Intertwined (22 page)

At the very least, he should have said goodbye.

God, when had she become so needy?

That doesn’t matter right now.
Only one thing did, and that was Aden. He’d been right, she thought. Her dad really had thrown him out of his office. Because he’d loved her mom—her real mom? A woman who had been a little bit crazy?—and Aden had awakened memories of her that had sent him into a tailspin of uncertainty?

Pot and pans began banging downstairs and she knew her dad was up. She rose from bed, showered and dressed as if she planned to go to school. In the kitchen, her dad had breakfast prepared and waiting on the table. Scrambled eggs and toast. He was in his usual chair, hidden behind a paper. The thing that proved how upset he was was the colorlessness of his knuckles as he clutched the sports section.

There was nothing she could say to soothe him—not without admitting what she knew. And if she began talking to him, she knew she would ask questions he wasn’t yet ready to answer. Questions with answers she would be better off
finding on her own. He was hiding something from her, and she didn’t want him to have the chance to lie to her.

It was odd, knowing her dad had secrets. Odd, disappointing and yeah, upsetting. He’d promised to be open and honest with her always.
You promised the same
, she thought, but look at her now. Lying about study groups, sneaking around, reading patient files. Guilt was suddenly swallowing her up.

“I don’t want you hanging out with that boy, Mary Ann.”

The out-of-the-blue statement surprised her; the sternness of his voice jolted her into speechlessness.

“Aden Stone is dangerous.” He set the paper down and stared over at her, his eyes devoid of emotion. “I don’t know what he’s doing in Crossroads or how you met him, but I do know he’s no one you should trust. Are you listening to me?”

Nothing in the journal, upsetting as the entries had been to her, had explained such an intense reaction. She cleared her throat. “Yes.” She was. But that didn’t mean she’d obey. Aden was a part of her life she would not give up. Ever.

“If I have to, I’ll call the school and—”

She slapped her palms against the table. “Don’t you dare! You would get him in trouble and they would pull him from class, then shove him back into a mental institution. A place he doesn’t belong and you know it! Tell me you won’t do that to him. Tell me you aren’t that cruel.”

She’d never spoken to him like that, and he blinked over at her in astonishment.

“Tell me!” Once more she slammed her hands against the table, rattling the dishes.

“I won’t,” he said softly, “but I need
you
to tell
me
you won’t hang out with him anymore.”

“Why?”

He pressed his lips together, refusing to answer.

The doorbell rang.

Her dad frowned. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.” She unfolded from her chair and strode to the front door, happy for the reprieve. When she opened it and saw the visitor, her heartbeat picked up speed. Riley. He looked as rugged and ruthless as always, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, his dark hair unkempt from the wind.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered, glancing over her shoulder to ensure that they were alone. They weren’t.

“Yes, what are you doing here?” her dad asked rudely from behind her. “And who are you?”

Unperturbed, Riley inclined his head in greeting. “Hello, Dr. Gray. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Dad, this is Riley.” Keeping the elation out of her voice was a struggle. “He’s new to my school. I’ve been showing him around and stuff.”

“Does he—”

“No,” she interjected, knowing he meant to ask if Riley hung with Aden. “He doesn’t.”
He hangs with me.

“So I ask again, what are you doing here?”

“Dad!”

“It’s fine, Mary Ann.” To her dad, Riley said, “I’m here to pick up your daughter for school.”

“She likes to walk.”

“Not today. I’ll be right back. Behave,” she said to her dad. She raced into her bedroom, grabbed her backpack and soared back down the stairs. Her dad and Riley were watching each other silently.

She kissed her dad’s check, noticed that he appeared older than he ever had before, with lines of tension branching from his eyes. “Bye. Love you.”

“I love you, too.” He didn’t say anything else, didn’t try to stop her. She was glad. She didn’t know how she would have reacted or what she would have said. She needed Riley right now. Her dad had answers, but Riley had those comforting arms. Inside his shiny red sports car, she buckled.

When they rounded the street corner and were out of sight, he twined their fingers together. Her world suddenly felt right again.

“Where’d you go?” she asked.

“Had to see to Victoria, shower and change.”

“Oh.”

“I hated to leave, though.” He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

Goose bumps broke out over her skin. A little bit down the road, the trees thinning, she realized he wasn’t leading her toward the school. She frowned. “Where are we going?”

He flicked her a grim smile. “You need to learn how to survive in this new world you’ve found yourself in. You also need a distraction.”

“What does that mean? About surviving.”

“You’ll see.”

V
ICTORIA SKIPPED SCHOOL
. So did Mary Ann, and so did Riley. What kind of students ditched class when it was only their second day at school? And what about supposed rule-follower Mary Ann? She sure was ditching a lot lately.

Were the three of them together? Aden wondered throughout the crapfest of a day. A day that had started with Ozzie threatening to kill him again and worsened when Shannon, coughing and weak, had insisted on coming to school anyway and Aden had practically had to carry him to the building. And then to discover that his friends were gone…

Now he desperately wanted to leave, to head out and look for them, but couldn’t. Not if he wanted to return. A single ditch, and Dan would send him packing. Victoria could fix that for him, of course, but only if she still wanted to hang out with him. After last night—
I told you to stay away from me and I meant it
, she’d said after spying the male vampire in the window—he couldn’t be sure.

Who had the guy been? Why the sudden change in Victoria?
He had no answers. And hadn’t Victoria wanted to protect him from the creatures now in town? Guess that had changed, too.

What made the day even odder was the way everyone waved and smiled at him as if he was their best friend. Guys patted him on the shoulder, girls flashed their pearly whites and giggled as if they were too nervous to talk to him but wanted to be near him all the same. Why?

As if reading his mind, a senior walked by and said, “Way to put Tucker in his place, man,” with a nod of approval.

Ahh. Now he understood (the welcome reception, at least). No one had liked Tucker, but they’d pretended to, simply to keep the tyrant from turning all that evil on them. Now they thought Aden was their savior, that he would destroy Tucker if necessary.

No pressure, he thought dryly.

All through chemistry, geometry, and Spanish he half listened to his teachers, half listened to his companions, who were now awake and no longer drugged into a stupor by the meds—though truth be told, he
had
been tempted to take them this morning. During that third class, John O’Conner once more appeared beside him, crouching at his desk.

“Why do you always ambush me here?”

“Because I had this class with Chloe. Speaking of, have you talked to Chloe yet?”

Aden spared him only the briefest of glances. He looked so real. Or perhaps because he was so recently dead. Perhaps because he’d had a power of his own when he’d been alive.

Aden nodded at the rightness of the thought. That made
sense. He drew vampires and werewolves—and goblins, fairies and witches, apparently—so why not ghosts who’d been “gifted” during life? Or did he draw
all
ghosts, gifted or not?

Surely not. Thousands of people died every minute of every day. If all ghosts came to him, he would never see anyone or anything else.

He wanted to question John, but they were in class and surrounded. He’d just have to do so stealthily, he decided, so that the teacher and students around him wouldn’t notice.

John babbled about Chloe while Aden considered his options. He couldn’t speak out loud, not even in a whisper. He didn’t know sign language, and even if he did, John might not. He couldn’t leave the classroom; because of his past, he wasn’t allowed to roam the halls during class time. What option did that leave him? A note?

A note! Of course. He lifted his pen and began writing.
When you were alive, did you have a
—how should he word this?—
superpower?
He swirled the paper around and slid it toward John.

John continued speaking, oblivious.

Aden tapped the page, keeping his gaze on the teacher.

“What? Oh. You want me to read that?”

He nodded.

A moment passed in silence. Then, “Nah. Not really. I mean, I could sense other people’s emotions, which really freaked me out, but that isn’t a superpower. It was just me being too sensitive. Like a pansy, as my dad would say. That’s why, I, you know, self, uh, medicated.”

An empath. John had been an empath. Aden knew about them only because he’d met another boy with a similar ability in one of the institutions and that boy had studied the ability in an effort to stop feeling so much, so strongly.

“What does my pansy factor have to do with anything?” John asked. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter. I need you to talk to Chloe for me. I want you to tell her what I can’t.”

He could have resisted. He still didn’t know what would happen if he failed, or even if he succeeded. But right now he was John’s only link to the living, and he knew what it was like to want something desperately but be unable to have it.
Okay
, he wrote.

John sucked in a breath. “Really? You’ll talk to her?”

He gave another nod.

“You swear?”

Another nod.

“Today?”

Nod.
What do you want me to tell her?

“If you’re lying…” John balled his fists and slammed them against Aden’s desk. The intensity of his emotion must have given him some solidity, because Aden’s desk rattled. As the students around him jolted, John said, “I’ll follow you. I swear I will. I’ll haunt you until you do it.”

Aden tapped his finger against the question.

John’s anger melted, dejection taking its place. “Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I didn’t use her, that I…loved her. I did.”

Aden’s brow creased in confusion.

Shame coasted over the boy’s face. “We didn’t hang with
the same people, but I asked her out on a dare. I never expected to like her. But I did. Her emotions are so pure, you know? Not overpowering. Then she overheard my friends teasing me about her. They wanted her to hear. Planned for her to, I think.”

John stared down at his wringing hands. “God, man. Her devastation…I can
still
feel it. It’s like I soaked it up and it became a part of me. I tried to talk to her, to explain, but she wanted nothing to do with me. I was desperate to forget, to feel nothing, you know, and did something stupid. Now, here I am.” His voice trailed off, perhaps too shaky to work past his throat, and he coughed in renewed embarrassment.

“—Mr. Stone?”

Aden straightened in his seat. The teacher was holding out a piece of chalk. “I’m sorry, what?”

I’ve been listening to him,
Eve said, always the one to his rescue.
He asked you to conjugate the verb run in Spanish
.

“Never mind,” Aden muttered, pushing to his feet. He approached the head of the class with trepidation.
“Sí, señor”
was the only Spanish he knew.

Good luck
, Caleb said.
I could tell you the color underwear the blonde to your right is wearing—rojo. That means red, by the way. But that’s all I know
.

“I’ll help,” John said, keeping pace beside him.

Thank God. With John telling him what to write, Aden managed to impress the teacher for the first time. He didn’t feel guilty about cheating, either. As he’d listened to John and written what he’d heard, he’d learned.

Halfway back to his seat, the bell rang. Crap. He wasn’t finished talking to John. He quickened his step, swiped up his backpack, then lifted the pad and pen and wrote,
Since I’m helping you with Chloe, will you help me? I need a bottle of nail polish.

John barked out a laugh. “Are you kidding me? I didn’t peg you as the type.”

He shook his head as kids filed past him, jaw locked together, cheeks heating.
It’s for a girl
. Last night after Victoria had left him so abruptly, he’d started to think. She had to paint her fingernails with that metal to protect herself from…he couldn’t recall the name of the liquid in her ring, but she could paint her toenails and she loved color, so…

Still laughing, John asked, “Any particular color?”

Doesn’t matter
, he wrote.
As long as it’s not black. If you can’t, I’ll
—

“Oh, I can. I’ve learned a few tricks these last few months. And I happen to know where Mr. White keeps all the bottles the teachers confiscate from the students.”

Has to be unopened, never used.

“Mr. Stone. The bell rang,” the teacher, Señor Smith, said impatiently. “You need to leave.”

“Never used won’t be a problem,” John said.

Aden crossed the room to the door. John remained beside him until he hit the hallway, then disappeared.

Time to hunt for Chloe. It was now lunch, so she should be in the cafeteria. He’d planned to sneak off campus and into the forest for an hour—searching for Victoria rather than
Riley this time—but that would have to wait. He’d given John his word. And he wanted that nail polish.

Something slammed into his shoulder, and his bag went flying. Suddenly Tucker loomed in front of him, scowling, pure menace. Determined. “Watch where you’re going, Crazy.”

He ground his teeth. “Get out of my face, Tucker.” He didn’t need the threat of Tucker now, on top of the threat Ozzie still presented. Not to mention all the creatures newly arrived in town.

“What’ cha gonna do about it, huh? No one’s here to save you this time.”

The world around him faded, another taking its place. This one was an empty alleyway, redbrick walls colored with graffiti. There was a Dumpster and rats ran along the edges. In the background, he could even hear the wail of a police siren. What the hell?

“It’s just you and me now,” the jock said, smug.

Aden saw the way Tucker’s eyes were swirling, the gray laced with sizzling silver. This had to be an illusion, he realized grimly. Tucker had tried before, but it hadn’t worked. This time, Mary Ann wasn’t standing next to him. This time, there was nothing to negate Tucker’s power. Except…

Riley somehow always negated
Mary Ann’s
negation, allowing Aden’s companions to talk and act even in her presence. Tucker had tried the spider thing when both had been around him, yet had failed. Shouldn’t that mean Tucker simply couldn’t use his ability against Aden, no matter who was or was not with him?

Lost in thought as he was, he was unprepared when Tucker shoved him and went flying backward. He tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground. Though his eyes told him he’d hit a brick wall, that wall jumped away from him with a curse. Had he actually hit a person?

Tucker grinned, and there was an evil edge to it. “This is gonna be fun.”

As Aden popped to his feet, Tucker launched forward. Back to the ground he went, but this time he rolled, pinning Tucker’s shoulders. He drew his knees up, straddling Tucker’s waist, holding him down.

“I don’t want to fight you,” he snarled.

“Chicken?” Tucker jerked his arms free, grabbed hold of his shoulders and tossed him aside.

Just determined to stay here.
He stood, fingers curling into fists. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? I’ve never done anything to hurt you.”

“Go ahead.” Tucker stood, too. “Get up and walk away. I’ll just follow you. I’ll be your new shadow. Every time you turn around, there I’ll be, my fist in your face. Then, when I’m done with you, I’ll turn on Mary Ann. After that, I’ll go after that new chick, Victoria. She’ll—”

Aden roared, his rage springing up, spilling over. Tucker’s eyes widened as Aden’s fist came at him. Contact. Cartilage snapped and blood poured. Tucker howled in pain.

Stop
, Eve said.
You have to stop. He’s just taunting you, trying to force you into this fight so you’ll be kicked out of school
.

Aden was past the point of listening. No one threatened his
friends. Him, sure. He’d dealt with threats his entire life. But Mary Ann was too delicate, Victoria too…his. He drew back his fist for another punch, but stopped when Tucker’s image changed, shifting into Mary Ann’s. He blinked in confusion.

Next thing he knew, a fist was connecting with
his
nose. Again, cartilage snapped and blood poured. His own. He felt a sharp sting, then nothing as adrenaline surged through his bloodstream.

Destroy him
, Caleb said.

No matter whose face he shows you, attack,
Julian added.

Eve is right
, Elijah said, trying to be the voice of reason.
He’s provoking you on purpose. Only reason he hit you back is because his own temper is too volatile to control.

In the distance, Aden thought he heard kids cheering. He just couldn’t see anyone. So badly he wanted to whip out his daggers, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to kill Tucker. He just wanted to stop him. Perhaps humiliate him in the process.

Aden crouched and leapt, arms wrapping around Tucker’s middle and propelling him into the wall. Cocky laughter filled his ears. When he straightened, drawing his elbow back, he saw that Tucker now looked like Victoria.

Not her, not her, not her.
Aden threw his punch, Tucker’s eyes widening as it neared. No longer was he fighting fairly. He hit Tucker in the throat, cutting off his air. The boy hunched over, trying to breathe. Aden then kneed him in the face, cracking his cheekbone and sending him to his back, where he writhed on the ground.

Aden leapt on top of him. Over and over he beat his fists
into Tucker’s face. Teeth cut his skin, but he didn’t care. After a while, Tucker stopped writhing. Then stopped moving. “You don’t ever threaten Mary Ann. You don’t ever threaten Victoria. Do you understand me?”

“Aden,” Victoria said softly from behind him.

An illusion, he told himself, continuing to punch and punch and punch. Victoria had told him to leave her alone. Victoria wasn’t even at school.

Gentle hands settled on his shoulders, inexorably hot. “You have to stop.”

He whipped around, ready to attack this new illusion when he noticed the alley had vanished and the halls of the school had once again appeared. Kids were all around him, no longer cheering. Not even smiling. They were gazing at him in horror. In fear.

Today was game day, so many of their faces were painted with
Go Jaguars
and
We’re #1.
That paint was stark against the paleness of their skin. His wild gaze flew back to Victoria.