Finding Sky (15 page)

‘Yes, I know. Not ideal. Can you come and meet me halfway? I don’t want to walk home alone.’

‘I’m leaving now. I’ll see you by the shop. Stay where there are other people around.’

‘Fine. I’ll wait inside.’

I slipped the phone in my back pocket. There was about five hundred yards between the café and the shop, and I had to cross an intersection with traffic lights. I felt happy walking it as it was well lit and there were always lots of people milling about. Setting off up the hill, I wondered how Zed was getting on. He must have stopped boarding now it was dark. Would his dad tell him I’d been over hoping to see him?

I’d almost reached the intersection when a man jogged up behind me. I took a quick glance. Big. Heavy stubble. He had almost completely shaved his head, apart from a long tail of curly hair at the back. I moved to one side to let him pass.

‘Hey, I think you dropped this.’ He held out a brown leather purse.

‘No, no, it’s not mine.’ I clutched my bag closer to me, knowing full well that my red wallet was tucked deep inside it.

He gave me an ‘aw shucks’ grin. ‘That’s kinda strange—because it has your photo in it.’

‘That’s not possible.’ Perplexed I took the purse from him and flipped open the front section. My face stared back at me. A recent candid shot of me with Zed in the school yard. The note pocket was crammed with dollar bills, far more money than I ever had. ‘I don’t understand.’ I glanced up at ponytail guy. There was something off about him. I backed away, thrusting it in his hands. ‘It’s not mine.’

‘Sure it is, Sky.’

How did he know my name? ‘No, it’s really not.’ I broke into a run.

‘Hey, don’t you want the money?’ he called, chasing after me.

I reached the corner but the traffic was going so fast I couldn’t risk crossing without causing an accident. My moment’s hesitation allowed him to catch up. He moved in and I felt something dig into my ribs.

‘Then let me explain things more clearly, cupcake. You’re going to get in the car with me now without drawing attention to yourself.’

I took a breath to scream, pulling away from his hand.

‘Do that and I’ll shoot.’ He jabbed what I now realized was a gun in my side.

A black SUV with darkened windows screeched to a halt alongside.

‘Get in.’

It happened so quickly, so smoothly, I didn’t have a chance to formulate a plan of escape. He pushed me into the back seat, forcing my head down as he closed the door. The car accelerated away.

Zed!
I screamed in my mind.

‘She’s using telepathy,’ said the man in the front seat, sitting next to the driver. In his late twenties, he had short red hair and a mass of freckles.

Sky? What’s wrong?
Zed replied instantly.

‘That’s good. Let him know we’ve got you, darlin’. Tell him to come get you.’ The passenger in the front had a strong Irish accent.

Immediately I shut off my link to Zed. They were using me to draw the Benedicts out.

‘She’s blocked him out,’ said the red-haired man.

The thug in the back seat pulled me up by the scruff of the neck. I got a brief glimpse of my mum waiting outside the store, pulling out her mobile. The one in my back pocket rang.

‘Is that him now?’ the thug asked. ‘Go on, answer it.’

He might not let me speak if I said it was my mother. I slid it from my ski suit but he grabbed it off me and pressed connect.

‘We’ve got her. You know what we want. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, two Benedicts for the two of ours.’ He cut the call then chucked the phone out of the window. ‘Who needs telepathy? That should do it.’

‘It wasn’t them—it … it was my mum.’ I was beginning to shake. The few dull moments of shock were passing into bone-deep fear.

‘Same difference.’ He shrugged. ‘Let her tell the Benedicts.’

I could hear the buzz of voices trying to reach me—not just Zed but the rest of the family too.

I couldn’t stop myself answering.
Help me! Please!

But then the noise deadened and faded out to nothing.

‘I let her get one heart wrenching plea through.’ The red-haired man rubbed his forehead. ‘But those Benedicts are battering away at the shield. Let’s get well away from here.’

So he was the savant.

‘That’s harsh, O’Halloran. You let them hear the little girl’s final words and then stopped?’ The thug was laughing.

‘Yeah, I think it was a nice touch myself. Brings tears to the old eyes, don’t it?’ He turned round to wink at me. ‘Don’t fret, my darlin’, they’ll come for you. The Benedicts won’t let one of their own down.’

I curled up into a ball, hugging my knees, putting as much distance as I could between me and the men. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on finding a way through the shield.

‘Stop it!’ snapped O’Halloran.

My eyes flew open. He was glaring at me in the mirror. I’d managed to affect him with my attempts but I was too clueless about savant stuff to know how to exploit it.

‘I’ll tell Gator to knock you out if you try that again,’ O’Halloran warned.

‘What she do?’ ponytailed Gator asked.

O’Halloran rubbed his temples again. My assault and that of the Benedicts on his shield was getting to him.

‘We have here a baby savant. I’ve no idea why she don’t know what to do with her powers but she has some locked up inside her. She’s a telepath.’

The thug looked unsettled now. ‘What else she do?’

O’Halloran dismissed me with a shrug. ‘Nothing, as far as I know. Don’t worry, she won’t harm you.’

Gator was scared of savants? That made two of us. But it was worth knowing—not that I could do anything with it at the moment. O’Halloran was right: I was a baby in savant terms. If I was going to help myself out of this mess, I had to grow up very quickly.

We had been driving for over an hour. I’d passed through abject terror and now felt a sense of deadening hopelessness. We were much too far from Wrickenridge for anyone to catch up with us.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked.

Gator seemed surprised to hear me speak. I had the impression that I was just a means to an end—getting the Benedicts—and no one in the car really considered me as a person.

‘Shall I tell her?’ he asked O’Halloran.

The savant nodded. He’d been silent, his battle on an invisible front as the Benedicts desperately tried to break his shield.

‘Well, cupcake, we’re taking you to see the boss.’ Gator took a pack of chewing gum out of his breast pocket and offered me a strip. I shook my head.

‘Who’s your boss?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

‘Where is he?’

‘At the other end of that plane ride.’ He gestured towards an aircraft waiting on the tarmac of a little provincial airfield.

‘We’re flying?’

‘We sure ain’t walking to Vegas.’

We drew up alongside the jet. Gator pulled me out of the car and bundled me up the short flight of steps. As soon as the SUV was clear, the plane took off immediately, heading south.

 

My room was on the top floor of a half-finished skyscraper hotel on the street in Las Vegas known as the Strip. I knew my location because no one made any attempt to stop me looking out of the ceiling to floor window. Lights from the casinos bled into the sky—neon palm trees, pyramids, rollercoaster rides, all glittering with zany promise. Beyond this thin layer of madness, past the twinkle of the suburbs, was the desert, dark and somehow sane. I leant my forehead against the cold glass, trying to calm the whirl of emotions beating away inside me. My head was on spin cycle.

After a long flight, we had put down at an airfield and I’d been bundled into another black car, this one a limo. My hopes of getting away from Gator and O’Halloran at the other end were dashed when we entered an underground car park and I was transferred into the hotel in a private lift. Whisked up to the penthouse, I’d then been left in my room and told to go to bed. My part was over for the moment, O’Halloran had explained, and he advised me to get some rest.

Rest? I kicked the white leather armchair stationed by the window. Five star accommodation didn’t make this any less of a prison. They could take their flat screen TV, Jacuzzi bath, and four-poster bed and stick it … well, I had some creative suggestions as to where.

As no bodily harm had been done to me, I was less worried for the moment about my own fate. Most tormenting was the knowledge that Zed and my parents would be going through hell. I had to get a message through to them that I was all right. I’d already tried the phone—no surprise that it had no dial tone. The door was locked and I couldn’t attract attention at this height from any living creature but the birds. That left telepathy. Zed had never answered my question as to whether he could talk to his brothers in Denver but he had managed to contact me over the couple of miles between his home and mine. Was it possible to communicate with him over the hundreds between Colorado and Nevada? I wasn’t even sure exactly how far apart we were.

I rubbed my head, remembering the ache I’d got just sustaining that ‘local’ telepathic call. And there was O’Halloran to consider. Would he bother keeping the shield up now we were out of range? He knew I had few powers as a savant so probably didn’t expect me to try anything so ambitious, but if he was playing safe and detected my clumsy attempts, he’d be furious and might punish me.

Fireworks went off in the distance, part of some nightly entertainment at one of the other casino hotels. Mine was called The Fortune Teller: I could see the crystal ball revolving on the roof in reflection in the windows of the building across the street. Only part of it was complete. ‘T’ shaped cranes stood sentinel over the rest—the offices, apartments, and malls that were waiting for the end of the recession so that their skeletons could be clad in something more attractive than iron girders. The rubble-strewn site to my right had weeds growing on the heaps, showing just how long the building project had been put on ice—ironically, given the name, not something the hotel owner had foreseen. He could’ve done with a savant to tip him off.

I hugged myself, missing Zed with a ferocity that surprised me. Unlike my boyfriend, I didn’t know what the future held. I’d have to risk annoying O’Halloran but I could lessen the chances by choosing a time when he should be asleep. I checked my watch: it was midnight. I’d leave it to the small hours before making my move.

Turning away from the window, I contemplated my room, looking for anything that could help me. I’d already had to peel off the ski suit, being far too hot. I’d put on the hotel robe but I really wanted a change of clothes, feeling at a disadvantage in nothing but long thermals. There was a nightshirt neatly folded on one of the pillows. I shook it out: it bore the hotel logo and looked like the kind of thing you could buy in the gift shop. Wondering if someone had thought to provide more of the same, I opened the wardrobe and found a neat pile of T-shirts and shorts. Did that mean they expected me to be here for a while?

This was all too much for me to take in. I felt out of place, unable to focus. The wonderful high definition perception I had with Zed had collapsed, throwing me back into my old Manga-izing habits, flat colours, disjointed images. I hadn’t realized until separated by hundreds of miles how I’d come to take his presence near me almost for granted. Even if we couldn’t spend a lot of time together, I’d had the reassurance that he was there. He’d grounded me, making all that I was learning about the savant world less frightening. Now I was open to all fears and wild guesses as to what was going to happen. He’d been my shield, not the ones I’d practised in my head.

I hadn’t seen it, but he had been acting as my soulfinder all along, even though I hadn’t acknowledged him. Now it was too late to tell him.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I could reach him.

Exhaustion crept up on me. I found my eyes blurring and I had to grab the wardrobe door as I swayed. If I wanted to have the energy for my plan, I needed to get some sleep. Even a few hours would make a difference. Changing quickly into the nightshirt, I set the alarm on the bedside clock and rolled under the satin sheet.

The neon lights were still pulsing outside when the alarm jolted me awake three hours later. A police helicopter circled overhead briefly then went north. On the street below, cars and hotel shuttles continued to cruise the Strip, gamblers unwilling or unable to stop even in the middle of the night. I dashed cold water in my eyes to clear my head.

OK. Time to take a chance on O’Halloran having gone to bed. I had to hope that abduction made for a tiring day for him.

Zed?

Nothing. I probed the darkness in my head, feeling the absence of the muffling blanket that had been in place in the car. That gave me hope that O’Halloran had dropped the shield.

Zed? Can you hear me?

No reply. I pressed my fingers to my temples. Concentrate. Perhaps Zed was asleep too?

No, he wouldn’t be. He wouldn’t be sleeping knowing I’d been taken. He’d be straining to hear the least word from me. Perhaps what I was trying was impossible?

I paced the room for a moment, my toes sinking into the deep pile of the rug.

Or maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing? I thought back through the things Zed had told me about telepathy, how he had made contact with me despite himself. He’d said I was a bridge.

Perhaps it would work like shielding, but in reverse? Opening up and building a link rather than closing down and constructing barriers?

I tried again, imagining I was building a thin arching bridge between my mind and Zed’s. I saw it like an image stretching out of a comic book frame, breaking the conventions to close the distance to the next picture.

After an hour of migraine-inducing thought, I felt a change, a subtle flow of energy in the other direction.

Zed?

Sky?
His thoughts sounded faint, moving in and out of reach like a thread of a cobweb dancing in the wind.

I’m in Vegas.

His shock was clear enough.
You can’t … How can you …
me
…
Vegas?

You tell me. You’re the savant, remember?

…
miracle
…

I’m OK. They’ve got me on the top floor of the Fortune Teller
.

Can’t … you. Breaking
…

Fortune Teller. Top floor
.

My head was screaming with the pain of maintaining the bridge but I was determined to get my message through.

I … you.

He wasn’t hearing me. I repeated my location.

…
love you…. come for you
.

No!

Easier … closer
.

No, no. It’s a trap
. The bridge was collapsing. I could feel it going, feel my stomach churning, head pounding. Just a moment longer.
I love you too, but don’t come. It’s what they
want
.

Sky!
He’d felt the link fracture, scrambling my last words.

‘Zed.’ I was on the floor, perspiration running down my back, nausea gripping my stomach. I crawled on hands and knees to the bathroom and was sick. Though shaky, I felt a little better for it. Hauling myself to the bed, I fell on the covers face down and passed out.