“I’ll be fine. Better do it now, anyhow.” He tapped his pen on the desk. “It may be necessary, considering.”
“Don’t talk like that.” I grabbed his hand, stopped the tapping, and focused on playing the studious student. “So…” I thought a moment and scribbled some things down. “Want me to read yours?”
“You’re done?” he asked skeptically, walking his pencil up and down his hand, twirling it between each of his fingers. “I must not have accomplished much if you can do it that fast.”
“So you don’t want me to impress you with a flowery, emotional eulogy?”
He leaned in, studying my eyes. “What do you really know about me, Jess?”
“I—” I blinked at him, suddenly frustrated. “I know a helluva lot more than most people here do. And I know how I feel about you.”
His lips and jaw were tight. “Is that enough? Don’t you wonder why you feel the way you do? Shouldn’t I have somehow earned it?”
“You have earned it.…” I shook my head. “Stop. Now. Quit trying to quantify things and make everything logical. Sometimes our hearts should rule our heads.”
He blinked at me. “That sort of attitude gets people killed.”
I knew what he was referring to—his father had died as a result of acting out of passion. Pietr preferred cool logic and reason—the odd disconnect of philosophy and reason—to the blinding power of passion. Maybe that was why we kept having problems.
He wanted control of his heart.
And so did I.
Jessie
I joined Amy at our regular lunch table minutes before everyone else showed up.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Tired. Dad’s place is a wreck. But he’s off the sauce. Mostly.”
I reached out and patted her hand. “Hey, what’s this?” I touched the large pad of paper Amy had closed as I’d approached.
She shrugged, tapping her pencil on the cover protectively. “Just some stuff I’m doing.”
“Stuff, like art?”
“Some might call it that.” Her eyebrows lowered and I saw a look cross her face that I had missed for months now, the look of the self-critical artist. “It’s just some sketches I’ve been working on.” She tried to sweep the sketchpad down onto the seat beside her, but I rested my palm heavily on its cover.
“I haven’t seen you do any art, except in class, since…” I realized I hadn’t seen Amy do any art, any sketching, any photography, since she started dating Marvin. I swallowed hard. “Why did you stop drawing?”
“I didn’t stop drawing.”
“I mean outside of art class. You used to draw all the time. There were times we couldn’t separate you from a sketchpad.”
She glanced around, making sure no one else was listening before she leaned forward. “Recently I had a really tough time seeing beauty in anything. And if you can’t find something’s beauty, it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth trying to capture on paper.”
I nodded. I’d gone through a period after my mother’s death where words wouldn’t come. A writer without words was like … Like being an artist starved of inspiration, I realized.
I’d been so selfish—so blind. “Can I take a peek? That one day Max took you outside he kept popping into the house to grab art supplies, and claiming you were drawing him”—I rolled my eyes—“but he wouldn’t show me anything.”
“Smart boy.” Amy’s hand slid across the yellow cover of the sketchpad, her thumb ruffling the corners of the paper as she thought. Before Marvin she had been pretty bold with her art. She hadn’t cared who saw her stuff or when. “I don’t know … They’re rough, really unfinished.”
“I won’t judge,” I said, lifting my hand from the cover to rest over my heart with such gravity I thought she’d burst laughing.
“Oh, hell. Judge all you want,” she said with a snort. “I have to remember that art—like writing or music—is totally subjective. What I think is majestic, you may think is absolute crap.”
“Or unique. That’s the artist’s bane. Like wishing someone an interesting life. Give it here.” I motioned. “I guess everyone gets to have their own opinion about the quality of the artist or writer. Isn’t living in a free country grand?”
She slid the sketchpad across the table to me, keeping a wary eye on the lunch line, tracking the movements of the rest of our friends.
Staring at me from the first page was a charcoal sketch of a young man with wavy dark hair and careful eyes. He looked like he had been caught speculating and didn’t want to talk about what was really on his mind. I knew him immediately.
“Max,” I said, my voice soft with reverence. She had captured him with amazing accuracy, using only lines and smudges. “God, Amy. It’s amazing.”
I glanced up long enough to notice she was blushing before I turned the page. “Oh!” Max again, I noticed. Shirtless and dozing in sunlight slanting beneath the back porch’s roof, his saber-shaped birthmark carefully outlined on his shoulder blade. “Does he snore?”
Amy glanced down, finding something impressive to study in the chipped Formica of the lunch room tabletop. “Yes,” she said, wistful. She gave her comparison some thought. “He does, but it’s more like a purr.” Her blush deepened.
Gingerly, I turned the page. This time a fawn peered back at me, frozen as it stood not far from the thicket that was probably its home. “Wow,” I said, stunned by the clarity of the sketch. “Did you do this one from a photo?”
“No,” Amy said with a sigh. “Max took me into the woods and told me we should just sit still and be quiet, that remarkable things would happen. I thought it was just a cheesy line! I laughed and told him nothing remarkable happens to me. He just told me to be quiet. Wait.” She grinned, remembering.
“Ten minutes later this little guy stepped out. It was the slowest I’ve ever sketched anything. I was so scared I was going to scare him away. But he just stood there staring at Max, their eyes locked.”
The poor fawn probably would have stood there forever, realizing he was watched by one of the fiercest predators his forest had ever known. Surely instinct told him that springing away would only encourage unwanted attention.
“Max has a real way with animals,” Amy said, awe tinting her voice.
“I guess he does.”
Amy glanced nervously over my shoulder.
I knew she was watching someone’s approach. I flipped to the next page. Max again. Shirtless and reclining on the love seat. My eyebrows must have shot up, because Amy slapped the cover back down on the sketchpad and yanked it across the table and into her lap.
Sophia sat, watching us in her quiet way. Looking at me, her face scrunched up and she passed her hand about an inch in front of her lips, signaling me.
I grabbed a napkin and took a swipe at my mouth.
Her lips puckered in frustration and she repeated the motion more dramatically.
I shrugged at her and returned to my conversation with Amy. “Again, I say: WOW.”
“Thanks,” Amy said hesitantly. “I kept trying to get him right, but it seemed like he’d blur and change.… The light must have been the problem. One moment he had a full six-pack, and the next they smoothed into a solid sheet of muscle.”
I wondered just how many abdominal muscles a wolf had.
Pietr clicked his tray down next to me, a sack of mainly meat—jerky from home—and a canned juice from the cafeteria set on his tray. Since we no longer trusted the school’s food under the new lunch plan, we’d all become packers. Pietr’s strange diet, I’d learned, was because he burned through things at a different rate with his strange metabolism. Consuming so much meat, he was a low-carb-diet dream.
Sophie glanced at my lips again, then looked at Pietr, focusing on his mouth. Her eyes darted back and forth between us for a moment.
Amy leaned nearly all the way across the table, wanting to finish our chat, but very aware of her growing audience. “The weirdest thing was,” she whispered, “
the way I couldn’t quite get his eyes right. No matter what I did, they kept coming out more animal than human.”
Suddenly beside her, Max set his tray gingerly next to hers. “It’s because I’m such a sexy beast.”
For a moment she looked like the fawn in her picture—too stunned to move. Then she blushed cherry, and milk nearly shot out my nose.
Pietr threw his straw paper at his older brother in silent protest.
Feeling Sophie still staring, I stood and looked at her. “Come on. You know the drill. Girls’ bathroom.”
Hesitantly she followed me and stood in silence by the sink while I checked the stalls.
I glanced in the mirror. “So what was the big freak-out about my lips?”
She rolled her own lips over her teeth, struggling like I’d so often done in the past to find the words she wanted. “You know my vision’s funky.”
“You could say that, what with the seeing ghosts and traces of energy.”
“Oh. You know that last part, too?”
“It sorta makes sense. So…” My brows tugged together. “Are you seeing something else now, too?”
Her gaze skimmed over me, one corner of her mouth twisting. “Maybe auras? I don’t know enough about this stuff. If it’s auras, shouldn’t I see full fields of color surrounding people? Up until a couple minutes or so ago it looked like you had lipstick smeared all over your mouth. When I looked at Pietr he had the same weird thing.…” She squinted at me. “It’s fading.…”
My hands clamped over my mouth and my eyes widened, thinking back to my quick make-out session with Pietr right before lunch. There had definitely been a lot of lips-smearing-across-lips action. “Are you still eating the school lunch every day?” I asked, muffled by my hands.
“Duh. Packing’s so passé.”
“Okay, just pack. Trust me. You are starting to see—um—energy traces like auras. You’re just seeing where they overlap first.”
“What?” Her eyebrows lowered. “Oh. Ew! Can you two not keep your lips off each other?” She rubbed her forehead. “This is not a socially acceptable gift—seeing where people have touched. I’m going to get such a reputation for gawking at people…”
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Look. I have a lot on my plate right now. But as soon as things clear up, we’ll try and find a way to dial down your sight. The last thing I want is for you to be socially unacceptable,” I teased.
“Yeah. You have the market cornered on that, thanks to your willingness to help Sarah and duke it out with Jenny and Macie. I don’t want to usurp your title as school pariah.”
“Nice, Soph. Glad to be back at Junction High so I can be the source of your amusement.”
“Things aren’t nearly as exciting without you around,” she admitted.
Jessie
We were barely off the bus and back in the house after school when Max got on the house phone with Amy, checking up. He carried the phone upstairs, not worried at all about agents listening to the Rusakova land line. It cracked Max up knowing someone was listening to him flirt with his girlfriend—agents’ ears probably burned hearing them talk.
It was pretty miraculous to see, Maximilian Rusakova—player—moonstruck.
I called Dad on Alexi’s special cell phone and let him know Alexi’s tests proved Annabelle Lee’s blood had many of the same properties as mine. If he wanted, we’d find a spot for her, too, until things cleared up.
Dad explained Wanda was going to be staying over and that between the two of them Annabelle Lee would be okay. “But she’ll ask some hard questions,” he said. “Especially about Wanda spending more time over here. Do you think we should—”
“Should what, Dad? Tell her the truth?”
The other end of the line was quiet. “She’s smart as a whip.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “No, don’t try and explain it. Okay. I’ll call after dinner. You can drop her off to stay here tonight and I’ll give her the talk.”
“Good. Wanda and I’ll prep the house in case trouble heads this way.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“How much do you know about Wanda?”
“Enough to know I have a tiger by the tail.”
I grinned. “Be careful over there. I love you.”
Dinner was over and everything was following the plan—things looking amazingly normal and uneventful at the Rusakova house, even with “Uncle” Dmitri still lurking, and belated birthday presents still rolling in to better equip the army of mafiosos Dmitri would import.
Pietr looked at me wistfully as he stood up from the table.
Dmitri grunted, looking at him. “You need exercise—practice. Outside.”
Pietr nodded. It would give him the chance to work out some frustration and would probably keep Derek’s remote viewing abilities focused inside—on me—instead of realizing how rapidly Pietr’s skills were increasing.
I grappled with the bookbag I’d hung over the back of my chair. “Before you three leave”—I looked at Max, Cat, and Alexi—“I need some help with a homework assignment.” I turned to Dmitri. “Uncle Dmitri,” I used the term the Rusakovas suggested to keep up appearances, “you are free to go. Anytime.”
He glared at me and rose.
“I need to know about Pietr—before Junction. What he was like.”
Dmitri sat back down.
“Oh. Excellent. You’re staying.”
“Ask Pietr,” Max suggested.
“He won’t say. I think he wants me to work for this. I’m looking for defining moments from his youth—things you think made him who he is now.”
They looked at each other a moment. “The fire,” Max said.
They nodded and Alexi began. “Soon after Pietr turned thirteen and got his hearing, there was a fire in our neighborhood. Pietr was home, reading, when the fire trucks rolled past. Like most people, he followed them, stunned at the sight of flames devouring a house. The firemen rushed in, saved many young people—”
“A girl was having a party. No parents,” Cat explained.
Alexi continued. “They thought they had gotten everyone. But Pietr”—he smiled with pride—“he heard someone else inside. He convinced the firemen to go back in one more time.”
“And they found one more kid,” Max said, “that stoner—what was his name?”
Cat tsk-ed at him. “That doesn’t matter. The point is, Pietr helped save a life. With his special abilities.”
“He didn’t get any credit for it,” Max pointed out. “The guy who came out of the building with the boy did.”
“But that didn’t matter to Pietr,” Alexi clarified. “Because he knew what he’d done. And he was proud of what he was becoming.”
There was a long pause while everyone avoided looking at everyone else. We all thought the same thing—that Pietr once wanted to be the thing he now fought so hard against finally becoming.
Cat finally broke the silence. “He used to be very popular,” she said softly. “He’s always been handsome, but it seemed there was some sort of inner light that glowed in Pietr, something that made him special. We had to collar him early,” she said, touching the spot on her neck corresponding to where the boys wore special silver necklaces. “The girls started coming on strong at an early age,” she said distastefully. “He didn’t understand it—none of us did.”
“Perhaps it was the alpha aspect kicking in early?” Dmitri asked.
I had nearly forgotten he was still there, intruding.
Alexi shrugged. “Does that make you proud that you are holding such an alpha’s leash now?”
Dmitri glared at him. “It could be a far worse man than I.”
“So he had girl trouble early?” I asked Cat.
“He made Max look like chopped liver for a while,” Cat replied.
“Bad for the ego,” Max chuckled.
“Do you remember Rachel?” Alexi asked the others. “I think she was, what? Were they fourteen? Fresh
men.”
Cat nodded. “That went badly,” she recalled.
“But, when you consider defining moments…”
Cat picked up the tale. “Rachel had a cat she loved very much. She kept it indoors, safe from the neighborhood dogs, very much loved.”
“Spoiled,” Max specified.
“Pietr and Rachel’s relationship was”—Cat eyed me carefully—“heating up. They had dated steadily for a few months. They were frequently together, holding hands, kissing…”
“Groping,” Max added.
Again, Cat gauged my expression. I stayed perfectly still except for my head, which I nodded. Pietr was still a virgin by his own admittance, so I knew things hadn’t gotten too hot with this Rachel girl, but at the idea of him pawing someone else … my stomach twisted a little. The past, I reminded myself. It’s just part of his past.
“He probably loved her,” Max said, trying to excuse Pietr’s past explorations.
“Nyet,” Pietr muttered, making us jump in our seats. He stood in the doorway, leaning against the door frame. His eyes trapped mine. “I did not love her, but I was crazy about her.”
“She was very pretty,” Max said in consolation.
Pietr shrugged. “One night, in the worst bit of winter, she called me, frantic. The cat had gotten outside and disappeared. No claws, bad teeth—it would be no match for the neighborhood dogs, and we were expecting more snow. Rachel was desperate. She wanted my help.” He shrugged. “Her parents were out at some event and there was no one to help her look for the cat. I wanted to help her. Perhaps I wanted a reason for her to feel grateful.…” He shook his head, clearing his mind of the memory.
“I went to her house. It was a very clean place, everything neat and tidy. You would not know a cat lived there—not by scent or sight. Rachel had already gone into the snow and come back unsuccessful. She was crying.” He looked at the floor between us. “I wanted…”
“You wanted to be her hero,” I said with a smile.
“I had been a hero before—why not again? It seemed such a small thing, to scent after a cat. She tried to tug me out the door into the backyard to look.… I pulled away and went to the cat tree they had in the corner of the kitchen. I tried not to be obvious, but her mother had mopped and vacuumed and there was so much disinfectant in the air…”
Bargains and Betrayals Page 20
