by K. C. Archer
He looked past her, scanning the group of new arrivals. Then his gaze returned to Teddy. “Disappointed?”
“What do you mean?”
“You sent for him, didn’t you?” Before she could deny it, he took in her running clothes, and one corner of his mouth quirked up. “You’re not exactly known for taking long jogs before dinner just for the fun of it. You’ve been coming down here the past three days, checking to see if Yates got your message.”
She didn’t bother to deny it. Yes, she’d sent the message. A Hail Mary, to use one of Clint’s football analogies. “And you don’t approve.”
“If I didn’t, would it stop you?”
“Pyro—”
“He’s a con, Teddy. I know how cons work. He was just buying time when he gave you that mailing address, giving you what you wanted so he could manipulate you.”
Yates wasn’t a liar. He’d already proved that, but Pyro still wasn’t convinced. Frustrated, Teddy turned and studied the shoreline. She and Pyro kept reaching the same stalemate. Whether the subject was Marysue’s guilt or Yates’s motivations, they constantly found opposite ground. There had to be a way to make him understand.
She tugged a hand through her hair. “Do you remember when I passed out back in Sector Three?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I didn’t actually pass out.”
“But we saw you—”
“Not in the normal sense, anyway. I had an astral travel experience. I went back in time to when my parents were there. I was in the lab when my father was being experimented on. Tortured, more accurately. I saw it happening.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”
She paused, considering how to express what it was that she wanted to say: Because how could you have understood when I barely do? Instead, she shrugged.
He caught her by the wrist and pulled her up against him, her back pressed up against his chest. Wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin lightly atop her head. She eased back against him. He felt strong and solid. They stood like that for a long moment, watching the sun sink into the bay.
“I’m glad you told me,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Yeah, there is.”
“What?”
“You can try to understand why I can’t let this thing with Hyle Pharmaceuticals go. Not after I saw what they did in that lab to my father. I won’t let it happen again.”
“Clint swears it’s not happening.”
“And if Clint’s wrong?”
She reached into her pocket, felt for her mother’s necklace. The answers were out there, answers she desperately needed but didn’t know how to access. Even with her mother’s pendant. It was like getting a computer for Christmas and then hearing: Surprise! No internet.
“What if Yates is the only one who can help me?” she said. She didn’t know what other options she had. She wasn’t about to break in to Hyle Pharmaceuticals. Not worth getting kicked out of Whitfield, and she had no doubt Clint would make good on his threat. Other than pursue Eversley directly (which she doubted would bring results), she seemed to be back at square one.
“Hey, Teddy.”
“Yeah?”
“Screw Yates.” His signature smirk returned. “You’ve got me.”
* * *
Pyro and Teddy walked back to her dorm room. Teddy sat on the edge of her mattress. Jillian would be out of the room until well after nine, at a tutorial with Ava and Professor Dunn for mediumship. Teddy patted the space next to her and said, “Okay. We’ve got the room to ourselves for the next two hours. Let’s do it.”
Pyro leaned against her closet door, folded his arms over his chest, and regarded her through narrowed eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding. I can’t keep up with all this ‘Are we or aren’t we?’ business.”
She threw a pillow at him. “Not that.” As much as that would be really freaking great right now. She wanted to feel outside of herself. Wanted not to think. Wanted that great big shattering release. But traveling, in a way, would accomplish the same thing. Or almost the same thing, if she could finally manage it.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
“Clint has me working on meditations. I suck at them.”
Pyro sat on the bed next to her as she explained how the process worked. Before she could effectively direct her astral travel, she needed to let go of all interfering thoughts. Jillian could fall into a deep meditative state in an instant. So could most of her classmates. Teddy, however, constantly struggled to calm her mind. She hated letting her guard down, hated feeling vulnerable and exposed. She hoped, however, that guided meditations—with someone she could trust—would help.
Pyro kicked off his shoes and lay down on her bed, holding one arm open to invite her to join him. Teddy stretched out against him, resting her cheek on his chest. Her head rose slightly with every breath he took.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes.” She clearly and firmly set her goal: separate from her body and direct her consciousness through space. She felt safe and secure. Relaxed.
“Feel the air enter your lungs,” Pyro began, his voice low and steady in her ear. He counted to four to set a gentle rhythm for her breaths, then guided her through Professor Dunn’s meditation techniques step-by-step, encouraging her to let go of stress, to silence her thoughts.
Teddy felt the tension seep from her body. She forgot about Sector Three and her father and mother. Yates. Molly. While usually, she waited for Clint to signal a movement from one phase of the exercise to the next, now she lost track of time, content to simply be in this moment—weightless.
Then, in a quicksilver instant, everything changed. Her lungs constricted, cutting off her air supply. She felt sharp, piercing pain in her chest. She opened her mouth to alert Pyro that something was wrong but found that she couldn’t speak. She felt herself drop, plummeting downward, as though the bed beneath her had been snatched away. It felt like the gravity that bound her to the earth had ceased to exist. She blinked and discovered that she was still in her dorm room—but no longer on her bed.
Rather, her body was on her bed, lying against Pyro, but she, her astral self, was floating above, watching.
She hung there, suspended and amazed, until stark terror shot through her. Maybe she’d done it wrong and was dead. Clint had warned her how serious astral travel was, but she hadn’t listened. Blinding despair engulfed her. She’d never be able to rejoin her body. The fear hit her like a sucker punch to the chest. Her breath caught, and the room dimmed as she spun.
“All right, Teddy. Time to wake up.”
She blinked and tried to focus. It was like she was seeing Pyro doubled—from above and below—before he finally swam into focus as a single living being. Then she slammed back into her physical body. The sensation stung like a full-body belly flop from ten feet above a pool.
Teddy dragged in a ragged breath as relief poured through her. Slowly, she came into awareness of her body. Felt the tingling in her limbs as blood began to flow more rapidly through her arms and legs. Felt a lock of hair brush against her cheek. She wasn’t dead. She’d separated her astral self from her physical body and projected herself on the current time line, a first step in astral travel. Until her terror had knocked her out of it, she’d been in a full-fledged OBE.
She’d done it. Deliberately and with intention. She wanted to laugh. Cry. Both. At once. While eating Ben & Jerry’s and riding a motorcycle, drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, winning the lottery and having the best sex of her entire life.
Speaking of that last part: Teddy wrapped her arms around Pyro’s chest and gave him a squeeze. “I did it.”
He tilted his chin to look down at her. “Really? It looked to me like you were just taking a nap.” She was scanning the ceiling, lost in thought. Her expression must have reflected her amazement, for he shook his head and said, “I can’t even imagine. Where’d you go?”
“Not far. Just floating above
the bed, watching us.”
“Sounds kinky.” His lips curled into a suggestive smile.
Teddy smiled back. “Stop it.”
“Stop what? You’re the one who admitted you like watching us together in bed.”
She rolled onto her side, bringing them nose to nose. Her legs tangled with his. Their breath mingled. “Why can’t you be good?” she asked.
“Because if I were good, you wouldn’t want me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Pretty sure.”
He toyed with the hem of her T-shirt. With his gaze locked on hers, he traced the skin above her low-slung jeans. She felt herself slip back into the relaxed state she’d been in moments earlier. Pyro made her feel like this. Pyro made her feel good. All of her earlier resistance and rationalization, her determination to remain strictly friends, seemed silly in retrospect. There was something about the two of them that worked.
She felt the heat of his body through her clothes, drew in the familiar scent of his skin. She ran her hand over his chest, felt his heat level start to burn through the thin material of his T-shirt.
Instead of reaching for her, he leaned back, putting a little distance between them. “Hold on, Teddy.”
She blinked and pulled back. Frowned. “I thought you wanted—”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You know I do. But . . .”
“But what?”
“I thought about what you said back in that diner in Jackson. You’re right. We can’t go back to random hookups. Not anymore.” He paused, seemed to gather his courage. “We’ve got too much to lose now. Or at least I do. I don’t want to screw it up by screwing around.”
She studied him in stunned silence. She and Pyro didn’t do this. They teased and they flirted. They messed around. They didn’t talk about their feelings. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. The cowardly way out would be to reply with a joke. She had a number of them already on the tip of her tongue. There was a time when Teddy would have done that. But not now.
“I don’t want to lose you, either,” she admitted. She watched as something that looked like relief spread across his face. “The other night on the beach, you said something about me mucking the wrong card?”
Pyro smiled and slid her toward him. “You must have heard me wrong. I probably said something else. Some other activity that rhymes with muck?”
“No, you were right. I did muck the wrong card.”
He slid his lips over hers, but Teddy turned slightly. “Wait. Just one more thing.”
Pyro groaned. “Please tell me it’s not another meditation. Because I’m anything but Zen right now.”
He dragged a palm up her thigh. She had to swallow before she could speak. Even then, her voice came out all breathy and warm.
“If you set the fire alarm off again, I’m going to mucking kill you.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SEPTEMBER SLID INTO OCTOBER. BETWEEN sessions with her professors and “sessions” with Pyro (one particularly memorable one in a deserted office near the gun range), Teddy found herself wrapped back into the daily life of being a Whitfield student. Still, she found her thoughts continually triangulating between her mother, the Hyle report, and Molly. Not that she was able to do much about any of it.
Jillian and Dara hadn’t appreciated having to promise to stay out of Hyle Pharmaceuticals’s business (but for different reasons). Nevertheless, they kept their word to stay on track, as did Teddy and Pyro. Teddy’s mother’s necklace remained tucked in her drawer. A temptation kept out of reach (unlike a certain steamy pyrokinetic) until she mastered travel without the object. And she was getting better. With Clint’s guidance, she was able to astral-travel to different locations on campus, but only short distances and only for seconds at a time.
What didn’t pass quickly? Rosemary Boyd’s torturous training exercises. At that moment, Teddy Cannon found herself finishing the second round of a muscle-melting three-minute plank. She promised herself she wouldn’t drop before Kate Atkins did. No sir, no ma’am, not in this lifetime. Not in the next lifetime, either, whether she reincarnated as a human or one of Jillian’s pet hamsters.
Teddy shifted her weight on her palms, careful not to press too hard on the knuckle of her right index finger. It had been over a month since she’d astral-traveled to Sector Three, but that damn cut wouldn’t heal. It seemed that every training exercise or activity required this finger, whether it was at the gun range or writing reports for casework or tackling the obstacle course. And each time she rebandaged the wound, the image of her father strapped to that metal chair came back to her. If anything Hyle developed came close to what she’d witnessed at Sector Three, she was determined to stomp in there and kick some serious pharmaceutical ass, regardless of what she’d promised Clint.
“Tighten your glutes! Engage your core!” Boyd yelled.
If my core were any more engaged, it would be registered for china at Bed Bath & Beyond.
Sweat slid down her arms. Teddy watched a droplet’s journey down her wrist and onto the squishy blue mat that had absorbed the literal blood, sweat, and tears of every recruit who passed through Boyd’s obstacle course.
Who in her right mind holds a plank for three minutes? And how, pray tell, does it come in handy in crime fighting?
Teddy shot another glance across the room to where Kate held her perfect alignment. Teddy shifted her hands and felt the scab on her finger tighten, then saw the telltale bloom of red through the Band-Aid.
Crap. Not again.
“All right, recruits. Fall out!” Boyd blew her whistle. Kate’s knees dropped to the mat. Teddy’s hit a second later. “Good improvement, Cannon.”
Not exactly high praise, but she’d take what she could get from Boyd. In truth, she had improved in the last month. And not just on Boyd’s sadistic course. She was gaining momentum in all her classes. Dedication with a laser-like focus had that kind of effect on a girl.
On the mat beside her, Dara groaned and rolled over. “Lunch?” she asked. “I hear they’re serving lentil burgers.”
“Ugh.” But Teddy was starving, so she gathered up her things. She caught a glimpse of Boyd in a classic bullying pose, fists perched on hips and face screwed up in anger, lecturing Jillian.
One recruit whose dedication to success was seriously lacking? That would be Ms. Jillian Blustein. Still on probation, Jillian hadn’t seen Eli in weeks. Teddy had hoped that Eli Nevin would be “out of sight, out of mind,” but instead, he was all Jillian could talk about. Without the ability to go off-island or communicate via traditional means, she’d taken to sending messages via a pigeon she’d befriended and named Burt. But Burt, according to Jillian, had Alzheimer’s and did not make a great carrier pigeon, because Eli had not written back.
Or Burt is just a bird, Teddy wanted to suggest. Or Eli Nevin proved to be an environmentalist asshole who was only interested in using you.
Teddy watched as Jillian’s face turned red. Watched as Boyd walked away and Jillian wiped her eyes and then hurried out of the gymnasium to the bathroom at the end of the corridor.
Teddy waved Dara off and moved to follow her roommate. The bathroom was empty save for the last stall, which was shut. The sound of ragged breathing and desperate sniffles emanated from behind the stall door.
“Jillian? It’s me. Are you okay?”
A sharp gasp, then, “Go away.”
“C’mon, Jillian. I just want to talk.”
“Go away.”
As with her travel, the friend thing was getting easier. Even if it meant dealing with messy emotions from animal mediums overly invested in guys who wore bad pants. “I’m not going anywhere. You need a friend right now, and whether you like it or not, you’ve got me. So get your weepy, Eli-missing, naked-yoga-doing, animal-chatting self out here.”
Teddy waited. She heard a snort, though whether it was of laughter or despair, she couldn’t say. A second later, the door swung open and Jillian emerged.
She looked almost cartoonlike in her misery. Blotchy skin, runny nose, eyes red and brimming with tears, blond curls matted with sweat from Boyd’s butt-busting workout.
Then that six-foot-tall mess threw herself into Teddy’s arms. Teddy staggered from the impact. “Oh, Teddy,” Jillian said.
What followed was a gasping, shuddering, heart-wrenching account of two lovers separated by a cruel, unfeeling world. Teddy gritted her teeth and listened, forcing sympathetic noises at what she hoped were appropriate intervals. She didn’t want to be having this conversation right now. She was hungry and due at the rifle range in thirty minutes. But she felt like she was still on friend probation, so maybe she owed Jillian at least this much.
After what felt like forever, there came a moment of silence, and Teddy belatedly realized that Jillian was staring at her expectantly, waiting for her to speak. Did she want her to say something nice about Eli? Comfort her? Teddy paused, searching for the right words. “Oh, um . . . yeah, it’s totally unfair that you two can’t be together. I know he really likes you.”
“Thanks.” Jillian wiped her eyes. “He is amazing and his dogs are amazing and he smells amazing and he makes amazing tea, and between you and me, he is really, really amazing in bed.”
“You’ve mentioned that before. Again, I really don’t need to know these things.”
“It’s totally healthy to have a good sex life. Root chakra.”
“Jillian, I don’t want to know about Eli’s root . . . chakra.”
“And that’s why I’m sneaking off campus tonight. I have to see him.”
Teddy blinked, certain she’d missed something. “What? No. Jillian, you can’t do that. You can’t even think about doing that. You’re on probation. If you’re caught sneaking off campus, you’ll get kicked out of school.”
Jillian brought up her chin. “I don’t care. I have to see him.”
Teddy narrowed her eyes. She’d been kind. She’d been empathetic. She’d let Jillian cry on her shoulder. Enough already. “Don’t be an idiot, Jillian. You’re not going to throw away everything you’ve worked for just to spend a night with Eli.”
