by Gloria Craw
She took my hand. “I saw something in your future yesterday. I wasn’t looking for it, so the vision came as a shock, but I saw you happy. Very happy.” Her eyes shone a little in the dim light. “And you weren’t alone.”
I snorted. “Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”
“Everything happens for a reason. Even the hard stuff.”
I wanted to believe that was true, but I didn’t.
By the time I made my way into the kitchen, everyone had already eaten breakfast. Ian was sitting at the table behind his laptop. He gave me a bright smile before returning to whatever he was working on. Not wanting to interrupt him, I ate my cereal and looked at the others in the room. Katherine and Brandy were sitting together on one of the big sofas. Brandy’s vibration was weaker than it had been the night before. Her laugh was vibrant, her eyes were bright, but her internal energy was fading fast.
With a hollow place in my stomach, I looked for Spencer. His huge frame cast a shadow as he stood staring out the wall of windows. He was talking on his cell phone and seemed agitated. Hanging up, he strode to the center of the room. “We’ve got another situation,” he said. “The Sterling clan chief’s went early to our meeting location, and they found a spy among the cleaning staff there. Just like before, the human bolted and was in the middle of a seizure when they caught up to him. He said one word before dying. Any guess what it was?”
We looked at him questioningly.
“‘Stentorian,’” Spencer said in disgust.
All of my alarm systems started firing at once. “That’s Luke’s clan,” I muttered.
“Yes,” Katherine said. “What’s going on, Spencer?”
“That sniveling, sneaking, conniving Luke Stentorian must be our mole,” he replied heatedly.
“Couldn’t it be someone else in the Stentorian clan?” Katherine asked.
“Who besides Luke would have known the location of our next meeting?” he asked in return. “Luke has been on the inside of our circle since his parents died, the perfect place to gather all sorts of damaging information. He doesn’t have much of a backbone, we all know that, but I tried to help him.”
“At least you know who the mole is,” Brandy said. “All you have to do is catch him.”
Spencer was still furious. “Oh, I’ll catch the little coward, and when I do…”
“What about the flash drive I gave you?” Ian asked. “Is there any information on it?”
“It was just stupid poetry stuff,” Spencer said in disgust. “Luke’s random musings about life. I can’t figure out why he wanted me to have the garbage, unless it was to throw me off track.”
I got to my feet. “My mom’s car was broken into yesterday,” I said.
Every face in the room turned to me. Their expressions suggested I was really missing the point. “Luke knows who I am,” I explained. “He knows my name, and my mom’s car was broken into yesterday. What does that suggest?”
“There’s no reason to suspect the two are related,” Spencer said, coming toward me. “However, I understand why you’re concerned. Luke could pass a lot of information about you on to Sebastian, but he’s known who you are for days. If he’d said anything to Sebastian, I’m sure your family would have been taken by now. I have the feeling that our traitor will hold onto most of the really valuable intel for a while. At least until he’s sure of getting an enormous payoff. If we catch him soon, we can keep him from telling Sebastian anything more.”
I paced the kitchen. “What are we going to do in the meantime?”
“I’ll make some calls,” Spencer said. “By this afternoon, I should have a couple of dewing here to guard your family. I’ll have to invent a plausible reason for what I’m asking my friends to do, but I’ve always had a creative streak.”
It wasn’t enough. “Shouldn’t we be guarding them right now? At least until the other dewing arrive?”
“We don’t want to rush in and surround your family,” Ian said. “That would be a red flag to anyone watching. As much as possible, we have to pretend everything is normal.”
“I’ll call Lillian,” Brandy said, retrieving a phone from her pocket. “She won’t mind running surveillance again today.”
I nodded my thanks, and Spencer started dialing on his phone, too. He stepped out onto the deck to talk.
“What about the clan chiefs’ meeting tonight?” Ian asked Katherine. “If Luke is the mole, he would have given Sebastian all the details.”
“We’ll change the location and time,” she said, searching her purse for her phone.
While the people around me made calls, I looked at my bowl of soggy cereal.
“You’d better eat it,” Ian stated. “This is going to be another long day.”
I didn’t doubt his words, so I started shoveling cereal into my mouth. I chewed and swallowed without tasting. All I could think of was Luke telling Sebastian my mother worked out at Forever Fitness off of Forty-Fifth.
Five minutes later Spencer came striding back inside. “Time to get to work,” he announced. “The best way to mitigate any damage Luke might do is to teach you everything we can.”
“I’m ready,” I said.
“We are going to work on defending your thoughts today,” he explained. “Being raised in a human family has put you at a disadvantage that none of the rest of us face. You’re vulnerable to all the joinings of other dewing. So you’re going to have to be aware of your own mind at all times in order to keep others out of it.”
“There is a second part to the lesson,” Ian added. “As a thoughtmaker, you might be able to access the mind of another dewing. My mom told you that, remember?”
“Yes, but I tried it on you and Brandy several times the day we met. It didn’t work.”
“That was the day you hit your head and nearly passed out in class,” Brandy said. “I don’t think you were at your best.”
“True,” I agreed, remembering that my thought transference hadn’t worked very well on anyone else, either.
“We know other thoughtmakers can use their joining on dewing, so we’ll just have to assume you have the same ability,” Spencer continued. “We don’t share your joining, so we can’t explain how it works, but we hope that showing you our minds will give you enough information so you can figure the process out.”
I nodded my understanding and immediately felt the familiar squeezing of Spencer’s mind linking with mine. Absent the discomfort of our previous encounters, I was able to feel his approach clearly. It was like a butterfly landing here and there in a garden of flowers. Everywhere he touched felt better when he left. The process went on until I had a decent understanding of what a healer’s mind would feel like.
When he finished, he motioned for Brandy to take his place. “Haven’t you already done this on me…like a million times?” I asked her.
“I haven’t, actually. It’s nice to be friends with someone without my joining occasionally. It reassures me I’m not a complete fraud. I chose to get to know you without cheating.”
That was a relief. It was good that I’d liked her because of who she was, instead of having some voodoo-like joining make me think I did.
Brandy’s mind aligned with mine in a quick and direct way. I felt her search for information and knew it was a violation of my privacy, but I didn’t mind so much, because she was feeding me my own version of pleasant thoughts at the same time. It was like having someone ask my favorite ice cream flavor and then being fed dish after dish of it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was going to regret eating so much, but in the moment it was delicious.
“Got it?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Yep,” I said, with a full mental stomach.
Katherine was unsure when she sat in front of me. “I don’t know if this will work,” she said. “It depends on whether or not destiny wants to tell me anything today.”
Her approach was subtle. I had to really focus to catch the details of it. After a few moments
, it felt the way music sounds. The beats of her thoughts matched my own and then jumped ahead a bit. Her eyes had a faraway look as she worked. The process continued until I understood what a futureteller’s mind felt like. When her eyes came sharply to focus, I asked, “What did you see?”
Her eye wandered to Ian. “Nothing,” she said, getting up to leave the room.
She’d seen something that involved Ian, and it wasn’t good. I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, though, because Spencer motioned for Ian to begin. He gave me a look of warning. “It will be more like the first time than the second,” he said.
“I’m ready,” I said, and the process began again.
I tried to follow the path he took, but it was more complicated than the others. It felt antagonistic again, too. It wasn’t butterflies, it wasn’t music, and it wasn’t eating ice cream. It was real manipulation, direct pressure applied to my free will. He didn’t waste time with warm-up questions this time, either. “What is your greatest fear?” he asked.
Most people would probably have answered, “Spiders,” “Monsters under the bed,” “Terminal illness,” or “An eternity in hell.” But I hesitated. The pressure he applied went straight to the core of my mind, and it made me furious. How dare he rob me of my secrets, I thought. I pushed back at the pressure of Ian’s mind until I felt his energy shift backward. Then I pushed harder, and with a giant flex of mental muscle, I hefted his energy out of my mind.
He was surprised. “What happened?” Spencer asked.
“She just skipped ahead a lesson,” Ian said. “She kicked me out.”
“Try it with me,” he said delighted.
I felt his approach and though there was no hostility in it, I pushed back against his energy and refused to let him in.
“Very good, Alison,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to get so far so fast.”
I was pretty proud of myself, but I’d forgotten about the rebound. The room tipped to the side, and the cereal I’d eaten felt like it was crawling up my throat. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed to steady myself.
“She needs a break,” Ian said.
“She’s earned one,” Spencer responded.
Opening my eyes, I looked toward the wall of windows. I hadn’t been outside in three days. “I’d like to go for a drive,” I said.
Ten minutes later I was drinking in the hot, polluted air of Las Vegas and loving it.
“Air-conditioning, or windows down?” Ian asked.
“Windows down, please.”
I laid my head back. Warm wind brushed against my face like soft kisses. I let my arm dangle out the window. Imagine Dragons’s “Demons” came through the speakers. “This is one of my favorites,” I said.
“I know,” he said, turning the volume up. “I checked your playlist yesterday.”
I smiled. “Stalker school again?”
He drove the back streets while I slumped in the passenger seat and practiced breathing. All the pressure and stress of the past three days seemed to evaporate. When he pulled into the shade of a tree at a well-watered park, I felt a lot better about life.
Ian leaned back in his seat, too. “Why did you throw me out of your mind when I asked your greatest fear?” he asked, looking over at me. “Are you afraid of dying? That’s the answer most people give.”
“I don’t fear dying so much,” I replied honestly. “After the party the other night I realized I’ve been half alive for most of my life. There’s really not much difference between half alive and fully dead, is there?”
“Are you afraid of fighting Sebastian Truss?” he pressed.
“No. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the idea of pain recently.”
“What is it, then?”
I watched a dog run up to a magpie in the park. The bird rose in flight and hovered above a dog as if taunting him. I wondered what it would feel like to fly away from danger. Maybe it had a nest and a mate to go back to. He was lucky if he did.
The fear I wasn’t going to tell Ian about was my reality. I was going to be alone for the rest of my life.
When we got back to the house, Spencer put me to work trying to thoughtmake Brandy. I started off feeling optimistic, but after trying to push thoughts into her mind for half an hour, I slumped into the corner of the sofa, utterly discouraged. As far as I could tell, it was impossible to thoughtmake another dewing.
Thanks to sharing my mind with four of them earlier, I’d learned dewing thoughts were different than human thoughts in some important ways. Human thoughts were jumbled and erratic, tumbling over each other in a sort of fight for supremacy. They were constantly jumping from one thought to another, which put the human mind on a kind of thought overload.
The dewing mind ran a straighter course. Their thoughts flowed from one to the next smoothly. There was no fighting, jumping around, or switching back and forth between tracks. The result was that dewing thoughts had a power and efficiency human thoughts didn’t.
Half an hour of searching also showed me there were no open places between a dewing’s thoughts. They ran continuously like a long stretch of rope. There were no spaces to slip a thought into. I was on the verge of giving up entirely when it occurred to me I might be going about the process all wrong. I couldn’t push my thoughts through an open place, but maybe I could wrap a thought around the strand that was already there.
Brandy had lost interest in my attempts to thoughtmake her and was watching television. I searched in her mind for a specific thought, and then formed Your ear itches in my mind. I used my energy to wrap that thought around hers like a tight hug. It was intensely difficult, and the rebound hit me hard, but it was worth it when I saw Brandy reach up and scratch her ear.
Quickly, I formed Your other ear itches and wrapped it around her thoughts. The room seemed to shift and dip to the other side as my energy came back at me, but Brandy scratched her ear again. Pushing the motion sickness away, I wrapped You’re thirsty around her thoughts.
Brandy got up from the sofa and headed toward the kitchen. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To get a drink,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”
I jumped to my feet, shouting, “Yes! Yes!”
Everyone looked at me like I’d finally snapped under the pressure. I tried to calm myself. “Are you really thirsty?” I asked. “Or do you just think you’re thirsty?”
Brandy considered, and then an excited expression crossed her face.
“It was a thought,” she squealed. “It was one of your thoughts!”
I started jumping up and down.
Brandy and Katherine joined me half a second later. Through a haze of happiness, I saw identical expressions of relief on Spencer and Ian’s faces.
Chapter Nineteen
Later that night, I choked down some kind of vegan casserole with a smile on my face. Of course, Mom wanted a full debriefing of my weekend and everyone involved in it. I answered her questions between bites of gooey mush with more than usual eagerness, and then joined Alex in the living room. He had a new video game warmed up and waiting. After giving me a royal beating at it, he asked if I could get Brandy to invite him to her next party. I wouldn’t answer.
When he left to do his homework, I curled up in my dad’s recliner. Coming into the room, my dad kissed me gently on the forehead and told me he loved me before going to bed.
They were all asleep when I went upstairs. Out my window, I searched for the dark SUVs I knew would be tailing my mom, dad, and brother for the next few days. I couldn’t see them, and the drivers were too far away for me to feel, but Spencer’s friends were out there somewhere. It was a huge relief.
I was still sore from beatings I’d taken the day before, so I filled the tub and added lots of watermelon-scented bubble bath to it. As the water soothed me, I went over the dewing skills I’d learned that weekend. I could defend myself when another dewing attacked my essence, and I could protect myself from others’ joinings. I could even do thought transference with other
dewing, which was a big accomplishment. But there was still a gaping hole in my abilities. I couldn’t act offensively. I couldn’t fight back with my essence, and that really worried me.
When I’d talked to Ian about it, he wasn’t bothered. He told me my abilities would be needed before and after but not during the attack on Sebastian.
I didn’t like the idea of Ian and Brandy going at Sebastian while I stood on the sidelines. So I planned to make Ian teach me how to fight. But not tonight. Tonight I was going to sleep in my bed, in my house, and tomorrow morning I was going to eat seven-grain organic cereal like the daughter of a hippie should.
Brandy picked me up for school the next day. “Where’s Ian?” I asked, missing the sight of him.
“He’s taking Spencer and Katherine to the airport. He’ll meet us at school.”
“Spencer and Katherine are leaving?”
“Katherine changed the location for the clan chief meeting. Apparently, it’s not going to happen anywhere around here. Only clan chiefs know where and when it will take place. As an added precaution, they’ve agreed to suspend communication with the outside world until it’s over. They won’t be gone long.”
“I hope it works.”
“Me, too,” Brandy agreed. “They have got to come to a consensus about what to do. If they don’t, it might be all-out war between the Truss and us. I don’t fancy blowing up another island or maybe a continent this time.”
“Could we do that?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
As we exited the gates of my community, I felt two dewing vibrations coming from a car parked down the street. Brandy tossed a short wave in that direction, and the driver flashed the car’s lights.
Ian met me at my locker. He wore his usual T-shirt, worn jeans, and Vans. My heart did unwanted flip-flops at the sight of him. I told myself to get a grip. “You ready for our presentation?” he asked brightly.
I pointed toward my temple. “Perfect recall, remember?”
“How could I forget?”
I quickly clicked through my locker combination, checked my reflection in the mirror, and straightened the picture of my dog on the door. After moving my notebooks around, I glanced up and saw Ian watching me with a troubled expression.
