Pull

by Anne Riley

  “Hang on, champ,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I was going to say, the thing is, you actually might be able to Pull because you can feel it and your grandfather could do it, and guess what? The ability to Pull can be passed down to a blood relative. Not always,” he says as I bounce on the balls of my feet, “but sometimes. And I don’t know specifically how it’s done, except that it involves a great deal of magic and sometimes it doesn’t work at all—”

  “Okay!” I cry out. He winces. “So let’s see if I can Pull, and then we’ll figure out what to do about Paul and The Black Swan. Sound good?”

  “I don’t think there’s any stopping you,” he says, giving me the side-eye. “But I’m determined to shower first. Dan’s put the kettle on for tea, although more caffeine might make you explode.” He motions for me to enter the house. “Go on into the kitchen. I’ll be back down in a bit.”

  I walk through the foyer to the living room and pass the sofa, where my red blanket lies folded across the arm. I push through to the kitchen. Dan is leaning against the counter with his long arms crossed tightly, glaring at a bright red coffee maker while it splutters black liquid into the carafe below.

  “Heck yes,” I say to the full pot on the counter.

  Dan turns to me with a mock scowl. His red hair looks even wilder than Albert’s, and his freckles stand out on his pale skin. “Look,” he says with exaggerated pain, “if you’re going to walk into my kitchen and throw filthy language around like that, I’m going to have to hurt you.” His expression darkens. “Don’t think I won’t make you drink decaf.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” I say. “No one’s that heartless.”

  He grins. “Cups are in the cupboard by the sink and milk is in the fridge.”

  I retrieve two white mugs and set them on the counter. Dan fills each of them nearly to the top while I wait, tapping my fingers against the countertop. It’s quiet again—too quiet. And just like always, I’m desperate to fill the silence.

  “Albert said you were making tea,” I announce.

  He grimaces as he carries our cups to the kitchen table. “Not strong enough today, love. Want to sit?”

  I grab the milk out of the fridge and follow him to the table, adding white to the black until my coffee turns a soft gold. The kitchen is so small I feel like we should be running into each other at every turn, but somehow, the space doesn’t seem too cramped. The round white table fits nicely into a bay window that overlooks the backyard, and the appliances are minimal, which keeps the room uncluttered.

  “I never got to thank you for what you did at the Hare & Billet,” I say as I sit across from him.

  He shakes his head and gazes into his steaming mug. His eyelashes are the same shade of orange as his hair, long and delicate, and the blue of his irises is just visible through them. “Don’t worry about it. Just a typical night in London, isn’t it?”

  “Not for me. And not for anybody else except you four.” I laugh. “How do you do it?”

  He looks up. “How could we not?”

  To me, there are a million ways they could not. They could pretend their ability didn’t exist, for one. They could walk away and let whatever happens happen. Lord knows it would be easier if they just acted like everybody else, like they were as much victims of the universe as the next person.

  But they don’t.

  “Not everyone finds it so easy to put themselves in danger for someone else,” I say, tracing the rim of my mug with my finger.

  “Yes,” he replies. “But not everyone has the ability we have, either.”

  He takes a long sip of coffee, and I turn my gaze to the window. The kitchen is on the back of the house, so we have a view of the small, overgrown yard. There’s nothing in it but a pile of firewood in the corner, next to a big tree stump with an axe leaning against it. I wonder which of them chops the firewood when it gets cold.

  “Albert told me you’re Edward Clayton’s granddaughter,” Dan says after a while. “He was a great Servator and a great man. I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you at the service; Casey and I weren’t able to attend the burial.” He pauses for a moment, as if he’s wrangling his emotions into submission. “Someone always has to be on patrol, no matter the circumstances.”

  “How did you meet him?” I ask. “My grandfather. You obviously knew him well.”

  “Through Al.”

  “And how did you meet Albert?”

  He wrinkles his long nose with a smile. Everything about Dan is long, from his gangly limbs to his pointy chin. “It’s a bit embarrassing.”

  “I won’t laugh. I promise.”

  “Not embarrassing for me,” he says with a grin. “Embarrassing for Al.”

  “Oh, now you really have to tell me.” I prop my elbows on the table. “Go on. I’m ready.”

  He leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. “We were at a mutual friend’s party a few years ago. This gorgeous girl had been snogging him all night, but then she left with somebody else. He was trying to Pull so he could get her back and take her home with him.” He chuckles. “You know the slang meaning of ‘pull,’ I assume. We’ve joked since then about him being on the pull that night and trying to Pull just to pull a bird.”

  I flash back to that night in the Hare & Billet when Albert first told me about the Pull. It has nothing to do with kissing, he said to me when I brought up the term’s colloquial meaning. It seemed funny then. But now, I can feel my face arranging itself in disgust. Using something as important as the Pull just to get a girl? That doesn’t seem like the Albert I know. I try to picture it happening, but I can’t.

  “He was too drunk to make it work, of course, so all he managed to do was exhaust himself. But I could feel him trying to do it, and I recognized the position of his hands—palms up.”

  The memory of Albert under the table at the pub comes back to me. I remember his open hands, the way he closed his eyes and went very still—and then everything swirled into a vortex, and the people who had been dead weren’t dead anymore.

  “I’d been Pulling for years at that point, so I figured he was either a Servator or he was insane. Either way, he seemed like a fun bloke. I walked up to him and asked if time manipulation was something he attempted for every girl, or just for the incredibly fit ones.”

  His face lights up with laughter. I move my lips into a shape that hopefully resembles a smile, but my stomach has turned to molten lava and sunk all the way to my toes. I stare into my coffee.

  “You okay?” he asks, watching me closely.

  There’s a noise at the door. I look up to find Albert standing there with damp hair, wearing his usual uniform of frayed jeans and a T-shirt. This time, the T-shirt is a dusty shade of blue, and I wonder if he bought twenty of the same shirt in twenty different colors. They certainly look identical, with the pocket on the left side and a tendency to cling across his chest.

  The flutter comes back—a fizz of bubbles deep in my gut. I blink and shift my eyes back to my coffee, wiping at a rogue droplet with my thumb.

  “All right, Rosie,” Albert says with a smile. I look up and force myself to smile brightly. “Ready to be trained in the art of Pulling?”

  “Of course.” I stand up and squash the seed of disappointment planted by Dan’s story. So Albert tried to use the Pull to get some action. I bet every Servator in the world has done that at one point or another.

  “Aren’t you going to eat something?” I say. My voice sounds too sharp, my words too quick. I lick my lips and take a deep breath; let’s try that again, without the accusatory tone. “Surely you don’t want to do this on an empty stomach. Unless a full stomach would be worse, with the whole turning-inside-out feeling.”

  He slathers a slice of white bread with Nutella. “The last time I Pulled hungry, I passed out and nearly fell off a bridge.” He devours the whole thing in two enormous bites. “Right. Let’s go upstairs.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “SO HOW IS THIS GOING TO WORK?” I
SAY AS I SETTLE into the brown armchair in Albert’s room. “Do I need someone to save? You’re not going to have to hurt yourself or anything, are you?”

  Albert crosses the room to the window, where a timid sliver of sunlight seems to be requesting permission for its existence. It stretches from his left temple down to the right side of his jaw as he leans against the window frame, and for a moment it looks like he has two faces, separated by a stripe of pale gold. But then a cloud shifts, and the two faces merge into one.

  “Nah, don’t worry,” he says with a grin. “If somebody has to be hurt, I’ll make Dan the guinea pig.”

  “Very funny.” I tuck my knees into my chest. “Seriously, though. How do we do this?”

  He moves to the bed and sits carefully on the edge of the mattress. We’ve sat like this before—me in the chair, him on the bed. But I have a feeling this conversation won’t be anything like that one.

  “Even if you have the ability to Pull,” he says, “you won’t be able to do it unless you’re desperate to change something. Not at first, anyway. With more practice, you’ll be able to do it whenever you want, but it will take a while.”

  “Okay.” The half-gallon of coffee I’ve had is starting to burn a hole through my stomach. “So what do I do?”

  “In a real-world situation, you’d check your watch right before you Pulled.” He holds up his left wrist to show me the black watch wrapped around it. “Otherwise, after you’ve Pulled, you have no concept of how much time you’ve bought.”

  “And if I don’t have a watch?”

  “We’ll need to fix that soon. In the meantime, we’ll start with the fun bit.”

  He extends his hands, palms up. “Hold your hands like this, and focus on the exact moment you want to relive. Picture as many details as you can. If you do it right, your fingers will touch something that’s not there.” His mouth twists as he searches for the right words. “It’ll feel like a handle, but you don’t have to move your hands to grab it. You just use your mind. And once you’ve got your mental fingers wrapped around the handle, you Pull. Make sense?”

  I mimic the position of his hands. “You just used the phrase ‘mental fingers’ in a sentence. Of course it doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know, I know,” he says. “It sounds ridiculous. Let’s focus on finding your motivation.” He looks around the room as if my motivation could be lurking in a corner or behind a book. “Something needs to happen that you want to change.”

  I give him a significant look. “Like another chance at getting in somebody’s pants?”

  He freezes and looks at me like I’m a cat about to take a swipe at him. When he speaks, his voice is low and even. “What are you talking about?”

  “Dan told me how he met you,” I say, feeling heat creep up my neck. “At that party, where some girl made out with you all night. He said he felt you trying to Pull so that you could leave with her.”

  “Oh.” He cocks his head to the side. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. I—just forget about it.”

  “Does that upset you?”

  I look down. “I spent half the night going through my grandmother’s scrapbook of the Blackheath Savior,” I begin. “I’d started to think of the Pull as a gift. A way to make the world a better place. But now I’m afraid that you use it for your own purposes, too.”

  Albert’s face hardens into an expressionless mask, and I squirm beneath his stare. Why did I say that to him? He’s saved my life multiple times since I got into town, and now I’m suggesting that all he cares about is getting girls.

  “I was a different person three years ago,” he says.

  Regret climbs up my throat and starts to choke me. “You don’t have to—” I begin, but he holds up a hand. The words die in my mouth.

  “My dad had just left Casey and me. He moved to New York. Said he needed a fresh start in a new city.”

  The disdain in his voice is almost a tangible object I could pick up and toss around.

  “He’s a barrister, and a really successful one, so he paid off this flat, paid our tuition through graduation, and told us to call our uncle in Worcester if we needed anything. It wasn’t that big of a shock when he left—he worked all the time, so we were used to taking care of ourselves—but it still hurt, being abandoned like that.”

  I’ve wondered about his parents—why he and Casey live in this flat with two other guys, how they manage their expenses with nothing but part-time jobs. But I didn’t expect that the answer involved abandonment, and I didn’t expect to get the answer by making a fool of myself.

  Were Dan and Isaac left by their families, too?

  “My answer to that hurt was, quite simply, to have as much fun as possible.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I went to parties almost every night. Drank anything I could get my hands on. Took drugs whenever I could find them. Hooked up with girls I cared nothing about.”

  I lick my lips; my mouth has gone unbelievably dry. “And now?”

  “And now I’m clean. In every way.” His eyes are locked on mine. “Sure, I’ve got regrets—loads of them. But I’m not that bloke at the party anymore. I haven’t had a drink in two years. I haven’t taken a hit of anything in two years.” He swallows. “I haven’t been with a girl in two years. In fact, I don’t even pay attention to girls unless—”

  I watch him closely. “Unless?”

  His jaw clenches once, a flutter of muscle that ceases almost instantly. “Never mind. The important part is that your grandfather dragged me out of all that. He’s the one who helped me sort out my life.”

  I’m dying to ask him where his mom was when all this happened, but judging from his reaction last time I asked about her, that’s probably not a good idea.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. It’s none of my business.”

  He doesn’t respond. His expression is carefully neutral, and it’s all I can do not to beg him to say something.

  Finally, he stands up. “Do you still want to try to Pull?”

  “Yes.” I get to my feet. Maybe if I can appear calm, I’ll start to feel calm. “But I don’t know what to use for motivation.”

  He crosses his arms. “Do you have something special I could destroy? It needs to be something you love, but not something you can’t bear to lose. Once it’s gone, it’s gone; I won’t use energy on a Pull to get it back for you. But you need to really feel the loss of it. You need to want it back.”

  My hand flinches toward my necklace. Albert catches the movement.

  “You said a friend gave you that,” he says, “the night I brought you to my flat for the first time. I asked you about it because you kept touching it.”

  I pinch the golden rings tightly. Part of me wants it to stay around my neck forever; the other part can’t get rid of it fast enough. If the necklace is gone, it will feel like my relationship with Stephen is really over—for good. No going back. No second chances.

  And I just don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of finality.

  “That’s what I said.” I clear my throat. “But I lied. It was a boyfriend.”

  He looks from the necklace to my eyes, and back again. “A current boyfriend?”

  “No. We broke up.” We broke up. It’s the truth, and yet it’s so laughably incomplete. Alternate phrases run through my mind, various ways of communicating the fullness of what happened.

  He shattered my heart the day Papa died.

  I found him betraying me with another girl in April.

  The relationship we spent two years building fell to pieces the moment I left his sight.

  “It’s time I took it off,” I blurt. And then—no, no. I can’t be crying—not here, and not about this necklace. But the tears are coming hot and fast, and even though I manage to wipe them away before they fall, I can’t hide them completely.

  Albert watches me, stone-faced. “Sometimes,” he says, “we need a little shove from the nest.” />
  He reaches beneath my hair and feels for the clasp. His fingers trace warm paths over the back of my neck. I let my eyes fall shut. There’s a small click as he unhooks the clasp, and I open my eyes to see it dangling in front of me. It looks so fragile in Albert’s hands, like it’s made of thread instead of metal.

  “You’re sure this is okay?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Not really. But that’s the right answer, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he says with a sad smile. I feel like he understands. It’s in the way he looks at me with long gazes that drape around me like a cloak.

  “All right then.” He nods toward the door, pocketing my necklace. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  We swirl down the staircase to the ground floor and I follow him into the living room, through the kitchen, and out a back door that leads to the overgrown yard. We walk until we reach a tree stump near the axe I saw earlier. Albert stretches my necklace out on the stump and picks up the axe, testing its weight in his hands. I can tell he knows how to handle it.

  So that’s where those callouses came from.

  “Last chance to back out,” he says with a half-smile. “Ready?”

  “Well, mostly—”

  WHACK!

  In one swift motion, my necklace is halved. He swings the axe over his shoulder and brings it down again, right where the two rings link together. They fly apart and one piece of the necklace lands in the grass. He picks up part of the chain and tosses it into some scrubby bushes over the fence. Then he flings the remaining parts onto the roof.

  And just like that, my last connection to Stephen is gone.

  Every bit of breath in my lungs whooshes out. I stare at the spot where my necklace lay only a few seconds ago.

  “So?” he says. “How do you feel?”

  I stare at him with my mouth open. “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it. Wait until you have an answer, and then tell me.”