A Matter of Heart (19 page)

“I think the twin brother of
the Creator’s Connection might very well cover up for her if asked,” Jens dares
to say.

“He did not just say that,”
Callie hisses. But me, I don’t even know what to say. I am so, so utterly blown
away by what’s going on.

Kellan lunges toward his
boss, but once more, Karl yanks him back.

“Too bad your opinion means
nothing anymore,” Jonah says. It’s then I notice Astrid has a hand on his arm,
too.

This statement, though, is
enough to send Jens into a rage. “Why are none of you questioning her? Are you
truly such puppets of this . . .
child
?” One of his long fingers shoots
out toward Jonah, who now lunges. Karl whips out to grab him, one hand still on
Kellan, while Astrid tries her best to restrain my fiancé, as well. “She’s a
Creator
,
for gods’ sakes! They have been known to do this sort of thing in the past! If
she’s a murderer, then we need to—”

“Touch her,” Jonah says
quietly, no longer struggling against his mother or Karl, “and
this child
”—he
touches his chest—“will kill you where you stand. Do I make myself clear?”

I realize I am
hyperventilating when Caleb does the equivalent of slapping my face in my mind.
BECAUSE OH MY GODS. Jens thinks I murdered people. Earle! Nividita! Harou! And
Jonah just threatened to murder
him
.

THIS IS INSANE.

“Do not look at her again,”
Jonah continues. “Or even say her name. Chloe Lilywhite is off limits to you.
Do not doubt I will carry through with my threat, Jens.”

“I don’t doubt you mean it
at all,” Jens replies coolly. “Which is why nobody with a Connection should be
allowed to serve on the Council or Guard.”

“Luckily you have no say in
the matter,” Kate says. “Especially now you are on neither entity. You’re
nothing more than a neutered bull put out to pasture.”

Callie snaps the laptop shut
just as Jens attempts to tear into the Shaman. We can still hear his muffled
yells through the walls, though. And finally, Karl’s booming voice joins in,
rattling the door. “Well,” she says to me, a wry smile teasing her lips, “at
least we now know why nobody wanted you in there.”

Despite my protests earlier,
I can totally see why and actually agree with their logic. Because now that I
know at least one person out there thinks I’m a murderer, I wish I could go
back to being in the dark.

“I didn’t do it.”

She actually laughs. “No,
really?” And then, “Sorry, but c’mon, Chloe. I highly doubt you’d kill a
spider, let alone three people.”

I think back to my behavior
when I’d caught her and Jonah kissing last year. “You’ve seen me destroy things
before. I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought I’d be capable of bad stuff.”

“Yeah,” she muses, “but it
wasn’t because you’re evil; it was because you have so much love in your heart.
You were hurting. I knew that even then. And I know that those boys in there
would never defend anybody, Connections or no, who could do such heinous acts.
You’re no more a murderer than I am.”

I want to cry—in shock over
these charges, in relief that people are defending me, in surprise that
somebody I’d never think is on my side—but I don’t. Instead, I just stare at
her, too afraid to move because, once I do, I’m pretty sure I will collapse
under the strain of everything that’s happened to me in the last week.

Callie stands up and holds a
hand out to me. “Mom and the boys have things well in hand. Let’s go get some
drinks. ”

Did she just say what I
think she said?

“Drinks,” she repeats, like
she knows I need repeating. “Only in Annar does a hospital have a fully stocked
bar. Let’s go, Helen of Troy. Let the Council and Guard battle it out over you
while we pretend we’re in Maui, sipping Mai Tais. They’ve got a simulator in
there, like a jukebox. You pick the setting, and the room transforms into what
you want.”

I take her hand, even though
I say, “Me and alcohol don’t really mix well, remember?”

She
pulls me to my feet. “Trust me. This is what you need right now.”

For the life of me, I cannot
remember why, just last year, I vowed to never have another drink again. For
one, drinks are tasty—or, at least the ones Callie orders for us are. And two,
I feel really good right now. Light. Non-accused-murderer-like, which I like a
heck of a lot more than, you know, being an actual accused murderer. And this
place—THIS PLACE!—is sososo awesome. Callie plugged enough coins in the jukebox
to ensure that we will be lounging in Maui for hours. The bartender, somebody
Callie has known for a few years (I think they might have hooked up once or
twice? I can’t remember now) is handing out Mai Tais with pretty lil’ umbrellas
like they’re smiles.

We relax in lounge chairs,
overlooking an ocean view. Callie does the bulk of the talking, sounding much
like an auctioneer. I like that she sounds like this. It makes her all hyper
and happy, when earlier she seemed so stern. “Clothes!” She holds up her drink,
and we clink. Several guys nearby holler, “Cheers!” and we laugh. “I love ‘em.”

“Those guys?” I slide a
piece of pineapple off of the umbrella. Fruit is so much better than Jell-o. I
don’t want to eat it again, not for a long time.

“
Gross
. No!” She
slams her drink down on the table. Nothing sloshes out because she finished it
in two gulps. “Clothes!”

Come to think of it, she
does have a very cute dress on. I am in hospital scrubs, which are way better
than those backless gowns they force on some patients. And really, after
everything that has just gone down, the last thing I need is for Annar to see
my naked butt. So thank goodness for pants and all.

“Shopping,” Callie is
saying, “is a religious experience for me. Know what I mean?”

I squint at her. “Um—”

She hushes me. “Sometimes
when I shop, I get this feeling. You know, the one you get when you eat
chocolate, and it’s divine?” Mmm. Chocolate. I could use some of that stuff.
“Or when you kiss someone for the first time? Really great clothes do that to
me, too.” She sighs blissfully and closes her eyes. “That’s one of the things
about your boyfriend I do not miss. He doesn’t shop. He doesn’t have that
feeling when he shops. Maybe it was a sign that I always ignored.”

“He doesn’t shop,” I
confirm. “Except when he’s buying things.”

“Exactly!” Callie sits up
again and throws out a megawatt smile. “I knew you’d understand. Steve!” She
turns to the bartender and holds up some fingers. “Two more, good sir!”

Steve brings the drinks over
in record time, leading me to wonder if he’s got a row of pretty Mai Tais
already mixed up behind the counter. If so, maybe I ought to go back there?
“Put it on my tab,” Callie graciously commands, and he just stares at her so
hard that she’s forced to repeat the order.

“Like I would make you pay,”
he finally says, his words all jumbly.

“I think that guy likes
you,” I whisper, pointing as Steve trips on his way back to the bar.

“Oh, Steve,” Callie sighs.
“Yes. Steve will wash my car if I ask.”

To prove her point, Steve
calls out that he’d be happy to do so, and it makes us and the two guys nearby
laugh ourselves silly.

“I’ll wash your car, baby,”
one of the neighbors says, and they drag their chairs over to sit next to us.

“I’ve got a secret,” Callie
puts a finger up to her lips and issues a long warning for silence. “I don’t
have a car.”

This only makes us all laugh
harder. After awhile, one of the guys says to me, “Hey. You’re wearing scrubs.
You hurt or something?”

I look down at the light
blue scrubs. Am I? I pat my chest. It feels okay.

“Those are ugly,” Callie
says, frowning. “I’ll tell you what. Lemme go shopping for you. You can get
something-something that’s pretty and I can get my rush. It’s a win-win
situation, know what I mean?”

“You,” I say, motioning to
the guy who asked me if I’m hurt. “You look familiar. Why do you look so
familiar to me?”

“I’m in one of your
classes,” he tells me. He kicks back in his lounge chair and calls out for
another shot. “I sit behind you when our prof actually decides to lecture.”

Both Callie and I scream out
“Stalker!” and everyone dissolves into fits of giggles once more. How could I
have hated this girl? She’s like my
sister
. Like, if I ever had one and
all.

“Only sometimes,” the guy
assures me, still smiling. It looks like somebody threw a tomato and hit him in
the face. “Your hair. It . . . it smells really nice.”

I squint at him and then
flip a piece of it to study. Does it?

The other guy hoots like an
owl. This one scratches at his neck and tells me, “You sometimes fall asleep in
class. There was this one time I dropped a book, so I . . . had a sniff. It’s
really . . .
nice
.”

“Don’t insult a girl by
telling her her hair is nice,” Callie snarls. She’s leaning forward, her brows
and nose scrunched up. Does she smell something bad? Oh my gods, does my hair
smell
bad
?

“What’d it smell like?” I
demand. “My hair I mean? When you were sniffing it in class?”

“Strawberries,” comes the
answer, and I stare hard at the guy, amazed at how he can talk without moving
his lips.

“Amazing!” I jab Callie.
“Did you see that? This dude is like a ventranloquinst! Or, um, you know. The
guys with the dummies?” I pretend to have a dummy on my lap. “My name is
Chloe,” I try saying, but I am not good. My lips totally move.

Callie’s hand shoots out and
touches the guy’s lips. He jerks back, startled. “I was just thinking
the
same thing
.”

And then the drink in my
hand is pulled away. I marvel, “HE CAN MOVE THINGS WITH HIS MIND!”

“He must be a god.” Callie’s
eyes go saucer wide. “Quick! Superdude! Make our chairs levitate.”

The man in question is no
longer looking at us. He’s looking up and above us. Is this how his craft
works? The guy next to him, the one who is kind enough to want to wash Callie’s
car, leaves without even saying goodbye.

“Well,” Callie huffs. “There
goes my clean car.”

“You don’t have a car,” says
the superhero-god sniffer in front of us, lips still clamped shut.

“How do you know that?”
Callie demands, enraptured.

“You told him,” I offer, and
she sagely nods.

“Right. But he could’ve
cleaned something else, like a bike or something.”

“You don’t have a bike,” the
superhero says. And I swear, those lips still aren’t moving, not even a little
bit.

“You don’t?” I ask, staring
at the Callies sitting next to me. I blink rapidly. “Everyone has a bike.
Everyone.”

“You don’t have one,
either.”

“Holy schnikes!” I shriek.
“He
is
a god! How does he know this?”

“Tell us,” Callie demands of
the guy. “Did you get this all from one sniff? Does her hair tell you that
she’s bikeless?” She leans over and picks up a strand of my hair. “He’s right,
though. Strawberries. I’d totally eat it if, you know, people ate hair. And I
wasn’t allergic to strawberries. But if you switched to something like
raspberries? Yeah. It’d eat it then.”

“You. Bartender,” the
superhero growls. His voice is so mighty it comes from above. “Absolutely no
more drinks for these two, got it?”

He looks nervous, this
superhero. And he keeps looking up and then back down at us over and over
again. “I…I…” he stammers, and his lips are moving. Geez, he is confusing.

“Should go? Immediately?” he
snaps to himself, lips shut.

“Dude!” Callie number one
says. “He speaks in voices. So cool.”

“You’re like one of those
superhero twins,” I say as he jerks to his feet. “The purple-ish ones? Who can
turn into buckets of water?”

“This is what I’m saying!”
Callie slaps a hand against my shoulder. “A bucket of water would be awesome
right now. Will you do it for us?”

The multi-voiced, sniffing
superhero flees, leaving us puzzled and hurt over his absence.

“Our combined beauty,”
Callie says seriously, hand pressed against her chest, “was too much for even a
god to bear all at once.”

“It’s a burden we must
bear,” I murmur. And then, out of nowhere, Jonah materializes in the chair that
the god-like guy from my class was in.

“Jonah!” Callie sits up,
surprised. “You just missed the most amazing person EVER.”

“He was,” I agree, and Jonah
has to help me sit up. My head spins. The room is spinning, too. Is this the
jukebox? I should tell Steve to push a button to make it stop. I hold my head
in my hands and tell Jonah, “I had no idea that one person could do so much
Magic!”

“He was better than you,”
Callie sighs. I peek out of my hands to see her motioning to Jonah. “I’m sorry,
but it’s true.”

With
a very, very straight face, Jonah says, “I suppose it’s a burden I must bear.”