Chaos (Kardia Chronicles) (Entangled Teen) (19 page)

“Uh, you know the note you left in my locker?” I asked, remembering what I’d been wanting to tell him. I dropped low and made a show of retying my sneakers.

“I do.”

His voice held a smile, and I realized that although he’d been tasked to make me go berserk, at some point, he’d gotten a taste for teasing me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Well.” I straightened. “It’s about to get found. By Mrs. Verbiglio.”

I waited for the realization that he was going to get in trouble to sink in, but he stared at me blankly.

“So?”

“So,” I said, exasperated that he was being thick about it. “That means once she reads it, she’s going to be on your tail. And once she finds out
He
is you, you’re going to get suspended.”

Maybe that didn’t matter to him. Maybe he didn’t even really need to be in school at all. What did I know?

“Well, that won’t work.” He sucked on his bottom lip, looking thoughtful, and I was glad to see him taking me seriously. “I can’t be away from you right now. Every day counts.”

That declaration made me wish I hadn’t already retied my shoes so I could get another second. He hadn’t meant it
that
way, but it didn’t matter. It still made my stomach feel like taffy. His intense gray eyes locked onto mine, and I could feel my cheeks going red.

“Well, you can be near me after school when you’re on suspension, because I can’t imagine this playing out any other way.”

His face split into a smile. “I can,” he announced, whipping around and walking toward the street. I was frozen to the spot, wondering what the hell had just happened.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“We,” he said over his shoulder. “The question is, where are
we
going. Hurry up, Magpie.”

My sneakers crunched on the new snow as I jogged after him to catch up, apprehension making skin feel too tight for my body. “Okay, whatever. Where are
we
going, then?”

“To get my letter back.”

Chapter Eleven

By the time we got to Crestwood an hour later, Mac had traded his usual jacket for a black one he had in his trunk, and we were armed with a flashlight and that was about it. We’d parked his car on a side road, it was pitch dark out, and we were about to break into the school.

So, you know, a typical evening.

The school lot was empty. Mr. Banto, the night janitor, wouldn’t be in until eight, and we’d watched from the safety of Mac’s car parked across the street as Principal Jordan, the last of the faculty, drove away fifteen minutes before. Now, we were squatting next to the first floor window of Hortense’s classroom, and my heart was galloping wildly. If I was being honest, it had been since we’d gotten to the school. I wondered idly if anyone had ever died of overexcitement. Wasn’t I supposed to be avoiding all sense-heightening activity?

“Right, then, you ready?” Mac whispered.

“No,” I whispered back. Not by a long shot. My hands were shaking, and not from the cold. This was insane. Now, rather than risking Mac’s suspension, we were both looking at jail time. I opened my mouth to remind him of that for the third time in case he hadn’t heard me the first two, but he was already standing and extending a hand to the window.

“Wait!” I hissed.

He paused, peering down at me where I still squatted in the snow like some broke-ass bird.

“What if it’s wired with an alarm or something?”

“On the doors for sure, but the windows are just the regular old-fashioned windows, I think. Kids open them all the time when it gets stuffy. Besides, that’s why I brought you. If need be, you can disable the alarm.”

He reached out again, and I wracked my brain for another stalling tactic until his words sunk in.

I tugged on his pant leg, and he looked down again with a deep sigh and a ‘
for real?’
stare.

“What now?”

“I can disable alarms?”

He sighed and nodded, the irritation on his face fading. “Sure, I imagine so. The pulling thing you do? You just put it in reverse and push it outward. It should fry the wires. What you can’t do is get us out of jail without leaving a trail of bodies behind us, so can you let me work here?”

I guess it made sense that I could interfere with the alarm. I’d brutalized some serious fruit in the past few months, and my locker still bore the scars of my rage, but it seriously had never occurred to me. I’d never been able to imagine any practical application of my powers until that moment, and although this one lent itself more to B&E than it did to saving the world, it wasn’t too shabby, either.

I’d started running through some possible superhero names, just for kicks, and had almost settled on “Electro-Suck” when Mac called my name softly.

I took a quick look around into the darkness and rose to my feet on jelly legs. I’d been hoping for a little more time to get used to the idea of breaking and entering. Like maybe a month.

Or seven.

“What?”

“There does seem to be a wire embedded in the glass.” He stuck the tiny flashlight he’d been holding between his teeth and pulled me closer using his other hand to point at the web of mesh.

“It could be just to keep it from shattering if it broke, like netting, but I’m not taking any chances.” His brow wrinkled thoughtfully. “So here it is, Magpie. Lesson number one on controlling your powers. Disable the alarm, if there is one, but don’t break the glass.”

Sure. Yeah. Easy for him to say. I stared at the window for so long and hard, I almost expected it to just open itself.

“We don’t have all that much time. Put your hand on the window and let out a slow, low stream of energy.”

His voice was soothing but firm, and I realized I probably wasn’t his first assignment. The thought annoyed more than comforted, and I frowned.

He patted my gloved hand with his. “Focus now, and we’ll talk later. Come on, Maggie.”

I pushed off my curiosity and my inexplicable disappointment that he’d had other…whatevers before me. Then, I did what he asked and focused.

“How do I…?” I touched the glass but he tapped my arm.

“You’ll have more control with your bare hand.”

I raised my glove to my mouth, tugged it off with my teeth, and shoved it in my pocket.

“Put your fingertips on it and wait.”

I laid the pads of three fingers on the frosty glass, the butterflies in my stomach migrating to my chest. “Now what? How will I know if it worked or even if there’s an alarm?”

“Open yourself up to sensing it. There will be an electrical current. You should be able to feel it. Like that day in art class. The snap of energy…”

Had his voice gone husky or had the fact that my brain just exploded impaired my hearing?

I’d wondered, but now I knew. He’d felt it, too. The air between us snapped again, and the glass beneath my fingers made a low, ominous groaning sound before a hairline crack snaked up the center of it.

“Crap,” I muttered, yanking my hand away as my heart kicked it into warp speed.

Mac pulled in closer behind me, aiming the penlight at the crack. When he spoke, his warm breath tickled my ear, and I could feel the heat radiating from his body even through my heavy coat.

“It’s okay; no one will even notice, I bet. At least not for a while. Did you sense anything?”

Other than your luscious front pressed against my back?
I wanted to ask, but instead I cleared my throat and shook my head. “No. I…got distracted. Let me try again.”

This time, when I laid my hand on the glass, Mac covered it with his own. It was warm, and big, and strong. Exactly the way a guy’s hand should be, and I had to clear my throat again. My senses were heightening like a motherfucker.

“Wha-What are you doing?”

“Helping you like you asked, you pain in the arse. Now close your eyes. And it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you did the same with your mouth.”

His tone was teasing, so I let it pass and allowed my lids to fall shut, waiting. When he didn’t give me further instructions, I opened my mouth to question him, but he squeezed my hand.

“Shh.”

I shushed. And waited. And soon, I started to feel something. A blip of palpable energy pulsed under my hand and another above it. I tuned in to it, blocking out the scent of fresh snow and warm boy, blocking out the sounds of the night, and focused every breath on those pulses of energy. One was so strong. Alive and vibrant. A sizzle went through me, and the urge to tune in to the lure that was Mac reared hard.

“No,” Mac said softly, his breath feathering my ear and making me shiver. “Resist that feeling and try to separate it from yourself. Focus on the glass. Is there power in the window?”

My cheeks that were almost numb from the cold went white hot. I had this ugly thing in me, uglier than any scar or wart, and he knew it. It flashed like a neon sign in front of him, and he knew that part of me craved it. Him. His vitality and his life. The shame was almost crippling. So silly to have allowed myself to forget for even a second that we weren’t a normal guy and girl doing something stupid because we were young and wild. This was serious business.

“I’m so sorry, I—”

“Focus.” This time, it was all firm, no soothing, but I think I needed that at the moment. I was a hair away from giving up, and we were no closer to the note than we had been when we got here. Maybe I shouldn’t have cared that much. It was mostly his fault we were in this predicament in the first place. He was the one who printed the column and put it in my locker, but still, I felt guilty for not having been more careful with it when I knew I was on Hortense’s shitlist. And now I was going to get us out of this mess.

I closed my eyes again and concentrated so hard, my head ached. But within less than a minute, it was all there. Not a chaotic, hot mess of energy. Not an orchestra of noise coming at me. It was clear. I could pick out the violin and the flute, and even the bells. There was a low-level energy in the window, and I could pluck it like the string of a guitar.

“That’s it,” Mac murmured low against my ear. “You got it.”

“Can you feel it?” I whispered back, amazed that, even while talking, I could still sense the texture of the alarm in my consciousness.

“Only through you. I can’t feel it if I touch it, but you give off the same power you sense or take in, so I can feel what you feel. If we’re skin to skin.”

That
did
distract me. Images of the two of us, skin to skin, flashed through my head and I gasped, hoping to the gods that he couldn’t sense those. Before I could shut them down, they were gone, and I didn’t feel Mac’s energy at all. He’d put up the shield. Whatever he did to keep me out was in full force now, and I wanted to weep at the loss until another thought occurred to me. Had those images been mine…or his? Up until now, I’d only been able to see my victims’ memories, and I surely would have remembered that.

“We have twenty minutes, so you’re going to have to save all those dirty little thoughts you’re having about me again for later tonight, Magpie.” The laughter in his voice didn’t hide the tension there and goosebumps rose on my arms.

I considered elbowing him in the breadbasket, but I settled for a short laugh that sounded a leeeetle breathy for my taste. “Looks like it’s going to be a boring night for me, then.”

He snorted, but let that one slide and patted my hand. “Okay, we have to focus now.”

He was right. There was a lot—my whole life as I knew it—riding on this. I wasn’t about to fail my very first training mission by turning around, wrapping my legs around him, and kissing his face off to see if he wanted me like I wanted him.

The goal was to make him see that I had the discipline to fight my urges. Somehow I knew that him believing in me—Mac having faith that I could do this—was the only way I had a shot at success.

I blocked him out as best I could and re-centered my thoughts. Now that I knew how to find the energy in the glass, it was easier to get back into the zone and reconnect with it, in spite of the pervy visions that were now running rampant in my head. The harder I tried not to think about what Mac looked like naked or what he would feel like pressed against me front to front, the more I thought about it. But still, the energy was present and accounted for. I was getting better at this already.

“What do I do to it? Push out? Suck in?”

He paused. “This part is hard to explain because I don’t know how it feels to a
kardia
Aphrodite. I only know how I do it with my power. If I want to alter something, I push out. As if I were squeezing from the bottom of a tube of toothpaste.”

“You can change stuff?”

He blew out an exasperated sigh. “I can.”

He didn’t want to, but he was slowly opening up to me and something warm blossomed in my belly. “Cool. Into what?”

Silence. Then, “Fifteen minutes.”

Shit
.

“Okay, I’m squeezing the toothpaste.” I tried to do as he said, and it took a few minutes, but to my shock, it was working. The window wasn’t cracking anymore, and I sensed my power traveling beyond the wires in the window to the source of the power. A second later, I felt an internal pop and I gasped. Mac sucked in a breath and we both froze, waiting for something to happen. An alarm to blare, someone to come running toward us waving a gun. But nothing did, and the glass beneath my hand felt…dead.

“Brilliant, Mags, I think you shorted the fuse.”

The praise spoken in that lilting brogue went straight to my heart. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it was the first time I’d ever done anything even questionably positive with my powers, and my throat ached with the need to cry about it.

Stupid girl tears.

He squeezed my hand before letting go. “I’m impressed. You did good.”

Up until that moment, I didn’t know how hungry I was to hear that from someone. From Mac.

I didn’t have time to dwell, though. Once the alarm was down, we realized the window wasn’t even locked. Mac went through and helped me behind him. From there it was a quick and silent two-man moving operation as we dragged the bank of desks away from the wall and found the letter exactly where I’d dropped it.