“No offense, but you had a messed-up childhood.”
“And yours was peaches and sunshine? Father dead, mother absent. Any therapist would tell you that’s why you’re so reckless. You want to get caught. You want your mother to notice you. And that’s why you want to save her, instead of the police, isn’t it? She’ll notice you if you save her. Did you even really tell the police? Or is this all a lie?” She sent the cyclone against his ankles. The sand and pebbles pelted him.
He glared at her but didn’t move. “Defensive much? I haven’t lied to you.”
“Except about my father.”
“That was an omission, not a lie.”
“In case I haven’t been clear, I haven’t forgiven you.”
He looked pained, but she refused to feel guilty. He deserved every second of angst. She created more cyclones. “But you hate your father more than you hate me?” he guessed.
“That sums it up nicely, yes. I want him stopped. I won’t live in fear. That’s my mother’s life, not mine. He can’t make me feel this way.” She glared out at the rain and sent a cyclone into it. The dust was pummeled by the droplets, and the cyclone fell apart.
“If we meet him again, I can teleport him somewhere,” Daniel offered. “Leave him on a mountaintop. Drop him in the ocean. Say the word.”
Despite everything, she nearly smiled. That was the nicest present anyone had ever offered her. “You’ll bring him to the police. That’s my price for helping you. I want him behind bars for what he did to my sister. It’s the only way my mom will feel safe, if she knows for certain he can’t reach her. She’ll never just take my word for it. It has to be visible.” She let the other cyclones fall to the floor. “If he tries to kill us again, of course, all bets are off and feel free.”
“Deal.”
They resumed watching out the doorway. Soon, the rain swept by as if it were a gray sheet that had been draped over the trees and then yanked away. Blue sky appeared in patches and then spread, the gray peeling away around it. A few minutes later, Kayla could see the distant mountains. Daniel wrapped his hand around hers. She flinched. “Sorry my touch is abhorrent,” he said stiffly. “Do you want to stay here?”
She glared at him and let him take her hand, and the world flashed around them.
Rain dumped on them again.
“Guess we should have waited,” Daniel said, squinting as he looked up. Water streamed over his face.
“Indeed,” Kayla said.
“Sorry.”
“On the plus side, I don’t think it’s possible to get any wetter.”
Around them, the rain battered the leaves. It sounded like drums. But soon, it lessened to drips, the forest lightened, and the birds began to call to one another again. Kayla shivered. “Any idea what the stages of hypothermia are?”
“A few jumps, and then we’ll jump somewhere to warm up,” he promised. “I just want to get a little farther.”
“Fine.” Her teeth chattered like fake windup teeth.
“I said I’m sorry.”
“And I gave a very optimistic, silver-lining response about not getting any wetter. If you’d rather I actually complained, I can do that, though I’ll warn you that I can achieve epic-level whining, given the opportunity.”
“It is called a rain forest,” Daniel said.
“Was I blaming you?” Kayla said. “I don’t think I was. I blame you for lying to me. I blame you for leaving me emotionally unprepared to come face-to-face with the man who personified fear and danger to me my entire life. I blame you for bringing me to his attention, endangering both me and my mother. But I don’t actually blame you for the rain.”
“Good to know,” Daniel said blandly. The sky had cleared enough to see a few peaks in the distance, but they were shrouded in streaks of gray. More rain.
Kayla noticed that his lips were tinged bluish. He was shivering too. “I vote we dry off now, let the rain get even farther away, and then come back and continue after the rain stops. Are you familiar enough with this place to come right to this spot?”
He glared at the rainstorm that they seemed to be chasing and then sighed. “Fine. The weather changes visibility anyway. Should I bring you home?”
Kayla glanced at her watch. Only a few minutes left before Moonbeam started to worry. She could go back, and Moonbeam would never know she’d tried this. But if she went back … she knew she wouldn’t leave again. It would be too easy to stay there and stay safe and let her father roam around Guatemala and Peru without her.
“Kayla, home or not?”
If she saw her mother, Kayla would lose her nerve. She had to stay strong. “Not.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to lie to her. I don’t want to explain. I want to fix this.” All they had to do was get to the end of this trail, find the stone, and capture her father. Then her mother would forgive all.
“Selena’s house?”
“Her mother’s home. I don’t want to complicate her life more. Queen Marguerite?”
He shook his head. “Rather not tell her we lost the first stone. Ira Reginae Dolorem, remember? We can go to my home.”
“Yours?”
“It’s not like anyone is there,” he said, his voice grim. He put his hand on Kayla’s shoulder, and the world winked around them.
It took a moment for Kayla’s eyes to adjust. She saw shapes in the darkness: a flight of stairs, a mirror … Daniel flicked on a light. They were in a foyer. A mirror in a wood frame hung on one wall, and Kayla avoided looking at her bedraggled self. There was an umbrella pail and a coatrack next to the mirror. She didn’t know anyone owned a coatrack. She’d thought those were reserved exclusively for restaurants or the 1800s. A raincoat, gray and tailored, hung picturesquely from one of its brass hooks. A few black-and-white photos decorated the wall, mostly houses and streets in Europe. One had a cat in silhouette on a London roof. Another was the Eiffel Tower. A third was an ornate church with a triple dome. None were of people.
It hit her that she was doing this. She hadn’t gone home. She was going to let the two hours expire. Kayla exhaled. You can do this, she repeated like a mantra, as if she were the Little Engine That Could, if what the train wanted to do was toss its dad into prison.
Through one doorway, she glimpsed a perfect dining room with a china cabinet filled with delicate glass vases, Fabergé eggs, and plates with Native American designs. Around a corner, she saw a hint of a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator and an extensive spice rack. Directly ahead of Kayla was a flight of stairs with a deep red rug running up them. Daniel trotted up.
She followed. There was dust on the handrail, and she realized that no one lived here right now. Her life might have been turned upside down by this, but so had Daniel’s. At least she knew her mother was okay and would be okay, even if Kayla got herself killed.
That was not as comforting as it should have been.
Upstairs, the hall was filled with antiques and knickknacks from around the world: an African mask on the wall, an Indian elephant statue on a delicate European end table in one corner, a Greek-looking sculpture of a horse. There were four doors: two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closed door that could have been another bedroom or maybe an office. The first bedroom had a four-poster bed with a bedspread that looked like silk with tassels on the edge. The bathroom had a shelf with a replica of an Egyptian boat. She didn’t see anything in the house that looked like Daniel lived here too until she reached his bedroom. His door was open and he was rummaging through a dresser. She stepped inside.
Daniel’s room was covered in maps. They wallpapered every wall from floor to ceiling. He had photographs pinned everywhere. She walked up to one, a waterfall that cascaded from black lava-like rocks. “You’ve been to all these places?”
He tossed clothes onto his bed. “Not all. But a lot. I keep them for reference—you know, for future jumps. I like knowing I can go anyplace I want. All I need is a picture.”
She walked along the wal
l. There were photos of cafés, of dirt streets and colorful houses, of children with wide eyes, of icebergs, of jungles, of lava-filled volcanoes. “Is there anywhere you haven’t been?”
“Wyoming.”
“Really? Why not?”
He blushed. And then he shrugged. “I like to keep one place that I’ve never been.”
“Why?”
“That way it can’t ever disappoint me.”
“Oh, dude, you have issues,” Kayla said.
He tossed her a plain black T-shirt. “You can wear this. And whatever else you want. Bathroom’s down to the left. You can borrow my mom’s underwear, which is a weird sentence that no guy should ever have to say.”
“Why not choose someplace more, I don’t know, exotic for your ‘one place’?”
“Because my mother and I didn’t go there.” There was pain in his voice, raw and clear, as he mentioned his mother. “Years ago, she planned a road trip for us, across the whole United States. Said she wanted me to see how the pieces connected to each other, instead of jumping from point to point all the time. I would have seen Wyoming then. But she was invited to speak at a conference so she canceled. Never mentioned it again.”
“I’m sorry.” Dammit, she was sympathizing with him again.
“It’s stupid. It wasn’t like I was excited about Wyoming itself. It’s just … She didn’t seem disappointed when she had to cancel, you know? Forgot about it instantly, even though it was the only trip we’d ever planned that didn’t involve her work or my jumping.” He frowned at the photos, as if they’d failed him. “Work always comes first with her. She’d say it has to. Publish or perish. If she wants tenure … She likes to talk about how much better it will be once she has tenure. They can’t fire her after that, so we’ll be secure. It’s a guaranteed future. She doesn’t get that I’d rather have had that road trip.”
Kayla wanted to cross to him and put her arms around him so badly that she took a step toward him before she stopped herself. “I’ll … get ready to go.” She fled down the hall. Cranking the water to hot, she let the steam fill the bathroom before she stepped into the shower. When she came out again, she felt like a thawed Popsicle. Pulling on a mix of his clothes and his mother’s, she emerged, wringing her hair, and she dumped her clothes in the dryer in the hallway.
“Your turn,” she told Daniel.
He headed for the bathroom, and she sat in his room, listening to the shower and looking at the walls. He had maps of everywhere in the world. On his neat-as-a-pin desk were more maps, street maps, and atlases. The bookshelves were stuffed with travel guides and, oddly, dozens of photo albums. Kayla didn’t have any albums from her childhood. Moonbeam had deliberately left those behind. So Kayla didn’t have any cute baby photos or anything. Or any pictures of Amanda. She wished she had at least one of those. It was too easy to forget what her sister looked like. Sometimes she wasn’t sure that she remembered at all. It had been eight years. Kayla felt her eyes heat up. To distract herself, she pulled one of the albums off the shelf and opened it. But there were no cute baby pictures of Daniel inside. Just more photos of places. She flipped through. There were no people in any of the shots, except for what appeared to be casual passersby. She looked through more albums, and it was more of the same.
She checked his desk. There had to be a photo of someone—ahh, there. A photo lay on top of an old album. It was of Daniel and a woman. His mother. It had to be. She had the same black hair and stormy eyes as he did. She was wearing a pantsuit, and she stood stiffly, her arm awkwardly around her son’s shoulders. Kayla guessed he was about three years younger than he was now. He had that gangly new-to-being-tall look. His mother was smiling stiffly. Kayla wondered if they’d been having a bad day or an ordinary day.
The old album was battered leather. She opened it, expecting more landscapes. And saw a photo of Moonbeam.
Kayla sat down hard on Daniel’s bed and stared at it.
Moonbeam looked to be about sixteen. Her hair was short, curled around her ears, and had zero gray in it. She was laughing, and her face was unlined. Her arm was around a younger version of Daniel’s mother, who was also laughing. Both were holding ice cream cones. Ice cream was dripping onto her mother’s wrist.
She turned the page and there he was too. Her father. He was sitting at a picnic table with corn on the cob in front of him, as well as a bottle of ketchup. There was a lake behind him. Another photo had her mother and father. Her mother’s arms were around his waist. He was looking directly at the camera and smiling.
“They were friends,” Daniel said from the doorway. He was wearing jeans and no shirt. He wiped his hair with a towel. “The three of them. Inseparable, from what I can tell.” He sat on the bed next to her. He flipped a few pages and pointed to a photo of two kids, about six or seven years old—his mom and her dad. Her dad looked very serious and very thin. His mother, also too thin, had a bruise on her cheek. “My mom and your dad were best friends since pretty much nursery school. My mom met yours in middle school and roped her in to make a trio. Your parents started going out in high school, but near as I can tell, there were never any jealousy issues. My mom was best friends with both of them.” He turned to a set of high school photos.
“What happened?” Kayla asked. “Did my father just, snap, become a psychotic killer one day, or what?” She pulled a photo of all three of them out of the album. They were seated on bleachers. They had sodas and sunburns and were smiling at the camera. Other people’s legs were in the shot, so they weren’t alone, but they might as well have been. They were sandwiched together, their arms draped around one another—a clear trio. She flipped the photo over. Someone had written their names in blue ink: Evelyn, Jack, and Lorelei.
“My mom never talks about the past. Yours?”
“Only time we talk about my dad is when we discuss how to hide from him. There aren’t any happy stories about him.” Kayla gently touched her mother’s face in the photograph. Lorelei, she thought. Young Lorelei’s thigh rested on top of Dad’s. Her head leaned against his shoulder. “Looks like they were happy once.” She took a breath. She knew they must have been. They’d married and had two kids. She couldn’t imagine that her mother would have married him if she’d had any inkling as to what would happen.
From the hallway, the dryer dinged. Leaving the album on the bed, she fetched her clothes and dressed in the bathroom, being careful to transfer everything from her pockets. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Daniel had finished dressing.
“I should call her,” Kayla said. She picked up the photo of the three of them. Her mother looked so happy. “I should make some kind of excuse so she doesn’t have to worry. She must be so—”
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. They both froze.
“I shouldn’t have turned on the lights,” Daniel said. “Neighbors must have noticed. Let’s go.” He put his hand on Kayla’s shoulder, and his bedroom vanished. The photo was still in Kayla’s hand.
Chapter 15
The rain had stopped. Sort of. It had quit falling from the sky, but it still dripped hard from the canopy of leaves overhead. Shaking off the drops, Daniel walked onto an outcropping. Kayla watched him check the view, then check his compass, then check the view again.
As she waited for him, she knocked drops of water out of the sky. If she concentrated hard enough, she could flick them aside seconds before they hit her skin. It was tricky to hit objects in motion, and it required pinpoint accuracy, like with the mosquitoes. But the more she practiced, the better she got. Soon, she was able to deflect several dozen drops at the same time. She played with flicking them away faster and faster until the rain spattered sideways.
She felt Daniel looking at her. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Releasing the drops, Kayla let gravity grab the rain. It spattered onto her face and shoulders. She wiped her face with her hands. “Ready?”
He held out his hand, and she took it. He hesitated, as if he wanted to say somethi
ng profound, or at least difficult to pronounce. “What?” she asked.
“Do you think … Will you ever be able to forgive me?” The expression in his eyes was so intense and so sad that she had to look away.
“Probably not.” She tried to sound cold. What he did was unforgivable. It was the honest answer.
He was still holding her hand. His hand was damp but warm and covered hers almost entirely. “Can you tell me, if you were in my shoes, would you have done any different?”
She opened her mouth to list the thousand ways she would have acted differently. But if she was going to be honest, then she’d be honest all the way. “In details, yes. In essence …”
“But you still won’t forgive me?”
“Probably not.”
He laid his hand on her shoulder.
The wet green vanished and was replaced by a house with a chain link fence. Kids were playing in the yard in the middle of a mud puddle, stacking goopy mud cakes on top of a toy truck. Mud streaked their shirts. Clean clothes waved like flags on a line strung between the house and the fence. One of the boys jumped to his feet, shouted in Spanish, and pointed at Kayla and Daniel.
Glancing at his compass, Daniel jumped again. Now, they were in the middle of a street outside an abandoned gas station. Rusted cars littered the cracked pavement, and half of the station roof had collapsed. And then they jumped again. And again.
Rain forest. Fields. More rain forest. A road.
“Halfway there.” His jaw was clenched tight.
“Are you—” she began. He jumped them again, and her words were left miles behind. Again. And again. And again. Over and over, until her head buzzed and he started to shake. She grabbed his shoulders. “You need to rest.” She forced him to sit on a graffiti-covered rock at the side of a road. A bus rumbled past. It was crowded with people and released a cloud of exhaust that made Kayla’s eyes sting. “Memorize this place and then take us home to sleep,” she ordered.
Gulping in air, he hung his head between his knees.
“Really? Again? Can’t you stop before you drain yourself? We aren’t going to get there faster if we get ourselves killed sleeping out in the open.” She felt his head. Hot. Idiot, she thought.
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