Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (39 page)

“Stick around, kid. Pick up that gun.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Didn’t ask you what you wanted. Yeah, I was
busy, but do you think I didn’t see how Dylan told you to cut him
free and you did exactly what he wanted?”

“I…I…”

“Yeah, I get it. Lots of people are stupid
enough to do what he tells them to do. I used to let him talk me
around, too. But you screwed up, Curtis, and now I need you to show
me where your loyalties lie. So pick up the gun.”

Curtis’s eyes darted all over the room,
searching for me as he moved over to Nathan. He was trying not to
step in the blood, trying not to actually touch Nathan’s body. He
picked up the gun like it was a dead rodent.

“Now come back here.”

Curtis did as he was told and Marco turned
him by the shoulders to face the room.

“Now you’re gonna want to shoot Dylan.”

Even though I could have guessed that was
coming, hearing Marco say it froze the blood in my veins.

“But…but I can’t see him.”

“Life’s full of challenges. Just lift it up,
point and click. If you hit Dylan, we’ll know. At the least
there’ll be a thud. And he’ll probably phase back. Even if you wing
him, he’s gonna bleed and he won’t be able to keep the blood
invisible once it’s spilled. So that’s cool. Thing is, it’s kind of
a big room and you’ve only got so many bullets. So you’re going to
want to really try.”

I stayed as still as I could, tried not to
breathe. There was a knife in my hand. If I were Joss I could make
it fly into Marco’s throat. Hell, if I were Joss I could probably
throw it without using Talent and get Curtis out of danger. But I
wasn’t Joss. She wasn’t here and she needed me. I had to get out of
this and get to her. I couldn’t help Curtis.

I’m sorry.

Marco raised Curtis’s arms, put his finger
around the trigger, told him to listen, aim, and shoot. Everything
was deathly quiet. Curtis’s eyes were squeezed shut.

The first shot exploded into the room. I
don’t know if I could actually feel it move past me or if that was
just my imagination.

“Missed. Again.”

Curtis aimed at another spot, fired. Then
another. He kept going, the shots coming closer together like he
just wanted to get it over with, his aim changing so fast it was
hard for me to follow. Two of the shots came close, but finally
luck was on my side and I was still in one piece when the big gun
clicked empty.

Marco plucked it from Curtis’s grip and
chucked it into the room, still hoping to hit me, but his aim was
way off and I ignored it, keeping my eyes trained on him and
Curtis.

“You lose. Big surprise.” Marco snapped
Curtis’s neck without another word. There was that moment’s pause,
like the world stopping to absorb the enormity of it—or maybe that
was just me. Then Curtis slid to the floor. “Well, would you look
at that.”

I looked down. The empty gun was lying next
to my foot. Or, where my foot should have been, if it had been
visible. Marco’s throw must have bounced it off the wall and it
slid across the floor. If I’d been paying attention, I could have
sidestepped it.

Marco was already barreling toward me. I
reached out instinctively to block him. Or maybe that’s bullshit.
Maybe I knew the knife was in my hand. Maybe I meant to stab my
best friend.

Why did my brain want to call him that
again, after everything that had happened, right now while his
blood was pouring over my hand? I let go of the knife and stumbled
backward, phasing in again, unable to keep myself invisible for the
moment.

Marco was stumbling back too, his eyes wide,
hands clutching at his gut as he pulled out the knife and dropped
it to the floor.

“You fucking stabbed me!”

I didn’t say anything. What was I supposed
to say?

“I can’t believe you fucking stabbed me, you
piece of shit!”

“You can’t? Really?” Was I really such a
wuss in his eyes that he thought he could do all this shit to me
and I’d never retaliate? But then, maybe he was right because the
sight of him, standing there bleeding, knowing I’d done that, was
making me sick. “Tell me where Joss is.”

He laughed. He was turning pale, starting to
sway on his feet. “Fuck you. She deserves everything she gets and
more.”

I saw red. I went at him, grabbing him by
the shirt and shoving him backward until we were stopped by the
railing. “What’s Trina’s plan? Where did Corey take her?” I shook
him hard. His head snapped forward and back. He was getting heavy
in my hands quickly and I was trying not to understand what it
meant.

He grabbed onto my jacket at the shoulders,
like he was trying to steady himself. His head lolled back and he
looked up at me. “You were like my brother. For life or longer. I
took care of you.”

“Until you didn’t. Until you could only care
about yourself.”

“And why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I take
care of myself, look out for number one? Is your way so much
better? It’s all about her for you now, doing what she wants,
jumping through her hoops. She doesn’t care about you. Not like I
do. Doin’ you a favor, man. She’s gonna get you killed.”

“
Not like I do”?
His speech was
slurring, his voice getting fainter. Did he know what he was
saying? A thousand pictures flashed through my head as his blood
oozed onto the floor between us. A lifetime of him being my friend
and not a monster. I was looking for the turning point I had
missed. The place where it had all started to go wrong. The point
when I had failed him.

“We need to get help,” I heard myself
saying. “Just tell me where she is and we can—”

Marco laughed weakly. “A deal? Just tell you
where to find your girlfriend and you won’t let me die?”

“No! Jesus Christ, would you—?”

“I think it’s too late. For all of it.
Except for this.”

With a strength I wouldn’t have believed he
still had, Marco tightened his hold on my shoulders and pitched
himself backward over the railing. I was taken by surprise, and yet
I let go of him immediately and grabbed for the rail, as though
some instinct for self-preservation was still on guard. One hand
caught, wrenching my arm, and I had the other hand on the rail and
my grip adjusted before I even fully realized what had happened and
that Marco was still clinging to me with his arms wrapped around my
hips, gripping my belt.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled at
him.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m
taking you with me.”

“You’ve got the strength to take us over the
rail like that, you can climb back up. You need to do it now,
because you know I can’t hold on like this for long.”

“Oh yeah, I know it.” He smiled up at me and
jerked his body. My arms screamed from the effort of holding our
weight. I started to think about my hands sweating.

“Marco, come on, man, don’t do this. I’ve
already made this choice. I’m not going down with you.”

“That’s the problem with you. You
still
think you have a choice.” He jerked again and I almost
lost my grip. “But you never did. You’re mine. You’ve always been
mine, and if I have to lose everything else I’m going to hold on to
you until it’s over, feel your skull crack against whatever’s down
there and know that I did that.”

I didn’t say anything. I needed all my
strength just to hold on and there wasn’t anything I could say to
that.

Marco jerked his body again and I just
reacted, bringing my knee up hard into the wound in his gut with as
much power as I could get. Air huffed out of him as his hands came
free, and again the world slowed. It seemed to take forever for him
to fall, his face a mask of rage and hate, screaming my name down
into the dark. It seemed like he screamed my name for a long time
before it was cut off.

I hung, my arms on fire, imagining his
broken body lying down there somewhere, still hearing that last
scream echoing in my head, even while the silence of the dead
pressed in against me. It was creeping over me now, the insanity of
everything I had seen tonight: a guidance counselor on a killing
spree, kids executed at gunpoint, the crack of Jeff’s neck, Joss
brutalized.

Joss.

I started to swing my legs, my head crowded
with crazy. With all the horrible images. With the sure knowledge
that I would never be able to get myself back onto the ledge,
knowing that I wasn’t strong enough, that I would fall too and
maybe no one would ever find me, and Marco and I would rot here
together.

But I also knew that Joss was still out
there somewhere. She was in trouble. And I knew I would do whatever
it took to get to her and make sure she was safe.

Even if what I have to do is completely
impossible.

I was swinging hard now, concentrating on
that last thought and not the pain. My ankle caught the rail
support and I held it there, catching my breath for a moment. Hand
over hand, I moved closer to it, wrapping my leg around the support
up to the knee. Moments later I was pulling myself back under the
rail and onto the concrete floor.

Part of me wanted to lie there and rest,
maybe cry for everything that happened. But mostly my brain was in
hyper-drive, the need to find Joss overriding everything else. I
looked at the bodies around me.
No one left to threaten. Where
could she be? She could be anywhere. How are you gonna find
her?

Okay, slow down. You gotta think. Think
like Joss would think.
I tried to quiet all the voices in my
head, to clear out all the images. And as I knelt on the floor,
clearing my head, the image that stayed was one of me kneeling,
with Marco holding me down, Tony with the glow of fire on his face,
Trina holding out her hand to me. Behind her was the house, the
house on fire where Joss was trapped and no longer screaming.

Then I knew where Joss was and what Trina
was going to do.

Chapter 18

Joss

“Finally. I thought you were never going to
wake up.”

My head was a swimming mass of pain.
Thoughts flooded in as I looked around the dark room.
Where am
I? Where’s Dylan? I’m chained to a bed, have they—?
I looked
down at myself, and that’s when I realized I was blindfolded.

I tried to calm down and take stock. I was
sitting up against a headboard. I could feel the wooden stiles
against my back and a heavy, metal chain wrapped around my upper
body several times. My feet weren’t bound, but my clothes were
still in place and I felt okay. Nothing had happened.

Nothing happened.
I wondered how long
I was going to keep repeating that to myself before I believed
it.

Focus.

Someone was moving, walking toward me. I
pulled my knees in to my chest, ready to defend my self.

“Joss, I’m just going to take off the
blindfold. You want to be able to see, don’t you?” I recognized
Trina’s voice. “I want to talk to you and I feel stupid doing it
with that blindfold Corey put on you, but if you’re going to kick
me, forget about it.”

“I won’t.” My voice came out all hoarse. My
throat was sore. It made me think I had done more screaming than I
remembered. I stretched my legs out again in a show of good
faith.

“If your head hurts, it’s probably because
the idiot dropped you on the way up the stairs. You rolled all the
way to the bottom and smacked your head on the newel post. That’s
probably why it took you so long to come around, but you should
have seen Corey’s face, he was so embarrassed.”

Oh, well, at least it amused you.
My
headache did feel different than usual. I wondered if I had a
concussion.

Her weight came down on the foot of the bed
and she started to crawl toward me. Hands wrapped around my ankles
and then she was straddling me, her palms smoothing up my jeans. My
body recoiled at her touch, caught between a fight response and my
order to lie still so she’d take off the blindfold. I didn’t want
to be blinded and helpless again, but oh God, I didn’t want to be
touched. She sat on my knees, pushing them painfully into the bed
in the direction they weren’t meant to bend, and squeezed my thighs
hard with her hands.

“You’ve had a hard night, haven’t you Joss?”
She loosened her grip on my legs, her palms rubbing over the spot
like she was trying to soothe. My skin crawled, but I was trying
not to show it.
It’s just Trina. She can’t really hurt you. But
what if Corey’s still here? What if Marco’s here? You need the
blindfold off. Then you’ll have full control over your Talent.
You’ll be able to see what’s coming. You can put up with some girl
pawing at you for a minute if it means getting the hell out of here
and finding Dylan.

Please let Dylan be okay.

“Did you ever have one of those dreams where
you’re just so sure it’s real? And then even after you wake up it
feels like you’re still in it? And you’re totally confused. Am I
awake or asleep? Was that a dream or not?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think she
really expected an answer.

She laughed softly. “Like that time I was
messing with Dylan’s dream, where he couldn’t rescue you—that’s a
big theme with him, by the way. When I was done with him, Tony
drove me over to your house. Then next thing we know, Dylan’s there
at your window. I must have been doing good work that night. Tony
said the way he shimmied right up that tree, it didn’t look like
the first time he’d climbed up to your room. So who’s been a
naughty girl, Joss?”

“Do you have any kind of point?”

“I was just thinking that tonight must be
like that for you. Corey gave me the whole play by play of what
went down at the mall. And I know how much you don’t like to be the
center of attention. It would be cool, wouldn’t it, to know that it
never happened? That you fell asleep in your bed and you stayed
there? You never went downtown. Never had those boys hold you down
and look at you. Touch you.”