Payback (6 page)

“Not too drugged up to escape,” Anthony shot back. Aiden didn’t have an answer for that. He just waved Anthony down a sterile corridor with pale green wal s.

“This is it.” Aiden stopped in front of a large glass window, the kind of glass that was reinforced with embedded crisscrossing wires.

Anthony peered inside. It was empty except for a single bed with a plain blue spread and a freestanding toilet and sink. “Can I go in?”

Aiden nodded, and Anthony stepped into the room. The first thing he did was rip off the bedspread and shake it out. He pul ed the pil ow out of the case and turned the case inside out. He felt the pil ows, hoping to find a little tear that might mean something was hidden inside. But it was smooth and soft under his fingers.

“Next,” he muttered as he flipped the mattress. Nothing underneath. He stretched out on his stomach and checked under the bed. Clean. While he was down there, he did a survey of the whole floor. Bare linoleum. No bumps. No pencil marks or anything.

Crap.

Anthony stood up and checked out the ceiling. No tiles that could have been pul ed down and then replaced. Aiden was right.

There was nothing here. And even if Yana had left a print somewhere that Rae could pick up, they already knew Yana could block her thoughts. There was no point in dragging Rae al the way out here. “So there was a power surge and she just waltzed out the back door. Is that right? Even though she was so drugged up?”

“Yes,” Aiden answered. The bastard wasn’t helping any more than he had to. Fine. Whatever. Anthony had needed him to find this place, but he didn’t need anything else. Right now, anyway.

Anthony opened the back door and stepped outside into an al ey that was about a car length wide. There was a Dumpster to one side of the door. Empty. “What’s the closest public transportation to here?” Anthony asked. “Bus? Train?”

“The bus station’s about half a mile away,” Aiden answered from inside. “East on Hil ary to Curtner. On that corner.”

“I’m going there. You coming or staying?” Anthony leaned through the doorway and looked at Aiden.

“Staying,” Aiden answered.

“So am I going to have to make friends with every bookie in town so I’l know where to find you if I need you? Or are you going to cough up an address?”

Aiden didn’t answer. Anthony crossed his arms and waited.

“I guess I’l be here for a few days at least,” Aiden answered. He smoothed a loose piece of hair back into his ponytail. “Safe as anyplace, I guess.”

“When you decide to move, I want to hear from you,” Anthony said. “You owe Rae. You know that.”

Aiden nodded, but that didn’t mean anything. Anthony locked eyes with him for a moment, trying to figure out if he could trust the guy. Aiden gave him nothing back. But it wasn’t like Anthony could do anything. He couldn’t handcuff Aiden to him until the Yana situation was dealt with. Although if Anthony could have, he would have.

Without bothering to say good-bye, Anthony started down the al ey.

“Wait,” Aiden cal ed. Anthony turned back, and Aiden threw a pack of matches at him. “It’s the number here. In case.”

“Thanks,” Anthony said. Aiden ducked back inside. Anthony stared after him for a few seconds, then turned and circled around to the parking lot. He climbed in the Hyundai and drove straight to the bus station. If Yana had been here, somebody had to have noticed her, he thought as he got back out of the car, hurried inside the station, and got on the shortest ticket line. Yana didn’t exactly blend, not with her bleached blond hair and that tattoo on her bel y.

Come on, come on, come on,
he silently urged the guy ahead of him who was careful y counting his change. The guy placed the money in his wal et in what seemed like slow motion, then final y left the window. Anthony stepped up and slapped a photo of Yana that he’d gotten from Rae down on the counter. “You seen that girl around? The blond, not the one with the curly hair?” he as ked.

The clerk studied the picture for a second, then nodded. Anthony felt a surge of adrenaline, and he leaned in close to hear what she had to say. “She was sleeping on that bench over there when I got on shift at midnight last night,” the woman said, gesturing to a nearby wooden bench. “I almost went over and woke her up. It’s not a safe place for any woman to sleep. And someone as young as her? Forget about it.”

“So what happened to her?” Anthony asked, unable to keep the urgency from his voice. “Did she just leave or what?” He felt like yel ing, but if he did, the woman probably wouldn’t be in the mood to help him, so he tried to sound concerned about Yana, in a big brother kind of way.

“Nope. She bought a ticket from me this morning, when I was about to get off.”

“To where? Do you remember?” Anthony asked.

“Atlanta. Like half the people I sel tickets to,” the woman answered. She popped a stick of Big Red gum in her mouth.

“So she’s there already?” Anthony gripped the counter with both hands.

“Yeah,” the woman answered, chomping away. “She’d have gotten in hours ago.”

Crap. Crap. Yana’s there. I’m here. Rae’s got no one to protect her.

Rae tiptoed across the front lawn, the dewy grass slick and cool under her feet. Before she’d made it halfway to the sidewalk, Anthony was out of his car. He raced toward her like she was the goalpost on a footbal field. “What happened?” he demanded, his voice low and intense.

“Nothing. Nothing bad,” Rae answered quickly. “It’s just that if you’re going to keep watch on me al night, you might as wel co me in. Your back’s going to kil you in the morning if you don’t. The coach wil be real y pissed.”

Rae didn’t care about the coach. But she didn’t want to just say, “Hey, Anthony, you want to come in and spend the night in my bedroom?”

“What about your dad?” Anthony asked, squinting.

Rae inched her wet feet onto the tops of his dry sneakers and wrapped her arms around his waist for balance. “He’s asleep, and he sleeps like a rock. I’l set the alarm and make sure you’re up and out before he gets up. Okay?”

“Okay.” Anthony started toward the house. Rae rode on his feet al the way to her bedroom.

“I’l make you a bed on the floor,” she volunteered. Although God, how nice would it be to sleep al wrapped up in Anthony’s arms. Except that if she
was
al wrapped up in his arms, there was no way she’d ever be able to go to sleep. Rae got a flash of an up-al -night kind of night with Anthony. She wanted that. Someday. Someday when they wouldn’t have to worry about Yana hur ling herself through the window and trying to kil them both.

Rae grabbed one of her pil ows and tossed it onto the floor. “There are some extra blankets in the closet,” she told Anthony.

“Sorry I don’t have a sleeping bag. My dad and I, we’re not exactly outdoor types.”

Anthony stood rooted to the floor, looking at her, and Rae was pretty sure he was thinking almost the same thing she’d been thinking a few seconds before. The realization made her feel like she’d chugged a pot of steaming tea. Heat flooded her entire body. “Closet. Right.” Anthony jerked around and retrieved a couple of blankets from her top shelf.

“Sorry I don’t have anything you can sleep in,” Rae said. She ran her hands down the oversized T-shirt she wore to bed. “I have lots of these, but they wouldn’t exactly fit you. Wel , they’d fit you.

But they’d be tight. Like the T-shirt you already have on. So it wouldn’t-”
Stop the babbling,
she ordered herself. “It wouldn’t ma ke sense,” she finished.

“I’m… what I have on is fine,” Anthony told her. He knelt down on the floor, spread out one of the blankets, then slid off his shoes without bothering to untie them and lay down.

“I guess I’l turn off the light,” Rae said.

“Yeah,” Anthony answered.

Rae slid into bed and switched off the lamp on her nightstand. “So, good night.”

“Good night.” Rae heard Anthony rol onto his side. Should she pretend to fal asleep right away? Or should she talk, the way

she would if Yana was sleeping over? Yana back when Yana was her friend. When Rae
believed
Yana was her friend.

“How did it go with Mandy?” Anthony asked.

“Uh, not great,” Rae admitted. She rol ed onto her side, too. If they’d both been on the floor or both been on the bed, they would have been face-to-face. “Actual y, she got me pretty freaked out on the car ride. She’s having this blind-spot thing, I guess sort of like my numb spots. But it got a little better over a couple of hours, so I think she’l be okay, probably by tomorrow. She just has to be careful not to use her power a lot.”

“Huh.” Anthony paused, and Rae figured he just didn’t know what to say. As great as Anthony was, having an ability that chan ged your life like that was pretty much something you had to experience to total y get. “Did you find anything out at least?” he as ked. “About Zeke?”

“No. When I went fingertip-to-fingertip with him, I couldn’t get much because he’d ingested or inhaled or smoked or whatevered enough to block pretty much everything. The top layer, what I could get to, was just bizarre images.” Rae decided not to describe the squirrel. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about right before going to sleep.

“You ever, you know, do any of that?” Anthony asked.

“No, never,” Rae replied. “I think the whole thing with my mom, thinking she was a kil er, it made me want to stay under control. I was always afraid I had that-that kil er part in me and it could come leaping out, like some kind of deranged jack-in-the-box, if I wasn’t careful. You know, I’ve never even gotten drunk, if you can believe that.”

“You’re not missing al that much,” Anthony answered. She heard him rol over again so that he was facing away from her. “At my old school I was smoking weed every day. I only stopped because I final y decided I wanted to graduate sometime before reti rement age.”

“Are you waiting for my gasp of horror?” Rae teased. Because the way Anthony had said it, it was like a huge confession.

“The col ege professor’s daughter and the pothead. It doesn’t exactly sound like friggin’ Romeo and Juliet. I mean, Mandy’s al upset because Zeke’s using,” Anthony answered.

“First, a lot of col ege professors’ daughters
are
potheads,” Rae answered. “Probably a few professors, too,” she added with a smile, thinking of some of the ones she’d met through her dad. “And second, Mandy’s freaked because her sister’s stopped ca ring about stuff she used to care about. She’s thinking about dropping out of school, even. And from what Mandy said, getting a scholarship’s something Emma’s been focused on for years.”

Rae leaned over the bed and ran her palm down Anthony’s back. “If you’re thinking that you’re bad for me or some bul like that, stop it,” she said softly. “You’re the perfect guy for me. You’re the opposite of Zeke.”

Anthony snorted.

“I mean it.” Rae ran her hand up his back. “Like the swimming thing. I was afraid to even step into the shal ow end when I met you. And now I can kick and breathe and everything.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Anthony said.

“Yes, it is,” Rae insisted. And it was. Anthony was everything she could ever want in a boyfriend-even though he was nothing li ke the perfect guys she used to imagine. She just hadn’t known what perfect was back then.

Every muscle in Anthony’s body went tight. He cracked his eyes open just a slit. There was somebody in the room. Not Rae. He could hear her soft breathing on the bed behind him. Someone else. Over by the window.

He opened his eyes a fraction farther. Without lifting his head, al he could see was a pair of feet in camouflage-print sneakers.

Did Yana have shoes like that? Anthony couldn’t remember. His brain felt as tight as the muscles in his body. It was hard for tho ughts to squeeze through. But it had to be Yana, right? Mandy wouldn’t be stupid enough to come sneaking in now that she knew Yana was on the loose.

Okay, so I’ve got to take her down before she gets in my brain. Gotta be something fast. Something that will knock her out-ba boom.
Nothing came to him. Not one friggin’ thought.

The feet in the camouflage sneakers began to move toward him.
All right, so, so I let her get closer,
he decided.
Then I do a
snatch and jerk on her closest foot. She hits the floor. Probably won’t knock her out. But she’ll be surprised. That might give
me a couple of seconds. No time to look for a weapon. Just gotta grab her head and slam it against the floor. Only gonna get
one chance. If she’s not out after one hit, I’ll be her puppet boy for the rest of my life.

“Which won’t be very long,” a voice said. Yana’s voice. Not possible. Or could she read minds, too?

“There’s nothing I can’t do,” Yana answered, even though he hadn’t spoken aloud. “You should have stuck with me, Anthony. You could have had anything you wanted. Except your little rich-girl arm-trophy.”

Anthony tried to sit up, but his body wouldn’t respond. She had him. She already had him.

“Yes, I do,” Yana said. He watched her feet move toward him. That’s al he could do. Watch. Wait for whatever it was she had planned. “On your back,” she ordered.