winced as lightning crackled overhead and the winds whipped into a greater fury.
Stop it, I thought. Just stop it.
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