“She touched them, and they disappeared,” Nose said, glancing at me.
“That was a couple of hours ago,” Yale said. “We didn’t have a clue where they’d gone until now.”
“What the fuck?” Jason said, staring at me, his expression a mixture of fear and awe. “Is that what you were trying to do to me before?” he demanded, stepping over Mike Palmer and coming at me. “Did you try to disappear me?”
“Back off!” Marcus said, stepping between us. “She didn’t even know she could do this until tonight. I told you, what happened before was an accident.”
On the ground, Mike Palmer groaned loudly.
“Shut up, pig!” Jason yelled, turning and kicking him in the ribs.
“Stop it!” I cried, pushing my way around Marcus and shoving Jason as hard as I could.
“I told you, bitch,—don’t ever touch me!” Jason yelled, charging me and grabbing a fistful of my hair.
I wanted to sink my hand into him. I wanted to yank out everything inside of him and make it all disappear.
But before I could, Marcus was on him, clamping Jason in a headlock, pulling him off me, wrenching Jason’s hand away with a fistful of my hair in it. I ignored the pain, the stream of vulgarity raining down on me from Jason’s mouth, the scuffle going on behind me as Nose and Yale joined the effort to restrain him.
I knelt in the mud next to the bloody blob that was Mike Palmer. It hadn’t rained for days. It wasn’t mud; it was blood, soaked into the dust, making it black and wet and sticky.
“Bring me some water and a washcloth,” I ordered no one in particular.
They didn’t listen at first. I had to say it three times. By the third time, the commotion behind me had died down, and Jason had been escorted away by Nose.
Finally, someone brought me a basin of water and a cloth. Yale and Marcus stood behind me, mumbling, talking, sometimes arguing. I didn’t listen, didn’t care what they said anymore. I washed Mike Palmer’s swollen face, his bloody hair, his neck, his bruised arms, careful to use only my flesh hand. Jason had put duct tape over his mouth, and all the while I cleaned him, he glared at me, hate spilling from eyes swollen to mere slits.
“Get me some bandages,” I ordered the hand that took the basin of bloody water from me. The bandages came, but there weren’t many. I’d only be able to use them on the worst of his cuts. His head was still bleeding. Head wounds bled a lot.
I’d have to use both hands to apply the bandages.
When my ghost hand neared his head, Mike Palmer rolled his eyes crazily and groaned and rocked, trying to writhe away from it.
“Stop it,” I scolded. “I’m trying to help you,” but he wouldn’t listen.
“Let me try,” Marcus said, kneeling beside me and taking some of the bandages, our shoulders touching.
But that only made things worse. Mike Palmer’s thrashing grew even wilder. Staring at Marcus, he bucked and whimpered and tried to roll away, making bandaging him completely impossible.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked in frustration.
“He shot me in the chest,” Marcus said. “He thinks I’ve come back from the dead. Or I’m a ghost.”
“Oh, right. Well, hold his shoulders then, Ghost Boy.”
Marcus circled around to Palmer’s bucking shoulders, pinning them with his hands. Quickly and not exactly neatly, I wrapped the bandages around the top of Palmer’s head like a mummy, even wrapping them over his eyes. Maybe if he couldn’t see us, he wouldn’t freak out so much.
I sat back and surveyed my work. He was still tied up, the ropes biting into his skin. He was lying in a puddle of his own blood, this man who had burned down my house, and taken everything from me, and tried to kidnap me, and shot Marcus. But I didn’t hate him. I didn’t really feel anything; I was too exhausted.
“Is he going to die?” I asked Marcus.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “I know it looks bad, but it’s all surface stuff. Jason wasn’t trying to kill him. He was just interrogating him.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
“It wasn’t my call.”
“But we’re not letting him go.”
“We need what he knows,” Marcus said, “but there may be better ways of getting it.”
I didn’t want to know what he meant by that. “I’m so tired,” I said, leaning into him.
“I know, babe,” he said, wrapping me in his arms.
I could feel the lively Thu-bump of his PSS heart as he picked me up like a little child and carried me toward the tent. His arms were strong and firm and safe.
And he’d called me babe.
* * *
When I woke,
The Other Olivia
was leaning against the nearest tent wall, reaching out her perfect flesh hand to me. Marcus must have brought her in and put her where I’d see her the moment I opened my eyes. Did he know how much that meant to me?
Next to the painting was the cot I usually slept on, folded and leaning against the tent wall too. I turned my head and came face to face with a sleeping Marcus. We were laying side-by-side in sleeping bags on the floor.
One of his arms was slung over me, pinning me down, the weight of it like some unconscious promise. It was so startling that I froze, not knowing if I liked it or not, the way it made me feel trapped and held at the same time.
I suddenly became aware that I was only half-dressed inside my sleeping bag. That realization was followed by a memory of Marcus helping me out of my bloody clothes, out of my sweatshirt, and my boots, and my jeans. Oh God! He’d helped me take off my jeans, and it had not been sexy. Not even close. I’d been completely out of it.
He, on the other hand, had been a complete gentleman.
He’d tried to put me to bed in the cot, but I’d asked him to sleep next to me, to hold me. And that’s what he’d done. What he was doing, even as he slept.
I turned, rolling further into the curve of his arm. His eyes, soft with sleep, blinked open, a boyish smile on his lips. Not the smirk this time, but something better, something wholly unguarded.
I didn’t even think about it. I went in for a kiss.
His lips quirked in sleepy surprise, but then they were moving against mine. Opening. Tasting. Our lips testing each other. He was a good kisser, and his arm tightened, pulling me against him, reminding me that other parts of him felt nice against other parts of me, even through two thick sleeping bags.
I pulled back, looking at him.
“Good morning to you too,” he said, grinning like a pleased cat.
“Good morning,” I said, wanting to kiss him again, but feeling suddenly shy.
He raised a hand and brushed a strand of hair away from my face, letting his fingers linger. “How are you?” he asked.
“I’m—okay,” I said, the glamour of our kiss suddenly dispelled as I remembered Mike Palmer, and Jason, and the bullet, and all the other horrifying moments of the night before. “Thanks for last night,” I said. “I don’t know what was wrong with me.”
“Nothing was wrong with you,” he said gently. “Last night was rough for everyone.”
How rough had it been for Mike Palmer? What if he died? What if we’d killed him? He’d lost so much blood.
“Is Mike—?” I didn’t even know what to ask.
“He’s alive and secure,” Marcus said.
“So what now?” I sat up in my sleeping bag. “He needs medical attention. And what if the CAMFers come for him?”
“They don’t know where he is,” Marcus said, sitting up as well, his bag slipping down to his waist.
He hadn’t slept in a shirt this time, just his jeans; he wasn’t hiding his PSS from me anymore. I tried not to stare, but his chest was so distracting, his skin so brown and smooth, like mocha ice cream, that I had the sudden urge to lick him.
“Jason checked him for tracking devices last night and smashed his radio,” he said, oblivious to my appraisal. “I wish he’d left the radio intact. We might have been able to listen in on them with it. But Jason doesn’t always think things through.”
“No shit.”
“We need the information Palmer has,” he said, looking at me.
“If nearly beating him to death didn’t get it, I don’t know what will.”
“There is something he’s more afraid of than pain,” Marcus said, glancing down. I followed his gaze, saw he was looking at my ghost hand, pale against the darker blue of my sleeping bag.
“No,” I said, slipping my hand inside my bag, all my warm feelings for him suddenly gone.
“It would be painless,” he said.
“It would still be torture,” I argued.
“Is bigoted irrational fear torture? If it is, it’s torture of his own making. Was it torture when you cleaned him up and treated his wounds last night? In some war camps, they’d beat the prisoners and then treat their wounds so they could beat them again. So they wouldn’t die so soon. So the torture could go on longer.”
“That is not what I was doing, and you know it.”
“He doesn’t,” Marcus said, his voice gaining some heat, his eyes boring into mine. “In his mind we are monsters. Nothing is going to change that. We can either let his fear hurt us, or use it to our advantage.”
“And those are the only choices? Really? What about staying neutral?”
“After all they’ve done to you, do you really think there’s a neutral?” he asked, throwing his hands up in frustration.
I tried to ignore the way his muscled rippled so nicely when he did that.
You’re pissed at him. Don’t get distracted.
“Fine. Maybe it is us or them,” I said. “But why this? Why me? He’s afraid of PSS, so why not unmask Nose in front of him? Or depants Yale? Or better yet, show him your wonderful pecs.”
Crap! Had I just said that out loud?
“My wonderful pecs?” he asked, raising an eyebrow, that familiar smile forming on his lips as he absently scratched a rib, taunting me. His abs were pretty ripped as well.
“They’re—well defined,” I said, feeling the blush rush to my face, looking anywhere but at his more than adequate physique. “But that’s not the point. The point is why does it have to be my PSS?”
“He hasn’t seen any of ours,” Marcus said, “and the last thing we want is to give him more information about us. Besides, your hand has special properties.”
“Special properties,” I repeated. Suddenly I felt closed in, stifled, like I couldn’t breathe. I unzipped my bag a little, and clutched the zipper, feeling the cold metallic bite of its teeth digging into my flesh. “You don’t just want me to scare him with my ghost hand,” I said. “You want me to reach into him.”
“Yes,” Marcus said, his eyes drifting to the zipper, to the black-laced edge of my underwear dark against my pale upper thigh.
I had forgotten I wasn’t wearing much inside my sleeping bag. But now I felt it—my nakedness, my vulnerability; the Marcus who had stripped me so gently last night and laid me down and held me safe, now wanted to use my hand to torture someone.
I reached down and zipped the sleeping bag up above my waist. “I’m not going to do that,” I said.
“I know you’re afraid,” he said, gently, comfortingly. Was it comfort? Had any of it ever been genuine, or was it just a way to manipulate me? “But think about it. The blades and the bullet, each one has saved you already. The bullet saved us all. What if we could find something else like that? Something that could help us.”
“So, Mike Palmer is one of those vending machines full of toys, and I’m the mechanical claw?”
“How about he’s the bastard that burned down your house and shot me and would kill us all in a heartbeat,” Marcus said angrily, grabbing his shirt off the tent floor and yanking it over his head. “And maybe you’re the one person who can actually do something about it. The one person who could eliminate the CAMFers as a threat for good, but you’re too scared to do it.”
I stared at him, hurt welling up in my chest. Yes, I was scared, but how dare he throw it in my face. “That is such a load of superhero crap,” I said. “You really believe I’m the one person who can stop this? You really want to put that on me?”
He stopped moving, sat staring at me, his eyes anguished, his shirt only pulled down halfway. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re right. That’s not fair.”
Something buzzed against my leg, from under my sleeping bag. I rolled aside, revealing my blood encrusted jeans from last night. “It’s Emma’s phone,” I said to Marcus, scrambling in the pockets.
By the time I found the phone and pulled it out, the call had already gone to voicemail. There were two other missed calls.
“Someone called twice last night,” I showed Marcus. “Once at 12:35 am. Then at 12:50. Same unknown number. That call just now was Emma’s mom.”
“Maybe she thinks Emma still has the phone,” Marcus said. “Listen to the messages.”
I pulled up the first call and put the phone to my ear.
“Olivia,” came Emma’s voice, muted and hard to hear, as if she was whispering. “I’m scoping out Mike Palmer’s place right now. Thought I’d do a little recon before I went back home. There is definitely some action here. I’ve seen three different guys, none of them Mike and they—” Emma’s voice suddenly stopped short. Then there was a very deep, manly sort of grunt in the background and the phone cut out.
I took the phone from my ear and stared down at it.
“What?” Marcus said. “Who was it?”
“It was Emma,” I said, fear climbing the ladder of my ribs straight to my heart. “Calling from her new phone. She went to Palmer’s house last night.”
“Dammit! I told her to stay out of this.”
“The call cuts off,” I said, holding the phone out to him, trying to make him understand. Yes, he had told Emma to go home and stay out of it, but I hadn’t. I’d suggested she spy for us—that she do the very thing she’d done.
“Maybe she dropped the phone,” Marcus said. “The second one is probably her calling back.”
Yes, my heart sighed. I’d almost forgotten about the second call. Emma had called back. She must be all right.
I jabbed the button to listen to the second call.
“We have your friend,” said the Dark Man’s voice in my ear, “but
he
knows what I really want.”
That was it. That was all he said before he hung up.
LOSING EMMA
“They have her,” I said, shoving the phone at Marcus.
He took it from my shaking hands and listened to the message, his eyes growing dark and worried. “Check the last one,” he said, handing the phone back to me. “The one from her mom.”