Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (20 page)

“Please hurry.”

“I’ve got it. Raine Jennings, yeah, she’s a
sophomore. Want me to cross-check for a brother?”

“No, that’s gotta be her.”

“Okay, I’ve got a phone number, got a
pen?”

“Oh God, no, hang on.” I looked around the
mess of a room frantically.

“Okay, Joss? Calm down. I’ll just connect
you from here, okay?”

“You can do that?”

“It’s all computers now. Take care of Dylan.
Hold on.”

There was a break in the connection, and
then another phone was ringing.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Raine, please?”

“This is Raine, who’s this?”

“It’s Joss. Joss Marshall. I need your
help.”

“You need
my
help?” She sounded
suspicious. And why not? She didn’t really know me. And I could be
anybody. I could totally be setting her and her brother up right
now. What if I couldn’t get her to believe me?

“It’s Dylan. You remember Dylan? From the
other night? He’s hurt. It’s…really bad.”
And I’m really scared.
Please help me.
“I can’t take him to the hospital. Look, I know
you don’t know me—”

“Lakota!” she called, away from the phone.
“Get your coat. And the spare car keys.” To me she said, in that
same calming tone that Rob had used, the one that let me know I
sounded hysterical, “Okay, Joss, we’ll come. It’s gonna be okay.
Where are you?”

“Can you even drive?”

“Joss, we’ve done this before. It’s okay.
Where are you?”

I gave her the address, she said she knew
where it was and promised to be over in minutes.

“When we get there, my brother will fix it,
okay? Whatever it is, you just have to keep him breathing until we
get there, understand? Don’t let him die.”

Don’t let him die.

She hung up.

I stuffed my phone into my pocket and tried
to pull it together. Help was on the way. Lakota was going to fix
it. “Two kids are coming over,” I told Dylan’s mother. One of
them’s supposed to have a healing Talent—”

“Supposed to have?”

“I’ve never seen it. I talked to his older
sister, and it seems like they’ve done stuff like this before. I
need you to go down and let them in. Get them up here as fast as
possible.”

She shook her head, glaring at me, and ashed
in the soda can again. “You’ve got your nerve, don’t you? Ordering
me around in my own home. Who do you think you are?”

“I’m the person who’s trying to help your
son.” I said this wonderingly. Why wasn’t she jumping up to do what
I’d asked? Didn’t she care? Why was she just sitting there, smoking
and looking at us with hard, angry eyes.

Eyes that were the same blue as Dylan’s, but
so completely misused in her face.

“You’re the one who’s caused us all this
trouble. You’re the one who made him get that stupid mini-mart kid
job!” She accused me with this sort of triumph, like she had solved
a mystery. But I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. “Do
you have any idea how much harder it’s been on me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dylan
used
to bring stuff home, when
was pulling his own weight around here. Sometimes money. Usually
just things he’d picked up. Nice things. And then one day he limps
home looking like a car wreck. After that, an after school job with
a shitty paycheck. And he tells me if I want stuff, go buy it, but
he’s not stealing for me anymore. As if it was all my idea in the
first place.”

It sure sounds like it, you—
I just
cut myself off in my head, to make sure nothing came out of my
mouth. Jesus H. Washington Christ, this was Dylan’s life? I was so
angry I couldn’t even trust myself to look at her. I looked inside
my head.

There was a crash in the front room. Dylan’s
mother jumped up out her chair, dropping the soda can on the
carpet.

“What the hell was that?”

“I opened the door for you. Want me to open
the one on the street?” My voice was steady and quiet. While I
glared at her, I floated the soda can back up and set it on the
desk for good measure. “Or will you go down and let our friends
in?”

She had already started to back up out of
the room, with her eyes too wide and fixed on me. I felt that same
faraway satisfaction I had when Marco had looked at me like that
earlier, but the rest of me was as brittle as cracked glass.

As soon as she was gone, I raced around the
bed so I could face Dylan. Parts of his face were gone, clear, like
he was fading away. That was just too much. I buried my face in his
pillow and started to sob. If only I hadn’t insisted on confronting
those idiots at the record store. If only I had kept my mouth shut
about going out tonight in the first place. But would he have
followed me anyway? I had to get him to stop that, stop being so
reckless, stop coming to my rescue.

All this time I had wanted to be with him so
much. And I had never even had a clue. I’d thought I wanted the
shoulders, the eyes, the smile, someone nice, someone for whom
everything seemed so easy. And then I found out who Dylan really
was, and it was so much more than that.

I can’t lose you now. I just can’t. Please
be okay.

I felt his hand fall heavily on my head, as
though the effort to raise it was all he could manage. I wanted to
take it. To hold it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at it and see
him disappearing. He didn’t say anything, didn’t stroke my hair.
All that was beyond him now, and that only made me cry harder.

That’s how they found us. I didn’t even know
we weren’t alone until I felt arms around me, pulling me away from
the bed. Raine said, “Move aside, Joss. Let Lakota take care of him
now, okay?”

A chill swept over me as I let her guide me
back to the desk chair, my eyes never leaving Dylan. I shuddered
violently and wrapped my arms around myself.

Lakota moved slowly across the room, a
little boy with a winter jacket thrown over sweats. He had a folded
blanket tucked under his arm; it was past his bedtime. He was a
beautiful boy, maybe ten years old, with dark brown hair and eyes
the same color. His dark eyes were fixed on Dylan with a look of
concentration on his face, as though he were already assessing his
condition. Something about the look in those eyes made him seem
much, much older.

Raine was bustling around the room. If
Lakota looked ready for bed, I didn’t know what the goth girl
looked ready for. Even this late she still wore the same kind of
costume she wore to school. Blue lipstick, dark stuff around the
eyes, and her skin was much paler than her brother’s, especially
since she’d dyed her hair pitch black. She shrugged out of her
jacket, just let it fall to the floor, like it was in the way and
laying it down would be too much bother. She was wearing one of
those high-necked frilly white blouses with a leather corset at her
waist and those crazy leather gloves that went up to her elbows. If
she was really a Talent, she sure didn’t understand about keeping a
low profile.

She took the blanket from Lakota and tossed
it down with her jacket. She walked passed me, grabbed a trash can
from under the desk and upended the contents onto the floor. One of
those gloved hands fell on my shoulder, squeezing.

“It’s going to be okay, Joss. You need me to
get you something? Kleenex?”

“Yeah, thanks, that’d be great.” Her hand on
my shoulder was so cold. Painfully cold. And it shocked some sense
into me. Raine wasn’t wearing makeup to make her skin paler and her
lips blue. She was just that cold. The rest of it was
camouflage.

Lakota’s hands were moving lightly over
Dylan’s head, over the injury. He pressed one palm to Dylan’s
forehead, the other to his chest. His back was to me, but I
imagined his eyes were closed. Then he rolled Dylan onto his back
and sat down on the edge of the bed. I started to get up, but Raine
came back in, put some tissues in my hand, and gave me a look that
pinned me to the chair as she went to her knees beside the bed.

Again Lakota put his palms to Dylan’s
forehead and chest, and this time I could see his closed eyes, the
hard set of his mouth, the concentration. His hands actually glowed
for moment, a soft yellow that went as quickly as it appeared.

Lakota slid from the bed to the floor. Raine
reached out an arm to keep him from falling over sideways, but he
righted himself and she didn’t touch him. She shoved the trash can
in front of his face just before he started to retch. When he
seemed finished, she handed him a damp cloth she must have gotten
during the Kleenex run.

The boy leaned against the side of the bed
and wiped his face, looking pale and sick. On the bed, I could see
Dylan was breathing, and all of him was visible again. He seemed to
be just sleeping.

Raine crossed in front of me with the trash
can, but set it down to snatch up the blanket and throw it over her
brother’s shoulders before leaving the room with it. Lakota
clutched the blanket around him and shivered once. Just a little.
His eyes were still closed.

I heard the toilet flush and water running
in the bathroom and then Raine came back and sat on the floor next
to her brother, but not too close. I wanted to ask about Dylan,
even about Lakota, but instead “I’m sorry about Kenny,” is what
came out of my mouth.

Raine looked up quickly, surprised, and
didn’t say anything.

“I guess you guys were pretty good friends,”
I said stupidly.

“Me and Kenny? No, not really. I mean, we
hang in the same group, spent a lot of time together, but…no, not
really. Mostly he made me nervous. I mean, there are some people I
kind of suspect of having a Talent, you know? Because some things
aren’t easy to hide, or sometimes people just slip. I always
thought Kenny would get picked up someday because he was just one
of those people who had to
talk
about it, you know? Had to
show it off every once in a while.” She looked at me, considering.
“You’ve been thinking maybe it was your fault, because of the fire
thing. It wasn’t. We all had to hear about that as soon as you
left. Who knows how many other people had to hear about it. Tim
came down on him, though, told him to keep all your names out of it
if he had to go shooting his mouth off. Hope he did. But he was
just like that, you know? We all knew he’d get himself into trouble
and just hoped he didn’t take us down with him.”

“So why’d you hang out with him?”

She shrugged. “You gotta have friends,
right?”

Before I could think that through, Lakota
cut in, his voice a little hoarse. “It’s because she
likes
one of the Kenny’s friends.”

Raine turned to her brother with a
narrow-eyed glare. She puckered up and blew softly at his head. A
thin layer of frost formed on his hair which he rubbed off with his
hand.

I shook my head, not really wanting to take
that in. “Are you okay?” I asked him. “Did it—?”

He smiled up at me. That same cute boy
charming kind of smile that Dylan has. Color was already coming
back to his cheeks. “Did it work? Of course it did!” He seemed to
be laughing at me, without actually laughing. “It always
works.”

“I…don’t,” I had to stop and swallow. I was
scared to actually believe him. “I don’t even know how to thank
you.”

“Thank
me
for bringing him by not
giving him a bigger, swelled up head than he already has,” Raine
said dryly. She stood and swiped her jacket up off the floor.
“Ready to go?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lakota pulled himself to
his feet.

“I gotta get this kid and the car home
before our parents get back. They frown on the unlicensed
driving.”

“But I have a calling!” Lakota said,
throwing up his arms in a triumphant gesture that looked more
wrestling champ than altruist. Raine picked up the blanket as it
fell and threw it over his head.

“See you at school, Joss.”

“I—yeah, um, thank you.”

“He’s gonna sleep a while. Hard. But he’s
okay now,” Raine told me, in that voice of talking to an idiot,
which was pretty much how I was acting. “We promise, right?”

“Yeah. He’s all fixed,” Lakota agreed. “But
don’t hit him like that again, Joss. Damn, girls are so mean.”

“I didn’t—”

But they were already out the door and
laughing over the joke.

I sat on the side of the bed, trying not to
start crying again, and stroked the backs of my fingers along
Dylan’s cheek. He smiled and caught my hand, opened his eyes for
just a moment. “Hey,” he slurred.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“Not the boss of me, Marshall. Stay a while,
okay?” I realized he was pretty much asleep already. He turned onto
his side again, keeping hold of my hand and pulling it into his
chest. “Need you to stay.”

Well hey, even a mean girl like me can’t say
no to that. I thought about taking my hand back to get my boots
off, but I kinda figured Dylan’s bed had seen boots before, and I
wasn’t staying long anyways. I curled up beside him, tucking my
cheek against our joined hands, and trying to let the horror of the
evening slide back a bit.

The bed was soft. Dylan was warm and alive
beside me. This was the only place I wanted to be.

“Crazy,” he muttered softly, “how much I
need you.”

Crazy, how something like that can feel like
a kick in the chest, can hurt that much, can suck all the air right
out of your body for a moment. And at the same time, settle over
you, around you, so soft and warm and sweet, that you think nothing
can ever be as good as this one moment.

Crazy.

That I can love you.

This much.

* * *

Joss

The morning was bitter cold. Or maybe it
just seemed that way because all the warmth I was carrying from my
snuggle with Dylan fled the moment I stepped out into the dark.