by Jena Leigh
Walking through the crowd was like parting the Red Sea. Alex had been notorious at Bay View High long before her face made headline news. Now, her infamy would precede her everywhere she went.
Students backed up one step, then two or three more as they realized who had just arrived to crash their party. Alex’s and Jezza’s jet black eyes and stone-faced expressions only added to the students’ fearful apprehension.
Rumbles of surprise and recognition rippled through the crowd, barely heard over the music blasting from a nearby mansion’s patio.
Alex immediately recognized the home.
Apparently, this year’s Summer Fling was being thrown by Marcie Anders—one of Jessica Huffman’s best friends and a heartless witch in her own right.
Once upon a time, long before the computer lab explosion, Alex and Jessica’s groups had still been civil enough to attend the same parties. She’d been to a homecoming bonfire on this same strip of beach during her freshman year of high school.
The night she met Connor.
After they were introduced, Connor made the mistake of flirting with her in front of Jessica—and thanks to that twenty-second-long interaction, Alex would never again attend a Marcie Anders party.
At least, not until tonight.
When a few of the students turned and began walking back toward the Boardwalk, Jezza lifted both arms and summoned a massive wave of saltwater from the ocean, casting it over the entire group like a net. Shouts of surprise and alarm filled the air as everyone present drew closer to the bonfire at the center, staring up at the impossible wave with fear and confusion in their expressions.
In response to a subtle shift of Jezza’s arms, the blanket of water arced upward, then out, creating a shimmering wall of seawater around the group. A sudden chill filled the air as the wall hardened into a dome of solid ice, immediately trapping everyone within.
There was nowhere for any of them to run to now.
Her former classmates began to scream, stumbling over each other as they pushed toward the far side of the dome, as far as they could get from Alex and Jezza. They beat frantically against the ice, but to no avail.
Alex had forgotten just how powerful a water-wielder Jezza actually was. She nearly rivaled Aiden in terms of strength and control. The dome’s wall was a solid three feet thick at the base and almost thirty feet high at its center. No amount of kicking or clawing would bring it down.
Alex’s gaze settled on the bonfire that stood between herself and the panicked mass of her former classmates.
She knew what she had to do. And it wasn’t just the device she found herself fighting this time. It was the call of the flames themselves.
Even still, Alex managed to hesitate.
The device wanted her to move. To act. To kill.
It took every ounce of willpower just to remain still—but, at least for the moment, she was managing to do exactly that.
It wouldn’t last.
It couldn’t.
But it might buy her a little time to think.
Beside her, Jezza’s implacable countenance cracked and she let out a cry of pain. She thrust an arm up over her head and the ice at the center of the dome began to melt. Water rained down onto the bonfire, causing the flames to sizzle and hiss as steam rose and escaped through the newly created opening.
“Stop me!” Jezza screamed. “Somebody stop me! You promised, Lex!”
And then the device won out. The dome reformed and Jezza straightened as though the outburst had never occurred. Her hands fell back to her sides as the emotion drained from her face.
She’d broken free, but only for a moment.
Alex spotted Terrance Wilkins crouching near the back of the terrified crowd, typing frantically into his cell phone. The thought of more people arriving on the scene—of more potential victims—filled her with sudden panic.
Without consciously meaning to, Alex surrendered to the device… and reacted.
A pulse of electricity cascaded through her fingertips. It was weak, thankfully, but it was more than strong enough to fry every cell phone within the dome.
People yelped—many cursing in surprise—as the pulse destroyed their phones… and gave anyone holding a device in their hands or in a pocket a nasty shock in the process.
The pulse may have happened too suddenly for her to prevent, but the epiphany it sparked was worth every last volt.
Suddenly, Alex knew exactly what to do.
The device in her neck was small. So small that, while she was being held within the stifling confines of the black site’s EM shield, Alex couldn’t even sense its presence.
Outside of that shield, however…
It was a strange sensation, fighting her own limbs for control. Forcing her arm up was like lifting an impossible weight. Moving her fingers to the back of her neck, like swimming upstream against a storm surging river.
Agonizing seconds passed before her fingertips found skin and she sent out a second pulse—this one directly into her neck.
Nothing happened. Her body was instinctively reabsorbing the charge.
Focusing on the device this time, she tried again… and then she collapsed like a rag doll into the sand as her vision momentarily went dark and she lost control of her limbs. A heartbeat later, she blinked, and her vision was restored.
Looks like that healing ability had come in handy. She got the distinct impression that without it, she wouldn’t have been able to maintain consciousness.
She clenched her fist and, with a rush of relief, Alex realized that the implant had been destroyed. Its hold on her finally severed, Alex’s body was her own again.
When she looked up, her triumph immediately turned to dread.
While Alex had been struggling to put her own plan into motion, Jezza was still there standing next to her, carrying out Harrison’s orders. Drawing from the top of the dome, she’d summoned roughly a dozen sharply pointed shards of ice and taken aim at the crowd.
“No!” Alex cried.
It was too late. With barely a flick of Jezza’s wrist, the ice shards went sailing toward Alex’s classmates.
Flinging out her own hand, Alex managed to halt the projectiles less than an inch from their targets. Granted an extra moment to react, those in the path of the shards hastily dove out of the way.
It was a good thing, too, because Jezza’s control eventually won out over Alex’s.
The icy missiles collided with the wall of the dome and shattered to pieces.
Before Jezza could ready another volley—and before Alex could even consider the consequences of what she was about to do—Alex leapt to her feet, reached out, and placed her fingertips on the back of Jezza’s neck, sending a concentrated charge directly into the device and immediately frying it to a crisp.
Jezza collapsed into the sand, unconscious.
Panicked, Alex checked her neck for a pulse—and found one. It was slow, but steady, like someone in a deep state of rest.
She hoped it meant that Jezza would be okay… because just now, Alex had more immediate problems.
Two dozen of her former classmates were staring back at her with nothing short of fear in their eyes.
Alex couldn’t say she blamed them.
Scrambling for what to do next, she caught a glimpse of a familiar face hiding at the very back of the crowd.
Jessica. Head cheerleader, boyfriend thief, grade-A bitch—and Variant pusher. Though whether or not she knew what she was remained something of a question.
Alex walked toward her, the crowd once again stumbling over themselves to get out of her way. Only Jessica stood firm, staring daggers and holding her chin up in nervous defiance.
When she realized that Alex was headed directly for her, she stepped back until she ran out of room and found her back pressed against the icy barrier.
“Are you here to kill me?” Jessica asked angrily. “Is that what this is, Lexie? You and your freak friend came here to murder me?”
Alex ro
lled her eyes. Only Jessica Huffman could take a situation like this one and make it all about her.
“This has nothing to do with you, you self-absorbed Barbie doll. Now hold still.” Alex reached out and rested the palm of her hand gently against the bare skin of Jessica’s upper arm. “I just need to borrow something.”
Her gaze turned quizzical. “What? What do you mean, borrow something? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Jessica shifted, yanking her arm away. but not before the transfer completed.
“Thank you, Jessica,” said Alex.
The other partygoers watched the interaction unfold in silence, too stunned—or perhaps, still too terrified—to interrupt.
Alex moved back to the outskirts of the crowd so that she held everyone present in her line of sight.
What she was about to attempt was beyond insane, but she was entirely out of options. And it’s not like she could ask Jessica to do it.
So, instead, Alex was going to break the Grayson family’s cardinal rule—she was going to intentionally use her abilities against a norm.
Against an entire group of them, in fact.
Further complicating matters? Alex’s experience using the push was minimal at best. Truth be told, she still had no earthly idea how to properly wield it.
And she definitely didn’t know how to use it on an entire crowd of people at one time.
Carefully altering Trent’s, Nathaniel’s, and Aiden’s memories, one by one, in order to preserve the timeline was practically a party trick compared to what she was about to attempt. And with her immense strength, using a brand new ability on an entire group of innocent normals wasn’t just reckless, it was dangerous.
She could only hope and pray she didn’t accidentally injure any of them in the process.
Either way, she needed to act fast. There was no telling how long it would take for Carter to realize that the devices had failed—and she and Jezza needed to be long gone from Bay View before that happened and Harrison arrived to take them into custody again.
Drawing a deep breath to steady her nerves, Alex fixed her attention on the fidgeting crowd, and spoke.
“In a few moments, after my friend and I… disappear… you are all going to forget that we were ever here tonight. You will go back to enjoying your party as though nothing unusual has happened.”
She scanned the eyes of the partygoers and saw that they were just as glazed and compliant as the boys’ had been, back when she made her first attempts to use this ability.
“And later on tonight, when you realize that your cell phones have been damaged,” Alex continued, “you won’t wonder about how it might have happened. You’ll just accept the damage without question. It will all be just another normal night for you. Just another run-of-the-mill beach party… Is that understood?”
A chorus of dazed affirmations greeted her—along with the furious, entirely lucid gaze of Jessica Huffman.
Guess you can’t push a pusher, Alex mused.
It didn’t matter. Even if Jessica tried to convince the others of what happened, no one would remember and so, hopefully, no one would believe her.
Alex exhaled in relief, then knelt beside Jezza’s prone form to take hold of her wrist. As the dome of ice dissolved and Alex sent the water sailing back home to the sea, she caught a glimpse of Harrison further up the beach. Realizing that everyone was still alive, he began running flat out toward the bonfire.
Before he could reach them, Alex jumped—leaving an oblivious Bay View, a seething Jessica Huffman, the dazed collection of her former classmates, and an obviously confused Harrison behind.
Twenty-Five
Alex and Jezza reappeared in the desert.
Not in the recognizable shadow of Shiprock, but instead in the same barren landscape Alex once brought Aaron Gale. The sun was low on the horizon, painting the desert in tones of hazy gold. There was nothing and no one to be seen for miles in any direction.
The vacant expanse was the first location that sprang to mind when Alex scoured her memory for possible jump sites. Not knowing where to teleport in order to find the others, a remote desert seemed like the most viable alternative. At least here she could take a few moments to gather her thoughts without worry of being ambushed by more of Carter’s agents.
What she hadn’t counted on was being assaulted with the painful reminders of Aaron’s final days as the past came back to her in a torrent of sounds and images. Alex might have come to terms with the night terrors—but there was only one power on Earth that could ever erase the memories themselves.
And that was something Alex would never do. She owed it to Aaron, and to the others, to remember them. Always.
Running a hand over her face, she sat down beside Jezza’s supine form and stared off into the distance.
The last time she came here, she’d been trying to understand—and desperately attempting to control—her freshly absorbed ability of weather manipulation. By the time Aaron finished giving her a crash course in how to derail a full-blown hurricane, he was unconscious and looking roughly as worse for wear as Jezza now did.
She reached out and brushed some of the pink and blonde braids away from her friend’s face, watching Jezza carefully as her eyes darted back and forth behind her closed eyelids.
Was she asleep? Dreaming?
Alex reached out once more to check her pulse. Jezza smacked her hand away and bolted upright. Her breathing suddenly ragged, she crawled a few feet away as she glanced about in obvious panic.
“Whoa!” Alex held her hands up in a placating gesture. “It’s alright, Jezza! You’re alright. We’re safe now.”
Jezza stopped moving and raised a hand to block the light of the sun, hanging low on the horizon behind Alex. Her frantic movements slowed and she reached up to feel the back of her neck.
“Did I…”
“Hurt anyone?” Alex finished. She shook her head. “No, you didn’t.”
The tension in Jezza’s expression dissolved. “Is it over?”
“For the moment, I guess,” said Alex. “At least until we can take care of Carter and get these things out of our heads. How much do you remember?”
“Only bits and pieces.” Jezza scowled. “I remember really wanting to deck that big guy. What was his name? … Harrison. Oh my God, that guy was such an ass.” She stared off into the distance, narrowing her eyes as she sifted through her memories. “I remember him hitting you.… And that group of teenagers on the beach. That part’s the clearest because I was trying so hard to fight the device. But eventually it all just goes dark. What happened to those kids?”
“They’re fine. I figured out how to disable our devices before we hurt anyone. I also nuked a bunch of cell phones and altered some memories, so the secret of our abilities should be safe,” said Alex.
Of course, that was assuming Jessica kept her mouth shut—and that there were no bystanders hanging around outside the dome of ice who might be left to question what it was they’d witnessed.
“After I melted the dome, I brought us here before Harrison could take us back in.”
“And where is ‘here,’ exactly?”
“Honestly? No idea,” said Alex. “But it’s pretty isolated, and I figured we could use that right about now.”
“Isolated and dry as a bone,” said Jezza.
She waved a hand through the air to illustrate her point, summoning a collection of minuscule water droplets from the arid landscape. They pooled above her open palm, creating an orb roughly the size of a ping-pong ball.
“I vote we find a new hideout sooner rather than later,” she said. “I don’t like being defenseless.”
Alex stood and began to pace back and forth across the cracked white desert floor as she struggled to formulate a plan. At least this time she hadn’t brought them here while frantically trying to dissolve a hurricane of her own making.
Alex came up short, inspecting her surroundings with fresh eyes.
How had s
he originally brought Aaron here?
If there was one seemingly unshakeable rule of teleportation, it was that a jumper needed to see their intended destination at least once before they’d be capable of completing the jump.
Alex was absolutely certain she hadn’t picked this place as her intended destination back then. It would have been a pretty difficult jump to pull off, considering she’d never actually seen the location before landing there with Aaron. This desert might as well have been another planet, prior to that first jump.
So how the ever-loving crap had they ended up here in the first place?
It was in that moment Alex realized this desert wasn’t the only location she’d jumped to without seeing an image of it beforehand.
Looking back, one other instance immediately sprang to mind.
The stormy skies above the Bering Sea.
She’d managed to reappear in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, to find Nate on that fishing trawler.
But how?
“What’s with the face?” asked Jezza.
“Hmm?”
“You’ve got a look,” she said.
“I’m trying to figure out how I got here,” she explained.
When she jumped with Aaron, she’d been desperate. So desperate, in fact, that when she jumped without a solid location in mind, it didn’t even faze her when she reappeared in exactly the sort of isolated place she knew they needed to escape to.
And when she arrived in the past—so close to Nate, smack dab in the middle of the ocean, despite the fact that she’d never seen the place before—it was because she’d been focusing on him instead of a location for her jump.
She’d been so overwhelmed with relief at seeing him alive prior to her jump that her original location slipped her mind.
Was that the key, then?
A sense of need or a powerful emotion? Perhaps one tied to a person, as was the case with Nate?
Alex reached out and took hold of Jezza’s hand.
She had plenty of overwhelming emotion to draw on and enough need to spare. Without pausing to consider the possible ramifications of what she was attempting, Alex closed her eyes, thought of Declan, and jumped.
