Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (22 page)

“And what kind of future am I risking? A
whole future of this? Of hiding? Of never doing anything or having
anything worthwhile?”

“Joan?”

“Joss, sweetheart,” Mom crooned, “you’re
being very dramatic.”

I was feeling pretty dramatic. I realized
tears were running down my cheeks and that underneath all the
things I wanted to scream at them, huge sobs were trying to push
their way out of my chest. I looked at my dad, with his brows drawn
down over a hard, angry face. My mom looked up at me, disappointed,
her eyes pleading with me to back down and end this. To be her good
girl.

“It’s my life,” I ground out, trying to keep
my back teeth set against everything I was holding back, “and if I
do what you want me to do, there’s going to be nothing worth saving
it for.”

Then I just turned and walked out. Dad
called me back, and I heard Mom talking quietly to him as I climbed
the stairs. She’d be telling him to let me go, to give me some
time, and she’d really mean for both of us to take some time to
cool off. Come back and talk about this later.

I needed to take some time, but it didn’t
matter how much cooling off we did, Dad and I were never going to
see eye to eye on this stuff. I was trying to hold it together, but
my whole body was shaking from the confrontation, and in the wake
of all the things I was just now starting to realize about myself,
and even about my dad. I had a lot of thinking to do.

But I couldn’t do that right now. Right now
I needed to get ready for school, and before I did that, I had some
packing to do.

Chapter 11

Dylan

“So, you sure charmed my mom. I’m afraid I
missed a lot of what went on last night, though.” I swung our
joined hands as we walked to a meet-up at the Warren.

“Oh yeah? What’d she say?” Joss’s tone was
guarded. She’d been in a weird mood today. Even for Joss she’d been
quieter, less eye contact. But yet when I took her hand her grip
was quick and harder than it should have been. I don’t know, there
was just something about her today that felt…brittle. I guessed it
had something to do with last night.

“Um…I’m not gonna repeat what she said.
There was an
I don’t want you to see that girl anymore
vibe
to it, though.” I was trying for a joking tone.

“Oh.”

I felt her go stiff beside me, so I bumped
my arm against her shoulder. I didn’t want to be bringing this up.
It was embarrassing, knowing that she’d been to my place, met my
mom. I’d never intended for that to happen, ever, and not knowing
what went on while I was out of it was really getting to me. I
couldn’t bring it up at school because it seemed like no one would
leave us alone today. But now that we were strolling down a public
street, there was nothing to do but rip off the Band-Aid and find
out what had happened.

“Obviously, her opinion has great relevance
in my life.” I made sure there was enough sarcasm in my voice that
Joss couldn’t mistake my meaning even if she wanted to.

“You know it’s my fault you’re not stealing
for her anymore.”

Fuck.
“Is that what she said?”

“Pretty much.”

Well, I wanted to know what they talked
about, didn’t I? What was I supposed to say to that? Especially
since it was pretty much true. I mean, it had been fun, seeing what
I could get away with, and it felt good, bringing things to my mom
that made her happy for a while. Then it wasn’t fun anymore, she
started to expect things, was harder to please, and I just didn’t
feel the need to keep trying so hard. And then there was Marco,
pushing, raising the stakes. And then there was Joss, making me
want to make a change, making me feel like maybe I could.

“It sounded like you were supporting her?
With the stealing.”

“No. I never took that much, and we never,
you know, tried to fence stuff.” Like that somehow made it better.
“Mom’s always had a job—two jobs at one point. What I brought were
the extras, things she couldn’t afford to buy us because she was
always paying the rent, car repairs, food…grown-up stuff. I kept us
in stuff like cigarettes and sometimes something special like
jewelry or electronics.”

“Or a flat screen.”

“Yeah, that was a—”
Um, no,
I cut
myself off.
Joss is not going to be amused by the story of that
caper.
“Stuff like that.”

“And she just thinks it’s okay, to encourage
you to steal?”

“I don’t think she really thinks too hard
about it. I mean, she gets really down sometimes. It’s been hard on
her since my dad left, and sometimes she just needs a little
pick-me-up, you know?”

A glance a Joss’s tight-lipped profile told
me that she didn’t know. At all. And I was dangerously close to
trying to justify something she would never understand. I should
just shut up.

* * *

Joss

Is it really wrong to hate your
boyfriend’s mom? No, right? That’s like a classic in-law dynamic. I
mean, not that we’re anywhere close to that yet!
Clearly, being
this pissed off at her, on top of everything else, was making me
crazy and I needed to just turn it off. Because thinking about it
might lead to saying something about it, and it probably wouldn’t
be cool to tell Dylan just what I thought of his mother.

Damn that woman for treating him that
way.

“Joss? You’re thinking. What are you
thinking?”

“I don’t know. Not a lot.”
Or, actually,
everything. About how when you go to work I have to sneak back to
my house and get the bag I dropped into the hedge this morning and
bring it back here because I’m not going home tonight. And about
how maybe I want to tell you about that but also I’m not ready. And
probably how, on my way back from getting my stuff, I want to stop
by your mom’s and punch her in the face for being such a lousy
human being.

“There’s scowling. You have scowl-face.”

We had reached our entrance to the Warren,
and, as we checked the area and moved the grate, I felt myself
smile. I couldn’t help it. It was like he knew when I needed a
reset, and always knew what to say. This is part of what I loved
about Dylan. Ugh, and there was that love thing again, making me
feel kind of weak and silly.

I scowled down at Dylan gratuitously as he
climbed down the ladder. “You don’t like my face?”

His low voice drifted up as I climbed down.
“Get down here so I can tell you what I think.”

As I neared the bottom of the ladder, his
arms came around me from behind, stopping my descent and giving me
chills as he nuzzled my neck.

“I’m enchanted by your face,” he told me in
a soft, muffled voice, “and everything else about you.”

“Enchanted, is it?” I wanted to sound snarky
and unaffected, but didn’t pull it off. Everything—his nearness,
his lips on my neck, his voice in my ear—was making me feel
stupidly happy, like I couldn’t decide if I wanted to sink back
into some dream or turn and hurl myself at him. I looked up and
concentrated on pulling the grate back into place over our heads. I
needed to stop swooning over him before I made a complete ass of
myself. “You know, I think that’s what they’re putting under my
yearbook picture. ‘Joss Marshall: Enchanting.’”

He hugged me tighter, chuckling. “Yeah, but
that’s only because I paid them to. Trust me, the secret’s not out
yet.”

I struggled to turn in his arms, still on
the bottom rung of the ladder and just a little taller. “Jerk.” I
punched his shoulder for emphasis.

“For now,” he whispered, combing his fingers
into my hair, “you remain the enigma you’ve always been.”

My eyelids dropped as he pressed his lips to
my temple.
You’re killing me, you know that?

“And I’m the only one who knows,” soft
kisses made a tingling path down my cheek, “how amazing you
are.”

But what’s a little death?

When his lips covered mine, I actually made
a noise—some kind of whiny, breathy, girly noise that would have
been even more embarrassing except that Dylan seemed to really like
it. The teasing vanished in that instant as he kissed me harder,
urgently. His arms came around me, pulling me closer, which I
needed so much. I needed to be pressed up against him, to feel as
much of him as I could. I tried to hold back more of those sounds
as I tightened my fingers in his hair and tried to get closer, to
kiss him harder.

His tongue slid into my mouth and I went
weak all over, feeling like my body had been drenched in liquid
heat. His hands slid up under my shirt, rough palms sliding over my
skin, returning strength to my limbs with this wild need for
contact, pressure. In my mind I was chanting,
Please,
please,
with no idea what I wanted until his hand moved over my
bra and squeezed gently.

Too gently. He was kissing me and touching
me and it felt
so
good, but still all I wanted—what I
needed
—was more. And then more.

Dylan pulled his mouth from mine and yanked
his hands away from me, pressing me back against the ladder.

“I need a time-out,” he said breathlessly,
wrapping his hands around the ladder and laying his head against my
shoulder with his face turned away from me. We were both breathing
hard, and I thought Dylan was shaking a little.

I didn’t know what to say, or if I should
say anything, or if I could even speak. But I wondered what had
happened, and why he’d stopped. My Dylan-crush hyper awareness had
tuned me in to enough locker room eavesdropping to know that this
wasn’t new territory for him.
So it must be me, right? Something
I’m doing wrong?

“Unless you’ve got a cold shower down here
in your bunker, I’m just going to take a minute, recite some
multiplication tables in my head, and try to pull it together
before we go too far and wind up really embarrassed when Kat and
Heather finally get here.”

Oh, right. I remember those guys.

Vaguely.

“You drive me crazy,” he muttered.

“Don’t act like it’s a long trip.”

“Nice. So in an effort to keep me sane,
let’s talk about something unpleasant. Like…do we have more
patrolling planned for this weekend?”

“Are you kidding me? After you almost got
killed last night?”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“They. Bashed. Your. Skull. In. Uh-uh.
Consider yourself retired.”

I should have paid attention to the way he
stiffened, the way he was already pulling away from me. “You mean,
‘consider
us
retired.’”

To keep my mind off of the other stuff
today, I had been thinking about how the patrol thing hadn’t worked
out. Even though I hadn’t come up with much, it had been good
distraction and I was glad to let the conversation go that way.
“I’m not sure what to do now. I mean, clearly, I need more
information, but confronting them last night didn’t get me
anywhere. But it’s not like—” I cut myself off when he pushed back
from me and settled against the wall across from me with his arms
crossed.

It was suddenly much colder.

“I’m hearing an awful lot of ‘I’s here. I’m
sorry, was I cramping your style? Let’s not forget what I was doing
when I got my skull bashed, which was saving your ass.”

Cramping my style? What the hell?
“You know, a ‘Joss! Head’s up!’ would have been a lot safer way to
go.”

“Safer for who? What, did you expect me to
just yell out and wait to see if you’d catch it before it landed on
you? Jesus Christ, what kind of guy do you think I am?!”

“Breakable!”

There was a moment of silence that didn’t
sound good, and made it really obvious we’d been yelling at each
other. How did that happen? What was I thinking?

“So. What I think I hear you saying is that
I’m too fucking fragile—not to mention not altogether smart and
quick-thinking enough—to accompany you anymore when you decide to
go out and save the world. Because you’re Joss. Super powerful,
Super-Joss, who’s always got it all under control and always knows
just what to do.”

“Dylan—”

“Oh no, I get it. Totally. You can’t be
worried about me and my breakable little self when you’ve got the
fate of Fairview—and possibly the world—resting on your
shoulders.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of things aren’t fair. A
whole lotta things. You wanna move off that ladder so I can get out
of your way?”

I moved, because he’d told me to, before I
realized what was happening and that I should have stayed and
blocked his exit.

“Where are you going?” I asked him as he
climbed away from me. When I looked up, I could see Kat and Heather
peering down through the grate. As they lifted it aside, I wondered
how long they’d been there.

“Home. Such as it is.”

I wanted to try to bring him back, figure
out what I’d just said and take it back. I couldn’t stand for him
to look at me like that, to be mad at me. How had I messed things
up so fast?

But I couldn’t say anything, not with Kat
and Heather there. Dylan barely looked at them and no one said
anything as he climbed through the opening and stalked off. Heather
and Kat came down, and I hoped it was dim enough that they wouldn’t
see how watery my eyes were or how red my face was.

“Well, nice job, Joss,” Kat told me, wiping
her hands on her jeans. “Tell me, is there anyone you haven’t
pissed off this week?”

I so did not need her crap right now. “No, I
think that pretty much completes the list, so I was thinking about
going for round two. Wanna be first?”

She actually laughed. “Well good. For a
minute there I thought you were gonna cry and I’m still mad at you,
so that would be awkward for me.”

“Jesus, Kat, give it a rest,” Heather said,
looking uncomfortable.