Keystone (10 page)

“Stop it,” I say, moving my head back and forth, but I can’t see him, and the frustration builds up in seconds. It slops over onto all the belief I had that I could do this. This should be easy. I touch the ridges of the Impressioning in my palm, like it’s proof. I should be able to do this. Should. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe things didn’t get connected right.

The panic forms tears that sting my eyes. It makes this game of hide-and-seek a thousand times worse. Warriors don’t cry. Warriors don’t. I sit on the table and hide my face in my hands.

“Relax,” Garrett’s breath whispers at the nape of my neck. Then he plants his kiss, soft and moist, on my skin. The heat of his body is so close that his warmth seems to join mine. His lips are beneath my ear. My tears evaporate. His kiss moves under my jaw.

“Open your eyes,” he whispers again. I open them, wanting to see him the way I did the first time I met him at this table, and he’s almost there, standing right in front of me.

The shadows around him fade to gray in the center, as if I’m rubbing charcoal off a canvas. The more I want to see, the more Garrett’s face materializes from the dark until he’s even clearer than he was before. He could be on a black stage with spotlights shining on him. The blue of his eyes is so brilliant that they look painted.

“Hi,” he says. He tips his head to one side and grins.

“Hi,” I say.

He reaches for me and my focus shatters the moment his hand slides into my hair. I close my eyes and focus instead on my lips, his lips, him. The smell of citrus fills me up as his lips close over mine. I’m lying in the sun. Tiny vapors of heat curl across my body. I center all my concentration on this feeling and it boils up inside me until I’m not sure there’s enough of me to hold it all in. Garrett’s kiss has never been any less than amazing, but this kiss is even more. This kiss is the sun, opening inside me.

My hands are in his hair. There’s a girl in his kiss who laughs like wind chimes and who says the smartest things and whose eyes are as natural as the Earth. I could be jealous of her. If she wasn’t me.

I want to pull his kiss inside me. My breath and his, my mouth and his, we’re perfect, all mixed up together. I weave my bare ankles around his calves, pulling him closer. Garrett jerks away.

I yelp like he’s poured ice on me. Then I bite my lip, hoping he’s not focused, watching me through the dark, seeing my face shoot up in flames. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I have no idea what just went wrong, but I close my eyes so I don’t accidentally focus and have to see his face.

His fingertips rest on my knee.

“Sorry,” he says, but there’s a chuckle beneath his apology. “I forget you don’t know how to dial any of this down yet. I’ll show you how to do that.”

Since his voice is thick and my eyes are still closed, no matter what he says, I imagine him staring at my lips, wanting another kiss the way I do. I can’t imagine ever wanting to feel less of him ever again. The dark makes me brave and I put my hand on his.

“But I don’t want you to show me that,” I say. I keep my eyes shut, so I don’t accidentally focus and lose my nerve. I wait for his lips to fall hard against mine.

Instead, there’s a long pause. Too long. If
stupid
were a real thing, it’d be a brick. And every second that passes makes me feel like I’m being buried under a big, dirty heap of stupid. It’s another first kiss that wasn’t, all over again. Another second passes and I hear Garrett’s breathing return to normal. Another load of stupid piles up on top of me, crushing my throat and my lungs and my heart. The table wobbles as he moves away and I think I’m going to scream. Instead, I open my eyes. Garrett is looking away.

“I was up here a few times, on watch, while you were Impressioning,” he says. “My mom sent me up because I was coming completely unglued.”

“That makes two of us,” I whisper. I know he’s talking about how I died. It seems like the right time to tell him about the Memory and about being a Tralate. “Something happened to me when I...uh…when I…”

I can’t say it. He turns back to me, his hand warm on mine. I wish it could be the only thing in the world I have to think about.

“What happened?” he asks. His voice is deep and smooth.

“I think something got screwed up in my head,” I say. My palms are suddenly sweaty and I drop his hand. “The message at the Memory…I saw something on Ms. Fisk’s paper. Addo said it’s a gift. There were just symbols on the paper, but letters kind of floated out of them. I don’t know how to explain it, but they just kind of floated up and I could read them.”

“You’re a Tralate,” Garrett says with a nod, but I can see the worry he’s trying to hide. “What did it say?”

“It was a message from my mom. She wants me to find my grandfather’s memory.”

Garrett shakes his head. “No. That’s not going to happen, Nalena. That’s a suicide mission with everything going on right now.”

My hands go dry. There’s no way I won’t do what my mother asked me to, no matter what’s happening. And it’s a crushing thing to hear Garrett, the only person in the world that I can trust to help me, say that he won’t.

“It is going to happen,” I tell him. “I have to do it.”

“Nalena.” His voice drops. “The Ianua have been searching for that memory for 17 years and they still haven’t found it. If you went looking for it now, by yourself and without even being trained first, The Fury would be climbing over each other to pick you off before you even got out the door. They’d think it was an honor to annihilate the last of your family tree. One less Contego in the Ianua’s blood line.”

Anger rolls down into my stomach. It sits there like a hunk of granite, while I stare at Garrett’s shadowed cheeks. I take a step back as my adrenaline fires up and runs the circuit of my body, looking for an escape.

“Then I better get trained fast,” I tell him. “My mother asked me to do this and I’m going to do it, Garrett. I’m a Contego now. I’m a warrior, just like you, and I’ve got to do what I know is right. You should know that.” I gulp a breath that goes down my throat like a bag full of hair, but I don’t let his eyes get away. “Especially you,” I say.

I expect him to yell at me or laugh in my face or tell me I’m naive. I boil, waiting for him to tell me how stupid I am to go half-baked into some quest that I’m totally unprepared for. Or to ask me what we both know that I don’t know: where am I going to look when I don’t really understand what I’m even looking for? But instead of any of this, Garrett just presses his lips together and drops his chin.

“Alright,” he says. “Then we need to get you trained, ASAP.”

I wish I could be some awesome warrior girl that could grab his shirt and give him a movie star kiss, but I’m just me and I’d probably break his nose trying to do it.

Garrett takes my hands in the dark and draws himself close to me again. I can feel his chest rise and fall as we tangle ourselves together. I want him to say everything will work out, but instead, his hair dusts my face. I want him to kiss me, but Garrett takes a deep breath and straightens out his arms, holding me at the ends of them. He groans.

“We have to get you trained. And that means that I’ll have to stay my distance.”

It throws my brakes on. “Why?”

“We can’t have any physical contact during training. Contact with me will drain your energy and you need to keep it at a maximum so that you can learn how to use your senses and your field.”

He lets go of my shoulders and his heat moves away. I might as well be in a rocket, racing away from the sun.

“I won’t be able to see you?” I ask.

“Oh no, we can see each other all we like,” he almost laughs. But not quite. “We just can’t have any physical contact.”

“Can’t you just teach me what I need to know now?” I say and at the same time, I focus on seeing him. Like someone’s flipped a switch, he appears only a foot away, leaning against a shelf. The way he looks at me, he’s been focused for a while. I smile at him. “See? I’m learning. You’ve already taught me to do this.”

“This.” He waves a hand between our gaze. “Is nothing compared to what you need to know. You need to learn how to work all your senses together…how to shut them down so they don’t drive you nuts and how to ramp them up when you need to win a fight. You’ll have to learn about protecting your Cavis and how to find your opponent’s...”

“Cavis?” I giggle.

“Exactly,” Garrett says. “There’s so much you need to know. Cavises are weakness that show up in your field. They can be physical, mental, spiritual or emotional. Don’t worry. It sounds complicated, but you’ll learn to find them in your opponent’s field. You’re going to learn all of this, but for now, it’d be a good idea for me to practice a little more distance so we can get you up and running a lot more quickly.”

“Just you? Or I can’t touch anybody?”

“No,” he says with a fading grin. “Just me.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if you understand how it works.” He grins sheepishly. “I deplete your energy because…because I want to be with you. In ways you can’t even imagine.”

My insides spin like a turbo-charged merry-go-round. Garrett underestimates me. I can imagine
every
way that I want to be with him
.
I start to and then it’s hard to concentrate on anything else he says, even though he keeps talking.

“Learning how to use your energy is draining enough. Real combat fighting is as much about stamina as it is technique. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll figure out how to build up and save your energy, but in the beginning, you just have to work with what you have. I wouldn’t be doing you any good by syphoning it away...”

I inch closer to him. “But maybe I want you to.”

“Because you don’t realize what it’s costing you.” His voice is solid. He pushes away from the shelves with one shoulder. “Or what it’s going to cost the people you’ll be protecting. And the real point here is that I know better. It’s just that we have this little window right now, because things are so goofed up, that we don’t know when your training will happen. It’s got to be soon though.”

A little spark of hope blows through me. “But it’s not now.”

“No, it’s not now,” he agrees softly. I stop focusing as I walk toward him and he disappears.

Before he can open his mouth again, my lips are on his. Garrett can’t be the one calling all the shots. I need to start thinking and acting like a confident warrior and Garrett is the safest place to start. His breath and mine twist into one breath and I forget where I am and what I am and how we should be practicing staying away from each other.

I forget everything until someone outside the library pounds on the window like they want in.

Now.

Chapter 5

GARRETT GRABS MY WRIST AND drags me down the aisle, away from our table. The sharp strikes on the glass come so rapid fire that the whole library echoes with the wobbling vibration, and it doesn’t let up.

Garrett stops short at the end of the aisle and I plow into his back. My bubble orbs around me, but I’m scared and instead of following my instincts, my head spins between holding Garrett back and jumping out to face the intruder myself. My field bursts and reforms, bursts and reforms, in the annoying, rotating door of my indecision.

But Garrett’s breathing is so even, I barely feel the rise and fall of his lungs. And the second I let go of him, he steps out from behind the shelves.

“Oh…you’ve gotta be kidding!” He laughs out loud. It doesn’t make sense and I want to yank him back, but he’s just out of reach. He rests his hands on his hips, too genuinely relaxed to be gearing up for a fight, so I peek out from around the shelf myself. I gaze toward the full-length glass, from where the sound is coming. In the bare moonlight, I see a paper-thin guy standing on the window ledge outside. He’s dressed in all black, but his hair is a shocking, white-blond.

And he’s humping the glass.

Garrett busts out in laughter again.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“Zane,” Garrett says. Then, as if it clarifies everything, he adds, “Middleditch.”

I’ve heard that name at school. I remember Cora telling me that Zane Somebody was one of the Classics, like Garrett, which meant he was one of the popular guys who drove an otherwise unpopular, but immaculate, clunker. And as I keep trying to place the name, it comes to me, exactly where I’ve seen this guy in the library window before. Zane was at Jen’s year-end bash. He was trying to orchestrate a polar plunge into the ruthless cheerleader’s closed-up swimming pool. It happened only a few weeks ago, but it feels like years have passed since then. I follow Garrett to the window.

My first impression was right.

Zane is very much humping the glass.

Garrett raps on the window and Zane stops pumping long enough to look down and laugh. He jumps backward off the ledge and even though his voice is muffled, I can hear him shouting at us to let him in. Garrett puts his finger over his lips and points toward the back of the library. Zane flashes a thumbs up and disappears.

“You remember Zane, right?” Garrett asks. He steers me back through the aisles again and I try to focus, so I can see what’s coming at me, but I’m still too jumpy from Zane’s pounding. I can’t see a thing, so I end up tripping on Garrett’s heels and thumping along behind him.