Twisted Miracles (7 page)

I stared at Shane, unconscious on the floor, and then at Bunny, whose eggshell silk blouse wasn’t even rumpled. “Whatever you say.”

* * *

Shane slept through the morning. I opened the door to his room only once, just to make sure he was still breathing. He’d moved from how I’d left him, kicking the covers down to his waist and tangling the hem of his T-shirt up to his chest. One hand lay on his flat stomach, rising and falling with his breath. I thought about going to him, seeing if I could wake him, but I couldn’t make myself move. He was dreaming. I could tell from the restless movement of his eyes and the flashes of images I couldn’t block out. The riverbank, the stolen boat. Me. He shifted in his sleep, his fist clenching and relaxing around a handful of sheets, and I pulled out of his head, fast. It seemed like a great time to clean the guest bathrooms.

By dinnertime, I had to stop. The guests were trickling back to their rooms, and I noticed for the first time how filthy I was, how strung-out. Scrubbing the bathroom floors on my hands and knees hadn’t helped. I took a long, hot shower and felt better, or at least warmer, then I towel-dried my hair and pulled on another old nightshirt scrounged from one of the drawers in my bedroom. It was Shane’s, and it said Riverside High School Warriors in obnoxiously bright blue letters.

For a long while I lay in bed and tried to sleep, but it was no good. I didn’t want to think about how I’d broken a five-year hiatus from my powers; I didn’t want to admit that we might still lose Mina. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her slim body shoved into that muddy crawlspace, the way she jerked as Bunny tried to bring her back. After an hour passed, I swung my feet out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and padded downstairs to the kitchen. A glass of milk would help me sleep. Maybe.

The dark, empty kitchen unnerved me. I liked it better busy and full of clattering dishes and heat. When I switched on the light, it was so quiet I could hear the bulb buzzing ten feet above my head. I scuffed the floor with my feet and tapped my fingers on the counter just to clear the silence.

I opened the door to the oversized fridge and stared at the contents. An industrial-sized crate of eggs, three gallons of milk, a huge tub of orange juice. Enough food to feed a crowd, as usual. It made me feel vaguely nauseated. I abandoned the milk idea and grabbed the bourbon out of the liquor cabinet in the guests’ dining room, splashed a generous portion into a juice glass and sat down on the back porch with the bottle.

The first frost hadn’t hit yet, and Lionel’s patio garden was doing well. The periwinkle was still flowering, and pots full of multicolored croton were clustered by the brick wall. I sipped the bourbon and thought about snapping the rope when we’d stolen the boat. At the time, I’d only been thinking of Mina, but looking back, I remembered how it felt. Good. Powerful. Like a runner’s high. I flexed my fingers and felt the power in them, waiting. It would be so easy to go back. I shook off the impulse to try lifting the patio table and took another sip from my glass.

A board creaked behind me, and I jumped before I could stop myself. Shane was looking down at me. He’d showered and changed into a fresh undershirt and pair of loose basketball shorts. He’d shaved. I looked back out at the periwinkle.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” I did my best to calm my heart, but it was still pounding. “You feel okay?”

He sat down next to me, his bare knee touching mine. In the cool air, his skin felt very warm. “I’ve got a headache. What did she do to me?”

“She said you were interfering.”

He rubbed his temples and gave a humorless sort of laugh. “I should know better than to ignore Bunny. Any news?”

I shook my head. Lionel had called two hours ago, and there’d been no change. It could be days. It could be years. I blinked hard and poured another finger from the bottle.

“Care for a sip?” I held up the bourbon, and Shane grabbed the bottle by the neck and took a swig. We both looked out into the dark for a while.

“I think I dreamed about her the night before you came,” I said, thinking of the nightmare that had left my bedroom in shambles. “I felt like I was suffocating. I wonder if it was her.”

“You’re close to her. You have a connection.”

“Yeah, I guess. I wonder why it didn’t happen to you.”

He shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t pretend to understand what we are.” He passed the bottle back to me. “I can’t imagine who would want to hurt her.”

“Maybe when she wakes up...” I couldn’t bring myself to say
if.
I bit my lower lip to keep myself from crying.

Shane shifted closer to me and draped his arm over my shoulders. “She’ll be all right,” he said, his breath ruffling the hair at the top of my head. “She’ll be all right.”

I knew he didn’t believe it yet himself, but hearing someone say it made it seem possible. So much of his body was close to mine, I grew warm from the outside in, from skin to muscle to bone, like every night I’d fallen asleep with my head on his chest. His fingers threaded through the ends of my hair, and the close-by rhythm of his breath was as familiar as well-worn jeans. The last of my composure fell away like melting ice.

“Oh, God, I was so scared.” I broke open, sobbing into the thin white cotton of his undershirt. “I thought I’d never see her again.”

Shane turned my face up toward his and wiped the tears across my cheeks with his thumbs. “It’s okay, Cassie. She’s safe now.”

And he leaned down and kissed me.

Tears streamed down my face, hot and stinging, but I opened my mouth on his and let the taste of him mix with the salt. He brushed my jaw with his fingers and pulled me closer, deepening the kiss, his tongue touching the roof of my mouth.

“
Cassie
,” he said, his voice a whisper in my head. I couldn’t speak, so I just leaned closer, pressing against him. My fear didn’t so much recede as grow tame, and as Shane kissed me, it seemed to me that things would be all right, that Mina would wake up and we could all go back to the way we were before I’d left. I slid my hands over his shoulders to the back of his neck, drawing him closer and tilting my head to fit my mouth to his. He murmured something unintelligible in response, but his meaning was clear enough from the swirl of images in his head. Before I even processed what he was asking me, I was saying yes.

Shane curved an arm under my knees and stood, lifting me up, his mouth still on mine. I hardly noticed as he walked up the stairs, but I felt it when he used his mind to swing the door to his room open. He walked in and set me on the edge of his bed.

“Cass,” he said softly. “Are you—”

I put my hand up to his mouth. “Don’t talk,” I said, and I took off my shirt. We were about to make things a hundred times more complicated, but I didn’t care. Shane got onto the bed one knee at a time, straddling my legs, and I pulled his shirt over his head and pressed my hands against the hard muscles of his chest. His mouth came down to my neck, and I shuddered at the feel of his warm tongue on the hollow of my throat, at the way my body remembered his.

“
Are you sure?
” His voice rang in my head like organ music as his hand grasped my waist. The calluses and cracks on the pads of his fingers, built up from years of working on cars at Charlie’s, scraped my skin and made me tremble. “
I
have to know.
” He threaded his other hand through my hair and cupped my skull, tipping my head back so he could kiss my jaw.

My heart was pounding and I could only moan in response. His hands on my body, his lips on my skin—all I could think was “
More.
”

“
I
have to hear you say it.
”

I was about to find my voice, to tell him yes, now, when his cell phone, still in his pocket, vibrated against my leg.

We both realized at the same time who was probably calling. Shane jumped up and yanked his phone out of his pocket so fast it flew across the room. I dove for it, but he was already lifting it up with his mind, and it soared toward him and opened in midair.

“Hello? Uncle Lionel?” He paused, listening, his eyes closed. “Thank God. Thank God. Okay. See you soon.”

He flipped the phone closed. “She’s awake. She’s all right.”

Chapter Six

Shane slammed a stack of dirty plates into the sink. “This is ridiculous. I can’t believe we’re even talking about it.” His voice was quiet. Even Bruce could probably tell how furious he was.

“You’re the ridiculous one. Don’t you want to figure out what happened?” Mina gestured with her coffee mug, and café au lait sloshed out and onto the floor. “Sorry, Uncle Lionel.” She bent to wipe it up.

I exchanged a glance with Bruce. The two of us were staying out of it.

“You’re not recovered yet.” Shane was trying to make his tone reasonable, but it wasn’t working. He hadn’t even noticed me yet. Thank God. I was having enough trouble suppressing what had almost happened the night before without encountering his memories of it, too. “You need to rest. Bunny told us you shouldn’t exert yourself. If you want to heal—”

“How would I be exerting myself?” Mina snapped.

“Who says you wouldn’t be? No.”

“Who says you get to decide?”

“Fine.” He picked up the coffeepot from the warmer and stalked out into the dining room. His eyes caught mine as he went by, and his gaze was so dark, I pressed back against the wall.

I understood where he was coming from. The night before, Mina had been so weak he’d had to carry her up the stairs, and she’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep almost as soon as he’d gotten her to bed. He’d stayed up all night beside her, terrified she’d slip back into a coma. I hadn’t slept either. Worry for Mina would have been enough to keep me awake, but Shane’s mental turmoil had been like a siren.

“He’s only worried about you,” Lionel said. “We all are.”

Mina sighed and rubbed her head. The sight of it so bare was unnerving. Bunny’d had to shave her hair off—it had been too tangled and clotted with sticks and leaves to save. “Yeah. I know.”

When Shane came back in with an empty coffeepot and another stack of dirty dishes, Mina went to him and took his hands. “It’s my choice. Okay?”

I caught Lionel’s mental message to Shane. “
It can’t hurt.
”

“
Sure it can.
”

“
She’ll be fine.
”

Shane’s lips went thin, but he looked at Mina’s face and nodded.

“Jesus,” Mina huffed. “That only took half an hour.” Lionel shot her a look, and she said, “Thanks,” with considerably more grace.

“Go on,” Bruce said. “I’ll handle the guests.”

Lionel wiped his hands on a dishrag, and he and Shane each took one of Mina’s hands. I hesitated, not sure if she was including me, not sure if I wanted to be included. Back when I still used my powers, we’d swapped memories all the time—sometimes it was easier to watch a story play out in your friend’s head. Since I left, the most I’d done was catch the peaks of people’s thoughts, the ecstatic or terrible moments they rolled over and over in their minds for days after the event, stripped bare of the attached story. And I’d spent five years learning how to ignore even those. I wasn’t sure I could do this.

“Come on, Cass.” Shane put his free hand on my shoulder. I put my palm on Mina’s forearm and dove in.

Lionel’s messy kitchen slipped away, and I was out on the river in Mina’s bateau, bundled up against the predawn cold.

Riding memories was like watching a badly edited film. It wasn’t smooth. Mina’s thoughts skipped from memorable moment to memorable moment, leaving out the stream of triviality in between. She was riding upriver, waving at a fellow fisherman as she searched for a new spot; she was hooking a worm; her line jerked in muddy water; she reeled in a bream and splashed the leg of her jeans. Then came a strange feeling, a kind of low-pitched buzzing deep in her head. I recognized it at once as the humming sensation of another converter using his powers.

The feeling was tinged with hurry and fear, someone in trouble. Mina cranked the motor and headed in the direction of the buzzing, which got stronger and more unpleasant as she went. The source was close by, but not on the water. She took off her life vest and left it with the boat, clambered onto the bank and stepped around the rotting shack. For a fraction of a second I saw the face of a man, fifty yards away through the sparse underbrush. He had unkempt brown hair and the tired, weathered skin of someone aged beyond his years. He seemed to look at Mina without seeing her, his eyes unfocused and blank. Then my whole body exploded in pain and everything went dark.

I came tumbling out of Mina’s head in terror. My skin was slick with cold sweat, and everyone was staring at me. The feeling that had hit right before the blackness was still with me, an awful, gut-dropping surge of power. Afraid I’d vomit, I put my head between my knees and closed my eyes.

Everyone had the sense not to touch me. When the nausea passed, I raised my head slowly. “What was that?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Lionel said.

Shane was looking at me carefully. “You were screaming. You were saying ‘No.’”

I finally noticed no one else was curled up with their head between their knees. “Didn’t anyone else feel it? Right before she blacked out?”

“Yeah...” Shane said. But it was clear it hadn’t affected him in the same way.

“It was intense,” I said. Even Mina looked concerned.

“I’m sure you’re just not used to riding memories.” Shane was keeping his voice light, but telepaths are hard to fool. He caught my eye.

“
Outside.
” His mindspeech came on such a tight line, I barely heard it.

“I think I need some air,” I said, getting up shakily. Everyone watched as I let myself out the back door, letting the screen door bang behind me. It took several minutes for Shane to follow me out.

“Here.” He passed me a thick porcelain mug. Coffee.

“I quit.” I tried to hand it back. I hadn’t had caffeine since I’d left. It made it harder to suppress my powers. I’d given it up cold turkey the day I’d killed Andrew.