Twisted Miracles (29 page)

“I won’t miss again,” he said, and my veins flooded with pure, adrenaline-soaked rage.

“Yes, you will.” I stood in one fluid motion to face him.

It was like the moment on the lake in California, when I’d felt the details of everything around me like an extension of my body. I could sense Ryan getting ready to fire, the impulses traveling from his brain to the muscles in his hand. I felt the blood seeping from the hole in Shane’s chest, the small waves hitting the lakeshore a mile away, the fear and sweat pouring off of Ryan as he yelled something incoherent and pulled the trigger three times.

For the first time since I’d learned what I was, I gathered myself to pull and let my natural urge to latch on to a warm body take over completely. Ryan was right there, full of pulsing, powerful force. The pull strained for him, wanting him like a wild thing, and I let it loose. Three bullets cut tunnels through the air toward my heart, and I reached out and stopped them as though they were dandelion seeds. They hit the gravel with a tinny, anticlimactic sound, and Ryan fell forward and slumped facedown onto the rocks.

He might have been dead. I didn’t care. I turned my back on him.

Lionel was kneeling at Shane’s head and talking to an emergency operator on his cell phone. Shane was lying very still, and I leaned over him and put my head against his chest. His breath was shallow.

“Love you, Cassie,” he said, and I watched the slow, weak movement of his ribcage as he spoke. His shirt was soaked red; blood ran down his left arm and stained the earth. I reached out mentally for the wound, found the hole in his chest that was killing him and put pressure on it, holding back the flow of blood with my mind.

“I know, I know. I love you, too. Don’t talk.”

“...liked it better...when you said that...in my bedroom...”

I laughed through my tears. “Shhh.” I could feel his heart slowing down. I increased my mental pressure on the bullet hole and he moaned, twisting away from the pain. “The ambulance is coming,” I said. “You just hold on, okay? Hold on.”

After that, the only thing I was aware of was the hole in Shane’s chest and the feel of his fingers in my hand. I’d tunneled so deeply into the bullet wound, I was stopping blood flow from tiny, skin-deep capillaries. He lost consciousness at some point, but I stayed tapped into his head, riding the increasingly chaotic swirl of his thoughts. Lionel was gripping my shoulder and saying something, but I didn’t hear it, and finally, someone’s strong arms pulled me away from Shane’s limp body. I fought, trying to get back to him.

“No! He’ll die! He’ll die—I have to—”

“Let them do their jobs, honey, let them do their jobs.” It was a woman’s voice. I thrashed, but she held me tight around the shoulders. “I know,” she said. “It’s gonna be okay. They’re gonna do everything they can.”

I could only watch as paramedics strapped Shane to a stretcher and started a transfusion. I stayed connected to his mind. It was there. It was still there. That had to be good. It had to be.

“
Hold on
,
baby
,” I sent. There was no reply.

“Get him in!” one of the EMTs yelled, and then they were moving fast, running. They loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance, both of them jumping in after him, pulling the door closed. The siren flared to life and the deputy who was holding me let me go. I nearly fell over, but she caught me.

“I’ll take y’all to the hospital,” she told me. “Come on, come with me.” I let her help me into the back seat of her cruiser.

Lionel sat next to me and gripped my hand.

“
He’ll be okay
,” he said, but I couldn’t stop crying. Under his assurance, his mind replayed a single anguished thought—
it’s my fault my fault my fault—
I shook my head, but I didn’t have the composure to comfort him. As the deputy turned the ignition, I listened to the paramedics ahead of us—
another bag of O-neg—thought we’d stopped the bleeding—
My grip on Lionel’s hand tightened.

As we drove away, a second ambulance arrived and headed for Ryan. Two more deputies were waiting next to him, guns drawn. Moments later, the second set of sirens started up. They were following us to the hospital. Ryan was still knocked out, and the EMTs were attempting to figure out why.
Not a mark on him
, one of them said.
Wait
,
I’m getting something.

I had a moment to think
I
hope he’s not waking up
, and then the ambulance slammed into the back of our car.

“What the hell?” The deputy kept hold of the wheel as we fishtailed. With one hand, she grabbed her radio. “Crawford? What the hell are you doing?” Another jolt sent us careening toward the ditch. She got us back onto the blacktop just in time to avoid the roadside ditch. She cursed and looked behind her, still yelling at Crawford.

“It’s him!” I said to Lionel, not bothering to mindspeak. I banged on the partition behind the driver’s seat. “Stop the car!”

She didn’t hear me. She was yelling into her radio, asking for backup, and then the ambulance hit us again, hard, and the whole car slammed sideways into a tree.

The airbags went off, but they didn’t keep the deputy from smashing her head against the driver’s side window. She slumped over, unconscious. A lick of flame appeared under the hood as the ambulance stopped behind us, sirens still blaring. I scrabbled at the door for the handle, but it was locked.

“Shit!” Lionel and I exchanged a glance as a figure got out of the back of the ambulance and started coming for us. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel. The second cop car was nowhere to be seen. I fought down dread. My hands didn’t seem to be working.

“Open them from the outside,” Lionel said, impossibly calm. I reached out for the handle, but the crash had warped the door, and it wouldn’t open.

“I can’t!”

Lionel shook his head. He was trapped, too. In front of us, the deputy moaned and lifted her head. Voices were shouting out of the radio. Behind us, Ryan was getting closer. The flames under the hood were multiplying, and heat radiated through the ruined windshield
.
If he doesn’t kill us first
,
we’re going to burn to death
, I thought, and then I remembered the day on the lake with Shane. The campfire.

“
Cover your head
,” I said to Lionel. He saw my intentions, and his eyes widened. He put his head between his knees an instant before I blew all four doors off of the car.

“Get her out of here!” I yelled, and I rolled out of the car onto the grass. I’d drawn a lot of energy for the blast, but the fire under the hood was still going, and the more distance they put between themselves and the car, the better.

Ryan had danced back in shock when I blasted off the doors, but he recovered fast, and I knew I only had seconds before he focused on me again, and I couldn’t let that happen. If he incapacitated me, we were all dead.

Even as I thought it, the force of his pull hit me in the chest.

I doubled over onto the ground, gasping. His power wrapped around me like a snake. Each beat of my heart was a struggle, something I had to consciously work for. My skin was exploding with pain like a hundred cigarette burns, power bleeding out of me. I tried to put up shields, but the connection had already formed. There was nothing I could do.

Ryan saw me struggling and laughed.

“
Ryan
,
stop!
” I yelled it in his head, drawing power to strengthen my shields from the fire, from the wind, from Ryan himself. If he heard me, I couldn’t tell. He kept advancing. Behind me, I was vaguely aware of Lionel pulling the semi-conscious deputy out of the driver’s seat and dragging her away from the car. He saw what was happening and ran at Ryan, but Ryan saw him coming and sent him flying back into a tree with an awful cracking sound. Lionel hit the ground and didn’t stir. I thought,
it doesn’t matter now;
he’s going to kill us all
, and then the gas tank exploded.

The force threw Ryan off his feet, and his connection to me snapped. Luckily, I was already on the ground, and I flattened myself into the grass and as the shock wave rushed over me. When Ryan reached out for me again, I was ready.

I hadn’t taken enough from him before. The force I’d used to stop the bullets would have been enough to kill a converter. Ryan it had only knocked out. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Before he could recover, I sank a pull into him with everything I had.

Ryan gasped as a thousand needle-thin lines of force sliced into him, drawing energy out of him in pinpricks. As I took more, the threads combined and thickened into ropes, dark and heavy. He struggled against me, but I was stronger now by far, and I didn’t hesitate. It was frighteningly good, the feeling of his power surging into me. Fear crept into his eyes like wine soaking a tabletop.

I got to my feet and advanced on him, sinking deeper into his head as I drained him. He was awash with memories of the church, reliving a whole string of murders. Homeless men, drug addicts, prostitutes. How many people had he kidnapped and killed? Fury rose up in my chest and my hold on him tightened until all of his thoughts were drowned by a single desperate impulse
—getoutgetoutgetout—

I realized what he intended seconds before it happened. Ryan flickered on the ground in front of me, and I felt the answering echo in my bones, connected as we were through the lines of the pull. There was no time. I couldn’t disengage. When he gathered his remaining power and made the leap through the void, I went with him.

Chapter Thirty

I was ready for it this time. The airlessness, the absolute dark. It seemed to last for hours, my body grappling with Ryan’s in the void, both of us blind and fumbling. When we came through, we hit a wooden floor in a painful tangle, rolling. Air rushed back into my lungs, and I choked. I barely had time to get to my feet when Ryan kicked me in the gut and knocked me back down again. More blows landed on my ribs, my temple. I curled up, wheezing, and he ran for a doorway on the other side of the room.

The floor beneath me was made of unfinished wooden planks. Through the spots in my vision, I saw screened windows above me. Wherever we were, it wasn’t a hospital, and I felt a surge of hope that Shane would be safe. There was no telling how far from civilization we’d jumped. No one would come to save me.

Or him.

I struggled to my feet and went after him, bent double against the pain in my side. It hurt to breathe, and I was sure he’d broken one of my ribs. Slamming sounds came from the doorway, as though he was shifting furniture.

I staggered into the next room. Ryan was crouched on the floor, an unfinished pine chest pushed aside to reveal a trap door in front of him. He rooted through the opening, cash blooming out of it like socks from an overstuffed dresser drawer. Bills drifted across the floor, hundreds of them, but he didn’t pay attention to them. He came up with a gun.

He hadn’t noticed me yet. He was checking the chamber, cursing, hunting for ammo. Still curled over from the pain in my side, I reached out with my power and flung the gun away from him. It went skidding through the open doorway to the porch and over the edge. I heard a splash as it hit water.

“Bitch!”

Before I could react, he came at me, knocking me back down, straddling me, locking his hands around my throat. I tried to buck him off, but he had sixty pounds on me and a lot more upper body strength. My broken rib was on fire. Ryan slammed my head into the wooden floor and I scrabbled at his wrists, frantic until I remembered I didn’t have to fight him with my hands. He saw the realization in my head, and his grip tightened on my throat.

“Fuck you! No!” His voice was shrill with fear. Tears caught in his eyes.

I was starting to see black spots in my vision. I knew I didn’t have much time.

Ryan might have been able to block me if he hadn’t made the jump, but the teleportation, combined with the power I’d taken from him moments before, had weakened him too much. I was stronger than him, and we both knew it. There was nothing he could do. The lines of my pull wrapped around him, sinking into his body like thick, blind worms. He jerked against the pain of it, but I didn’t relent. I had to make sure he would never heal. Deep in his head, the invisible linkages that connected his shadowmind to the world around him loosened and unwound. They were free, seeking, and I drew them to myself, taking everything I could. His grip on my neck loosened.

When I killed Andrew, I’d been focused on stopping Cindy’s fall. I hadn’t paid attention to what was going on in my own head. This was different. When a stream of unfamiliar images rose up my mind, I knew that they were Ryan’s.

His first bike. His first gun. His first kill—a white-tailed deer, Mac by his side. Scattered, disconnected images of him in high school, at baseball practice. Running with guys from his team. Flirting with the cross-country girls. I saw Shane, and Mina, and myself. So many people I recognized and loved. It was Ryan’s life, flashing before his eyes.

Memories weren’t like books. There was no story written out in people’s heads, each word as clear as the next. Some moments had more weight than others—getting yelled at by your boss, meeting someone new and feeling that first spark of attraction, having a near-miss when you ran a stop sign—things like that rose to the surface. They got replayed over and over until you fought them down or they faded on their own, but they were always there.

I’d seen dozens of memories like that, sometimes of things so mundane, I never would have believed how important they were if I hadn’t recognized that telltale clarity that always came with a life-changing event. So when Ryan’s mind called up a view of a pine forest over an unfinished wooden windowsill, and I could see the way every leaf in every tree fluttered and shook, I knew instantly that the memory I was about to ride was important.

“Let’s do some target practice.” It was his brother Brandon’s voice, and Ryan’s field of vision shifted to look at him. I’d never known Brandon well, and I was shocked by how much he resembled Ryan. The same dark hair, the same easy good looks. But Brandon was taller and broader-shouldered, and his eyes were green, like his father’s.