“Shh,” Jackson said. “It’ll be okay.” I noticed that Thomas was now unconscious and wondered what Jackson had done to him. I tried to reach out for him—God only knows why—but I ended up toppling over.
“Nine-one-one,” I managed to say between breaths. A wave of nausea rolled over me and I felt myself slip out of consciousness. I fought my way back. “Hospital.”
“No time for that.” Jackson lifted me, his skin touching mine in dozens of places, and I groaned and tried to shift away from him, forgetting I’d neutralized Thomas, forgetting I was already tapped out.
“No...I’ll hurt you...”
“Shh,” he said, his arms tightened around me.
“Stop it,” I said, and then I was out.
Chapter Sixteen
I woke up at Featherweight’s. The neon sparrow above the bar was dark, and the room was quiet. I saw a couple of figures, blurry. My eyes flicked shut again, and I registered the feel of smooth wood underneath my cheek.
“She’s coming around,” someone said.
“Almost done,” said someone else. A man. I couldn’t place the voice. Everything faded.
My uncle’s face was in front of me.
“Mina. Mina. Can you hear me? Listen. Can you hear me?”
Nothing but silence.
“Give her time.” The healer. “Let her rest.”
My mind was silent. White noise. I started to panic.
“Whoa, easy—what’s happening to her?”
“Hang on, I’m going to put her under again. Hang on.”
Nothing but blackness again.
I could feel time passing as you sometimes could in a state of half sleep. Things that might have been dreams or real events flashed through my mind. My brother’s face, my uncle’s. Everyone speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. Jackson’s face, brows drawn together, lips held tight. I registered the ache in my muscles, the hard surface I was resting on. My feet were too cold and the rest of me was too hot.
“Any minute now.”
“She’s okay?”
“She’ll be fine.”
Something warm and wet on my face. Pleasant. A washcloth. I opened my eyes and saw Jackson, his hand on my forehead. He smiled at me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
The fog in my head cleared and I remembered what had just happened. Thomas, the blood. I shifted, waiting for pain to slice through my side again, but I felt fine. I tried to get up, but Jackson’s other hand was holding me down by the shoulder.
“Let me up,” I said, trying to sound demanding, but my voice cracked.
“Slowly,” he said. He removed his hand, and I braced myself up on my elbows. It turned out I was resting on top of the bar.
“How are you feeling?” asked the voice I hadn’t been able to place earlier, and I turned to see Caleb standing beside me.
“We didn’t have time for a hospital,” Jackson said.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime.” Caleb squeezed my hand.
I sat all the way up and rubbed my head. Looking down at my stomach, I shifted the torn, bloodstained fabric of my shirt aside. The skin below was angry dark pink, like a new scar, but it was whole. The torn fabric felt warm.
“Sorry I couldn’t take care of the scar,” Caleb said. “You were pretty bad off.”
I could only imagine. “I don’t mind a scar.” I turned to Jackson. “What happened?” Before he could answer, James walked in through the front door.
I’d never seen him looking so unkempt. His salt-and-pepper hair was mussed, and there were sweat stains down his back and under his arms.
“She okay?” he said, walking forward. Jackson nodded.
“Did you get him?”
James shook his head. “Outran me.” He grimaced. “Not as young as I used to be.” He sat down heavily at a barstool, and Caleb slid him a glass of water. He drained it in one gulp. “How you feeling, rocket?”
“Confused,” I said, and he smiled.
“Thomas must have had a partner,” Jackson said. “I should have picked up on it, but he slipped through.”
“What happened?”
“He attacked you,” James said. “Got a good slice in. He must’ve been trying to help his friend.”
“Was there a knife?”
James shook his head. “Sharp telekinetic force. Takes practice, but it can be done.”
“Jesus.” I looked at my stomach again. It must take a lot of concentration to focus telekinetic power knife-edge thin like that. “What about Thomas?”
Jackson’s lips went thin. “Let’s go and find out, shall we? I think he’s probably ready to be questioned by now.”
“Do you think it’s safe for me to come?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll make sure of it,” Jackson said.
We wound through the passageways behind the speakeasy until we arrived at the concealed entrance. We all walked into the spartan office area and waited while Jackson punched the code for the cell block.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw Thomas.
He was curled up on the floor beside the cot, and sweat had soaked through the back of his shirt. As we watched he gave a soft moan and lifted his head. On the floor beside him was a pool of vomit.
“Jesus! What happened to him?” I remembered how I’d shocked him, and I felt sick. He’d seemed fine, just shaken up, and now this?
“I don’t know,” Jackson said, and he shifted me gently aside to get to the door. He punched the code into the keypad and the magnetic lock released. Thomas didn’t even stir when he walked in. Behind me, I sensed James craning his neck to get a better look. As we watched, Thomas twitched and dry-heaved, his hands flat on the concrete floor as his body convulsed. He lay back down panting, and I covered my mouth.
Everyone was thinking it. I just said it. “What if it was me?”
“It wasn’t you,” Jackson said. “It couldn’t be.”
I knew why he thought so. If my new powers had that effect on shadowminds, Jackson would be dead. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible. Some combination of grounding and electric shock?
“Think about Paulie,” Jackson said. “He’s still fine, and you’ve grounded him twice now.”
Jackson didn’t know it had been a lot more than that. But grounding Paulie hadn’t been half as hard as neutralizing a converter on enhancers. “Well, then what’s wrong with him?”
Thomas moaned on cue.
“Maybe it’s food poisoning,” James said.
No one responded to that theory. I figured Jackson gave it about as much likelihood as I did. I crouched down in front of Thomas. When I tried to touch him, he pushed himself away, moaning, “No...” I looked up at Jackson, who shrugged.
“What do you need?” I asked him.
“Pills,” he said. “My pills.” His lips were cracked so badly they were bleeding.
“We can’t risk it,” Jackson said. “What if he pops the locks?”
“What if he dies?”
“She’s right, Jack,” James said. “And maybe it’ll help, ah, encourage him to remember who he got them from.”
Jackson nodded. He fished in his pocket and came up with the baggie. Thomas saw them and went instantly alert, trying to pull himself up.
“Please...” he said, reaching a hand out to Jackson. Jackson plucked a single pill out of the bag between his thumb and forefinger.
“You want this? Tell me where you got it, and it’s yours.”
“Don’t remember...Please...”
“I can’t help you unless you tell me where you got them. Only a handful left.”
The kid moaned.
“Who’s your partner? Who tried to kill her?
” He nodded toward me.
“What? No...I don’t know...please...” He gave another jerk and gripped his head at the temples.
“Jackson,” I said. He didn’t look at me.
“Dad?” he said, and that’s when I noticed James’s eyes were almost totally black. He was mindreading Thomas, diving in while Jackson directed his thoughts toward his partner.
“Nothing,” James said. “Give me another minute.”
“We may not have another minute,” Jackson said. Tears leaked out of Thomas’s eyes. He was drooling. I remembered the guy who’d died in the speakeasy, the way he’d foamed at the mouth.
“Holy mother of God,” James said, and his eyes snapped back into focus. “Give him the pill, Jack.”
Jackson sent the pill floating directly into Thomas’s mouth. He swallowed reflexively, and within moments, he’d stopped twitching. His breathing evened out, and he went quiet.
Jackson turned to his father. “Well?”
“He’s been bent.” James’s voice was hushed.
“That’s not possible.”
“See for yourself.” He gestured at Thomas, now snoring softly.
“I’m not sure I can.” He glanced at me, just for a moment. But he crouched in front of Thomas and put his hands on his chest, and his eyes went dark for a moment. Then they went wide.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
I finally got tired of sitting at the kids’ table. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
Jackson stood up. “His memory was altered by a mindbender. I can feel the edges of the plant.”
“Still not making sense. What’s a mindbender?”
“A shadowmind who can alter memories,” James said.
“A mindbender can change memory,” Jackson said. “A really talented one can put something wholly new in your head, or even take something out completely.”
“Well,” James said, “not you. That’s the thing—it’s not supposed to work on our kind.”
I wondered if “our kind” still included me. “How can you tell he was...bent?”
“Whoever did it was in a rush,” Jackson said. “I can find the memory of the pills. He’s got a bag of them, looks like he was planning to sell them. And I can tell he picked them up about a month ago. But there’s no memory of where he got the stash. It’s as if he teleported from the speakeasy to his apartment and picked up a bag of pills in between.”
“Maybe he did,” I said, thinking of Cass’s unusual powers, but Jackson shook his head.
“No way. This kid’s barely telekinetic. Someone bent him.”
“But why?” I asked, and everyone was quiet.
“We need Cameron,” Jackson said, and James nodded. Something about the way he said it made me think finding Cameron wasn’t going to be easy.
* * *
We went back up to the speakeasy, and James poured drinks while Jackson typed an email to Cameron on his phone. Cameron, it turned out, was another mindbender. Since Thomas had been bent, only another bender could recover the memory, and mindbenders were vanishingly rare. There were only a handful of them in the state, and Cameron was the only one Jackson and James knew.
“Won’t Simon mind?” I asked, looking at the top-shelf scotch in our glasses.
“Nah,” James said. “I’ll leave some cash in the till.”
“Done,” Jackson said. His phone made a whooshing sound. “But there’s no telling when she’ll get it.”
“Better than nothing,” James said. We all watched Jackson’s phone for a moment, as if it would start vibrating any second. Nothing happened. Then a door clicked shut in back, and we all turned around to see Simon coming in through the stockroom. He didn’t look surprised to see any of us.
“Isn’t it a little early for scotch?” he said to James.
“Technically, it’s still late. What are you doing here this time of the morning?”
“Fell asleep in the back. What’s going on?”
“Put a new guy down in holding,” Jackson said. “He had these on him.” He held out the baggie.
Simon took the bag and fingered the pills. “What are they?”
“Some kind of cocaine analog. They work on shadowminds. Enhance our powers.”
Simon grinned. “Nice.”
“Yeah, not really. Kid downstairs is going through withdrawal. It’s not pretty.” He paused. “Have you ever seen anything like this in the bar?”
Simon frowned and shook his head. “I’ll let you know if I do, though.”
“I wouldn’t ask around if I were you. Somebody almost killed Mina trying to get Thomas away.” Jackson covered my hand with his.
“Careful,” I said, pulling away.
“Oh, relax,” he said, smiling. “The bad guy’s already locked up.”
“Did you get anything off the guy you arrested? Maybe he can lead you to the supplier.”
Jackson and James exchanged a look. “We’re working on it,” James said. “Looks like he was bent.”
Simon raised an eyebrow. “That would be a first.”
“I’ll call someone in to keep an eye on things,” James said, taking out his phone. “Jack—get some rest.”
“You, too,” Jackson said, and we left through the back entrance. Jackson drove me back to my place and put the car in park, but didn’t turn it off. I took off my seatbelt, but I didn’t get out. Should I invite him up? Did he want me to? Shit, he could probably hear everything I was thinking right now.
“Thanks for, uh, saving my life,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Come again?”
“For putting you in that position.”
“You didn’t put me in any position. I wanted to help, remember?”
“I know.”
“Look, you don’t have to take care of me, okay?” I looked up at my window and saw the curtains he’d put up. “I don’t need that.”
“I just know it’s been hard for you to adjust. And to be away from your family...”
“I decided to come out here. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”
“It’s not only that.” He did that thing he did when he was nervous, running his hand through his hair and mussing it. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Me either. But you don’t have to keep...looking out for me and buying me curtains and cooking me breakfast.”
“Maybe I like cooking you breakfast.” He mock-leered at me.
I smacked him on the shoulder, but he leaned in closer anyway. I had enough time to think it had been a long time since anybody had kissed me in a car, and then he did it. I could tell he was smiling, and for a minute, I smiled back and let his mouth play over mine. I pulled away before the transfer could start.
“This isn’t a good idea.”
He sighed. “You worry too much.” He rested his forehead on my collarbone, and his breath was warm through the fabric of my shirt. “I’m not all that tired.”
“Me either.” I wanted to invite him upstairs so badly I almost did it. Instead I said, “Want to go for a walk?”
Jackson lifted his head and looked at the sky through the window over my shoulder. “It’s actually a clear night for once. Want to see the beach?”
“How romantic,” I said, laughing, but I agreed.
We drove west, toward the ocean, and Jackson parked in a concrete lot alongside the highway. Despite how clear it had been by my apartment, it was cool and windy near the water, and for once I was glad my hair was so short. I wrapped my arms around myself, and Jackson took his jacket off and wrapped it around my body.
“There you go again,” I said.
“I can’t help it. Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.
I shoo
k my head, but I was smiling, and I didn’t take off the jacket.
I was surprised to find that the beach wasn’t deserted. Two small groups were huddled together on the sand, and one of them had a campfire going. Jackson and I walked down to the edge of the water and headed north. Ahead of us was a restaurant on a rocky cliff, lit up like Christmas. Laughter carried over the water.
“That’s the Cliff House,” Jackson said. “Pretty famous restaurant. We should go sometime.”
I looked at him, letting my eyes smile. “Are you asking me out?”
“Are you saying yes?”
“Maybe I am.” He slipped his hand into mine, tightening his grip when I tried to pull away on instinct. The zaps that signaled a transfer started, and I remembered what Simon had taught me.
“I want to try something,” I said.
“All right.”
I stopped and kept hold of his hand, closing my eyes and focusing on the feeling in my palm, willing it to stop the way I’d once willed a pencil to move or a thought to leap from my brain to a friend’s. It was like swimming upstream, but slowly, the force of the impulse faded. I had to keep holding it in check—the second I let my concentration wander, the transfer started again—but I could do it. I let go of Jackson’s hand, a grin spreading over my face.
“You stopped it,” he said, his face lit with wonder.
“Simon helped me. I was hoping I’d be able to do it again.”
“That’s great. Really.”
“I just hope it gets easier.”
We kept walking, and I released his hand. Water from the sand soaked through the sides of my tennis shoes, and I realized I was still wearing my torn, bloody shirt. Hopefully we wouldn’t run into anyone out here.
“I used to come out here with my brother when we were kids,” Jackson said. “We’d set these fires on the sand and see how long we could keep them going before the cops came.”
“You little delinquent.”
“Oh yeah, that was me.” He laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “No, Adam was the delinquent.”
“He was older than you, right?” I sensed him nodding. I was careful not to look at him as we walked. He never talked about his brother. I wanted to ask what he’d been like, how he’d died, but I kept quiet, waiting.
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