Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) (7 page)

“Look, I need to get home, it must be late—” she said as she reached into the side pocket of her messenger bag for her cell and realized that it wasn’t there.
“Great. I left my cell at Angelo’s. I gotta go.” She was already on her feet and had begun to jog back the way they’d come.

At Angelo’s she pushed the glass door of the pizzeria open and made her way toward the table she’d occupied with Malcolm, though she held out little hope her phone would still be there. The
crowd was a lot worse at this hour, and the noise of conversations and the TV that blared from its mount on the wall were hardly conducive to ambient dining. She gently pushed between two people to get a clear view of the table and saw, to her astonishment, her cell phone right in the middle of the table, between and among the plates and glasses and red pepper shakers that cluttered its surface.

“Hey, I left my phone here,” she said loudly to the four students who sat there eating, and one of the guys indicated without a word that she should take it. “Thanks,” she said, grabbed it and turned to go.

“Tesla,” Finn said, suddenly by her side in the crowd, but before he could say more there was a shout.

“Turn it up—shut up everybody, check it out!”

The girl at the register had picked up the remote and turned up the volume on the TV, and every head in the place turned to face the screen. The ticker tape feed at the bottom read, “Breaking News: explosion on university campus,” and the live video showed smoke and fire billowing out of a large, cream-colored building, a dozen fire trucks and ambulances parked nearby. Red lights flashed, reporters stood with mics in the glare of studio lights positioned by their crews, and dozens of people watched from behind yellow tape barricades.

“Tesla,” Finn said again, his voice loud and his hand on her arm. “We need to talk.”

“I can’t!” she said, and the panic in her voice was unmistakable as she shook his hand off her.

He tried to follow, overcome by frustration, as she pushed her way through the bodies. Tesla was desperate, panicked. “Move!” she shouted repeatedly as she slipped further away from him and burst out of the door of Angelo’s.

Finn shoved someone into a chair by the door in order to catch her before she got away. “Tesla, stop! What the hell?” He was outside, finally, and he grabbed her arm again, tried to fix her to this moment, to him.

She pushed him away from her, harder than he would have thought she was capable, and he staggered back a step. “That explosion—it was the physics building,” she yelled.
“I need to make sure my dad’s at home!”

Tesla turned before he could say a word and sprinted toward her house as fast as she had ever, in her seventeen years, moved.

CHAPTER 7

Tesla rounded the corner by the tall hedge of the next-door neighbor’s house and was suddenly yanked back on her heels by Finn, who had caught up to her.

She turned on him, her eyes narrowed to furious slits.
“Get the hell off me, Finn!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” he hissed.
He pulled her back into the thick, solid wall of greenery. “Slow down. Tell me what’s going on, I can help.” He was winded—she had said she was no athlete, but the girl was
fast
.

She squirmed and twisted, tried to break free from the tight grip he had on her, but his hand around her bicep would not yield.
“Let me
go
!” she whispered fiercely, her voice low, but she stopped struggling. Finn’s hushed voice, his attempt to hide them both in the dark shadows of the hedge, had begun to affect her own behavior. She leaned toward him and whispered, “I need to find my dad—”

“Shhh,” he suddenly cautioned, his mouth by her ear, as he pulled her deeper into the greenery and pointed at her house. “Look.” He felt her labored breath, the adrenaline-fueled tremors that shook her body. They melted into the hedge, safely hidden in
the shadows that were even darker than the night that had descended fully since they’d left Angelo’s.
A lifetime ago
, Finn thought as he slowly, carefully leaned his head out from the hedge. Tesla immediately followed suit, just enough to get a glimpse of the front of the house.

They stood still and peered through the dark, barely breathing.
There was no movement, no noise at all on the quiet residential street. But just as Tesla opened her mouth to tell Finn she didn’t see anything, they both stiffened and stared, mesmerized by the ghostly vision they could just make out through the gently blown, sheer curtains of the open living room windows.

A light moved along the interior walls of the house and made its way up the staircase to the second floor.

“
Shit
!” Finn said quietly to himself as Tesla darted out from behind him. She stuck close to the dense leaves and branches that formed a wall on her right as she began to walk quickly toward the backyard of her house.

He caught up with her under the big maple half a dozen yards from the back of the house where Tesla had paused in the shadow of its thick, gnarled trunk. He stood just behind her, put a hand on her shoulder and leaned down. “What, exactly, are you doing?”

“I need a better vantage point,” she whispered back.

“There’s somebody in your house, Tesla, and I don’t think it’s a member of your family.
You can’t go in there. C’mon, let’s go. Leave it to the professionals.”

“Good.
You call the police. The physics building—where my dad works—blew up tonight and now somebody’s
in my house
.” She stared him down, her eyes disconcertingly clear, blue and green even in the darkness. And then she walked swiftly toward the backdoor.

I didn’t mean the police
, he thought, as he hurried after her and cursed himself for not realizing before just how reckless she was.

“The lock’s broken?” Finn whispered behind her, just as Tesla reached the door and began to turn the handle.

“No. We never lock it.”

Finn shook his head in disgust.
Brainiacs
, he thought.
How do they dress themselves in the morning?

He cringed at the
click
of the screen latch as it closed behind him, and then followed Tesla across the kitchen floor. She paused in the wide, arched doorway that led to another room, and he came up close behind her. He put his hand on the small of her back, aware of how close she was, the faint lemony smell of her hair, the top of her head just under his chin.

“Tesla, we have to go,” he whispered in her ear.
“Now. This is dangerous.”
Although it’s anybody’s guess where the danger is coming from
, he thought grimly.

Tesla surprised him again when she suddenly reached behind her, grabbed a handful of his T-shirt, and began to inch her way forward.
She pulled him along behind her and he did not resist. He could not know that he would regret his acquiescence in this moment for a very long time.

They inched forward, Tesla in the lead while Finn followed blindly behind her in the dark.
They both froze at the sound of a creaky floorboard on the stairs; it served to remind them, viscerally, that they were not alone. No other sound followed, as if the entire house held its breath. And then a dark shape was in front of them. Finn was behind Tesla, unable to act as she was suddenly pulled forward into the wide expanse of the room. His hands reached out in front of him and found only air. The streetlights outside were inexplicably off and Finn was left to grope in the dark of an unfamiliar room. In the split second that it took for Tesla to be yanked away from him he understood what it meant to be helpless.

He followed her momentum forward a step or two but stopped, afraid to go further and somehow make the situation worse, his body tense as a boxer’s.
Within seconds he heard a crash and Tesla cried out—once, agonizingly—in pain.

Finn turned his head left, then right.
He attempted, as an act of will, to force his other senses to make up for his inability to see in the dark. He heard a hurried footfall close by, sensed someone move just out of reach, and he lunged to his left, relieved to be able to act, to set his body in motion and damn the consequences. He felt his shoulder connect with a very large, rock-hard torso.

Finn and the man he had tackled fell to the floor.
They rolled and clutched each other tightly in the dark, neither of them able to punch the other, as their arms strained to get a purchase on a largely unseen opponent. Finn felt the weight of the man on his chest and his right arm was pinned to the floor by the guy’s knee, meaning he was only seconds away from defeat—and then Tesla would be alone with their assailant. With the speed of desperation, Finn threw his head forward and connected with the man’s face, a dim shadow above him. Confusion reigned as he heard, simultaneously, the sound of shattering glass just above him and felt the sharp, feather-light shards of whatever had broken land in his hair and on his face. Warm blood was in Finn’s eyes—he wasn’t sure whose it was—and he blinked furiously to clear them, but the grunt of pain and sudden absence of pressure as the man slid off of him told him that the other guy had gotten the worst of it.

Finn rolled away from the man who no longer pinned him to the floor, the man who now moved slowly, groggily, to his knees by the sound of it.
He was just about to grab for the man again and finish it, anything to get some lights on and see what the hell had happened, when he heard Tesla moan somewhere behind him. He paused for only a fraction of a fraction of a second, uncertain whether to secure the man’s capture or go to Tesla, and realized immediately that even pausing to consider the question gave away the answer. He turned away from the injured man, whoever he was, and made his careful way toward the sound Tesla had made. He felt the air in front of him so as not to run into her, or over her, and though he clenched his jaw when he heard the heavy footsteps of the man he’d grappled with move away from him, cross the room, and then the slam of the backdoor, Finn remained undeterred until he heard Tesla whimper right in front of him, low to the ground.

“Tes, it’s me, are you okay?”
He wondered suddenly if there might be more people in the house when he heard the backdoor close again, gently and quietly this time.

“Max?” Tesla asked, her voice thin and reedy.

“No, it’s Finn. Are you hurt?” He crouched down and felt along the floor in front of him. And then his hand was in her hair, spread across the hardwood floor, and he followed it with his fingers to find her head, her shoulders. “Can you sit up?” he asked.

“Yeah, I think—” she began, and he could feel her move to brace her hands against the floor and push herself up, but then she gave a cry of pain and fell back to the floor.

“Fuck this,” Finn said through clenched teeth. He crawled a couple of feet away until he found a table leg, which turned into a table, upon which his scrabbling hands found a lamp. He flipped the switch on its base and the room was flooded with light. He squinted in the sudden glare and turned to find Tesla on the floor about four feet away from him. She lay in a fetal position, legs drawn up, head down, the long, bright waves of her hair tangled across her face so he could not see her expression, or even if her eyes were open, and she cradled her left arm against her body with her other hand.

Finn scrambled over to her, still on his knees, and gently brushed her hair back from her face—and immediately wished he hadn’t.
She turned stricken, drenched blue-green eyes toward him, bright as polished beach glass, all of her pain and fear right there for him to see, and when he went to reach for her, to offer whatever comfort he was capable of, she said, “Did you see my dad?”

“No, I didn’t see him.
And I think it was just the one guy, and he’s gone—your dad would certainly have heard the noise if he was here. Where are you hurt?” He wanted to touch her, as he had since he’d seen her up close for the first time, at the botched party, but unlike in the park earlier tonight, he was afraid. His hand hovered an inch above her shoulder as he waited for her to tell him what to do.

“My arm,” she said as she closed her eyes, her wet lashes jet black against her cheeks.
One tear squeezed out from under her eyelid, and Finn felt a rush of such tenderness and rage that he was paralyzed for a moment—not by the rage, which he had long ago grown accustomed to, but by the tenderness, unfamiliar and unwelcome.

“Let me see.”
He gently but firmly moved her hand away from the arm she held close.

He had to quickly swallow the shocked gasp he would have otherwise made and turn back to her face, away from her already swollen forearm, the hand and wrist at a sickening angle.
The end of a clearly broken bone pressed tightly against skin that was already a deep, angry purple, but at least the skin wasn’t broken—it wasn’t an open fracture. The pain must be unbearable.

“Is it bad?”
She looked at him with those eyes, summer sky and swimming pools and new leaves in the spring.

“No, not really.
Probably a sprain,” he assured her, the lie calm and sure. “Still, we should get it looked at. Can you stand up if I help?”

“I think so,” she said, and he moved to get behind her, to offer his support so she wouldn’t need her injured arm, already swollen beyond recognition, and cradled in her other hand, up by the elbow.
Slowly, carefully, Finn took most of her weight and they got her up on her feet. She shook uncontrollably, but she said she thought she could walk.

With one arm around her waist to keep her steady, they made their way to the front door.
Finn opened it—it was also unlocked—and they stepped out into the night. Tesla asked no questions as he walked her up the street toward the edge of campus, but he heard her suck in her breath whenever her steps jarred her arm. They were almost to the old Victorian house when Tesla stopped, and Finn, though his arm was tight around her waist, could feel her sway on her feet.

“Tes, we’re almost there,” he said.
“Hang on, okay?”

Tesla turned her head to assure him she could make it, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, her eyes fluttered and her knees gave out.
Finn felt her slump against him, her dead weight more than he could support with one arm. He turned her body awkwardly, tried not to touch her injured forearm as he picked her up, her head fallen back over his arm. The vulnerable, pale flesh of her throat was revealed, the sharp little V of her chin he felt he already knew, as he’d seen it thrust out toward him in defiance on several occasions. Every muscle in his back and shoulders was tensed as he carried her up the steps to the front porch of the old house and leaned his shoulder into the buzzer.

The door opened almost immediately, and he met Lydia’s eyes with their fine web of lines at the corners, as her sharp, observant intelligence shone out from behind her reading glasses.

“We’ve got a problem.” Finn stepped into the parlor as Lydia held the door wide and moved out of his way. He carried the unconscious girl into the house and Lydia looked up and down the dark, quiet street of the sleepy college town before she shut the massive oak door. The sharp, metallic sound of a deadbolt as it slid into place echoed ominously down the sidewalk, just before the porch light went off and plunged the house into darkness once more.