Midnight Runes (The Bestowed Ones) (25 page)

“Much better…you’re not even scrunching up your face this time.”

I smacked his shoulder. “Don’t start with me. You didn’t tell me what to expect, and then you try to intimidate me. Not very gentlemanly. What would my mom say?” I grabbed my bag off the table and slung it over a shoulder.

“Can I be there when you tell her? I’d love to see her expression as you explain this.”

“Ha ha.” Like that was a possibility. Did they even know about this world?

“Are you willing to do this again?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

He walked me to my car and surprised me by getting in. He disappeared when I arrived home.

A
t school the next morning, Landon waited around his locker for me. Maybe this was something he looked forward to, too. I couldn’t wait to spend more time with him.

He stood by me as I switched my books, then turned with me and we headed to class.

“Did you make a list of where you want to go?”

“I have a few ideas.”

“Good. Call me when it’s convenient.”

The day passed at a normal rate. My mind fluttered from thought to thought throughout, and I immersed myself in each class, hoping it would be enough of a distraction to get me through the day without losing my mind.

When I walked through my front door, I put my thoughts into motion. I scribbled a quick note to my mom, saying I was working on a project with Landon. There was nothing better I could come up with, and I figured we’d be back before she came home, so she wouldn’t see it anyway. I ate a cookie and a protein bar while I wrote. It was the fastest meal I could think of.

“Hi,” he answered when I called him.

“Hi,” I responded.

“In a minute, go to your front door,” he said mischievously, then disconnected.

I didn’t wait thirty seconds. I opened the door, and he was there.

“I figured you wouldn’t wait,” he said with a grin. “So, where do you want to go?”

I bit my lip in anticipation. I thought about this all day, but there was a potential hitch. “Can we be invisible together too?”

“Of course. It works the same way.” He held out his arm.

“Well, how do I know that it really works? It’s only us here. There’s no one to see we’re invisible,” I challenged.

Instead of answering my question, he grabbed my arm. Suddenly, we weren’t standing in my kitchen. We were behind the teller’s counter in a bank. A closed bank. On another continent?

“Are you crazy?! We’re going to set off the alarms and get arrested!” I tried to disconnect our connection and rush toward the exit.

His hand clamped around my arm as I struggled against him. “Calm down! If I let go, you’re going to trigger an alarm. Is that what you want? Stay connected, and we’ll go unnoticed.”

I stopped struggling. “So you’d leave me here to get caught?” I accused.

“Of course not. I’d take you back home. I’d have to come back and destroy the security tapes before the police show up. It’d make an awful lot of work for me. I thought you wanted to be invisible.”

“Yeah. I figured we’d go somewhere like a library or grocery store. You know, where other people are to prove they couldn’t see us.” I glared at him, furious.

“That’s boring. How else did you think we could walk around in here without the motion detectors going off?”

I closed my eyes in an effort to calm down.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said. As angry as I was, I knew that, and I nodded. “I can’t, anyway, because then I’d be in breach of my oath.” I shot him a look. As much as I thought I was learning about him, there was still so much unknown. “I bet you’ve never seen the inside of a vault. A real one, not on TV or in a movie.” My look transformed into curiosity.

He flashed us to the inside of the bank’s main vault. There was an entire wall of neatly stacked bundles of bills, and lock boxes in varying sizes filled the other two sides.

“Glad to see you’re over your misplaced distress.”

“It would be hard for you to shock me more than that. And it’s not a challenge, so don’t try.”

“Do you still want to visit a library or store?”

“No, I have somewhere else in mind, but I was wondering if only we can hear each other when we’re like this?”

“I don’t see why not, and we don’t have to worry about it in the States, since it’s illegal to take audio surveillance, but we’re not in the US. I hope so, though. Otherwise we’re disembodied voices on the security footage. Where to?”

“I want to visit Elyse and play a prank on her.”

“At her home?”

I nodded, and he took us there.

Elyse sat on the couch and typed on her laptop, which was perfect, since I wanted to go in her room. We were upstairs in a flash, and I found her book bag by her nightstand. I opened it and emptied the contents on her bed. Landon laughed next to me as I placed all her textbooks, notebooks, and binders in two even, straight rows.

I still felt a rush of adrenaline and concern we’d be caught. Landon insisted he was listening for her to come up.

I gathered all her shoes and used them to make an outline of a square on her area rug.

“Remind me to never get on your bad side.”

I laughed. “Yes, or I’ll organize everything you have into straight lines. Okay, I’m satisfied.”

“Is she going to say something about this to you?”

“Not likely, unless another strange phenomenon happens again.”

“We just may have to arrange that.”

We arrived back at my house.

I paused, not wanting to take the conversation in a negative direction. “Life is full of give and take. What’s the catch?”

He opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by a knock at door. Roxie barked and charged the door. He looked relieved. “Expecting someone?”

I sped through my mental calendar of things to do this week. “No.”

The doorbell rang again, and another knock came to the door.

“Certainly seems urgent enough,” I said as I went to answer it.

“Wait, let me see who it is,” he said and disappeared. “It’s Trevor. I’m going to take off. I’ll see you soon.”

“You wouldn’t be leaving to avoid telling me about the downside, would you?”

“It is a convenient coincidence. Don’t worry. I tell you what you want to know. Eventually,” he said, then vanished.

The doorbell chimed again.

I pulled the door open with enough force to make Trevor jump.

“What do you want, Trevor?”

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“You’ve heard of a phone, right?”

“You don’t return my calls.”

“What is so important to tell me that you had to come over unannounced?” I vaguely remembered a time when I wished he would just show up. Now that it had happened, I couldn’t even laugh at the irony.

He collected himself and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for hurting you. I’m sorry for pushing you away. I didn’t know any other option at the time that would keep you safe. I couldn’t bear the thought of you being caught up in this mess because of me. I know how much you hate doing things against your will. I naively thought if we didn’t have a connection, you would be left alone. I didn’t understand why I was dragged into this group, and if I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t prevent it for you. I’m taking action so you won’t have to ever worry about it again. I’ll do my best not to exclude you anymore.”

I hugged him. “I appreciate you coming here to apologize. It means a lot.”

“I don’t like you being around Landon for many reasons, not just the jealousy thing. But I recognize he can most likely handle whatever comes up.”

My demeanor softened further. I didn’t like seeing him vulnerable. “I promise I didn’t know you called. My phone must still be off from school. You know you’re important to me, even if you make me crazy.”

“I do know, and the same to you.” His phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and sighed. “I’ve got to answer this. Take care of yourself,” he said before turning away and walking back to his car.

I watched him drive away and shut the door.

T
he next morning, Elyse was waiting at my locker. She perked up when she saw me come around the corner.

“Hey! You look better than you have in days. What changed?”

“The stuff that was bothering me the last few days was resolved.”

“What did you do last night? I didn’t call because I didn’t want to bug you.”

“Really? You wouldn’t have bugged me, but I wouldn’t have been able to talk.”

“Why?”

“I had some errands to do. Hey, you know what?” I said before she had a chance to ask the next logical question. “I had a surprise visitor last night. Trevor stopped by. Just showed up with no warning.”

“You’re kidding! What for?”

“Honestly, he drives me crazy.”

“Jared hasn’t mentioned talking to him lately. He said he was acting kind of preoccupied the last time he did. He’s a little worried.”

“I am too. But there’s nothing I can do.”

“You know you’ll be the first to know if I hear something.” She gave me an encouraging smile. “See you at lunch.”

I made my way to class. Barely making in the room before the bell, I had a lot on my mind. But it wasn’t like I could use any of the thoughts I had as reasonable excuses for being late.

Landon chose to sit in the seat next to my usual one. That helped me snap out of my trance.

Mr. Lewton wasted no time starting class. Our assignment was to work with the person sitting to our left and write an outline together for a creative writing project. It just so happened that I was be to Landon’s partner. I squinted my eyes. Perhaps he had checked today’s assignment.

Landon accepted the handout from our teacher and pretended to look it over. “You’re going to love our options,” he said and placed the seemingly innocent paper in front of me to read.

Mr. Lewton gave us three selections to choose from: how our lives have changed from last year to this year, an important decision we need to make, or a secret we need to confess.

“Really?” I was bewildered. “This has got to be a joke.”

I spoke loud enough to catch Mr. Lewton’s attention. “Is everything alright, Brynn?”

“There’s no way I can come up with anything different than what’s already going on in my life.”

“Use that and work it in your outline. It can be a combination of real life experience and imaginary.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Okay, class,” he spoke louder to make an announcement, “you can also come up with your own topic.”

“Great,” I said to Landon, “I got us out of that one, now what are we going to write about?”

“I’ve got a few ideas.”

• • •

Saturday, I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the phone in my hand. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to dial the number on the screen. I knew I could call Landon if I wanted to. The question was if I should. It was true that our relationship had changed over the last week, but I didn’t know if it would send the message that I was using him or if it would be too much time spent together in a short period.

If I didn’t call him, there weren’t too many other ways I’d want to spend my day. Elyse was with her family. My parents were booked for hours while they picked up supplies and met with the caterer for our upcoming annual Holiday Kick-Off party, the one time of year they splurged. It had started off as a joke to have a party before Thanksgiving because that was the safest date for everyone to be free. Once Thanksgiving came, it was madness until after Christmas, so my mom had come up with the solution to not seeing all her friends that time of year because they were committed to other events. The party grew larger and more involved each year until it finally reached the point that it was more convenient to pay someone to prepare the food. They had found a new caterer since the one they had used for years moved out of the state to be with her daughter in North Carolina. They were a little nervous about handing the responsibility over. I didn’t know why they were so worried. The samples had tasted great, and she seemed more than competent.

My finger hovered over the send button. There wasn’t anyone else I’d rather spend time with, and I barely had any homework. I pushed the button.

“Hi, Brynn,” he answered.

“Hi. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Not at all. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I want to mess with Elyse again. She said she had to shop for her cousin’s birthday gift, and I wanted to take advantage of her being gone.”

“Okay, be right over.”

I backed my chair against the wall so he couldn’t sneak up on me, but I didn’t have to worry about that or have time to think since the doorbell rang.

I opened the door. “It must really bother you to travel at a normal speed.”

“Depends on my patience level.”

“The bus trip to and from rafting must have been hell. I’m assuming you didn’t drive your car here.”

“No. Why would I? Aren’t we breaking into Elyse’s on a mission?”

“What if we wanted to go somewhere after?”

“If we need one, it’s not a problem. What did you have in mind for her?”

“I was thinking along the lines of more subtle stuff. Organize the clothes in her closet according to color. Put her CDs in alphabetical order.”

“What is it with you and organization?”

“Do you know Elyse? She tends to be messy. You have a better idea?”

“We can make her think she’s slowly going crazy.”

“How?”

“By moving a few items around in her room. Putting things in weird places.”

“Okay, enough talking. Let’s go.”

He held his hand out, palm up. I ceremoniously touched my index finger to the center of his palm.

“Let’s see,” he said as he scanned her room. He focused on the small table by her bed, walked over to it, and moved her lamp to the opposite side. “She’ll have to reach farther for it and it’ll throw her off.”

“That’s good,” I encouraged. Glancing around, I wondered what I could do. Here it was, my idea to mess with her, and he thought of his so quickly. I forced myself to come up with something that involved disorganization.

I walked over to her dresser. “I’m going to switch her sock and pajama drawers.”