Twisted Miracles (30 page)

“No way,” Ryan said. “You always win.” The memory was from his perspective, so I could only see his forearms and his calves, but I could tell he was much skinnier than he was now.

“Don’t be such a chickenshit.”

“Fuck you, man,” Ryan said, but there was no heat in it.

“Come on, best two outta three.”

“Ah, whatever, fine.” Ryan dragged himself to his feet and picked up his shotgun. The handle was warm, as though he’d just been holding it. The air had the fresh, earthy smell of a recent rain shower.

“Twenty bucks,” Brandon said. “Make it interesting.”

Ryan sighed, but didn’t protest. He went to the window, and I could see every splinter in the wood, every rusty nail hole. If I’d wanted to, I could have counted the damp pine needles on the ground below them.

I knew what they were about to do. Shane said he’d tried it once with a BB gun when he was ten and his mother was still alive. It was the only time she’d laid a hand on him in anger, he said. She’d been so scared, she’d cried in front of him, the only time that had happened, too.

The game was simple. A regular converter wasn’t strong enough to stop a bullet, but it was easy enough to deflect one. You had to be fast, and you had to have control, but it could be done. The problem was, a deflected bullet was likely to go wild. You couldn’t predict where it would hit, and there was always the chance you’d send it flying off into the woods to kill someone you didn’t know was there. The Tooley boys had grown up half their lives in deer stands with their father. They should have known better.

Brandon tossed an empty beer can out into the underbrush. It landed in a thicket of blackberry bushes, but it was still visible, reflecting the sunlight.

“You first,” he said, and Ryan took aim. Three times, the slugs went wide, hitting pine trees and dirt. Brandon smirked and took the gun.

“My turn,” he said.

He centerpunched the can on the first shot, and the lead made a plinking sound as it hit. I could feel Ryan’s frustration. It was just a game, but this was Brandon. Two years older, better at everything, beloved. Ryan’s memory was soaked with anger and regret, and I couldn’t help knowing what was going to happen next. His mind was so focused on the incident that it skipped ahead to the moment Brandon fell and then back again, a sick loop of his brother firing and then falling to his knees.

Brandon pulled the trigger, and Ryan was overcome with jealousy. He wanted nothing more than to keep that slug from hitting that can, but even he could tell that he was too late to deflect it. As he focused on the projectile’s path, for the first time in his life, he tapped into his latent powers.

Ryan hardly knew what he was doing, but he stopped the slug inches before it hit. And it didn’t simply stop—it melted into a misshapen lump of lead and plastic and dropped, setting the dead leaves below smoking. Shock and triumph rushed through him, and then there was something else, something I recognized. The ecstatic jolt of a pull. Whooping, he turned around in time to see Brandon hit his knees as the life rushed out of him and soaked into Ryan like water into sand.

Ryan didn’t realize what had happened, at first. But as he shook his brother and pounded on his chest, he understood, the way I’d understood, that the surge he’d felt must have come from somewhere. As understanding dawned, so did panic. I watched with helpless horror as Ryan hefted his brother’s body and threw it over the side of the deer stand. Brandon’s neck snapped as he hit, but he was already dead.

Ryan stayed in the stand for hours, rocking with his head in his hands and trying to pull himself together. It grew dark. He went and picked up the beer can and crushed it, then buried it along with the spent slugs. He swept pine needles over the charred spot on the ground and threw the misshapen slug into a river fifty yards off. He went home and called the police. He told his parents that he’d gone into the woods to take a piss and returned to find his brother on the ground.

I remembered now how Ryan had gone silent after Brandon died. No one had pushed him. His brother was gone—it was natural for him to avoid mindspeaking for a while. Lionel had told us to let him grieve. No one had seen how deeply he was hiding what happened.

The surge haunted him. Barely knowing what he was, he sought the feeling out again, trolling the Quarter after dark, picking a fight outside a strip club. This time no one died, but the man he’d beaten ended up in a coma. Even then, it wouldn’t have been too late. Maybe if he’d gone to Mac and confessed...but he hadn’t.

The secret bred. It spawned small deceptions that crept through his life like weeds through cracks in a sidewalk. He slowly taught himself how to pull on demand. He sucked power from bums sleeping on the street, telling himself it didn’t matter, that they’d die of drug overdoses anyway. He lied about his grades to his parents. He sapped power from Evie, a telekinetic he’d dated while I was in college. I remembered her, how they’d broken up over Christmas one year. I hadn’t known she was pregnant, or that she’d miscarried. Little things. I saw him cheating at cards on the rig, getting fired and telling no one.

Then there were the debts his mother racked up playing video poker and buying jewelry from home shopping shows. His father’s expensive back surgery. Ryan’s first encounter with the church in Briny Point came through clear and complete. He walked in late and saw Geary working cheap magic tricks for the crowd. He killed Matthew Green, realized he needed another source of power and kidnapped a whole string of helpless people, addicted to the high of pulling and the money that flowed in from the miracle-seeking crowds. He saw Mina on the riverbank, a hazy figure through the trees, coming upon him just as he dumped the dead man in a shallow grave. He attacked on instinct, saw that it was her and panicked, afraid Shane and Lionel were close by. He shoved her body under the shack and fled. He kissed Mary Ellen in a cluttered bedroom that must have been hers, then threw her into that awful cell in the church, drained her to work miracles while Geary played his part onstage, and dumped her unmarked body in a Dumpster behind a bar.

And then there was Mac.

A moan escaped me as I saw his father come to him. His face was tight with anger, but his eyes were soft with hope, and I knew he hadn’t wanted to believe. The scene played over and over and over again.

“Where’s the money coming from?”

“It’s keeping you in fishing tackle, isn’t it? Keeping Mom in her rings and shit from those shows. What do you care where it comes from?”

Ryan’s memory skipped ahead. He cast his hand out like he was throwing a punch, and then his mind cycled back to watch his father open the door again.

“Where’s the money coming from?”

Mac fell and Ryan called his mother. “Heart attack,” he said. “It’s too late.”

“Where’s the money coming from?”

Ryan sobbed over the sink in his tiny bathroom.

The remains of Ryan’s shadowmind flickered and went dark. I knew, on a bone-deep level, he was past healing. I was in so deep I could feel how the electrical impulses tying his gift to the world faded. Power sang through my body. It was ecstasy, and just in reach was the stabbing release of his death. If I pushed a little bit further, it would all be over.

I could do it. I could make sure he never hurt anyone again. There would be no way for anyone to tell that I’d killed him, and even if they could, my broken ribs and the marks on my neck would make it easy to claim self-defense. He’d tried to kill Mina. He’d killed Mary Ellen, killed his father. He’d tried to kill Shane. Twice.

The problem was, I knew that I could stop.

When I killed Andrew, I hadn’t known what I was. I hadn’t known how to initiate a pull, much less stop one, and in the years since, the best I’d been able to do was suppress what I was, keep my powers battened down so they couldn’t whip out of my control. It was different, now. This time, maybe for the first time, I had a choice.

With a huge effort, fighting instinct and desire and pure inertia, I disengaged my mind from Ryan’s. Every step of the retreat was painful, and I longed to push forward, to finish it. Ryan slumped over me, one arm stretched out across my chest. I could feel his heartbeat. It was a moment before I felt steady enough to shove him off and get up.

I was in the Tooleys’ fishing camp. The unfinished wooden floor was all I’d taken in earlier, but now I saw that one wall was lined with fishing poles and tackle. The camp wasn’t wired for electricity, but it had a plastic sink in one corner, the kind that draws from a roof reservoir. Still shaking from the surge of power, I walked to it and splashed my face with water.

Ryan had brought us down on the back porch, which overlooked a dense stretch of deserted swampland. I went through the doorway to the front porch, which was screened and looked out over the river. Camps stretched out along the weedy bank on both sides, but they were dark and empty. It couldn’t have been past 3:00 a.m., if that. The first fishermen wouldn’t show up for hours. There was no one around.

I had only one option, really. I had to get to Shane, to make sure he was all right. I didn’t have a handy marina to steal a boat from. But if Ryan could teleport on command, then so could I.

I walked back to the spot where we’d hit. Ryan was still breathing, so I left him where he was. Away from the shelter of the side walls, the chill bit deeper into my skin. The water was twelve feet below the porch, and waves lapped against the thick, creosote-soaked timbers holding up the camp and the low dock where the Tooleys must have tied up their fishing boat. Ryan’s power was thrumming in my blood, but it wouldn’t last. Even as I took in my surroundings, I could tell it was bleeding out of me, dissipating. I didn’t have long.

I closed my eyes and focused. Then I stepped off the porch into blackness.

Chapter Thirty-One

I materialized three feet above the balcony of Bunny’s Magazine Street condominium.

I landed hard on weather-warped boards. They weren’t meant to hold a human, and the whole structure creaked dangerously. I staggered and grabbed the knee-high wrought-iron railing. Plaster flaked off the supports and rained down on the driveway below.

“Shit!” I righted myself and faced the floor-to-ceiling window. Old wavy glass. It would be a shame to break it.

“Bunny!” I banged my palms on the panes. “Bunny! Wake up!”

Nothing. I peered inside and saw the outline of a couch and a wingback chair facing a brick fireplace. I needed to get to the bedroom.

Chances were these old windows were painted shut. I reached telekinetically for the latch, but it wouldn’t budge. Could I teleport inside? I wasn’t sure I could risk it—too many warm bodies nearby. To my right another flimsy balcony overlooked the street, and the curtains were drawn across the windows. I reached out carefully and felt Bunny’s sleeping signature. She was having a nightmare about a disastrous hamburger-scented bath gel.

“
Bunny!
Wake up!
It’s an emergency!
”

I wasn’t even sure she could hear mindspeech. She rolled over and slipped deeper into the dream. The spa was overrun with rats wearing paper fast-food caps.

“
BUNNY!
”

Still nothing. I took a deep breath, prayed for control, and levitated myself the four feet over to the next balcony. The landing went much better this time, but I heard a gasp from the street below. A group of three girls dressed in halter tops and high heels stared up at me from the sidewalk.

I closed my eyes and cursed. “Window washing!” I said cheerfully.

They gaped at me, but went clicking unsteadily down the street. Drunk. Thank God.

I banged on the window, not expecting it would do much good. Who knew Bunny was such a deep sleeper? There was no help for it. I crouched on the balcony, curled my arms protectively over my head, and shattered a single three-foot pane of glass into dust with a jolt of telekinetic power.

That woke her up.

By the time I’d fought my way through the filmy white curtains, Bunny was standing up, and her handgun was pointed right at me. She was wearing a midnight-blue satin-and-lace nightgown, and a matching sleep mask was pushed up on her forehead. Her hair, I noticed, was perfect.

“Not another step!” she said.

I put my hands up. “Bunny, it’s me, it’s Cass. I need your help.”

“I said, not another step.” She was still yelling. With the gun still trained at my chest, she fished in her right ear and extracted a bright yellow foam earplug.

I tried again. “Bunny?”

“Good lord, darling.” She lowered the gun and turned on the lamp by the bed, then put on a pair of wire-frame glasses. “What are you doing breaking into my house at—” she looked at her bedside clock, “—three-thirty in the morning?”

“It’s Shane.” The adrenaline and stolen power suddenly weren’t enough to keep me upright. I hit my knees on her plush modernist rug. “Please.”

* * *

Bunny wouldn’t let me come to the hospital. She gave me her cell phone—mine was fried after two trips through whatever it was I went through—and told me she’d call “when everyone was fine.” She said it with total confidence. I wanted to believe her.

I pocketed her phone and called a cab to take me back to the B&B. It was totally dark, none of the guests awake, and Bruce, thankfully, had taken off for the hospital. I pulled out Lionel’s truck, hitched up Mina’s bateau, and headed for the lake.

No roads led to the camp. By water was the only way to get there, and I didn’t have Shane this time to hotwire a cabin cruiser. I launched the bateau myself and levitated myself in, leaving Lionel’s truck parked on the lakeshore.

I drew from the water as I raced over it and boosted the speed of the little motor. It was cold out, and I used my powers to block the wind and warm the air around me. A mental windshield and heater in one. I wouldn’t let myself think about Shane. If he was dead, I would know, I was certain. Thin sheets of ice formed behind me and broke up in the wake.

I should’ve expected what I found at the fishing camp. Ice clung to the support timbers like barnacles. Frost laced the dock with slick, strange patterns, and icicles dripped from the Spanish moss-draped tree limbs overhanging the balcony. I tied off the bateau and climbed carefully up to the house, feeling mentally for Ryan’s presence.