We stood frozen together like that for a time, the hot water beating on us. I could not speak.
Finally, quietly, Jamie reached out and shut the water off. He stepped back from me, leaving me bereft but satisfied. I turned to look into his eyes. They held more naked emotion than I had ever seen on his face. I reached to touch his cheek and he pulled me against his skin, enveloping me in his arms, burying his face in my wet hair. Maybe I wasn’t the only one getting more emotionally involved than I should.
I put my arms around his neck and held him close. Minutes passed.
He pulled back and looked around the room and up at the ceiling.
“What?” I said.
“Just checking. The roof isn’t on fire this time.” He gave me a cheeky grin. “Should I take that as some kind of insult?”
I swatted him on the behind.
“Ouch!”
“It’s not funny!”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. I went to swat him again but he jumped away. I chased him into the bedroom and we fell, laughing, onto the bed.
Jamie pulled the covers up over us and me against him. “You know something, Cat? You’re good for me. Very, very good.”
“You were good for me too,” I said.
Now it was his turn to smack me on the butt. I squealed, and the ruckus began all over again.
In the morning, I was sorry not to have gotten much sleep last night. I hurt all over. It had been the good kind of hurt until we started running through the woods. The sky was black, again, and my clothes were wet through.
I didn’t understand why Miller thought we should be out in the rain, but I admit the weather probably reduced the risk of starting a forest fire.
When we arrived at the training area, the group had one extra person present. Justine had joined us today. I hadn’t seen that much of her at the camp. She mostly stayed in her cabin while Eric trained, and clung to him like a silent, brooding leech at meals.
I was surprised when Miller beckoned me forward.
“You’re up first, Cat. Let’s start with something basic.”
My first job was to start a fire in a bundle of kindling. I closed my eyes, and gathered myself, centering as we had practiced in yesterday’s meditation. Feeling full of power and Talent, I released it into the pile of kindling.
Nothing happened.
“Whenever you’re ready, Catrina,” Miller said mildly.
I tried again, breathing slowly, and in a controlled fashion, working hard to systematically relax every muscle in my body, from my toes all the way up to my scalp. Then I released my inner power into the kindling. Nothing.
Thinking back to yesterday, I tried to remember the sequence of events that led to the cabin catching on fire. My mind filled with images of Jamie naked, the sensation of his skin against mine, his body moving in me, the smells and tastes of him. My face flushed. The more I remembered the hotter I got. Finally, I tried to open my mind as I had while I lay relaxing in bed afterward.
A rush of hot power built inside me. I had Talent, it was here in my hands, mine to use. I tried to release it, to channel the fire outward, but the power filled my head, unable to escape. Bursting with energy, I screamed in frustration, and felt the power drain away.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I opened my eyes. The kindling was still intact. I looked around. Everyone was staring at me. I had failed.
Jamie made a slight movement beside me. I turned to look at him.
“I felt that,” he said.
“Felt what?”
“I felt you use your Talent. But nothing happened.”
“Clearly,” I said, biting my lip in frustration. “Why doesn’t it work?”
“I don’t know.”
Miller broke in. “Why don’t you rest for a minute, gather yourself? Eric, take a turn.”
The old resentment settled over me as Eric glanced at the kindling, and moments later, it was smoldering. I pushed the feeling away—this was no time to resent him. He had too much power, and I had too little. If we were more evenly balanced, life would have been better for both of us.
Eric seemed to be doing a little better. Again, he managed to contain the fire to the firewood, and not start any unintended fires.
I looked around the group, wondering what they thought of me, his useless sister.
I accomplished as much as usual during the rest of the morning. It was with a tired mind and a heavy heart that I returned to camp.
As I turned off to head back to my cabin, Miller stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
“I have some exercises,” he said, “that your brother found useful. Follow me.”
I trailed him back to a partitioned-off room at the back of the Quonset hut, where he handed me a binder full of paper. “Here,” he said. “Read through these and try them. It’s a set of exercises for focus and concentration.”
“I was concentrating,” I muttered.
“There are many pieces to your personal puzzle,” he said. “I believe you have the raw Talent. We need to work out what you did the other night to unleash it, and reproduce that in a controlled way.”
All my focus, concentration and control went into not blushing. “Thanks,” I said, “I’ll read it.”
“Catrina,” he said, “you have to believe in yourself, and in your brother. I’ve seen people overcome blocks worse than this. Give it time.”
“We may not have much time left.”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, thinking the rest of my answer, but not saying it. Before Eric gets desperate and does something stupid. Before the Grey Institute men or the cops find us, somehow.
“Patience is all you need.” He smiled, the first time I’d seen a crack in that grizzled façade. “You have an amazing aura. I’ve never seen anything like it. You will crack this.”
I took the binder back to our cabin. There was a rocking chair on the porch, ancient and weathered gray. I tested the seat for splinters and weight bearing before I settled myself down in it to read.
The binder contained a series of exercises, which seemed to work by getting you to visualize various grids in your head and then allowing your power to flow through the grid lines. The grids started out simple—the first was a set of perspective lines—and gradually became more complex as the set went on.
I flicked through the pages to the end of the binder and found designs of Escherian complexity. After trying to understand how the last couple of grids could even exist under the laws of physics, my head started to hurt. Lying back against the chair, I closed my eyes and let the binder slip shut.
“Trying the academic approach?”
I opened my eyes. Jamie stood on the porch next to me. “I don’t think this is going to work,” I said. “I’ve never been much good at this sort of thing.”
“This was Miller’s suggestion?” Looking askance, he picked up the binder from my lap and turned a few pages. “God. I can’t imagine trying to work this way.”
“How do you make your Talent work?” I asked, hearing the frustration in my own voice.
Jamie closed the book and handed it back. “You’re not going to like my answer.” He leaned back against the porch rail, something I wouldn’t have been game to try considering the general level of disrepair. “I don’t make it work. It just works. Sometimes. Except when it doesn’t. Finding is a quirky and unreliable Talent. It’s why I would never fit in with the Greys. Regimentation, discipline, theory”—and here he poked at the book in my lap—“never work for me.”
“What about when you’re trying to find something specific? Like when you were looking for Eric?”
“I think about what I’m looking for, sometimes I do some research. Then I wander off and play pool for a while, drink a few beers, surf the internet. And usually, soon after, I get an idea about where I should look. If I’m not looking for something specific, it’s much less formulated. I could be walking down the street, and a little
voice says, ‘You should go down that alley.’ Or, ‘Play cards with that guy, he’s desperate and has a tell.’”
“That doesn’t help me even a bit.”
“Sorry.” He pushed himself up to sit on the rail. “I suspect there are different kinds of Talent. Some are passive, or involuntary, like mine. Or like Herb’s—if he touches an object, or a person, he knows things about them. I suspect Justine’s is passive too—she doesn’t need to do anything to invoke it. It just is.
“Some Talents are more active—you have to concentrate and direct them. In this theory of mine, Eric’s Talent falls into this category. Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?”
“If fires are going to start around a person involuntarily, that seems to be kind of inconvenient.”
“Like the cabin roof?”
“Like that.”
I stared out into the woods. The trees were still in their bare winter state, barren like my Talent.
“What would you do if you were me?”
Jamie folded his arms. “I think you should try and work out what you did to set the cabin roof on fire. Do that again.”
“That’s the least subtle suggestion I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m a guy, shoot me.” He took my hand to pull me out of the rocker. “What do you say we run some private experiments?”
I laughed. “For the greater good.”
“Exactly.”
The first time we made love, I forgot we were supposed to be experimenting, which didn’t stop me from having a good time. After that, I got increasingly frustrated as I found myself focusing on flammable objects near the bed instead of what was going on inside it.
Eventually I rolled away from Jamie and groaned. “This is no good.”
He ran his hand down my arm, smiling. “I thought it was passable, myself.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “You would.” Stretching, I arched the kinks out of my back. “I wish I knew what was different, before.”
“We’ll have to keep experimenting.” He kicked his legs out of the bed. “I’m going to take a shower.”
After he left, I ran my hands over the warm spot on the sheet where he had lain. Theoretically, I had now joined the ranks of the Talented, which meant my life heading off in a new direction. No more hope for a white picket fence, no two-point-four kids, no minivan. No quiet life. I had Jamie to distract me now, but deep in my heart I knew I wanted more than he wanted to give me.
Once we solved Eric’s problems and mine—if we could solve them—we’d have no reason to stick together. Jamie would go on to his next assignment, and his next short-term relationship, and I’d…I didn’t know what I’d do. Something.
I picked up the binder again and lost myself in the grids, forcing out the sick feeling I got from thinking about the future.
A few days later, Miller upped the ante for Eric. Building on the small successes he’d had the previous couple of days, he brought us out to the clearing to see a pile of hay bales. Not a small pile, either. I didn’t know where he’d found a hundred bales of hay in the night, or the time to stack them, and I wondered if he’d used some kind of Talent to magic them up.
The whole group had turned out again today, I assumed to watch Eric. I couldn’t imagine that watching me fail day after day was particularly interesting. Justine had taken to clinging to Eric’s hand, even when he was doing the exercises. I scowled at her.
“Hay,” Miller said, “is amazingly flammable. This should be easier for you, Cat, and harder for you, Eric. It’s the perfect training exercise.”
Unfortunately, it was my turn first. I’d memorized the first few grids in the book, so after I seated myself in a relaxed lotus pose, and closed my eyes, I visualized grid number one.
It didn’t help. I was getting pretty tired of this. After a few minutes, I swore.
Eric turned to look at me. “Should I go ahead?”
“Why not,” I said. “I’m going to take a walk.”
I headed off in a random direction through the woods, happy that not even Jamie followed me, for once. He must have detected my mood accurately. When I thought I was far enough away, I stopped. I wanted to punch a wall, but it didn’t seem fair to punch some poor tree that was minding its own business.
I kicked the leaves, threw some impotent punches at the air, and spun around in a circle until I was dizzy. Slipping down onto the ground, I lay on my back and stared up at the canopy of golden leaves. So near, and yet so far.
My frustration came to an abrupt end, interrupted by an inhuman, high-pitched scream.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I scrambled to my feet and sprinted back toward the training area.
Everyone clustered around a person on the ground. Jamie must have heard my approach and turned aside, letting me see the tableau.
It was Miller. His hands and arms were blackened, the remnants of his shirt clinging to his body. I could see reddened raw flesh in between the scorched black skin. The sight would stay with me forever.
Darla held his head, but he moaned and thrashed.
“He needs medical attention,” Jamie said. “I’m assuming you don’t want to call an ambulance.”
Darla shook her head once, sharply. “Bring the van round. I’ll take him to the emergency room.”
Jamie took off through the woods like a jackrabbit.
Only then did I see Eric. He stood still as a rock, watching everything, his face gray. Justine hovered beside him, not touching him, but close enough to at any point. She looked calmer than I expected, and I found myself giving her a notch more credit for that.
Tiffany sobbed and wailed, reminding me that for all her sullen bravado, she was a teenager.
Darla stared deep into Miller’s eyes from where she sat with his head in her lap. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “They’ll give you morphine at the hospital. This will heal.”
The rest of us stood useless until Jamie returned, gunning the van through the trees to a position at the edge of the clearing. He leaped out and slid the side door open.
“Eric, you take his legs,” he said. “Darla, I’ll ask you to step aside. I’m going to put my arms under his shoulders. We’ll lift him on the count of three.”
Eric stood like an ice statue, and I stepped up to Miller’s ankles. Darla looked askance at me.
“I’m strong enough,” I said. “Carried plenty of drunks out of bars.”
He was heavier than I expected, and I winced as he shrieked when we lifted him. Each step to the van was punctuated by screaming, like a hot poker across my soul. We laid him on the floor in the back, on a pile of tarps.
“Tiffany, I want you to get in the back with Dad,” Darla said. “Do you hear me?” Her voice held command worthy of a sergeant major, and I looked at her again, wondering where she and Miller had met.
The girl’s sobbing cut off and she nodded and climbed into the back of the van, then slid the door closed behind her.
“I’ll call you,” Darla said to Justine, and got into the driver’s seat. The van disappeared down the trail back toward base camp.
We four were left, three of us looking at Eric, who still hadn’t moved.
Justine took his hand and gave it a tug. He stepped toward her, and she led him down the trail. Jamie and I followed behind at a respectable distance.
He took my hand and held me back so we dropped farther behind.
“What happened?” I said in a low voice.
“He was supposed to start the fire in the hay, same as you. He was looking at the hay, and then Miller started to scream. His hands were engulfed in flames. Darla smothered them with her jacket.”
“Just like that?”
“It was fast. I couldn’t tell you what went wrong. I’m guessing, though, that it’s pretty similar to what happened in Vegas.”
I swore. “Eric suggested if he couldn’t control the fire he’d…”
“He’d what?”
“He said something about shoo
ting rabid dogs. I think he means to kill himself.” My throat tightened around a lump. There had to be a way to stop that from happening.
Jamie’s hand tightened on mine. “Now I know why you’ve been so worried.”
“Miller being hurt is bad enough on its own.”
“True. What do you want to do?”
I ground my teeth together while I thought. “Let’s see if we can talk him down off the ledge.” I didn’t see what else we could do.
“Sounds like a plan.”
We arrived back at camp in time to see Justine shepherding Eric into their cabin. She caught my eye, shook her head and mouthed “Later,” and shut the door.
“Maybe she beat me to the punch.”
Jamie shrugged. “Whatever works. I want to keep an eye on things, make sure she doesn’t leave him alone.” He made for one of the big rocks out the front of the Quonset hut, where he sat down and began inspecting his fingernails.
“I’m going to get a glass of water,” I said. “You want something?”
“A beer would be nice, if they have any,” he said. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
I headed into the Quonset hut and back into the kitchen. Not knowing my way around, I started with the beer—that was easy, in the refrigerator—and then rooted around to try and find a drinking glass.
Busying my hands with domestic tasks calmed me, as always. Once I had my glass of water, I dug around until I found some cheese and crackers, and set up a little tray for Jamie.
I headed back through the hut, and used my hip to open the door. I stepped out into the clearing. Jamie still sat on the rock, swinging his feet back and forth.
A cracking sound startled me, and as if my mind were buried in molasses, I wondered what it was.
Jamie hit the ground behind the rock, and the cracking sound repeated a couple more times.
It was not until a bullet sang into the ground in front of my feet that I dropped the tray. Beer fizzed onto the dirt, crackers flew, and I threw myself back through the doorway.
I rushed over to one of the windows, crouching down as Dad had always coached me, and then taking a quick prairie dog glance out of one corner of the glass—head up, head down. Look fast and remember what you see, he said. Look with soft eyes, get the whole scene and think about it after.
Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) Page 17
