Designed to Love (15 page)

I would give up my own life if I could
truthfully say those words. "She's gone, Tucker."

"What happened?" he asks, shaking his head
in disbelief as he starts to hyperventilate.

"Airplane crash."

"When?"

"A few days ago. I'm sorry I didn't call
sooner," I reply numbly.

"God, why her?" he cries angrily, biting his
knuckle as he rocks back and forth.

It's the same question, I've asked a
thousand times in the past four days. Yes, why her? Why not one of
the Brazier twins, or Officer Jones, a blue or gray as Claire would
say?

"Such a tragedy. Such a nice, beautiful
girl," Tucker's mom says, shaking her head sadly, as she attempts
to console her son.

I watch the two of them for a few awkward
minutes, then clear my throat, and politely excuse myself to leave.
I have nothing to offer to ease his grief and there is nothing that
can be said or done to ease mine. Tucker stops me at the door, his
face now contorted with pain, replacing the smile that was there
just minutes earlier. His eyes are moist with tears when he says,
"I've never seen two people more in love than you. You made her
really happy, Ronan."

"Thanks. As she did me," I reply and walk
out the door.
I made her happy but failed to
protect her. I should have been there to catch her when she jumped
off the train of life. She would have hated it, but she'd be here
now,
I think to myself.

***

It takes effort to pull into the Holiday Inn
Express on the edge of town and rent a room for the night. Part of
me wants to keep moving or keep running which is what I'm really
doing. The minute I am checked in to my hotel room, Claire connects
a call with me and scolds me like an adult, for blocking her
previous attempts. I can hear the hurt in her voice, and the
reluctance to believe me, when I assure her I never got the
connection. It's only when I change the subject and ask her about
Midnight Star that her demeanor changes and she proceeds to give me
a thirty minute report on how Brandon agreed to have a heated barn
built for Midnight.
"And it will have a loft
so I can have sleepovers with him once in awhile,"
she
says trying to sound excited.
Cat would never
allow such a thing,
I think to myself but refrain from
telling her. She yawns but seems wary of letting me go and it's
only after I promise to connect with her first thing in the morning
that she agrees to go to sleep. Her last words to me are,
"I miss you Ronan."

The first night in a hotel by myself, is one
of the longest and loneliest nights of my entire life and I
question whether or not my decision to leave was a good one. At
least at the Freeman estate, there were distractions everywhere and
someone was usually around to fill in the void when I couldn't
stand the quiet any longer. Now, every time I close my eyes, Cat is
there. Every sweet memory tucked away in my brain is seared into my
consciousness, and my mind is flooded with images of her and me,
starting with the motorcycle ride in Great Falls. The pain is so
real, that I double over and moan in misery, burying my head in the
pillow to stifle the sound. The empty hollow space in the center of
my chest feels like it's slowly filling with a thick black sludge
that makes it difficult to fully expand my lungs. Finally, in the
early hours of dawn, I fall asleep and don't wake up, until
housekeeping services knocks on the door, requesting permission to
come in and clean.

RONAN

It's been one week to the day since Cat's
death, and my despair is beyond comprehension. It's as if the sun
in my world has been completely obliterated and every living cell
in my body is slowly dying. Most days, I drive aimlessly along the
deserted highways of Montana with no particular destiny in mind,
stopping at roadside diners to eat and catch a few hours of sleep
amongst the truckers. Other days, I rent a hotel room and sleep up
to ten hours, sporadically dreaming of Cat. My dreams of her are
bittersweet. Sometimes they are so vivid, I feel as if she is lying
right next to me and the warmth of her breath on my neck seems as
real as the pounding of my heart. It's only when I wake up to find
the cold empty space next to me that I curse at myself for falling
asleep in the first place.

***

I figured out that moving vehicles not only
pose a problem for remote traveling to other locations, but they
also affect telepathic communication. Incoming mental calls from
the others are limited but not entirely impossible. Claire seems to
have the most success getting through, especially if I am traveling
at speeds less than 50 mph. Her level of distress when she can't
connect with me though is so pronounced that I've made it a habit
to call her anytime I stop for a break. When the others find out
they insist that I check in with them as well. Alisha's
conversations are always about business and keeping me abreast of
the current training progress. She makes it clear that she expects
me home soon and informs me that I will need to complete a special
training program to catch me up with the others. Elizabeth, Burke,
and Brandon mostly complain about Alisha and her demands for eight
to ten hour work days. None of them are very good at hiding the
sadness in their voice, not even Alisha, and there are times when I
feel so guilty for leaving, that I purposefully keep my
conversations to less than five minutes.

***

There's a whole lot of nothing between
Bozeman and Billings, Montana, so for lack of anything better to
do, I practice mental multitasking exercises; remote traveling out
of body, while concentrating on keeping the car from sliding off
the icy road. It could be just my imagination but it seems that the
more I practice, the further and longer I can remote travel from
the vehicle. The small amount of progress is enough of an
encouragement that I keep practicing for hours giving my mind and
heart a reprieve from thinking about Cat. I pull behind or along
side of unsuspecting travelers and remote travel in and out of
their vehicles, listening to their conversations like a sick,
spying, peeping tom.

A couple in the car in front of me amuses me
with an argument over what is considered a safe driving speed for
the current weather conditions, and in the car behind me a young
mother tries to comfort a toddler who is throwing a temper tantrum
in his car seat. It was only by chance that the speeding red Chevy
pickup piqued my interest enough to entice me in a game of
peek-a-boo into his vehicle. The driver, a male appearing to be in
his thirties, at first appears to be traveling alone, but once
inside the car, I quickly notice a small human form lying
motionless on the back seat with a quilt covering it. My heart
pounds in my chest as I consider the possibility that whoever the
person is might be dead. I'm so intently focused on the occupants
in the truck, that I fail to adequately balance my attention with
driving my own car, and it isn't until it is halfway in the ditch
that I return fully to body, using all of my enhanced reflexes to
get it back on the road, and keep it from slamming into the 4-door
sedan in front of me. I catch the driver of the red pickup smiling
wickedly as he passes by, and my temper flares. This time when I
remote travel to his vehicle, I take extra caution to keep most of
my attention on driving.

"Stupid foreigners don't know how to drive
worth shit," he mutters out loud, as he looks in his review mirror
at my car. To my relief, the form beneath the blanket moves
slightly in response, and I catch a glimpse of the pink sneaker of
a child sticking out the end of the blanket. It's clear that this
is more than a sleeping child in the back seat and my fears are
confirmed when he threatens her to keep still, reaching for an
object on the seat next to him, that I immediately recognize as a
Taser gun. The anger within me explodes, causing me to swerve my
car once again. I vividly recall the crippling pain caused when
Officer Jones used one on me and to think that someone would use it
on a small child, makes me sick to my stomach. If it weren't for
the unrestrained child on his backseat, I would run him off the
road and end his life right this second.

He turns on the radio and sings out of tune
to the country song playing, then cusses when it is interrupted by
three loud tones. When the tones are followed by an announcement
for an Amber Alert, he smiles smugly and turns the volume up.

"You hear that honey, they already have the
pigs out looking for you. The problem is they're looking for a blue
Honda, not a red Chevy," he says, laughing cruelly. "They're never
gonna find you little pet. You can count on that. They are never
gonna find you. You're mine now."

My mind reels as I consider my next move.
With less than a half of a tank of gas left, I would definitely
have to make a stop in Billings. As luck would have it, he takes
the exit to a small town just west of Billings and I follow,
letting the 4-door sedan cut in front of me to avoid making him
suspicious. When he pulls into a gas station right off the freeway,
I drive past, parking my car three blocks away. It takes me less
than two minutes to sprint back to the gas station and while he
busies himself with putting gas in his truck I walk directly up to
the clerk behind the counter of the mini store.

"I need you to call the police. The man in
the red pickup abducted a child and she is in the back seat," I say
calmly. The clerk looks at me like I'm crazy and doesn't budge, so
I repeat the instructions, and command in a loud voice, "Do it
now!" as I walk out the door towards the red pickup.

He is so overly confident in his ability to
outsmart everyone else, that he doesn't display any signs of
paranoia when I approach him.

It isn't until I bluntly say, "Sir, I was
wondering if you have ever had the pleasure of having someone use a
stun gun on you?" that the blood drains from his face and his lip
turns up in a snarl as he sizes me up. I may not have Claire's
color screening abilities, but standing next to this guy, I feel a
certain vibration quality that intuitively I understand as
gray.

"You freaking little punk, you better get
your ass out of here or you're gonna be sorry," he sneers, showing
off a row of missing top teeth.

My pulse quickens at his response and I feel
a jolt of excitement course through my body, awakening my senses
and prepping my body for action. When he reaches in his coat and
pulls out the Taser gun, I am ready for him. In one swift motion, I
knock it out of his hand before he even has a chance to point it at
me. Grabbing his arm between my two hands, I snap his forearm like
a twig, breaking both bones simultaneously. I'm sure his cries can
be heard a mile away, as he crumples to the ground, and it isn't
until I discharge the Taser in his chest that he is silenced,
making barely audible gurgling sounds as he thrashes on the ground,
frothing at the mouth. I wipe my fingerprints off the gun and toss
it near his feet, then quickly walk away, easily scaling the eight
foot wall behind the store. Sitting in my car, chewing on a stick
of beef jerky I mentally hover over the scene, watching as first
one cop car, then two, shows up, followed by a local camera crew.
The little girl under the blanket had been bound and gagged. She
was quickly identified as the girl that had been abducted from
Bozeman, Montana and the man lying in the back of the cop car,
positively identified as a known sex offender. It isn't until I
hear the store clerk giving the officer my description that I start
the car and quickly head for the freeway.

"What are you some highway crusader now?"
Alisha asks, giving me a hard time in a nicer way than typical for
her. She said my explosion of anger could be felt by all of them in
Canada and she was glad it only lasted for a few minutes.

"You know the police are going to want to
talk to you, Ronan," she warns. "How are you going to explain the
injuries to that guy's arm?"

"Don't know Ali, why don't you think of
something brilliant and get back to me. I have to go now," I say,
and mentally block her just as she starts to raise her lecturing
voice.

***

It wasn't my first choice to head south
through Montana, but the recent snow storm dumped over four feet of
snow, closing some of the smaller northern mountain passes. Having
spent the last two nights sleeping in my car in below freezing
temperatures, I was looking forward to having a warm hotel room to
crash in tonight. With Christmas just around the corner, hotels are
filling up quickly with holiday travelers, and I know my chances of
booking a room are better if I do it now, so I pull into the
parking lot of the first hotel I see, not giving myself a chance to
be undecided in the matter.

After taking a long hot shower, I order room
service and collapse on the bed fighting to keep my eyes open until
the hotel staff arrives with my meal. It's not even four o'clock
yet and the news stations are already carrying the story about Tom
Porter, the child molester who abducted nine year old Kayla Munson.
The bulk of the story is centered on Kayla's reunion with her
family, and that Tom Porter is a suspected serial killer. Had my
room service order been delivered a few minutes later, I might have
missed the fifteen second segment involving me altogether.
Unbeknownst to me, there were cameras out at the gas pump that
recorded me with Tom Porter. Alisha was right, I would have a hard
time explaining the video capturing me snapping Tom Porter's arm in
half with just my bare hands, tasering him, then wiping my
fingerprints off the weapon, not to mention my knowledge of Kayla
in the backseat of his car.

After watching several more news clips
showing the event from a few different angles, I am wide awake,
restless, and can't resist the urge to get outside to stretch my
legs. I do the best I can to modify my appearance: shaving the
mustache and beard, and styling my hair to give me a tamer look.
Thankfully, I had enough sense to wear sunglasses so at least my
custom yellow eyes were camouflaged. All I can do is hope that
people were more focused on the critical aspects of the story, and
not on the part that involved me.