Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (33 page)

“See this bit of vine right here? I forget
what it’s called, but when you grow it, it clings to anything.”

I had put down the rag and taken Joss’s free
hand in mine, running my thumb over her knuckles as I talked to her
sister. I reached out for Jill with my other arm and hugged her to
my side, giving her a smacking kiss on the cheek. “Thank you.”

Her eyes got huge. She slapped her hand to
her cheek and bolted across the room. I was about to feel worse,
like I had really freaked her out on top of everything else, but
she grabbed the cordless off the wall and whirled back to us.
“Excuse me, I have to call everyone I have ever met, right now.”
And she ran out of the room.

I turned back to Joss and felt the grin at
Jill’s cuteness evaporate as I met the hollowed-out look in her
eyes. I ran my hands up her arms. “You’re too cold.” I started to
take my jacket off.

“Hang on,” Tim said, coming around the
table.

“What are you doing?” I asked with menace
when he put his hands on her bare shoulders.

“Relax, man, we’re practically cousins or
something.”

“What’s ‘or something’?” I wanted to know as
his hands, now glowing, slid down her arms.

Joss shuddered and flung the ice pack back
toward his head. He caught it and it immediately melted limp over
his hand. “We’re so not related.” Her voice sounded almost
normal.

I touched her arm again. She felt better.
Warm. Her color was better too.

Tim shrugged, tossed the wet mess in the
sink and sat down. “You’re always so pleasant, Joss. Like the big
sister I never wanted to have. Been a long time since we’ve done
this, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so. You potty-trained
yet?”

“I was potty-trained!”

“You had Pull-ups.”

“See?” he said, getting up and shaking a
finger at her. “This is what people mean when they say you’re
abrasive.” He looked at me. “You must put up with a lot.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but strolled
out of the room. Immediately the attitude she had been wearing the
last few minutes dissolved and she seemed to shrink into herself
again.

“How’re you doing?” I asked her, wondering
if it was the dumbest question ever.

She just shrugged.

I tucked her hair back behind her ear,
kissed her forehead. “It’s gonna be okay.”

She didn’t look at me or bother to tell me
how ridiculous that was.

“What was Tim talking about? Been a long
time since you’ve done what?”

“Since we were stuck in a house together.
His dad babysat me a lot last time Dad…got sick.”

“Oh.” I didn’t really know what I was
supposed to say or do now. It was getting on toward morning. It
seemed like we should be doing something, but everyone who knew
what to do was, like, monumentally distracted. And all I knew to do
was sit here and hold Joss’s hand until she snapped out of it and
became Joss again.

“When I was little I had these blocks,” she
said, kind of startling me, “lots of them. I used to like to stack
them on top of each other, see how high a tower I could make before
it fell over.”

Okay, about the last thing I expected her to
do right now was start talking about childhood toys. It kind of
worried me.

“I know kids just do that, but I liked to do
it sitting across the room. I could hold the tower up with my mind
and keep floating blocks up and setting them on the top. ‘Look,
Mom, no hands!’ It was a challenge. I could spend hours doing
that.

“I was never supposed to let Dad see me
doing it. Mom was really serious about that. I guess somehow she
knew my Talent was going to be a problem for him. I usually did
what I was told, so I was pretty careful.

“This was just after the fire. Like, right
after, when I’d just gotten out of the hospital. Emily wasn’t home
yet, so there was no one next door to play with. Mom started
talking on the phone and she asked me to go to my room and play for
a while, so I was sitting on my bed and stacking blocks when Dad
came home from the shop. He’d just heard that NIAC had taken Emily
from the hospital and came home to tell Mom in person. But she was
on the phone with Emily’s mom, so he came up to check on me.

“One minute I was stacking blocks, and the
next minute he was just there, in my room, staring at me with this
look I’d never seen before. The tower fell, but I still had this
one block hanging in air that I was too stupid to drop.

“‘What the hell are you doing?!’ He screamed
it at me. Dad had scolded me, sure, but he never raised his voice
to me. I mean, he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t have to, right? But
that day he screamed.

“I dropped the block. It ricocheted off the
pile and landed against his shoe. He bent down and picked it up. He
was studying it, like he…I don’t know, like maybe it was the block
and not me. Like that’s what he wanted it to be, and if he glared
at it hard enough, he could make that be the truth. I just sat
there on my bed, shaking, waiting for something else to happen.

“I heard my mom racing up the stairs. She
bolted into the room and skidded to a stop, looking from the pile
of blocks, to me, to my dad, and she knew exactly what
happened.

“So I said, ‘Sorry, Mommy,’ because I knew
it was supposed to be our secret.

“I swear it was like the air in the room
changed. Dad closed his fist around the block and turned toward
her. That moment, they both seemed, like, broken. Dad looked like
someone had put a knife in his gut. Mom was crying.

“He said, ‘You knew.’ And she said his name.
And he said, ‘You knew that she was like this, and you… Why?’

“She tried to answer, but he cut her
off.

“‘Why would you keep that from me?’

“‘I was trying to protect you!’ She yelled
it like that, like she was pleading with him to understand.

“‘By
lying
to me? By hiding from me
the fact that my own child was—?’

“I don’t know, it was like…If I think about
it now I hear all this pain and disbelief in it. But then I think I
was just totally scared myself and didn’t know what to think. And
then he said, ‘Oh my God,’ and he was shaking his head. He brought
his hands up, pressing them against his skull, the block still in
his hand, digging into his scalp.

“‘Gene, please,’ she said it like she was
begging. She was crying and she swiped the tears off her face and
held out her hand, took a step toward him. ‘Please, stay with
me.’

“And not ‘
stay
with me,’ but ‘stay
with
me,’ you know?”

I nodded, but I don’t think she was paying
attention.

“He stopped pacing, and something was
different. Like, really different. He said, ‘You lied to me. You
hid this from me because you’re with
them
.’

“And she was like, ‘No, honey, I’m with
you
. I’m always with you. You
know
that.’

“‘I don’t know anything anymore!’ He
screamed it at her. ‘Have you already called them? Are they on
their way?’ Then he raced over to the window and looked out.

“Mom grabbed me by the arm and pulled me off
the bed. She slung me out the door before my feet ever hit the
ground. ‘Go to the kitchen and call Aunt Jayce,’ she said. ‘She’s
on speed dial. Tell her Daddy’s sick and I need her and Uncle Ben
over here right now.’

“And I was like, ‘But Mommy—’ because I was
scared and I didn’t want to leave them and I wasn’t supposed to
touch the phone.

“She said, ‘Please, baby, help me. Go!’

“I mostly fell down the steps while Dad
started screaming for me. I pushed a chair up to the phone and
called Jayce. She told me I did good and to go find a place to
hide, not to come out until she or my mom came for me. So I did. I
hid in that cabinet,” she pointed across the room, “under the
kitchen sink, and listened to a lot of pounding and screaming for a
few minutes, and then there was just nothing. For what seemed like
forever.”

“What happened to your mom?” I asked, when
it seemed like she wasn’t going to go on.

She jumped, like she forgot I was even there
for a minute. She shook her head once, like she was trying to break
free of the story. “He broke her arm and her jaw. And she still
managed to keep him away from me and lead him back to their room
where she tranqued him.”

Jesus Christ.

Joss shook her head again. “It wasn’t until
years later that I realized not everyone has a syringe full of
sedative hidden in a drawer. She must have known something, known
she might need that someday. I never asked her about it.”

I wondered what had happened to that plan
tonight. “And she let him come back after that.”

“Of course she did,” Joss said, in this
are you some kind of moron?
tone.

“He broke her jaw.” I drew the words out,
like I could somehow help her understand what that meant. What was
it with the Marshall women?

“He’s my
dad
. Don’t you get that? She
said: ‘I’m with you. I’m always with you.’ That’s how it
is
.” Then the absolute faith of that bled out of her face
and she went back to looking defenseless. “Dad’s just…sick, you
know? Then he’ll go and get better, and he’ll come home again.”

I saw it coming and yanked her into my lap
as she totally came apart.

I hated it when Joss cried. I hated the way
it made me feel, the helplessness, the way it took me by the throat
and clawed at my gut. I felt like shit because she was hurting so
bad and there was absolutely nothing I could do to fix it. And
that, even though it was horrible, the sounds she made, and the way
the sobs jerked her whole body, part of me kind of thrilled to the
way she clung to me, the way she trusted me, the way she was so
completely mine to care for in those moments.

And that was just totally fucked up.

I held her, rocked her, told her stupid
stuff she couldn’t possibly hear over the sounds of her own grief.
Jill poked her head in, looking worried, and I mouthed “’S okay,”
and waved her off again. Joss wound down, twisting her fist in my
jacket like it was the valve that could turn off her own emotion. I
turned the damp rag to a clean spot and put it in her hand, knowing
she was about done having me mop at her face for one night.

“I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely, when she
could talk again.

“You don’t ever have to apologize for
that.”

She tossed the rag on the table and buried
her face in my neck with a sigh. I just held her like that until
her mother looked cautiously into the room. I tapped Joss on the
shoulder and she raised her head, meeting her mom’s eyes. She slid
back to her own chair, raking her hair back with both hands while
her mom, whose red eyes matched her daughter’s, took the chair at
the head of the table.

She reached out and took Joss’s hands in
both of hers. “What Jayce gave your father,” she stopped, cleared
her throat, “was a relatively small dose of tranquilizer. We waited
until he started to come around to see if…maybe…if he would be more
like himself. He wasn’t. She had put him out again.”

Mrs. Marshall spoke very calmly, her words
clear and deliberate. I thought about Joss’s story, about this
normal, human woman with a small child taking on a madman by
herself like that, keeping her head and coping with her own
injuries to do what needed to be done. And then bringing that man
back into her home and living with the threat of that hanging over
her head. For love.

I’d always seen how Joss was similar to her
dad, their eyes, their toughness, the way they brushed everyone
aside. But now I was looking at how much Joss was like her mother
and I saw devotion, raw nerve, and pure steel spine.

“Ben told me you probably heard things that
gave you some questions.”

“Dad called Ben ‘Brian Nichols.’ Ben called
Dad ‘Sarge’ and ‘Joe.’ And he answered to it. It was like they were
different people.”

Mrs. Marshall sat there for a moment,
considering her words. “I guess we were all different people, a
long time ago, and that’s not really my story to tell.”

“Dad’s never going to tell me.”

“Jocelyn, if your father ever decided to
tell anyone, he would tell you. The important thing for you to
understand right now is that his…problems…pre-date you. This is not
your fault.”

“Okay.”

“Not ‘okay.’ I need to know you understand
me.”

“I don’t understand anything, Mom. But I
hear you.”

“We’re going to have to move him to the
hospital, and he’s going to be admitted. And you know there’s no
way of knowing how long it’s going to take before he’s well enough
to be released. And honey,” she breathed in and let it out slowly,
her hands tightening around her daughter’s, “you have to go.”

“I know,” Joss whispered.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“You’ll stay with Dad. Help him get better.
He needs you and I— This is what he trained me for. I’ll be
okay.”

Mrs. Marshall bit back a sob, shook her head
as her eyes found the ceiling and tears she couldn’t blink back
rolled down her cheeks. “I know.”

She looked at me. I swallowed, hard. “I’ll
stick,” I told her. “I won’t leave her. No matter what
happens.”

She nodded. “Your sister.”

“I’ll take her. Marco knows about her, and
we don’t know who’s implicated. I’ll take her with me and I’ll keep
her safe. It’s what Dad wanted.”

She nodded again. Then shook her head.
“Maybe…maybe you don’t have to go. Maybe they won’t go through with
it.”

“Mom. You know we can’t just wait and
see.”

“I know, I just—I just want to go with you.
I want to go with you so much, honey. You’re my baby.”

I felt like I shouldn’t even be there,
seeing the raw pain in that woman’s face.

“You promised him. He needs you. Even more
than we do. And you can’t leave him. No matter what happens.” Her
mother looked like she would say something, but Joss cut her off,
“It would break you.”