Here

by Ella James

  It was wrong to feel so glad, I told myself. Wrong for me to think ‘he likes me.’

  I dragged the alcohol over his flayed skin, then dared lean close to blow it dry. I felt his hand come down on my shoulder, and was surprised to feel him leaning on me.

  “I’m not a normal person,” he said softly, to my hair.

  “Why not?”

  His laugh sounded more like a croak. “Where to start? How about this, I can cook.”

  “And that’s weird how?”

  “Because I can cook anything. I can play basketball, too. I shot 322 of 322 at the YMCA. I can play every song I hear on the piano or guitar.”

  My mouth hung open. Nick grimaced. “I rock at Jeopardy.”

  “How—“

  “To top it all off, I’m not going to remember anything.”

  “Someone told you that?” I made my fingers move, gently taping gauze to his hip, but I felt sick for him.

  “The doctors, at University hospital.”

  I tried to focus on those doctors as I folded his boxer shorts gently over the wound. When I was done, I rocked back on my heels. “Why do they think that?”

  “No brain injury.”

  I nodded, like that meant something, and Nick grew more animated.

  “I know everything in all my textbooks. And you know how I escaped?” I shook my head. “I made the wheel lock up. The steering wheel. And then I made the doors unlock. I pressed the break a little bit, and I jumped out.

  “I stole the motorcycle. I wanted it to go, and it just did. That’s how I did it at your house, too. I just didn’t tell you.”

  The revelation should have been earth-shattering, might have been if it hadn’t been preceded by everything else.

  “I’ve still been getting headaches,” he continued. “All the time. But it’s usually when I think of certain things. Like iron. Or water. I know the exact conductivity of my grandmother’s jewelry. Platinum, gold, silver. When I walk outside, sometimes I can feel the angle that the Earth is tilted. I have this sense of where we are…around the sun. And pills,” he said. “I understand them. What they’re made of.” He took a deep breath, like he was preparing to jump into an icy pond, and said, “I remember the crash. I remember looking at it from above.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Did you see yourself?”

  “It wasn’t me. I can’t explain it,” he said, reaching up to push his hair back.

  I noticed a scratch on the back of his neck as he moved.

  “You’ve got another scrape,” I said, because I hadn’t said anything, and I needed to hear my own voice.

  He looked down at his lap, like he knew I was changing the subject, and he was frustrated. I didn’t know what to say, or what to think. I didn’t know how I could help him out of this.

  “Why don’t you roll over? Stretch out on the bed and let me clean your neck?”

  Frowning deeply—obviously upset—he started to get up.

  I caught him by the chest, my fingers tangling in his shirt. “Please?”

  With a long look at my face, Nick turned slowly, easing himself down on his good elbow. He rested his right arm above his head, and I stared at his back, thinking how beautiful he was, how strange.

  Then I stretched out beside him, finding the sore spot with my fingertips and gauze.

  23

  I shouldn’t have come to Milo’s house, but I was weak. When the dudes with the black suits whacked me on the head and stuffed me into their souped-up SUV, I panicked.

  I hadn’t been totally honest with Milo at her concert. Yeah, it was true I couldn’t heal Gabe’s grandma’s arthritis, but I’d left out being mind-jacked by someone with a serious hard-on for charts and numbers. I had a freaky suspicion that the Real Me was some kind of wizard/astrophysicist, because after a couple days of data scrolling through my mind, my superpowers rushed back even stronger.

  I hadn’t left anything out this time, when I told Milo what happened. Except how easy it was for me to take control of their car.

  The Harley had been the closest vehicle to me (I knew the exact distance in millimeters) and the easiest to manipulate. It was slower than the SUV that had been spinning at that moment, tires screeching as it turned to come back for me. But I also knew the town grid completely, and I’d been able to clog their fuel injector, which meant that ten minutes after our little chase started, I had lost them.

  I doubled back, went out of my way to get to Milo’s house. I didn’t want to leave an easy trail, and I wanted to give them a chance to beat me there. When I pulled up and they were nowhere to be seen, I thought I had evaded them, told myself I had gotten away. But I didn’t know. I didn’t even know who they were or what they wanted, yet I’d risked leading them to Milo and her mother.

  And what did I get for my selfishness?

  Milo, wide-eyed and concerned. Milo, rubbing my back, tapping my knee. Milo, heedless of the danger.

  She was leaning over me now, blowing on the scrape she’d just cleaned. “That feel any better?”

  I nodded, my nose and forehead digging into her blankets.

  “Good.” I felt her hand trail up my spine, then lift away and land atop my hair.

  “You can go to sleep, you know. I’ll keep watch.”

  I shook my head, dizzy from the pill and her soft hand. “I need to…go.”

  *

  I don’t know if I even said that. There was a buzzing in my head, a white noise that seemed to come from nowhere.

  My vision whited out, and I got the feeling people had been talking. So many of them, I couldn’t tell who was who. Maybe there was no way to divide the voices. I had the sense that they were all one thing. Voices from one rattled mind? (Mine?) The chorus of people that had made me. I had this horrible sensation, as I lay there listening to them, that I wasn’t real.

  There was something floating just out of my reach. Some knowledge. Something I didn’t want to know.

  Something that had to do with Milo.

  And suddenly I knew that we were talking about Milo. I had shared something I shouldn’t have. I’d revealed something forbidden.

  While some part of me continued lying on Milo’s bed, the rest of me was taken somewhere else: a place I couldn’t see clearly, but somewhere big—a vast ballroom. Unlike last time, where the space I was in had felt so small and crowded, this space was huge and dark. There were others here; I could feel them, but I couldn’t place them. Name them.

  I didn’t want to. I was angry.

  Something wrong was being done. Everything was wrong. If we kept on this way, we would fragment. I tried to impart this, but like other times, “we” didn’t understand. “We” didn’t want to. Already I was beginning to form I, to forsake “we.” Maybe “we” should sever ties right now. Because if it happened by an accident or famine…

  A deafening voice cut through my thoughts, more intention than sound, pushing me out of awareness.

  It was over as soon as it had begun. Maybe sooner. This time I didn’t moan or even writhe, but the pain was still crushing. I arched my back and tried to bring my hands to my skull, which felt like it was being ripped apart. Milo said something. I felt her hands on me. I felt another sudden wave of sensation—like if I wanted to, I could go back to the place where… I didn’t understand what it was. . I didn’t want to, so I shut my mind off. After a minute of hard focus, I was able to hear Milo.

  “Are you okay?”

  The way I saw it, I was pretty well screwed. Not to mention that my head hurt like God’s hands were boxing my ears.

  “Nick?” She shook me slightly. “Are you asleep?”

  I nodded—so much effort. “I’m…sleeping,” I said into her sheets.

  And then I was.

  24

  Watching Nick sleep was like nothing I had done before. Well, duh. But seriously—it was…really cool. Before that night, when I wrapped Nick’s warm, sleeping body in my blankets and snuggled up next to him, I’d never felt like I was missing a
ll that much. I’d never been on the romantic fast-track like Halah, and unlike S.K., who said she was saving her virginity for Chris Pine, I’d never thought about my own—or even making it through the first few bases. If I was honest, those things scared me.

  But lying beside Nick—just lying—was something I decided I could quickly get used to. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of him. I closed my eyes and felt overwhelmed by how much I cared for him.

  We were only friends, of course, but it was pretty clear I liked him more than that. I didn’t think of him in terms of “boyfriend,” probably because our situation was so weird, but when I lay there by him, my heart felt like a helium balloon bobbing on a string.

  After a long time, he turned to me and wrapped one arm around my waist, and my face ended up on his chest, where I could smell his guy-ish scent, plus soap or cologne—something clean, like a mountain brook.

  I couldn’t sleep—or wouldn’t sleep—so I thought about everything he’d told me. It should have been difficult to believe, but it wasn’t. Starting with that whistle—that stupid little metal whistle—scalding my leg, and going all the way up until the party, when I hadn’t felt Annabelle’s pulse, and Nick had brought it back, I’d seen first-hand that Nick was something special.

  I figured that when you saw things for yourself, you didn’t really have a choice but to believe.

  I had extracted myself from his grasp—as painful as it was—to go to the bathroom (leaving a pillow behind to hold my spot) when I heard the doorbell ring. I froze, hand on the bathroom doorknob, desperately hoping that I had imagined it.

  It rang again, and I knew who it was. I felt my chest go cold, the rest of me still. I wasn’t panicked.

  I crept down the stairs, my body tight and hard, ready for action. Mom slept with her fan on, and she didn’t have Dad’s ears. I peeked out the windows in the library, on the middle floor, by her and Dad’s room, and I saw the big, dark SUV.

  The doorbell rang again, followed by someone’s fist pounding on the door. A second later Mom flew out of her room like a bat out of a cave, so when her footsteps hit the stairs, I jumped a mile. My instinct was to run to Nick, but I followed her down, waiting on the stairs while she answered the door in her same, clear, wide-awake Mom voice. I heard a crisp, rich voice: Sid’s. When I crept down to the bottom of the stairs, I caught a glimpse of him and a pretty, short-haired blonde who introduced herself as Ursula.

  “Mrs. Mitchell,” the girl said, “is your daughter home?”

  I jerked like I’d been shot, then whirled and ran upstairs. My room was empty. I ran onto the roof, where I found Nick heading down the stairs. He turned to me, hard-eyed.

  “Milo,” he said firmly, “go inside.”

  “No way.”

  “I mean it, Milo.” And when I shook my head: “Please.”

  I meant to be reasonable, to be rational, to convince him that I was already too involved to make my staying worth anything. But I panicked, and I launched myself at him. “I’m going with you,” I declared as my hands clenched his shirt.

  Nick shook me off and darted down the stairs, and I followed. As he headed for the Harley, parked below the deck and hidden by some bushes, I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward Dad’s Agusta.

  “Milo, please.”

  “Forget about it,” I said.

  He jumped onto the bike like he thought he could lose me, but I was faster than I looked.

  “Damnit Milo!”

  I locked my arms around his waist and we were off, tearing down the driveway, whipping through the grass as Nick cut across the yard toward Mitchell Road.

  We could make it, I thought, as the dark billowed around us. We could make it because we had a lead.

  For a good five seconds, I embraced this fantasy. As Nick swerved onto Mitchell Road and we whizzed underneath the turbines, spinning, flashing against the pink-gray of the clouds.

  Then I heard a noise from Nick that sounded like a curse. I leaned around him, and I realized: we were riding toward two motorcycles. Or rather, they were riding toward us. Their drivers must have been armed with guns, because as they sped by us, I felt something graze the sole of my shoe; my heel was hot and burned a little. I screamed, and Nick sped up, and all too soon they had spun around and were behind us, and the noise of three bikes roaring at max speed was barging through my head, and my heart was beating so quickly that I thought it might explode.

  “Take a right!” I said, too late; he’d already done it. We tilted so sharply I swear I felt my leg brush gravel, and I said, “Go straight! I know a place!”

  For just a second, just one blissful fraction of a moment, we pulled out ahead; I wondered if he was doing something to their bikes. The next minute they were gaining again, their motorcycles faster than the Agusta.

  I clutched Nick harder, glanced behind.

  Oh dear God, they were getting closer. They would ram us, knock us off our bike; they would shoot.

  Out of nowhere I remembered an old obstacle course, a place up to our right—unless we’d passed it; had we passed it?—where Halah and I had gone two summers before to watch some boy she’d liked jump dirtbikes. I remembered that the course was in a clearing, facing a road that wound toward S.K.’s family’s cabin. The cabin was the only place I knew, and it was really isolated, because S.K.’s dad was part doctor, part philosopher, and he had this thing about Walden and— damnit, there was the turnoff.

  “Nick, TURN LEFT!”

  Either I was loud or he had supernatural ears, cause Nick pulled hard to the left, the back tire spun and we fish-tailed, and I screamed and thought they had us but they didn’t. We were shooting through the woods, and then we were in the clearing and the moon lit the ramps and without me telling him, Nick took one of them—a large one that shot us high into the air, so fast our landing took my breath away. My arms lost their hold on Nick, but gravity slammed me into his back and as we shot off, I somehow caught his belt loop and I managed to call, “RIGHT THERE!”

  Right there, between two stones, there was the little path that led us to the road. And by the time we made it to the road, no one was behind us.

  This lasted maybe ten seconds, then the bikes were back. No, bike. Turning around—so dizzy; I might fall—I saw only one headlight and I wanted to cheer even though I was frozen with terror.

  Abruptly I felt Nick’s torso start to tremble, and again, I thought that we would wreck. The last thing I thought before we left the ground was that I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t blame him if he killed us. He’d done so well, and he wasn’t a stunt man or an angel or a vampire. He was just a guy who did weird things.

  *

  I opened my eyes, and we were flying off a cliff. I noticed the railing of a lookout point and thought ironic. This was how Nick had died before—if he was Gabe, if he had died—and we were going to—

  “Oof!”

  We hit the ground hard. The bike bounced so low my shoes touched the ground; the impact shimmied up my shins and thighs, exploding in pain that wrapped my waist. I screamed, and Nick fell forward, over the handles, and the bike tipped sideways, landing on our legs, and in that second, I heard a powerful roar somewhere above us.

  It took me a moment to realize: we were on an overhang. Nick had overshot the road and sped through Johnson’s Post, a popular lookout point, and somehow we had made it to a ledge that hung beneath it.

  More important, we had lost our tail.

  25

  The valley was bathed in soft moonlight, as if the craggy peaks and sparkling suburbs below were behind a sheet of wax paper. It took me several seconds to notice I was leaning sideways, my left leg pinned under the hot weight of the Agusta, my forehead jammed into Nick’s back. He groaned and pushed the bike off of us, balancing it between his legs and leaning forward, onto the handlebars.

  “Nick,” I said, wobbly. “Are you okay?”

  He was panting, but he quickly turned around and reached for me. His warm hand touched down on my hair
, a rough, worried caress. “Are you?”

  “I think so.”

  Still clutching his waist, I looked over my shoulder at the iron rail that framed the cement lookout point. Dust billowed from the rocky path that curved into the brush beside it. It wasn’t an official trail, just a path made by tourists too adventurous for the same snapshot everyone else got.

  “Hop off,” he told me gruffly, then maneuvered his own weight off the bike and held out his good hand for me. Working mostly with that arm and limping slightly, he pulled the bike toward the rock wall, making us invisible from the road.