Twisted Miracles (11 page)

“We’re more common than you realized, then,” Jackson said. His legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He was wearing argyle socks.

We’d left the office and walked to the park by the Yerba Buena Center to sit on the benches beside a sleek stone waterfall. At this time of day, nobody was out but tourists, and I watched a couple of kids—a brother and sister, maybe—throwing coins into the pool while their parents argued over a map.

“How long have you known?”

“A while now. I was going to tell you that night at Featherweight’s.” He paused. “So what happened? I know that was no ordinary headache.”

“You’re telling me.”

He gave me a small smile that managed to look sympathetic without being patronizing. “You want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know. I usually try to avoid it altogether.”

“That much is obvious.”

I glanced sharply at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“Only that it’s clear you aren’t using your powers. That’s why it took me so long to figure you out.”

“You mean you’ve—”

“
Snooped?
Only a little.
” His mouth quirked.

We sat in silence for a while. I could tell he was waiting for me to volunteer something, but I didn’t know what to say. Last week, all I’d wanted was to forget about being what I was. Now, I didn’t know how I felt about it.

I leaned down and rubbed the back of my neck with my hands. “How long have you known what you are?”

“All my life. It runs in my father’s family.”

“Lucky you,” I said, watching the kids by the fountain. They’d given up on throwing coins and were splashing each other.

“What about you?” He cocked his head at me. “Were your parents normals?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re dead or alive.”

“That must’ve been rough.”

I could’ve blamed it on the stress of the previous week, but that would’ve been lying. Once I started talking, I didn’t want to stop. I told him about moving things in my sleep when I was a kid, how I’d thought I was crazy, how I’d been shuffled from foster home to foster home. How Shane had found me and I’d fallen for him. And then, because it would have been harder to stop than to go on, I told him about Cindy Cepello and Andrew Allston. How I’d known somehow his death was my fault, but no one had believed me. I avoided looking at him while I spoke, but when I finished the story, I turned toward him. His face was even and calm.

“So I came out here,” I said. “This friend of mine from the dorms was moving here for a job, and she said we could split an apartment. But then she met someone, and they got married and moved to Sacramento. I figured it was better for me to live by myself anyway, so I stayed. I just try to forget that other part of me exists.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Why does everyone say that?” I blinked back tears, embarrassed by how shrill my voice had become. “Who else, if not me?”

“You couldn’t have known.” He paused, licked his lips and looked down. “Cass—”

Something about the way he said my name told me he wasn’t about to offer the same old “you’re just imagining it” explanation I’d heard so many times before, but I couldn’t fathom what he would say instead. I looked up at him expectantly.

“You realize you’re not just a regular converter?” he said. “You know you can pull?”

I only stared.

“Look, the first thing you probably learned was your limits, right? Nothing heavier than what you can lift with your hands.”

I nodded. Lionel had explained it to me, teaching me to lift uncooked rice grains at the big, scarred kitchen table. I’d wanted to try bigger things—the table itself, the oversized refrigerator, his truck. “It doesn’t work that way, sugar. It’s all gotta come from here.” He’d tapped his chest.

“I’ve never lifted anything heavier than a case of beer,” I said. “Not except that once.”

“Most of us can’t. I can’t. But you can. There are stories of pullers lifting cars, telephone poles, even mobile homes.”

“How?” I wasn’t sure I believed him. It went against everything I’d been taught. But in the back of my mind, the part that relived Andrew’s death every time I closed my eyes, I already knew the answer.

“You can draw energy from the environment. Boost your powers. It’s just that the easiest source is another person. Another converter, if one’s nearby. If not...” His voice was soft, and he was watching me carefully.

“Oh, my God.” I looked down at my hands. It was true. I’d killed Andrew. I’d never doubted it, really, but it was different somehow, to hear someone else confirm it. A strange feeling expanded in my chest, relief mixed with grief. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I was close to sobbing, but I held it together.

“I’m sure they didn’t know,” Jackson said, still soft, still careful. “There can’t be more than a hundred people in the world who can do what you can do. It’s a rare gift.”

“A
gift?
” My head snapped up. “I just told you I killed someone.”

“Look, Cass, you were—what—twenty-one? Twenty-two? At that age, without any training, there’s no way you would’ve been able to control the surges. Most converters don’t learn how to use their abilities to the fullest until their thirties, and if you can pull, it takes even longer. You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know.” He paused. “It can be done safely, if you learn how to control it.”

“Safely?” I said, incredulous. “How can it be done safely? I don’t want to do it at all, ever. If I could cut that part of my brain away, I would.” I put my head in my hands, forcing myself not to cry. “I don’t care how rare it is. I don’t want it.”

“I don’t think you get to decide,” he said gently, and we were silent for a while. After a few minutes he asked, “So why are you leaving?”

As I told him about Mina and how she’d collapsed, he grew slowly more serious.

“It’s someone like you,” he said once I’d finished. “Another converter who can pull.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can’t you tell?”

I thought back to the surges that had made me nauseated. They hadn’t felt anything like what had happened to me with Andrew. That feeling had been amazing—frighteningly, addictively good. I shook my head. “It felt totally different.”

“May I see?”

It took me a moment to realize he was asking permission to ride my memory, and I blushed, remembering what had happened right beforehand. Focusing on the instant before I’d felt the surge, I took Jackson’s hand. His presence was careful and polite—he wasn’t looking past what I showed him—but it was still strange, adding Jackson to the short list of people I’d let into my head. Reliving the attack made my stomach churn again, but Jackson let go before it became overwhelming.

“That’s a pull,” he said. “It was stronger than anything I’ve ever felt, though. It must feel different when you use the gift yourself.”

I wished he would stop referring to it as a gift. “How did you recognize it? Did you know someone who could...
pull?
”

Jackson nodded. “My half brother. He’s been dead ten years now, but I can still remember how it felt.” He looked away from me for the first time, and I knew not to ask how his brother had died.

“This guy,” I said. “Whoever he is—he’s like me. So I can stop him? Take his powers?”

“You may be the only one who can.” He paused. “Look, I can help you learn to control it. It’s been a while, but I remember what Adam went through when he was training.”

I almost said no. I wanted to. But then I thought of Mina, waiting to go back home. The helpless feeling bleeding out of Shane as he locked up the shotgun.

“Okay.”

* * *

I called Shane from the same spot by the waterfall five minutes after Jackson left. I explained everything—what Jackson told me about his brother, how I was the only one who could take this guy down, how I had to learn to control it. Shane was quiet for a long while. For the first time in a long time, I was desperate to know what he was thinking. I paced in front of the waterfall, barely avoiding the tourists and the running children, waiting for him to react.

“Cassie, we’ve been through this.”

I stopped pacing. “Shane, you don’t get it. I’m not just imagining this—Jackson’s brother had the same powers. This is real.”

“Cass, you’ve got to let this go. It was an accident. You can’t let it take over your life.”

“That’s just it—it
was
an accident, but I can learn to control it. Jackson’s going to help me.”

“Isn’t he the guy from the bar? The one who was there the night I came to get you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Are you saying he doesn’t have feelings for you?”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.”

“So he says you have this thing, that his brother, who’s conveniently dead, had this thing—he manipulates you into staying, into letting him
train
you... Jesus, I can’t believe you’re falling for this crap.”

Heat flushed up my face. “It’s not crap. He’s not lying. You just don’t want to believe it—you’ve never wanted to believe it.”

“Because it’s not
true
—there’s nothing
wrong
with you.”

I went strangely calm. Everything around me came into blindingly sharp focus. I pressed my free palm on the top of the wall around the fountain, and the stone cracked.

“I didn’t say there was something wrong with me.”

He didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I meant—”

“I know what you meant.”

“I just want you to get past this—you’re still letting that one day control your whole life.” He paused. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Cassie, come home.”

“I have to go.”

“Cassie—”

I hung up.

I sat staring at the empty black face of my phone for a while. I remembered again the look on Andrew Allston’s face when he’d thought about asking me out, and instead of crying, I felt calm. It didn’t matter whether Shane believed me or not. I knew, finally, that what I’d felt was real. And I was going to do something about it.

It wasn’t until I got up that I saw the flowers in the landscaped bed next to me had shriveled and turned brown.

* * *

It gets dark early in San Francisco in the winter, and when I got back to my apartment, the light was already fading. I let myself in, looking for Mina, and found her sitting on my couch, staring at the coffee table. The room was lit only by the dim, fog-filtered sunlight coming through the window. Mina was so still, for a heart-pounding moment I was afraid her attacker had somehow followed us and finished the job, but she blinked, and I breathed again.

“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” I asked. She was wrapped in my thick blue bathrobe, staring at a mechanical pencil lying on the coffee table. “What are you doing?” I sat in front of her on the floor and ducked down, trying to get a look at her face. “Mina?”

She finally looked at me, and her eyes were red and puffy. “It’s gone again. I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything.” Her voice was inflectionless. It wasn’t stoicism; it was a kind of death.

I struggled to keep the panic out of my voice. “Maybe you just need more time to recover. Maybe yesterday was too much.” But then I remembered the dream I’d had last night, the state of my living room. I hadn’t been in control—and I knew what happened when I wasn’t in control. The flowers by the fountain. My blood went cold.

“Oh, God,” I said, and then I started calling hotels.

Chapter Ten

“This is hopeless.”

“
It’s not hopeless.
Try again.
”

I was sitting on a four-top in the middle of Featherweight’s with a rosary in my hand and a crate of expensive gin on the floor in front of me. It hadn’t moved since Jackson and I wrestled it into place two hours earlier. Jackson was leaning against the bar drinking coffee. I was doing my best not to notice him.

“
Try again
,” Jackson repeated, probably for the thirtieth time.

“This would be easier if you were farther away. I keep thinking I’ll hurt you.”

“
The whole point is learning to avoid me.
”

I grumbled and fingered the rosary beads. I hadn’t said a Hail Mary since high school, but if anything called for it, the current situation did. Apparently doing something meditative was supposed to help my brain slip into the right “mode,” as Jackson put it. I was supposed to let my awareness broaden until I could feel everything in my range, from the liquor bottles behind the bar to the dust ground between the floorboards. The theory was, once I was fully aware of my surroundings, I’d be able to pull from the latent energy in the environment instead of more dangerous targets. Like people.

I gripped the beads and began again. They were warm. I ran my thumbnail over the grain of the wood, catching a rough spot where the sanding wasn’t even. I wondered how they were made. Maybe there was some machine that cut them out and sanded them all together, like a rock tumbler. Or maybe someone had whittled them by hand. I hoped so. I didn’t like the thought of them being mass-produced. But was it any better if someone had slaved over a block of wood for pennies a day just to make my rosary by hand? Maybe there was a “manufactured in” tag on the back of the cross—

“
You’re wandering.
”

“Goddammit.” I set the rosary down and scrubbed my hands through my hair. “Is this really how your brother learned?”

“No,” Jackson said, and I gave him a shocked and indignant glare. “He used Hindu prayer beads.”

I resisted throwing something at him. “At this point I’ll pray to anyone who wants to help.”

“Go easy on yourself. It took Adam years.”

“I don’t have years.” I blew out a deep breath. I prayed ten Hail Marys, and for the first time, I actually meant them. After the tenth one, I reached out into the space around me and felt the table underneath me, the chairs stacked upside down throughout the bar, the heavy crate of gin on the dusty floor, and Jackson. In his head was me.

He was remembering how I’d looked on my first day of work when we’d met for the first time, my too-dressy dark blue business suit standing out in the sea of rumpled chinos. I blushed crimson and my concentration collapsed.