Twisted Miracles (15 page)

Maybe it was all the hiking I’d done, my sheer physical exhaustion helping my shadowmind take over. Maybe it was my growing familiarity with what was around me. Whatever the reason, when I reached out, it worked.

I was ready for the jerk of the log lifting, for the sucking feeling of the water as it rose free. I wasn’t prepared for how easy it was. Energy surged through me, power like a runner’s high, like adrenaline, but sharper, more directed. I could sense everything around me, down to the tiniest detail. I understood the way the drops of water were sliding off the backs of the nesting waterbirds, the speed of the wind through the trees, the rise and fall of every ripple on the surface of the lake, the minnows darting back and forth along the shore. In the deeper water below me were bigger fish, their strong tail muscles undulating in the mild currents. Waterweeds drifted. Deep in the rotting log beside me, still isolated from the encroaching lake water, termites were chewing through the crumbling wood like frenetic ants on a hard candy. I knew all of this. I felt it. I felt the unfathomable power of the aspens around the lake reaching upward slowly, powerfully, unstoppably. I wanted to go up with them.

Even as I thought it, I rose out of the raft until I was ten feet above the surface of the water. The air around me grew colder, ice crystals forming and falling to the lake below.
Higher.
The streams of power tunneling into me grew stronger, as though those first thin threads had opened up highways through my body.
More.
I pulled from the lake, from the currents in the shallows, from the breeze hundreds of yards above me. I wanted to scream, primally, joyfully, and then I realized that I was.

“
Cass!
” It was Jackson. He was sprinting up the trail toward me, panicked.

“
No!
” I might have called out aloud; I might have only mindspoken. I couldn’t tell. Either way, it was too late. A line of power attached to him like a fishhook catching on submerged roots, and strength arrowed into me. The log and I shot higher into the air, flung up by the surge of energy. Jackson was still running, but he was slowing down.

“No!” I screamed out loud, certain of it this time, and I shut my body down like I was flipping a switch.

The threads of energy connecting me to my surroundings snapped as though they’d been cut. The weight of the log was far too much for me now, and it slipped from my mental grasp like an anvil and plummeted to the water. I realized, in an odd, dispassionate way, that I must be falling, too, and then I blacked out.

Chapter Fourteen

When I came to, I was naked in a sleeping bag with an also-naked Jackson. He was curled around me from behind, his arms wrapped around my shoulders. I shifted, and he was moving instantly, angling away from me and sitting up.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Why are we both naked in this sleeping bag?”

“You were freezing. I had to warm you up.”

I didn’t know how to reply. Jackson pulled a blanket off the floor and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said, not quite meeting his eyes. I extricated myself from the sleeping bag and wobbled to my feet, feeling as if I was learning how to walk all over again. My muscles felt like they were on a delay. I managed to pull on pants and a sweatshirt under the blanket while Jackson studied his hands.

“The fire’s still burning,” he said. “Go warm up. I’ll make coffee.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t intend to drink any, and slipped out of the tent. There was a deep bed of glowing coals at the base of the fire, and I had to stop myself from drawing the heat right out of the flames and into my body.

“You froze the lake,” Jackson said from behind me. He set a pot of water in the coals and put a red enamelware French press down beside the fire. “And then you fell in it.”

“I did?” I looked out toward the lake and saw that he was right—there were sheets of ice thawing and breaking in the shallows, and in the center was a crater of dark water in a slab of white.

“It was pretty incredible. Why did you fall?”

“I felt you running for me, and I sort of switched off. I don’t remember anything after that.”

“I thought you’d drowned,” he said softly. He’d put on jeans, but he still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his frame was much more muscular than his dress shirts ever let on. He stepped toward me and took my hand, placing it on the warm bare skin of his upper arm. With the contact, his memory rose up in my mind.

I was screaming. I closed my eyes as I sensed his dread, saw the terrible possibilities racing through his mind. Bear attack, mental burnout, drowning. He took off running. In the distance, I was hovering ten feet above the surface of the lake. My head was tipped back; my arms and legs were spread as though I was reaching out with them. Below me, the water was freezing, ice racing out from the center in many-fingered tentacles. I could sense it as he got into my range and power surged out of him and into me. I could feel the gut-dropping intensity of it.

Jackson’s thoughts skipped to seeing me fall, the log and then my body bursting through the ice. White chunks skittered out from the point of impact. His mind strained to lift me telekinetically out of the water, but failed, and then there was shocking cold as he slid across the ice, yanked off his boots and dove down to reach me. He got me back to the fire, pulled off his clothes and mine and wrapped us both in the sleeping bag, skin to skin.

“I couldn’t lift you,” he said. “It was like that part of my brain was stunned.”

“Oh, God, no.” I stepped closer to him. “Is it back now?”

“
It’s back.
”

I breathed. “Thank God.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my powers,” Jackson said. My hand was still on his bicep, and he reached up to cover it with his own. “Cass.” His thumb traced the valleys of my knuckles. “I thought you were gone.”

I shook my head and said, “I’m all right now,” and Jackson closed the distance between us and kissed me.

At first I leaned into him, wanting strangely to quiet the fear I still felt in him, left over from the memory of my fall. He responded with more force than I’d expected, his hands firm on my back, his mouth slanting over mine, possessing. The heat of him was intense, his tongue searching, demanding, and for an instant, I lost myself in the kiss, wanting so badly to forget my terrifying, complicated life and pretend, for half an hour, that I was a regular woman with regular problems. And then I thought, almost casually, about the way Shane’s voice had sounded in my head as he’d pressed against me that night behind the storage shed.

Jackson went still and drew back. “You don’t want this.”

“I...” I rubbed my face with my hands. He was right. “Shit.” I hadn’t meant to lead him on.

He smiled a little ruefully. “One of the benefits of mindreading. It’s pretty much impossible to lead someone on. I just hoped... Well. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He ran his fingers through his hair, which was sticking up in odd places from being dunked in lake water. “Let’s just get some rest.”

We went into the tent, and I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t do it. The elation I’d felt when I finally got it, when it finally clicked—that had all bled away. I felt like I had back when I was a kid, before I’d known what I was, before I’d achieved the barely adequate restraint I’d spent over a decade fighting for. It was as if I was starting over.

I was six when my gift started manifesting. I’d go to sleep in a cute, girly, twin-sized bed and wake up in the morning to a disaster zone. Dolls knocked off the shelves, books thrown around the room. The first set of foster parents thought I was acting out. They didn’t even punish me; they just put everything back in order and acted as though nothing had happened. I was terrified. I had no memory of doing it myself, and I thought people were breaking into my room at night and smashing up my toys. I threw tantrums at bedtime, afraid to go to sleep. It didn’t take them long to give up on me.

By the time I was twelve, I’d been through over twenty different homes. No one kept me longer than six months, and some of them sent me back to the group home after only six weeks. I thought I was crazy, damaged. By then, I was starting to pick up stray thoughts from the people around me, and it terrified me. I knew it wasn’t normal to hear other people’s voices in my head, but I couldn’t make it stop, and I was slowly shutting down. In another few years I might have withdrawn completely. Instead, I met Shane.

He was two years older than me, so he was in eighth grade when I was starting sixth. We were both in the same public school—this was before the Weatherfields—but we moved in different circles, and not just because I was white. I was also weird, and everybody knew it. People avoided me like you avoid the smelly guy talking to himself outside the liquor store. I wasn’t normal. They could tell.

I usually ate my lunch on a bench behind the cafeteria. I’d chosen it because it was close to the Dumpsters, and no one else was likely to want it. During classes, I couldn’t help being surrounded by people, but at lunchtime, when everyone else was inside occupying their established table territory, I could finally be alone. It was the half hour of sanity that got me through the day.

That day it was raining, and water was blowing in under the eaves. I was getting wet while I ate my free school lunch from its plastic tray. Pizza. Not the good kind. When Shane came out and sat down next to me, I was sure he was there to play some sort of prank. Make the weird girl think the popular guy likes her.

“
You’re Cass
,
right?
”

Only years of practice trying to look normal kept me from dropping my tray.

It was the clearest thing I’d ever heard in my head. Usually I got garbled, incomplete jumbles, sharp surges of powerful emotion. Shane’s voice was like a voice in my ear, deliberate and strong.

I didn’t answer him. I was still afraid it was a test; I was waiting for a group of kids to pop out from behind the Dumpsters to laugh at me.

“
It’s okay.
I
won’t tell anyone.
”

When I still didn’t respond, he stood up, his jeans wet from the rainwater on the bench. “
You can trust me.
I’m just like you.
”

He walked away before I could collect myself enough to speak, but his intentions came through with his parting words. “
I’m here if you need me.
”

For weeks I treated the experience like a hollow egg, afraid I’d destroy it if I let it have too much importance, if I believed in it too fiercely. But then, three months later, when my current foster family predictably sent me back, I met Lionel for the first time.

I could still picture those moments perfectly; I could live in them if I wanted to. The social worker said “Thank you, Mr. Tanner” to Lionel’s face and “
No white folks left to take that girl
” in her head. Lionel’s beat-up blue-and-white truck smelled of chewing tobacco and sounded like it would fall apart when he drove it over speed bumps. He showed me to my room—my own room, just for me—and gave me a stack of brand new clothes with the tags still on them. And then, finally, he sat me down and explained everything with so much regret in his eyes that I knew he was telling the truth even before he telekinetically lifted the chair in my room and made it dance.

“You have the gift,” he said. “I can teach you how to use it.” It was like something out of a fairy tale.

Back then, I was young enough to believe in them.

* * *

Jackson and I woke up with the sunrise.

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I said that last night.”

“Don’t mention it.” His thoughts were locked down, and I didn’t pry. This was awkward enough already.

I got a fire going while Jackson took the bear canister down from the tree and speared thick slices of bread with toasting forks. We ate quietly, listening to the woods wake up around us. The sun warmed the lake, and fish started breaking the surface for flies in the shallows. I was glad I hadn’t killed them all.

It took us six hours to get back to San Francisco, and another two to inch through the traffic on the bridge. By the time Jackson dropped me off at my apartment, I was bone-tired. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner even though I wasn’t hungry, and when I crawled into bed, I fell asleep almost immediately.

I dreamed. It was like the dream I’d had the night before Shane arrived, the same strange feeling of panic, but this time, I thought I could sense someone I knew. I realized with a jolt that it was Shane. It was dark, and I was feeling for him through underbrush so dense it was like reaching through a hedge. I pushed my face through the leaves and they closed around me, suffocating me. I called for Shane, but he was running, and I realized with a shock of terror that he was running from
me
—and then I was above the lake, pulling. I felt Shane in the distance, felt him sag and go limp as his powers flowed into me, each surge like a tiny orgasm, exhilarating, addictive. He was screaming and screaming, and I laughed with a voice that wasn’t my own. Ice was all around me, breaking, and I heard it crack like glass. Shards of it pierced my skin and I bled, and still Shane was screaming, screaming—

I shot awake in an instant. I fought my way free of the sheets and ran for my closet. Shane. Shane was in trouble. He was
dying—
I needed shoes, clothes, a cell phone—I had to get to the airport—I should call a cab—oh, God it was going to take too long, I needed to be there
now—

There was an awful, elevator-dropping feeling in the pit of my stomach, and all my senses went totally dark. No sight, no sound, no touch. I tried to take a breath and drew in nothing. I gave a huge, wheezing gasp as my lungs began to collapse. I was clawing at nothing, through nothing, lost in a spinning, senseless vertigo, and then I was on solid ground again, my knees pressed painfully onto something hard, and there was too much air in my lungs, too much pressure all around me. I tried to get up, fell down again, and vomited onto the ground.