Tony and I are the last to leave the study. I can feel him close behind me as I reach up to turn off the light switch. His hand gently covers mine from behind and guides my index finger to flip the switch downward. We are plunged into darkness as the footfalls of our friends grow further and further away.
All of my other senses go into high alert and I find myself even more acutely aware of Tony than I’d ever been in the past. He slowly turns me to where we are facing each other. One hand is clasped in his and the other I reach up to place lightly on his chest, just above his heart. His heart is pounding wildly and it sends a shiver of pleasure through me. As he leans in to place his mouth on mine, I find my heart contending in a high-stakes race against his. My head goes dizzy and my knees grow weak as this kiss takes me away to places I’ve never been before. Just when I think I can’t take any more, because if we kiss any longer it would be almost torturous to stop, Tony pulls away. He rests his forehead against mine. His breathing is heavy. We stay like this for a few minutes, until both of our hearts wind down to a simpler pace.
“I love you, Willow. Sometimes—” He seems to be having trouble vocalizing what he wants to say and I find myself listening into his thoughts. “—Sometimes, I feel as if loving you is the single greatest and scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Scariest?” I ask, bewildered.
“Yes. You are my oxygen, Willow. If you ever left me, if anything ever happened to you... I don’t think I could ever breathe again. I think I would just cease to exist right then. That is terrifying,” he tells me.
“I won’t ever leave you, Tony. I love you.” I move my hand from over his heart and place it on the side of his cheek. “If I am your oxygen, then you are my gravity, Tony. You keep me grounded. If it weren’t for you holding me to this earth, I surely would have floated far, far away, filled with the pain of losing my mother. I would be drifting into space, filled with anguish. Instead, you keep me here and you fill those empty and sad places with something much bigger than words can express. You give me hope. Because if we can still find a love this powerful amidst the chaos that consumes our surroundings—then there is something to live for. There is something to fight for.”
Without words to express his feelings, the same feelings that run amuck throughout my body, he pulls me into another kiss. This one is deeper, filled with a thirst that isn’t easily quenched. Our bodies are so close that our heartbeats become one. His hands wrap around my waist and pull me even closer. I wrap my arms around his neck and revel in his touch. Then, just like before, our lips part when I think I can’t take any more. “I love you,” he says again.
“I love you too,” I answer breathlessly.
“We should get back upstairs,” he tells me but doesn’t move.
“Yeah, we should.”
We both stay for a few more precious moments, just relishing in the closeness of each other. Then, reluctantly, we head upstairs hand in hand.
CHAPTER 8
I don’t wake up until closer to noon. All the excitement from the day before made for a good, high-dosage sleeping pill. When I do finally open my eyes, the sun is streaming in through the windows. I can smell freshly baked biscuits and my stomach growls. I look around and see that I must have been the last one to wake up.
I head into the kitchen and find everyone else, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, sitting around the breakfast table.
“Good morning, sunshine,” my dad says.
“Your hair funny, Wello.” Sabby giggles and Lillie lets out a silly laugh.
I reach my hands up and try to smooth down my curls.
“Bedhead is hot,” Tony says to me in our own secret language.
I raise an eyebrow at him and then roll my eyes jokingly before taking a seat. The biscuits are still slightly warm. I grab one and pour some honey on it. “Thank you,” I tell her before taking a bite.
“No problem.” Carrie smiles.
“So you want to do some exploring today?” my dad asks me.
I gulp down my bite and nod my head.
“I looked through the paperwork. That’s some disturbing evidence stacked against Dr. Hastings. I am relieved to know that the government wasn’t a part of this craziness,” my dad says.
“Me too!” Carrie says.
“Me tree!” Sabby adds, even though he has no idea what we are talking about. He giggles again.
“You are a giggle pickle today, aren’t you?” I smile wryly at him.
He and Lillie bust out in another giggle fit that has us all smiling.
“I told your dad that someone should stay here to protect the kids,” Tony says.
“He was referring to me staying here.” My dad arches an unamused eyebrow.
“What am I? Chopped liver?” Carrie asks. Then to demonstrate, she stands up from the table and heads to the fridge, which she persists to pick up off the ground. She doesn’t lift it all the way, because she doesn’t want to pull the cords from the wall. It’s enough though for us to get the point. Carrie seems to be the gentle, caregiver type. She cares for the children, cooks the food, and is like the ultimate mother hen. It isn’t often that we think about the power that she wields behind those neon-yellow eyes.
“You are definitely not chopped liver,” my dad tells her.
“No, Ms. W. Liver is gross! You are not chop liver,” Lillie says.
“Gross!” Sabby agrees.
This makes Carrie smile. She was never very upset about the idea of needing to be protected; she just wanted to give us a reminder of what she’s capable of it. “Thank you,” she tells them.
“You welcome,” Sabby says and Lillie agrees.
“I didn’t say who should stay.” Tony brings the conversation back to its origin. “I was just stating that not all of us should go. A few should stay behind with the kids.”
“So you want to stay behind then?” my dad asks him.
Tony looks taken aback. “Uh, no sir. I was just thinking, what with the powers that I have, and my experience having been a fighter, that I should be a part of the party that goes.”
“And since my daughter has similar experience, then she should go too?” he asks with a stern expression.
“Dad,” I draw out, not knowing why he is being hard on Tony this morning. Then I feel it. He must have had a vision or something about us. He has protective papa bear emanating from him like crazy.
“He had a vision of us getting married.” Tony laughs inside his head as he looks at me. “I don’t think he was ready for that. I guess he’s starting to be able to see further into the future than just a few days.”
“Wow. Um, that’s a little weird,” I say to him, trying not to think at all about the vision I had of Tony asking me to marry him. Hopefully, he didn’t have a vision of our wedding night. I put my hand on my dad’s hand. “If you want to come you can, Dad. Connor and Claire can stay.”
“Hey!” Connor says, not seeming happy about the new plan.
I give him a stern look and he shuts his mouth.
My dad seems to think it through. I watch as his face flickers through an arrangement of different emotions. Finally, as if he’s decided that his behavior is childish, he relents. “No, you can all go. Carrie and I will stay here. You need to go soon though. It doesn’t look too far away, but I want you back before nightfall.”
“Deal!” I agree. I kiss him on the cheek, scoot my chair back, and hop up from the table. “Let’s do this,” I say, feeling good about doing something purposeful. I know we should be finding our friends that were taken by the military, but we have no clues yet as to where they were taken. Nor do we know exactly how we can retrieve them if they are able to incapacitate our powers.
I throw on my warm clothes and then look outside. After seeing the bright landscape around the front yard, I run upstairs to search through Candy’s old bedroom. I come up with a few pairs of sunglasses and excitedly bring them downstairs. Tony had rummaged through the other rooms and found a few pairs as well. I try n
ot to think of the men they used to belong to.
With the sun out full force today, its reflection against the snow can be almost blinding. Now that we have the proper, and might I add very stylish, eye protection, we are ready to head out.
My dad and Carrie escort us to the front porch. My dad hands me a pistol, which in any other time would be an odd gesture. “Be safe,” he tells me.
“I will, Dad,” I assure him. I accept the pistol, check that the safety is on, and then place it in my jacket. “Love you.”
“Love you too, Willow,” he tells me.
I smile at him before heading off with my friends to find out what might be on this mysterious plot of land.
It doesn’t take us too long to tread a mile through the partially melted snow. The entire walk passed in a deadened silence with none of us saying a single word. The only sound to be heard comes from a bird here or there and our feet plowing across the white earth. We don’t even realize that we reached the address of the land until we arrive at the edge of a cliff. We saw this same drop off on the drawn map of the boundary lines. This means that we have passed through the land that Dr. Hastings owned.
“I don’t see any buildings,” Connor says.
“Me neither,” Claire agrees.
I look around at a sea of white. The trees still dot the earth. “I guess he never used it.” I don’t even try to mask my disappointment. I have no idea what I hoped to find here anyway. Perhaps I thought I’d find the answer to the thousand and one questions I have.
We walk around, pacing across the acres of land, hoping to find something, anything, that can help us. We spend an hour scouring it from side to side. “Maybe he owned it and planned to use it for something in the future, but never got around to it,” Marya suggests after a little while.
“Yeah, but why was he so secretive with the deed?” I ask.
She shrugs her shoulders and tosses her strawberry blonde hair over her shoulder.
“Hey! I think I found something!” Claire calls out from near a close cropping of trees.
We all run over to her. She’s kicking at the ground and shoveling snow away as best she can. Connor and Alec have already started helping her.
“I felt my foot hit something hard. It might just be a tree root though,” she says, looking at the trees around her.
We began to push back the remaining snow, slowly exposing a metal door meticulously made to look like the earth. The handle is the one thing that doesn’t belong and makes it look out of place. The one thing Claire happened to catch her foot on. Seriously, what are the odds?
Once we’ve unearthed the door, Tony has us all step back while he struggles to open it. His face turns red with effort. It makes me wonder what the door is reinforced with if a man with super strength can’t make it budge.
Connor comes up behind him and places his hand on his back. “I got this,” he states with a smirk. Connor pokes his head through the metal door; the sight is eerie and unfitting as half of his body is plunged underground. After a handful of seconds, he pops back up.
“Dude, I was about to do that,” Tony says to Connor.
“Sure you were,” Connor mumbles under his breath. He turns to look at the rest of us. “It’s a metal tunnel. Nothing else except that, from what I can see.”
I’m about to plunge my head through to see what he’s talking about, but a strange feeling stops me in my tracks. I can feel an odd sense of nervous excitement coming from the woods. I stand up and look at my friends, trying to figure out if the feeling is emanating from one of them. Tony gives me a curious look before his eyes turn black and his body tenses from having caught the feeling a moment after I did.
A throat clears from somewhere behind him and then an unfamiliar voice speaks. “Hey there.”
Everyone stops dead in their tracks and look from one person to the next, everyone except Tony and me. We are already reaching for our weapons.
Claire whispers with a panic in her tone, “Who said that?”
“I mean you no harm,” the voice says again.
This time we all waste no time coming together as a group and then turning into a full circle with our backs to each other—readying ourselves for any onslaught of trouble. I pull the pistol from my back pocket and point it towards the trees. There’s a small rustle in the bushes and a man steps out. I immediately readjust my aim.
The good-looking man lifts his hands up in a surrendering gesture and takes a step forward into the sunlight. I survey him. He can’t be too much older than we are. He’s tall with a medium build. His jeans and boots are covered in snow and his black jacket looks like it has seen better days. His blonde hair is cropped close to his head and his eyes are most unusual. They are a deeply intense, blue-green that I haven’t yet seen. They are shimmering with excitement at seeing us. He doesn’t seem fazed at all by the gun I have trained on him. Instead, he gives me an appraising smile and I feel locked in by his gaze, by those eyes. The excited feelings rolling off this stranger are hard for me to read. I can’t read his intentions at all but somehow I’m not scared and I almost feel guilty for aiming my weapon at him.
Obviously Tony can’t read him either but he doesn’t seem to be bogged down by the strange sense of guilt that I’m experiencing. I feel the energy leave Tony as he raises the log that was a foot in front of the man, to block his path. “Not another step,” Tony shouts at him.
The log hovers in midair, making the man’s interesting eyes go wide. “It’s true,” he whispers.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Tony demands.
Connor interjects, “Yeah, what he said.” I notice though, that there isn’t much conviction in Connor’s voice and his stance loosens.
The grip on my gun falters slightly and I feel an untraceable tug, like its being pulled from my hand. I grip it tighter and keep the pistol aimed at the stranger, his head in my sight. I force myself to think about the facts and not think about whatever is trying to sway me to trust this stranger. The facts are that we don’t know him and that he has eyes the color of the Caribbean ocean. An eye color we have yet to find!
His gaze seems to settle on me when he answers. “I’m sorry I startled you. I just wasn’t sure how to approach you. I’ve been running from these... From these monsters for a few days now. Every time I think I’ve out run them or outsmarted them, they find me again. I have no idea what they want from me. When I try to ask them, they look at me with hungry eyes. I lost them a few miles southeast of here. I hadn’t slowed down until I heard voices in the distance, your voices. I came to see if you could help me.”
I let my pistol drop just a bit. “Are you traveling alone?” I ask him.
“Yes, yes I am,” he nods. His eyes rake over me, sizing me up.
Tony steps in front of me and I have to hastily aim the gun towards the ground so as not to have it at his back. “We’re going to need to search you,” Tony demands.
The man thinks for a second as if he has a choice, then nods. “Okay.”
Tony leaves the circle and heads towards the man. He turns him around and scoots his legs apart with his foot, just like in those cop shows I used to watch. I drop the pistol to my side as Tony searches him. The man seems unconcerned by their invasion of his privacy. Instead, he pulls his gaze away from mine and assesses the rest of us.
I don’t miss the interested feelings that wash over the girls. This stranger intrigues them.
The few items Tony finds in the man’s pockets are dropped on the ground during the search. It looks like a sheathed knife, wallet, a lighter, and a key ring.
Alec comes behind Tony and grabs the wallet in search of identification. “Michael Bennett, age twenty-three. Brown hair, blue eyes, 5’9”, and 165 pounds,” Alec says, reading his identification card aloud. He flips through the wallet some more. “Works for Atlas energy as an energy consultant. Nothing else I can tell here.” Alec tosses the wallet back into the pile.
Blue eyes, I wonder. So is the color of his
eyes his original color from birth? It’s in this moment I realize that the one gift I rarely use could be of huge value.
I walk up to Tony, put the safety back on my gun, and slip it into my pocket. I put my hand on his shoulder as he finishes his searching procedure. “I’m going to read his memories,” I tell Tony.
“Together,” he says and grabs my hand. I notice that Tony has a swirl of silver in his eyes. He’s already working to shield himself from any unforeseen threat.
I feel strangely pulled towards the man that Tony has a hold of, so I should probably do the same. A memory of Zack and his compulsion flickers in my mind and icy pinpricks cover my arms. I focus on putting up my shield as I address the man. “If you don’t mind, Michael, we’d like to make explicitly sure that you mean us no harm. May we have your hand please?”
His blue-green eyes flinch almost untraceably before he hesitantly offers us his hand. I close my eyes, feeling his gaze weighing heavily on me. I do my best to ignore it as Tony and I take hold of his hand together and are instantly transported to a whirlwind of memory flashes. We go momentarily blind as we walk through his memory.
Nothing that I can see sticks out like a red flag. A non-broken home, a stay-at-home mom, private school, a high school sweetheart that died from the outbreak, a... I gasp for breath, my whole body feeling jarred as the sound of metal screeching, screams, and then an explosion fills my mind. I drop his hand and blink several times, trying to regain my sight.
“What the heck was that?” Tony asks, shaking his head in an effort to clear it.
The pain from his memory was so severe and quick that it felt like a slash, like a cut deep inside me. I run my hand over my head and through my hair, taking a few breaths. Alec has come up behind us and has his hand on both Tony’s and my shoulder. Connor is training the gun Alec must have handed him, at Michael.
“What was it?” Alec asks. I can feel him sending healing into us even though it’s not necessary. We didn’t really get hurt—it was just a memory... Michael’s poor and horrific memory.
Ending ELE (ELE Series) Page 10
