Twisted Miracles (20 page)

“Don’t,” he said. “I can be your friend, but there’s only so much I can take.”

I looked at him. He hadn’t moved his hand away, and the places where his skin touched mine were thrumming with energy and heat. As I met his eyes, I saw the question in them that he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and I could only think
Yes.

He closed his eyes, and I sensed the range of emotions tugging him toward me and away from me: joy, fear, anger, desire. He pulled himself back in check, like a rough sea growing quiet again, and then he slid his hand along the back of my neck, his nostrils flaring as he took a deep, steadying breath. I could hear his thoughts—there was no avoiding it.
Shouldn’t do this—only makes it harder when she leaves—can’t help it—Cassie—so beautiful—
I didn’t hear any more. I put up mental shields and closed the distance between us.

His lips were gentle at first, responding slowly, waiting for me to change my mind and pull away. But stopping was the last thing I wanted. I strained toward him, slanting my head to deepen the kiss. He was so close to me his thoughts tangled with mine, little threads of his presence darting through my shields. Jolts of his desire ran through me, and my longing sharpened into need. When I slipped my tongue past his lips, he groaned and pulled me hard against him.

Shane ran his hands down to my waist and pressed me back against the bed. As his thigh nudged my legs apart, he began to draw me into his head, reaching through my mental wall and gathering me to him. The unapologetic lust on the surface of his mind made me twist with anticipation, but Shane was pulling me deeper, into the parts of his consciousness I hadn’t seen in years, memories from my absence. He was helping Lionel knead bread, stone-faced, ignoring his uncle’s attempts to ask how he was doing. He was drinking beers with Mina, neither one of them talking. I saw him at Charlie’s, turning away a pretty girl with a Volvo who’d spent weeks working up the courage to ask him out. My face was in his head. The intensity of it made me tremble, and I resisted, pulling mentally away even as I wrapped a leg around his waist to bring his body closer.

Shane went still above me, his hands still gripping my hips.

“
I
can’t.
” He pushed himself off of me.

“What?” I sat up.

“I’m sorry.” He stood and scrubbed his face with his hands. “I can’t do this. It’s not enough.”

“What do you mean
it’s not enough?
” I stood up, my face flushed.

“You know what I mean.” He blew out a deep breath and laced his hands behind his neck. “I love you. I want to be with you. But I can’t if you don’t trust me.”

“Who says I don’t trust you? I trust you more than anyone.”

“You don’t. Not really. Look, I’m not going to push, okay? I’ll wait for you. But don’t expect me to take less than everything.” And then he turned and left me sitting on the edge of my bed.

Chapter Twenty

The next morning, Shane treated me the way you treated a good friend who’d just stopped by to visit. He laughed at my jokes and gossiped about the guests. He refilled my coffee cup when it was empty. But he didn’t touch me, and he didn’t try to mindspeak.

He even looked well rested. The bastard. I’d barely slept two hours. After I’d gotten over being shocked that he’d turned me down, I’d gotten angry. I convinced myself he was punishing me for the years I’d been gone, but it was hard to give him the infuriated silent treatment when he kept asking me to pass the jam as if it were any other morning. I finally decided to match his “nothing happened” attitude. On the drive over to the Tooleys’, we talked about the weather.

It was a clear, crisp day, which made me perversely angrier, but I pretended to enjoy it, hanging my elbow out the window as we drove to Lakeview. At the Tooleys’ we found Mac at the kitchen table reading the paper while Janine stood at the stove, watching a home shopping show on TV and stirring a roux. She was wearing a Central Grocery apron with a huge picture of a muffaletta on the front.

“Hey there,” she said giving me a one-armed hug so she could keep stirring. “Y’all just missed Ryan. He left an hour ago for the rig.”

“What was he doing here—he come by for dinner last night?” I grinned.

“You know it.” She grinned back. “But he cut the yard while he was here.” She nodded toward the tiny backyard. It had been freshly mowed, and someone had gone around the fence with a weed trimmer.

“Good of him,” I said.

Mac grunted, but in an approving sort of way. He got up and went to a cabinet, pulling out a pair of thick porcelain coffee mugs and holding them out to us. We both nodded, and he poured us each a cup from the pot on the counter.

“Ya’ll seen Deborah Hebert?” Janine asked, her face going serious.

I shook my head. I’d missed Mary Ellen’s funeral, but Shane had told me her mother had been in shock, too grief-stricken even for tears. As I’d predicted, the coroner hadn’t been able to determine what killed Mary Ellen, but word had gotten quietly around the shadowmind community that her death had been no accident. We weren’t the only ones looking for her killer.

“That’s part of why we’re here. We found this out on the river, right where we found Mina.” Shane took the broken shovel handle out of his pocket and handed it to Janine. She wiped a hand on her apron and took it, still stirring the roux. He described how we’d found the body and what we suspected about the man who’d dumped it, but left out the fact that I had the same abilities as the killer. I was grateful. I’d hardly come to terms with it myself.

“Even a direction might be enough.” Shane glanced at me. “Give us something to go on.”

Janine pursed her lips and shook her head. “The connection’ll be weak. And if it wasn’t something he had a lot of contact with... Well, I can try.”

“That’s all we can ask,” Shane said.

“Let’s go up to the attic. Less interference up there.” Janine put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Mac, can you stir?”

“Sure,” he said absently, still reading the paper.

Janine rolled her eyes at him. “Cass?”

“No problem,” I said, laughing. “I’m no cook, but I can stir.”

Mac looked up from his paper and smiled apologetically at his wife. “You know I’d just burn it, hon.”

“I know, I know.” She gave him an exasperated look but smiled at the same time.

I leaned against the kitchen counter next to the pot and started stirring, smelling the delicious toasted-flour richness of a browning roux. I never had the patience to do one properly, but I’d watched Lionel spend half an hour or more stirring, never letting up once. I sighed.

The Tooleys’ mail was sitting on the counter next to me, a celebrity magazine tucked in with the bills. I fished it out and flipped through it, reading about the latest fashion faux pas as Janine’s power pulsed two floors up. I hoped she was getting something. I turned a page in the magazine and a pair of folded papers fell out, falling to the dirty kitchen floor.

I knew I shouldn’t snoop, but I couldn’t help looking as I bent down to lift them up. Both were credit card statements folded over to the Amount Due sections. I had to suppress a gasp when I saw the balances.

The Tooleys were over fifty thousand dollars in debt.

I shoved the bills back into the magazine and tossed the magazine back onto the counter, hoping Mac hadn’t noticed. I chanced a look at him, but he was still going leisurely through the paper.

I knew Mac had lost his job a few years ago, but he was nearly sixty-five, and I figured he’d been ready to retire anyway. Renovating the house after the storm must have been expensive, but they’d gotten at least a little government money to do it. Were they in trouble? I had to clamp down on the thoughts before I started broadcasting.

I focused on stirring and waited, wondering what Janine was finding. It seemed to be taking an unusually long time. After about ten minutes, I heard footsteps on the stairs, and the two of them came back down.

“I’m sorry,” Janine was saying.

“It’s something,” Shane replied. “Better than we had before.”

She handed the broken handle back to him, and he put it in his pocket.

“Y’all want to stay for lunch?” Janine asked, taking the spoon from me. She gave the roux a sniff and kept stirring. “We got plenty of cold cuts.”

“Thanks, but we’d better get back and help Lionel,” Shane said.

“All right, then. See y’all later.”

Once we were in the car, I told Shane about the bills. “Do you think Lionel knows? I mean, they might really be in trouble.”

“I don’t know, Cass. They can handle their own business.”

“But Mac lost his job years ago. What if they’ve been piling up debt this whole time...”

Shane shrugged. “We shouldn’t pry.”

“Yeah. And I guess Ryan’s got that job on the rig—maybe he’s helping them out.”

“Maybe.”

Back at the B&B, the back door was open to the kitchen, and Lionel was sitting at the table shelling peas. A pot of red beans was simmering on the stove, and every now and then Lionel used his mind to give it a stir telekinetically, the wooden spoon rising up and circling the pot like a bizarre shark. I got out the map and unfolded it on the kitchen table, looking at the line I’d drawn two days before.

“Which way?” I asked Shane. Lionel stopped shelling to watch.

Shane traced a line with his finger from Lakeview, where the Tooleys lived, to the western shore of Lake Salvador, south of the city. The two paths intersected in the middle of the lake. To the east was the Barataria Wilderness Preserve, a twenty-thousand-acre swath of uninhabited swampland.

“Is he out on a boat?” I wondered.

“He could be moving around,” Shane said. “And we’ve got to allow for errors in Janine’s internal compass. She didn’t seem sure.” He rubbed a hand over his head. “She said he felt familiar, though.”

“He?”

“Yeah. She couldn’t place him, but she got that much.”

“That narrows it down a little.”

“Like I said, she wasn’t sure.”

“I need to get closer. Get another line. It could be coming from one of these towns, too.” I ran my finger over the cluster of communities to the west. “What if I went and hung out on the lake for a few nights—waited for another surge?”

“We. You’re crazy if you think I’m letting you go down there alone.”

“I can handle myself.”

Shane looked at me. “Maybe so. But if you’re out there alone, I’m not going to sleep until you get back.” He was smiling, but his voice was soft and serious. “Have mercy.”

Remembering how he’d pushed me away last night, I wanted to snap back that he didn’t seem to mind letting me sleep alone, but I couldn’t. Not with Lionel there, focusing back on pea-shelling as if he were disarming a bomb.

“Can you spare him?” I asked Lionel, not sure how I wanted him to answer.

“Sure,” Lionel said, still staring at the peas, and my reaction did nothing to clear things up for me. Equal parts nerves and relief. “But you two stay in touch. If anything the least bit strange happens, you come right on back, hear?”

“We will,” Shane said. “We’ll be fine.”

“Take a gun,” Lionel said. “For gators.”

“It’s really too cold out for gators.”

“Still,” Lionel said, and I knew he was worried about more than reptiles. He went to the cabinet above the pantry and pulled out an old hunting rifle and a box of shot. He handed the gun to Shane, who checked the chamber and set it by the door.

“That’s on you,” I said, watching him. “I don’t do guns.”

“Five years in San Francisco and you’ve gone all liberal on us,” he said, teasing me. “You won’t complain if a gator comes after you.”

“I can handle a gator just fine.” I cracked my knuckles.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I guess you can.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“
Come on
,
Cass.
Do it the easy way.
”

“
Someone might see!
” We were hiking through the underbrush on the eastern shore of Lake Cataouatche, on the edge of the Barataria Wilderness preserve. I had a duffel bag slung over each shoulder, and I’d just had to stop and readjust my grip. The straps were cutting off my circulation. Shane was levitating his own bags plus a two-person tent five feet above his head. He stopped, held back a sapling so I could pass, and rolled his eyes at me.

“
We’re in the middle of nowhere.
No one’s gonna see.
You’re just chicken.
”

I gave him a look and reached out with my power, lifting the bags in front of me as though they weighed no more than a couple of dishrags. Just to prove my point, I telekinetically snapped a skinny branch off of a tree and whacked Shane across the shoulders with it.

“
Show-off
.
This is the spot.
” He set the tent down on a bare patch under a stand of pine trees, and I lowered my bags onto a log. He’d chosen well. We were within a few yards of the water, but the underbrush was thick, so it was unlikely we’d be spotted from the lake. There were boardwalks and hiking trails throughout the preserve, but I couldn’t see any of them from the site.

“I’m going to get a fire started.”

“Great,” Shane said, hammering in tent stakes. “Try to find dry stuff. We don’t want it to smoke too much.”

“Good point.” I looked around. It hadn’t rained in a while, but the ground was still damp. I ended up reaching into the trees for dead branches that hadn’t yet fallen, easing them down by telekinesis. By the time I’d gathered enough for a sizable A-frame, Shane had the tent staked. I was about to strike a match when he came over.

“Don’t bother with that.” He took a twig from the pile of kindling under the larger branches. He held it upright in his hand, and as I watched, the tip glowed orange and caught fire.

“Now who’s the show-off?” I rolled my eyes at him, but I couldn’t help smiling as well.

We ate a late lunch of potato chips and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then wandered around our campsite exploring, making sure we were out of sight of the major trails. When it grew dark, we threw dirt on the fire and headed into the tent. It had gotten much colder since the sun went down, and we both concentrated on warming it up for a couple of minutes.