Blind Trust (3 page)

Chapter 3

“AERON . . . AERON, WAKE up.”

I peeked open one eyelid to see Renee’s weary face hovering over
me.

“S’matter?” I opened the other eye, wondering when daylight had
disappeared. “Where . . . what time?”

“Time for food,” she said, giving my arm a shake. “I’ve forgotten
just how heavy you sleep.”

I sat up and stretched out, smacking my elbow on the doorframe and
grunting. I felt like I’d been crinkled up like one of those Chinese fans. “How
long was I out for?”

“Five hours,” Renee answered with a tinge of irritation in her
voice. I’d never learned how to drive or I would have tried to take the
reins—well, the wheel—for a while to help.

“Sorry,” I offered as I opened the door and then closed it as I
tried to control the case of shivers. “When did we take a wrong turn and hit
Alaska?”

“It’s been like that for over an hour,” she said, peering up as
the snow covered the windshield. “It’s not even forecast until tomorrow.” She
reached back into the backseat and threw me a jacket. “Change out of those and
I’ll get the order in.”

“Here?” I peered out of a tiny gap in the snow-dusted windshield.
We were in the middle of a town. A pretty place with bubble-windowed shops.
Their twinkling lights bathed the snow with gentle yellows along the misty
tree-lined street.

Renee nodded at the white fluff outside. “Here. Look at the
windshield, it’s already covered.”

She headed out into what looked like a blizzard. I started
wriggling and crashing about the car as I tried, not too successfully, to
de-CIG myself.

I got a mental image of someone heading past the car rocking with
my muffled curses. It made me thankful for the snow. I got out of the car and
smiled at the bemused-looking man and nodded. At least what I attempted to do
was smile. What actually happened was I shivered, nodded, and made a strange
stamping action as the cold wind rattled up through my unzipped jacket and
tickled my insides. Maybe we’d bypassed Alaska and ended up in Antarctica.

I locked up and headed past the gawping man toward a lodge-like
cafe. Snow was building up alongside old-worldly windows. It was well taken
care of, I could see that, and the shiny trucks parked alongside said that,
wherever we were, money wasn’t any kind of obstacle.

“Coming down ain’t it?” I said as the man followed me, his
eyebrows raised. Brown hair jutted out from under his woolen hat.

Wish I’d had a hat.

He was shooting for some kind of explanation. I was barely keeping
my bubbling laughter from bursting out but my shoulders were shrugging. He must
have thought I was crazy, but to his credit, he managed a polite smile.

It was a hell of a lot warmer inside the café. The dry warmth made
my ears and cheeks burn as they thawed. Note to self: always pack a hat.

The café looked like a place that you would see in tourist
haunts—maps of the area framed up next to pictures of what the town looked like
way back when. There was even a dedication to the skiers and mountaineers who
had lost their lives. I wondered if the broken ski crossed by a rusted hammer
was just symbolic. I resolved not to go nowhere near them. Objects tended to
store up the energy of whoever had used them. When I touched them, I saw
flashes of memories, kinda like my own version of one of them USB drives that
Renee had told me about. Either way, I didn’t plan on reliving it.

My eyes worked hard to adjust from the dark outside and were still
fuzzy as I wandered in further. The lighting gave it a homey feel. Like walking
in from the cold and ending up in the pioneer era. Then again, the stainless
steel counter top and shinier-looking kitchen gave the impression that,
although these folks wanted you comfortable, they were no slouches in the
kitchen. My stomach rumbled. My kind of people.

Renee sat staring out of the window as I approached, something odd
in her mood. I’d seen her mad, exhausted, scared, and all manner of emotions
but whatever was going on behind the grey eyes, it was dark.

“You okay there?” I said, slumping into the seat opposite and
mumbling my apology as my knees collided with hers.

Renee jumped and then sighed as she rubbed the bridge of her nose.
The waves of tension made me clench my jaw.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head and shot me a glance, the one that said, “We’re
in public so quit interrogating me.” I gave her a look back that said, “Stop
being a moody pain-in-the-butt and I’ll think about it.”

“Your meals, ladies,” the waitress said, plonking our plates in
front of us. I looked down at the fried eggs and bacon and grinned so wide that
my jaw cracked, loudly.

“Thank you,” Renee said as I shoved as much of the food onto my
fork as I could manage. I shoveled it into my mouth and groaned; bacon was the
elixir of heaven. The salty taste danced around my taste buds as the yolk
followed and I sat there, eyes shut, savoring the moment. Oh yeah.

I heard a polite cough and opened my eyes to two sets of amused
ones.

“Good?” the waitress asked.

Renee was stifling her laugh, her mood lifting, if only a bit.
“She is a sucker for fried food.”

“So I see,” the waitress said. “You want a drink with that,
honey?”

Over the course of my life, I’ve been conditioned that when people
meet me, they really don’t like me. When I was growing up, everyone figured me
for a freak and so the genuine warmth in this stranger’s voice had me stunned.
I guessed I must have been looking at her like she’d landed in front of me in a
halo of lights as Renee kicked me under the table.

“I . . . er . . . I—”

“She’ll have a Coke,” Renee said.

I nodded, still completely shocked. The lady shook her head with a
smile and wandered off with me staring after her.

“Did they cook it in whiskey?” Renee shot at me, kicking me again
to stop me gawping.

“She
talked
to me,” I said. I knew I sounded simple but I
couldn’t help it. 

“She works here,” Renee said, her aura filled with a yucky green
color. There was snappy, then there was her. “She wouldn’t be very good at her
job otherwise.”

“No, I mean she
really
talked to me . . .” I shook my head
at Renee who looked like she might commit me. “Like I was . . . well . . . like
folks talk to you.”

Renee’s aura filled up with pink again and she reached across the
table and patted my hand. “They didn’t in CIG?”

“You kidding me?”

“No.” Renee leaned her elbows on the table. I half expected her to
slip into shrink mode.

I took a couple of moments to sneak in some more delicious food.
If she started to ask me how I felt about it, I was leaving, cold or no cold.
“I was Lilia’s kid . . .
the
kid.”

“Ah,” Renee said and started to eat her own food.

Being the super-seer’s kid was enough to make me feel like I had a
neon sign above my head. It had taken some getting used to and a
lot
of
control. I went from the loner, the freaky kid that everyone hated in Oppidum
to the hero who saved the town from a killer. That was before I had the
undivided curiosity of an entire base. I’d been through the entire spectrum:
from freak, to loner, to convicted felon, to outcast, to hero, to the kid of
some big hero in CIG. It was a transition that still confused the heck out of
me. Yet, apart from my fellow inmates and Renee, there hadn’t been anyone who
actually just talked to me. I was used to being gawped at, but being treated
like I was everybody else? Not so much.

We sat there in silence—well, not quite silence, mostly chomping
noises and appreciative groans about the food—and I realized that I was half
ready to stay here, wherever here was.

“Some people are just nice,” Renee said, placing her knife and
fork down. She’d left all the crunchy bits of the bacon. “You haven’t gotten to
see that yet.”

I stole the scraps off her plate. I loved the crunchy bits. “Or
she just doesn’t know I’m a freak yet.”

Renee gave my hand a sharp tap. “Don’t do that. You’re an amazing
woman. She’d love you.”

I crunched away, sure that Renee was just being nice. “Really?”

Renee sat back, her stare certain. “Yes. Don’t judge everyone by
Oppidum’s standards.”

I narrowed my eyes. A challenge, huh? “So, if I wander up to her
and tell her that I can see how much she wants her son to go to college? Or
that she doesn’t want him to follow her husband into his business? Or that she
has arthritis in her left wrist, she’ll still want to be friends?”

Renee gazed out of the window, once again looking lost and tense.
“I can’t speak for her but you scared the crap out of me and I’m still here.”

“You wouldn’t have been if you weren’t making sure that I wasn’t
killing young girls.”

Her grey eyes snapped to mine. “I never believed you would.”

“Uh huh.”

She kinked her eyebrows up in the middle. “I did not.”

“You did in the institution. You thought I had tricked you or have
you forgotten?”

Renee’s gaze flickered between my eyes and empty space, then she dropped
her chin and sighed. “Point made.”

“It’s not your fault I’m a freak,” I said, offering the waitress a
smile as she brought our drinks. “I’m just glad you like me in spite of it.”
Before Renee could argue, I turned to the waitress. “Do you have pie?”

The waitress laughed and beamed at me. I got a burst of warmth
from her that made me smile back. “I think I got just the thing for you.” She
turned to Renee, paused, and tapped her finger to her lip. “I think you are the
cheesecake kind.”

I felt the flicker of panic from Renee. She was always on her
guard. She’d lived her life undercover for so long that the closer someone got
to the truth about her as a person, the more on edge she became.

“Cheesecake, huh?” I said, trying to cover up Renee’s sudden blanching.
“What flavor do you reckon?”

The woman closed her eyes as if she were trying to sense
something. I used that moment to touch Renee’s hand, giving her a shock and me
a weird flashed image.

“Strawberry,” the woman guessed.

She was way off.

Renee snapped her hand away from me and feigned happiness. “Yes,
you have me there. I’d love a piece.” She weren’t all that keen on strawberry
and she only liked cheesecake without gelatin in it. In the mass of weird
flashes, I got a memory of her finding a lump of gelatin in her cheesecake as a
kid.

“I never fail . . . it’s a gift,” the woman said as she hurried
off, answering a couple of other customers on her way.

Renee narrowed her eyes at me. “You had no right.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” I muttered, the cold sweat dribbling down
the back of my neck. “I was trying to comfort you.”

Murmuring a quiet “oh,” Renee leaned her head back and let out a
sigh. “I’m sorry. I—”

“It’s okay. I wasn’t the only one who crawled back in her shell,
huh?” I didn’t want to show her how much the flash had affected me but my hands
were so clammy that when I wiped them on my knees I felt the damp through my
jeans.

“It wasn’t an easy time,” she said, staring up at the set of skis
hanging from the wood ceiling above us.

I didn’t know what she meant, not really. With Renee, it was hard
to know what was her, really her and what was a fake memory from one of her
covers. The cheesecake felt pretty real but another flash, I wasn’t so certain
about. I wanted to say something to help her. Something that would ease the
edginess I could feel.

She rolled her head to the side and her gaze drifted to the
window. I hated seeing her look so worn and worried. I knew she’d been out on a
protection detail of some sort, that much I could decipher, and judging by the
time we’d spent when I was her protectee, it took a load of energy and then
some.

“You just need some time with me,” I said, drawing her eyes back
to me.

She raised her eyebrows. 

“You heard,” I said. “A couple of weeks trying to train me and
you’ll have laughed so hard, you’d have forgotten everything.”

Her eyes, much deeper in the yellowy lighting, twinkled. Then they
misted, her sadness gushing at me. The flash had been full of pain, fear,
desperation and I wanted to erase it from her memory.

“When I was a kid, I got real scared sometimes when I
saw
stuff.” I took my napkin and started folding it.

Renee watched me and cocked her head. “You must have been
terrified.”

“I was,” I said, continuing to fold. “So Nan used to get me making
these.” I tucked my finger in the fold to create an arch. “Eagles are a big
thing in my family and to be under the shelter of their wings,” I folded the
last piece over, “is to be protected by a great white light.”

Renee’s eyes widened as I handed her the little napkin eagle.

“Nan always said that and they remind me of her.” I shrugged as
Renee’s eyes misted. “So if you have one of her little creations, she’ll be
around to take care of you.”