Twisted Miracles (5 page)

“I brought your bag.” He took a half step into the room and set my duffel on the floor. “I could tell you were still awake.”

“Thanks,” I said, not moving. Even several feet away, I sensed his concern. My hand tingled where he’d held it, and my heart pounded with a thousand inappropriate memories of his hands in other places, doing other things. My face heated. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that I was only wearing underwear and a thin T-shirt.

“Thanks for the jacket,” I said, just for something to say. “You can take it back now.”

“Trouble sleeping?” If he was skimming my thoughts, I couldn’t tell.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. The hand with the pill bottle was still behind my back. He noticed.

Shane cocked his head and took another step toward me. I stepped back on instinct. That was a mistake. He closed the distance between us and spun me around before I could react, grabbing the bottle out of my hand. “What is this? You’re still taking these?”

I lunged for the bottle, but he caught me by the shoulder and held me back.

“I only take them at night!” I said, trying to twist out of his grip.

“Every night?” He looked at the bottle. “These are—”

“I know what they are. Give them back.” I felt like a child, and my face flushed with anger and embarrassment. The pity in his expression only made it worse. “You don’t know what it’s like—tearing up my bedroom every night, that day running through my head, over and over again—”

“So this is how you deal with it? You’re just going to ignore it?” He didn’t say it, but I heard him thinking,
Like you ignored me.

He was too close. His chest was half an inch from mine. I had to tilt my head up to look at him, and when I did, his eyes dilated and his grip on my shoulder softened. His fingers began to knead. I wasn’t sure he was even aware of it. It was too familiar, this position, too much like every time we’d kissed in this same room. The way my pulse quickened made me sick with panic.

“It’s the only thing that works,” I said, biting off the words.

He was totally silent for a moment, his dark eyes meeting mine with an intensity that almost made me look away. I held my ground.

“Bullshit,” he said finally.

“Excuse me?”

“Bullshit.” He pulled me in closer. His fingers tightened almost painfully on my shoulder, and his eyes flashed. “I won’t let you do this.”

“You won’t
let
me?” I wrenched myself out of his grip and took a step back. “I’m a grown woman, Shane. Give me my goddamn pills.”

He let his hands fall by his sides, and he didn’t have to speak his answer. The muscles in his jaw tightened. If I wanted my pills, I was going to have to literally fight him for that bottle.

“Fine,” I said. “Keep them. I’ll just get more once I get home.” It was a cheap shot and I knew it, but he didn’t react. A wave of concern and annoyance came rising up from him. I didn’t want to feel it.

I brushed past him and walked out, so angry my vision was swimming. All I could hear was the rush of my own blood in my ears, and I pounded down the hall without knowing where I was headed. Shane started to follow me, then stopped and leaned against the wall outside my room. His thoughts seeped into my head.
—should go after her—but she won’t listen right now—Jesus
,
why do I let myself give a shit—only be harder when she leaves—goddammit—
There was a thump as his fist hit the solid wood of the doorframe hard enough to make the light fixture on the ceiling rattle. I kept going, blocking it all out, and before I knew it, I was in Mina’s room.

It was just as I remembered it—the old antique canopy bed in the corner, a dresser with bits of fabric peeking out of the drawers, her statue of Saint Jude on the mantel surrounded by candle stubs in glass jelly jars. Her fiddle was leaning next to her window, which overlooked the brick-covered interior courtyard.

I went and sat on her bed, leaning against the big orange pillows and remembering the countless hours I’d spent in this spot.

By my junior year of high school, the Weatherfields had custody of me. Some asshole judge decided anyone would make a better guardian than a single gay black man raising his dead brother’s kids, so Lionel’s application to adopt me had been denied. Out loud, the judge said the income from the B&B wasn’t stable enough. In his head:
—pretty little thing—no telling what’ll happen to her in
that
family—that nigger looks like a faggot to me—
Social services placed me with Bill and Kate Weatherfield soon after, and unfortunately, they agreed with the judge about the Tanners. I made up a whole year’s worth of extracurricular activities to explain why I didn’t come home after school.

Looking at Mina’s candles, I remembered sitting there with her late one night during a summer thunderstorm, the rain beating at the windows. Me, Mina and Mary Ellen Hebert, another local converter Mina went to high school with. The power had winked out like it often did in bad weather, and we lit the candles to talk by. Mary Ellen had always been great at starting fire with telekinesis, and I’d been trying to learn. We got tipsy on wine stolen from Lionel’s stash and I lit everything but the wick on fire—the box of matches, Mina’s Calculus book, a dried rose from Mina’s sophomore homecoming. It would have been scary if we hadn’t been laughing so hard. We were lucky we didn’t burn the place down.

“How do you guys do that?” I asked. “Focus it like that?”

“You’ll get there,” Mina said.

“It just takes practice.” Mary Ellen lit a candle and snuffed it out, spinning it in midair.

I’d given up and watched them, wishing I had that much control, wishing my whole life had been different.

Shane and Mina had been practicing since they were six or seven, and I’d only begun training when I was twelve. While they were shuffling playing cards with their minds, I was struggling to lift a single sheet of paper without tearing it. Power would come rushing out of me at odd moments, and I’d break dishes or knock over chairs. Shane and Mina would laugh, set things right again, tease me. I felt like I was wearing mittens—clumsy, but not dangerous.

Everything changed on my last day of college. It was finals week, and I was taking my last exam. Linear Algebra. It was one of those hot, wet-blanket summer afternoons in New Orleans, the air so heavy with humidity it was hard to breathe. The air conditioning in the math building was pretty substandard, so the windows were thrown open even though there was no cross-breeze and the only thing getting in was flies. All the girls were wearing as little as they could, me included—spaghetti-strap tank tops, shorts, sandals. I was in a seat near the window, making myself re-check my answers one last time. My heart wasn’t in it. The guy sitting next to me wasn’t interested in his answers, either. His name was Andrew Allston, and he was contemplating asking me out after the exam. I could hear him trying to come up with a way to sound casual about it, and he caught my eye and smiled, hopefulness surging in his chest. I blushed and looked out the window, wondering how to let him down easy.

That was when I saw the crowd and got that first troubling hint that something wasn’t right. On the grassy area outside the biology building, people were gathered. The group was getting slowly bigger—mostly students but a few people who looked like they could be professors. A couple of campus policemen showed up and spoke into their radios, looking businesslike and grim with the receivers held close to their mouths. The crowd grew larger and louder until we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and my math professor finally gave up and came to the window right next to my desk.

“Oh, dear God,” he said.

We all got out of our seats then, chairs scraping against the linoleum, and clustered around the open windows. I followed the gaze of the crowd to the top of the biology building and saw, standing at the edge, a woman. About to jump.

Several other people made the connection at the same time, and I heard gasps from behind me. Andrew was right next to me, leaning over my shoulder to see out. Everyone started talking at once, pointing, covering their mouths with their hands. Some people looked away. Some got on their cell phones, called friends, parents, boyfriends, girlfriends. And then she jumped.

It looked so unreal, as if she’d tripped, as if it were an accident. Her arms windmilled around; her legs flailed as if she were trying to ride a bicycle. The crowd shrieked and people scattered away, trying to avoid the spot where she would soon, inevitably, hit. I felt more than saw with perfect clarity her face—the fear, the regret. And I just acted. As Andrew’s hand came instinctively to my shoulder in shock, I reached out with everything I had to stop her.

Being telekinetic wasn’t like being Superman. I couldn’t stop speeding trucks or lift boulders off of hikers. If I didn’t have the strength to do it with my hands, I couldn’t do it with my head, and even with the adrenaline rush I got the moment I saw that woman jump, I certainly didn’t have the strength to stop a body falling from seventy feet. But in that moment, I wasn’t thinking. I strained against the force of her fall, slowing her down, putting everything I had into it.

It didn’t seem like enough. But when she was only a few feet from the ground, I got a sudden burst of energy. It was exhilarating, the closest I’d ever get to flying. A flood of foreign images poured through my mind, but I focused all my attention on the falling woman. An inch from the ground, she stopped moving entirely, and for an instant, she hung motionless above the grass while the crowd went silent in utter, terrified shock.

I released her and slumped against the window, totally spent. I didn’t think I could walk if I tried. Outside, the woman got to her feet, looking thunderstruck, and the crowd rushed toward her. Everyone started yelling at once. Then I looked behind me and saw Andrew Allston lying still on the dirty, damp floor of the classroom, and I knew that I’d killed him.

* * *

I didn’t know how I was so certain that I’d killed Andrew, but that final surge of energy must have come from somewhere. It took a few minutes for everyone in the classroom to realize he’d collapsed, and a few more for someone to figure out he wasn’t breathing. When the dark-haired girl standing on the other side of him shrieked, “He’s dead!” I panicked and ran. For hours I wandered the campus, trying to convince myself it wasn’t possible, but I just kept circling back to the feeling of his fingers on my bare shoulder, the burst of power. Finally, I went to Lionel.

“It doesn’t work that way, Cassie,” he’d said. “You can’t suck the life out of somebody. You had an adrenaline rush, that’s all.”

“You didn’t feel what I felt.”

“Sugar, I’m sure it was just a natural tragedy. That was a horrible thing to go through. Maybe his heart was already weak...”

I didn’t believe him. I knew what had happened. No matter how much the Tanners tried to convince me, I was certain Andrew’s death was my fault. All I could think about was how he’d been planning to ask me out moments before, how he’d touched my bare shoulder and died, as if I were an electrified fence.

The coroner chalked his death up to a combination of heat exhaustion and shock. I went through the memorial service in stone-faced silence, waiting for someone to point at me and scream, “Murderer!” I wanted it to happen. I wanted to pay. No one noticed me.

Cindy Cepello, the woman who’d jumped, had a profound religious conversion and started showing up all over the place. She went on radio talk shows and gushed about how God had saved her and how she had a duty to spread his Word. She spoke at churches and high schools and senior centers all over the city, then all over the state, then all over the country. I saw her face everywhere—on television, on flyers on the street—and every time I did I had to fight down nausea. She told everyone she’d been saved by her guardian angel, claimed she’d felt feathered wings around her as the angel swooped down and broke her fall.

I had panic attacks every time I saw her. The doctors gave me sedatives, and I took them every night. They dulled my powers. Trying to use them was like trying to run in a dream—a thick, impotent feeling. I was glad of it. I never wanted to mindmove again. I thought about confessing to the police, but what could I say? There was nowhere for the guilt to go but deeper into my head, and that’s where it went. Shane and Mina tried to help, telling me it couldn’t be my fault, but it only made things worse. I
needed
someone to believe me; I
needed
to pay. Finally, after weeks of too many pills, I left.

I didn’t say goodbye; I didn’t explain. I just left one day and didn’t come back. I knew Shane would try to get in touch with me. We had too much history for him not to try to bring me back, but I refused to hear him. The pills made it easier.

I spent the next five years forgetting what I was, but I hadn’t known until now that the Tanners had always been there in my head, a safe place to land if I ever got desperate. As I lay there in Mina’s old room, soothed by the faint ghost of her presence, the thought of never seeing her again overwhelmed me, and I buried my face in one of her oversized orange pillows and sobbed until I fell asleep.

At 4:00 a.m. I woke up as if an explosion had gone off in my ear. It was her.

Chapter Four

I shot out of bed like a startled squirrel and hit my knee on the footboard. It hurt, but I hardly noticed; I was focused on the feeling of Mina’s mind with everything I had. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to reach me or just broadcasting, but I could hear her. I untangled myself from the sheets and ran out of the room, calling for Shane in my mind, my socks slipping on the cypress floors. He was up by the time I made it to the stairway in the hall, racing down the steps as he fastened a pair of jeans.

“What? What is it?” His heart was pounding, adrenaline surging. I could feel the energy coming off of him from yards away. He hadn’t managed to get a shirt on yet, and his smooth, brown chest was rising and falling rapidly with panic and power. Whatever had happened between us earlier, it didn’t matter now.