Hush Money (19 page)

“Hey, that’s why you’re here now.”

“—and all that time it never occurred to you
to say, ‘Hey, by the way, I can move shit with my
brain’?
What kind of friend are you?”

I could see by her face that she thought she
was funny. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not real comfortable
with the sharing.”

“Really?” she snorted and then we were both
quiet for a few minutes.

I pondered what I had just done. It was the
first time I had ever showed my power to someone who wasn’t
family—on purpose anyway—since before the fire. What did that mean?
Was that because of Kat and who she was, the way she had swooped
into my life and made me her friend? Or did it have something to do
with me, and how I was changing? Because I was…changing.

“Joss,” Kat said, interrupting my
thoughts.

“Yeah.”

“You totally owe me a kitchen.”

* * *

Dylan

I had been pacing my room with the phone in
my hand for the last half hour. I should have just told Eric to
pick me up before. I could have confronted Joss right then and then
I wouldn’t be standing around here like an idiot wondering what she
was up to. “Yeah?”

“Hey man.”

“Where are you?”

“Um, ok, intense much? So the girls just
wanted a ride. That’s it. Then they told me to get lost. Can you
believe that?”

“Well, where’d you take them?”

“You know the Riverfront Development thing?
The big conference center project? Kat made me drop them near
there.”

“At the construction site?”

“Near there, yeah.”

“And you just left them there?”

“Well since that’s what they
wanted
,
yeah. I mean, I thought I made it obvious I wanted to hang, but,
you know, I wasn’t about to
beg.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. So what are they doing? When
are you supposed to go back?”

“Dude, you need to chill. Who knows what
they’re doing? Use a guy for his wheels and then it’s ‘See ya!’ So
anyways, I’m free. You wanna do something?”

What the hell were they up to? At a
construction site?
I pretty much hated the idea of Joss—and
Kat—out there by themselves. Because the longer I sat here alone
and thought about it, the more I was sure she was up to something
stupid. I thought about the picture I had given her at lunch and
what I suspected. That kind of power might be a match even for
Marco. Then I thought about him pawing at her out in the courtyard
the other day and how she didn’t do anything to stop it. Did she
have the Talent or not? Would she even be willing to use it if she
needed to?

“Helllloooooo? Dude, you still there?”

“Yeah. Listen, I need you to swing by and
pick me up. I need a ride.”

He made a disgusted noise. “Eric’s taxi
service, coming up.”

* * *

Joss

“You rang?” Marco asked as he crossed the
concrete toward me. “So what’s up, Joss? Why are we meeting out
here? It’s too early for my surprise birthday party.” I was
standing right where I wanted him, so I let him come all the way up
to me, finger the collar of my jacket. “You must have thought more
about my offer. Was this the only place you could think of to be
alone? I’ve got someplace better and it’s actually not too far
away. Come on.”

He tugged at my jacket, and I took a few
steps back, breaking his hold and putting my hands up defensively.
My heart was starting to beat hard, and I couldn’t remember what I
had planned to say. This was possibly the most important—and most
dangerous—thing I had ever done. Had I planned to act nervous or
was that just me?

“Thanks for coming but…I…just want to talk,
ok?”

“What have we got to talk about? Please don’t
tell me you called me here to ask for favors, Joss.” He was faking
a whine, sounding pained. It was really annoying and helping me
focus a bit. “I’ve got something you need: my silence. You need to
give me something in return for that. It’s that simple. Plus, baby,
I got other stuff you need if you would just—”

“Can we not go there? I’m asking you one more
time to be reasonable.”

“I can’t believe you dragged me all the way
down here for this crap.”

Above us was the sound of metal scraping
against metal. The thought flashed through my mind:
when he
thinks back, will he realize that I was looking up before it
fell?

Then I was screaming his name, running
backward, getting out of the way as the beam plunged through space.
Inside my head though, everything was calm, focused, concentrating
on the moment when I might have to save him if he wasn’t fast
enough—or strong enough—to save himself.

He threw up his hands defensively and the
beam landed. It was so wrong, like something out of a cartoon.
There was a bend of his knees, a slight sinking of his body into a
weight-lifter’s stance as he took the weight. Then he was
straightening, holding the huge steel girder above his head, and
looking straight at me.

“What the fuck, Joss?” And he tossed it at
me.

Shocked, I shrieked and stumbled backward,
falling and landing on my butt in the dirt surrounding the concrete
pour that was now cracked and gouged. I could have blocked it, I
realized belatedly. I could have caught it and tossed it back to
him. We could have made a game of it just to see who would tire
first. But he had made me panic, and besides, he needed to be the
star of this video.

“Oops,” he said. “I guess it slipped. It’s
heavy.”

“Um, yeah. It looks heavy,” I agreed, getting
up and brushing off dust. I raised my voice. “What do you think,
Kat? You think that was heavy? Hey, did you get all that?”

The door to the construction office trailer
opened and Kat walked down the few steps, regal as queen, with her
girl-scarf fluttering in the breeze from the river and a video
camera held in front of her.

“Oh heck yeah!” she called, watching the
screen as she strolled toward us. “You guys should see the replay.
It’s awesome. Why Marco, what big muscles you have!”

“What the fuck?”

“I want to be sure you understand this,
Marco, so I’ll try to talk slowly and use small words.” Cheesy
movie line? Yes. But I was having a moment. “There is nothing worse
than a person who destroys others’ lives for personal gain—except
someone who does it by throwing his own to the wolves. You’ve been
blackmailing Talents and getting them hauled off by NIAC—and
you’re
a Talent, you piece of shit. I don’t understand how
you could
do
that. To your own kind! And you know what? I
don’t even care. Because now we’ve got evidence. So you can back up
off of Kat, my sister, Dylan—just keep your mouth shut. Because if
anything happens to us, or if we hear of you threatening any other
Talents again, that video goes straight to NIAC.”

“Yeah. And the local news, and anyone else we
can think of.” Kat added. She was almost to the edge of the
concrete on the other side of what would become the lobby, when her
ankle turned in her impractical shoe and she looked down to right
herself.

And that’s when Marco went for her. I knew
then that I hadn’t thought this through and there was no time
now.

“Kat! Run!”

She turned and fled, leaving the shoe and
Marco caught up to her fast. I raced toward them, but he was on the
point of reaching for the scarf that fluttered behind her. I was
close, but not close enough to a guy who could break her in half
like a twig. I did the only thing in my head: I took a nearby
pallet of lumber and slid it between them.

Marco skidded to a halt and crashed into the
pile anyway. Wooden posts spilled down the stack, as he pushed
himself up again, and I tackled him.

Joss

Oh my God, ow.

That’s what I thought about my ill-conceived
flying tackle at Marco that slammed us both hard against the
stacked lumber. We slid down, losing our footing some, and then,
before I stopped feeling the zinging shock of the impact through my
arm and shoulder, he was already shoving me off him.

Damn, he could shove. I planted my foot,
focusing the air behind me into a temporary wall that would keep me
from falling on my ass again. His face was a mask of rage as he
lead with a punch that was designed to take me in the face and
level me. But, like my dad had taught me, I stepped offline and
grabbed his arm as it whizzed by my head. I pulled hard, using the
incredible momentum that came with the awesome power behind his
punch to yank him off balance.

He went stumbling forward. He should have
fallen flat from that move; physics should have made sure of it.
But he had the same kind of super strength in his lower body that
he had in his brawler’s chest and arms, and when he planted his
foot, it stayed planted. He pivoted on it, turning back to face
me.

“I don’t care what you can do with your
Talent, you bitch, I’m getting that camera. You can step off and
I’ll go after Kat, or you can let me pound on you, which I’ll
enjoy, and then I’ll get her. Your choice.”

It’s not like I was standing there doing
nothing during the moment it took him to deliver this speech. I was
reassessing, getting the lay of the land. Figuring out what I could
use. All the good stuff was too far away, so I reached out with
mind for one of the wooden posts on the top of the stack and
brought it down on his head for an answer.

Marco’s arm arced through the air and
practically sliced through the wood. It broke in half, and I turned
my face away to avoid any splinters. That’s when he came at me with
his fists.

This was nothing like sparring with my dad in
the woods, learning how to duck, weave, and use my Talent in a
fight. No matter how hard we trained, it always came down to the
fact that we really didn’t want to damage each other. We were both
holding back. And even though Dad could sometimes be scary, I
realized that I had never known what scared really was until Marco
came after me with murder in his eyes.

He was holding nothing back, slugging at me
with a barroom brawl style of alternating punches that came too
fast to dodge them all. But time was slowing, nothing but the
moment-to-moment punches and blocks. My mind was working even
harder than my body, concentrating on focusing the air around my
fists to maximize my own impact. To me it felt like punching a
fragile balloon, feeling the pop of the air dissipating before my
fist struck flesh. To him, it would feel like I’d hit him with
block of wood before my bloodied knuckles made contact. Even harder
for me, probably because they were more important, were the
cushions of air I formed to block his blows. It was all that kept
him from punching right through me. He was past the point now of
looking confused at the feeling of punching into a bag of water
before he made contact with me. Now he was concentrating too, on
trying to hit me so hard I wouldn’t be able to protect myself.

I was letting him drive me back across the
site, back toward the more active part of the work area where all
the heavy stuff was. It was getting harder and harder to
concentrate, harder to keep raising my arms to hit back, and the
pain from even his muffled blows was starting to cut through the
adrenaline. I knew that I was now fighting for my life and if I
dropped, if I slipped, it was over. Panic started to nibble at the
ends of my concentration and I started to feel desperate. I had to
find some way to end this.

From the corner of my eye I could finally see
the dumpster. It was a huge, construction project container that
might hold him—at least long enough for me to get away and hide for
a few moments. If I could just regroup, get closer to something I
could do damage with… I ducked to the side, unexpectedly
disengaging and gaining just a moment to turn my gaze toward
it.

It shot up in the air, flipped over,
littering the site with a trail of building scraps as it sailed
toward us.

Marco’s fist connected with my kidney and,
even though I saw it coming, even though I automatically tried to
save myself, it was like being hit by a car. I felt the hideous
pain of impact, felt my body go airborne, heard the dumpster crash
to the ground a moment before I did. I skidded in dirt, heard the
tearing of my sleeve, but didn’t feel my body stop before the black
at the edges of my vision took everything over.

A heavy slap, like a bear with its dinner,
brought me around. So much pain knifed its way through my head that
I wasn’t even sure where it was coming from. Marco loomed above me,
his features twisted with hatred and satisfaction as his hands
closed around my throat.

So that’s it, then.

That’s what my last thought was going to be,
knowing that he could snap my neck and that he wanted to. But that
had been almost a minute ago. In this minute, with me trapped
beneath him, my arms pinned at my sides by his legs, Marco wanted
to squeeze.

* * *

Dylan

“This is where I left the girls. They said
they were going to go down to the river. Let’s go down and check it
out.”

“Yeah, ok.”

Eric had picked up on the fact that I was
really freaking out, but when I cut off his questions, he hadn’t
pressed me. He drove like a maniac to get back over here, but we
had hit rush hour and it seemed like no one was in any hurry to get
home. Every minute I was beating myself up about not going with
them earlier because, somehow, I knew something was wrong.

That’s what I was thinking about when Kat
came tearing through the tree line in a limping run, her hair a
wreck, one shoe gone, looking absolutely terrified. We called out
and raced toward her but she didn’t slow down until she had me by
the jacket and was shaking me and talking way too fast.

Eric came around behind her, wrapped his arms
around her, separated us. “Slow down, Kat. We can’t understand you.
Just take a breath.”