Damage (13 page)

My heart breaks for him, a split down the center that fills my chest with sad and happy at the same time. I suddenly wonder what it feels like to love someone, someone who isn’t family or a friend, someone who is a mix of both.

“Jesse, I—”

“Hey, you two,” a man’s breathless voice sounds from behind us. Jesse and I spin around and I stumble off the curb. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

It’s Vince, Penny’s brother. His face is beaded with sweat and his thick wool jacket is dotted with sticks and shriveled brown leaves—testimony to his run through the woods in back of our house.

“Run, Dani.” Jesse reaches for me, but Vince beats him to it. He snatches my arm so tight I cry out and he tugs me back onto the curb. A few people glance our direction, but quickly turn their dark eyes away. Most of the men and women on the bench have children in their laps, and I’m betting very few of them speak English. But surely they can tell something bad is going on over here.

“No,” Vince says. “You two are done running. You need to come with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I try to pull away, but his fingers bite into my skin hard enough to make me wince.

“Let her go,” Jesse says, his expression hard and dangerous. I’d be scared half to death if I were the one that look was intended for.

But scary looks won’t go far with Vince, not if someone is paying him to get something from my dad. He was raised by the same people who made Penny a genius, but he totally missed out on Penny’s work ethic. He’s a con man and a thief and he’s been in prison more than once. He must have decided the quickest way to my dad’s research is through me, but there’s no way I’m going to let him kidnap me in broad daylight. If I make enough noise, maybe one of the people on the bench will come to the rescue, or maybe someone inside the enclosed ticket area will hear me and call the police.

I open my mouth to scream, but Vince speaks before I can make a sound.

“I paid you to get her on the bus, kid, not become her fucking bodyguard.” Vince jerks me closer, but I barely feel the hand clutching my arm.

Paid Jesse? Vince paid Jesse? To get me on the bus?

I search Jesse’s face, looking for confirmation that Vince is lying. But he won’t look at me. He stares at Vince like I don’t exist, like we weren’t holding hands a second ago while he told me all about his awful childhood.

“I don’t want your money,” Jesse says.

“You snatched it up fast enough the other day.”

Vince’s words punch me in the gut, steal my breath away. Jesse isn’t who I thought he was. This entire morning has been a lie. His kindness, his “help,” that kiss …

“And there’s more where that came from if you help me out,” Vince adds.

“The bus crashed. It went off an overpass and exploded,” Jesse says. “There’s no way in—”

“You two look fine to me.” Vince’s flat gray eyes are still, complacent. I know he couldn’t care less about me, but shouldn’t he at least be a little shocked?

Unless …

“You knew there was going to be an accident.” My skin crawls as Vince’s gaze settles on my face. “Our friends are dead!”

Vince smiles. “But you’re fine, and the people I work for don’t seem surprised.”

Vince is working for someone and Jesse is working for Vince and the accident might not have been an accident at all. Someone might have deliberately killed my friends and Jesse is part of it somehow.

Images and thoughts flash through my mind, sharp-edged pieces of a puzzle I’m not ready to touch. All I know is that I have to get away from Vince and Jesse. I was stupid to trust a boy I don’t know, even if we do share a curse. Just because we have similar enemies doesn’t mean Jesse and I are friends.

“Let me go!” I scream as loud as I can, making every head in the waiting area snap in my direction. Vince pulls me close and tries to pin his hand over my mouth, but I twist in his arms. “Help! Someone, help me!”

“Be quiet, you stupid—”

“Let her go!” Jesse reaches for me, but I kick his hand, connecting with enough force that his fingers crack.

He flinches away with a betrayed look that makes me want to kick him again. How dare he act like
I’ve
hurt
him
? He lied to me, tricked me, made me believe and hope and wish when there’s no reason to feel anything but fear.

The more I think about what he’s done, the angrier I get. Rage burns across my skin, banishing the winter chill. I’ve always been the victim, the sick kid, the shy girl, never the fighter. But I suddenly can’t understand why. Why haven’t I ever fought back?

Sure, I kept Rachel from killing me when I was a kid—I played a good defense—but why didn’t I ever turn the tables? Why didn’t I set a trap, make a plan? Why didn’t I steal the knife from my dinner tray, hide it under my pillow, and do my best to rip Rachel open the next time she came to “visit” me in the night? Why have my only thoughts today been to run and hide? Why am I calling for someone else to save me when I could at least
try
to save myself?

Before the thought has fully formed, I fist one hand and slam it up and over my shoulder, aiming in the general direction of Vince’s face. I put everything I have into the motion. Still, I don’t expect Vince to let me go so quickly. The absence of his arms catches me off guard and I stumble. Jesse tries to grab me, but I push him away, half-falling in my haste to avoid his big hands. I don’t want him to touch me. I’d rather fall on my own than stand with his help.

“Ahh, shit!” Vince screams and clutches at his nose. Blood pours through his fingers, ribbons of crimson that are more shocking than horrifying. I’m amazed that I hit him hard enough to bloody his nose, but I’m not sorry.

“Leave my family alone, and that includes Penny. Don’t ever hit her again,” I shout, the words lifting me up, the high of standing up to someone for the first time in my life giving me the strength to turn and run without another glance at Jesse.

“Dani, wait! Dani!”

I hear him call for me again, but his voice only fuels my churning legs. I push faster and faster, until the wind whips through my hair and stings in my lungs. Until my face is so frozen I can barely feel the wet running down my cheeks. I pretend the tears are from the cold and run on, not daring to stop and think of what it means to be alone and hunted.

Jesse

“Get her back here!” Vince yells after me. “Get her back here or you’re
both
going to regret it. There’s no running from these people! They don’t take no for an answer. They’ll lock you up, kid.”

I sprint after Dani, ignoring his threats. People who don’t take no for an answer are
exactly
the type of people I will never regret running from. Especially people who arrange deadly bus crashes that almost kill me and threaten to lock me up and throw away the key.

But they didn’t kill you in the crash. And they’ve got people looking for you and Dani, like they knew you were going to survive.

But how could they
know
? There are no givens when you knock a bus full of kids off a bridge. Science is one of the only classes at Madisonville Prep that I actually find interesting, but it doesn’t seem like even the smartest scientist could predict how the weight in the bus would have been distributed, the exact velocity of the impact, what side of the bus would hit the ground first, who might or might not be wearing a seat belt and what crap would be flying around. Dani and I could have been killed by a DVD player to the head. There’s no way anyone could have
known
that we’d be okay.

There’s also no way Dani’s leg could have healed so quickly, or the gash in my side vanish by the time we got back to my house. There’s no way we should have been able to vault over the fence at Dani’s house like Russian circus performers, or that her tiny fist should have broken Vince’s nose. At least, not hitting him the way she did—over her shoulder without a chance to brace herself or put her weight behind the punch.

But all those things had happened, and Vince’s nose
is
broken. I saw the unnatural angle of the bone and the beginning of the crazy swelling that always comes with a facial injury. Dani messed that man up, and she nearly broke my hand.

Despite the pain that pulses through my fingers as I run, making my joints ache, I’m kind of glad she kicked me. I’m glad she fought back and that she finally knows the truth, even if she did hear it from the worst possible source. The way she looked at me—so angry and betrayed and disappointed—cut me up inside. I’ve already called myself every word for “stupid” I can think of, but I still feel like a load has been lifted.

Too bad another couple tons of crap has taken its place.

Now there’s no doubt that something very big and bad is going down. Something that involves both Dani and me and people who are willing to kill a few dozen kids in the name of picking us out of the bus wreckage. That must have been their plan, to come get us after the crash. But that brings me back to how they knew we’d still be alive.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s someone out there who knows about Dani and me? Who knows that we’re getting stronger, tougher, almost indestructible? It seems impossible, but our new powers and our old enemies are the
only
things that Dani and I have in common.

Another hundred questions race through my mind as I run, but I have no clue how to answer them. Especially not alone. I need Dani’s help. Together, we might be able to figure out what’s going on before the people looking for us track us down and throw us in the back of a van. Apart, we’ll be dead by imaginary friend or captured by crazy people by the end of the day. Right now, I’m not sure which would be worse.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the people looking for us are monsters, and a part of me has always thought it would be better to be dead than to go back to being ruled by fear and pain. I made a secret promise to myself that if the Thing ever came back, I’d take the easy way out. I’d put Trent’s shotgun in my mouth before I’d go back to fighting for my next breath every single night.

But now … I can’t imagine giving up so easily. Something inside demands I fight. Not just for myself, but for Dani.

I can’t quit thinking about the way she looked right after we kissed—hair rumpled, lips puffy, her eyes soft and dark. Something in my chest squeezes. I don’t want that to be our last kiss. I don’t want the only girl who ever trusted me to think I’m one of the monsters.

I sprint faster, following Dani across a crowded parking lot, past the entrance of one of those discount stores where you have to show a special card to get inside, and on, farther and farther. Past another mini-mall and down a side street that leads to the Madisonville historic district and the downtown shops on the commons.

She’s running fast, but not as fast as she could if she really tried. I can feel her holding back, conscious of the heads that turn as we dash by. I’m holding back, too. If I push hard enough to catch up with her, I’ll be running like a freak, someone there’s no way the people we’re passing won’t remember.

We’re already attracting too much attention. It won’t take anyone who’s looking long to figure out where we’ve gone. I have to make Dani stop. I have to convince her that I’m sorry and we need to work together.

And that we need to find someplace to hide. The sooner, the better.

“Dani! Stop! Please!”

She casts a quick look over her shoulder, but doesn’t slow. At the next street she cuts left, heading away from downtown, up a steep hill lined with vine-covered houses. There’s nothing up this way except a dead-end street and a trail that leads over the cliffs and down into the gorge, an isolated place I don’t think Dani would go alone. It makes me wonder where she’s headed. Maybe she knows someone who lives on this street.

If she goes to a friend’s house, there’s no way they’ll let me in. If it’s someone from school, someone who knows me—or at least my shitty reputation—they’ll probably call the police first and ask questions later. I’ll have to leave, and then what will happen to Dani?

I’m positive the people looking for us know way more about us than we do about them. They probably know where Dani’s friends live. They’ll track her down at her safe place and find some way to take her. Maybe they’ll pretend to be talent scouts from some reality show or long-lost family … or the FBI.