by Diane Farr
We each took a step backward, staring at each other. Both of us were breathing hard. I rubbed my arms as if I could scrub away the last few seconds and be free of him again.
It didn’t work.
The world did not return to normal right away, but as soon as our contact was broken it began to right itself. Eventually I was able to look at the planet through one set of eyes: my own. And that was plenty, thank you.
“What was that?” I croaked. It was hard to form words.
Lance didn’t bother forming words at all. I read the images in his mind. Rare. He must be having as hard a time as I was, regaining his balance. I couldn’t pick up a coherent, completed sentence. Just images, from which I gathered that he had heard of this phenomenon, whatever it was, but had never encountered it before. Very rare.
“You didn’t expect it. You didn’t expect that to happen.” Then I remembered something. “And you know what? I did. Explain that, Hot Shot.”
His body went still. He regained his voice. “What do you mean, you expected it?”
I was pretty rattled. I just hugged myself and shivered, shaking my head. “I don’t know. I expected something.”
“You expected wholesoul?”
His confusion and my confusion blended in my brain; I couldn’t tell what was my own and what I was picking up from Lance. “All I know is, I’ve been afraid to touch you. I back up when you come near me. I can’t stand to sit next to you. Ever since I first saw you, I just didn’t want you to touch me. Ever.”
Now a flicker of raw emotion flashed out of him, but he hid it from me before I could identify it. It was like catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye. I had told him that I didn’t want him to touch me, ever, and that made him feel ... what?? Something. Something strong.
Had I hurt his feelings?
Nah. Not possible.
Or was it??
I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. That’s the problem with information overload. After a while, you don’t know jack.
“Wholesoul hardly ever happens,” he told me. His voice was low and hoarse. “I can’t tell you how rare it is. Whatever you were expecting, it couldn’t have been wholesoul.”
“Well, duh, since I’ve never heard of it before—”
“Spellspinners can almost always communicate without speaking. But not ...” I saw the muscles in his throat work as he swallowed. “Not like that.”
“Look,” I said. My voice was starting to shake. “You want to go somewhere and sit down?” I was feeling a bit weak in the knees, frankly, but there was nowhere to sit. Meeting at the edge of the woods has its drawbacks. “This is a lot for me to process. I bet it is for you, too.”
“Sure,” he said. For once, I couldn’t read him at all. “I’ll meet you on the porch.”
And the sonofabitch vanished.
Can you believe it?! I offered him the old olive branch—sort of—and he just took off and left me there in the dark. Standing in a field all by myself, in the middle of the freaking night.
“That’s not funny, Lance,” I shouted. The only answer I got was about five seconds of semi-quiet as the bugs in my immediate vicinity shut up. I didn’t keep yelling, so they started in again. And I trudged back to the house, muttering under my breath.
There’s nothing like an uphill trudge to cool the blood. By the time I caught up with him, my priorities had shifted. Instead of the intimate, information-filled conversation I had pictured five minutes ago, I wanted something completely different.
I was ready to let him teach me a certain something. One teeny something.
When I got to the house, I stood on the bottom step of the porch and looked up at him—a shadow waiting for me among shadows. “Okay,” I said. “Show me how you do that.”
My, he was pleased.
He hid it from me quickly, though—because he didn’t want me to think he was gloating. (You see? I’m now really, really good at reading him. This is not a coincidence.) “Whatever you want,” he said lightly. “Come on up.”
I came one step closer. “First tell me what it is. You’re not really vanishing. Right? A person can’t vanish. Are you moving faster than the human eye can see, like one of Anne Rice’s vampires?”
“No. Not quite.” Lance must have read those books, too, because he knew right away what I meant. “And you’re right that a person can’t vanish. We all have to be somewhere.”
I took another step closer. “So what is it? What do you do?”
“I just ... be somewhere else.”
I paused. Then I took a step backward. This was getting to be a bit much, and we hadn’t even started. “You can’t be somewhere you’re not.”
“Most people can’t.”
“But you can?”
“Yep. And so can you—if it’s someplace where you have been.” Laughter lit the edges of his voice. “Which probably makes no sense to you, but it’s true.”
I sure would have liked to see his expression. The mind-meld was stronger than ever, but at this point I needed all the information I could get. I wished it were high noon instead of midnight. “Can you see in the dark?”
“No.”
“Neither can I. We’ve got to stop meeting in the dead of night.” I shook my head—trying to clear it, I guess. “Let me get this straight. When you do that disappearing thing—or that thing where you materialize out of thin air—you’re teleporting?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘teleporting.’ I don’t have a gizmo in my pocket, or a machine hidden in a basement somewhere. This isn’t a sci-fi movie thing.”
“I know, I know. It’s a spellspinner thing. Organic.”
“Right.”
At this point I couldn’t decide whether to back away or come closer, so I sat down right on the porch steps. The moonlight splashed across my lap, cool and pale as water. Lance moved out of the shadows and sat beside me—not too close, I noticed. After our experience in the meadow, I wasn’t the only one avoiding casual contact.
I looked at him. He looked at me. He was waiting. I had to make the first move.
“Okay,” I said. “Teach me.”
Lance has a very sexy smile. He smiled now, and I had to fight the urge to melt. It was quite a struggle. Plus I had to keep him from sensing how close to meltpoint I was. So I had to block him at the same time I was melting. All in all, it was an exhausting few seconds. I was glad when he put that hot smile away and got serious.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. He was all business now. “You have the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want. The only rule is, you can’t go anywhere you’ve never been.”
I thought about it for a minute. Then I asked the question burning in my brain. “Huh?”
Actually, he was fairly patient with me. He started over.
“You can’t use your powers to go to a place unless you’ve already visited it in the usual way. It doesn’t have to be a place you actually remember—once you get good at it, you can visit places you have no memory of. Places you visited as a baby or whatever. But it has to be a place that you have physically been, or your powers can’t send you there.”
I must still have been staring at him blankly, because he started to grin. “Come on, it’s not that hard. You can will yourself to Meg’s house. You can’t will yourself to Mars.”
“Why not? Not that I want to go to Mars. I’m just asking.”
“You’ve never been to Mars. So Mars isn’t programmed into your cells.”
“How can a place be programmed into my—”
“It’s a figure of speech. Just think of it that way. It’s easier.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I think I get it. I can go to Weaverville, but I can’t go to Honolulu. Which totally sucks, because I’d rather go to Honolulu.”
“Who wouldn’t?” He stretched his long legs out in front of him and leaned back on his elbows. He looked much more comfortable than a person should look, sitting on porch ste
ps. “The great thing is, once you’ve been to Honolulu you can go back pretty much anytime you want. So quit complaining.”
“Right. I’ll save a fortune in airfare.”
He nodded. “And time. No six hour flight for you, babe. Not after the first visit. From then on, just blink your eyes and you’re on the beach at Waikiki.”
I was glad I was sitting down. The picture he presented was making me feel light-headed. He must have picked up on this, because he shot a glance at me while I sat there, stunned. “Don’t freak,” he advised me. “You won’t be skatching that often.”
“I won’t be what?” My voice sounded a bit faint. “Scratching?”
“Skatching. That’s what we call it.”
“Skatching. Gee. Why won’t I? It sounds like fun.” I concentrated on breathing. In, out. “Not to mention useful. You seem to use it every day.”
“Just around you.” He flashed another sexy smile. “I've been showing off.”
“Trying to scare me, you mean.” I blew my breath out in a sigh, and felt better. “Is it hard to do?”
“Not particularly. But it’s dangerous. You don’t want to get caught.”
I thought about it. “I see. If I'm late to school some morning, I shouldn’t use my spellspinner powers to just pop in. Or skatch in.”
“Exactly. You can. But it’s not a good idea.”
And, with my luck, the spell wouldn’t hold and I’d skatch right back home again at some unexpected moment. Talk about conspicuous.
Note to self: Find out whether Lance’s spells fade away. Find out soon.
Another note to self: Don’t let him know that yours do.
This could be tricky. How do I find out whether Lance’s powers hold better than mine? I can’t just ask him. He’s already way more powerful than I am. The last thing I need is for him to find out that my spells unravel. I suspect that his don’t. I mean, if this were the norm for spellspinners, he would have mentioned it, right? In addition to warning me not to get caught, he would have said something like, “Oh, and when the power wears off, you’ll be back on the porch with no warning.” Or whatever. But he didn’t. The only pointers he gave me were on how it’s done. Nothing about it coming undone.
Then Lance stood up and dusted the seat of his jeans with his hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I couldn’t see his expression with him looming over me. So I stood up, too. “Go where?”
He shrugged. “How about the mall?”
If I hadn’t been able to read the excitement zinging through him, I would have thought the idea bored him. As it was, though, I wasn’t fooled. He was all torqued up. I wasn’t sure why. “The mall isn’t open at midnight,” I reminded him.
“That’s the point, babe. No one will see us.”
“Stop calling me ‘babe.’” But adrenaline shot through me. His attraction to the idea was contagious, making the invitation irresistible—scary and exciting at the same time. More exciting than scary. “What about mall cops? We could get arrested.”
“For what? Breaking and entering? We aren’t going to break in. We’re just going to appear.” His hot, contagious grin was back. “And if anyone shows up to arrest us, guess what?”
“We disappear?”
“You got it.”
Like I said, the invitation was irresistible. And when a hottie gives you a grin like that, you just have to smile back at him.
“So what do I do?”
“Think about the mall. Picture it.”
A jumble of fleeting images clashed in my mind. I let him in so he could see them. He shook his head. “Has to be specific. One store. One spot.”
The problem is, the mall is always changing. The displays are never the same. Even the stores morph over time, buying each other out and changing names and knocking out walls and whatever. So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and honed in on a spot that never changes: the drinking fountain in the hallway leading to the restrooms.
“Perfect,” he murmured. I was concentrating so hard on that drinking fountain, I was only dimly aware of his hand touching mine. But the connection between us roared back to life, blurring the boundaries between our two minds. I heard him: Take me with you. Before I could finish asking the how? that formed in my thoughts, he answered: Like this.
And knowledge struck me like a fist, knocking me, blinded and breathless, to the ground. I think I cried out.
Because I didn’t land on the ground, or on the porch steps. I landed on cold, hard tile. Lance tumbled down beside me, dragged by my hand. The world spun giddily for a moment, then righted itself and there I was: sprawled beside Lance on the floor near the drinking fountain. At the mall.
Lance leaned on his elbow—the better to see my amazement, I guess. I was flat on my back, staring at the emergency lights reflected in the stainless steel fountain. “Not bad for a beginner,” he told me.
Not bad? It was frickin’ amazing. I didn’t say it—but, of course, I didn’t need to. Not with Lance. I sat up a bit woozily. “We should have started with something smaller. Going from one end of the porch to the other. Something like that.”
“It doesn’t make any difference. Five feet or a hundred miles is all the same.”
“Wow. We’re messing with the space/time continuum.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. You want to look around?”
“Oh, sure. As long as we’re here, let’s do some shopping.”
See, I was kind of putting a bold face on things. I do have some pride. But I was feeling seriously freaked. And no, I did not want to look around. The mall was spooky. It was stuffy and silent, and lit only by emergency lights here and there. Without the people and noise and lights, you wouldn’t believe how huge the place seemed. Not the most welcoming atmosphere, quite frankly. And I was picking up some very strange vibes from Lance.
I got to my feet—moving cautiously at first. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, but whatever it was, it didn’t have to do with my physical self. You’d think that hurling yourself through space would hurt. Well, it doesn’t. I soon realized that I was perfectly fine. Weird, huh?
While I was checking my physical condition, Lance strolled out into the mall. He stood there, looking alert and watchful. Something in his body language made me think of a stalking cat. The strange vibes suddenly came into focus and I understood what I was picking up from him: Lance was looking for security cameras and calculating what they could, or couldn’t, pick up. And, written plainly in his mind, I saw why.
He looked back over his shoulder at me. Our eyes met. His smile sent a chill down my spine. “Spellspinners don’t shop,” he told me.
I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? They steal?”
Ooh, he didn’t like that word. Irritation flickered in his brain again. “I keep forgetting. You think like a stick. Your mind is all cluttered up with rules.” Amusement crept into his voice. It was a sneering sort of amusement, and I didn’t care for it. “You have to relearn a lot of stuff, Zara. I’m going to teach you a new way to look at the world. A new way to be.”
“Maybe I won’t like your way.”
“It’s not only my way, babe. It’s your way, too. You just don’t know it yet. Come on.”
I had to follow him. What was I going to do, hang out in the dark by the drinking fountain while Lance sauntered off? No thanks. It was wicked creepy in that empty mall. So I trotted after him.
All the stores had metal gates pulled shut across their gaping entryways. The effect was like wandering into a deserted cell block, with merchandise behind bars like neatly-stacked prisoners. Lance was, frankly, casing the joint. “Where are you going?” I said. I sounded like a panicked toddler.
“I’m just showing you something.” He stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. “You see those jeans?”
“What about them?”
The jeans display Lance was pointing to was about ten feet from us, on the other side of a steel gate. "I've never be
en in that store,” he said. “So what does that tell you?"
I looked sideways at him. "It tells me that you're not a Lane Bryant shopper. What a surprise."
"It also tells you that I can't get at those jeans. At least as far as tonight’s lesson goes." He jerked his chin at the store next to Lane Bryant. "Hot Topic, on the other hand, is a place where I have actually been."
Now I got it. "So the gates can't keep you out?"
He tapped the tip of my nose, which is probably my least favorite way to be touched. At least he didn't say 'beep.' He said, "Fast learner. You just won the cigar, babe."
While I stared at him, frozen in place by the alarming implications rushing into my brain, Lance vanished. And reappeared on the other side of the gate, inside Hot Topic. He laughed when he saw my expression. “I told you, don’t freak. I’m just demonstrating.”
“Don’t you dare touch anything. There are probably cameras all over the place.”
“Yep. They’ll have cameras, motion sensors, all that jazz. I’m surprised we haven’t heard any alarms yet. They must use silent alarms at this mall.”
“You sound like an expert.”
His smile went all sexy. “I’m an expert on all sorts of things.”
I tossed my hair back over my shoulder. “If you’re trying to impress me, Donovan, you’re—”
Right on cue, a loud voice rang out from the other end of the corridor: “Hold it!”
I whipped around, startled. Sure enough, it was a security guard. Bobbing flashlight, pointed gun. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. It is not a pleasant sensation.
We didn’t wait to find out whether it was a water pistol or a Glock. I heard Lance, loud and clear, in my brain: Go. And justlikethat, there I was, back on my porch.
It was too easy. A little disorienting, but not bad. You’d think beaming yourself to the mall and back would cause vertigo or nausea. The bends. Something.
You know what? It ought to. It shouldn’t be so easy for Lance and me to flout rules that apply to everybody else. I’m not talking about the shoplifting thing—which really didn’t happen, after all. I’m talking about the tesseract, or whatever it is. There’s something inherently wrong in this skatching thing. Or at least I’m afraid there is.
