Trance (6 page)

“Just admiring your suitcase,” I replied.

“There’s a shopping center a few miles away—”

“No.” He had just flipped a bad switch. Buying me dinner was one thing. I would not be beholden to him for little luxuries that I could do without. I’d managed on my own since I was sixteen; I didn’t need to be taken care of by Gage.

“If you need something, we can get it, Teresa, and if it’s about the money—”

“It
is
about the money, Gage.” I spun on my heel, hair flying, and planted both hands on my hips. “I don’t do charity. I took a handout from Cliff and look what it almost got me.”

He closed the space between us in three long strides. Muscles in my arms and back coiled as I braced for attack, and I found myself eye level with his neck. I swallowed. Gage wasn’t Cliff. He was on my side.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. Warm breath tickled the top of my head.

I looked down instead, but his hand cupped my chin; and I allowed him to tilt my head up. His flecked eyes bore down on me, mesmerizing and kind. A gentle look—one I’d not received
from a man in too many years. It made my stomach flip in a pleasant way.

“I’m sorry if I insulted you.” His breath smelled like apples. “That wasn’t my intention. The world rocked sideways last night, and I’m still getting back on my feet.”

“I’m grateful you want to help, Gage, but trusting people always comes with a price.” I’d learned that lesson the hard way—multiple times.

“Not always, Teresa. I’m not going to buy you dinner and then demand sex.” He sucked in his lower lip, adopting that scrunched, thoughtful look I’d seen twice in the last fifteen minutes. For a guy with learned control over his five enhanced senses, his face was pretty easy to read. “We may have been kids together a lifetime ago, but in so many ways we just met. I’m not expecting you to hand me your trust immediately, just hoping you’ll give me a chance to earn it.”

He was right. I didn’t know the adult standing in front of me, or what he was capable of doing (or lying about). History showed that my judgment sucked when it came to trusting men—especially when my last boyfriend abused that trust so badly. I knew better.

Yet for some reason, on an instinctual level built upon Meta kinship and the girlish crush of the child I’d once been, I knew I
could
trust him. Eventually.

Enough to let him buy me dinner.

We phoned in a pizza and made polite conversation until it arrived. I attempted to pick his brain one question at a time
over pepperoni and extra cheese, but hit wall after metaphorical wall when my questions delved deeper than surface stuff. I found out he’d been sent to St. Louis after the War, worked as a finishing carpenter in his early twenties, and then moved to Oregon. He’d lived twenty miles away from me for the last three years.

He wouldn’t talk about what brought him to Oregon or engage in reverse questioning. I didn’t enjoy talking about my meager existence in the service industry or the hell I’d made of my life, but I would have liked some personal interest on his part.

“Foster homes and therapy seem to be the norm for us,” I said, once again leading the topic. “I wonder if the others had the same problems adjusting to life-after-theft.”

“After what?”

“After our powers were stolen and our lives as we knew them shattered to bits. You know, I had the same damned nightmares for three years?” My stomach twisted at the recollection, the pizza no longer sitting well.

Gage’s left hand curled around the edge of the table. “Nightmares about that last day in the park?”

A tremor wracked my spine. I have never felt terror again in my life like the terror I experienced that day. Encompassing, mortifying, and ugly, it was fear of certain death in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

“Yes,” I said when I found my voice. “A variation of it, anyway. Sometimes I’d dream about my dad leading the Banes toward us kids, shouting orders to capture first and kill later. It would be him coming up the steps first.” Things got fuzzy
after that charge, because that’s when the gut-twisting, brain-numbing power loss began.

Gage’s right hand reached across the plastic table and squeezed my left. I tucked my fingers around his and held tight, focusing on his warmth. The nightmare had not returned in more than a decade, but the emotions behind it still ran deep and threatened to return in a wave of hot tears. Too bad memories didn’t come with an emotional mute button.

“Hinder was a good man,” Gage said. “I remember how bravely he fought, even before the War, and how proudly he led his Corps Unit.”

I rubbed my free hand across my forehead, as if the motion could erase the dream’s images from my conscious mind. “One of my shrinks used to say that the dream was my subconscious mind’s way of dealing with my own survivor’s guilt.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Yeah, well, another shrink said I had abandonment issues, so I don’t trust their analyses very much.” Even if the abandonment issue seemed pretty spot-on at times—but I wasn’t keen to delve into that particular neurosis tonight. “Do you remember your parents?” As soon as I asked it, I remembered the answer. Stupid.

He released my hand. “No, we were orphans when the Corps adopted us. My mentor, Delphi, raised me and Jasper.”

Jasper McAllister had possessed superspeed and enhanced reflexes, and had joined an active Corps Unit eighteen months into the War. The entire unit was killed a month later, trying to prevent a Chicago apartment complex from collapsing. He was sixteen.

Gage had been barely thirteen when his big brother, Jasper, died, and from the brackets of sorrow around his eyes, the pain was just as fresh now as it had been then. Picking at a pepperoni, he said, “It was the loneliest way for a kid to grow up.”

I held back a question and gave him a chance to continue the thought without prompting. I was afraid of shutting him up if I pushed.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if Jasper had lived,” he continued. “I could have had someone to talk to, someone who understood what it was like to hear people trash-talk the Rangers, curse Metas in general, and blame us for all the problems of the world. Like those problems hadn’t existed long before we did.”

I understood, probably better than he realized. I’d spent years pretending to hate Metas as much as my classmates, laughing at their cruel jokes, and convincing myself I’d never been different. Never been the daughter of Rangers, never been trained to save lives, never raised for a greater purpose.

“I used to wish I could just forget it all completely and start fresh. Put all that pain behind me and never look back.” Gage sighed heavily. “Wishes and horses and all that.”

I didn’t get the reference. I did understand the sentiment. We’d never be free from our pasts, whether personal or Corps-related. There was no way to gauge how the world would react to our empowerment. No way to know if we’d be welcomed or despised, or both.

And I truly didn’t know which I’d prefer.

T
he digital clock-radio ticked off another minute, and the bathroom door still hadn’t opened. Thirty minutes was a long shower for a guy—even though I’d taken nearly an hour. Hotels charged extra for water consumption that exceeded the regulated clean water limit, same as apartments and rentals. Between the two of us, we had racked up a pretty hefty fee. I was planning to pay him back for part of the motel (how exactly I’d get the money was still open to debate), so what was another fifty bucks in exchange for a shower that actually ran hot for longer than five minutes?

I unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water, swallowed a couple mouthfuls, and put the open bottle down on the small side table. Having Gage on the other side of that door, in some state of un- or half-dress, left me on edge. I’d believed him earlier, when he said he’d never demand sex in return for his kindness—old apprehensions just die hard, I suppose.

Out of boredom and a need to redirect my thoughts, I snapped my fingers and a small sphere popped into existence. It hovered, perfectly aligned with the tip of my index
finger, waiting to go where I sent it. Trouble was, any likely target in the room would just get billed to Gage.

The sphere fizzled out and disappeared.

Practice makes perfect, Teresa.
A woman’s voice, sweet and lilting, danced through my mind.
Practice makes perfect.

“Mom,” I whispered. I could recall the silliest details about my father—the mole on his left cheek; the way he wheezed when he laughed too hard; he couldn’t roll his tongue or whistle. So little remained of my mom.

Right before the official start of the War, when I was just five, she was shot by a panicked citizen as she tried to stop a bank robbery in progress—a citizen who probably thought she was a bad guy because she had green skin. It wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time the Rangers were turned on by the people we’d sworn to protect.

My gaze flickered to the bathroom door, and a single butterfly fluttered through my stomach. My various foster mothers had never invested themselves in my personal life, and there were so many times in my adolescence when I’d wished for my mom, yearned for her advice and a comforting hand to wipe away the tears. Someone to warn me about the danger of attaching myself to any adult male who showed me kindness, because I missed my father so badly—missed that connection and closeness. Someone to soothe me when I was sixteen and lost my virginity to a thirty-year-old man who told me he loved me and then never spoke to me again. Someone to explain why I trusted Gage so easily when every survival instinct told me not to.

The water finally shut off. A few minutes later, Gage
emerged in a cloud of steam, clad only in a pair of blue boxers, scrubbing a rumpled towel over his hair and neck. My attention dropped to his toned abs, their perfection marred by a thin scar the width of a pencil and the length of my hand. A second, similar scar peeked from around his back on the left side, just under his ribs. He retrieved a T-shirt from his suitcase and slipped it on.

“Squeaky clean?” I asked, looking away.

“Hope so.” He padded around to the side of the bed nearest the wall, since I’d made myself at home by the door. “Anything good on television?”

“There hasn’t been anything good in ten years.”

He chuckled and sat down, his weight sinking the mattress. I sat up a little straighter, stomach knotting. I closed my eyes, annoyed at myself for being so paranoid. He didn’t seem to notice.

“This is kind of funny, isn’t it?”

I gave him a curious look. “You want to narrow that down?”

“We’ve been back in each other’s lives for three hours, and we’re already in bed together.” His teasing smile coaxed a grin of my own, and I couldn’t help wondering if he’d known about my childhood crush.

I nearly fell out of bed at a sudden, thunderous pounding of fists against the motel door and a female shriek for help. I lurched to my feet and stumbled toward the door to the beat of the erratic knocking, adrenaline warming my hands and urging me to use my newfound power to help this terrified person. I peered through the peephole and saw the
blond woman from next door, her hair askew and matted red. Blood streamed down the side of her face. “Oh, God.” I wrapped my hand around the knob and twisted.

“Trance, don’t!” Gage said.

I turned my head to ask why not, as the center of the door exploded. The blast tossed me to the floor, peppering my neck and hair with shards of wood and glass. I rolled to the side, instinct propelling me out of the line of fire, and I came up in a crouch next to the table.

The rest of the door blasted in with the second shotgun report. I screamed, startled by the sheer volume of sound it created, and brought both hands up to my sides, creating twin orbs, each the size of a grapefruit. A quick glance to my right found Gage on his feet by the corner of the bed.

The blonde entered, her eyes radiating a garish, sickly shade of yellow. She eyed me, then Gage as she reloaded the shotgun. The odor of burned wood filled the room. Fresh blood continued to run down the side of her face, and with chilling certainty, I understood. I had seen this before. In training videos. That day in Central Park. In my nightmares.

The possessed woman snapped the barrel back into place.

“Gage, duck!” I shouted.

He dove behind the bed just as she fired. The shot struck the wall, blasting through the thin plaster to create a hole two feet wide.

I threw the twin orbs at the woman. She moved faster than she should have been able to. One missed and blasted a hole through the wall, straight into her adjoining room. The
second clipped her shoulder and spun her around. The gun belched an erratic shot that took out the room’s front window in a shower of glass and wood.

“Trance?” Gage said.

“I’m fine, stay down!”

I called up two more orbs, smaller this time, and released them both straight at the convulsing woman’s midsection. She screamed and the yellow light faded from her eyes. Her body jerked once, twice, and then lay still. I stood on shaky feet, ignoring the screaming cuts on my face and arms.

“Tell me that wasn’t who I thought it was,” Gage said.

I wished I could. “Specter.” Even saying the name chilled me, like calling on the Bogeyman.

Gage made a choking sound. “But how?”

“I don’t know.”

I nudged the dead woman’s hand with my bare toes. The third finger had two rings on it, one a very large (and probably fake) diamond. My first thought was to wonder how much a pawnbroker would give me for that ring. My second—and much more pressing—concern was about the man who had probably given the rings to her.

“Where’s the other guy?” I asked.

A looming shadow filled the door, still dressed in the same jeans and flannel. I looked up, right into a pair of yellow eyes and a sawed-off shotgun. No time to duck, nowhere to go.

“Say hi to your father for me,” he sneered, his voice a queer blend of the man’s and someone else’s. Monstrous and terrifying.

Enraged, I clapped my hands together with no real idea what would happen, and he fired immediately after. The buckshot struck a haze of violet energy and ricocheted, like a thousand Ping-Pong balls. Blood and gore splattered the open doorway and walls.