Twisted Miracles (16 page)

Running footsteps sounded behind me, followed by a screech like squealing brakes. I looked down at the herringbone pattern of the bricks under my hands, and I realized where I was—the back patio of the Tanners’ B&B.

Chapter Fifteen

When I woke up, Shane’s face was the first thing I saw, and I nearly cried with relief. I reached for him, struggling to get up, but he put a broad hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down onto the mattress.

“You don’t need to be exerting yourself right now.”

“You’re not hurt—you’re not—” Frantic, I reached into his head. “
Can you hear me?
”

“
Of course I can hear you.
” His voice was soft.

“Oh, thank God.” I stopped trying to sit up. Shane’s hand gentled on my shoulder, and he sat on the edge of the bed. I looked over his shoulder. There were the yellow curtains that had been in my room since grade school. There was the antique armchair Lionel had levitated to convince me I wasn’t crazy. It registered that I really was in Louisiana. That I hadn’t been when I went to sleep.

My first thought was,
Holy shit
,
I
teleported.

My next one was,
Who did I kill?

“Phone. I need your phone.”

“Sure, but—”

I yanked it out of his hand before he could ask me why and dialed Jackson from memory. He picked up before the first ring finished sounding.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this?”

“Jackson!”

“Cass! Where the hell are you? I came to pick you up and your place is a disaster zone. There are cop cars all over the street—it looks like a grenade went off in your place—what the hell happened?”

“Why are there cop cars there? Jackson, why are there cop cars there?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing someone saw the broken glass and thought there was a burglary. Every window’s blown out. There’s water everywhere—a pipe burst in the ceiling, and...it’s pretty bad.”

He wasn’t telling me everything. I didn’t need telepathy to know it.

“What else?”

“It’s hard to tell—”

“Jackson, what else.”

He paused. I could hear other voices through the phone, official voices. “The guy who lived in 3B’s in the hospital.”

3B was the unit right above mine. I went cold. He kept talking, but I only caught three words for every ten. “We’ll take care of it...sending a healer...Gordon’s handling...don’t worry.” I didn’t realize I was clenching the phone until the case cracked. I dropped it.

“Cass? Cass?” Jackson’s voice was small from the speaker.

I picked it back up. “I’m here, I’m here.”

“So...where are you? Were you practicing?”

“Not exactly.” I tried to think of a way to say it that didn’t sound crazy. No luck. “I’m in Louisiana.”

“You...”

“I teleported.”

“Holy fuck.”

It was the first time I’d heard him curse.

“How?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

I looked down at my pajamas. “I could use some clothes. And my wallet and cell phone.”

“I’ll overnight you a box. Anything else?”

“Just...take care of Mina, all right?”

“I will.”

I hung up and set Shane’s phone on the bed between us. He didn’t pick it up. He was watching me, and I knew he’d been listening.

“Are you okay?”

I shook my head. I was definitely not okay.

I hadn’t even known 3B’s name. I’d avoided my neighbors religiously. I hadn’t wanted to meet them, hadn’t wanted to get involved in conversations and dinner parties and cat-sitting, hadn’t wanted to answer awkward questions about where I’d come from and why. “Do you believe me now?”

“I’m sorry, I only—”

I couldn’t bear it. Not now. I ignored the tentative mental connection he tried to make and put up shields. “I need to know what happened before you found me. Was anyone here?”

“No. No one. Just me and Lionel and the guests.”

“I need to see.”

He closed his mouth and pressed his lips together. “Sure. Of course.” He held out his hand.

I didn’t want to touch him. I didn’t want to know how sorry he was for any of it—for what had happened just now or what had happened five years ago. But I needed to know what had brought me back. I covered the back of his hand with my palm.

He guided me down. You can do that when you know someone, when you recognize the touch of their mind. I was a little surprised when he didn’t force me to encounter all the emotions he was feeling. He focused in tightly on his memory of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing I was nearby.

It took him a moment to clear his head and look out the window. He saw me lying on the patio, not moving. The panic that flared in his chest was enough to make me shudder, even feeling it secondhand. He ran down the stairs in his boxers, mentally yelling for Lionel. When he got to me, he took my face in his hands and forced himself to stay calm as he searched out my mind, breathing again when he felt me alive but unconscious. He carried me upstairs and sat the whole night in the chair by my bed, waiting for me to wake.

I went further back, past the events of the morning to the deep memories of his dreams. They were full of half-formed images and intense, quickly shifting emotions, glimpses of myself. He let me search where I wanted, his mind offered up and open. It was all pretty normal—or as normal as dreams ever are—and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. I gasped and almost drew back, but I managed to keep hold of him. The muscles in his arms hardened under my hands as he felt my astonishment.

Cutting through his dreams was the gasping, strength-sucking feeling of the pull. It stopped suddenly with that same squealing sound I’d heard after I’d appeared on the patio, and I knew it must have been me, scaring off Shane’s attacker.

I opened my eyes. My face was just inches from his chest, and I shifted back, breathing hard. “He came after you.”

“You can tell?”

“It was just like that night... that night we...” My face heated, and I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Shane’s eyes darkened. “Cass, please, I—”

“I have to go get cleaned up.” I swung my feet out of bed and tried to stand, but I staggered as I straightened up, my head spinning.

“Whoa, easy.” Shane took my elbow and sat me back down. I pulled out of his grip, and he raised both hands, palms out.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. Okay.”

I got up again, more slowly this time, and Shane stayed where he was while I walked to the bathroom and shut the door.

I looked like I’d been in a bar fight. My hair was tangled and matted with blood, and the cuts on my body had dotted my pale blue shirt with brownish-red splotches, like sick polka dots. There were bruises under my eyes and a long scratch across my cheek, and when I looked more closely at my face, I saw shards of glass caught in the hair around my temples.

I leaned my elbows on the sink and tried not to cry.

Shane was still in my bedroom, sick with regret. I caught little snatches of his thoughts.
—not possible
,
not possible
,
just not possible—but it must be—she’s here
,
she’s here—Christ
,
that whole time
,
dealing with this—God
,
I’m such an idiot—

I couldn’t deal with his guilt. I closed him off ruthlessly and stripped, wincing as my shirt pulled away from places where it had adhered to the wounds. Fresh blood seeped from the skin of my stomach and back.

Naked, I looked worse. Like a shrapnel victim. Slivers of glass were stuck skin-deep all over my body. I set my jaw and dug around in the cabinet below the sink until I found rubbing alcohol. Then I stood in front of the mirror and ripped off squares of toilet paper, methodically pulling out the glass and swabbing every cut from my shoulders down. The slivers were milky white and rippled in places. I recognized the pattern. The fixture on the ceiling above my bed.

My back was worse off than my front. I craned my neck around to look, and it was brownish-pink with flakes of dried blood. There wasn’t enough damage to require stitches, but I probably needed a few Band-Aids, and I was going to have to use telekinesis to get the glass out and clean the cuts. The thought made me panicky, but the alternative was to ask Shane for help.

That would be worse.

I tried mindlifting a square of toilet paper soaked in alcohol. I got it six inches off the counter before I remembered the last time I’d seen 3B coming up the stairs with his mail. I’d pretended to be on my phone so I wouldn’t have to talk to him. The toilet paper hit the counter with a
splat
.

Shane tapped on the door.

“I’m not decent.”

“Cass, let me help you.”

“I’m fine.” Maybe if I said it enough, it would be true. I tried to reach the worst spot, the one where I could see a bit of glass poking out of my back. I twisted my shoulder to the limit, and blood oozed from the wound. Shane opened the door.

“What are you doing?” I covered my chest with my T-shirt and re-opened cuts in the process. “I said I don’t need your help.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” He came inside, set down a box of bandages and picked up the bottle of alcohol. “I won’t touch you, if that’s what you want. But you’re going to let me clean up those cuts or take you to the hospital. One or the other.”

I clenched my teeth and glared. He inverted the alcohol bottle over a wad of tissue, and I turned my back to him. It was all the acquiescence I could give him.

“Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was this bad.”

I didn’t say anything. He used telekinesis to lift the tissue, and I closed my eyes and hissed as he swabbed the cuts.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

His mindtouch slid over my skin, looking for the broken places. I tried not to remember what it had felt like to have his mental hands on me in other ways, with other intentions. I knew my face was heating, and I didn’t open my eyes. I wasn’t going to open a channel to his thoughts, either. I could guess them easily enough. The last time he’d used his mind to touch me, I’d been naked and moaning against the side of a shed.

He found the spot where the glass had gone in, and I yelped.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Slowly, carefully, he worked the shard free from the flesh of my back. I winced, but I wouldn’t let myself ask him to stop. My skin stung as the glass slid out.

“Got it,” he murmured, and wiped the spot. He tore open a bandage and used it to seal the cut. The shard made a tinkling sound as he dropped it on the bathroom counter. I opened my eyes. It was an inch long and jagged, bright red with fresh blood. “Are there any more?”

He met my eyes in the mirror. I shook my head.

“Then I’ll let you get some rest.”

By the time I found the words to thank him, he was gone.

Chapter Sixteen

“We can’t just sit around waiting for something to happen. There must be something we can
do.
” I was in the kitchen at the B&B, eating an omelet and drinking a full cup of coffee for the first time in five years. It was making my head buzz.

“If you have a better idea, I’m all ears,” Shane said, and he disappeared into the guests’ dining room. He was serving, which made it difficult to argue with him. Every time I felt like I was making headway, he went out to refill someone’s orange juice.

I was wearing a shirt and jeans scrounged from Mina’s closet while I waited for the box Jackson was sending. I probably should’ve been grateful I hadn’t shown up naked, but I couldn’t wear bloodstained pajamas all day.

The upside to accidentally teleporting across the country was that Shane and Lionel finally believed there was something different about me, but that didn’t solve the problem of how we were going to find this guy. Twice now he’d attacked someone at the B&B, and no one had noticed him nearby, much less been able to stop him. Shane suggested we keep watch every night until he came back to try and attack again. I was less than enthusiastic about this plan.

“I don’t like using him as bait,” I said to Lionel. In the dining room, Shane was laughing and making conversation with the guests as if someone hadn’t just tried to kill him.

“We don’t have much choice,” Lionel replied, telekinetically turning a perfect omelet. I could feel the power he was using, the little tingle at the base of my skull enhanced by the caffeine. “He already is bait.”

“I agree with you,
chère.
” Bruce was sitting at the table reading the paper. Lionel gave him a look. He shrugged. “Well, I do.”

Shane came in from the dining room with a load of dirty dishes and sent them floating into the sink.

“Isn’t there anyone else we can ask?” I said. “Have we gone to everyone we know?”

“We’ve covered half the coast already,” Shane said, and a glance at Lionel told me he agreed.

“We just have to wait, sugar.”

I glared at no one in particular and went back to my omelet as Shane went back to the dining room. The egg was so fluffy and rich with butter it practically dissolved in my mouth, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Any second, the rogue could come back for Shane. He could be out there in the dining room
right now.
What would’ve happened if I hadn’t interrupted him the night before?

“Cass, sugar, could you bring this plate out?” Lionel pulled me out of my thoughts. “Shane says somebody wants seconds. Table three.”

I wiped my hands and took the plate he was holding. One perfect crabmeat-and-goat-cheese omelet, with chives, decorative cut-up fruit on the side. Funny how the guests never noticed how seamless the service at the B&B was, as though the waitstaff could read their minds. I backed out of the swinging door with the plate.

The guests’ dining room had been decorated for the tourists, an exposed brick wall on one side, framed Mardi Gras posters and beads on another. French doors opened to the courtyard, and a nice breeze ruffled the edges of the white tablecloths. Table three was a young couple on their honeymoon. I gave them their omelet, and they asked for coffee refills, so I picked up the pot from the sub-station by the fireplace and started making the rounds.