Romance: Teen Romance: Follow Your Dreams (A Nerd and a Bad Boy Romance) (New Adult High School Sports Romance)

by White, Stella

  “How interesting.” The officer nodded. “Well, I am Officer Barnaby, and I’ll be investigating what happened here today. Our analysts have already discovered that this was definitely arson. Can you think of anyone who would want to harm your parents or you?”

  Amber struggled to keep the feelings around her from overwhelming her. She wished she had mentioned to Quint that she would need his help blocking out those foreign feelings. She wanted to answer the officer’s questions and leave as soon as possible. She looked up at Quint, wondering if he would be able to read her mind.

  “I don’t. I really don’t know anyone who would want to harm them. Quint. Help me, Quint.” She begged him with her mind, hoping he would catch on. She started crying again and squeezed him around the waist.

  He leaned over and pressed his lips against her ear. “I’m helping you now, Amber. I understand.”

  She suddenly felt awash with peace. She could no longer feel the sorrow, the anger and the suspicion that was coming at her from all sides. Officer Barnaby was staring at them, aware that something was going on he did not understand. He waited for her to look at him again and then gave her a look of understanding, his eyebrows raised.

  “No one?” He said, softly. “Did they get along all right? Did you fight with them or they fight with each other?”

  She shook her head, feeling stronger with only her own emotions to deal with for once. “I really don’t…can’t think of anyone. We did not fight. We never fought. My parents loved each other. You can ask anyone. They didn’t have fights about anything. It was very peaceful in my home.”

  Officer Barnaby nodded. “All right. Is there somewhere you can go while we do our investigation? Do you have relatives you can stay with?”

  “She can stay with my family.” Quint volunteered. Amber looked up at him, wondering what his parents would say to that.

  “As long as it’s all right with your folks.” Officer Barnaby voiced her thoughts. “And we can get in touch with her through you?”

  “I have my cell,” Amber said. “I’ll keep it with me.”

  The officer nodded. “You do that. If you’d like, there’s the chaplain over there. He might make you feel better.”

  There was a young police chaplain staring up at the burnt building, his face reflecting immense pain and sorrow. He kept shaking his head. He was only slightly taller than her, with glasses and closely cropped dark brown hair. She tapped on Quint’s chest, and he looked at the chaplain too.

  Amber felt him pull his block from around her, and emotions came flooding in. She concentrated on the chaplain and got a sense of trust from him.

  “I think I would like to talk to him for a moment.” She said, looking up at Quint.

  “We’ll be in touch. In the meantime, take care of yourself.” The officer once again squeezed her arm. She was grateful for the compassion he sent through her. It was heartfelt.

  Quint took her to where the chaplain was standing. As they walked, she whispered to him quickly.

  “There’s a lab in the basement, hidden from the outside world. No one else will be able to find the entrance. We need to get in there and see what my parents were working on. I’ll explain when we’re in there.”

  Quint didn’t respond or even look at her. He just nodded that he had heard her. He didn’t want anyone else to know she had even said anything to him.

  The chaplain turned to them when they got close. He held out his hand to her. “You must be Amber. I’m Darren. It’s good to meet you. I’m sorry it had to be under these traumatic circumstances.”

  She nodded. “It’s good to meet you too, sir. Please, will you say a prayer for me and my parents? I know they are already singing up there.” She pointed to the sky. “But I will need help adjusting down here.”

  Darren’s face fell into a look of deep sorrow. “I will do that, Amber. I will certainly do that.”

  “Thank you.” Amber still had her arms around Quint’s waist, and she pressed one hand into his back while she reached out with the other to give the chaplain a left-handed shake. He looked confused only for a brief second before shaking her left hand. She instantly trusted him and gave him a smile.

  “If there’s anything I can do, you can find my number. Just google Community of Faith Brethren on Franklin Road. Darren is my name. I’m the pastor there.”

  “I may call on you, Darren. I just may.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  Amber and Quint turned to walk away from him and go back his car.

  “Was that okay? Are you okay from that?” Quint was very specific with his questions. He knew she wasn’t okay and that things weren’t all right. But he also knew that was an experience she had never wanted to go through and would take years to get over, if ever.

  “I’m okay. Thank you for your help.”

  “Anytime. That’s what I’m here for.”

  She looked up at him. “We need to come back to look in the lab. Let’s come back tonight when all of these people have left.”

  He nodded. “We’ll do that. And my parents can come. They will undoubtedly spot things the police missed. They have very keen vision and observation skills. Since it’s already determined to be fire, perhaps they can pinpoint the killers more easily than the police.”

  “And I’ll be able to tell if they are lying or not after they are arrested.”

  Quint smiled at her and kissed the top of her head. “That’s the way to stay positive, girl.”

  Chapter Three

  It was dark before they were able to go back to Amber’s house. In the meantime, Quint introduced her to his parents, Marge, and Joe Preston, two of the nicest people the young girl had ever met. She was grateful that Quint kept their feelings from being exposed to her, though he gave her enough of an opening to know that she could trust them. They weren’t going to betray her or lie to her. They were genuine with her, just as he was.

  Marge prepared a large cheese casserole for dinner. They all ate around the dinner table like a family from years gone by. In her own home, Amber and her parents had not had a dinner table. There was always too much going on for everyone to have dinner at the same time. They’d never been able to take the time to eat together. One of her parents was typically in the lab or out of the house doing field work. She enjoyed the family time a lot, even though it wasn’t her family.

  “We would be glad to investigate the lab with you, Amber.” Joe said. He was a tall man, like Quint, but his gray hair stood up on his head as if he had recently been shocked and he had a gleam in his eye that couldn’t be hidden by the dark framed glasses he wore. Marge was much shorter than him, thin and pretty. Although they both carried smiles for her, she knew that they were burying the sorrow they felt for her at the loss of her parents. Quint quickly explained that she was an empath, and neither adult tried to hug her. Marge simply patted her on the arm and tilted her head to the side sympathetically.

  They were experiencing their own loss, she knew. Her parents had been their friends. They briefly told her how they knew Mr. and Mrs. Price, which was what they called them, indicating they hadn’t been close enough to be on a first name basis.

  “Our group consists of six couples, the parents of kids with special abilities in this county,” Joe explained as they ate dinner.

  “In the county?” Amber asked.

  “Yes.” Joe nodded, lifting his glass to take a sip of Coke. “Besides you and Quint, there are four other children in this area with abilities. We have two that read minds, a set of twins with their own abilities. Let’s see, one has telekinesis, is that right, Marge?” His wife nodded. “You know, he moves things without touching them and the other is a Mind mover. She can put thoughts into someone else’s head.”

  “Yes, that gets her a lot of attention, doesn’t it?” Marge laughed. “Her parents have a lot of trouble getting her to control that.”

  “Wow.” Amber was surprised. She had thought for years that she was the only one in the nation who had a
psychic ability. She wondered why her parents had never told her that there were others like her that were close by, even one that went to her school. She felt like she could probably have used Quint’s help long ago. “How long did you know my parents?”

  “They were recent additions to the group, to tell you the truth. I guess we’ve known them for…what six months now, Marge?”

  Marge nodded.

  “That’s not very long.” She said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  The four of them set out for Amber’s house after dinner when it was dusk, and the sun was about to dip behind the horizon. They used Quint’s car and parked a block away from the burned house. It was still smoldering in places as they approached and Amber felt a wrenching pain in her heart when she looked at it. All her clothes, her bedroom things, the pictures, the memories. All gone. She tried not to cry but couldn’t help letting her tears fall. Quint grabbed her hand and held on tight. She led them to the back yard. She pushed on a huge Oak tree that stood just behind the back of the house. The tree was so large; it’s branches hung over the back porch. Neighbors had been telling her father for years to cut it down, or it would someday fall right onto the porch, destroying it.

  Quint’s eyes opened wide when the tree moved over by two feet just from Amber’s push. He put his hand on it and realized that it wasn’t even a real tree. The bark felt real, but there was a surreal quality to it that would have to be closely inspected to see that it wasn’t real.

  “What happens if someone leans on the tree?” He asked her as they went down a set of hidden stairs below the tree. She looked back at him.

  “They’d fall down the stairs. But you have to push it just right. It won’t just come open on a whim.”

  “So a strong wind isn’t going to reveal the stairs or anything.”

  She shook her head. “That could never happen.”

  She flipped on a light once she was under the tree and he could see that the stairs led to a white tiled floor and brightly lit laboratory. There were tables and chairs lined up in the room, with computers lining the walls, monitors, keyboards, and lab equipment all around them. Charts and graphs were hung on the walls, and a huge dry-erase board stood in the middle of the room. It was covered with numbers and diagrams.

  “Wow, this is amazing, Amber.”

  “My parents did all this. They were working on a serum. Two actually. One to make someone’s powers get stronger and the other to take them away.”

  “Take them away?” That sounded ominous to Quint. His parents were on his heels and gave Amber a quizzical look.

  She nodded. “They wanted to make sure that if anyone wanted to be normal, they could be. They were doing it for me, I think. Being an empath has not been easy for me.”

  The four of them spread out around the room, looking in folders and studying the graphs and diagrams.

  Amber sat at one of the computers, Quint taking the chair next to hers and rolling it closer so he could watch what she was doing. “This is the main computer,” Amber said. “I should be able to access my dad’s notes from here.”

  “Do you know the password?”

  She looked at him with sorrow in her eyes. “Yeah. It’s Amberis#1.”

  He restrained himself before he could say, “Awww.”

  He nodded instead.

  She turned the monitor on and hit the power button. After a few moments, the computer showed the password screen and she keyed it in, hitting enter to bring up the main screen. She moved the mouse to hover over the Notes folder and double-clicked.

  Amber felt Joe and Marge approaching behind her but didn’t turn to look at them. She stared at the most recent notes about the project they were working on and then scrolled down until she found something interesting.

  “Look, look at that.” Quint stopped her from scrolling by pointing at something on the screen. She stopped and read it aloud.

  “Haven’t told Amber about the group or Quint yet. We’re waiting for the right time. She’s aware that we’re working on something to help her. I’d rather not drag a schoolmate into this if we can help it. Closing in on the SubPre group. They are going to try to take us down. We’ve discovered their plans to infiltrate and kidnap the children. We have to stop them, no matter what it takes.”

  She looked behind her at Quint’s parents through narrowed eyes. “Is that the name of your group?” She asked, hoping it wasn’t. She was relieved when they shook their heads.

  “No, look. He mentions our group and Quint. We are the Parent Coalition. We wanted a generic name so that if anyone asked about it, we could just say we are parents of children we want to protect from government control. We use politics to explain the group, even though we don’t have the need to talk about it very much. We aren’t a large group. We don’t have a website or anything like that.”

  Amber turned back to the screen, clicked on the “find” button and typed in “SubPre group”. It brought up several references, and she went to the first mention of it.

  The first mention of the group was from a short two months previous. Her father had found the group online. Its goal was to discover children with special abilities that enabled them to perform tasks that few other humans could perform – such as mind-bending and telekinesis. The group was formed to study and destroy those humans with the abilities so that they would never be a threat to humankind. They purported they were doing “God’s work for the greater good” by exterminating humans found to have any type of psychic ability.

  The words gave Amber chills. “Why would they want to kill us? We aren’t going to harm anyone.”

  When Joe answered from behind her, she swiveled in her chair and stared at him. His words made Quint stare at him in the same way.

  “I know you wouldn’t.” He said. He looked at Quint. “And neither would you. But there are a few people in this world that do take advantage of their powers to harm others. I understand the premise of why they are doing this but to put a blanket conviction over every psychic human being and set out to exterminate them all no questions asked is reprehensible.”

  “Do you know someone like that?” Quint asked. “Are you thinking of someone right now that we should be worried about?”

  Joe looked at the floor, and Marge answered instead, looking at her husband. “Well…as a matter of fact, there is a set of parents in our group that have a son who is not…shall we say, very moral? He would be…a textbook villain, I guess.”

  Quint’s jaw dropped. “No way. What is his power?”

  “He reads minds.”

  “And that’s a threat to all humanity?”

  Marge shrugged. “I suppose if he used it on the right people, it could be very dangerous.”

  Amber turned back around and looked at the screen. “Well, let’s see what else we can find out. It’s obvious this SubPre group tried to burn my house down so that they could get rid of this evidence. But how did they know what my parents are…were working on? What could have led them to…”

  She had a sudden thought and froze, her fingers hovering over the keys. She turned to Quint’s parents again. “This couple. The parents in your group. Do you…do you think they might have been worried, or maybe they were spied upon by this SubPre group?”

  Joe and Marge looked at each other. “I think that’s a good possibility. They were always very nervous at the meetings. They knew that their son was not controllable. Perhaps they…sought help elsewhere? They may have told someone in the SubPre group, unwittingly. It could have led them back to your parents.”

  Amber felt anger rising in her gut but suppressed it. It wasn’t Joe and Marge’s fault that this had happened. She turned back to the computer. “All right, I’m going to see if we can find any addresses or names or something. I guess you know the names of the parents you’re talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, we’ll get their address and go see what they are up to. Hopefully, they haven’t been already taken down by these mur
derers. I’ve got a plan. I think we can stop any more deaths. And maybe we can take care of this kid who doesn’t want to control himself, too.”

  Chapter Four

  After a half hour of investigation, during which time Quint, his father, and his mother began packing up the information her parents had gathered and boxing documents, papers and folders, Amber found what she was looking for. She had the names and addresses of everyone in the Parents Coalition, though she knew she only needed one. It was a family that lived near the edge of the county, about a half an hour’s drive from her home. She spent the next hour helping to clean out the basement laboratory. She did so with a sad heart.

  She took a picture of the dry erase board and then sprayed it clean so that it couldn’t be read from erase marks. They transferred everything on the computers to flash drives and CDs as backup. They packed Quint’s trunk with the remaining physical documentation.

  Quint slammed the trunk closed and looked at Amber. “You ready, honey?”

  She couldn’t help smiling at him. “Yes. Let’s go take care of this situation.”

  Quint dropped his parents off at their home, despite their protests.

  “We need to take care of this, dad. We can do it a lot faster and quieter with only two of us. In fact, depending on what the situation is, I might not be going in to help Amber. She might have to take care of this on her own. She’s the one with the plan. She knows what she’s doing.”

  “You keep your cell phone on,” Marge said. “And be careful.”

  “My cell will be on, but there’s no way the sound will be up. I’m not going to get a call from you when I’m in the middle of a breaking and entering.” He paused, giving them a look. “If that even has to happen. We’ll be careful.”

  Marge gave him a hug and squeezed Amber’s arm as she had done to greet her. “Be careful.” She whispered.

  Amber nodded.

  The two young people got back in the car and headed out.