“Like my prescient dreaming?”
“Exactly,” Ambrose said. “Each of us Walkers has one or two, sometimes three of these talents. They manifest at different times in our life. At birth, or adolescence, or well into our adult years. And there are many triggers, including hormones, stress, trauma, or simply maturation.”
“Go on.”
“Whatever the nature of our talents, we also have limits,” Ambrose said. “For example, Barrett is not a douser. And probably never will be.” He wagged at finger at Fallon. “With you, however, none of this is certain. I sense that you have no such limitations.”
“I might one day be a douser?”
Ambrose shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “But I would be a fool to bet against it. You are unbound.”
“A wild card,” Logan said admiringly. “You could become… anything.”
She frowned. “The prescient dreaming is freaky enough, thanks.”
“And yet, despite your unbound nature, it is also possible that prescient dreaming is the only talent you will ever manifest.”
“You make me sound like a lump of clay.”
“Who knows what wondrous form that lump of clay might take in the hands of a skilled artist?”
Fallon glanced sidelong at Logan. “No fondling wisecracks, mister!”
Logan shrugged with a ‘Who, me?’ look of innocence.
“You are the clay and the artist, Fallon,” Ambrose said. “No one else. You will shape yourself by the life you lead and the choices you make.”
“What if I don’t want any of it?”
Ambrose smiled benignly. “Ah, but it is never that simple. There is no lever to pull one way or the other. Regardless of what you want, or think you want, whatever happens will happen. What you
need
, is another matter. And what you do with what you have makes all the difference in the world.”
“You’re a walking, talking fortune cookie.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“What about that other thing?” Fallon asked. “You called me a catalyst.”
“An agent of change and reaction,” Ambrose said. “Logan called you a wild card, and there is some truth in that analogy. The root of potential is potent. There is that in you. While you yourself are unbound, I believe you have the potential—there’s that word again—to interact with our kind, to… shift our boundaries.”
“Does that mean I could make you—or Logan—unbound also?”
“No, I do not believe that is possible,” Ambrose said. “We are what we are and what we may yet become, but not that which is not within our nature. But I sense that you are capable of becoming one of those life triggers I mentioned earlier. In essence, you may be an accelerant for our own potential. Perhaps even a proximity booster.”
“The kiss…” Fallon said, then fell silent.
“Kiss?” Liana asked, looking back and forth between Logan and Fallon.
“I, um, kissed Logan,” Fallon said, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks yet again. “And it—something happened. We… tingled.”
“Interesting,” Ambrose said.
Liana smiled broadly. “Never realized you were such a fast operator, Logan.”
“I—but I—”
“That was me,” Fallon said. “I made him kiss me.”
“Not that I objected,” Logan added.
“But Logan said it’s happened before,” Fallon said. “The tingling.”
“Really?” Liana said, arching an eyebrow. “Logan?”
Logan cleared his throat and looked away, embarrassed. “Not as if I haven’t kissed a girl before.”
“You and Pamela tingled?” Liana pressed. “Or Diana?”
Logan said something under his breath.
“Speak up, boy,” Ambrose said.
“That may have been a, uh, static shock from her braces.”
“And what about Pamela?”
“We had some fireworks,” Logan said defensively. “I mean, she was the first girl I ever kissed, so naturally…”
“Don’t mind him,” Liana said to Fallon. “The tingling is significant.”
Logan cleared his throat again. “You know, I should probably go help Barrett. Right? He said something about bringing him a turkey club.”
“No need to be embarrassed, Logan,” Ambrose said.
“I won’t be,” Logan said. “If everyone stops talking about my love life.”
“Or lack thereof,” Liana said, grinning.
“Jeez, I get less abuse from Barrett!”
“Sorry, little brother,” Liana said. “I’ll try to restrain my inner Barrett.”
Fallon pressed her index fingers against her temples and shook her head. “Look, this all sounds—wonderful, really. Well, not the stuff about Logan’s love life. The rest of it. All of it. But what does it mean? I don’t know how to do anything—any of that unbound or catalyst stuff. True, I have these dreams, prescient dreams, but it’s not as if I control them.”
“You control your lips,” Ambrose said. “Right?”
“Okay, sure,” Fallon said. “That’s one thing.”
“Action and reaction,” Ambrose said. “Equally important. Talents may be active or reactive or passive, as with your prescient dreaming. But even dreaming may be aided and guided.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do, or what you expect me to do,” Fallon said. “I’m confused—it’s all confusing.”
“And yet you demanded the truth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That was your choice,” Ambrose said. “You will make other choices. This is how you shape the clay of your potential.”
“By every decision I make?”
Ambrose shrugged. “Why should it not be so?”
“I think I want—need to go home now,” Fallon said. “Can I just go home?”
“Of course,” Ambrose said, rising from his chair. “As much as I enjoy your company and as much as Logan, apparently, enjoys your kisses—”
“Leave me out of it!”
“In any event, you are free to go.”
From behind Fallon, another voice—a woman’s voice—demanded, “Who is she?”
Chapter 15
Fallon gasped, and her heart lurched in her chest like a startled deer in a meadow. She turned to face the woman, who wore a long, paint-stained smock, and clutched a dripping camel hair paintbrush in her trembling left hand.
The woman’s long blond hair was in mild disarray and her hazel eyes had a wild cast to them. Her question hung in the air like a threat of violence or a plea for mercy.
“Who is she?”
Liana slipped by Fallon and wrapped a comforting arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “Fallon, this is my sister, Thalia,” she said carefully, in a soothing voice, as if she were afraid to agitate the woman.
“Hi,” Fallon said. “You startled me.”
Under the paint-smeared smock, Thalia wore a gray, long-sleeved T-shirt. She’d pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, exposing forearms decorated with the same strange, rune-like golden tattoos that Liana sported. Thalia’s arms, however, exhibited long fingernail scratches, one of them stippled with fresh blood.
Almost as though, absent-mindedly, she’s been trying to remove the tattoos,
Fallon thought.
She’s… damaged.
Thalia looked from Liana to Ambrose and back again. “Who is she?”
“Fallon is a friend of Logan’s, from his new school,” Ambrose said, watching Thalia closely for any reaction to his words.
Thalia looked at Fallon again. “Friend, but I…” She shook her head and glanced briefly at Logan. “More than friends.”
Logan spread his hands, palms up, as if to exonerate himself from Thalia’s perceived conspiracy. “Really, it was
one
kiss.”
Thalia ignored him, slipped out from under Liana’s embrace, and walked toward Fallon. “I saw you!” Thalia whispered urgently. Forgotten, the wet paint brush slipped through her fingers and plopped to the floor, blotting the hardwood with a comet-shaped smudge of red paint. Thalia canted her head to the side, contemplating Fallon as if she were a different species. “Up there… alone. But I… saw you.”
Fallon fought the urge to back away and duck out the nearest exit. She wanted to ask the others—
“Is she violent?”
—but was afraid the question would provoke the woman.
Liana must have realized Fallon was on the verge of panic. She held up her hand and quietly said, “It’s okay.”
Thalia raised her own hand—the hand that had been holding the paintbrush a moment ago—and reached toward Fallon’s face, but paused, inches away, her fingers trembling.
“What—what do you mean?”
Was I in a dream of hers?
“Saw me how?”
“Shine,” Thalia said with a look of awe on her pale face. “You… are. You shine. The light in the dark…. Beacon in the dark.” She smiled, but her lips quivered with the fragility of her comfort.
On impulse—a fleeting, subconscious moment of trusting some unknown instinct deep inside—Fallon pressed Thalia’s trembling hand against her cheek. A rush of emotions flooded through Fallon’s mind, ricocheting around her consciousness with tiny jolts of elation and pain, triumph and failure, love and loss, comfort and fear, joy and anger, compassion and revulsion, confusion and emptiness and loneliness…
Thalia’s hand had become cold as ice.
Fallon shuddered but held on, hoping for… something—
—until Thalia snatched her hand away!
“Dark—dark—dark!” Thalia whispered rapidly. “All the dark, so dark. So dark, and it screams, you know. It screams because it’s angry.
And it listens!”
She swung her arm in a circle to encompass them all, fixing her wide-eyed gaze on each of them in turn.
“Don’t—don’t ever let it hear you!
That’s how it gets inside.” She wiggled her fingers beside her ears. “Rips you apart from inside.”
Thalia shook her head as if to disassociate herself from her warnings. She looked back at Fallon again. “You’re different. Like that, like the light, but not like that. I don’t know why. You won’t hurt me, will you? Not like the light. It’s warm—” she shook her head “—but it blinds! It
hurts!
” Thalia had begun to sob softly. “Don’t hurt me, Fallon.
Promise!
”
Again, Liana rushed to her sister’s side to comfort her.
“Warm, warm, like the light,” Thalia said, still staring at Fallon. “Make her promise. Please, Liana, make her promise.”
“You’re safe, Thalia,” Liana assured her. “Nobody will hurt you.”
Thalia pointed an accusatory finger at Fallon. “You say it!”
“I won’t hurt you,” Fallon said. “Promise.”
Thalia giggled and the tension seemed to drain out of her in that moment. “I was right about you, I was. Right about Fallon. You’re different.” She let Liana lead her from the office, but her voice carried back to them with a haunting, sing-song clarity. “I saw her. I saw Fallon. Right there, like before, but different. It’s always dark, so dark, but I could see her, up there… I could. She shines, doesn’t she?”
Fallon heaved an audible sigh, releasing some of her own incredible tension. Her neck and shoulders ached again, while her legs trembled like those of a newborn foal. She held up her hands and saw they were shaking as well.
Ambrose reached for her hand, perhaps to lead her to an armchair, but she jumped back with an almost self-preservation instinct. “No more touching!”
Nodding, Ambrose said, “Please, sit, Miss Maguire. You look terribly pale.”
Logan shadowed her to the chair, but respected her wish not to be touched. Maybe he thought she would stumble and fall. At the moment, she wouldn’t argue against the possibility. But she found her way to the nearest chair and lowered herself into it, following the effort with another sigh.
Logan leaned close and whispered, “Should have warned you about Thalia. Never thought she’d come down from her attic studio.”
“May I fetch you a beverage, Miss Maguire?”
“Water would be great,” Fallon said. Then, as an afterthought. “And it’s still Fallon.”
“Of course,” Ambrose said. “Back in a moment.” Then he left the two of them alone in his office.
Logan sat in the chair next to her. “You okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
“Honestly?”
She frowned. “No.”
“You look great.”
“Thought so.” She sighed.
“Tried to warn you.”
“Warn me? There should have been a restraining order to keep me one hundred yards away from this house.”
“Wasn’t time,” Logan said. “All the paperwork.”
Fallon smiled, but the edges faltered. “I want to go home,” she said. “I
need
to go home.”
“I understand,” Logan said. “I’ve had my whole life to adjust to this craziness. I’ll borrow the keys to Liana’s van and take you home.”
“I’ll drive,” Liana said as she returned to the office alone. Before they could ask, she added, “Thalia’s sleeping already. On the sofa. Too tired to climb the stairs. That”—she looked curiously at Fallon—“took a lot out of her.”
“Likewise,” Fallon said. “Feel like my head hasn’t touched a pillow in days.”
“Logan and I should check on Barrett,” Liana said. “We’ll drop you off on the way.”
Ambrose arrived with a tall glass of water, ice cubes clinking against the rim. Fallon took the glass from him, holding it gingerly in both hands. She gulped down as much as she could before coming up for air. “What—what just happened?”
“A manifestation of your catalyst abilities,” Ambrose said. “That’s the most I’ve heard Thalia speak since… well, in a very long time.”
“Was she afraid of me?”
“Oh, no,” Ambrose said. “Thalia is afraid too often these days. Poor girl.”
“Major trust issues,” Logan said.
“Though the source of her fear is gone,” Ambrose said. “The scars remain. Clearly, she was drawn to you. And you were two floors apart. Impressive.”
“Impressive? Right! Wiped out both of us.”
Liana shook her head. “Thalia has repressed everything that happened to her. It’s like a… poison inside her, locking her away from us. Someday we hope to learn, to help her heal, but…” Liana took a deep breath. “As Ambrose said, this is the most she’s talked about it. It’s jumbled and confusing, I know, but it gives me hope we’ll have the real Thalia back someday.”
“She wasn’t always like that?”
“No, no,” Ambrose said. “Thalia was much like Liana. In many ways.” Fallon thought he would continue, but he lowered his head wistfully, as if he couldn’t bear to speak anymore. He cleared his throat and addressed Fallon again. “Tell me,” he said. “When Thalia approached you and raised her hand to your face, you appeared frightened, no?”