I Wish... (21 page)

Marla looked like she might be softening, but then Ramona said, "Just let it go, dear. I know it stung a little at the time, but the air has been cleared and he's willing to overlook that you forced him to love you."

"Mother, why is it so hard to think that maybe a man can love me for who I am and not let my status as a Second Daughter interfere with his feelings?"

Ramona narrowed her eyes. "If that's the case then why was he so eager to climb into bed with your sister?"

The negative emotions that surrounded me seemed to have crawled inside my mind. I thought I might be sick. I bolted toward the back door.

Jack yelled, "Thistle, wait!"

Before I slammed the door behind me I heard Marla say icily, "You'd be well advised to tend to your own family and leave Thistle's parenting up to her mother."

I made it into the screen of the trees before I finally sank to my knees and was sick.

***

Chapter 8

After I threw up, I sat there for a moment, just hugging my knees and rocking back and forth. The accusations bounced back and forth in my memory. Jack was my father. My mom seduced her sister's husband away from his wife and child so that she could conceive me. Ramona knew and seemed to approve. Now I finally understand why Marla despised me. Just looking at me must bring it back for her. My dark hair and eyes and deeply tanned skin were all the same as Jack's. Now that I saw the resemblance I couldn't believe I never noticed before.

Even before I was born people were manipulating me. Everyone expected me to take Ramona's place as Matriarch when she died. My mother planned my conception so that I'd be powerful enough to fill that role. Then they spent my whole life lying to me about who I was, giving me the impression that the whole world was mine to explore when the entire time they planned to bring me back here and cage me with responsibility that I didn't want.

I want out. I don't want this life.
I thought about how Ben said they'd never let me go. I wondered how they'd make me come back if I used my powers to wish them away. I was willing to bet that there was nothing that they could do if I really set my mind against coming back here.

Cheered, I finally stood up and brushed the leaves from my pants and started walking along the familiar trail. As always, being in the woods comforted me. My head still pounded, but my stomach was more settled than it had been all day and I considered that to be a minor victory.

I walked for a couple of miles before I heard the crunch of leaves behind me. I whirled around, heart in my throat. Nobody was there. I looked back along the path, but all I saw was my own trail of churned fall leaves. My eyes darted back and forth, looking behind trees, trying to figure out where Lydia was hiding. I began walking again, slowly, listening intently. I was determined to flush her out this time and handle her on my own terms.

I was on high alert, but even that wasn't enough to save me from the familiar shove that knocked me onto my knees in the moist dirt. I leapt to my feet, fists raised, ready to fight, but she was still hiding. I spun in slow circles looking for a flash of clothing or a pale hand resting on the dark bark of a tree, but there was nothing.

Frustrated, I screamed, "Come out and have a fair fight, you bitch! Your cowardly hide and seek is getting old!"

A blaze of pain spread across my shoulders and started down my spine. I was on the ground again, this time flat on my stomach and catching my breath was hard. I fought to roll over like an overturned turtle, but not nearly as quickly. I saw a thick branch hovering in midair, like an invisible baseball player was getting ready to bat. With no warning it sliced through the air towards my head.

I will never know how I managed to roll out of the path of the branch before it crushed my skull, but somehow I was on my feet, bruised and wheezing, but alive. It swung at me again and this time I managed a clumsy evasive roll.

My breath was coming easier and being able to focus on the branch gave me something to avoid. My training with Shep had prepared me for being attacked by a swung object even if it hadn't exactly covered what to do when the enemy was wielding it telekinetically.

When the branch whipped toward me again, I met it with a kick and it went flying. I realized this was a huge mistake when an invisible fist crashed into my cheekbone. It was followed by several other blows to my face and shoulders. I traded a visible branch for fists I couldn’t see.

I raised my hands up to block my face which left my midsection open and the attack immediately centered to my vulnerable midsection. I was grateful that Shep had hit me as many times as he had over the years. If nothing else, I could take a punch. Shep's punches, even when he pulled them as much as he did, were still a lot more powerful than this flurry. But even if my attacker couldn't hit me as hard as he could, I couldn't see to block them.

Even in the midst of this attack I couldn't help, but marvel at the amount of control Lydia had over her power. So far she'd only ever pushed me or pushed other objects at me. I assumed that her power didn't extend much past that, but she was able to concentrate it into a person shaped force. An energy fist hit me in the mouth and split my lip against my teeth.
That is so cool.

After a particularly vicious kick in the ribs I braced myself against a tree, panting. The lack of sleep, my persistent headache and my inability to see what I was fighting had combined to render me almost entirely unable to defend myself. I thought bitterly about how Ramona had forced me into all those self-defense classes over the years. I could hot wire a car or evade a pursuing vehicle by executing a series of dangerous maneuvers I'd been taught at an elite driving school, but I couldn't even save myself in a fist fight. I swiped my arm across my nose and it came away covered my blood. This was bad.

When the next jab caught me in the jaw the world swam out of focus, but I noticed that I could see the ground depress where a foot would be on a person. Since Lydia had yet to show herself, I decided that the only thing I could do would be to defend myself against her power the way I would against a human attacker. I kicked as hard as I could in what should have been the side of the knee. Unfortunately, that wasn't very hard, but it bought me a couple of minutes to catch my breath and regroup.

I remembered what Shep told me a few weeks ago before we ever came to Desire while we were practicing fighting blind. "I can see you. I can dodge you if I can see it coming. You can't see me so you don't have that advantage. You need to use whatever other information you can gather. Listen for my breathing. Hear the leaves and sticks being crushed under my feet. Smell me sweating if you have to. When I move in close your body knows it, it feels my heat and the air I disturb around you. Listen to what your body is telling you."

When I quieted my own ragged breathing and listened carefully, I discovered that I could, in fact, hear not only the sound of rustling dead leaves, but the rapid panting of the other. It was coming at me quickly from my left. I spun away from the tree I'd been leaning against and met it with a kick to the midsection. I couldn't tell if the thing I was fighting was short or tall or male or female so there was no way to know where my kick had connected. But it gained me some space.

I planted my feet and readied myself for another attack. I wasn't disappointed. The energy entity rushed me and I stepped aside while landing several rabbit quick punches in what felt like the head. It appeared to be around my height. A female then? I had no way of knowing, but I didn't know how effective a groin attack would be on a non-human anyway.

We sparred for an uncertain length of time. We seemed to be about evenly matched once I was able to anticipate most of the attacks. If I weren't already weakened I thought I still might have been able to overcome it easily regardless of its invisibility. As it was, being punched in the face repeatedly did little to ease my headache, which felt as if I had dumped shards of glass into my brain and they were slicing it up every time I moved.

I thought it might be getting tired since the charges were happening less and less frequently. I was expecting another charge at any second when an arm slipped around my neck from behind. Somehow it had circled me without catching my eye as it stirred up the dirt around its feet.

I tried every evasive action I'd ever been taught by Shep or any of my other teachers over the years, but I didn't have enough strength behind my counter attacks to dislodge my attacker. The feeling was very similar to the attack in my room a few nights ago. It seemed that Lydia was finally going to finish what she started.

My muscles loosened completely and my knees unhinged. I was dangling now from the thing's grip around my neck, which I knew was only going to speed things up, but I couldn't stand. My frantic clawing at its arm first slowed and then stopped completely. My head drummed louder than ever, but my vision was narrowing as blackness crept in around the edges on all sides. It was like rushing backwards into a tunnel.

When the arm loosened around my throat, I didn't even notice. The froggy intake of breath didn't register as mine. My attention was totally fixated on the way the darkness that had nearly overtaken my entire field of vision suddenly pulled away and the world was creeping into view again. The colors were muted and blurry, but joyfully bright after the darkness of moments before.

With renewed strength, I grabbed the arm that was now dangling down my chest instead of choking me and used it to execute a flip that Shep would have been proud of. The strain of this most recent attempted murder and the stresses of the past few days clouded my mind and without thinking it through I croaked, "I can't take this anymore! I wish you were dead!"

The effects of this newest wish on top of the one I'd made earlier were nearly crippling. I collapsed on the ground, grabbing my head as I experienced this newest time line. In this one everything went as the events had in the original until I flipped the entity. In this new sequence of events, it landed on the protruding ragged stump of a sapling and it pierced its heart. And I saw, to my dismay, that it wasn't some non-human entity as I'd assumed while fighting it. Death rendered the corpse of Julia Carter visible at last.

I just murdered someone.
I looked at her broken body laying like a discarded rag doll. There wasn't a lot of blood. I assumed it might be because her heart wouldn't have kept pumping once it was ruptured by the sapling. Her hair fanned around her face and if you ignored her glassy eyes, she was even more beautiful in death then she’d been in life.

Tears streamed down my face. My head hurt so bad I could barely think, but I couldn't stop reliving the moment I threw her onto the sapling and she returned to visibility. It was a sight that was going to haunt me for the rest of my life, I knew and the knowledge made me cry even harder.

A hand fell on my shoulder and I attempted to shriek, but my injured throat didn't cooperate. My heart was racing, but I had no desire to defend myself. I was in pain and I wanted this nightmare to end.

"Thistle? What the
hell
just happened?"

It was Ben. He was holding the branch Julia had first attacked me with. It didn't take much effort to deduce what must have happened. When her body went lax it was because he'd clubbed her unconscious. When I'd flipped her and wished her dead she never had a chance to defend herself.

I just looked at him and shook my head. I couldn't talk about this, it was too awful.

He joined me on the ground until our faces were level and then he pulled me forward until our foreheads touched. We sat that way for a long time until his strength and calmness started to make me feel some of the same. My tears started to dry up and my chest loosened a little.

He must have sensed the change in me because he asked me again. "Please tell me what happened and why I feel like my head is going to split open?"

I nodded slowly to avoid jogging my own aching head. "It's the after effects of my power. When I wish for something to happen it does, but not without killing my head first. And if you happen to be too close, well you get a dose of it too."

He looked surprised. "You can make wishes that come true?"

"Yes."

"You really are as powerful as the stories make you out to be." He whistled.

I hung my head, "I just killed Coach Carter."

"Hey," He forced me to look into his eyes. "When I found you two it sure seemed like she was the one trying to kill you. I thought she'd succeeded and it terrified me."

He pulled me into a comforting hug. I let him hold me and took what reassurance I could from his arms. Finally I said, "I've got to tell someone what I did. Ramona, I guess. She will know what to do."

"No," He said sharply, "You aren't going to tell anyone what happened. Does anyone else besides us know what you wished for?"

I shook my head. "Not unless someone else was within twenty feet of me or so. All anyone else will remember is her dying. The part before I-- I killed her doesn't exist for anyone anymore except us."

"Good. We're going to leave her there. Someone will find her sooner or later; this path gets fairly regular traffic."

I was horrified at what he was suggesting. "We need to let her Family know she's out here."

Ben grabbed my upper arms, not roughly, but his grip was unyielding. "We're not going to tell anyone what happened here today. I'm sorry she's dead, but if she wasn't you wouldn't be safe. She was the one who tried to push you in front of the car, isn't she?"

Reluctantly I agreed. "She also tried to smother me in my room with a pillow on Friday night. I thought Lydia was doing all these things, but now that I know that Julia had a Talent to become invisible, I realize that it was her the whole time. I just wish I knew why."

He shrugged, "Who knows? It could have been a grudge against your Mother or a favor to someone else or a million personal reasons we'll never be able to guess at. It doesn't matter because now you're safe and I'm not going to let you throw that way on a woman who repeatedly tried to kill you and would have finished it today if I hadn't come along when I did."