Flux

The Flux Series

Book One

Marissa Farrar

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

Chapter One

“I hope you ordered one of those for me.”

I dropped my bag to the ground and sank into the seat opposite my sister, who was about to shovel a huge spoonful of chocolate sundae into her mouth. She chomped down on the ice cream and shook her head, clutching the glass flute of dessert closer to her body.

“No way, Ari,” she told me. “This baby is all mine.”

We were sat outside at our favorite cafe overlooking San Francisco Bay. Sure, it was full of tourists, with the ferry shipping boatloads of them out to Alcatraz Island every half hour during the day, and if the wind happened to be blowing in the wrong direction, you often got a lungful of the rank smell of all the sea lions that had hauled themselves up onto Pier 39, but we still loved it. We’d grown up here, and being able to see the Golden Gate Bridge—at least on the days when the fog wasn’t obscuring it—made me happier than any place I’d ever been.

“You’ll get fat, you know,” I told her with a smirk.

There was no way my super skinny sister Karina was putting on weight anytime soon. I was the one who had to watch what I ate before it ended up on my thighs. I’d always told myself it was puppy fat, and I’d soon shoot up just like she had, but now she was twenty-four and I was twenty-two, and I had to admit the growth spurt probably wasn’t going to happen.

She swallowed her ice cream, then offered the glass flute over to me.

I shook my head. “No thanks.” I signaled the waitress. “I’ll get my own. I don’t want your drool all over my food.”

Karina laughed and swept a strand of her jaw-length blonde bob away from her face, before spooning more dessert into her mouth. She always looked so mature, and I wondered for the thousandth time if I should get my own blonde hair cut into a shorter style. But mine was wavy, while hers was poker straight, and I was pretty sure mine would end up looking like a helmet if I tried to get it any shorter than the current middle-of-my-back length it currently was.

The waitress came over and I gave her a smile. “I’ll have what she’s having, thanks.”

The waitress returned my smile. “I’ll bring it right over.”

“Thank you,” I said, thinking I’d give her a decent tip. I’d been doing exactly the same job for the past eight hours, and I knew what hard work serving tables was. Where my sister had some important job in an office, I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with my life. Waitressing would have to do for the moment. I still lived with our dad, so it wasn’t as though I had massive bills to pay, though I always tried to contribute. He waved my money away, but I made sure I slipped my fair share into his wallet when he wasn’t looking.

“So how was work?” I asked my sister.

Karina gestured at her dessert. “How do you think?”

I grimaced. “Bad as that, huh?”

She gave a deep sigh and sat back in her chair. “I just don’t think I can go to work every day and pretend like everything is okay. He calls me in for a meeting, and I have to smile and act as though I wasn’t sitting on his face last week, and that he didn’t just completely stomp all over my heart.”

I tried to hide my smile at her description. I knew this wasn’t a laughing matter in her eyes. She caught my expression anyway.

“Ari!” she scolded.

“Sorry, but you can’t talk about sitting on someone’s face and not expect me to smirk.”

“No, but you need to focus on the heart-stomping part.”

“I did tell you it wasn’t a good idea to get involved with your boss. Especially considering he’s ten years older, and has never been in a serious relationship. He’s all smart suits, and expensive cars, and keeping women for the weekend.”

She gave another sigh and swirled her ice-cream around with her spoon. “Yeah, I know. It was a very bad idea, but when he stared at me in the office in that intense way he always did, I just about melted into a puddle.”

My lips twisted. “Yeah, and I bet he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Yeah, he did. I’m such an idiot.” She shook her head, glancing down.

I reached out and took my sister’s hand. “No, you’re not. You’re not the first woman to fall for an unsuitable guy.”

The waitress wove between tables, my sundae balanced on a tray.

“Ice cream will make—”

The sound struck me first, a deafening roar, followed by the feeling all the air had been sucked out of the atmosphere. A massive bang exploded in my ears, and a blast of heat and pressure sent both me and my chair flying. I hit the ground, stunned, my ears ringing. Things rained down upon me, pieces of brick and glass, hitting my arms, legs, and torso. I lifted my arms to protect my face, curling into a ball until the assault slowed.

The world felt like it had ended around me. The air was filled with screams and people crying. Confusion and fear reigned. Forcing myself to be brave, I blinked open my eyes to find myself surrounded by a cloud of dust. It caught in my throat, making me cough, and I covered my mouth and nose with the back of my hand. At least I was able to move.

What had happened?

I tried to piece together the moments before.

Oh, God. Karina. I’d been sitting with my sister.

I opened my mouth and choked out her name. “Karina?”

I couldn’t make sense of where I was. The scene looked nothing like it had only moments before. Everywhere were piles of rubble and twisted metal. I caught sight of people helping each other, of bloodied faces and people crying for help.

“Karina!” I tried to cry again, but my voice was hoarse and her name ended in a series of coughs as the dust surrounding me caught in the back of my throat.

I managed to get to my hands and knees. Was I hurt? I didn’t think I felt anything more than battered from being thrown in the explosion and from debris hitting me. I was more stunned than anything, my ears ringing from the roar of the blast.

I crawled forward, my focus on finding Karina. She’d been right here, right in front of me when the explosion had happened. She couldn’t have gone far, could she?

I called her name again, my knees and palms crunching through broken glass. I tried to get to my feet, but my balance was all off, and I teetered then fell back to all fours.

People staggered around me, each crying out for their own loved ones. I spotted the waitress who had been bringing my ice-cream. She wore a mask of blood, but she was on her feet, stumbling away from the destroyed building.

My mind tried to piece together what had happened. A bomb? Had it been a terrorist attack? Why would someone want to blow up an innocuous cafe in San Fran?

I heard the distant sound of sirens. Help was on its way.

The weight of a hand landed on my back. “Are you okay, miss?”

“My sister,” I managed to rasp. “Where’s my sister?”

“I don’t know,” the male voice said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

I struggled against him trying to help me to my feet. “No. Karina. I need to find Karina.”

My gaze scanned the survivors, desperately hoping to recognize her among them. There were men and women, even a couple of children, to my dismay, all with their arms around each other as they tried to get away from the wreckage. Then I spotted something and my heart lurched, ice water blasting through my veins. The world spun around me as I made out the sight of a body, broken and bloodied beneath a pile of rubble. Strands of blonde hair, tinted red with blood, spread like seaweed from beneath a rock, the same hair I’d been coveting only minutes before.

I opened my mouth to scream, but more movement came from above as another piece of the building dislodged.

And I was gone.

Chapter Two

I woke with no idea where I was.

For a moment, I’d forgotten what had happened, but then it all tumbled back down on me, horror crushing my soul. I tried to lurch upright, but a hand pressed on my shoulder, pushing me back to the soft bed beneath me.

“It’s okay, Arianna,” came a male voice which, after a moment, I recognized as my father’s. “You’re safe. Try to relax.”

I blinked, trying to focus on the room around me. My eyes felt sore and dry and gritty, but gradually my surroundings came into focus.

“Try not to move, sweetheart.”

I turned my face toward my father’s voice, wincing as pain lanced up through my neck. His face appeared in my vision, and his big warm hands took hold of mine.

“Dad,” I managed to rasp. “There was an explosion ...”

“I know, darling. I know.”

“Karina ...?”

He glanced away and I noticed how red-rimmed his blue eyes were. His face looked beaten, bruised shadows beneath his eyes, his jowls drawn down. I knew what that glance away meant, remembered the bloodied hair I’d seen fanned out beneath a pile of rubble.

Disbelief, denial, all rose up inside me. “Oh, no. Please, Dad, no. Not Karina!”

He looked back to me, his eyes flooding with tears. “I’m so sorry, baby. She’s gone. We lost her.”

A painful lump caught in my throat and my vision blurred. I shook my head, frantic, ignoring the agony shooting through my body as a result. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted him to take it back. Wanted to rewind to the day before when none of this had happened and my big sister was still alive.

“Please, Daddy, please,” I begged as though I was still a little girl who believed her father had the ability to change the world for her.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“No,” I said again, my voice growing louder. The pain at the thought of never being able to see or speak to my sister again was too much. I couldn’t even imagine a life without her. My beautiful sister who I’d looked up to my whole life. She wasn’t just a sibling, she’d been my best friend. “No!”

Above my head, the fluorescent lights of the hospital room flickered. A sudden gust of wind hit my face, and something went pop, and glass shattered, sprinkling down on me like confetti. I let out a scream and covered my head with my arms. A flashback of the explosion hit me, the fear and panic sending my heart rate soaring. Instinctively, my father covered me with his body, sheltering me. The slats of the blind on the window rattled, and then everything fell still.

We were both breathing hard, trembling.

The door flew open and nursing staff rushed in.

“Oh, my goodness,” cried one of the nurses, a dark-haired woman who didn’t look much older than I was. “Are you all right? I don’t know what happened.”

My father released me and placed a hand on my head. “It was nothing. Just a broken lightbulb. Bad timing, that’s all.”

The young nurse rushed to my bedside. “Don’t move. We need to clear this glass off you.”

I remained still as they lifted the sheet covering my body. Most of the glass had fallen onto it, so they were able to remove any dangerous shards easily enough. I still needed the rest of my sheets changed, however.

My father helped me out of the bed. I needed to use the bathroom anyway, so he helped me into the adjoining room. Though my body was bruised, I had no major injuries. It wasn’t my body that hurt the worst, but my heart. I felt hollow inside, numb, as though I was watching this whole thing from a distance. My dad closed the bathroom door for me, leaving me alone, and I sank down onto the toilet, my head in my hands. In private and out of view, I gave in to my grief, and harsh sobs wracked through me. I didn’t want anyone asking after me, so I grabbed a towel hanging from the rail beside me, and held it over my face, stifling my cries.

Above my head, the light blinked and stuttered. Beside me, the faucet suddenly came on, water rushing into the sink. In the corner of the room, the walk-in shower snapped on, pouring water down onto the porcelain base.

All the movement distracted me from my tears. What the hell was going on in this hospital? They must have been experiencing some kind of power surge.

I dropped the towel and stood from the toilet to turn off the water. The moment my tears ended, the water from the faucet and shower stopped. I glanced up at the light, which was now a steady illumination rather than the stuttering flashing it had been emitting a moment before.

A bang on the bathroom door made me jump.

“Everything all right in there, Ari?”

It was my father’s voice, and my chest tightened with grief for him. I’d lost my sister, but he’d lost his daughter. The young woman he’d brought up on his own for the past twenty years, ever since our mother died. I couldn’t imagine the sort of agony he must be in.

I unlocked the door and fell into his arms. We held each other, both of us crying onto each other’s shoulders.

One of the nurses cleared her throat. “We need to check you over, Miss Sheppard. You didn’t have any major injuries when you were brought in—just bruising and some swelling—but I want to give you one more look. I’ll make sure we haven’t missed anything so we can give you the all clear to go home. It’s a miracle, really, considering how bad the explosion was.”

My father and I exchanged a wobbly-lipped glance and her cheeks colored. She must have forgotten we’d lost our dearest in the explosion. What we’d experienced had been a long way from miraculous.

“Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry,” she said.

My father shook his head to tell her it was okay.

I got back on the bed, eyeing the broken strip of lightning above me. I told myself it couldn’t break twice. The nurse did a final check on me then got me to sign some forms. I was free to go.

“How bad was it?” I asked my dad. “The explosion, I mean?”

He shut his eyes briefly and shook his head. “Bad. Fourteen killed, including Karina—” His voice broke and he cleared his throat and started again. “Thirty-seven injured.”

“Oh, my God.” I could barely wrap my head around so many dead and wounded people. It broke my heart all over again. “Do they have any idea who did it?”

“No one is claiming responsibility yet.”

“But they think it was a terrorist attack?”

“Yes. There were no gas leaks or anything like that which might have caused such a large explosion.” He paused then said, “The nurse was right. It is a miracle you are still alive. I couldn’t imagine if I’d lost both of you. I wouldn’t be able to go on. I assume you and Karina were together when it happened.”

I nodded. “Sitting right across from one another.”

“And she’s dead and you’ve barely got a scratch on you.”

A wave of guilt and grief washed over me. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Hush, you don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more. I’m sorry she was the one who died and I was the one who lived. She had so much more going for her. She was smart and beautiful—”

“Hey, stop that, now.” His tone was harsh. “You are all of those things, too. Don’t ever let me catch you thinking that you should have been the one who died. This isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of whichever sick fuck was behind planting the bomb and taking innocent lives.”

His use of the word ‘fuck’ shocked me. I’d never known him to swear, or at least he didn’t around us girls, even though we were all grown up now.

I squeezed him around the waist. “I know that, Dad.”

We packed up my few belongings, getting ready to leave. I was struggling with the idea of stepping back into a world which no longer contained my sister. I kept hoping something would change and I’d flick back to a different reality where none of this had happened and Karina was still alive, but, of course, such a thing was impossible.

Fresh tears filled my eyes, and I blinked them away. I figured I had a flood of tears still to fall as I mourned for her, but right now I just needed to see my way out of the hospital.

We caught the elevator down to ground level and headed toward the exit. The hospital was busy, people rushing everywhere, some pushing wheelchairs, others on crutches. The smell of bleach filled my nostrils, and my sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floors.

A shoulder smacked into mine, shoving me sideways, and I collided with my dad.

“Hey, watch it!” I snapped.

I got no response. I turned to look over my shoulder at the person who’d slammed into me. The man barely glanced back at me before he vanished between the multitudes of sick and injured, so I caught only a glimpse of dark hair and eyes, and a leather jacket. Then he was gone. The moment he vanished from view, the wail of alarms sounded and lights in the corners of the corridor began to flash.

“What’s happening?” I cried.

My father put his arm around my shoulder and hurried me to the exit. “Looks like a fire alarm. It’s probably only a test, but let’s get out of here, just in case.”

What the hell was going on with this building?

Chapter Three

A week passed while I recuperated.

The first few days back home had been overwhelming, with reporters constantly camped out in the street outside our house, and the phone ringing off the hook with interview requests from the media. They’d come from all over the world—reporters from the BBC in England, even—and eventually my dad had been forced to unplug the phone. I stayed in bed with my curtains drawn, hiding from the camera men and women who seemed determined to get a picture of one of the survivors of the bombing. After a few days, they gave up and moved onto someone else, who, I assumed, must have been happier to speak to them. The last thing I wanted to do was recount a single second of what had happened that day.

Sitting on my dresser were some get well cards, flowers, and a balloon from colleagues at the restaurant where I waitressed. I appreciated the effort they’d made. I didn’t have a huge number of close friends—hell, who was I kidding? I hardly had any outside of my work colleagues. My sister had been my best friend, and now she was gone.

My physical injuries were few, and I barely felt them after the first couple of days, but I pretended to my boss at the restaurant that I was too badly hurt to waitress. I was happy not to have to go in to work. It wasn’t just all the questions I knew would be asked that bothered me. I was terrified I’d be overwhelmed with memories of the blast by going back into such a public area. It was a fear I knew would render me incapable of functioning, and I couldn’t bring myself to face anyone in that state. Even worse was the niggling terror it would happen again.

Every time I closed my eyes, I pictured the sight of my sister’s bloodied hair on the ground, and it felt as though someone punched me in the chest. My dreams were haunted by the explosion, and though I’d been given a couple of sleeping tablets to help me get some rest, I couldn’t bring myself to take them. I was terrified I’d end up trapped inside my nightmares, forced to relive that horrific moment over and over again until I eventually lost my mind. Because I was getting no rest, I was constantly exhausted. I felt strangely hollow, as though someone had scooped out what had made me me and replaced it with a ball of misery. I couldn’t see any point in getting out of bed, or eating, or washing, or doing much of anything. The epic fantasy novels I normally loved to lose myself in lay unread at the side of my bed. Even the indie rock bands I liked to listen to meant nothing to me anymore.

My dad continued to look after me, which bizarrely only served my misery. I was twenty-two years old and an adult, and he had just lost his other daughter, but I was doing nothing to help him. He brought me food I barely managed to choke down, and forced me into the bathroom to shower. I was weak and selfish, the wrong daughter to have survived. Karina wouldn’t have acted this way if I had been the one to die. She would have taken care of him, not the other way around. Instead of motivating me to deal with what was going on, the thought only condensed my feelings of worthlessness. I wanted to do better, but the thought of leaving the house, even leaving my bed, filled me with panic that left me tremulous and lightheaded.

The police had been to see me to get my side of the story. There wasn’t much I could tell them, only that I’d been sitting with Karina and the explosion had thrown me away from the table. They thought it had probably saved my life, moving me away from the building we’d been sitting beside, the same one that collapsed on top of Karina. But as for seeing anything suspicious, I wasn’t of any help. I scoured my mind, trying to remember anything I might have seen, but I’d been more focused on ice cream and stories of Karina’s love life than keeping an eye out for anything out of place.

They still had no idea who was behind the bombing, and that worried me more than anything. There was nothing to stop it happening again, and the constant fear made me not want to step outside our front door.

I had to eventually, though.

We had Karina’s funeral to attend.

I was dreading this day more than anything. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her for good, to admit I’d never see her or be able to speak to her again. Dad had already been over to clear out her room in the apartment she’d shared with a couple of other young, professional women. I should have gone with him to help, but I couldn’t face it. It wasn’t only that I didn’t want to see her room or clear out her things. It was that leaving my father’s house to go to her place would have meant going back into the city, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I woke in a daze on the morning of her funeral. Only thoughts of my father stopped me from pulling the blankets back over my head and staying in bed for the rest of the day, trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. But I was a grown woman, not a little girl, and I needed to find the strength inside me to support my dad. I couldn’t let him go through this alone. I was better than that. He deserved better than that.

I got up and showered, and put on a black dress with sleeves which stopped just above the elbow, and a tulip shaped skirt which ended just below my knee. It was classy and sophisticated—and not really me at all—but I knew Karina would have approved. There were discussions about banning people from wearing black, that we should have been brightly dressed to celebrate her life, but I couldn’t find it in me to celebrate. Someone had snatched her life away in one selfishly cruel act, and there was no way I was going to celebrate any part of what had happened that day.

I made my way downstairs to find my father in the kitchen, sitting at the table as he nursed a cup of coffee. He’d gone for a dark gray suit, rather than black. He glanced up at me with a tired smile as I walked in.

He’d lost weight in the last week, and he looked older for it. The sight made my heart clench. It suddenly dawned on me that if something happened to him, I would be completely alone in the world.

I leaned down and kissed his cheek. “You look handsome, Pops. Karina would have been proud.”

Just the mention of her name caused tears to flood my eyes. I hadn’t bothered with mascara, knowing full well it would end up halfway down my face by the end of the day.

He hugged me tight. “You, too, sweetheart. How are you feeling?”

“Like I want this day to be over. Is that bad?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s totally normal. I’m feeling the same way.”

I poured myself some coffee from the pot. I wouldn’t be able to eat anything. I had no appetite and my stomach was in knots. I set the pot back down. A sudden loud pop made me scream, and the glass part of the pot exploded, leaving me standing there with only the plastic handle in my hand. Black liquid spilled everywhere, and I jumped out of the way to avoid hot coffee spilling all over my legs.

“Dammit! What the hell is wrong with me lately?”

Ever since the bombing, it felt as though everything was going wrong. I couldn’t even pour a damned coffee without messing up.

“It’s only a coffee pot,” my father said, rising from his seat. “Sit down, I’ll clean it up.”

“No, I can do it,” I replied, suddenly angry with myself. Since when had I become so heavy handed? I’d been breaking things all over the place since I’d gotten home from the hospital.

I picked up the broken pieces of glass from the coffee pot, threw them away, and set about mopping up the coffee. Luckily, it had only been the dregs of the pot left, so there wasn’t too much

I drank some of the coffee I’d managed to get into my cup, but my stomach was twisted, my throat feeling as though someone had their hand around it.

The car arrived to take us to the church.

We rode in the back in silence, my father holding my hand. Most of the mourners were already there when we arrived. Because of the circumstances surrounding Karina’s death, we’d known a huge number of people would turn out, so we asked for a private service with only our family and the people who knew her. I spotted Karina’s old boss—the one who’d done the heart-stomping—sitting in the congregation.

Sudden rage bubbled up inside me and I left my father’s side to storm up to him. I ignored my father’s call of “Ari?” which followed me.

The man who’d broken my sister’s heart looked up at me as I approached. His expression flickered with recognition, and I thought he was about to offer me a smile of sympathy, but I cut him off.

“I hope you’re happy,” I snapped.

The smile faded. “Sorry?”

“Karina was only at the café that day to tell me what an asshole you were to her. If you’d treated her a little better, perhaps she’d have been doing something completely different that day.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

I leaned in closer so other people wouldn’t hear. “Next time you feel like using a woman and treating them like shit, have a think about the repercussions.”

My palms tingled, and I gripped my fists to my sides to prevent myself slapping him in the face. I knew I was being unreasonable. He had no way of knowing what was going to happen, but I was hurting, and he’d hurt Karina, therefore I wanted him to hurt, too.

All along the aisle where he was sitting, the small Bibles which sat on the pews flipped off, landing in the laps of the mourners. They all let out little cries of shock, and I froze, staring at the scene.

“Arianna?” My father’s voice pulled me away. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, giving Karina’s ex a final glare.

My father touched my elbow. “It’s time to sit down.”

I left the people questioning each other about the Bibles—had someone tipped the pew, or had it been a sudden breeze?—and went to take a seat at the front beside my dad.

The priest ran through his service, though I barely heard a word he’d said. Then it was my turn to stand at the front and tell everyone how I felt about my dead sister. As I stood, my legs wobbled beneath me, and my face grew hot. My heart pounded, making me short of breath. For a moment, I thought I would turn and bolt from the church, but then I caught sight of my dad watching me, his face filled with so much love, and I knew I couldn’t let him down.

My stomach felt weak and watery, but I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other and went to stand at the front.

I kept it short, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold it together for long.

 “I’ll miss Karina more than anything else in the world. When our mom died, I was too young to really remember her.” I had to stop to hold back tears and compose myself. I cleared my throat. “Karina was everything to me—my sister, my best friend, and even a mom during those times when I needed one. Our dad, Bryce, is the greatest father anyone could ever wish for, but there were certain things no dad wants to have to speak to his teenage daughter about.” A small ripple of laughter drifted from the crowd and I felt my heart lift. That was what I wanted. “Karina stepped in during those times, and I will always be grateful to her. I love you, Karina,” I said, addressing my dead sister, hoping she could hear me, wherever she was, “more than you’ll ever know. I hope you and Mom have found each other and you’re happy together now. I miss you so much.” Tears filled my eyes and I squeezed them shut, pressing my lips together to reclaim my emotion. A painful ball swelled in my throat, making it hard for me to swallow.

I was relieved it was done, and I took my seat back at my father’s side. He took my hand and held it tight while the priest finished his readings.

We left the church and walked through the cemetery to where her body would be laid to rest. We hadn’t done the traditional visitation of the casket at the funeral home. Her body had been in no state to be seen after the bombing, and Karina would have hated to be left lying there while people came back and forth, talking over the top of her.

I held my dad’s hand, suddenly feeling like he’d become an old man. He’d always been so strong to me, but my sister’s death had both aged and hollowed him. I knew he was being as strong as he could for me, but I was worried about him.

We stood by as the casket was slowly lowered into the ground.

To stop myself breaking down, I pulled back into myself. I allowed my gaze to sweep across the mourners, wanting to look everywhere but at the box containing my sister’s body. It was an annoyingly bright day, the sunlight causing the white gravestones to stand out against the vibrant green grass all around us. I would have preferred the usual fog of the bay to have blocked out the sun, weather far more fitting to the somber mood.

Someone, standing back from the crowd, caught my eye and I frowned.

Beneath a tree stood a young man wearing black—as would be expected—but not funeral wear. It was a black t-shirt and leather jacket. He held my gaze for a bit too long, before ducking his head, stuffing his hands into his pockets, and turning away. My heart lurched in my chest, but I didn’t know why. Something about him intrigued me. He looked to be about my age, but there was something about his face—a knowledge, an intensity. I couldn’t describe it. It was wrong to be distracted by some guy when I was at my sister’s funeral. I was a terrible person. But had I seen him before? Something twitched inside my head, trying to pluck out a memory. I was sure I had.

I stepped away from my father, and he shot me a frown. I shook my head, as though to say I couldn’t be there right at that moment, and took a step back. With my hand against my mouth and my head down, I turned and walked away from the graveside. It was over now anyway. There was nothing more to do other than fill in the hole, and I didn’t think I could handle watching dirt being thrown on top of her.

Instead, I followed in the direction I’d seen the young man go. I spotted him darting between the gravestones, then heading beneath a small copse of trees.

“Hey,” I called. Was I insane? Why was I chasing after some stranger in a graveyard? He didn’t stop, so I picked up my pace, wishing I hadn’t been wearing heels and a skirt that seemed to bind my knees together.

“Hey!” I shouted again. Irrational anger built up inside me. Why the hell wasn’t he stopping? He must be able to hear me shouting.

I passed one of the trees and the branches above my head whipped around, small twigs and leaves falling all around me. They bowed and strained, leaning toward me. I stopped in surprise and looked up. What the hell? There was no wind blowing, nothing to make them move like that.

A shiver rippled down my spine. Strange things happening in a cemetery immediately made me think of ghosts.

“Karina?” I asked softly. If she was here, could that be one of her ways of telling me? Had she been the cause of all the strange things happening around me since the bombing? And yet I didn’t get any sense of her being near. I felt as alone as I had since she’d died.

The trees fell still, and I glanced in the direction in which I’d been following the young man in the black jacket. He’d disappeared from view, and I didn’t know which way he’d gone.

What was I doing, anyway, chasing some stranger? I must be losing my goddamned mind.

With a sigh, I turned and made my way back to the graveside. My father was accepting condolences from people, taking hugs from the women and shaking hands with the men. My sister had plenty of friends. Morbidly, I thought about my own funeral. I’d only have my father here, and perhaps a couple of people I worked with. No one would really miss me apart from him.

I needed to pull my mind out of these depressive thoughts. I could feel myself being drawn down into the darkness of despair, and while one part of me felt the lure like a seductive mistress, the other part pulled away, knowing once I was in her grasp, I would have to fight to get free again.

We went back to the house for the wake. My dad had brought in caterers, but luckily only a few of Karina’s closest friends came back and they didn’t stay for long. I was relieved to see the old boss had stayed away. I couldn’t stand to watch them crying on each other’s shoulders, while I sat dry-eyed and distant, just wanting the day to be over.

Finally, they left, and my dad and I set about clearing away the debris of the wake. Empty plates and glasses, spilled food and drink. It felt strangely unreal to me to be cleaning what looked like the remnants of a party when we’d just had to bury the person we loved most in the world.

But it was done. We’d said our goodbyes to her. Now we just had to figure out how to go about living the rest of our lives.

Chapter Four

A knock came at my bedroom door, causing me to look up from my book. Since the funeral, I’d figured out how to focus enough to read, and it had been a lifeline to me—a way of not having to be alone with my thoughts, I guessed. The door cracked open and my father’s head peeped around the corner.

“You got a minute?” he asked.

I smiled and patted the bed beside me. “Sure.”

He sat down, not as comfortable as he’d normally be, clearing his throat and sitting too upright. “I don’t want you to think I’m being pushy, Arianna, but I wondered if you were considering when you might go back to work. I know it’s only been a week since Karina’s funeral, but you need to get back to some kind of normalcy.”

I bit my lower lip and glanced away. “Do we need the money?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just think it would do you good to have a reason to leave the house again. It’s not healthy for you sitting up here alone, day after day. I’m worried about you.”

I shrugged. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. And that’s okay. You’ve gone through a big trauma, and then losing Karina as well ...” He took a deep breath and let it out again. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re not thinking of going back to work, and you have no plans to leave the house, it might be a good idea for you to start going to see someone, like on a regular basis.”

I stiffened. “I don’t need to see a shrink, Dad. I’m not crazy.”

“I never said you were. I just thought it would be good if you had someone other than me to talk to, and having some regular appointments during the week would give a bit more focus to your days.”

“Dad, the last thing I want is to go and speak to a shrink. I was involved in a bombing where my sister died. I’m not crazy, I’m just really fucking sad, and kind of afraid of how fucked up the world is right now!”

I never swore in front of him. Certainly never the ‘f’ word, but my angry, frustrated reaction was perhaps because a part of me knew he was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. I was frightened to go back to work because it would put me right back in the middle of a restaurant setting—far too close to the scene of where I’d been when the bombing occurred. I didn’t want to be forced back into that situation.

The light above my head began to flicker, and the e-reader I’d been holding suddenly started to swipe through the pages. I glanced up and then down, confused. What was going on?

My dad hadn’t noticed, still intent on trying to create some focus in my life. “How about I book your first session, and if you don’t like it, you can always decide not to go back?”

I gritted my teeth. “Dad, I’m a grown woman. I don’t need you organizing my life for me.”

I might legally be an adult, but I didn’t feel like one. More now than ever I felt far younger than my twenty-two years. It was as though Karina’s death had somehow reverted me back to childhood.

“Just one session, Ari. That’s all I ask.”

“I said no.”

The thought of leaving the house caused panic to rise in front of me like a tidal wave at night, deceptively silent in its power. To defend myself against what I perceived to be the threat—at that moment, my father—my temper snapped. My breath grew shallow, my heart galloping. I clutched the e-reader tighter, trying to hide the fact my hands were shaking.

“Please ...” he tried again.

“No. I’m not going out there.”

“This is exactly what—”

“Leave me alone!” I pointed at my bedroom door, which he’d pushed shut behind him as he’d walked in. “Just get out!”

I jabbed my finger at the door again, and the door swung open, so fast and violently, it hit the wall behind with a massive crack.

We both stared toward the open door, eyes wide.

I broke down in sobs on the bed. Perhaps my dad was right and I needed to go and see a shrink, because ever since the bombing I was started to believe I was being haunted by my dead sister.

***

It turned out my dad had already booked the appointment.

The following day I set out. He’d wanted to come with me, but I didn’t want a babysitter. I was more than capable of catching the tram and then walking the couple of blocks to the shrink’s offices.

It was strange being out in the open again. I felt incredibly vulnerable, and tucked into myself as I got off the tram to walk the rest of the way. I kept my head down, my shoulders rounded, my hands shoved into my pockets. I knew the chances were that nothing bad was going to happen to me, yet I couldn’t push away the sense of impending doom. Perhaps the therapist would tell me this was completely normal after what I’d gone through, and losing the person closest to me as well—I was sure he’d say that it had made me aware of my own mortality in a way I hadn’t been before—and he would probably be right. But it felt like more to me. Something had changed since the bombing, something inside my head as though a piece of the mechanism of my brain had been shaken loose. Where before I’d felt like a normal twenty-two-year-old, now I felt like I was separated from the rest of the world, as though I was walking around in my own bubble no one else could see.

The streets felt ominously quiet. I passed a couple of other pedestrians, but I avoided eye contact.

I sensed it before actually seeing anything, the feeling of being watched, of someone behind me, their eyes boring into my back. I shot a glance over my shoulder. I caught a dart of movement, but it could have been my imagination. I was out alone for the first time since the bombing. My nerves were bound to be frazzled. I found myself wishing I’d taken my dad up on his offer to bring me. I kept walking, shivering against the cold. San Francisco had a way of changing weather from one hour to the next. One moment you could be in bright sunshine, the next you were freezing cold and either being blown down the street, or else surrounded in fog.

I turned back around and kept walking. The psychiatrist’s office was part of a building at the end of a narrow alley. I didn’t think he was going to be the most expensive shrink in the world considering the location, but I wasn’t working now, and Karina’s funeral had sucked most of my father’s savings. The last thing I should be doing was criticizing his choices when he’d only ever been trying to help me.

I turned left to go down the narrow street toward the office, but as I did so, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye again.

This time I spun around, my heart beating hard. I hadn’t been imagining things. Someone was following me, and whoever it was didn’t want to be seen. My gaze flicked between places the person might be hiding—a lamp post, a parked car, a tall trashcan up against the wall. The trashcan caught my focus, and, instead of doing the sensible thing, I found myself turning around and stalking toward it. I should have been frightened, but instead I was angry, the same rage I’d felt bubbling inside me when my dad had suggested coming here in the first place. I burned my gaze into the trashcan, willing whoever was behind it to suddenly become visible so I could catch them and demand to know who they were and what the hell they were doing.

The can began to vibrate, and I drew to a halt in confusion. The vibrating got worse, whatever was inside clanging against the sides. A low hum met my ears, and I realized it was coming from the trashcan.

A bomb? Was it another bomb? Panic surged inside me, but, before I could turn and run, the trashcan shot out into the road as though it had been pushed. A car driving by swerved to avoid it and the driver beeped their horn.

My eyes widened as the person who’d been following me was revealed in the space the trashcan had left.

From one knee, the tips of his fingers against the ground as though he was about to start a race, rose a man in a black leather jacket. As he got to his feet, he began to clap his hands in slow applause.

My heart stuttered. This was the same man I’d seen both at the cemetery and the hospital. His dark brown hair was long enough to curl at the ends, and was swept back from his face. He was in possession of equally dark eyebrows, with chocolate brown eyes. A scruff of stubble covered his jaw, framing his full lips.

He wasn’t especially tall, just shy of six feet, but I could make out the lean muscle beneath the gray t-shirt he wore under the leather jacket. Jeans and boots completed the outfit. He was looking at me with a kind of cold amusement as he clapped at me in a way I could only describe as sarcastic.

“Why the hell are you following me?” I yelled at him.

He stopped clapping long enough to shove his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “Why do you think?”

His answer baffled me. I’d been expecting him to say he hadn’t been following me, but that obviously wasn’t the case.

“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking!”

“I’m following you to make sure you’re safe.”

“Safe? You think I’m in danger?”

“That’s certainly a possibility, but mostly I think you could be a danger to others. I’m making sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

I blinked, my mouth dropping open. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you’ve changed.”

“I’ve changed? You don’t know me. How could you possibly know if I’d changed or not?” Despite my words, I knew he was right. I had no idea who this guy was, but I had changed. I barely recognized myself anymore.

The hint of a smile quirked the corner of one side of his lips. “Nice trick with the trashcan, though that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I say you could be a danger to others. You might have caused a car accident doing that.”

I didn’t think it was possible for my jaw to drop any farther, but apparently it could. “What are you talking about? You just shoved it into the road!”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t touch it. You were the one who made it move.”

I snorted in derision. “This is insane. I wasn’t anywhere near it.”

“You didn’t need to be near it. You wanted to see what was behind it, and so you made it move.”

It was a shame he was a complete raving lunatic. He was kind of hot.

“I’m about to go to shrink appointment, but I seriously think you’re more in need of it than I am. Please, take my spot.” I swept my hand as though showing him the way.

Frustratingly, he laughed. “You don’t need a shrink, Arianna. Neither do I.”

At the sound of my name, I stiffened. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s my business to know. And I know exactly why the world has seemed so different to you lately.”

Chapter Five

I stared at the man who was essentially my stalker.

I wanted to tell him to get lost, but something about his words resonated with me. My world had changed since the bombing, but it was more than being traumatized by the explosion and losing my sister. Something fundamental about me had changed. I felt as though I’d been rewired into a different person. The core of me was still there, but all the surface stuff I’d thought was so important had been wiped away. I didn’t know how else to explain it. Perhaps it was simply the result of going through what I had, and, if I went and sat down with the shrink, he’d tell me everything I was experiencing was completely normal, yet I couldn’t help feeling like it was more.

I was pretty sure the sensible thing to do right then was turn my back on this stranger and head straight to the psychiatrist’s office and tell him someone was stalking me. But I hadn’t exactly been in the headspace for making sensible decisions lately. Besides, this guy intrigued me. Perhaps I’d be less intrigued if he’d looked like a troll, but I found a frisson of excitement building up inside me as he locked me in his stare. It was the first time I’d felt anything other than despair since Karina died, and I wanted to hang onto that feeling.

The traffic was still swerving around the industrial sized trashcan in the middle of the road, but no one stopped to push it back onto the sidewalk. Why had this guy said I’d been the one to move it? It was such a crazy lie to tell. We both knew I hadn’t been anywhere near it. I wondered if we should be moving it back again before there was an accident. The police might even be called, as it was causing an obstruction, and for some reason I really didn’t want to see the cops again. Perhaps they reminded me of that day as well, of the questioning that had happened after.

“So tell me what you know.” I said to him, lifting my chin defiantly, my hands on my hips. “If you claim to know so much about me, tell me what’s changed.”

He bit his lower lip as he studied me. “You feel different than you did before—like you’re seeing things in a new way. Strange things keep happening around you—electrical equipment defaulting, glass breaking, things moving when they’re not supposed to.”

A chill speared down my spine then spread down my limbs and across my whole body. “How do you know that?” He was talking about the feeling of being haunted that I’d experienced since my sister’s death. “Are you some kind of ...” I sought in my brain for the word. “Medium?” I lifted my eyebrows and tilted my head slightly in a patronizing way. “Do you see dead people?”

His brow pulled down in a frown. “No, of course not. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how all these things that have been happening are to do with my sister haunting me!” I could barely believe I’d said it out loud. But there it was. It was out there now. I figured he was probably going to tell me he could communicate with her then hit me up for some money. A part of me was almost hopeful that was what would happen. Even though I was partially skeptical, I would have given anything to be able to speak to my sister again.

But to my surprise, laughter burst from his mouth. “Is that what you think has been happening? Your sister has been haunting you?”

My face dropped into a scowl. “Well, isn’t it? And by the way, laughing at the fact my sister just died makes you a total asshole.”

The smile fell from his face. “Yeah, you’re right, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. Your answer just wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“It wasn’t? What the hell were you expecting?” I didn’t think I’d ever been more baffled in my life.

His voice softened. “That you’re the one causing everything going on around you, Arianna.”

“Ari,” I said. “Everyone calls me Ari.”

The corner of his lip quirked again. “Ari,” he confirmed. “Like I said, you were the one who made that trash can move. You’re the one who’s been causing all the strange things that have been happening around you. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

I stared at him. “How could you possible know that? It’s crazy. What you’re saying sounds insane.”

“I know because I have the same ability.”

“What—”

I was cut off as the large can that had been sitting in the middle of the road suddenly started to roll back toward us, gaining momentum, until it flew back onto the sidewalk between us and stopped in exactly the same position as it had been before.

The man in the leather jacket stepped out from behind it and back into view. “Ta-da.” He said, gesturing toward the object.

My mouth dropped open once more. I did not just see that. It must have been a gust of wind or ... something.

The world suddenly withdrew around the edges, my visions graying out, and my legs buckled out from beneath me.

“Whoa,” he said, darting over to me, catching me right before I hit the ground. “You okay, there?”

Ugh. I did not just swoon? The world righted itself again, though I still had no strength in my legs. The scent of leather and musky cologne drifted to my nostrils.

“This cannot be happening,” I managed to murmur. “I’m losing my goddamned mind.”

“You’re not,” he said, still holding me around the waist. “You’ve just found it.”

“Found what?”

“The piece of your mind you’ve kept hidden from yourself all these years. You have a gift, Ari. A talent. You just need to learn how to use it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“This gift has always been inside you. Did you not notice the little things you were able to do—like being able to tell if someone was about to open a door, or picking up the phone and calling someone right when they were calling you. You might have moved things without realizing you were doing it—pulling a pen or a cup, for example, just a couple of millimeters closer to your fingertips before you touched it.”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I don’t think—”

But then I remembered when I’d known something personal about one of Karina’s friends—that she was pregnant and was considering an abortion—before Karina had even told me. It had just popped into my head and I’d blurted it out to Karina. My sister had looked at me like I was a witch and asked me how I’d known. I told her I didn’t—that it was just a guess. And then I remembered another time when I’d been waitressing and one of my tables had tried to run without paying. I was washing dishes in the back of the kitchen at the time, but I’d known, just known, and ran out to catch them leaving. Two of them had already run out the front door of the restaurant, but the door had slammed shut on the third, allowing me to catch him. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time, but perhaps I’d had something to do with the door flying shut like that. I had also always been bad with anything electrical, and they were always breaking on me, but I put that down to bad luck. Perhaps it had been more than that.

No, this was crazy.

He was staring at me intently. His eyebrows lifted, his eyes wide. “You do remember things, don’t you?”

I gave my head a slight shake. “They could be anything. Coincidences. I’m sure everyone has those kinds of things happen to them.”

“And what about now?” he urged. “These kinds of things don’t happen to everyone.”

“And what are we talking about here? That having things randomly moving around me, and light bulbs bursting, and things breaking are all down to me?”

He nodded. “It’s been inside you this whole time, ever since you were born. But it normally takes some kind of violent or traumatic event to switch your brain so it’s able to fully connect with your abilities.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I’m one, too?”

“One what?”

“A person with telekinetic abilities.”

I covered my face with my hands and turned away, still shaking my head. “This is insane. I need to go.”

I needed to focus, to get my life back on track like I’d been promising my dad I would try to do. I didn’t need to be fed crazy ideas by hot guys in leather jackets who were playing tricks on me. That’s all this was—some crazy trick. I’d probably turn around and discover I’d been Punk’d, which I thought was actually a pretty shitty thing to do to a girl who’d gone through the things I had recently.

I shoved myself away from him, untangling myself from his arms. “No, I need to go. I’m late for my appointment.”

“Ari,” he said, “you have to come with me now. I realize everything that’s been happening is frightening, and you probably feel like you’re losing your mind right now, but this is important.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not going anywhere with you. You could be a rapist or a murderer. I’m not just going off with some stranger. I don’t even know your name.”

“My name’s Hunter. Hunter Boone. See, we know each other’s names now, so we’re officially no longer strangers.”

“I don’t care what your name is. You’ve been stalking me, and now you’re putting crazy ideas into my head. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Please, Ari. I’m not the only one looking for you. There will be others, and they won’t be as gentle as I’ve been.”

I didn’t want to hear him, didn’t want to process what he’d said or detect the possibility of a threat in his words. All I wanted was for this madness to go away, so I could go back to my bedroom and continue to hide from the world.

***

I went to my therapist’s appointment, even though I was now running late. The therapist seemed like a nice enough man, and I did my best to answer his questions as honestly as I could without touching on any of the possible ghost and hot, leather-jacketed stalker. Though I tried to stay focused, my mind kept drifting back to everything the guy—Hunter—had said. I’d convinced myself that Karina had been haunting me, and had been more than ready to believe such a thing, so why was I less inclined to believe what Hunter had said about me being the one who was responsible for all the strange things? It had started the moment I’d woken in the hospital, when my dad had told me about Karina, and the big fluorescent tube above my bed had shattered.

Every part of me wanted to convince myself Hunter was lying. I felt like I was trying to put together pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit. Yet I couldn’t help but start to wonder if there was some truth in his words.

I went home to find my dad sitting at the kitchen table, anxiously waiting for me. I gave him a wide smile as I walked in.

“How did it go?” he asked. I could see he wanted me to be positive about it. The therapy session had been his idea, and I knew he wanted me to be better.

I kept the smile plastered to my face. “It was good.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He really got me to open up about everything. I was a bit anxious at first, but within twenty minutes, I felt like he understood exactly what I was saying.”

I knew because of my age, my father would never get to see what actually happened during the session. I couldn’t even have told him properly myself. I hadn’t concentrated on anything that had been said during the hour. My thoughts had been with Hunter and the claims he was able to move things … how, exactly? He hadn’t specified that. It was a mental thing. It had to be.

“So,” my dad said, hesitating slightly. “Did you talk about going back to work?”

“Yeah. He agrees it’s still a bit early, but he does think it’s a good idea for me to spend more time outside of the house. I’m going to meet up with some friends. Catch a movie, maybe some dinner.”

His face brightened, and I felt a pang of guilt for lying.

He seems happier. You couldn’t tell him the truth. It’s better this way.

But it wasn’t just about making my dad happy. I was also setting myself up with an excuse to leave the house if I needed to. I knew I shouldn’t even be considering it, but I couldn’t help my thoughts drifting toward the possibility that everything Hunter said had been true.

I kissed my dad on the cheek then made us both sandwiches.

I went up to my bedroom and lay back on my bed, looking up at my ceiling. Could what Hunter said be true? Did I have a talent? Could I move things with my mind?

I gave a frustrated sigh and covered my face with both hands. This was crazy.

But I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t let it go.

I sat back up in bed, swung my legs over the side, and rested my elbows on my knees. My gaze scoured my room, not sure what I was looking for, until my eyes alighted on the empty water glass sitting on my bedside table.

I felt ridiculous, but I had to try. My stomach flipped with nerves. I didn’t know what I expected—nothing, most likely—but I still held a tiny inkling of what might have been either hope or fear, that I might actually be able to do something insane.

Still sitting on the bed, I faced the empty glass. I locked my gaze on it and focused, blocking out all other thought and distraction.

Move, I thought fiercely, directing all my brain power toward the inanimate object. Move, move!

Nothing happened.

I spoke out loud, hissed the words. “Move, dammit.”

The glass remained sitting on the nightstand, not even trembling.

I gave an exasperated sigh and looked away.

This was ridiculous. It was the stuff of science fiction movies. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed some stranger to talk me into half believing him. Of course I couldn’t move things with my mind.

My sister haunting me was a far more logical explanation.

Chapter Six

The next morning, after I’d showered and pulled on a clean t-shirt, I yanked open my bedroom window’s drapes to look out onto the street beyond our yard.

I snatched a breath.

There, in the middle of the street, stood Hunter, wearing his now familiar jeans and leather jacket combo. He was staring right up at my window, as though he’d been waiting for me to come to it. It was only seven thirty in the morning. How long had he been standing out there, and what the hell was he doing here?

“You have got to be shitting me.”

Anger surged through me. How did he find out where I lived? This was totally unacceptable. He’d focused on me at my most vulnerable, filling my head with his craziness and lies. I didn’t understand what he wanted out of this, but I was determined not to let it go on for much longer.

I grabbed my sweat pants from the chair I’d slung them across the previous night, shoved my feet into my sneakers, and slammed my way out of my bedroom. My dad wasn’t up yet, the house still and silent, though I figured from the way I was storming around, he’d be awake fairly soon.

I hurried down the stairs and to the front door, which I unlocked and swung open. Hunter was still standing in the same spot, but his attention moved from my window to me as I stepped out of the door. I closed it behind me then strode across the street to come to a standstill right in front of him.

“What the hell are you doing hanging out in my street?” I demanded.

His lips twisted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know your number and I didn’t want to start knocking. I figured your father would start asking questions you didn’t know how to answer if he found me on the doorstep, and I didn’t want to put you in the position.”

“You still haven’t explained why you’re at my house.”

“It’s not your house,” he pointed out. “It’s your father’s house.”

“I grew up here. It’s still my home. Why do you have to be such a dick about everything? ”

He gave his head a slight shake. “Sorry. I have a bad habit of things I’m thinking coming straight out of my mouth.” He frowned slightly as he studied me. “Have you never wanted to move out? You’re the same age as me—twenty-two. I left home the minute I turned eighteen, but you’re still here.”

His line of questioning distracted me from my anger. I didn’t know why I felt the need to defend my life choices to him, but I did. “I never felt the need to move out. My sister did as soon as she could, but it didn’t feel right leaving our dad all alone.”

“So you stayed for his sake?”

“No, not completely. I’m happy here. I haven’t felt the need to leave the nest.”

He gave a small smile. “That’s good. At least you’ve been happy.”

I frowned. “And you weren’t?”

“No, I wasn’t quite so lucky. My dad wasn’t as good to me as yours was.”

I didn’t know why my interest had been piqued, but it had. “What about your mom?”

“She died.”

“Shit.” I glanced away then looked back at him. “I’m sorry. Mine, too.”

He nodded. “Yes, I know. She died the same way as mine—an aneurysm, right?”

My frown deepened, wondering how he knew this. “Yes, that’s right.” He always managed to confuse me. I could hardly believe we were standing in the middle of the street first thing in the morning, having this conversation. “Your mom died of the same thing? That’s weird.”

“It isn’t, really. They were both killed by the same people.”

His words struck me like a punch in the chest. I shook my head again and turned from him. “No, I’m not listening to you again. You’re crazy. Yesterday you tried to fill my head with a load of bullshit about how I had some kind of paranormal talent, and now you’re trying to tell me our mothers’ deaths are somehow connected?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, and it’s not bullshit.”

I spun back around to him. “I tried to move something with my mind,” I felt ridiculous even admitting I’d done this, “and nothing happened.”

“What did you do?”

I huffed out a breath of air in exasperation. “What do you mean, what did I do? I sat and stared at something, and willed it to move.”

He laughed. “Well, that’s never going to work.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Oh, really? And why’s that, Mr. Know-it-all?”

“I already told you, you need to be trained to learn how to use your talents. Just thinking about something is never going to work, especially if you’re sitting on your own in a calm environment. It’s intense emotions that makes our talent work—anger, fear, grief.”

I’d experienced each of those emotions a lot recently. I couldn’t let myself be drawn in by him again. “That’s convenient.”

He took a step toward me, and I was locked in his chocolate brown gaze once more. His eyes were so deep I thought I could fall right into them. I suddenly became aware I’d neglected to put on a bra when I’d run outside, and the chill of the morning air, combined with his increasing proximity, cause my nipples to pucker and point though the material of the shirt.

I lifted my arm to cover my chest, but his hand shot out and caught my wrist before I could, and he dragged me toward him. I was held, frozen in his grip, as he stared down at my face.

“Tell me about the bombing, Ari,” he said. “Bring it all back in your mind. How it felt to feel the heat of the explosion, the confusion and terror surrounding you. Take yourself back to that moment when you realized what had happened and it dawned on you that your sister was missing.”

His words conjured that moment in my mind. A wave of emotions swept through me, the panic of that day clutching at my heart, the sickness of grief churning my stomach and rising up through my throat.

“No, stop it,” I cried, tears filling my eyes. Inside my head, one thought blared louder than the others—help! I wanted to get out of this situation, couldn’t stand to relive another second of it. I’d do anything to make it stop.

Somewhere beside me, a car alarm sounded, followed by a second. Then another rise and fall of an alarm blared, and another, and another. Before I knew what was happening, the street was filled with the wail of alarms, and people began to emerge from their houses to see what was going on.

Hunter let me go and I yanked out of his hold. “What did you do?”

He reached out and swept away a tear that had escaped my eye with his thumb. “I’m so sorry to put you through that,” he said. “I needed to prove to you that you could do it. All it took was a little extra emotion.”

I looked around at the chaos on my street. “What are you talking about?”

“You did this.”

“What?”

“You think the car alarms came on by themselves?”

I blinked, trying to force away the memories of the bombing. Why did I keep finding myself wanting to believe him? It was the most frustrating thing in the world. This was nothing more than another trick—it had to be.

I remembered how I’d been frozen in place, and yet I’d called out with my mind—help! The car alarms had brought my neighbors out onto the street, a help of a kind, if they were all now giving us suspicious glares as though they thought we’d walked down the street hitting all of the vehicles to turn on the alarms. Hunter had released me and stepped away. I’d called for help, and I’d gotten it.

Across the street, people began to silence their car alarms, calling to each other to query what had happened, though of course no one could give an answer.

He must have noticed me floundering. “You still don’t believe me?”

“How can I? This is crazy.”

“So come with me. Meet the others?”

“The others?”

“Yes, there are more of us. It isn’t just you and me.”

“I can’t leave with you. You could be a murderer.”

He laughed, exposing straight white teeth. “I’m not a murderer.”

I pouted. “A rapist, then?”

His eyebrows lifted. “You seriously think I’m a rapist.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had the bad fortune of meeting one before.”

“Ari!” My father’s shout came from the direction of the house. The commotion outside must have woken him, and he’d seen me standing in the street and come out to investigate. He frowned as he saw me talking with a stranger and hurried over.

“Everything okay?” he asked. “I heard all the commotion.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened. All the alarms just starting going off.”

“Hmm, a minor earthquake, maybe?” he suggested.

“Yeah, maybe. I didn’t feel anything, though.”

My father’s gaze flicked to Hunter. “They can be like that sometimes.”

I realized he was waiting for me to introduce him. “Um, Dad, this is Hunter. Hunter, this is my dad, Bryce.”

Hunter put out his hand, and my father took it. They shook once, short and perfunctory.

“Good to meet you, sir.”

My father gave a tight smile. “And how, exactly, do you know my daughter?”

I quickly stepped in. The last thing I wanted was for him to start talking about special talents or anything like that. My dad was worried enough about me as it was. “We work together, Dad. Or we did before ... everything.”

“Oh, right. I don’t remember you ever mentioning a Hunter.”

Hunter’s eyes flicked to me. “I only started recently, but I heard what happened to Ari, and I wanted to make sure she was okay.” He paused and then added, “I’m sorry about the loss of your other daughter, sir.”

My dad gave a tight-lipped smile, his nostrils flaring as he held back his emotion. “Thank you.” He cleared his throat.

The neighbors had all started to head back inside their homes.

“Actually, sir,” Hunter continued, “I was just heading by to see if I could take Ari out for breakfast.”

I glared at him, but my dad’s face brightened. “I’m sure Ari would love to go out for breakfast, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”

“Ari would like to make decisions for herself,” I said, my voice tight. “Besides, I’m not exactly dressed for it.” I motioned down at my sweat pants, but kept my other arm folded across my chest to hide my bra-less nipples.

“You can go and get ready. I’m sure your friend won’t mind waiting for ten minutes.”

Hunter grinned, the corners of his eyes creasing. I could tell he was pleased he had my dad on side. “Sure. I’m happy to wait.”

I shot him daggers, but his grin only widened.

Shit.

“Okay, fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll go and get ready.”

We all went back to the house, and I left Hunter and my dad downstairs while I ran up to swap my sweat pants for jeans and put on the bra I’d been so desperately missing. I dragged a brush through my hair and slapped on some foundation and lip gloss. I told myself I wasn’t doing it because of the dark-haired, leather-jacketed guy downstairs, but even I knew I’d be lying to myself. He might be crazy, but he was annoyingly good-looking.

I cracked open my bedroom door to hear the sound of the two men talking downstairs. It sounded casual, and my dad’s laughter drifted up the stairs. They seemed to be getting on, so I assumed the whole ‘I think your daughter can move stuff with her mind’ topic must have been avoided.

Taking a breath, I headed back downstairs. My father and Hunter were in the kitchen, Hunter leaning against the counter as my dad bustled around, making himself coffee and breakfast. I assumed he’d offered Hunter coffee, but obviously he would have refused, as apparently that’s what we were about to go and get now.

Hunter noticed me lurking in the doorway and turned to me, that same wide smile spreading across his face. My stomach did a strange flip. No, I could not let myself be affected by this guy. It would be just my luck to fall for a madman.

But you’re leaving the house with him. If you think he’s crazy, why are you not hiding behind your father right now, demanding to call the police?

I wanted to know more. There was a reason Hunter had singled me out, and I had to admit strange things had been happening lately. I wasn’t sure I was convinced it had been me to set all the car alarms off, but something had happened. Plus, I’d seen that trashcan move outside of the shrink’s office the other day. Something was happening here, and I wanted to know what.

“You look beautiful,” said Hunter.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m wearing jeans.”

“Still look beautiful.”

“Whatever.”

My dad scolded me. “Ari, learn to take a compliment.”

Like a child, I pulled a face at my father and stuck out my tongue. I watched him suppress a smile.

“You’re ready to go?” Hunter asked me.

“I guess I am.”

My dad hustled me toward the front door, Hunter leading the way.

I approve, my dad mouthed at me as I walked out of the house. I stared at him with wide eyes, trying to silently tell him there was nothing to approve of, but my dad only gave me a smile and a wink. He wouldn’t be so approving if I ended up in a ditch somewhere. But for the moment, my apparent social life was making him happy.

I waited until he’d closed the front door behind us before turning to Hunter. “So, where are you taking me for breakfast?”

He grinned. “I’m not. I think there are some people you need to meet.”

Chapter Seven

I waited until we’d made it around the corner before I stopped and turned to Hunter. I put my hands on my hips as I faced him. “What was with all the stalking and sneaking around? Why couldn’t you have just come up to me and spoken to me like a regular person?”

“Well, for one, we’re not regular people. But the main reason is some people don’t react too well to the change.”

“What do you mean ‘they don’t react too well’?”

“They don’t deal with the change in how their brain works.”

I cocked my eyebrows. “You mean they think they’re going insane?”

He gave an awkward half shrug.

“Or thought they were being haunted by their dead sister’s ghost?” I added.

He winced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“So, who do you want me to meet?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said without cracking a smile. 

“Har har,” I deadpanned back. A jolt of unease jerked through me. “Seriously, though, you’re not actually planning on killing me?”

“No, Ari. I’m not.”

He probably wouldn’t have told me if he was, but I guessed if I planned on going with him, I’d have to wait to see if he was telling the truth.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s not something I can accurately put into words.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“This place is a secret. You can never tell anyone about it. Ever.” His tone had grown stern, and he held my gaze with his own, making me feel like I was shrinking in its strength.

“Ooh … kay.”

He must have caught the hesitation in my voice. “I mean it, Ari. You can’t even tell your father. This is purely about us.”

“Us?”

“Yes. You, me, and all the others like us.”

“I won’t tell, I promise.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what I was promising not to tell, but it felt like the right thing to do. I hurried along beside him as we left my street, him taking long strides, so I practically had to break into a jog to keep up. We joined a small group of people waiting at the cable car stop. At this time in the morning, people were already heading in to work, and more joined us in the short time we waited.

Barely a minute passed before a car arrived and we all got on. I looked up at Hunter’s face, trying to get an inkling as to where we were going, but he ignored me, instead hanging on to one of the poles. The bell dinged above my head, making me jump. The route took us down the steep hill toward the ocean. I hoped we weren’t going to be heading back to the piers, where the bombing had happened. The thought of being so close to the location had my heart doing that panicky little flutter I’d almost started getting used to.

The car came to a stop and Hunter grabbed my hand. He pulled me through the group of people hanging like monkeys from the leather loops from the roof, and down the couple of steps and out onto the street. Still not speaking, we walked a little farther, keeping the bay on our right, and then jumped on a bus.

“Where are we going?” I tried to ask Hunter again, but he ignored me. I tried to piece things together myself, but, other than knowing we were heading toward the bridge, I had no idea. A part of me was tempted to refuse to go any farther until he told me, but if this came down to a stalemate, he was going to win. He had all the answers, and I had nothing.

The bus was packed, so we stood near the front, jammed in with all the commuters. I faced the front of the bus, with Hunter directly in front of me. Our bodies were merely inches apart, causing heat to bloom in my cheeks.

Hunter glanced behind me, over my shoulder, then ducked his head away, a frown marking his forehead.

A prickle of unease ran up my skin. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t look back, but I think we’re being watched.”

Automatically, I twisted to glance over my shoulder. I caught sight of a serious-looking man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a black suit, who was staring directly at us.

Hunter grabbed my arm and yanked me back around. He leaned in and spoke low in my ear. “Don’t let him know we’ve seen him. We’ll get off at the next stop.”

Having him so close sent my heart racing. That, together with the fact someone was watching us.

The bus pulled in at a stop, and Hunter snatched up my hand again to tug me off. My feet hit the sidewalk, and he didn’t even give me time to pause, but hurried down the street, dragging me with him. I had to break into a trot to keep up.

He glanced back. “Ah, shit.”

“What?” I twisted my neck, following his line of sight to see the man in the black suit also disembark. He was focused on us, his walk hurried.

Hunter paused, so briefly it could almost have been mistaken as a stumble, and dropped my hand. His face took on a stern expression of concentration. From outside a café lining the road, a sandwich board flipped into the air, as though caught in a high wind, and flew toward the man, forcing him to leap out of the way.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand again. We broke into a run.

“Did you do that?” I asked between gasps of breath. I was fairly fit from all the waitressing—not that I’d even done that for the past few weeks—but I didn’t run anywhere, and it showed.

He shot me a look. “What do you think?”

“Shit.”

Things suddenly felt like they’d gotten real.

We were on the Shoreline Highway now, running along the sidewalk that would shortly turn into the walkway across the bridge. The vast expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge stretched out across the water. It was an unusually clear day, bright blue sky reaching across the horizon, out to Lime Point and beyond. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area was below us, on our right hand side, and we were about to run over Fort Point.

“Did we lose him?” I gasped.

“I don’t know, but there will be more. We can’t let him see where we’re headed.”

“Where’s that?”

“Across the bridge.”

I wanted to ask a million questions—who was the man in black? Why were there going to be more of him? What did he want? What was on the bridge? But instead I found I was running again, with Hunter pulling me along by my hand. I hadn’t even had the chance to grab coffee yet this morning, and my body was not up to this, never mind being able to talk while I ran. Instead, I concentrated on trying to breathe and stopping my heart from bursting out of my chest like something from an Alien movie.

Wisps of fog like smoke crept across the bridge in front of us.

Fog on the bridge was far from unusual, but the rest of the bay was still a stretch of blue sky. As I ran, I glanced over at Hunter. He had that slight frown on his face which he had when he’d made the sandwich board move in front of the black-suited man, though he continued to run alongside me.

The wisps had thickened into a cloud, so it trailed around our feet then rose higher. It entwined around the struts and cables, growing denser by the second.

I glanced at Hunter, confused. Where was this coming from?

The drivers on the bridge began to switch their fog lights on so they were able to see the way. I threw a hurried glance behind me, partially to see if the man in black was still following us, but discovered the view of the city behind had vanished. Now all I saw was a white cloud.

How far had we run? Were we even halfway across the bridge yet?

“Hunter,” I gasped. “What’s happening?”

“We need the fog,” he said back, but his breathing wasn’t as labored as mine. I guessed he’d normally be able to run faster if he didn’t have me holding him back. “So they can’t see us doing it.”

“Can’t see us doing what?”

“You’ll see.”

Had he somehow made the fog? Called it in, or something? This was insane, I thought for the hundredth time that week.

We kept going. It was unnerving to put one foot in front of the other when I wasn’t able to see more than a few feet in front of us. I heard cars go by us on the bridge, saw the fog turn golden from the headlights, but nothing more.

Hunter suddenly pulled me to a halt and dragged me to one side. We were at the edge of the bridge, standing right up against the railings. Below us was the drop to the San Francisco Bay—not that we could see it due to the mass of swirling fog around us. I wondered if the fog was localized to the bridge, or if the whole bay was covered. I had the feeling it was just here, only where Hunter wanted it to be.

“Come on,” he told me, and lifted a leg to climb onto the top of the railings.

My heart stopped. “No way.”

“This is the only way. It’s safe, I swear to you. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“What are you suggesting here? That we jump?”

“We have to.” He gave my arm another tug, encouraging me up. “That man will be here soon, and I guarantee he’ll have company. If he gets hold of you, jumping off the side of a bridge with me will seem like a walk in the park.”

“Oh, shit.”

I considered telling him no and making a run for it, but I’d seen the man in the black suit coming after us, and I definitely didn’t want to be caught by him.

“We’ll die,” I squeaked.

“We won’t. I promise you. I’ve done this a hundred times before. You’ll be fine.”

My legs trembled beneath me. All I could think of was the icy water below and the jagged cliff face beside us. I couldn’t see what we were about to jump into, but I knew from the number of times I’d walked over this bridge that it is what I’d see if I could. We were so close to the other side; we could be off the bridge again within minutes if we kept going.

I said as much to Hunter, but he shook his head. “They’ve probably got people waiting at the end for us, and if they don’t, they’ll still catch us. This is the only way.”

“They?” I yelled at him. “Who the hell are they?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled me up so I stood on the railings beside him. My legs felt wobbly and weak beneath me. His fingers tightened around mine. The wind buffeted my body, threatening to push me over. Fear brought tears to my eyes, my heart lodging like a rock in my throat. I couldn’t believe I was actually considering doing this. Was I suicidal? No, I wanted to live, but I couldn’t live with myself if I walked away from this. Besides, by the look of the man who had been after us, there might be far worse danger waiting for me.

“We have to jump, Ari. Are you ready?”

I stared down into the nothingness before me. All I could see was a rolling white cloud. The city on the other side of the bridge had vanished, and the bridge itself was only visible via the few struts right beside us. The rest had been swallowed in the fog.

“Yes,” I managed to squeak. “I’m ready.”

“Then jump!”

I held tight to his hand and we both launched ourselves forward into the blank void. I had a moment where I thought, ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ but then all thoughts were overtaken by the pummeling of air against my face and body, snatching the breath from my lungs. My clothing rippled around me, flapping in the wind. The noise was overwhelming—like being caught inside a bed sheet in a storm. I’d only been falling for a matter of seconds and I braced myself to hit the water, knowing it would be so cold it would make my body go into shock.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the air rippling around my body no longer blew upward around my face. I seemed to be on a kind of invisible slide, the fog still obscuring my vision.

Then my feet hit solid ground.

Hunter was obviously more prepared for this than I was and landed with a couple of running steps forward, staying on his feet. I lost my grip on his hand and pelted forward, curling my body inward so I ended up doing a roly-poly across the stony ground. My breath gasped in and out of my lungs when I finally came to a standstill—or at least a sit still. I felt battered and dizzy and confused, but very much alive. The fog was still present, but it wasn’t so dense down here, and I could see I was sitting on the tiny cove of beach at the bottom of the cliff that led up to Lime Point.

Hunter’s hand on my back made me look up. “Are you okay?”

I managed to nod. “What the hell was that?”

“We’re telekinetic, Ari. We can control things with our minds, and in some of our cases that can mean our natural surroundings as well.”

“The fog?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes, and the air. I was able to use it to slow our fall and sweep us over this way. Think of it like a miniature twister I was able to control. It formed a tunnel around us and I nudged it in the right direction.”

My mouth was open. “If I hadn’t seen what I’d already seen, I’d be calling bullshit on you right now.”

He grinned and offered me his hand. “And I wouldn’t blame you. Now, come on. We’ve still got a little way to go.”

I wondered how we were going to go anywhere. The only people who would be able to make it round to this side of the cliff were people in boats or the occasional surfer. The fog was starting to clear now—though it still clung to the bridge. I figured that was down to Hunter as well. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see how we made our getaway.

My legs were still shaky beneath me as I took his hand and allowed him to pull me to my feet. I brushed the sand and stones from the seat of my jeans with my other hand.

“So, where now?” I asked.

He nodded toward the cliff face. “Right there.”

“Huh? It’s just a cliff.”

He grinned knowingly. “No, it isn’t. You’ll see.”

He led the way and we clambered over the rocks. To me, it looked as though we were walking directly into a sheer cliff face. I hoped he wasn’t going to make me scale it, or conjure up some other weird weather phenomenon to throw us back up to the top of it.

“Where are we going? I can’t see anything,” I asked again.

“It’s right here.”

I moved farther forward, clambering over more rocks, my feet slipping, especially as my legs were still shaky. But then, when I was almost nose to cliff-face, I saw what he was talking about. What had previously looked like a part of the cliff, was actually a small cave with a large chunk of rock overhanging the front, which hid the cave from view of anyone who might be passing—not that there was much foot traffic around here.

“We’re going in there?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I couldn’t see what could possibly be interesting about a cave. In fact, cave was probably too glamorous of a description. It was barely head height, but did appear to be deep.

“Who the hell are we supposed to be meeting in there?”

“Just follow me.”

Hunter led the way, slipping behind the overhanging rock and ducking to enter the cave. I followed, peering into the dark, not wanting to lose sight of him. The roof was jagged and uneven, and though it was above my head in height, I found myself curling forward, worried I’d crack my skull on something.

As he moved deeper, I realized my assumption of this being a cave had been wrong.

It was a tunnel.

We were in almost pitch black now, and I reached out both hands either side of me, my fingertips skirting cold, damp rock, terrified I’d trip and crack my skull open. The panic of claustrophobia rose inside me.

“Hunter …” I said, a tremor to my voice.

“It’s okay,” his voice came back, echoic and hollow. “Just a couple more steps …”

I’d hoped that would mean we’d emerge wherever it was we were supposed to be, but instead I heard the scrape of flint, and a flame lit the narrow space. There were candles in holders attached to the rock walls, and Hunter took one down, lit it, and handed it back to me.

“Here, it’ll be better with a couple of these lit.”

He was right. It was better, but only marginally.

The candle flame flickered and guttered, casting menacing shadows across the rock—looming shapes that could have been monsters, but were actually just our own distorted shadows. Hunter still looked good, perhaps even more so in the candlelight. All brooding dark looks and mysterious powers.

We kept moving forward, keeping our heads ducked low, though it was easier now we could see. I tried not to let myself be distracted by Hunter’s rear end being quite so close to my face, focusing instead on not tripping again and landing on my face.

“How much farther?” I asked him, my voice not much above a whisper. I didn’t know why I felt the need to be quiet, but I did. I tried not to think about the millions of tons of rock above our heads, how, if we had the slightest earthquake, we could end up crushed in here and no one would ever find us. My thoughts went to my father, and I felt a sudden desperate need to let him know where I was and that I was safe. I had a feeling my cell phone wasn’t going to work this deep in the rock.

“Another five minutes. Maybe ten.”

“How far into the rock does the tunnel go?”

“All the way,” came the reply.

I didn’t know how to answer that.

I continued to follow Hunter’s back, then a light brightened ahead of us and my heart leapt.

“We’ve arrived,” he told me over his shoulder.

I had no idea what we’d arrive to.

Chapter Eight

We emerged from the tunnel, Hunter leading the way.

I stopped short and stared at our new surroundings, my eyes bugging.

“What is this place?” I hissed at him.

We’d stepped into a large space, brightly lit with synthetic light. In contrast to the natural rock we’d made our way through, this place was all chrome, glass, and polished concrete floors. It appeared to be one main room, with a number of other rooms adjoining it.

“This is our training center—the Cavern. It’s the place where we learn how to use our skills.”

“Our training center?”

“Yes, the training center for me and the rest of the Kin.”

I looked at him, knowing my face was a blank. “The Kin?”

 “Yeah, that’s what we call ourselves, though the men in black probably call us something else. Something less flattering. It started off as The Kinetics—short for Telekinetics—but then we kept feeling as though we were some old band from the eighties, so we shortened it even more to the Kin.”

“Oh, right.”

He shrugged. “The Kin actually suits us better. Our abilities bring us close, so we’re more like family than anything else.”

The separate spaces were connected with glass rather than brick, so I was able to see people inside, and, in turn, they were able to see me. Some appeared to be practicing a kind of hand-to-hand combat—throwing punches and kicks at each other, while others were sitting in chairs, undergoing what seemed to be tests. My eyes popped even farther as I watched a young man sitting in a chair several feet away from a table which held a number of objects on top. As I watched, a tennis ball lifted into the air and hovered momentarily before dropping back to the surface. It rolled off and hit the floor. The man punched his thigh with his fist in exasperation.

Hunter must have noticed me watching. “The ball is light,” he said, “so that should have been easy. They’re building him up to heavier objects as his strength increases.”

I noticed one of the other items was a kettle bell. I guessed that was what he meant by heavier items. I thought of something and frowned. “But you said I moved that huge trashcan when I first met you.”

He studied my face. “Yes, you did.”

“But I haven’t been trained yet. I shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“We all have different strengths. Some people are good with controlling electricity, others, like me, with natural forces.”

“Like the wind and fog,” I joined in.

“Exactly. Some other people work with controlling emotion, others have an affinity with animals.”

My eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”

He nodded. “Yep. Our world is in constant flux. Nothing ever stays the same. Energy can be changed, but it can’t be destroyed, it just becomes something else. That’s where we come in. We use our own energy to change something else into what we want. Inertia to motion.” 

I thought of everything that had happened with me—taps and showers turning on and off by themselves, lights exploding, alarms going off, doors shutting on their own. Water, light, electricity, as well as being able to move heavy objects. Maybe moving things was my skill, but I wondered, silently for the moment, if it was more. I guessed I’d find out soon enough.

“How is this all even possible?” I said instead.

Hunter shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

I looked around at my surroundings again. At a guess, I figured there were about fifteen to twenty other people here—all about the same age, early twenties. A couple of walkways branched off the main room, but I couldn’t see where they led.

The longer we stood there, the more we were starting to get noticed. People stopped what they were doing and stared at us. Others nudged each other and whispered from the sides of their mouths. I’d never felt under such scrutiny, my breath growing shallow, my mouth running dry. I was thankful to have Hunter by my side.

A large man—taller than Hunter by at least a couple of inches and burly with muscle—approached. He had sandy hair and equally sandy stubble on his jaw. He appraised me with a cool, light blue gaze.

“So, this is the girl,” he said as he stopped in front of us.

Hunter nodded. “I told you I’d get her here.”

“No problems?”

“No more than normal,” Hunter replied.

I heard a girlish squeal then a petite woman with short dark hair who I’d never seen before threw herself at me. Her arms wound around my neck and she squeezed me tight, taking the breath out of me. I didn’t know how to react, so I just stood, frozen, until she released me.

“Oh, my God. I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been feeling you ever since you woke up.”

I blinked. “Feeling me?”

“This is Dixie,” Hunter introduced. “Dixie, this is Ari.” He turned to me to explain. “Some of us can sense others more keenly. As soon as you woke up after the explosion, Dixie felt you.”

“Oh, right.” I still didn’t understand, but I figured there was going to be a lot I didn’t.

“Are you not going to introduce me, Hunter?” said the big guy.

Hunter lifted his eyebrows at the name, but said, “Ari, this is Kit. Kit, this is Ari. Happy now?”

The sandy-haired man, Kit, grinned. “Very.” He stuck out his hand to shake mine, and I obliged.

“Welcome to our secret lair.”

“Thanks,” I said, not sure what the etiquette was in this situation.

Other people began to filter over—a black guy with a decent looking afro, who slipped his arm around Dixie’s waist and stuck out his hand to me.

“I’m Sledge,” he told me, in the deepest voice I’d ever heard.

An identical looking blond guy and girl introduced themselves as Lisa and Lyle. I knew without asking that they were twins.

A number of other people held back. I guessed they weren’t very trusting of strangers. I smiled at anyone who caught my eye. Some smiled back and turned away, while others pretended they hadn’t noticed. I wondered what the stories were behind all these people. Had they thought they were normal until something had happened to make them realize their lives weren’t as regular as they’d thought, or had they grown up knowing they had these … talents?

I guessed from the way things weren’t going crazy around us that they were all able to control their abilities—unlike me, though surprisingly I hadn’t done anything since I’d been down here. Perhaps there was some way of safeguarding against uncontrollable new recruits who were capable of making every piece of technology down here stop working.

“Come on,” said Hunter, jerking his head toward one of the passageways that led away from the main hall. “Let me show you the rest of the place.”

The others drifted away, leaving Hunter and me alone. I noticed him exchanging glances with Kit and wondered if they’d all left us for a reason. Was Hunter in charge of giving me some kind of rundown about the situation?

“So, what’s above here?” I asked, glancing up at the very solid rock ceiling.

“It’s Battery Spenser,” he said, naming the old military fort which looked out across San Francisco Bay.

“But don’t people know you’re down here?”

“Nope. That tunnel we came through is the only way in or out.”

I shivered. “Isn’t that dangerous? What if something happened to it? A rock fall or something. We could all be trapped in here.”

“Our collective strength, mentally, would be enough to move any stones out of the way. It’s better that there are as few entryways as possible. It means there’s less chance of us ever being discovered.”

“By who?”

His lifted his eyebrows and gave me a look that told me I was exasperating him by continuing to ask, but he hadn’t really told me anything yet. Men in dark suits chasing us on public transport. Someone who might have been connected to the death of both of our mothers, though I was yet to understand how or why.

It didn’t look like I was going to find out about that just yet.

Hunter continued to walk, stopping to gesture through to various rooms.

As well as the training rooms, there was a communal area, where several people lounged around, relaxed and chatting. They lifted a hand in a wave to both me and Hunter as we poked our heads in. There was a large kitchen with industrial, stainless steel appliances and a number of separate bedrooms containing bunks. From the clothes and personal items around most of the beds, I could tell the bedrooms were already inhabited, I guessed by the same people who had been in the training area.

“People live down here?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. We can train, and besides, we know it’s safe down here.”

“Safe from the men like the one on the bus?”

He nodded.

“Do you live down here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What about your family?”

His eyes narrowed, a muscle in his jaw tightening. “I only have my dad, and like I said earlier, I wasn’t as lucky in the fatherly parenting area as you were.”

“Oh, right.”

Something twisted inside me at the idea of Hunter being as good as alone in this world. I missed my sister as though someone had reached inside me and carved a piece out of my soul, but I was thankful I’d had the short time with her that I had. Yes, we’d both lost our mom, but we’d had each other. She’d taken care of me in many ways that I guessed our mom would have done if she’d survived, and though I hated she was gone, I knew I’d been blessed to have had her.

My eyes filled with tears.

Hunter noticed. He stopped and caught my hand. “Hey, are you all right?”

I sniffed. “Yeah, sorry. Just thinking about home.”

I was suddenly aware of his proximity and the way he was looking at me. He took a step closer and his arm went up to rest of the window behind my head, which looked onto another empty bedroom.

“Hunter—” I started to say, though I had no idea what I was going to finish the sentence with.

He just gave his head a slight shake to tell me to shut up, and then his mouth pressed firmly against mine. My heart thumped. His lips teased mine open and our tongues met. He moved in closer, pressing the length of his body against mine, sandwiching me between him and the glass behind. A thrill raced through me, but with it came awkwardness and uncertainty.

I tried to act like a woman of the world, but the truth was I’d only had one real boyfriend, and we’d been together for a year before we’d slept together. That hadn’t lasted, and I’d followed it up with a couple of drunken make-out sessions with strangers, but nothing more.

But there was no denying Hunter was hot, and for some crazy reason he seemed to like me. I was melting in his arms, and almost turned into a puddle when the hand that had been holding mine pulled my arm up above my head and pinned it to the glass behind me. I actually whimpered then tried not to die of embarrassment. But the noise only seemed to drive him on, and his other hand skirted down the side of my body.

Someone cleared their throat nearby and we sprang apart.

Kit was standing in the doorway, glaring at us. “Sorry,” he snapped, sounding anything but sorry, “did I interrupt something?”

Hunter glared back. “Clearly, you did.”

“Sticking your tongue down the new recruit’s throat isn’t part of your job description, Hunter. Now get on with what you’re supposed to be doing.”

We waited until he’d moved away, my cheeks burning hot.

“Why does he get to tell you what do to?” I whispered, once Kit was out of ear shot.

“He was the first,” Hunter replied. “He’s the reason this place even exists.”

“How?” The place was massive, and Kit must have been around the same age as us. How was such a thing even possible?

“Have you heard of the Myriad Group?”

“Of course.” The Myriad Group was a multinational technology company which sold computer software, electronics, and licenses. Everyone had heard of them.

“Kit is the son of the man who started up the corporation.”

My mouth dropped. “He’s Philip Middleton’s son?”

“Yep. His father thinks he’s a total dropout, though a dropout with a stupidly huge trust fund, which he now has full access to. This center already existed from when the company was doing testing of some kind. When they eventually gave up, they abandoned this place, but Kit knew about it and took over.”

“Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Years ago, there was another entrance from the observatory, but it’s since been filled in, so all we have is the tunnel now. The people from the Myriad group think this place has been buried under several tons of rubble.”

I didn’t know what else to say. My mind was reeling from all this new information, and I could barely start to process it all.

My lips still tingled from the kiss, my skin buzzing from where he’d touched me. I wanted everyone else to vanish so we could continue where we’d left off, but that wasn’t going to happen.

“So, what’s the rest of the job?” I asked, referring to what Kit had said. He was staring at my mouth, as though he was thinking exactly the same as I was, but then he dragged his gaze away.

“We want you to stay and train here with us, Ari. You can eat here and sleep here, and train your skills to the very best of your ability. You have no idea what you’re able to achieve yet.”

The thought of living down here filled me with claustrophobia, but I had to admit I was curious. I wanted to see if I was able to do all the things Hunter claimed I could do, if I could learn to control them. Plus, I liked the idea of being around him more.

“But what about my father? He’s going to notice if I’m gone for weeks in a row.”

“You’ll have to tell him you’re away for work, or perhaps visiting someone? Obviously, you can’t tell him the truth.”

“Because he’ll think I’m crazy and have me committed,” I confirmed.

“Exactly.”

I chewed on a snag on my thumbnail. “I don’t know. I feel horrible leaving him now. He’ll be all on his own, and now my sister …” I trailed off.

“The trouble is, Ari, you don’t have much choice. There will be more men like the one who chased us here. You need to learn how to defend yourself.”

“Why? What are they going to do to me?”

“They’ll take you for research, if you’re lucky,” he said.

“And if I’m unlucky?” I almost didn’t want to hear the answer.

“They’ll eliminate you.”

Chapter Nine

A rush of cold flooded over me.

“Why would they want to … eliminate me? And who are these people, anyway?”

“Not just you. All of us who have this talent. And they don’t want us around because we’re not supposed to exist. And they can’t control us, and the government doesn’t like things it can’t control.”

My eyebrows lifted. “The government?”

He glanced over his shoulder, toward the open doorway. “Look, we have a lot to discuss, and I promised you breakfast. How about we do this over coffee?”

“Here?”

“Yeah, and I’m afraid we don’t have a Starbucks.”

I laughed. “I can live without Starbucks.”

Truth was, I was starving, and the only thing I’d had that morning was a gulp from the glass of water I always kept at my bedside. That had been hours ago now, and we’d been running as well. I needed food, water, and coffee, though not necessarily in that order.

I followed Hunter back out of the bedroom, down the corridor, and into the kitchen he’d already shown me.

“Sit,” he instructed, and I slid myself onto a stool at a stainless steel breakfast bar which ran along the wall closest to the door.

I asked for a glass of water and a cup of coffee, and he busied himself pouring them for me.

“We don’t have anything fancy to eat,” he said. “But I can rustle up some toast and peanut butter.”

My stomach gurgled appreciatively. I’d have been happy with anything by that point.

Hunter made the toast for both of us, slid a plate in front of me, then took the stool beside me, so our knees were almost touching. I picked up my slice and took a big bite, too hungry to care about being self-conscious eating in front of him. I let him take a few chomps of his breakfast before waving my hand in the space between us.

“Come on, then,” I said. “Talk.”

He chewed and swallowed, and dropped his remaining toast on the plate in front of him. “Okay. In the nineties, the government gave an experimental drug to thousands of women. It was touted as being some sort of miracle cure for extreme morning sickness—hyperemesis gravidarum—but in fact it was changing the fetuses.”

“Changing the fetuses?” I parroted back. “And let me guess—we were the fetuses?”

“Exactly.”

“Changed us into what?”

“From what we have figured out so far, the only thing it affected was our brain waves. It seems we’re able to interact with the energies surrounding us on a profound level.”

“But why would the government do that?”

“Who knows? Maybe they thought they’d be able to create people they’d be able to use in war or secret service.”

“If the government was doing this knowingly, wouldn’t they have kept better track of the women it was given to?”

“They did, at first. But then the babies were born and appeared completely normal. They grew and went on to have regular lives. There was nothing to study.”

“But you said our mothers died the same way?”

He nodded. “A small handful of these women suffered the same effects of the drug that your mother and mine did.”

“The brain aneurysm?”

“Exactly. After that happened, and with the children appearing normal, with nothing special about them that they could discern, the government distanced themselves from it all. I guess they didn’t want to be linked to the women dying, probably afraid some massive lawsuit would be brought against them.”

“There weren’t many women who died, then?”

“Out of thousands, there were only a few. It was enough to be significant, but the government did what they do best and buried it.”

“And those same women, were they all our mothers? All the people who are here now?”

He nodded again. “Yes. There’s seventeen of us so far, eighteen now, including you.”

“And we all have these … talents?”

“Exactly. The thing the government wasn’t looking for when they were observing us was the possibility that our skills would lie dormant until something happened that brought them to the surface.”

“Wasn’t our mothers’ dying enough to reveal them? Surely that’s one hell of a trauma to go through.”

“Yes, you’d think so, but it needs to be a physical trauma. A mental or emotional one isn’t enough.”

I was putting pieces of the story together in my head. “But being thrown in the bombing was?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him curiously. “What was your event that started it all? What happened to you?”

He glanced away. “My father threw me down a flight of stairs when I was eighteen.”

I could hear the pain in his voice. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, no one died. Not like with you.”

Pain struck my heart. “No, I guess not. Must still be hard, though. Where is he now?”

Hunter shrugged. “No idea. Don’t care either. I walked away from him that day, left the house. I lived rough for a few months, until I realized things were happening to me, and that people were following me. Then Kit approached me and brought me here.”

“Wow, you’ve been here for years?”

“Yeah, I didn’t exactly have anywhere else to go.”

We were silent for a moment. But I still had so many unanswered questions.

“How did the government find out about us?”

“I guess they were still watching some of us to a certain extent. Maybe someone reported seeing something strange, and that brought them down on us again. They started to realize the drugs they’d given our mothers may have actually done something to the babies they were carrying. Of course, they couldn’t track us all down, but they started to try. Most of the babies were completely normal—either they weren’t able to do what we can, even if they’d experienced a physically traumatic event, or else they hadn’t experienced one yet, so the agents didn’t know one way or the other. But then there were those of us, like you and me, who were showing abilities. We find you—newbies—and bring you here to train you and keep you safe, but it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes we lose people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some people’s minds can’t handle the change. They think they’re going crazy, and so they do, quite literally, and end up either dead or in the hospital. Others, the government gets to before we do.”

“And what happens to them?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. They just vanish. We’ve lost people from here as well. People who’ve gone out to get supplies, or out to bring in new recruits, and they’ve never come back.”

“Maybe they’ve done that willingly.”

He chewed his lower lip. “Yes, maybe. Or something else happened to them. People go missing all the time, but they’re not normally people who also have government agents tracking them. Normally, the most obvious explanation is the correct one.”

“But why do these government agents seem to hate us so much?”

“Because we’re not supposed to exist. They’re frightened of what we can do.”

I ran my hand through my hair, trying to let it all sink in. It was absolute madness, but what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t deny things I had seen with my own eyes, things happening around me even before Hunter had come into my life. If this was some kind of trick or a joke, they’d gone a freakishly long way to try to play it on me, and what would be the point?

Was my life in danger?

Hunter was watching me. “So, what do you say?”

“About what?”

“About coming to stay here for a while, learning what we do, and what you can do as well.”

I didn’t think I had much of a choice. How was I supposed to go back and live my old life after what I’d seen? Plus, I didn’t know if my so-called abilities would cause me problems if they went untrained. What if something happened and I did something that hurt someone? The cold, menacing expression in the eyes of the man following us remained in my mind. Would I forever be looking over my shoulder? And I had to admit, the idea of living in such close proximity to Hunter had my heart fluttering.

“I can’t just stay,” I said. “I need to go home first and tell my dad I’ll be going away for a couple of weeks. It would kill him if I disappeared, and after losing my sister, I couldn’t put him through that.”

Hunter nodded. “I understand. I’ll take you back home, but it can’t be for long, okay? We don’t know if the men in black have figured out if you’re one of us or not. If they have, it won’t take much for them to learn your address.”

I stared at him in alarm. “Is my dad safe?”

“Yes, perfectly. They know the family of people like us don’t share our abilities.”

“But what if they tried to make him tell where we are?”

“They won’t. They know we don’t tell a single soul.” He looked at me intensely. “And that applies to you as well, Ari. It’s one of our rules. No one is to know about this place.”

“What are the other rules?”

“That we never use our powers to hurt an innocent person, which includes financially or emotionally. And we never use our powers on each other.”

That all seemed reasonable. I nodded. “Deal.”

We left the kitchen and walked back through to the Cavern. I caught Dixie’s eye and she threw me a wink, and I smiled back. Others nodded at me as I followed Hunter back to the tunnel we’d entered through. What were they thinking? Did they assume they’d see me back here? Did they ever have people who said no? I wondered what happened to those people if they did.

Hunter stopped at the entrance to the tunnel through the rock cliff face and lit a couple of candles.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to carry flashlights?” I suggested.

“Flashlights can get lost, or run out of batteries. At least if these are always here, we know there’s going to be light along the way. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the tunnel with no light.”

I thought of all the light bulbs I’d blown in the last couple of weeks. “I guess not.”

I’d been mostly breaking things, but I wondered, for a fraction of a second, if I’d be able to make a bulb illuminate by myself rather than break it.

Pushing the thought from my mind, I took one of the candles and followed Hunter back the way we’d come. I felt more comfortable doing the journey this way around, knowing I’d emerge into fresh air and space. Being underground for so long had left me claustrophobic, and I tried not to think about how I would be living down here.

We emerged fifteen minutes later, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The bay was exactly as we’d left it, with the exception that the fog had gone and the bright blue sky had returned. I was glad to see it. I looked up at the bridge, the vehicles passing overhead. I remembered our jump down, how crazy it had seemed. Would my life ever stop feeling like I was stuck in the middle of a dream?

Something occurred to me as I stared at the expanse of metal above. “Hey, how are we going to get back up? You’re not going to call some wind to catapult me, are you?”

He grinned. “Nah, we’ll use the steps.”

My mouth dropped. “If there are steps, why the hell did we jump off the bridge?”

“I didn’t want anyone to see us. Besides, I wanted to see how much you trusted me.”

I glared at him, but he only laughed and turned away. I had no choice but to follow him.

It turned out the steps weren’t really steps at all, but perilous grooves cut away in the face of the cliff. I skidded and squealed a number of times as we ascended, sending little flurries of rock falls down onto the beach below. Heights weren’t exactly my favorite thing, and when Hunter reached back to help me up, I held so hard onto his hand I thought I might crush his fingers.

We reached the top and I threw myself down onto the grass, breathing hard. “Oh, my God. I think I’d rather jump off the bridge.”

“That can be arranged.”

When I’d pulled myself together, we walked back across the bridge. A couple of cabs were waiting outside of the café that catered to tourists who were sightseeing, so we jumped in the back of one. I told the driver my father’s address.

I didn’t want Hunter to leave, but I needed to have a difficult conversation with my dad. I didn’t know how the idea of me leaving for two weeks was going to go down with him.

“Thanks for walking me back,” I said, outside of the front door. “So, what happens now?”

“I’ll take you back to the Cavern tomorrow.”

I nodded, my insides twisting uncomfortably at the idea. Living underground with people I didn’t know, all practicing some kind of magical power, and hoping government agents didn’t track us down.

Above my head, the porch light fizzled and popped.

Hunter looked up at it, his eyebrow arched.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I do need to figure out how to control this.”

“It’ll be all right,” he told me.

I gave a tight smile. “I hope so.”

He stepped away, and I sighed. A part of me wanted to leave with him now, but I couldn’t do that to my dad.

“I’ll catch you later,” he said, and I nodded and turned to my front door.

I left him, letting myself into the house.

“Dad?”

“Through here?” his familiar voice called back. The scent of meat and gravy wafted through the house, making my stomach gurgle. I’d eaten the toast in the kitchen at the Cavern, but all the running around, and kissing, had left me famished. I couldn’t help the smile spreading across my face at the thought of kissing Hunter. That part had definitely been unexpected. Hell, all of it had been unexpected, but for some reason that was the thing lingering on my mind.

“Hey, sweetheart,” my dad said as I walked into the kitchen to find him stirring a pot of something. “Hope you’re hungry. We’ve got Irish stew and dumplings.”

“Starving,” I said, plopping myself down at the kitchen table.

“I’m glad you’re home. I was starting to get worried. It’s not like you to be out all day.”

“I got called in to work,” I said. I’d been thinking about what reasons I’d give for my sudden need to disappear for a couple of weeks, and he’d given me a good opening.

“Work?” The tone of his voice lifted in surprise.

“Yeah. Obviously, they were concerned that I haven’t been showing any signs of wanting to go back.”

He huffed out air through his nose. “Well, that’s hardly surprising after what you’ve been through.”

“It’s okay. They understand. That’s actually what they wanted to speak to me about. They realize it would be difficult for me to work back in the restaurant considering it’s a very similar setting to the one where the bombing happened, and wanted to offer me an alternative.”

“Oh?” My dad stopped stirring the stew and faced me.

“Yeah, they wanted to know if I was interested in taking a marketing role with the company. A lot of it would be online, but I’d be doing all the regular stuff as well, like coordinating flyer drops and getting spots in local newspapers.”

Lines appeared between his eyebrows. “Why would they want you for that job? You don’t have any experience.”

“Oh, I do,” I continued, hoping I could bluff this. “I ran a team during the holidays last year to promote all the Christmas meals they were running—remember?”

I’d played a very small role in that campaign, but I hoped it would jog his memory enough to make what I was saying plausible.

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I do remember that.”

“So, they said they’d rather find a new role for me than lose me as a staff member. They know I’m a good worker—it’s not like I’ve even had a day off sick before now.”

“That’s true.” He nodded again. “Well, that’s all very exciting, sweetheart. Congratulations.”

I forced a smile. “Thanks. There is one problem though.”

His face dropped. “Oh, what’s that?”

“I have to go away for training for a couple of weeks.”

“Right. That’s understandable.”

“And it starts tomorrow.”

His eyebrows lifted. “That soon?”

“Yeah. The courses don’t run too often, and they want to get me on board sooner rather than later. You don’t mind, do you?”

He gave a smile, but I could tell it was strained and my heart twisted for him. “No, of course not. I was only nagging you last week because I wanted you to go out more, and I was worried about you. You’re a grown woman. You should be out there making your own life, not worrying about me, and certainly not asking my permission. I think it’s a great opportunity. I certainly won’t be the one standing in your way.”

Guilt swamped me over my lies, but I couldn’t tell him the truth, and it would be even worse if I just vanished.

I got to my feet and went over to him, and pulled him into a hug. I squeezed him tight, noting how much weight he’d lost since my sister had died. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart. Now how about we sit down and eat.”

I released him. “Sure.”

We sat down to hearty bowls of stew and dumplings, exactly what I needed to make me feel more grounded again. I tried to spend these last few hours in his presence as focused as possible, though my mind constantly drifted to thoughts of Hunter and the Cavern.

“I wish I’d known it was going to be your last night for a while,” he said, surprising me. “I’m supposed to go out bowling with the guys.”

“Oh, right.” He’d caught me off guard. “That’s okay, Dad. You go out and have fun. I need to pack, anyway. I’m not going to be much in the way of entertainment.”

He looked at me, one eyebrow drawn down, biting his lower lip. “I can always cancel. They won’t miss me.”

I laughed. “Yes, they will. You know they’ll lose if you don’t show.”

His laughter joined mine, and I relaxed for the first time that day.

I left him to get ready for his game, and I went up to my bedroom to pack. I figured a rucksack was more sensible than a suitcase, though I wouldn’t be able to fit as much in it. I guessed I should plan on packing light anyway. From the quick tour I’d been given, I hadn’t seen a ton of personal items.

The memory of the tour immediately took my thoughts back to Hunter and the way he’d kissed me. God, it had been a long time since a man had been able to take control of my body like that. The moment I was in his vicinity, I found myself yearning for him. Hell, I didn’t even need to be near him. Maybe I was just using him as a distraction for the way I’d been feeling about everything else recently, and for the sudden turn of events I was dealing with now, but even if I was only using him as a distraction, he was an excellent one to have.

My dad called goodbye to me from downstairs, so I left the bedroom to stand at the top of the stairs and wave.

“When will you be back?” I called to him.

“Depends how many beers the guys want to have. I’ll see you in the morning before you leave, though?”

I smiled. “Of course. I wouldn’t go without saying goodbye.”

He left the house and I went back to my packing, over-analyzing every item, trying to figure out if it was appropriate or not. What exactly did you pack to go and live with a secret community of telekinetic twenty-something-year-olds?

A scrape came at my window and my heart jumped into my chest.

What the hell was that? There were no trees nearby to cause a branch to brush against the window pane. The memory of the man in the black suit flashed up in my head. Could he have found me here?

My small PC suddenly whirred to life, and, across the other side of the room, my digital radio blared, making me jump, my hand clutched to my chest. I knew now these things happening were a response to my emotional reaction and the energy waves I was sending out rather than anything supernatural, but it was still freaky as hell.

I hurried over to turn off the radio, the loud noise unnerving me even more than I already was. I switched it off, and it occurred to me if I had control over my powers, I’d have been able to do this via thought. I glanced back toward the window, listening hard for any further noise. It was already dark outside, and the light being on in my bedroom caused my own reflection to stare back at me.

I was paranoid. Considering everything that had happened that day, it was hardly surprising. I must have imagined the sound, or it had come from a different part of the house. My heart started to slow, my breathing returning to normal.

Crossing the room, I went to the window to pull my curtains across and shut myself off from the street below. I gripped the material to give it a yank—

And a face appeared in the window.

Chapter Ten

I exhaled a sigh of relief and tried to steady my shaking limbs. “Jesus Christ, Hunter. You just about gave me a heart attack.”

I unlatched the window at the bottom and pulled up the sash.

Hunter grinned back at me, balancing on the roof of the porch which ran around most of the house, before pulling himself in through the window. He straightened in front of me and dusted himself down. “Sorry. I was waiting for your dad to leave.”

“So, you knew he wasn’t here. Why didn’t you just ring the damned bell?”

“I figured this was more dramatic.”

“Like the bridge jump?”

“Exactly.”

He was smirking at me, and I was doing my best not to smile back. The truth was, I was pleased to see him, even if he’d aged me ten years by his choice of arrival.

I reached out and smacked his arm. “Stop it!”

“What?”

“You know what. You’re playing with me.”

“I can’t help it. You just seem so … playable.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Playable?”

That smirk was back. “Yeah. Someone I’d want to play with.”

“Well, I’m kind of busy right now. As you can see, I’m doing the important job of packing for tomorrow.”

“The packing will still be here in the morning.”

“Is that right?”

He’d gotten closer, taken steps without me even realizing. My body hummed for him again, and I found my breath shallow, my body subconsciously leaning toward him.

“What are you doing? We’re in my dad’s house.”

A dark, teasing look appeared in his eyes, the smile touching his full lips. He stepped forward again, but I didn’t step back. “Your father is out. I watched him leave. And this is your bedroom.”

“You were watching the house? That’s kind of creepy, you know.”

“I don’t care. I wanted to see you.”

My breath was suddenly short. “You did?”

“Of course. You can’t tell me you didn’t want to see me, too.”

How was it possible that he was right? I’d only known him a matter of days, yet he was filling my every thought. We’d kissed, that was all, but I wanted us to know each other. I wanted him by my side, to be able to go back to the Cavern and for people to see us together.

Unless he did this with all new recruits, of course. Maybe this was some kind of initiation he put all the new women through?

The thought spiked alarm through me and I stepped back.

He noticed and frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“I just …” I stuttered. I didn’t know how to say what I felt without sounding like an immature little girl. Perhaps he was used to confident, worldly women who were happy to screw and get on with things. That wasn’t me. I connected emotionally to anyone I was physical with, and I didn’t want him to think I was the type who could be with someone, forget about them, and move onto the next person. “I just don’t do this with everyone,” I managed to say.

He paused, his dark eyebrows shooting up his forehead. “And you’re worried that I do?”

I gave an awkward shrug. “It may have crossed my mind.”

He laughed and pulled me into him. I tried to protest, but my heart wasn’t in it. “I promise you, Ari, it’s just you. And I won’t push you into anything. Honestly, I just wanted to be here with you. I realize the last few days have been insane, and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“It hasn’t only been the last few days,” I said. “My life has been upside down ever since the bombing.”

His expression grew serious. “Hey, you’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mess around.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me down so we sat, side-by-side, on the end of my bed. “Honestly, I’m excited to have you on board, and I guess I’ve been letting that push any considerations for what you’ve just been through. You were in a bombing where you lost your sister. I can’t even imagine what that must be like.”

I pressed my lips together, my eyes squeezing shut, as though blocking everything out could lessen the pain.

“I’m not sure I can explain it either. I thought what was going on now would be the thing to define me, and what I’d be focusing on, but it’s not.”

“I get it,” he said.

But I wasn’t sure he did.

I found myself thinking in blocks of time relating to her death. This time two weeks ago, Karina was still alive. This time a month ago, Karina and I were having dinner down on the pier. This time a year ago, we’d been laughing about the antics we’d had on my twenty-first birthday. My sister had been excited about taking me out to all her favorite joints without needing to use any fake ID. Would it always be like this? Would I always be marking my life by the passage of time since her death?

I gave a deep sigh and flopped back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Hunter copied me, so we lay together, not looking at each other, not speaking, just being there.

“You know,” he said eventually, “I can’t help thinking about the bombing.”

I twisted to face him. “What do you mean?”

“That you were there at all. That you survived when your sister, and most of the people around you, died. Doesn’t it strike you as strange no one has taken responsibility for it yet?”

I shrugged. “It might have just been a lunatic, wanting to do something crazy. It doesn’t mean there was a political motive.”

“Okay, let’s say it was. How come you got away with no major injuries?”

“I was thrown from my chair by the force of the blast. A lot of people—Karina included—died when the building collapsed. I was just lucky, that’s all.”

“Have you ever been hurt, physically?”

“Well … I …”

I wracked my brains for something. I’d broken a tooth when I was seven and had been jumping rope. I fell over the rope and smacked my face on the floor, but I’d been okay. I’d never been admitted to a hospital. I’d never even been stung by a wasp or a bee, though the mosquitoes liked me well enough. I put it down to my over-cautious nature. When other kids were jumping on skateboards or climbing trees, I was more than happy to sit to one side and read a book. It wasn’t that surprising I’d never injured myself much more than a scraped knee.

“I guess I’m just more resilient, or I’ve never put myself in a situation where I’ve been capable of being injured.”

He lifted his eyebrows at me.

“Apart from the bombing, of course,” I filled in.

He was still staring at me, a curious expression in his dark eyes that I couldn’t read.

“What?” I demanded.

“I just wonder …”

I sat upright and looked down at him. “Wonder what?”

“If you’re one of the more resilient ones.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Some of us are harder to hurt than others. Kit is one of them. You can still get hurt—still die, we assume—but not as badly as others. So something that would be a broken bone to a regular person would only be a bruise to you. Or a bad cut on another person might only be a scrape for you.”

“Seriously? I think I’m just risk averse.”

“We could test the theory out.”

I stared at him. “Uh-uh. No way.”

“You don’t want to find out?”

“I’m barely coming to terms with the whole telekinetic thing. I’m not going to start self-harming so see how easy I am to hurt.”

He shrugged. “I’d want to know.”

“How do you not know already? You might be hard to hurt, too.”

He shook his head. “Nah. My father threw me down a flight of stairs, remember? I fractured three ribs and my skull. Plus, he’d already broken my arm when I was sixteen, and gave me multiple injuries before that. I’m definitely easy to hurt.”

Sorrow swelled up inside me at the thought of him being treated that way, of a small boy being beaten by the one person who was always supposed to love him. I reached out and took his hand.

“I’m sorry. I have a bad habit of always thinking about myself. You don’t know where he is now?”

“No, I don’t care either. If he ever tries to find me, which I highly doubt he ever will, I’ll kill him before I ever speak to him.”

A hardness crept into his tone, and for a moment the sexy, teasing guy vanished and was replaced by someone angry and dangerous.

He shook his head, breaking himself from the moment. “We have other things to worry about, anyway.”

I was thankful he wasn’t going to bring up the hurting thing again, though now I had something else to mull over. Was what he said a possibility? It seemed crazy, but no crazier than the possibility of being able to move objects and even the air around us by the power of thought alone. And he said the other guy, Kit, was already this way—harder to hurt. I wondered what sort of experiments they’d done to prove this, and if they’d try to push me into them eventually. I would be at the Cavern for training. I doubted they’d let it slide.

Exhausted from the day’s events, I let out a big yawn, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.

Hunter patted my pillow. “You need to get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll sleep with you.”

“Hunter,” I warned.

He laughed and held up both hands. “Sleep. I promise. That’s all I meant.”

I wasn’t totally sure I believed him. I also wasn’t totally sure I wanted him to keep to his promise. But I didn’t want to be seen by the others at the Cavern as the new recruit who slept with her recruiter after only a couple of days of knowing him. Kit had already caught Hunter kissing me, and he clearly hadn’t been happy about the situation.

I was tired, however, and the thought of having him sleeping beside me made me feel safer. My dreams would be full of men in dark suits, and bombings, and jumping off bridges into expanses of white nothingness. Being able to wake from my fears to have someone there who understood what I was going through made everything feel just a little bit better.

We lay side by side, his arm slung around my waist, the weight of it calming me. I didn’t think I’d sleep, having someone else in my bed, and with my thoughts churning, but my eyes grew heavy, my thoughts distant, and before I’d even registered it was happening, I’d vanished into oblivion.

Chapter Eleven

I woke the next morning and knew he’d already gone before I even reached out and found the space beside me empty. The atmosphere in the room was different when he was around, and the bed wasn’t dipped in the way it had been when he’d been lying next to me.

With a sigh, I rolled over, taking the spot where he’d been. It wasn’t even warm, so he must have vacated the room a while ago. The temptation of sleep lulled me back down into its depths, but then I remembered what day it was. I was due to be leaving to go and live beneath ground for several weeks.

And I hadn’t even packed yet.

My eyes snapping open, I bolted up in bed. Nerves churned my stomach and lightheadedness washed over me. I scrambled to my feet and used the bathroom, hurriedly scrubbing my teeth and throwing water over my face. I pulled my blonde locks into a high ponytail, and then put my hands either side of the sink, the porcelain cool against my palms. I took a slow breath, trying to calm my nerves. My gaze alighted on my razor blade and the memory of the conversation we’d had last night came back to me. Could what Hunter have said been true? It was easy enough to find out. I just needed to take the blade out of the razor and slash my arm with it. If it cut as I’d expected, it would mean I didn’t have that particular talent, but if it didn’t ...

The thought of being somehow protected from injury made my head spin. The possibilities were terrifying. Endless. Infinite.

No, I couldn’t do it. Picking up a razor and deliberately cutting myself felt too close to stepping into the realms of madness.

I was going to freak myself out again if I thought about things too much. To keep busy, I went into my bedroom and continued the packing Hunter had interrupted the previous night. I picked up clothes and stuffed them in my backpack—more jeans, t-shirts, underwear, a spare pair of sneakers. I added my toiletries, and then slipped in the couple of framed photographs I had on my bedside table. One was of me, Karina, and my dad a couple of years ago, taken when we’d rented a cabin near the lake. We were all tan, with big white smiles. We looked happy, and I had to blink back tears as a swell of emotion buffeted me. The second picture was of my mom and dad when they first met—my dad looking much the same as he did now, only with a few less lines and a little more hair, and my mom looking just like Karina did before she died.

I hoped they were together now, wherever they were.

My thoughts turned to what lay ahead.

Would Hunter come back for me, or was I due to make the trip to the Cavern alone? If so, how was I supposed to get down there? My powers were in no way strong enough to conjure up whatever magic worked the wind and fog like Hunter had, and I thought I’d rather jump off the bridge than attempt to scramble down the cliff-face steps by myself.

I’d go and have breakfast with my dad, and hang around for as long as possible before heading out. I hoped Hunter would show up again, but, if he didn’t, I guessed I would have to take this into my own hands. I was a grown woman, and I needed to start acting like one.

Turned out, I was up first. Roused by the aroma of the coffee I was brewing, my dad clomped his way down the stairs and entered the kitchen.

“Hey, Dad.” I took in the sight of him—ruffled, crazy bed-head, and puffy, bloodshot eyes. I caught the faint hint of old alcohol. “Rough night?”

He yawned. “Yeah, we won.”

I laughed. “Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”

“It was. We celebrated with a few too many beers. Sorry, sweetheart. I meant to be up and making you breakfast before you left.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make you some instead.”

“You’re a good girl. What am I going to do without you?”

His words made my heart clench. “You’ll be fine, Dad. It’s only a couple of weeks, and I’ll call, and email. You remember how to use email, don’t you?”

“All right, miss,” he grumbled. “I’m not that old and decrepit.”

“Just checking.” He knew I was teasing him. I’d miss this easy banter between us. I didn’t think the company where I was going would be quite so lighthearted.

I poured coffee and made us some eggs. We ate in a companionable silence, and the moment I stood to clear the plates away, the doorbell rang.

My stomach lurched and I was suddenly worried I’d need the bathroom again. I forced a smile. “That’ll be my ride.”

My dad was already on his feet. “I’ll get it.”

“No, it’s okay.” I was suddenly panicked at him finding Hunter there again. What would he think? He might guess that this whole thing was a ruse, but assume I was running off with some guy rather than going to live with a group of telekinetic people.

He ignored me, however, and was out of the room and heading to answer the door before I could protest again.

I heard mumbling, and then my father returned. “Wow, they really are taking care of you. They’ve sent you a car.”

I blinked. “They have?”

I peered past him to see a man in a suit walking back down to an expensive looking car parked at the curb. I could only see the back of him, but I thought I recognized the sandy colored hair. As I watched him walk away, he glanced back at me.

It was Kit, the same man who apparently owned the whole of the Cavern. Was he going to drive me? How would we get down to the entrance of the Cavern if I didn’t have Hunter to take care of me? All my defenses were up. Why was Kit here? I wished Hunter had come. I’d have felt a lot better then.

“Everything all right, sweetheart?” my dad asked, 0bviously recognizing my discomfort.

I forced a smile. “Yeah, it’s just scary going away for this long. I’m worried you’ll need me and I won’t be here.”

Or worried I’ll need you and you won’t be there.

“I’ll miss you,” he said with a smile, “but I will be fine. I have a half dozen TV dinners in the freezer, so I’m not going to starve. You have your cell phone, right?”

I patted my pocket. “Yep. I’ll call, I promise.” Though I wasn’t sure how much cell phone coverage there was underground. They must have phones down there, though. From what I’d seen, they had enough technology to serve half the city.

“Good girl.”

He leaned in and hugged me, and I squeezed him harder, holding back the tears that always seemed too close to the surface ever since the bombing. Above my head, the light bulb started to flicker and flash. Recognizing it for what it was, I took a breath, steadying my emotions, and the light died away again. I allowed myself a small smile of pride. Where previously the bulb probably would have broken, I’d managed to control the outcome instead.

Kit honked the horn to hurry me up.

I bent and picked up the backpack, which I’d slung at the bottom of the stairs when I’d come down for breakfast. With a final smile, and half wave to my dad, I trotted out the door and down the path to the waiting car. Kit was already waiting behind the wheel, so I opened the passenger door and climbed in.

“Hi,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“Sorry if I’m a letdown,” he replied.

The rapid clicking of the blinker filled the car, and he leaned out slightly to check his blind spot, before pulling the vehicle out into the road, joining other traffic.

His words jarred me. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just assumed Hunter would come and fetch me. Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, but he told me someone followed you yesterday. If someone is on his tail, I didn’t want him to lead them to you.”

“Of course.”

I wondered what Kit would say if he knew Hunter had spent the night lying beside me in bed.

Facing the passenger window, with my bag clutched on my lap, I watched the city go by. I had too many questions, but I was too nervous to give voice to any of them. Would I be allowed to leave the Cavern once my training had started? Would I be able to call my dad? Was Kit hard to hurt physically, like Hunter had said?

I didn’t know why, but something about Kit made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was only that he came from big money and he carried himself as such. He was one of those people who automatically thought everyone should be focused on him, and got shitty with anyone who wasn’t.

We drove through the city and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. At the other end, he took the ramp off which was sign posted to Vista Point. I thought he might pull into the car lot provided for the tourists, but instead he followed the road under the bridge, taking us out the other side. Kit drove down the narrow road, heading back toward the headland. He turned off again, and this time the way forward became a service road that was little more than a dirt track. A few minutes later, he pulled in, easing the car up alongside one of the block-shaped buildings. Metal railings ran around most of the single story structures. The view across the Golden Gate Bridge and out to San Francisco Bay was breathtaking. I guessed hikers liked this spot for the view as well, though there weren’t any here today.

“You know where we are?” he asked, as switched off the engine and climbed out.

“Yeah,” I replied, undoing my seatbelt and climbing out to join him. “It’s the old fort used during the war. Battery Spencer. What are we doing here?”

“I bring all of our new recruits here. I want you to understand exactly where you are and how what you’re about to see came about.”

I frowned, still not understanding what he was getting at.

He nodded to the ground. “The Cavern is directly beneath us.”

My eyes widened as I looked down at the dirt covered ground, imagining everyone below us.

“The Cavern—though obviously it wasn’t called the Cavern back then—was originally built by the military. It was used as an underground test facility.”

I was confused. “But I thought the underground part of Battery Spencer had reopened. Don’t people run guided tours down there? How do they not come across the Cavern?”

He nodded. “Yes, the top layer is still open, but the place is like a labyrinth. The area where the Cavern is now is completely blocked off from the part where the tourists go—from where anyone else goes, apart from us. Plus, it’s deeper, far deeper. As far as people are aware, the whole lot collapsed and it doesn’t even exist anymore.”

I nodded, remembering Hunter telling me the same thing.

“There are plenty of other parts that are sealed off as well,” he said, walking toward the buildings. “Years ago, my father made the government an offer to purchase the lower levels of Battery Spencer. I guess he figured if it made for a good research center during the war, it would work as a research center now. The government must have decided the money made more sense than having the place lying around abandoned. He used the place for a few years, though I have no idea what he had people working on down there, but then an earthquake caused part of the structure to collapse. Luckily, no one was down there when it happened, but they arrived one day to find access was impossible. It was decided that it wasn’t worth trying to get out the equipment, and that moving anything more would most likely only bring down more of the structure, so they just abandoned it all.”

“Wow. But you found another entrance?”

He nodded. “Found … or created.”

My eyes widened. What was he saying? That he was the one who created the gap in the rock that we walked through to get to the Cavern?

We continued to walk side-by-side around the abandoned buildings that once housed the military. Huge concrete circles where the massive guns had once been mounted were still present. We stopped at another of the buildings, and I peered through the bent metal railings of what would have been the windows. It was sad to see the amount of graffiti scrawled all over the flaking white painted walls. The darkness inside loomed and, despite the unusually bright day outside, a shiver caught hold of my body. It was bizarre to think all this would be above our heads while we trained down below.

Kit cleared his throat. “I guess it’s time to go and get you settled into your new home. For the moment, anyway.”

“Sure.”

We got back in the car and Kit drove to the other side of the headland, before taking another small road winding down the cliff face, to bring us to the same spot where I’d climbed up with Hunter the previous day. I knew what this meant, and my stomach twisted in knots.

I peered over the edge. It looked a lot farther down than it did when I had been standing at the bottom and looking up. It was probably about thirty feet—the height of a three story building—and falling directly down would kill me. I wasn’t about to start throwing myself over the edge, however. I knew from the ascent I’d made with Hunter that it wasn’t a direct drop. From my position, I could make out the steep steps cut into the rock. They were impossible to spot, unless someone pointed them out, which helped to keep the access to the Cavern hidden.

Kit jerked his head. “Come on, then.”

“What?” I peered nervously down.

“You’ve just got to get on with it.” With that, he jumped for the steps, making no effort to be cautious or take things slowly. Instead, despite his size, he reminded me of a sure-footed mountain goat, leaping, light footed, downward.

“Come on, Ari!” he yelled up. “You didn’t strike me as a chicken!”

I growled, clenching my teeth. What was it with these men putting me in life threatening situations? I thought they were supposed to get all macho and protective, not encouraging me to jump off cliffs and bridges.

He made it to the bottom, a cloud of dust in his wake. He whooped, as though high on the adrenaline. “Come on, Ari. Trust in your abilities!”

Was this some kind of test, like with Hunter and the bridge? He was going to make me do it, and do something that would help me make it to the bottom? I was fairly sure he wouldn’t let me fall and die.

My legs were shaky. I couldn’t bring myself to look right to the bottom. I clutched my backpack to my shoulders, holding the straps tightly, as thought they were the straps of a parachute and had the ability to save me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and mumbled, “Oh, shit,” under my breath, and then went for it.

Gravity and my momentum increased my speed within seconds. I jumped from one step to the next, to the next, my arms involuntarily pinwheeling as I did so. The backpack swung from side to side, threatening to slip down my arms and hinder me from using my hands to break my fall should I go over. My feet skidded, and I left my stomach behind several steps up. Dust caught in my nostrils and the back of my throat, stirred up by our descent, and inhaled through my overexerted, terrified gasps. I was too fast, losing control, my feet moving quicker than I could control them. I tried to direct myself to the next step and the one after, but I was losing the ability to process my direction.

Surely Kit would step in and do something to help me! Perhaps create a whirlwind like Hunter had to land me safely on the ground. But nothing like that happened, and I wasn’t even able to process what was coming out of my mouth enough to cry out for help, instead letting out a garbled shriek. My feet skidded out from under me again, and this time, instead of catching my balance, gravity took over. I pitched forward, but managed to roll, slamming my shoulder and hip against the jagged rock, first on one side, then the other as I tumbled. My bag padded me against some of the impact, but it seemed to move with its own momentum, flipping around with me.

I hit the bottom with a crunch, not far from where Kit was standing, the river lapping right behind him at the narrow shingle cove.

I lay there, disoriented and gasping for breath. The fall had knocked all the air out of my lungs.

“There,” Kit said, standing over me. “I said you could do it.”

“Are you shitting me right now?” I sat up, fluffing the dirt and stones out of my hair. “I could have broken my neck!”

“But you didn’t, did you? You’re absolutely fine.”

I got to my feet, brushing myself down. He was right. I’d had a fright and been winded, but otherwise I’d survived unharmed.

Kit narrowed his ice-blue eyes at me. “Hunter said he suspected you might be like me.”

For some reason, I didn’t like hearing that. I didn’t want to be anything like him at all. “You mean because of the whole Kin thing?” I said, playing dumb.

He held my eye. “No, I mean because of the whole 'just fell down the side of a cliff and got up from it again' thing. Barely a bruise on you.”

“I’ve been hurt before,” I said. “I was hurt in the bombing. It put me in the hospital.”

“And yet your sister died.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to talk.

He continued. “Has it occurred to you that the government might be responsible for the bombing?”

My mouth dropped. “Why would they be?”

“Trying to weed you out, perhaps. Or kill you altogether.”

“There are easier ways to kill someone.”

“Yes, but nothing deflects things away from our own government like a little terrorism. See everyone else as the enemy instead of ourselves.”

“Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.”

He held my gaze. “Exactly what they want you to say.”

“They’re not going to kill numerous people just to see if I have some… special powers.”

“Most of the people died because of the building collapse, not the bomb. What if they hadn’t meant for all those people to die, but only for you to go through the traumatic event which would bring on your abilities?”

I didn’t want to think about it. I’d accepted what Hunter had said about the man who’d been chasing us being a government official—hell, he’d couldn’t have looked more like a government official if he’d been wearing a name badge—but the idea of our own government being responsible for the bombing and killing all those people, Karina included, was too much.

“How can I be that important?” I said, half to myself.

“It’s not just you, it’s all of us. That’s why it’s so important they don’t find us, or if they do, make sure we’re strong enough to protect ourselves.”

“What could they do with us?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Being able to move things without being close by. Exploding bombs without ever having to send anyone into enemy territory. An energy source that costs no money and uses no fossil fuel. An ability to affect enemies’ electrical supplies or tamper with technology without ever being in the room. Even being able to affect the temperament or put ideas in the heads of our enemies. The possibilities are endless.”

“We can put thoughts into the heads of other people?”

“Only one person has been able to do that so far—Dixie. It seems her abilities are more to do with people than anything else, though she has some telekinetic powers, too. They’re just not as strong as some others.”

I remembered Hunter telling me about how she’d felt me wake up. Had she tried to put any thoughts into my head?

“Okay,” I agreed. “You have a point. Maybe it is all down to the government.”

Kit’s lips pressed together and he gave a brief nod, as though approving of my acceptance of the possibility, then he turned and started to walk away. I followed.

We crunched our way across the narrow shingle beach, the waves of the river lapping at our feet. This time I knew my way, but I still let Kit lead me toward the rock overhang which hid the entrance. I ducked down and scooted inside, squinted against the darkness which lay ahead, the black pressing upon my eyeballs. I heard something fizz. In front of my eyes, the candle on the wall lit, the wick flickering with light. Kit moved his hand in sweeping motion down the tunnel and each of the candles burst into flame. I didn’t like the guy for some reason, but even I had to admit that was kind of impressive.

From the smirk on his face, he knew it, too.

I followed his broad back down the tunnel. I was amazed he even fit—his big shoulders bunched with muscle and stretched across the t-shirt he wore. He filled the space completely. I wove around the bends and ducked beneath overhanging crags, inhaling the damp aroma of the rock. The place felt familiar to me now, and not as frightening as it had before, though the thought of a part of the structure collapsing played on my mind. It was hard not to be claustrophobic knowing it was a possibility.

We emerged into the Cavern, blinking in the bright light, and immediately I found myself searching for Hunter’s familiar face and dark hair. I didn’t see him anywhere, and my stomach dropped. I was sure he’d at least be here to meet me, especially after last night.

I dared to ask Kit. “Hunter around anywhere?”

“He’s busy,” he replied, his tone curt. “We have other recruits than you, you know.”

I wanted to ask who the other new recruits were, but I didn’t think Kit would give me a civilized answer.

Dixie ran over to me, her blue eyes bright. “I’m so glad you came back,” she said, giving a little excited clap.

I wanted to absorb some of her enthusiasm, but instead I felt out of kilter from not having Hunter here. “I didn’t feel like I had a huge amount of choice.”

“Well, you made the right one,” she said, grabbing my hand. “Let’s tell everyone you’re here.”

Unease flooded over me as I glanced down at our joined hands. How did I know she wasn’t using some of her ability on me right now? I didn’t know what her motive for doing so would be, but even so, I was mistrustful. Call me jaded, but I wasn’t someone who made friends easily, and anyone being overly nice to me automatically made me think they were up to something.

She must have noticed my hesitation. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, I just—” My cheeks burned with sudden embarrassment. I didn’t want to accuse her of something I knew nothing about.

Kit’s deep voice spoke from behind my shoulder. “She thinks you might be affecting her emotions or thoughts in some way.”

I hated that he’d plucked the thought right from my head. I hoped it wasn’t one of his other skills as well.

“You are?” She seemed surprised. “Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t! Didn’t Hunter tell you our three rules?”

He had, and I went back over them in my mind. No one is to know about this place. We never use our powers to hurt an innocent person, which includes financially or emotionally. And we never use our powers on each other.

Ah, we never use our powers on each other.

“I get it now,” I said, and a small part of me relaxed.

She didn’t appear to be perturbed by my suspicions. “Come on. I’ll show you where you’re sleeping,” she said, bouncing off like an excitable puppy.

I couldn’t help but smile as I followed her. I glanced over my shoulder to see Kit watching us walk away, his light blue eyes focused on me. I quickly snapped my gaze away. I didn’t know what it was about him, but a part of me felt like I couldn’t trust him.

Where are you, Hunter? I sent the thought out, hoping I might have a little of the talent Dixie had, and was somehow able to make him pick up on the fact I wished he was here.

Instantly, I regretted the thought. I didn’t want him to think I was missing him. How pathetic was I?

Pushing thoughts of Hunter away, I followed Dixie out of the Cavern and into the corridor. We passed the common room, and I spotted a couple of faces I recognized from yesterday. The blonde twins, Lisa and Lyle, sat side-by-side on the couch, and waved at me as I passed by.

“Do they always hang out together?” I asked Dixie.

“Pretty much. They’re nice enough, but way too attached to each other, if you ask me. Thing is, their abilities don’t work if they’re alone. They can lift insane amounts when they’re together—can turn over buses—but they can barely move a pebble on their own.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Yeah, it is. I’m glad I don’t have a twin, though. It would drive me nuts to have to rely on someone else all the time.” She gave a shrug. “They seem used to it.”

We passed the kitchen where I’d eaten toast with Hunter the previous morning, and then the bedroom where he’d kissed me and Kit had interrupted. Another couple of doors led off the corridor, and Dixie pushed one open. I followed her inside and she threw herself on the bed closest to the door.

“Ta-da!” she exclaimed, her hands lifted in the air above her. “This is your bed!”

“Thanks.” I wondered why she was lying on it, and immediately she said, “oops,” and rolled off.

“Sorry, this one’s mine.” She clambered onto the bed next to it. “We’re roomies.”

I smiled. “Cool.” I hesitated then added, “But did you just hear what I thought?”

“Ah, damn. It wasn’t on purpose, and I didn’t hear it exactly. It’s more like being super great at picking up on other people’s vibes.”

My smile widened. “Got it.” I figured Dixie was one person who I had no choice but to be completely honest with.

A figure appeared in the doorway, and she bounced back off the bed to greet him.

“Hey, babe.” The guy with the afro caught Dixie by the waist, kissing her neck. She squealed and I experienced a hollow pang of loneliness in my chest.

“Sledge, you remember Ari?”

“Sure. Hey, Ari. You ready to start training?”

I liked these two together. They were relaxed and natural, as though I’d met them at a coffee shop instead of god-knows how many feet below ground. I wondered what Sledge’s special talent was. It suddenly occurred to me that we all had one thing in common, and not just our own powers. We all knew how it felt to have our mothers die.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, ignoring my morbid thoughts. “Though I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Kit runs most of the training schedules, but I’m sure he’s already fixed you a spot. He’s kind of interested in you.”

“Me?” I couldn’t hide the surprise in my voice.

“Yeah. Way more than the last few people we’ve had in.”

Her boyfriend raised his eyebrows. “It’s hardly surprising, Dixie. Ari here is kind of gorgeous.”

She smacked his big arm. “Hey. You only have eyes for me.”

“’Course I do, babe. I’m just sayin’, that’s all.”

I noted the small set of drawers beside my bed. “Is this mine?” I asked.

“Sure is,” said Dixie. “We’ll give you some space to get unpacked and then come out into the Cavern.”

They left me to it, and I sat on the edge of my bed with a sigh. My backpack was beside the bed where I’d dropped it. I picked the bag up and opened it, removing the photographs of my family first. Though I’d squashed the framed pictures between my clothing, I’d worried the tumble down the cliff might have broken the glass, but as I pulled them out, I was relieved to see them all still in one piece. I placed them on the top of the drawers, angling them so the faces of my family looked over my bed. A wave of homesickness washed over me. This was ridiculous. I was twenty-two years old. I could handle being away from home, even if I was alone.

Where was Hunter?

I barely knew him and I couldn’t rely on him.

I had to deal with this myself.

Chapter Twelve

With my clothes slipped into the drawers and my toiletries deposited in the adjoining bathroom, I stopped in the kitchen for a quick drink of water—a part of me hoping Hunter would somehow materialize there—before continuing to the Cavern. I passed a number of people. Everyone smiled hello, and I smiled in return, feeling awkward and self-conscious. How many people did Hunter say lived down here? Eighteen? I wished I was better with names, but I guessed I’d figure everyone out eventually.

Kit was waiting for me when I entered. He was leaning against the central console, one foot crossed casually over the other, and pushed himself fully to standing. “So, are you ready to get started?”

I glanced nervously at the training rooms which were all divided by glass walls. Most of them had people inside, and they all looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. I hated that everyone would be able to witness me making a fool of myself, but I figured a request for curtains or blinds was probably not going to go down so well.

“I guess so.”

“We’ll start with something simple,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to tax you on your first day.”

I could never tell if he was being nice or taunting me.

“Right.”

We went into the room where I’d seen one of the other men lifting the tennis ball the previous day. It was empty of people now, though the objects remained on the table.

“I don’t know how much Hunter told you,” Kit said, moving more fully into the room, “but most of us have an affinity for one talent or another. Hunter is talented with being able to control the air, but also at your good old-fashioned telekinesis.”

I lifted my eyebrows to tell him to explain more.

“He can move inanimate objects,” Kit explained. “Others struggle more with this, but find they can control electrical things—make computers work without having to touch them, or light a whole room without needing to flick a switch.”

I nodded. “Hunter did mention it.”

“Good. So, we need to find out what you’re good at then focus on that during your training. He says he’s already seen you move objects.”

“Yes … well …” I stuttered. “He says it was me, but I don’t have any recollection of making it happen. It just kind of happened.”

Kit shrugged. “Not to worry. We’ll find out soon enough.”

A chair was set opposite the table containing the items I was supposed to lift with my mind. There was a good six feet between where I’d be sitting and the table—I guessed to reduce any chance of me being able to tamper with the objects by hand, or perhaps simply to make this harder than it already was. To the right was another chair, but this one was set in front of several computer screens and other equipment.

“Take a seat,” he said.

I did as I was told, and Kit fiddled with a few items around the computer. He picked something up and approached me, wires trailing out behind him.

Suspiciously, I eyed the things he held. “What are they for?”

The wire trailing behind him ended in electrodes, and I assumed he was headed toward me, clutching them, so he could attach them to my head.

“So we can monitor your brain activity.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Yeah. It’s important for us to understand what’s going on when we’re able to do these things.”

“Is it? What is going on?”

“We’re not completely sure yet.”

I wondered who he was referring to when he said ‘we,’ but I was too intimidated by what was about to happen to ask any more questions. What if I wasn’t able to do anything? Would I be singled out as the fake I believed I was?

I sat in the chair as he attached the electrodes to my temples.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I gave a brief nod. “Yeah, let’s just do this.”

This didn’t feel like I was in training. I felt like I was in a science lab. A shiver caused my shoulders to shudder. He sat behind a computer, where I assumed my brainwaves were now showing, darting up and down in a mountain range of peaks and troughs.

“Let’s start with the lightest object,” he said. “The tennis ball.”

Nerves jangled through me. I felt like I was sitting a test I hadn’t been to the classes for, never mind studied to take. I had a reoccurring dream where that happened, and the emotions hitting me now were exactly the same.

I tried to settle my nerves and focus on the job at hand. I took a shaky breath and glanced over at the table. I’d barely finished the intake of air when every single item on the table rose upward and hovered.

I caught my breath, staring, fixated. I didn’t feel as though I’d even done anything, but there it was, everything hovering in midair. I froze, unsure what to do now. Was this some kind of trick? Was Kit playing with me?

Averting my gaze from the items to glance over at him, a massive crash sounded as everything plummeted back to the table. The ball and a rock rolled off, hitting the floor.

I thought Kit would have been looking at me, or even the objects, but instead he was frowning at the computer screen.

“Did you do that?” I demanded, but he ignored my question. He jiggled the mouse, then got up and approached me. He readjusted the electrodes and tried again. He seemed less bothered by the floating things than he did the computer.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. The readings are all over the place.”

“They are? What does that mean?”

“You must be interfering with them in some way.”

My mouth dropped. “Me? I’m just sitting here.”

“No, you’re not. You lifted everything on the table, and your brainwaves went insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’m not doing anything deliberately,” I said, my anxiety increasing.

His eyes narrowed, a muscle in his temple twitching. Did he think I was lying?

From the corner of my vision, I caught movement. Turning toward the floor to ceiling glass that divided us from the rest of the Cavern, I saw people had started to notice something unusual was going on. They had all stopped what they were doing and were watching me instead. Talk about a fish in a bowl. I didn’t like the feeling of being scrutinized. I was already claustrophobic from being underground, but now the walls pressed in on me from all sides. My breath grew shallow, a tremble affecting my hands. The electrodes on my head felt like they were boring into my skull, the pressure forcing themselves inward, like clamps instead of two circles of rubber.

With a gasp, I shot to my feet and yanked the wires from skin. “No, stop. I can’t do this,” I managed.

To my left, a massive crack issued through the air, and the blood in my veins turned to ice. I was transported back into the moment of the bombing, and my vision tunneled with panic.

I was barely aware of Kit on his feet, both hands held out toward me as though calming a wild animal.

“Everything is okay, Ari,” he said, keeping his voice calm, though I detected a tremor of uncertainty beneath it. “Take some deep breaths and control your emotions. You’re safe here. Everything is fine. We’re not going to do anything you don’t want to do.”

I sucked in air, desperately trying to calm myself. I didn’t want to look at what had caused the huge crack next to me, instead staring at the floor and trying to imagine myself somewhere else. I forced my thoughts to go back to the previous night, where I’d been lying in bed with Hunter beside me, staring at the familiar ceiling of my bedroom and enjoying the sensation of having a man beside me.

Gradually, my panic retreated, and my heart rate slowed, my breathing returning to normal. I stayed in position for a few beats longer, not wanting to risk the attack returning, and then I lifted my head.

Kit was staring at me with concern in his eyes, but not just concern—something else …

Fear. Alarm. Nothing good.

I needed to know what had happened. Though I was aware of all the people standing on the other side of the glass, all watching the freak who’d been brought to live with them, I turned and looked.

To my surprise, the others were no longer standing so close. They’d all retreated to the other side of the Cavern, though they still watched me with expressions not unlike the one I’d seen on Kit’s face.

My line of sight readjusted and I saw why.

Starting at the top of the glass dividing the space I was currently in from the rest of the Cavern, a massive crack ran in jagged lines right down to the floor.

Chapter Thirteen

I stared at the huge crack in horror. It loomed above me, a physical threat that might give way at any moment. I must have been the one to cause it while I’d been in the grip of my panic attack, but I hadn’t done it intentionally. From the size of the fracture, I was amazed the entire pane hadn’t shattered, dumping broken glass down on everyone. From the look on everyone’s faces, I could see they were thinking exactly the same thing.

I turned to Kit. “I didn’t mean to,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know what happened.”

“It’s okay,” he said, though still wary. “We’re going to have to try to get out of here without the glass crashing down on us.”

The doorway out into the rest of the Cavern was to the left of the crack and was also made of glass. It was, however, mercifully intact, though there was the worry the movement needed to open the door allowing us to get out would bring the glass down on our heads.

“I’ll open the door,” I said, stepping toward it, but Kit’s hand caught my arm.

“Uh, uh. No, you won’t.”

His eyes narrowed as he focused his gaze on the glass door. So slowly I almost missed it happening, the door began to push open. I caught my breath, my eyes fixated on the crack in the glass, expecting it to go at any moment. So slowly, it was hard to see, the door edged open. When the gap was big enough for Kit to get through without touching the rest of the glass, he moved his attention away and jerked his head to motion me forward.

I didn’t want to go out there with all those other people, but I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t exactly stay in here, and it wasn’t as though I was even hiding—everyone was still watching me through the cracked glass. My face burned with shame as I followed Kit through the gap, cringing away from the danger as I did so. The moment I passed beneath it—aware that if the bottom half fell away, it could act like a guillotine on my body, slicing me right through the middle—I ducked away and created some distance.

Back in the rocky part of the Cavern, I allowed myself to breathe.

The friendliness I’d experienced from everyone when I’d first arrived had vanished. Now I received mistrustful glances and frowns, or even worse, I was completely ignored. Dixie and Sledge still smiled over me, but even I could see the expressions were strained.

A familiar figure appeared through the group, hurrying toward me.

Hunter! I didn’t think I’d ever been so pleased to see someone.

“Ari,” Hunter said, his face shadowy with concern, but thankfully with none of the wariness I’d seen on the others. “You okay? Dixie told me what happened.”

“She did?” I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I knew myself.

“She made a good guess.”

I looked over to where Dixie was standing with Sledge’s arm around her shoulders. She gave a shrug, almost an apology. I figured she’d been able to pick up on what had happened, the same way she’d known about my thoughts about her lying on my bed earlier.

I lowered my voice. “Where have you been?”

His arm wrapped around my waist and he squeezed me tight, but mainly to whisper in my ear. “I’ll tell you later.”

I leaned away to look into his face. His eyes told me that he had something to tell me, but that he didn’t want to say it in front of everyone else.

“So what did happen?” he asked.

“Honestly, I have no idea.”

Kit stepped toward us. “Her abilities are far beyond what we’ve come across before,” he said, addressing Hunter. “The problem is, she has no idea how to control them, or even when she’s using them.”

“Hey,” I snapped. “I am here, you know.”

He turned to me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I get it. I said I was sorry. I’m still not completely sure I was the one who lifted all those things off the table.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Ari,” Kit said. “You haven’t even tried yet, and look what you’re able to do.”

Hunter nodded. “The same thing happened when we first met, do you remember? You launched a huge trashcan out into the road, and thought I did it.”

“Okaaay,” I said, though a part of me still felt like this was one massive joke. I looked between Kit and Hunter. “So, I need to learn how to control my ability to move things.”

Hunter touched the back of my hand. “I don’t think you can just move things, Ari. I’ve seen you affect electrical currents as well. You started all the car alarms on your street, remember?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but closed it again. He was right. I also knew of numerous times where I’d burst light bulbs, and set televisions and radios going. It had been happening to me almost constantly since Karina’s death. Since the bombing.

“So, I can move stuff, and control electricity.”

Hunter frowned at me. “What about natural elements? Water and air.”

“Umm …” I thought hard. “The faucet and shower have an unnerving habit of coming on around me, but that’s it.”

“No weather anomalies?”

I shook my head. “Not that I can think of. I mean, other than the ones when I’ve been around you.”

The two men exchanged a glance.

“What?” I said, trying not to get angry. I didn’t want a repeat of what had just happened.

Hunter spoke first. “Most people only have one affinity to a certain talent, and even then it takes time to train it. It’s taken me years to be able to do what I can do, and yet you’re able to do some pretty impressive stuff right off the bat. Plus, you seem to have an affinity to several talents—telekinesis, electrical, natural.”

I lifted a hand to halt him. “We’re only guessing the natural one.”

“Okay, but you definitely have the other two. You also have no history of ever breaking a bone, and the only hospital stay you’ve had was for the bombing where most other people were killed, and you only received a few grazes and bruises.”

I shrugged, awkwardly. “So what does that mean?”

“That if the government gets wind of this, they’re going to bust ass to get hold of you.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Get hold of me for what?”

“To use you. Or, if they think they can’t, they’ll kill you.”

“There’s something else,” said Kit. “You need to be able to control your abilities, or you’re a danger to us all. What if you were to bring the roof down upon our heads just because someone upset you? We’d all be buried under thousands of tons of rock.”

“I’d never do that!” I exclaimed, horrified at the idea. But he had a point. How did I know I wouldn’t do that?

He put out his hands. “It’s okay. Calm down. Take a breath.”

I didn’t like the way they were both looking at me—as though I was a bomb about to go off. Plus, there was nothing less likely to make a woman calm down than being told to calm down. But considering what had happened, I made myself do as he said, taking slow breaths and pushing all thoughts from my mind. The energy that had been building inside me slowly faded away.

“I’m fine,” I told them both, as soon as I was.

Hunter caught me by the elbow, but spoke to Kit. “I’ll take Ari into the kitchen. She needs a break from all of this.”

Kit nodded. “Okay, I don’t want her around while we trying to dismantle the glass anyway. It’s going to take some finesse to get it down without it breaking into a million pieces.”

“What about using Natasha?” Hunter suggested.

I couldn’t help experiencing a zing of jealousy rush through me, wondering who Natasha was. Remembering I needed to stay in control, I tried to calm myself. I had no right to be jealous. It wasn’t as though Hunter and I had an actual relationship. He’d kissed me a couple of times, and one of those times had only been to make a point. Finding new recruits was his job. I was a new recruit, therefore spending time with me had also been his job. I wasn’t going to kid myself that we had anything more.

From the small group still hanging around, a tall, long-limbed girl with bouncy dark hair stepped forward.

I took a good guess that she was Natasha. Typical.

“Can you help?” Hunter asked her.

She nodded, giving me an uneasy side glance as she did. “I can try.”

I frowned. My confusion as to how she could help must have been clear on my face.

“Natasha has an affinity for changing temperature,” Hunter explained.

“Seriously?”

He nodded. “Watch.”

I didn’t know how that was going to help anything, but I had to trust they knew what they were doing—far more than I did, anyway.

Everyone stepped back, giving Natasha space. She stared up, focusing on the top of the crack I had caused. I was worried the whole thing would fall apart—I already felt like public enemy number one, but I’d be worse then. Her already high cheekbones grew more pronounced as her expression grew rigid, her full lips tightening, her dark eyes narrowing. As she stared, the line of the crack at the top began to glow a bright orange. The glow moved downward, following the fissure, like lava tracking down a fault in a volcano. The glass glowed bright orange with white in its center, and red around the edges. The heat and color faded from one area as she moved to the next, somehow heating the glass enough to cause the crack to melt and mold. Natasha reached the bottom then moved back to the start, now cooling the glass in the same way she’d heated it. The process was fascinating to watch. There was no other explanation for it happening than what she was doing. Any skepticism I held fell away. This might have been explained scientifically with brain waves and distribution of energy, but right now it looked like magic.

“There,” Natasha said, blinking herself out of the trance-like state she’d been in. “It’s not perfect, but it should hold.”

I could still see where the crack had been—the glass was now cloudy and blackened at the edges where it had previously been a jagged line—but it appeared solid. From the notable lightening of tension in the room, it was clear everyone else felt safer, too. Soft conversation broke out among the others, and a number wandered away to do something else, the interesting part of the day apparently over. I didn’t even know the names of half of the other Kin, and I didn’t feel as though I’d left them with the best impression of me.

“Come on,” said Hunter, his fingers pressing against my shoulder to guide me out of the Cavern and back down toward the living area. “Let’s take a break.”

We didn’t speak again until we were in the kitchen, with Hunter brewing a pot of coffee while I perched on the stool at the counter. No one else was around, and Hunter paused what he was doing to gently push the door shut. At least down here everything was made from good old concrete and wood, and I didn’t need to worry about shattering any more glass.

He placed the coffee down in front of me and sat on the adjacent stool.

“So,” he started, “Kit sent me off on a wild goose chase.”

I blinked. “What? Why would he do that?”

“Because he didn’t want me in the way.”

“Way of what?”

He lifted his eyebrows at me, and the penny dropped. “Oh, no. I seriously don’t think so. The guy doesn’t even like me.”

“Whether or not he likes you is irrelevant. I think he has a fascination with you.” He held my gaze. “Of course, I understand why.”

“You do?” My voice was unintentionally breathy.

“Sure. Talents like yours have never come along before. I can’t even imagine what your potential might be.”

“Oh, right, talents,” I flustered, heat creeping up my chest and settling in my face. What was it I’d expected him to say? That he thought Kit was fascinated with me because he thought I was beautiful? Not that I thought I was beautiful, but I guessed I’d hoped Hunter might have thought that.

“You kind of freaked everyone out with what happened back there, though,” he continued. “Did you seriously not know what you were doing?”

I shook my head. “Not a clue. Things started happening, and Kit put those electrodes on my head, and I began to feel claustrophobic and panicky, and the next thing I knew, the glass was breaking.” I looked away, focusing on my hands in my lap. I remembered what Kit had said. I needed to know if he’d been exaggerating, perhaps being dramatic because of what had happened. “Kit told me I was a danger to everyone here. He said I might bring the whole structure on everyone’s heads.”

I glanced back up at Hunter, to see what his reaction was. His hesitation was enough to tell me this was a possibility.

“I should leave,” I said abruptly, rising from the stool. “It’s as simple as that.”

Hunter reached out and pressed me back down again. “No, you need to learn to control what’s happening to you. What if we send you back home and someone upset you and you ended up killing them? A driver cuts you up on the road, and you flip his car without thinking about it? A shop assistant annoys you so you electrocute them through their till …”

My eyes widened. “I wouldn’t do that!”

“Ari, you’re doing these things without even realizing it. Your abilities are getting stronger.”

“What about the others when they first came here? Didn’t everyone else have to deal with this kind of thing, too?”

He shook his head. “Ari, most people have to train their abilities for months before they’re able to do what you’re doing. It can take days or even weeks just to lift the tennis ball, or illuminate a light bulb without touching it. We’ve never seen anyone do what you did today.”

I put my face in my hands. “I don’t know what to do to control it.”

He reached out and gently pulled my hands away. “It’s all about your emotions, Ari. You’re feeling things too strongly.”

“I can’t just turn off my feelings.”

His face took on a strangely hard angle. “You might have to, at least until you can figure out how to control what you can do.”

Turn off my feelings? I toyed with the idea in my head. Was such a thing even possible? Of course, if I was able to turn off everything I felt, it would mean I’d shut my heart off from Hunter, too.

Perhaps that was the safest thing for us both.

Chapter Fourteen

I didn’t try to do anything else for the rest of the day, too worried about what might happen if I did. Instead, I ate lunch at the big table in the common room with everyone else. Hunter introduced me to several of the other Kin who I hadn’t yet met officially, but who I’d spotted as being part of the crowd who’d been watching me through the glass. The girl sitting opposite me was Ashley. She was from Arkansas—I mentally repeated in my head Ashley from Arkansas to try to remember—and wore black framed glasses that were too large for her face. I got the impression she didn’t want to make eye contact with me when we were introduced, though I couldn’t figure out if she was shy, or if what I’d done made her nervous. Beside her sat a slightly overweight guy with prematurely thinning hair who chewed gum the whole time he was eating, something I found weirdly fascinating. His name was Russell, and he was the opposite of Ashley in that I kept looking up to find him staring at me. Whenever our gazes met, he looked away again, returning to chewing either his gum or meal—I still hadn’t quite figured out which.

Hunter nodded to a couple of others and told me their names, which promptly left my head. They all gave me half smiles and continued with their own conversations. I’d been seated between Hunter and Dixie, and felt safe under both their wings. If only I didn’t have to deal with some of the rest of them. Kit was at the head of the table, and I caught him watching me several times during the meal. Natasha had taken the seat on the other side of Hunter, and I tried not to notice the number of times she laughed at something he said, or flicked back her hair, or touched him on the arm. She’d barely said a word to me, and again, I didn’t know if she was normally standoffish, or if what I’d done had made people distance themselves from me.

When lunch was finished, most of us headed back into the Cavern. It seemed everyone else already knew where their skills lay, and went to the appropriate rooms. Those who had been at the Cavern the longest—Hunter, Kit, Dixie, and a couple of the others—led the training.

I lurked around, unsure of myself, moving from room to room, and trying to act as though I belonged. Both Hunter and Kit had already made it clear that I wasn’t going to be involved in any more exercises for the day. I didn’t think they quite knew what to do with me, which was hardly surprising as I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Instead, I watched the others as they went about their training. Kit was right when he said none of the other Kin were like me. They all appeared so in control and reserved. The few frustrations they did have were taken out in a normal way—swearing, and the occasional hand in the hair. No one else made a scene.

We ate dinner together that evening, and then I made my excuses and took myself off to bed. Dixie wasn’t around—I assumed she and Sledge had gone somewhere for some privacy—and Hunter had been busy with his own stuff. Curling beneath the covers, the lighting set to dim rather than full power—turning them off completely would have meant plunging myself into total black, something I wasn’t going to do on my first night in a strange place deep underground—I stared at the photographs of my family which I’d arranged on the bedside table. Loneliness swept over me, causing my heart to clench inside my chest, and I blinked back tears. I wished Karina was still alive, and that she was by my side to help me through this.

I didn’t think I’d ever missed my sister more than in that moment.

***

First night in my new bed, and my sleep was fitful and full of nightmares. I dreamed of being in a box made of glass walls. Faces loomed beyond the walls, looking in from all sides, watching me—no, not just watching, but studying, criticizing, inspecting. I spotted faces I recognized—Hunter, my father, even my sister in a fleeting glimpse, and someone I thought to be my mother, but who could have been someone completely different, but warped in that strange way dreams did. The walls of the box began to move inward, reducing the space I had to move. I called out to everyone to help me, battered my hands against the glass panels. I couldn’t understand why no one was helping me, but instead continued to look at me as though I was insane.

Suddenly, the reason came to me. There was nothing external pushing the glass in toward me, bringing down the clear ceiling, forcing me into a smaller and smaller place until I thought it would crush me. The people outside couldn’t do anything to help or stop it, because I was the one making the walls move.

I was doing this to myself.

***

I woke, coated in sweat, panting hard and trying to shed the panic of my dream. Bolting upright in bed, I smacked my head against something hard above me. Confusion about where I was filled me. I was in darkness now, where I’d gone to sleep with the light on. Perhaps Dixie had come in and switched off my security light, yet I felt hemmed in, something directly above me, and the bed below. Had I somehow ended up in my dream? I reached out for the light on the bedside table, but my hand grasped only air.

“Ari?” Dixie’s voice came to me, but there was something wrong about it. Too far away, in the wrong direction.

Using my will, I focused my energy, telling the light to turn on. Instead of just my dim bedside lamp, the room filled with bright white illumination, one of the lights only inches from my face.

That was when I realized that while caught in the panic of my nightmare, I’d somehow caused my bed to elevate with me still lying on it. I was floating only inches away from the ceiling. My surprise at this revelation caused my panic to retreat and the bed dropped back to the floor with a bone-jarring crash.

Dixie was staring at me wide-eyed, biting her lip, as though she didn’t know if she was going to scream or burst out laughing. I sat, frozen, gripping the sides of my bed, half-terrified it was going to start moving again. Everything stayed as it was, and I allowed myself to exhale.

“Oh, my God, Ari!” Dixie declared. “No wonder you thought your sister was haunting you.”

She pulled a face at the look I gave her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Too soon? I have no filter.”

I threw my hands over my face. “No, you’re completely right! I’m such a freak!”

She left her bed to huddle onto mine, her arm around my shoulders. “Honey, we’re all freaks here.” She paused for effect. “Some are just a little more freakish than others.”

I jabbed her with my elbow, but let out a snort of laughter at the same time. I was glad I had her there. This place would have been a whole lot less welcoming without her.

“Has anything like that ever happened to you, Dixie?”

She twisted her lips and shook her head. “Nah. I’m not great with the telekinetic stuff. I mean, I can move things if I really try, but nothing massive. I’d struggle with a bed when I was awake, never mind doing it in my sleep.”

“But you have your other talent though,” I persisted, wanting information to try to understand what was happening to me a little more. “Can you control that? Hunter said you felt me wake up after the bombing.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t just waking up in the opening your eyes sense of the word. It was more like your mind had woken up to the possibility of what it was capable of doing. After a traumatic event—like for you, with the bomb—it’s as though our brains rewire themselves.”

“What was your event, Dixie?”

She glanced at me. “I almost drowned.”

“That must have been terrifying. What happened?”

She shook her head at herself. “Ah, it was stupid. I’m almost a little embarrassed to tell you after what you went through.”

“It’s fine, just tell me.”

“I went to a beach party. There were drinks going around and everyone was having a good time, then some of the guys suggested we go skinny dipping. I’d had a couple of beers by this point and it sounded like fun, so I jumped right in.  I was showing off a bit—there were some cute guys there—and so I swam out a little too deep. I hadn’t realized I’d gotten caught in a current until I was too far away to get help. Then I got cramp in my legs and I was exhausted and I started to go under. The people back on the beach only just noticed something was wrong. It was dark, and they only had the moonlight to see me by.”

Her story held me rapt. “How did you survive?”

“I was lucky. The current washed me up on shore two miles farther down the beach. I was unconscious when they found me, but the moment I opened my eyes, I could hear them.”

I frowned. “Hear what?”

“All their thoughts, jangling around my head. I was unconscious, half-drowned, and naked. I remember one of the other girls thinking I needed to cut down on the fast food.” She gave a laugh. “I mean, I was half dead and this chick was criticizing my figure.”

“That’s nuts,” I said. “You have a gorgeous figure.”

Dixie waved me off. “I won’t tell you what some of the guys were thinking, but trust me, it wasn’t a criticism.” Her eyebrows lifted, her lips pressed together in a mischievous smile.

“That must have been insane, hearing everyone like that. You must have been terrified.”

“I thought I was going crazy. I started researching things on the internet, and stumbled across Kit on a forum. He’d already met Natasha by this point, and Hunter came along not long after. It felt good to meet people who were also experiencing these things, and one by one we started to put our experiences together—our mothers all dying from an aneurysm, and that we’d all started to be able to do insane things not long after being involved in an accident of some kind. I started being able to filter out what I was hearing, and by doing that I realized I could also sense when another one of us had woken up.”

My curiosity hadn’t yet been sated. “So when you sense us ‘wake up,’ what does that feel like?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like a distant light goes on in my head, or like I can feel a warmth from a certain direction and I’m drawn to it.”

“And you’re able to direct Hunter or Kit to the new person.”

She smiled. “Exactly.”

I was being selfish by asking the next question, but I needed to know exactly how many of my private thoughts Dixie could pick out of my head. “So, can you still hear what everyone else here is thinking?”

She shrugged. “Most of the time it just hits me. It’s like someone has spoken words into my head, and I just know them. I try not to pay any attention when I’m around you guys, but it’s hard. For example, I can’t help but pick up on this thing you and Hunter have going on between you.”

My cheeks warmed. “There’s nothing going on. Seriously. I’ve barely seen him since I’ve been here.”

“Hmm. That may be so, but I think even someone without my abilities would be able to see there’s a connection between the two of you.”

I shook my head. “I think you’re wrong there. I think Hunter and Natasha are more suited, and she clearly likes him.”

Dixie surprised me by bursting out laughing. “Oh, honey. Natasha’s more likely to want to spend time in your company than Hunter’s, if you get what I’m saying.”

My eyes widened. “Oh, she’s gay?”

“I’m not going to gossip, but you don’t need to worry about Natasha being competition for Hunter. Besides, Hunter wouldn’t be interested in her even if she was in him. It’s clear to everyone that he only has eyes for you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know about that.”

“You might not, but everyone else does, including Kit. And I don’t know how that’s going to go down, if the two main men here are both after the same girl.”

My eyes widened. “You’re not talking about me!”

“Who else would I be talking about? Now, don’t go telling me I’m wrong. I can see into people’s heads, remember.”

“I’m not interested in Kit,” I said, firmly.

“You don’t need to convince me, but you might want to make sure Kit knows that. Hunter, too. We still don’t know the full background of what we are and what made us this way. We need to be a united group if we’re going to fight them one day, and it won’t help if something or someone comes between us.”

Her words were a warning to me.

“Who are we going to fight?”

“The people who want to use us. The same ones we think created us in the first place.”

Chapter Fifteen

The following day passed with me trying not to get in the way of everyone else. I stayed back, didn’t make nuisance of myself, and tried to blend in with the background. I was a sponge for information, listening in on other people’s conversations, trying to learn everything I could about what we were. I’d been hoping for definitive answers, but instead it seemed everyone made vague references to this being the government’s fault and that those were the people after us, though no one had names of people or even a specific department. If I hadn’t seen and experienced everything I had, I’d have thought this was all one paranoid conspiracy theory.

Most of the other Kin were cautious of me, but the longer I spent with them, the warmer they became. I learned several of Kin had only been discovered a matter of weeks and others months ago. Everyone was free to come and go as they pleased. No one was a prisoner down here. Most people were telekinetic, in the way they could move things with their minds. Only a few had different connections with the talent, such as Hunter with the air and Natasha with heat and cold. Affecting electricity, I discovered, was more common, though I’d only found two other people so far other than myself who were able to do it—Franklin, a skinny, tall guy from Missouri, and Caro, a girl with red hair who’d left New York to come here.

I also discovered that it was unusual to find one of us living so close to the location of the Cavern, and part of Hunter’s job was traveling all over the country to track us down. I hoped Dixie wasn’t going to sense someone else anytime soon. I didn’t want to lose Hunter for days or even weeks while he went to bring in a new member. If it happened, I’d offer to go with him, but I knew my offer would be refused. I was still considered a liability.

Did they send Hunter after people because of how he looked, I mused over coffee as I sat in the kitchen. He was the type of guy most other men warmed to quickly, but women would want him around for a whole different reason.

“Are you ready to get back on the horse?”

Kit’s voice made me jump and I spun around to face him. “Am I what?”

“We can’t allow one little mishap to bring your training to a complete halt.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “It was hardly one little mishap.”

“Okay, but I think you of all people are most in need of continuing your training. With the others, we’ve trained them to get stronger, but we’re working the other way with you. We need to figure out how to rein you in.”

I thought of something. “Who trained you, Kit?”

He glanced away. “No one did. I had to figure things out for myself.”

“You did? That must have been hard.”

“Yes, it was.”

I could sense that he’d clamped down on me. He might not want to speak about this, but if I was to put myself in his hands, I figured I was allowed to find out more about him.

“What was your traumatic event?”

He looked at me with a frown. “Sorry?”

“The thing that made you like you are now.”

For a moment, I didn’t think he was going to answer, but then he spoke.

“Car crash. My little brother died. You might have read about it in the newspapers.”

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

I had read it in the papers. It was all over the news when it happened. The fifteen year old son of the multi-millionaire Philip Middleton, founder of the Myriad Corporation, dying in a car accident while his older son walked away unscathed. Everyone had been talking about how it didn’t matter how much money a person had when something like that happened to them. It was a tragedy for the family. You could never get over losing a son.

I remembered something else and the words flew from my mouth before I’d given thought to their impact. “You were the one driving!”

“It was an accident,” he snapped. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“Of course it could.” I put out a hand, but wasn’t sure what I intended to do. The pain in his words was palpable. He gave my hand a mistrustful look, and I pulled it back in again.

“I blamed myself for my sister’s death, too,” I said, instead. “I was the one to suggest meeting at the café where it happened. I wish every single day that I’d said somewhere else.”

“I don’t blame myself.” His tone was hard. “Now are we going to do this, or not?”

He clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

“Sure. Can we stay away from glass this time?”

I was only joking when I said it, but he nodded. “Yes, we will.”

I hesitated before making my other suggestion, unsure of how he would take it. “And maybe with fewer people around? I’d like Hunter to be there, though, and maybe Dixie. I don’t know why, but I feel more secure when they’re around.”

He fixed me with his blue gaze—a glacier of cool emotion. “Are you saying I don’t make you feel safe, Ari?”

My cheeks heated. “No, I mean … it’s not that … I just …”

He ignored my flustering. “Come on, this way.”

He led me to a part of the Cavern I hadn’t been to before—a second tunnel on the opposite side to our living area. I followed him, curious, but also wondering if my request for Hunter and Dixie had been side-swiped by a deliberate attempt to make me feel awkward. He was right when he said he didn’t make me feel safe. He made me feel the complete opposite.

We walked through the rock, heading deeper into the earth. My claustrophobia threatened to raise its ugly head again, but I breathed deeply through my nose and focused on Kit’s back rather than the walls surrounding me, and the roof pressing down on my head. The tunnel was lit; small bulbs strung across the uneven rock walls.

But when we stepped from the tunnel, only darkness stretched on ahead. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being in a dark space, alone with Kit. I could tell the space in front of me was vast, purely by the change in the air and the coolness of the temperature in here. The dim light from the tunnel lit only our backs and a couple of feet into the new area. I could make out a continuation of the rock floor and walls, but that was all.

“Where are we?” My words echoed back at me.

Kit spoke beside me, but I couldn’t make out his features. “The electricity training room back in the Cavern is just a taster. This is the real thing.”

My stomach churned with nerves. “Is it?”

“We can do so much more than turning on televisions with our minds or lifting household objects into the air. You’re something special, Ari. We all are. Sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves of that.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Your brain is constantly firing out an electrical charge. You need to focus that charge and push it outward.”

“Toward what?”

“You’ll see.”

His lack of instruction was frustrating and I gave a sigh. “Okay, fine.” Nervous energy jangled through me, but after the last time, I was frightened of what I might do. Images of the roof and walls collapsing down around us, burying us, just like my sister had been buried during the explosion, filled my mind. I was holding back, frightened of pushing my internal energy outward.

Kit’s voice came from beside me. “You’re going to have to let go. You’ll never learn how to control it if you don’t.”

Why was it so important to him for me to learn, anyway? Why didn’t they all just leave me out in the real world? Surely it would have been safer for everyone down here.

“I can’t.” I shook my head, even though no one could see me. “I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can. Just let it go.”

For a moment, I wondered if he’d do or say something to get an emotional reaction out of me, like Hunter had done outside of my house to make all the car alarms go off. But then I reasoned that Kit didn’t want to get a reaction out of me. He’d already seen what happened when I had a bad reaction to something, and if he tried anything, he definitely wouldn’t get a good one.

I had no idea what I was doing. Quite literally stabbing in the dark. But I focused inward and exhaled, trying to project my thoughts forward.

At first I didn’t think anything had happened, but then a pinprick of light appeared above my head, followed by another one, and another. I felt it growing inside me, tumultuous energy that snowballed, building momentum. But where the energy when I’d been lifting things had been bad—frightening, panicky, overwhelming—now I experienced something akin to euphoria. It tumbled from me, giving birth to a new force, and with it came light.

The handful of lights on the roof gradually spread, illuminating first one area, and spreading to the next. It was beautiful to watch, hundreds of tiny LED lights attached to the rocky roof of what appeared to be a second cave very similar to the Cavern. The energy continued to spill from my mind and still more of the lights illuminated until they stretched right to the other side of the cave. It was like looking up at the night sky, dotted by hundreds, if not a thousand, stars.

I sensed Kit glance over at me. “You did it, Ari.”

I had. Every light in the space had been lit, but still I felt the energy pour from me. It was too good a feeling to stop, but as that realization came, so did the first thread of panic.

“I’m not …” I tried. “I don’t think I can stop it.”

“You can,” he said firmly. “Yes, you can.”

“No, it’s stronger than me.” It was as though I’d found myself caught in the rapids of a river, and I didn’t know how to fight the flow. I tried to pull it back, but my struggles only made it worse, increasing my anxiety.

Above my head, one of the lights darkened with a hollow pop. A tinkling of glass confetti sprinkled over my shoulders.

“Kit!”

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Just calm down. This is the point you need to learn to control. This is the whole reason we’re here.”

Another light went pop, then another, and another, until a whole section of the cave ceiling was in darkness. And still it kept coming, the overload of power which I knew was causing the electricity feeding the bulbs and making them burst.

“Breathe, Ari,” Kit said, his tone commanding, similar to how he’d spoken to me last time. “Deep breath. In through the nose and slowly out through the mouth. Count backward from ten in your mind. Refocus that energy.”

I did as he instructed. Ten … nine … eight … seven …

Like corn in the microwave once most of the kernels have already popped, the bursting of the bulbs began to slow. Inside me, the storm began to calm. The final bulb burst, eradicating the small amount of illumination it had caused, but I was able to focus again.

“It’s okay,” I managed to say, though I felt spaced out from the experience. “It’s finished. It’s over.”

Kit’s lips twitched at the corners. I figured that was as close to a smile as he got. “I said you could do it.”

I surveyed the disaster I’d caused. What had been an almost magical light show was now a blotchy mess of partially lit patches. I couldn’t see the ground, but I knew tiny shards of glass covered the surface. I didn’t like to think who would be in charge of replacing all the bulbs I’d broken. It would take forever, and I had no idea how someone would go around reaching them all. They were going to need one hell of a step ladder.

I said all of this to Kit.

“We have people who can lift things without the constraints of a human body,” he said. “You could probably do it yourself, if you had more control.”

“I don’t, though, do I?”

“Not yet, but I think you can get better. I’ve never seen anyone do what you just did.”

“What? Breaking things again?”

He shook his head. “No, lighting the whole cave. Those who are able to control electricity have only managed a small corner, and that was after weeks of practice. You just lit every single bulb in a matter of seconds.”

The sound of footsteps running down the passageway behind us made us both turn.

Hunter burst out into the cave, his features thunderous. “What the hell is going on?”

“Hunter, it’s okay,” I said. “Kit’s been teaching me how to control what I can do.”

Hunter’s gaze lifted to the cave roof, scanning the once star-like illumination, and then, with a frown creasing lines between his eyebrows, down to the ground. “Doesn’t look like he’s doing a very good job of it.”

His words hurt. Perhaps I’d wanted him to tell me well done for trying, or that I was getting better. Instead, he seemed angry at Kit for letting me attempt it. I wondered why Hunter had even brought me here if he didn’t want me to learn.

“I’m trying, Hunter. I might not be perfect, but I’m trying.”

“You were going to leave not so long ago,” he snapped back. “Both of you agreed you were a danger to everyone else, and yet here you are, doing something that might have gone horribly wrong. What if you’d brought the roof down?”

“She didn’t, though, did she?” said Kit. “And deciding what happens down here isn’t your role.”

Hunter glared at him. Was he worried for our safety, or was he just annoyed that Kit had spent time one-on-one with me? Dixie’s warning about me not coming between them played on my mind.

“It’s been a really long day,” I said. “Thank you for trying to help me, Kit. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to assist with the cleanup.”

I pushed past Hunter, not looking at him. I wasn’t sure why I was so angry at him. He was supposed to be supporting me, wasn’t he?

I couldn’t figure him out at all.

Chapter Sixteen

I didn’t sleep well that night, and was happy for morning to arrive.

Movement came from the bed on the other side of the room. Dixie was awake.

“Morning,” she said, her word stretched as she yawned and rubbed her hand over her face.

“Morning,” I replied, swinging my legs out of bed. I’d been playing over the incident with Hunter and Kit in my mind the whole night. A couple of days ago, I’d have thought I’d have been taking Hunter’s side on everything, and that Kit would have been the enemy, but weirdly, things seemed to have switched around. I’d made up my mind to confront Hunter and find out what the hell was going on with him. I couldn’t help but feel like there was more going on than him being worried about everyone’s safety while I was conducting my training. After all, it had been Kit who’d voiced his concerns initially, but Kit still seemed to have some faith in me. Hunter, it seemed, had none.

I rifled through the drawers containing my clothes, picking out what I needed to get dressed. Breakfast would be on the table in five minutes, and I wanted to be there, waiting, when Hunter came in. I picked up a sweater and looked under a pair of jeans, and frowned.

I turned to my roommate who was getting dressed on her side of the room. “Hey, Dixie, have you seen my socks—the merino wool ones?”

“The pink ones?” she asked.

“Yeah. I can’t find them anywhere.”

They might only be socks, but they were the best money could buy. They were a little home comfort, and I wanted them.

“You sure you didn’t put them in the laundry?” she said with a frown.

“No. I laundered them yesterday and dried them, balled them back up, and put them in my drawer. I’m always careful with those ones ’cause they can’t be tumble dried.” Finding socks that would keep my toes snug was a big thing for me. They might only be socks to anyone else, but I hated having cold feet.

She shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

“Yeah, I guess so.

I finished getting dressed then went into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. I stopped short. My favorite moisturizer had been squeezed out all over the sink. A spark of irritation ran though me, and I clamped down on it before my surroundings reacted to my emotions.

“Dixie,” I called out.

“Yeah?” she shouted back from the adjoining bedroom.

“Did you try out my moisturizer?”

She appeared in the doorway, a frown on her face. “No. Why?”

I gave a sigh. “Don’t worry. I must have left the lid off.”

“Oh, right.” She vanished from the doorway again.

I set about cleaning up the mess, suddenly despondent again. Had someone been messing around with my stuff? I didn’t think it would be Dixie—I trusted her—but there were plenty of others down here who I wasn’t so close to.

Voices came from the corridor outside, followed by the sound of feet running.

“What’s going on?” I asked Dixie. I figured she might have picked up on some information, though I knew she wasn’t supposed to use her abilities on us.

“I think we should get to the Cavern,” she said.

Leaving everything where it was, we followed the backs of several of the others, who all must have had the same idea.

We entered the Cavern to find Franklin, the tall, skinny guy who was able to connect to electricity, doubled over and breathing hard. A small crowd had gathered around him, a murmur of unease rising from the group. I spotted Hunter among them, but he didn’t look at me.

Kit pushed through. “Give him some space, guys.”

Dixie leaned into me and spoke against my ear. “Franklin’s been out in the city. Doesn’t look like it went too well.”

“What’s going on, Franklin?” Kit asked him. “What happened?”

“I think … they’re getting … closer,” the other man said between breaths.

“Who?”

“The men … in black.” He started to regain his composure and straightened. “I just had one of them chase me right across the city. They must have figured out we’re holing up somewhere nearby. You saw one when you were bringing Arianna back here, didn’t you, Hunter?”

All eyes turned to Hunter and he nodded. “Yeah, one of them followed Ari and me, but we lost him.”

Kit stepped forward. “They don’t know this is where we’re gathering. The only reason they’d be in the city is if they’re searching for Ari.”

Damn. Why did everything seem to fall back on me?

“Me?” I managed. “Why would they be searching for me?”

“If they figured out you were one of the children from the experiments they’d been conducting on all our mothers, and then planted the bomb to see if the explosion would free up your powers—which it did—then they would have been watching you for any signs. You vanishing would have been enough for them to start wondering if you were one of the few to be affected.”

I was starting to feel as though everything was my fault. “I never asked for any of this!”

“None of us did.”

“Look.” My brain was whirring. “If they thought I might have these … talents … and was trying to weed me out, why wouldn’t they have just come to my house and taken me in from there?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to have to explain your disappearance to anyone. They thought you’d be missed.”

“But they’re happy to kill my sister and a bunch of other people,” I snapped. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Remember, there were thousands of women given this drug, but only a few of the resulting pregnancies resulted in people like us. I don’t know, maybe there were a few women in your area who were given it, and they were trying to weed people out.”

I still wasn’t buying it. “I think you’re on the wrong track with the bombing. I don’t know who was responsible, but I don’t think it was the government trying to activate these abilities we have.”

“Why else would they be here if it wasn’t for that?”

I waved my hands around. “Because they caught wind of all this. Isn’t it possible they’ve found out we’re congregating somewhere in San Francisco and they’re trying to find us? Not just me, but all of us.”

Everyone exchanged glances, and I knew I might have stumbled upon a possibility. I hated that I was the one to be the bearer of bad news again.

“If the government is getting closer to us, we need to be ready,” said Kit.

Hunter stepped in. “Then we need to work more with Ari.”

My eyebrows shot up my forehead. “Oh, no, we don’t.”

Why the hell was he suggesting this now, after he’d bitten Kit’s head off the previous day for working with me? This guy ran hot and cold more than the faucet.

“Yes, we do, Ari. You could be our most powerful weapon. You could be stronger alone than all the rest of us put together.”

Everyone’s eyes focused on me again. I didn’t want to be singled out. I wanted to fit in with the rest of them. But what could I say?

“I don’t want to train here,” I said. “We need to go somewhere I’m not going to freak out that I’m going to bring the roof down on everyone’s heads.”

Kit nodded. “We can do that.”

Dixie, who had been standing close by, bounced up and down and clapped her hands. “Yay! Road trip!”

I smiled over at her, thankful to have someone on my side.

Honestly, I was almost looking forward to getting out of here myself. It had only been three days, but this place was intense and claustrophobic. We might be safe from whoever was trying to track us down out there, but I didn’t feel safe from myself.

“I’ll go, too,” said Hunter glancing over and giving me a half smile.

I smiled back. I felt as though I’d barely seen him since I’d been here, except when he wanted to interrupt to tell me off, which was crazy when we were effectively living in the same place. He was always busy, being whisked off for something or other. Even when we ate, and most people sat down, he stopped only to grab a bite and leave again. Nothing had really happened between us, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. I wondered if he’d only used my attraction toward him as a way of getting me down here. Now his job was done, and he didn’t need to pretend to like me anymore. At least he’d offered to come along to help train me. I knew it was just another part of the role he’d been given in all of this, but his presence still made me feel better.

“You can take my car,” said Kit. “Get Ari a good distance away from here, somewhere you won’t be noticed by any locals. And be careful. Make sure no one is following you.”

“Are you not coming?” I asked him, surprised. I thought he didn’t trust me enough to leave me alone to wreak havoc.

“Hunter and Dixie can handle it. Take Sledge and Natasha with you, too.”

My heart sank a little at having Natasha around—I still didn’t think she liked me—but I saw Sledge and Dixie exchange a small smile at them being able to go off together. I wished I could have shared a similar moment with Hunter, but now I was here, he was treating me like one of the gang. The connection I’d believed we’d had during the night before coming here had all but vanished.

“We’ll leave in thirty minutes, so get yourselves ready,” said Hunter, addressing us all. “I suggest we head past San Jose, toward Tracy. That area is fairly unpopulated.” He glanced over to me. “We don’t quite know what we’re up against.”

Me. They were up against me, and my uncontrollable talents, though I thought I’d been damned reserved since the glass incident … Oh, and the bed incident, but I’d been sleeping and could hardly be held responsible for that. Besides, as far as I was aware, Dixie hadn’t told anyone else.

Everyone going agreed to meet back in the Cavern in half an hour.

We still hadn’t had breakfast, so we quickly swung by the kitchen to grab coffee and toast. I’d put my plans to confront Hunter to one side for the moment. If we were going to be out of the Cavern for the day, I was sure an opportunity to speak to him in private would arise. Besides, I thought I’d be more comfortable talking to him away from the confines of the Cavern. This place had a way of intensifying everything.

Dixie and I finished breakfast and headed back to our room. Dixie was right behind me, chatting to me as we stepped through the door.

I stopped short, my stomach lurching, and Dixie slamming into me from me.

“What the—!” she squeaked.

I didn’t answer, couldn’t even bring myself to turn around. My gaze was fixed on the photographs on the top of my bedside table, or at least I should say my lack of photographs. The pictures of my family which I’d brought from home were all missing. The frames still stood in place, but the spots behind the glass where my dad, mom, and sister had smiled out at me were no more than backing card.

Sucking in a breath, I broke my paralysis and stormed over to the frames. I picked each one up, turning it over in my hands, and checking on the floor and down the sides of my bed as though I thought the pictures might have escaped.

“What’s going on?” Dixie’s voice at my shoulder.

Something deep inside me had turned cold. “Someone stole the photographs of my family.”

“What?” She was at my side now, frowning as she did the same as I’d just done, checking around as though she’d see them lying on the floor. “Why would someone do that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I couldn’t get out of this place fast enough.

Chapter Seventeen

I didn’t know what lay ahead, but with everything going on, I desperately wanted to get out of the Cavern. I didn’t want to think of my photos missing. I’d taken comfort in being able to see their faces each time I sought sanctuary in here, but also I hated the idea someone down here would deliberately do something to upset me. I knew I wasn’t exactly popular, but the thought of someone wanting to drive me out made me feel sick.

The missing photographs weren’t my only reason for wanting to get out of here. I hadn’t seen any natural light in days, and though I’d sent my dad a couple of emails telling him everything was going well, I longed to hear his voice again. He’d replied to my emails saying he was missing me, but coping fine without me. Turns out, he was happy to get the television to himself to watch sports, rather than having to put up with my binge watching of Netflix series. For the first time, I wondered if perhaps it was time to move out for real. Maybe he did need his own space. I’d told myself I only stayed because I didn’t want to see him alone, but what if I had been the one who’d been afraid of being alone? My dad was a guy—a man’s man—and he didn’t need a twenty-two-year-old daughter constantly getting in his way.

I glanced over at my pictures for comfort, but remembered with a sinking heart that they were missing. Who had taken them? I knew I wasn’t exactly little miss popular around here, but to steal someone’s only photographs of their dead mother and sister was low.

“Right, that’s it,” I snapped, snatching up one of the empty frames.

Dixie straightened and looked over at me in alarm. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find out who took my pictures. Someone must know something.”

“Ari, wait.”

But I ignored her. I was fired up and I didn’t want her to talk me out of confronting everyone. I was sure it would do nothing for my popularity ranking, but I didn’t care.

I stormed out of the room and went back to the Cavern. Oblivious to my anger, people were milling around, those not joining us on the road trip either continuing with their training or standing around in small groups, talking.

I lifted the frame into the air, like I was holding a trophy, and called out, “I want to speak to whoever took the photographs of my family from my room.”

Everyone fell silent and numerous faces turned to look at me. I did my best to remain calm and hold back my emotions, even though everything about this situation made me emotional.

No one said a thing. A couple of people shook their heads and glanced at each other, but that was it.

I was aware Dixie had followed me out and was standing not far behind me.

“If you don’t like me, or don’t want me here,” I continued, addressing everyone as I had no idea who the culprit was, “that’s fine. I get it. But don’t take your dislike of me out on my things. Come and tell me face to face. We’ve all lost our mothers here. Ask yourself how you would feel if someone took the only photograph you had of your mom.”

Angry tears were building, and I didn’t want anyone to see them.

“I have to get ready to leave now, but while I’m gone, I hope whoever took the photos will have the decency to put them back again. I didn’t just lose my mother, I lost my sister, too, so have some damned sympathy.”

I knew I couldn’t hold back my frustration and heartbreak any longer, so I turned away from them all and ran back to my room. Dixie followed me back in.

“You okay?” she asked me.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll be glad to get out of here for a while.”

“Getting claustrophobic?”

I glanced at my empty photo frames. “Yeah, that as well.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Try not to worry about the pictures. I’m sure they’ll turn up. Someone is just messing around. I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by it.”

I remembered my missing socks, which were still nowhere to be seen, and the way my moisturizer looked as though it had been deliberately squirted all over the sink. I didn’t like other people touching my things, and righteous anger began to build inside my chest. “Whoever took them is nothing but a coward.”

“Ari …” Dixie warned as the lights in the room began to flicker.

I took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

How was I supposed to function when I couldn’t allow myself to think of anything that might upset me? Alarm bells were jangling inside me, and I couldn’t give any thought to them in case it caused me to do something stupid that put everyone’s lives in danger. The stifling walls of this place weren’t only housing my body, they were housing my mind and emotions, too.

Kit had helped with some coping techniques, but the last thing I felt was confident. This power I had was stronger than I was, and I didn’t trust myself with it. Once it was out, it was too easy to get caught up.

We grabbed what we needed and headed back into the Cavern. I felt even more self-conscious after my outburst. I wanted to skulk around with my head down and shoulders rounded, but I forced myself to keep my chin lifted and make eye contact with anyone who caught my gaze, though most people ignored me. No one approached me to own up to being the one responsible.

Dixie was even more excitable than her usual excitable self, and when she saw Sledge, she swung her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. I wondered why the two of them didn’t share a room. Kit must have rules about that kind of thing, or perhaps there simply weren’t enough rooms to start letting couples share, and they didn’t want to make others in the room feel awkward. They both seemed happy about the road trip, though I couldn’t shift the tension that had bored its way into my muscles and bones. The thought of spending the whole day with Hunter left me both anxious and filled with anticipation. The guy made me mad, but I still wanted to spend time with him.

We convened at the exit from the Cavern. I could tell others were talking about me again, from the way they spoke to each other from the sides of their mouths after quickly glancing at me and then away again. I was looking forward to being away from them all, even if it was to push myself out of my comfort zone again.

Hunter approached, walking with long strides across the Cavern. “Everyone ready?”

We nodded.

“Where’s Natasha?” he asked with a frown.

Footsteps ran up behind him. “Sorry, sorry. I’m here now.”

Her ponytail swung perfectly, her jeans fitted, sneakers on her feet. She was the epitome of casual, and yet she managed to look amazing. I wanted to hate her, but for once she gave me such a bright smile I couldn’t.

“This is exciting, huh?” she said. “We never get to go out as a group like this.”

Dixie hooked her arm around my neck. “We have Ari being crazy to thank for that.”

“Thanks, Dixie!” I protested, but only half-heartedly. It was nice to feel like part of the group.

We took the tunnel out of the cliff face, walking in a line between the candle-lit walls. We stepped out onto the shingle beach. Far above us, the Golden Gate Bridge stretched out toward San Francisco Bay. Cars, trucks, bikes, and pedestrians all crossed it, completely unaware of the group of outcasts below.

I spotted something on the beach.

A small rowboat sat on the shingle, pulled far enough up the narrow beach to be out of reach of the waves, and far enough under the cliff so it wouldn’t be spotted from the road or bridge above.

“Oh, is that for us?” I asked.

“You didn’t think we always climbed cliffs or jumped from bridges, did you?” Hunter said to me, that glint back in his dark eyes.

I shrugged. “Honestly, I think I’d believe anything at this point.”

We each grabbed an edge of the rowboat and hauled it down to the water, the wood crunching through the pebbles.

Natasha and I jumped in first, wobbling and squealing a little as we did so, grabbing onto each other for support. Sledge lifted Dixie and deposited her inside, and then climbed in himself, taking the middle seat and picking up an oar. Hunter gave us a final shove then jumped in after us and positioned himself next to Sledge.

The two men rowed with strong strokes. The small boat lurched in the surprisingly rough water. I calmed myself with the knowledge Hunter could use his skills to calm the waves if needed. They rowed the boat away from the bridge and around the headland.

Within ten minutes, we’d reached a more accessible cove. A postage stamp sized parking lot provided parking for tourists, or anyone else who wanted to visit the small beach. I recognized one of the cars parked there—the same one Kit had picked me up in a couple of days before.

“Kit’s letting us borrow his car?” I said in surprise.

“It’s kind of a community vehicle,” Hunter replied. “If we need to cover any distance, we’re free to use it.”

“Like when you go out to pick up new recruits?”

“Yeah, normally. Except with you, Kit suddenly found something else for me to do so he could do it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I almost felt I should be apologizing, though it wasn’t like I’d done anything wrong.

Hunter drove. Being larger and needing more space, Sledge called shotgun. That left us girls in the back—Dixie, with the shorter legs, squashed in the middle of Natasha and me. Hunter turned on the radio, and we sang along to the songs we knew as he drove.

For the first time since the bombing, I felt like a normal twenty-two-year-old.

***

An hour into the drive, we stopped at a service station. Everyone jumped out, happy to be in fresh air and open surroundings. The greenery around here was dry and bleached from the summer sun, but the amount of space made up for the somewhat barren scenery. Dixie and Sledge took off, hand in hand, into the store to browse the snacks. Natasha gestured toward the bathrooms and walked away, leaving Hunter and me standing awkwardly together. He’d barely said anything directly to me since finding me with Kit in the cave the previous day.

“Come here a second,” he said, jerking his head toward the side of the building.

I frowned. “What is it?”

“Just come with me.”

Was I in trouble? I wracked my brains for something else I’d done wrong. Perhaps he’d figured out who’d taken my stuff, but didn’t want to say anything in front of the others, though he could have easily told me with everyone out of earshot.

We rounded the corner of the store.

“What’s the—” I started, but didn’t get the chance to finish.

He used his body to command my movements, stepping forward to make me step back, so I hit the wall of the building. The concrete was hot and gritty against the backs of my shoulders. I opened my mouth in a gasp of shock, but then his hand was in my hair and his mouth was on mine. Whenever he touched me, it was as though my body sank against his of its own accord, and all other thoughts fled my mind. My eyes slipped shut with pleasure, my arms winding around his neck. His tongue pushed between my lips and tangled with mine. He tasted of mint with the faintest hint of that morning’s coffee, and sea salt from the ocean spray after rowing. His lips were warm and soft and perfect, and all anger I’d felt toward him vanished.

From inside the building, an alarm started to sound, forcing us to break the kiss.

I glanced over my shoulder, heat rising in my cheeks. “Shit, was that me again?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he grinned.

My senses came to, and I shoved him in the chest.

“Hey!” he protested.

“What’s with the kissing? You’ve practically ignored me over the last few days. Or when you haven’t been ignoring me, you’ve been shouting at me.”

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t have much choice. After the glass incident, I didn’t want to get you all stirred up.” He gave me a wink and I smacked him again.

“You’re giving yourself too much credit.”

He cocked his eyebrows at the building, where someone had just shut down the alarm. “You think?”

“I didn’t break anything,” I said in my defense.

“Anyway, it wasn’t just that,” he said. “Kit sent me away when you first arrived for a reason. He didn’t want me around because he was concerned there was something between us. I had to convince him otherwise.”

“Why? What’s it got to do with him?”

“He thought you’d put us in danger if you got upset.”

“Do you have a habit of upsetting women?”

He didn’t answer.

“Plus, I didn’t want him watching over us. I doubt he’d have allowed me to come on this excursion if he thought we were an item.”

I lifted my own eyebrows. “We’re an item?”

He shrugged. “You know what I mean. A thing.”

I couldn’t hide my sarcasm. “Wow. A man of true commitment.”

“Ari, you know I—”

“What are you two up to?” Natasha’s shout interrupted our conversation and it took all of my self-control to stop myself glaring at her.

Hunter leaned in and spoke close to my ear. “We’ll continue this later.”

He stepped away from me. “Just figuring out what we’ll do when we find somewhere to stop and work with Ari.”

Natasha’s expression tightened with disbelief. “And what will that be?”

“That we’ll put Ari through her paces. You know I’m a taskmaster.”

With that, he walked away, leaving me standing there, still feeling the press of his mouth on mine and the taste of his tongue. Damn, that guy was infuriating. I still wasn’t totally convinced he was actually into me, or if he just kissed me whenever the hell he felt like it.

I needed to stop letting him kiss me, I decided. This was all on his terms, and that wasn’t the way I worked.

Dixie skipped out of the store, Sledge close behind. “Okay, so which one of you was responsible for the alarms?” she said. “The clerk thought we were trying to shoplift.”

“Sorry.” I lifted my hand in admission. “It was an accident.”

Sledge grinned and hooked an arm around Dixie’s shoulders. “No worries. I gave him a lecture on racial stereotyping and he was soon apologizing.”

A knot of tension inside me relaxed. “Good.” I remembered I’d planned on calling my dad as soon as I could. I had my cell phone in my pocket, so I pulled it out and waved it at the others. “I’ll just be a minute.”

I stepped away from the small group, giving myself a modicum of privacy. My home number was the first on my contacts list, so I swiped the screen to call it. Dad was normally home around this time, having enjoyed a leisurely breakfast before heading out for the day, so I hoped to catch him. I longed to hear his voice, and to let him know I was okay. Texts and emails were fine, but nothing beat a real conversation.

The phone rang in my ear and I waited, eagerly anticipating the sound of his voice. But instead of my dad’s, I heard my own as the answering machine cut in.

I waited until I’d finished telling myself what to do, and then left a quick message.

“Hi, Dad, only me. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to hear your voice. You should be able to catch me on my cell this morning, if you want to give me a call back.” I hesitated in case he was somewhere else in the house and was now rushing to pick up. He didn’t. “Okay,” I continued. “I’ll try again in a little while. Love you.”

I hung up and made my way back to the car.

“Are we getting out of here?” Hunter called from where he stood beside the open driver’s door of the car, his forearm rested on the roof.

“Sure.”

“Everything okay?” he asked, catching the despondent expression on my face.

“Yeah, I was just hoping to speak to my dad, but he’s not picking up. He’s normally in at this time.”

“Try again in an hour,” Hunter said. “He’s probably popped out for something.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I will.”

I shouldn’t let not getting hold of him spoil my mood. We were out of the Cavern, and Hunter had kissed me again. Today was a good day, and I was sure I’d get to speak to my father later.

We all piled back in the car. Hunter took the 580 toward Tracy, but before we reached the town, we left the highway and turned north. The surrounding area quickly grew more remote. This was farming country, flat plains hemmed in by hills. Yellowing crops stretched for miles around, with the occasional farmhouse or ranch dropped in the middle like an afterthought. I figured Hunter was playing things by ear. I had no idea if he knew this area. In fact, other than what had happened in his childhood, and what he could do now, I realized I knew little about him at all.

“There,” said Natasha, pointing down a lane. It led toward what appeared to be an old quarry for construction sand and gravel, though the boards across the road and signs were faded and broken. The place must have worn out its usefulness years ago.

“Good spotting, Tash,” said Hunter, and turned down the gravel track.

The dry terrain become more extreme, any vegetation giving way to rock and dirt. A chain link fence stretched across the opening to the quarry. This place hadn’t been mined underground, but instead huge quantities of the earth’s surface had been dug out like a giant scoop of ice cream out of a tub. The result was a massive dip with rock walls rising on either side. The entrance to the quarry was on the same level as the lowest part, so we’d be able to walk right into it, once we’d figured out the chain link fence. Signs warning against trespassers had been attached haphazardly to the wire, but were bleached by the sun and looked as though they’d been there since humans had started walking the earth.

Hunter drove in as far as he could, then stopped the car. We climbed out, standing to look at the fence. A large padlock hung from the double wide gate blocking the way.

“Do we climb over it?” I asked, doubtfully. It was at least ten feet high.

The others all looked to me, and Dixie laughed.

“Why would we do that?” said Hunter.

He turned his attention back to the gate. His face took on the similar expression of concentration I’d seen before. The padlock began to vibrate, sending the shock waves through the metal of the gate, the chain rattling like a cheap Halloween decoration. Then the padlock popped open with a clunk.

“No climbing needed,” he said with a grin.

I laughed in return.

Hunter untangled the chain and pushed open the gate enough for us to be able to slip through, one after the other. Hunter went back and drove the car through the gates and into the large, empty space.

The quarry seemed even bigger now we were standing in the middle of it, the rocky walls looming up on three sides. A couple of pieces of machinery sat like the skeletons of fallen dinosaurs, abandoned and rusting.

“This place is perfect,” said Natasha, turning a circle.

Sledge pulled Dixie to his side and kissed her. “Shame we have to work when it would be more fun to play.”

“We can always combine the two,” Dixie suggested.

“What are you suggesting?” he waggled his eyebrows.

“All right, get a room!” Hunter shouted, but I felt him glance over at me, and my cheeks heated. “We’re here to train Ari, remember?”

Dixie poked her tongue out at him. “Spoilsport.”

Hunter got a glint in his eye. “Okay. Who can hit this?”

His head whipped around and his gaze focused on one of the large boulders at the foot of the steep rock face. The boulder—easily the size of a small car—dislodged from its position, rolling slightly, before lifting into the air.

Sledge punched one hand in the other with a smack. “All right, man. You’re on.”

All around me, stones began to move, the sound of cracks and rock hitting rock filling the air as they dislodged from where they’d been resting. One of the smaller stones hovered for a second, before suddenly flying toward the boulder Hunter was suspending in midair. The boulder dropped several feet, the smaller rock flying past it and hitting the quarry’s cliff face behind.

“Ha! Missed!” Hunter yelled.

“It’ll be the last time,” Sledge called back, laughter in his voice.

The boulder immediately rose back into position, only for a second stone to shoot toward it. This one cracked on the surface and Dixie gave a whoop of triumph.

I quickly ascertained this game consisted of Hunter levitating one rock, while the others tried to hit it with smaller ones they were lifting with their own thoughts. They launched smaller rocks at Hunter’s boulder, which he maneuvered up and down, left and right, in order to avoid their assault. If they managed to hit, that was a point for them, though I had no idea how many points it took to win or lose.

I wondered how Natasha would play—as far as I knew, she couldn’t actually move things. But then I saw her focusing her attention on one of the rocks Sledge had lifted. It only took her a moment to get the stone glowing red with heat. A second later, it exploded into a shower of dust and gravel.

“Hey, no fair!” Sledge declared. “How come you’re on his side?”

“I’m on my own side,” she laughed.

The game came to an end with Natasha exploding Hunter’s boulder. Chunks of rock rained down, and I was thankful we were far enough away not to be hit by pieces of it.

“Damn, you always win,” he said with a chuckle.

She grinned. “Your skills might look more impressive, but mine are more powerful.”

“Bullshit!” he said, but I could tell he was only messing around.

They seemed to remember me standing there. I hadn’t dared try to join in. I’d probably only have ruined everyone else’s fun by doing something extreme and embarrassing. Besides, I’d enjoyed hanging out without everyone’s attention being focused on me. Looked like I’d run out of luck on that front.

Hunter turned to me. “Your turn, Ari.”

I screwed up my face. “Does it have to be?”

“There’s no glass walls to crack here. Nothing you can break.”

I looked doubtfully at the rocky slopes around us. I wasn’t so sure about that.

He must have picked up on my doubts. “And there are enough of us to combat anything else you throw at us.”

I knew I was going to have to give in. We’d come all the way out here for me. I couldn’t back out now.

“Okay, okay. Tell me what to do first.”

“Let’s start with some old fashioned moving objects. We already know you’re strong, so I’m not going to start you on something small.” He scanned the quarry. “How about that?” He nodded over to another boulder similar to the size he’d been lifting.

I exhaled and nodded. “Okay. I’ll try.”

He smiled. “Good. You can do it.”

I remembered the instructions Kit had given me the previous day, about building the energy inside me and then pushing it forward and out. Could I feel it intensify now, like a rising up through my chest to condense in a focal spot in the center of my forehead? Maybe this was what I needed in order to be able to direct my abilities instead of having them direct me. In order to concentrate more, my eyes slipped shut and I centered all thoughts into that spot between my eyebrows.

My third eye.

As the energy built inside me, I pushed it outward.

A gasp came from Dixie beside me and my eyes shot open. I started back in shock, though I wasn’t sure why I let any of it surprise me anymore.

All of the lose rocks and boulders that had been lying around the quarry were now hovering in the air, twenty feet above ground. They were completely static, just floating in midair.

“You need to pull it in, Ari,” said Hunter beside me. “Your energy is spread too widely. You’re working like a blanket when you should be an arrow.”

“I can’t,” I said, starting to feel panicky. “I don’t know how.”

“Fix your eyes on the largest boulder and use that as your focal point.”

The usual feeling of the power getting away on me filled me. The walls of the quarry began to shift, rocks dragging free, causing other stones to dribble down the sides in miniature landslides. The panic started to rise inside me. What if I couldn’t control it, and we all ended up buried under piles of rubble?

Hunter must have sensed my fear.

“It’s okay, Ari. We’re here to help you. We won’t let anything bad happen.”

The landslides began to reduce, the rocks no longer dislodging. I realized the others were working against me, but for me, preventing my power from doing any more damage. They wouldn’t let the walls of the quarry collapse on us. I wasn’t alone. Hunter and the others wouldn’t let anything bad happen.

The knowledge caused the knot of energy inside me to loosen. I remembered Kit’s instructions from the starlit cave, and forced myself to slow my breath, inhaling deeply through my nose and slowly releasing the air between my pursed lips. In my head, I counted backward slowly …

Ten … nine … eight … seven ….

I did as Hunter had said and stared directly at the largest rock still suspended feet above the ground. It felt strange to be fighting something that came so intrinsically from inside me, but that was what I had to do. I had to pull the energy in. Gradually, from around the edges of all the suspended rocks, smaller stones began to drop like rain, hitting the dusty ground with audible thumps. A number of rocks were above our heads, and Dixie and Sledge whipped them away before they could hit us. Anything they missed or got too close, Natasha pulverized.

Hunter focused only on me.

“That’s it, Ari. You’re getting it. It’s working.”

And it was. More of the rocks fell away, until finally the only one still hovering was the boulder I forced my will upon.

I was finally in control.

Chapter Eighteen

My strength suddenly vanished and the huge boulder dropped to the ground with a resounding crack. The impact it made on the ground shuddered up through the soles of my feet, and dust filled the air in a cloud around it. I imagined there would be a substantial crater beneath.

I sagged, my muscles going limp, exhaustion make my mind foggy. Hunter caught me around the waist, holding me up.

“Okay, time for a break,” he said.

I nodded. I needed to sit down. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, and desperately needed a drink of water.

Dixie and Sledge had bought snacks from the store, so we sat in a circle on the ground and passed around a couple of bottles of soda, and a bottle of water—which I eagerly gulped down—followed by snacks. I crunched salty chips, starting to come back around. What I’d done had sucked a huge amount of my resources from me. It didn’t seem to affect anyone else in this way. Perhaps not allowing it to drain me was just another thing I needed to learn.

Looking around at the others, I noted how none of them seemed affected by what we’d done. Their mood was bright and they were enjoying themselves. I hoped this wasn’t yet another thing that would separate me from the crowd. I was starting to hate how everything was always an uphill struggle.

“You okay?” asked Hunter, dragging me from my thoughts.

“Yeah, better now.” I gave him a smile. “You mind if I go and try my dad again? I’m sure he must be home by now.”

“Of course. You don’t need to ask.”

I scrambled to my feet, brushing the dirt off my jeans, and, as I walked from the group, I pulled out my cell phone from my pocket. I checked the screen, in case I’d missed a call or text from him, but there wasn’t one. He hardly ever used his cell phone anyway, just kept it in the car in case of emergencies, but I’d hoped he’d have kept it a little closer now I was away.

I swiped my home phone number and called again. Once again, the phone rang out. What was going on? Where was he?

Nerves twisted uncomfortably in my stomach. If my father was one thing, it was predictable. I meant that in a good way—he liked his routines and rarely strayed from them. Had something happened? Had he fallen ill, or had an accident, and was stuck in the house with no way of getting help? I tortured myself with the possibility of him lying a matter of feet from the phone, hearing it ring and my voice on the machine, but unable to reach it for some reason.

“Everything all right?” Hunter called over to me.

I turned to him, my features pinched in worry.

“She’s worried,” said Dixie, almost to herself. “It’s her father.”

This time I didn’t mind what she’d picked up from me. “Yeah, it’s really not like him to not answer the phone. He’s always home for lunch. He never eats out if he can help it, unless it’s a dinner he can have with the guys and a couple of beers. He refuses to pay ten bucks for a sandwich.”

Hunter frowned and bit his lower lip as he thought. “I’m sure he’s fine, but if you want, when we go back, we can drop the others back at the Cavern then head home to check on him.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that would be good. I’ll keep trying him, though. If I get hold of him, it won’t be necessary to go to the house.”

“Sure.”

Just beyond Hunter, Natasha got to her feet, her head tilted to one side, a frown marking her normally smooth brow. “You guys hearing that?” she said.

We all stopped, listening out for what she meant. The quarry was surprisingly quiet—with no trees around to rustle their leaves and branches in the breeze, which meant no birds or insects either. The only sound was the occasional hollow grind and thud, thud, thud of a rock coming lose and falling down the side.

“I can’t hear—” Hunter started but then clamped his mouth shut again.

My ears strained. I could hear something now, but I couldn’t say what it was, or even which direction it was coming from. It felt like approaching thunder, a change in the air pressure. I wondered briefly if I’d done something to affect the atmosphere, but then what the noise was clicked in my head.

Hunter must have realized it at exactly the same time. “Get under cover! This isn’t good.”

But we were in the middle of a quarry. There was no shelter.

The noise grew louder, emerging from a distant thrum to the more distinct thwack of helicopter blades.

Everyone scrambled to their feet and Hunter snatched at my arm. “Get to the car!”

I’d thought the helicopter was coming from the north, about to appear over the top of the quarry, but instead it swept up behind us, blades thumping, deafening, the air whipping the hair from my face.

Confusion filled me.

What the hell was a helicopter doing all the way out here?

Then Hunter yelled, “Ari, get down!”

I’d been staring at the chopper in bewilderment. I caught a glimpse of the figure in the open doorway of the aircraft, before the crack of gunfire sounded beneath the thwump thwump of the helicopter blades.

Hunter’s body struck mine, shoving me down to the ground. Bullets hit the ground where I’d been standing, dust bursting up in little spurts. Hunter shot a look at the helicopter, swiping his hand through the air, and the chopper immediately veered off to one side.

“There’s another one,” I cried.

A second chopper appeared on the skyline, across the rise of the quarry walls. That must have been the one I’d first heard, the wind carrying the noise in this direction.

We managed to scurry to our feet, running at a crouch to the car. It would be scant protection against two helicopters filled with armed men, but it would buy us a minute or two. The others ran with us, Sledge with his arm around Dixie, pulling her in front of his much larger body as protection. Natasha ran just ahead of them.

The five of us bunched down the side of the car, sheltering from any further bullets, though all the people in the helicopters needed to do was fly over the top of us and start aiming at this side.

“What are they doing?” I had to shout of the noise of the blades. “What do they want?”

“Us,” Hunter yelled back. “We need to take them down.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he got to his feet.

I dragged at his shirt sleeve. “What are you doing, Hunter? Get down.”

He shook me off.

Suddenly the wind whipping up the dirt and dust around us wasn’t only caused by the helicopter blades. I squinted against the grit threatening to blind me, my hair lashing around my face, my clothes billowing. I realized what was happening—Hunter was using his control of the air to push the helicopters away from us. I risked popping my head up over the roof of the car to get a look. He’d created a whirlwind, which had lifted all the air and gravel from the ground, and was pushing closer and closer to the first helicopter. But he could only take on one chopper. While that helicopter lifted higher into the sky to try to avoid the magic Hunter had conjured up, the other one was heading in a sweeping curve in our direction.

“Use your strength, Ari,” Hunter yelled. “We need it now more than ever.”

Fear paralyzed me. “I don’t know how!”

Sledge and Dixie both got to their feet and focused their energy, using the power they had in order to upset the movement of the second chopper. The blades fought against the power exerted upon, slowing their rotation and bringing the aircraft lower in the sky.

“Tash!” Hunter called over. “Heat the fuckers up!”

“I’m trying,” she cried. “They’re moving around too much. I can’t get a fix on them.”

Hunter’s whirlwind caught the other chopper. The aircraft spun around and around, propelled by the air. The pilot fought against it, trying to break free of the funnel, and in doing so the chopper listed sideways. I stared in fascinated horror as something fell from the open doorway, twirled in the whirlwind for a few seconds, before being spat out like an unwanted morsel. The thing landed on the ground and lay still. One of the people who’d been shooting at us.

“We’re not strong enough, Ari,” cried Dixie. “We need you.”

I wrenched my gaze from the fallen man. Was he dead?

More bullets sprayed from the doorway of the helicopter Dixie and Sledge were trying to control—a desperate effort by those onboard to try to put a stop to us. It worked momentarily, distracting their focus, and the chopper straightened up and flew back toward us.

“Ari, now!” Hunter’s voice tore me from my shock.

The helicopter was approaching again. The effort Dixie and Sledge put in had lost its strength, and now the aircraft was able to fight against the force they’d been applying, though the blades still seemed slower than before, the machine lower to the ground. If it got over top of us, it would shoot us all, and Hunter, still standing with all his mental energy pinned on the helicopter caught in the whirlwind he had created. If he lost control of that, we’d all be dead.

I took my terror and placed the chopper heading toward us in the middle of my line of sight. I remembered how it felt to have all that energy building up inside me, and how it had fought for an escape, a release. This time, I needed to direct that release to one place. Natasha had the power to stop the helicopter for good—perhaps I did, too, but I was too new at all of this to understand how to use it. No, all I had to concentrate on was keeping the damned thing away from us.

I centered my fear and anger then let it pour from me. Somehow, letting go of all that negative energy made me feel different—stronger, powerful. I stood straight, everything happening around me fading away. All I knew was that helicopter, and how I couldn’t let it come any closer. My will was stronger than that of a machine. The mental force I applied to it was like a glass box, trapping it like a bug in a glass jar.

The machine blades continued to whip around, keeping it suspended in the air, but it was no longer moving forward. Any efforts the pilot made to pull back around were also thwarted. The helicopter was caught in the invisible box I had created for it. I only wanted one thing. Destruction.

“Natasha,” I said, quietly, not looking at the other woman.

I sensed her stand beside me, felt the air between us tingle with shared forces. Red and orange flames suddenly licked up from the middle of the chopper, where the fuel tank was positioned. The flames spread across the body of the helicopter, painting the machine in a strange fiery glow. The effect was only noticeable for a few seconds.

The helicopter burst into a ball of bright flames, the explosion deafening. Instantly, I was taken back to the moment of the bombing and I lost all control I had over the chopper’s position. It didn’t matter anymore. What was left of the helicopter was completely out of control, spinning in a crazy circle, one, two, three times, before it veered off to one side and hit the ground.

A second explosion boomed through the quarry, sending rock falls skittering down from the sides. The ground vibrated and hot air hit us, causing everyone to lift their arms to cover their faces, and crouch back down beside the side of the car. A piece of broken, white hot metal pinged across the top of us and hit the ground only a matter of feet away. If we’d still been standing, it could have easily taken one of our heads off.

Hunter had lost control of the whirlwind, but the pilot of the other helicopter must have decided he didn’t want to meet with the same fate as his friend. Hunter had done enough to drive it off. The machine flew away, the sound of the chopper blades barely audible over the roar and pop of the fire.

I was breathing hard, trembling. After the bombing, I didn’t do well with loud noises, and this had shaken me down to my core.

Hunter got to his feet and rounded the car.

“Where are you going?” I called out, fresh panic firing through me.

“Seeing if the other guy is still alive.”

I didn’t want him to go alone. What if the man was still alive and armed?

“Wait for me.”

I forced myself to my feet and took after him. We gave the fallen chopper a wide berth and ran around the edge of the quarry. The heat from the burning, twisted pile of metal was intense, warming my face even from this distance. The man who’d fallen from the chopper appeared even more twisted than the machine had. His limbs were all at unnatural angles. I didn’t know what I wanted to find—him alive or dead? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle it either way. If he was alive, would we be forced to kill him? Or would we try to save his life? I couldn’t decide either way.

We got closer and I saw the man was alive. He moaned, his body jerking in strange spasms. He’d fallen from a massive height and must have broken half the bones in his body. I couldn’t even imagine the sort of pain he must be in.

Hunter dropped to one knee beside him. The man was in his late twenties, dressed fully in black—a close fitting long sleeved t-shirt, and black cargo pants. I was amazed he didn’t have a black balaclava over his head, but I figured he must have thought no one would ever recognize him from the chopper. The man groaned again, a wet rattling emitting from his chest.

“Hey!” Hunter grabbed the man’s jaw. “Who is behind this?”

The gurgle came again and his eyelids fluttered.

Hunter’s fingers dug hard into his skin. “Tell me and I’ll end this quickly. You’re going to die, you know that, don’t you? You can either die easy or die hard. Trust me, you don’t want to die the hard way.”

My breath caught, horrified. So we were going to kill him.

The man’s eyes fluttered open, glazed but fixing on Hunter leaning over him. “Eee …” he managed to rasp.

“Easy? Is that what you’re saying? Give me a name then. Who is behind this?”

The man’s eyes slipped shut again, his head falling to one side.

Hunter reached down to where the man’s arm was folded in half, but backward, the elbow completely shattered. He grabbed the bloodied mass of elbow and squeezed.

The man screamed, his eyes pinging open.

“There, that got your attention. Now tell me who sent the helicopters after us.”

“Mm …” the man managed. “Mm—”

“He’s trying, Hunter!” I cried as Hunter reached to his shattered arm again.

“Aaa,” the man said, but I couldn’t tell if he was trying to tell us, or suffering with the pain.

“What? Say that again.”

“Mmm … Aaah …” The man sucked in a breath. It caught in his chest, as though his own lungs were choking him. His eyes bulged and a bubble of blood swelled from between his parted lips, glinting in the bright sunlight.

“Dammit,” swore Hunter.

I stared on. This man was dying right before me. We’d done nothing to help.

The exhale of air finally came, popping the bubble of blood in bright red spatters across his now pale skin. The light from his eyes died, and his chest didn’t rise again.

Sledge’s deep voice called over. “Hunter, we need to go. Someone might have reported the chopper going down.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha, “or the people in the other helicopter will have reported our location and be sending backup.”

Hunter got to his feet and wiped his bloodied fingers on the seat of his jeans. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

Leaving everything, we ran back to the car and jumped inside. We were lucky nothing had happened to the vehicle when the chopper had gone down. We’d have been stranded out here if it had.

“Take shotgun, Ari,” Sledge told me. “Dixie needs me.”

I looked over at Dixie. She appeared as shaken up by all of this as I felt. Yes, these guys might be trained with supernatural abilities, and perhaps had noticed themselves being followed on the odd occasion, but I didn’t think any of them had ever experienced anything on this scale.

Why had the men in black upped the ante? What had changed?

I climbed into the passenger seat, glad to be sitting beside Hunter. He’d shown me a different side to himself back there—hard and ruthless.

It was a side I wasn’t sure I liked.

Chapter Nineteen

Hunter drove away from the quarry at a breakneck speed, screeching the tires and sending dirt spurting out from under the wheels. Smoke from the burning helicopter rose in a plume into the air, and I was still able to see it even when we’d put several miles between us and the scene of the crash. The taste of hot fuel and burned rubber lay thick in the back of my throat, and I couldn’t get the image of the dying man’s face out of my head. I figured everyone else felt the same way. The tension inside the vehicle was palpable. No one spoke.

Even back on the main road, with the quarry far behind us, we couldn’t relax. In the rear seat, Sledge, Dixie, and Natasha twisted around to peer out the back window, trying to see if anyone was following us. I sat, leaning forward so I could see the sky above the car out of the windshield. I was waiting for the remaining helicopter to return, though I’d be amazed if they started shooting at us on the highway. Not only would they risk a multiple pile-up, they’d have numerous witnesses.

I suddenly remembered my father and the worry I’d had for him before the helicopters had shown up. Leaning onto one hip so I could reach into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and tried his number again. My hand shook as I held the handset and pressed it to my ear. As the phone rang, I willed for him to pick up—wanting to hear his voice now more than ever. There was still no answer.

Dread thickened and solidified in my gut.

“I have to go and check on my dad,” I told Hunter. “I know this isn’t convenient, but something is wrong, and I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.”

He glanced over at me as he drove. “You can’t. We have to go back to the Cavern. Kit needs to know what’s happened.”

“You go, but I have to go home. My dad’s still not answering. Something’s wrong. I can feel it. You say I have more skills than anyone else, that I’ve not even started to explore what I can do yet. Well, what if I’ve got a little of what Dixie can do? Maybe I can pick things up about people, I just hadn’t realized it.”

He shook his head. “Checking on your dad can’t be our main priority here, Ari.”

“You don’t have to come. Go back to the Cavern and tell Kit, if you want. Drop me off on the bridge, and I’ll thumb down a cab to take me the rest of the way.”

“I’m not going to let you go alone, Ari. We’ve never experienced this sort of attack before. They’re closing in on us.”

“Then maybe they’ve figured out I’m one of the people they’re after. What’s stopping them going to my father’s house?”

“They have no interest in your father.”

“No, but maybe they think they can use him to get to me.”

Hunter didn’t answer me, staring straight ahead at the road.

“Okay,” he said eventually. “I’m not letting you go alone, though.”

“Thank you, Hunter.”

He leaned back slightly in his seat to address the others behind us. “I’ll drop you guys off on our way through, okay? Tell Kit exactly what happened and that I’ll be back within a couple of hours. If we don’t return, tell him to send backup.”

“Sure, Hunter,” said Sledge.

Nerves churned my stomach. Backup. What would we need backup for? Did he expect to find more men like the ones in the quarry waiting at my father’s house? If so, there was only one thing they were waiting for, and that was me. I prayed my dad was safe. I might not be directly responsible for what was happening, but I knew if I lost him, too, I’d never forgive myself. I would be completely alone in the world. I might be an adult in years, but I wasn’t ready for losing my only remaining parent.

“Who do you think those people were, Hunter?” asked Natasha, breaking me from my thoughts. “More government people?”

“They must have been,” he replied, his eyebrows drawing down, creating lines between his eyes.

“The man didn’t sound like he was trying to say the government when you were questioning him,” I said.

“He wasn’t saying anything at all. He was just moaning from the pain. The guy was as good as dead when we got there.”

I wasn’t so sure. To me it had sounded as though he’d been trying to speak.

“How do you think they found us?” asked Dixie, her voice small. “Did they follow us from the Cavern?”

Hunter nodded. “Possibly. Or they spotted the car and followed that. They might have been waiting for us to stop in a remote location so they could take us out. We gave them the perfect opportunity.”

I shook my head in amazement, recalling the number of bullets that had rained down upon us. “We were lucky no one was killed.” Everyone was looking at me. “I mean, none of us were killed.” Obviously, the guy who’d fallen from the chopper, and everyone who’d been inside the helicopter Natasha had set on fire had died.

“Those sons-of-bitches deserved everything they got,” said Hunter, his voice hard. “They were the ones who open fired on us.”

I couldn’t argue with him, though the image of him digging his fingers into a dying man’s wound flashed in my head.

“Do you think someone might be watching the entrance to the Cavern now?” Dixie asked, leaning forward, between our two seats.

Hunter shook his head. “Impossible. The entrance is completely hidden. They’d need to have a boat on the water to see anything, and we’d spot them for sure.”

“What about a satellite?” Natasha suggested. “Wouldn’t they be able to see using one of those?”

“If they’re watching us using satellites, then we’re in some serious shit. But I think the bridge would make it hard to see the entrance, even from the air.”

“Plus, if they know we have a base there,” said Sledge, “they’d have just stormed the place already. It’s not as though the Cavern has a ton of escape points. Why pick us out miles away when they could get us all together, trapped, in one place?”

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Okay, so they don’t know about the Cavern—not yet, anyway. But they must know we have a base somewhere near San Francisco. They must also know this car belongs to one of us, or they wouldn’t have known to follow it.”

I thought of something. “Kit picked me up in this car.”

Hunter glanced over at me. “Sorry?”

“If whoever is after us knows this car belongs to the Kin, then they might have seen Kit coming to pick me up. If they did, they know my address, and my father’s not answering the phone. I want to think this is only a coincidence, but my gut is telling me something completely different.”

Hunter looked back over at me, his expression stern. “Okay, we’ll go there as soon as we’ve dropped the others back at the Cavern.”

I nodded and tried to push away my anxiety. I couldn’t ask for any more than that. I prayed we’d reach my father’s house and find him safe and well, but the churning inside me told me something different.

After what felt like a lifetime, we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay on the opposite side. Hunter took the small road which led down to the cliff steps.

“I’d take you back to the boat,” he said to the others, “but I’m not sure there’s time, and we don’t know if someone is watching from the bay.”

“That’s fine,” said Sledge. “Faster is better. We’re capable of making it down.”

Hunter drove them to the end of the road and stopped the car. Dixie, Sledge, and Natasha all climbed out of the back. I didn’t envy them their climb down to the entrance of the Cavern, but I wished I was going with them, taking shelter in the almost impenetrable walls of our training center. Only hours ago, I’d been wanting to get away from the place—feeling claustrophobic and hemmed in, but now I understood the benefits of the place being so deep below ground and with only one entrance. If anyone who wasn’t wanted tried to make it through, they’d be taken out before they even stepped into the Cavern. 

My car door window was open, and Dixie leaned through the gap and gave me a hug.

“Stay safe,” she told me. “You both need to come back in one piece.”

“We will,” I reassured her, though I wasn’t sure myself. We were about to drive through the city in a vehicle that was most likely recognizable by people who for some reason wanted us dead, or perhaps wanted us injured enough that we were no longer a threat so they could take us in. We probably needed to dump it somewhere, and I said so to Hunter.

He nodded. “We will. Let’s just try to cover some of the distance first.”

Being able to drive the car was always going to be quicker than navigating public transport, and right now all my focus was on getting to the house and checking on my father. Besides, we weren’t completely helpless—far from it. We might have given whoever was after us something to think about after we took that chopper down. Perhaps they hadn’t considered us to be worthy adversaries. I hoped they’d leave us the hell alone—for the moment, at least—until they figured out another plan.

Unless, of course, they already had another plan.

Hunter reversed the car up the narrow road, the clutch whining as he did so. He reached the top and spun the vehicle around, before heading back onto the main road toward the bridge. Within minutes, we were crossing the bay. I looked out of the window, spotting the place where I’d held Hunter’s hand as I’d taken that first quite literal leap of faith and jumped off the side of the bridge with him.

I gave my head a slight shake. My life had changed so much over the past few weeks, now I barely recognized it. I’d been an ordinary twenty-something-year-old, just getting by, and now my life was everything but ordinary.

Hunter’s hand on my thigh made me jump.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, just thinking. And worried, of course.”

“We’ll leave the car a couple of blocks from your father’s house. If there is a problem, I don’t want anyone to see us coming.”

“You think there will be a problem?” I chewed my lower lip.

“Don’t you? Isn’t that the whole reason we’re going?”

He was right. I guessed I’d been hoping for some reassurance, but it didn’t look like I was going to get any. I didn’t blame him for that. We needed to go into this with caution. If everything was fine, it would be a relief, but if it wasn’t, going in recklessly could get us killed.

We crossed the city. It felt strange to see everything continuing as normal, all these people going about their normal lives, completely unaware of what we were capable of, or that people existed who would shoot at you from a helicopter if you had something they wanted.

Hunter drove into my neighborhood. A couple of blocks away from my father’s house, he pulled into a quiet street. I thought he would jump right out, but instead he turned to me.

“Hey, Ari, I meant to say to you earlier that I heard about someone at the Cavern taking the photographs of your family.”

I didn’t know why, but the mention of the incident embarrassed me and I glanced down at my lap. “Oh, right.”

He reached out and touched the back of my hand. “I’m sorry someone did that to you. Nothing like that has ever happened with one of the Kin before. We’ll find out who took them and get them back, okay?”

I offered him a tight smile. “Sure.”

“I mean it, Ari.”

I nodded. “I believe you.”

Hunter sat back in his seat, and then leaned forward, checking around us—including up into the air. “All clear,” he said, before climbing out.

Following his lead, I got out the passenger side. “I feel like we should have guns or something.” Nerves made my voice shake.

“Hey.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me into him. His palms cupped my cheeks and angled my face up toward his. He moved in close, so I could feel his breath upon my skin, the heat of him burning into me. “We don’t need guns. We can be more destructive than any single firearm. Always remember that, Ari. Be confident with who you are—what you are. Whoever these assholes work for, they can’t do what we can.”

He pressed his lips to mine, firm and soft all at the same time. My arms slipped around his waist and we moved closer together, our bodies filling the space that had been between us. My lips parted and our tongues met. Fire flamed up inside me, and I held him tighter as his hands left my cheeks and knotted in my hair.

As much as I didn’t want to stop kissing him, we had a job to do, and I couldn’t stop my worry for my father playing on my mind.

Hunter must have sensed how I was feeling and broke the kiss. He stayed in close, though, touching the tip of his nose to mine, his hands still laced in my hair.

“We can do this,” he said. “Stick together, and follow my instructions.”

I nodded against him. “Okay. I can do this.”

He gave me a final kiss on the end of my nose and we stepped apart.

“If we cut through here, we’ll come out opposite my dad’s house,” I said. I wondered why I’d started calling it his house as opposed to mine.

“Okay, good.”

Moving at a jog, we slipped between a couple of the houses, creeping down alleyways and using tall fences, trees, and bushes as cover. It was still daylight, and if anyone spotted us where we weren’t supposed to be, we were bound to get called out on it. We stepped out onto the adjacent street and hid behind the parked cars along the sidewalk, crouching down so as not to be seen. My father’s house was positioned across the road, my bedroom window on the second story. How strange to think I’d looked out of that window onto the street and seen Hunter that day. That had been a different Ari than the one who existed now. I’d been so naive, so clueless.

I pulled my thoughts from my past self and scanned the area for any signs of the men in black.

From the outside, the house looked exactly the same as it always had. My dad didn’t have a car—he preferred to use public transport—so I couldn’t tell that way if he was home or not. There was nothing from this angle that gave any indication of there being anything wrong.

“We’re going to have to go inside,” I said.

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Do you remember how I came to your room that night before you came to the Cavern?”

“Yes, of course.” It wasn’t something I was going to forget anytime soon.

“I suggest we get in the same way. I don’t think we want to just walk up to the front door.”

I agreed. We got on the move again, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, heading farther down the street so as not to be seen from the house. We jumped a fence and landed in my back garden. The porch ran right around the outside of the house, and we headed to the side. No windows of neighboring houses looked down at this spot, and a couple of trees hid us from the street out front. Hunter gave me a boost up, lacing his fingers together and allowing me to set one foot into them. I hooked my fingers over the top of the guttering, half pulling myself up while he pushed from the bottom. Less than elegantly, I managed to swing my leg up onto the porch roof and drag myself fully up. Hunter was far more agile than me. He took a run up and jumped, grabbing the guttering and swinging himself up.

“Showoff,” I hissed at him.

He gave me a wink in response. “Come on.”

We sneaked toward the front of the house, moving on tiptoes. We reached the corner and paused so we wouldn’t be too visible to the neighbors. My bedroom window was right beside us at the front of the house, and I leaned out and tried to pull the window up.

“Shit. It won’t budge.”

I felt horribly exposed up here. Though we wouldn’t be seen by anyone inside, someone across the street was bound to spot us eventually.

“You can open it, Ari,” Hunter said from beside my shoulder. “Just focus.”

I remembered what he’d told me—to be confident.

Staring at the latch on the other side of the glass, I willed it to move. I used my fear for my father’s life as the energy I needed, pushing it out of me and into the inanimate metal object. Move, damn you. Just move. I was worried I’d end up smashing the whole pane of glass in my usual over-exuberant way, but instead the latch began to wobble, then popped open.

Hunter rewarded me with a wide grin. “Told you so.”

I smiled back. I was pleased with myself, but worried about what I was about to find. I reached back to the window and pulled up the pane, giving us access. I climbed across the window ledge and jumped into my bedroom, doing my best to land lightly on my feet. Hunter followed close behind, annoyingly more agile than I was, despite his far larger size. I was thankful he was quiet, though. We didn’t want to alert anyone in the house to our presence.

I crossed the room and edged open the door, my ears straining for any sound. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the house. I wanted to call out to my dad, but I couldn’t risk the wrong person hearing me.

We sneaked out into the hallway, and I quickly checked the other two bedrooms and the bathroom. There was no one here, and nothing that made me think anything other than my father’s noticeable absence was wrong.

“We need to go downstairs,” I hissed at Hunter.

He glanced over at me and nodded.

With him leading the way, we edged slowly and quietly down the staircase. The living room was to the right, and it only took a quick peek inside to see the space was empty. The front door was directly in front of us, and appeared undisturbed, the latch still on. We made our way into the dining room, the kitchen just beyond. Both rooms were empty.

“I don’t know where your father is, Ari,” Hunter said, not bothering to whisper. “But he’s not here.”

He was right.

I went to the back door to check if it was locked.

My heart lodged in my throat. “Hunter?”

A smear of dark red blood striped the linoleum. It looked as though someone had been dragged across the surface. There was something else, too. A note had been pinned to the glass panel of the back door. “Oh, God.”

Hunter marched forward and snatched the piece of paper from the glass. He stared down at it, and I forced myself to look away from the horror of seeing the blood and all the terrible possibilities it might contain, and read what had been left for me. Because it had been left for me. I knew that with every fiber of my soul.

Miss Arianna Sheppard,

If you want to see your father alive again, come to the Island.

I will exchange him for information.

Come alone.

M.G.

Hunter frowned. “M.G.? Do those initials mean anything to you?”

I wracked my mind, trying to think of a name I could link it to. “No, I can’t think of anyone. We really don’t know that many people—certainly no one who would do something like this!”

“Hey.” He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me into his strong embrace. “We know your father is alive. That’s the main thing. We’ll get him back again.”

I wanted desperately to believe him. “This M.G. wants me to go to the Island. What does he mean? Alcatraz Island?”

“I can’t think what else that would be. Can you?”

I shook my head. “Shit. How am I going to get there?”

“How are we going to get there? You’re not going alone.”

My stomach twisted and I felt sick with fear. “You can see what the letter says. They’ll hurt him if they see you there, too.”

“So, they won’t see me. I have ways of hiding.”

I stared at him, terrified if I made the wrong choice, my father would die.

He leaned in and kissed me, a firm, reassuring press of his lips against mine. Nothing more. “Trust me, Ari.”

I nodded. “I do.”

“Good. Then it’s settled. We’ll take the boat we use to get from the Cavern.”

“Then what do we do when we get there?”

“We’ll have to figure that out on the way. At least we’ll be able to find out who’s behind the people chasing us, and the ones shooting at us from the helicopters.”

“You think they’re all tied together?” I’d already figured they were, but I wanted to hear it confirmed from his lips. This wasn’t just about me and my father; this was about all of the Kin.

“Absolutely. They want something from us, and they must have figured out brute force wasn’t going to work, so they’ve gone with a little kidnapping and threats instead.”

Tears for my father’s safety filled my eyes. He had no idea what was going on. He’d be angry and afraid, and wondering what the hell his remaining daughter had gotten herself involved in. After losing Karina, this was the last thing he needed or deserved. I’d left him unprotected and exposed, and gone off with people who’d been strangers to me. I was a terrible daughter.

A tear spilled from my eye and ran a track down my cheek. “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head angrily at myself.

Hunter reached up and wiped the tear away with his thumb. “You have nothing to be sorry for. This will all work out, Ari. Don’t be frightened.”

He pulled me in for another hug, his mouth pressed against the top of my head, his breath heating my hair.

“We won’t let them win.”

Chapter Twenty

We left my father’s house, taking the note with us as evidence, though I didn’t think Hunter had any intention of taking this to the police. How could we? They’d probably think we were making the whole thing up, and I had a feeling showing them proof of our abilities would only end in us being locked up in some research center like a couple of lab rats. If the government was responsible for kidnapping my father, they’d already have people secreted into places of authority such as the police department.

Despite our earlier plans, we decided we didn’t have time to get a different car. What would be the point, anyway? The people who took my father knew exactly where I was going to be. They’d forced my hand. They didn’t need to chase me anymore because I was about to walk right up to them and hand myself, and anything else they wanted, over.

Hunter drove back through the city and across the bridge. He parked in the same lot where we’d picked the car up first thing that morning. The little boat was still in the bay, pulled high on the shingle to avoid it being washed away. Night was drawing in now, the lights in the bay blinking at us from across the darkening water. Alcatraz Island appeared to be an overwhelmingly long distance away, and I couldn’t imagine us having to row all that way.

“What about the others?” I asked Hunter. “Shouldn’t we tell them what’s going on? They would have expected us to be back by now, and they’ll be worried when we don’t show.”

Hunter pressed his lips together and shook his head. “If we tell Kit, any chance of getting onto Alcatraz Island unseen will be lost. He’ll want us go in en masse, and I don’t know how the people who’ve taken your father would respond to that. Considering they told you to come alone, I can only assume the results wouldn’t be good.”

“Okay.” I didn’t want to do anything that might risk my dad’s life. Something still played on my mind, however. I felt as though we were going behind the backs of the other Kin. “I’m worried Kit and the others won’t be prepared, though. What if they think they’re safe when clearly someone is after us?”

“They already know. Dixie and the others will have already told them about the helicopters. They’ll be on high alert.”

He had a point. I hated to think of them worrying about us, however. In particular, the thought of Dixie fretting for my return bothered me. She might have already sensed something was wrong through her ability.

There was nothing I could do about it—not if I wanted any chance of my father living through this.

Together, Hunter and I pushed the rowboat down to the shore. The muscles of my back and shoulders strained under the force, the boat far harder to move than when there had been five of us. With lots of heaving and grunting, we got the small boat down to the water’s edge. Waves lapped at the toes of my sneakers. The scent of briny water filled my nostrils, with something underlying it, something dank and old. It was a cold evening, and a chill ran through me. I glanced to the horizon and spotted a bank of dark storm clouds building. I hoped they would stay away and that the wind wouldn’t come up. I didn’t much relish the thought of being in the middle of the bay in a small rowboat in bad weather. San Francisco was known for having three seasons in one day, and just because the day had been bright didn’t mean the night would remain clear, too.

The boat wobbled beneath us as we jumped in, then settled side by side. I picked up an oar, preparing myself for the tough job of rowing all the way out to Alcatraz Island. It was going to be tough and dangerous. I hoped I was up to the job.

“Just put the paddle in the water,” said Hunter beside me. “You don’t have to do anything else.”

I turned to him with a frown. “What are you talking about? You can’t row by yourself.”

“We’ll never be able to paddle all that way. Watch.”

The boat rose and fell with the waves, and we weren’t even deep yet. I still had the oar in my hand, and jumped as it moved in my grip. The paddle dug into the water then back around again, pulling the boat farther away from shore. I had barely touched it.

“You’re doing that?” I asked in amazement.

“Ari, if we can bring helicopters down with our minds, I think we can do a little paddling.”

It was certainly easier on the arms this way.

The movement of the boat on the waves made me nauseated—I’d never had natural sea legs—but even worse was the churning in my gut that I experienced at not knowing what waited for me on the island. I wanted to see my father alive, but I had no idea what the price would be to get him back again. The note said they wanted information, but I, of all people, knew very little.

I hoped my very little would be enough.

“The note said they wanted information,” I said to Hunter, “but what do I know? Why are they picking on me?”

His lips twisted as he thought. “Maybe you just got unlucky. You were the one they spotted and they were able to find out where you lived. The rest of us either come from some distance away, or else we don’t have people close enough to us to make us want to give ourselves up for their safe return. I know if it had been my father, I would have told them to keep him.”

Yeah, that sounded like my kind of luck. I felt bad for Hunter, though. Yes, my father was being used against me, but at least I had someone. I couldn’t imagine being in a situation where I wouldn’t care whether or not a member of my family had been hurt.

The night had closed in, thankfully shrouding us in darkness. Spray from the ocean hit my face, leaving my skin tight with salt, and dampening my clothes. Alcatraz Island grew larger as we approached, looming menacingly out of the ocean. The dark clouds that had been building were still too far away to have blanketed the sky, and moonlight streaked across the surface of the sea.

“If someone’s watching out from the island,” I said to Hunter, “which they will be, considering they’re expecting me to come, they’re bound to see us arrive.”

“Don’t worry, Ari. I’ve got it covered.”

The oar stopped moving in my hand, and I noticed his paddle had fallen still, too.

He lifted both hands in the air and closed his eyes, as though worshiping in church. His face tensed in concentration. I watched in fascination as wisps of white gathered around his fingers and spread down his arms. Little clouds scurried across the water toward us, joining the mist Hunter had already created. White garlands wound their way around the small boat, growing thicker and spreading outward.

I’d seen Hunter do this once before—when we’d been on the bridge and were being followed. He was calling the fog to hide us so we could make it to the island without being seen.

Whoever was waiting for us wouldn’t find this suspicious. Fog often descended upon the bay out of nowhere. It would be a hindrance in their mind, but not something to be wary of.

The white cloud surrounding us grew thicker by the second. It stretched out across the bay, swallowing both the moonlit waves and the stars winking above our heads. We sat, silent, bobbing up and down with the motion of the sea, strangely cocooned within the white folds of mist. Its damp fingers touched my cheeks, the back of my neck, my hands, wringing a shiver out of me. I didn’t know if I should be comforted or frightened by the isolation. I could barely make out Hunter sitting right beside me.

He picked up his oar again. “Now we can land on the island.”

We started to row, for real this time. In my mind, I could see the position of the island, but I followed Hunter’s lead, working with him as we pulled the paddles almost silently through the water. The faint splash of our oars and small waves hitting the side of the boat were the only sounds.

Suddenly, the wall of the pier where ferries docked loomed through the fog. We continued to row, navigating the sheer barrier of concrete and multiple metal struts until we reached a part designed for smaller vessels.

Hunter threw a rope around one of the struts and tied the boat. We moved as silently as possible, aware someone was most likely standing on the jetty, waiting for my arrival. The fog hid us well, however, and distorted any sounds we were making. Even so, I was poised for a yell that would signal we’d been spotted, or for gunfire to cut through the mist.

Thankfully, other than the sound of the waves slapping the sides of the jetty, and the wooden boat creaking beneath us, everything remained quiet.

Hunter gave me a shove up, helping me climb onto the platform, and then I reached down to pull him up after me, the boat wobbling precariously. We both rose to our feet to stand side by side and get our bearings. It felt strange being on dry land again, and disconcertingly, I could still feel the motion of the boat below me, as though we were still on the ocean.

The fog began to thin. I didn’t like that we’d be more easily seen now, but I did appreciate being able to see where I was walking. The island was rocky, with craggy, steep points, and I didn’t much like the idea of not being able to see anything. Though there were barriers and fencing everywhere, the thought of stepping off the edge of a cliff and falling to the unforgiving ocean below was too real in my mind. However, I also knew there were people here who were watching out for me. Hopefully, with what remained of the fog, I’d be able to take them by surprise. I wanted to have the upper hand.

Hunter and I left the dock, the large building of residential apartments on our left hand side. We hurried up the steps taking us to the higher part of the island, toward what had been the main cell house.

“Would they be inside?” I whispered to Hunter, keeping my voice down in case anyone was in hearing range.

He shook his head. “Not unless they have a key—which is a possibility. The place would be all locked up at this time, after the last tourists leave.”

A low moaning came from my left, and I reached out and grabbed Hunter’s arm, halting him. He frowned at me, and I put my finger to my lips then pointed in the direction I’d heard the sound coming from.

The moan came again, followed by a scraping.

Was it my dad?

My heart thudded hard, my breathing shallow. I couldn’t just ignore the sound and continue along the path we’d been headed. We need to investigate.

Hunter reached out a hand, and, using his ability, swept a clear path through the fog so we could see.

I gasped. A man I’d never seen before lay on the ground, his hands and feet bound together, his mouth covered by tape. He looked to be in his forties, the bulge of a gut straining against the buttons of his shirt. A trickle of blood ran from his hairline and down his temple. His eyes widened as he saw us, and his struggles increased in vigor, even though he must have realized he wasn’t going anywhere like that. Was this one of the men who’d taken my father? Perhaps he’d upset the others and ended up like this as a punishment? But then I realized he wore a green uniform, with a badge down the arm, and another on his chest. Who he was dawned on me.

“It’s one of the park rangers,” I hissed at Hunter. “We need to help him.”

But Hunter put out his hand, stopping me. “If you let him go now, he’s going to kick up one hell of fuss. You want the people who took your father to know you’re here and that you’re not alone?”

I didn’t, but I also didn’t want to leave the man like that.

Hunter crouched beside him. “I’m going to take the tape off your mouth, but you need to keep your voice down, understood?”

The man nodded, his eyes wide and wild.

Hunter peeled off the corner of the tape. With one firm yank, he tore the tape from the man’s mouth. The sound of tearing skin and hair made me wince.

“The people who did this to you,” Hunter asked. “Where did they go?”

“Up on the headland, toward the old laundry building,” the man rasped. “Please, untie me!”

“How many of them were there?”

“I don’t know. At least four, maybe more. They hit me over the back of the head and I woke up like this.” He struggled again. “Come on, man. You’ve got to let me go!”

“Was there an older man with them? He might have been tied up like you?”

He nodded, frantic. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Thanks.” Hunter taped the man’s mouth again. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back.”

The park ranger let out a muffled yell of fury, trying to kick out with his tied feet, thrashing his shoulders back and forth. He glared at us the whole time, and I didn’t need to hear his words to know exactly what he was thinking.

I felt bad for the ranger, but Hunter was right. My priority needed to be my dad, and even though this man might be a father himself, I couldn’t do anything to risk my own parent’s safety.

Hunter caught my hand and pulled me with him. We left the ranger behind and climbed the island, heading to the most northern point, where the ranger had told us they’d gone. Craggy rock faces rose up on the left hand side of the concrete walkways, and piles of rubble lay not far from the path. A sheer drop was on the other side of the path, down the cliffs to the ocean below. Only concrete balustrades separated us from the fall. There was a reason this island had been thought to be the perfect place to house prisoners. No one was ever supposed to be able to escape the treacherous conditions.

I glanced out to sea and frowned. The dark clouds that had been building on the horizon were pulling closer. If they covered the moon, we’d lose the little light we had. Yes, it would help to hide us, but it would also make dealing with the people who’d taken my father that much more difficult. I hoped the bad weather would stay away, at least until we’d gotten off the island. I didn’t like the idea of us being stuck here in the middle of a storm. The chances of being able to row back to the mainland if the waves got much higher wouldn’t be good.

We reached the most northern point of the island. Several buildings, each a number of stories high and all in an equally dilapidated condition, towered over us. Endless rows of chain-link fencing separated us from various buildings, signs hung on them warning us to stay out for our own safety. There were too many places to hide, and with both the darkness and fog, it was almost impossible to spot anyone. I was starting to feel desperate, knowing they were here somewhere, but unable to find them. Was this some kind of game? Were they playing with me—whoever they were?

Feeling as though time was running out, I broke into a trot. I resisted opening my mouth and yelling my father’s name. Bryce!

Hunter’s pull on my arm tugged me to a stop. “Ari, over there!”

Just beyond one of the buildings and the chain-link fences, several lights penetrated the darkness and what remained of the fog Hunter had created.

“Flashlights,” I whispered back. “It must be them.”

We slipped through a gap in the fencing, edging closer while trying not to be seen. Hunkering down by the side of one of the buildings, we hid for a moment, trying to figure out our next move. Hunter reached out a hand and waved it from side to side. The area where the people were standing cleared of the fog, letting us get a better look.

The small group was on the edge of the cliff, looking out across the water. The fog had almost cleared now, and the lights of the headland across the ocean beyond them shone through the haze, creating an effect that was almost paranormal. In the poor light, I couldn’t make out any detail—only dark silhouettes, of perhaps three men. It was hard to tell.

“We could take them down right now,” Hunter whispered to me. “Pelt them with rocks and push them over the side of the cliff.”

“No, my dad might be with them! I don’t want him to get hurt. Besides, we need to find out who is behind all of this. If we kill them and don’t find out, and there are more of them out there, we’re going to be left in exactly the same position as we were before.”

Hunter nodded. “Okay. Come on, then. Let’s find out who this asshole is.”

But I put my hand out to stop him. “They’re expecting me to come alone. They might hurt my father if they see you here, too.”

He frowned. “I don’t know, Ari. I don’t like the idea of you doing this by yourself.”

“I’m not helpless, Hunter. You’ve told me numerous times that I’m more capable than I think I am. Besides, you might be more use to us if they don’t know you’re here.”

He hesitated, and I could tell he didn’t like the idea, but he knew I was right. “Okay,” he agreed eventually. “I’ll stay back, but I’m not going to promise not to step in if you need me.”

I couldn’t ask for more than that.

I started to get to my feet, feeling tremulous inside, light-headed with fear and my legs weak. Yes, I was frightened, but I wasn’t going to let my emotions get in the way this time. My father needed me.

“Ari, wait.” Hunter pulled me back toward him and kissed me hard. It was urgent, claiming, bruising. It was a kiss that told me he gave a shit about whether or not I came back.

He released me and I stepped back, taking a deep, shaky breath. I didn’t want to leave his side, but I had to. I turned my back on him and approached the figures that were currently just featureless black shapes in the dim light. As I moved closer, I was able to make them out in more detail.

A man in his early fifties stood straight, staring off to the right. He had the look about him of a man with power—expensive suit, immaculate grooming. Something about him seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it.

On his knees and held between two men in black suits, a gun pointed at his head, was my father.

I couldn’t help myself. Seeing him like that rid me of all restraint and I rushed forward, breaking into a run. “Dad!”

They all turned at my shout. Anger built up inside me and I fought to control it, not knowing how it would manifest itself. I didn’t want to risk bringing the entire cliff edge tumbling into the sea beyond, killing us all. I didn’t trust myself enough to be able to control what happened.

The man in the gray suit seemed to hold himself even taller, straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin. “Well, you made it onto the island quietly. I hope you didn’t bring any of your friends with you.”

“I came alone,” I called back.

“We’ll see about that.” He lifted a cell phone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and placed a call. “Search the island. Make sure no one else is here.”

Damn it. He must have more of his goons elsewhere on the island. We’d been lucky not to have already run into them. I prayed Hunter had found himself somewhere good to hide, though I also hoped he hadn’t gone far.

“Dad?” I called out. “Are you okay?”

My father lifted his head to look at me. Even in the bad light, I could see he sported a black eye and split lip. The bastards had hurt him.

“Ari?” he croaked.

“It’s okay, Dad. I’ve come to take you home.”

The man in the suit chuckled. “Not yet, you haven’t. We had a deal, remember?”

“It wasn’t a deal,” I spat. “You kidnapped my father and forced me to come here. That’s not a deal, that’s blackmail.”

“Pedantic,” he said with a shrug. “Now tell me where he is.”

“Where who is?” I said, baffled, wondering if he was talking about Hunter and had somehow found out I’d brought him with me. “Who the hell are you? Let my father go!”

“No, it’s a fair swap, one for the other.”

“I don’t have anyone to swap. Please, just release my dad. He hasn’t done anything. He knows nothing about what’s going on here.”

Unintentionally, I locked eyes with my father. The look in his eyes, questions about what was happening that I couldn’t answer, broke my heart.

I’m so sorry, I mouthed at him.

The man in the gray suit called out once more. “I want to know where my son is. Kit Middleton. I believe the two of you are acquainted.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Blood rushed through my ears and my mouth dropped open. I suddenly recognized the man from the headshots I’d seen accompanying numerous newspaper and online articles. He also held an uncanny resemblance to the tall, sandy haired man I’d last seen down in the Cavern.

“You’re Philip Middleton,” I blurted. “You own the Myriad Group.”

It hit me what the man who’d fallen from the helicopter had been trying to say. Mmmm… Aaah. He hadn’t been groaning in pain. He’d been trying to say Myriad. It also explained the initials that had been left on the note. I’d assumed M.G. had been the initials of a person, when in fact they’d been the initials of a corporation.

“You? But … but …” My mind whirred at a thousand thoughts a second. Kit had told us the government was the one responsible for what we’d become. The one responsible for our mother’s deaths. The ones who had been chasing us. When the whole time it had been his father.

He’d been lying to us.

Had Kit been working for his father all this time? Had he been blaming the government in order to cover his own tracks?

If he had, he’d gone rogue, because his father certainly didn’t seem to know where he was.

Philip Middleton must have sensed my hesitation. He nodded at one of the men in the black suits, who jammed the gun he was holding into my father’s temple.

“No, stop!” I cried out, my hands out.

What was I supposed to do? Give up Kit’s location, and in doing so the location of the Cavern and everyone else there, or let my father die?

But Kit’s father wasn’t the only one who wanted information. I had questions, too.

“Did you do this to us? To our mothers? Did you conduct research on pregnant women?”

My father looked toward me. “What are you talking about, Ari? What does this have to do with your mother?”

I pointed a finger at Philip Middleton. “He’s responsible!”

I realized something else. Kit had our abilities and his mother had died. “You conducted the same research on your own wife. On your firstborn child. What kind of sick bastard does that?”

“It was the closest I could get to my work. The drugs were safe. We’d tested them thoroughly. We had a license to begin testing on human subjects.”

“But not for the thing you were actually testing for. You told people it was a treatment for morning sickness, but it was something else entirely.”

“We had harnessed something with huge potential. We needed human subjects, and that was never going to happen if we were completely honest about what we needed them for. The drugs were already proven to be harmless.”

I balled my fists with anger. “Except they weren’t, were they? It took a few years, but the women whose babies were affected—or perhaps I should say altered—by the drugs, all died, didn’t they?”

“I didn’t know that was going to happen,” he said with a frown. “I do deeply regret that. I didn’t want to be left with two motherless boys.”

“You selfish bastard. Don’t you think you should have thought about that before you gave her the drugs?”

“I told you, I believed they were safe. We had no way of knowing the effects wouldn’t show until several years later, and even then, the affected women were a tiny percentage. Don’t you think that sacrifice is worth it, considering what we created?”

“What you created?”

“Yes. Humans with special abilities.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I never asked for this. I’d swap what I can do in a second if it meant my mother and sister being alive again.” I gestured toward my dad. “And now you’ve taken my father as well. You think that is a reasonable sacrifice? Taking my entire family from me?”

Behind him, the storm clouds had begun to move, gathering, tumbling, building. Racing toward us at a rapid rate. A roll of thunder crashed across the sky, and jagged forks of lightning cut down through the dark.

“Are you responsible for the bombing on the pier?” I yelled at him, wanting to know, but also hoping to buy myself more time. “It killed my sister!”

Philip Middleton’s gray eyebrows pulled down, his lips thinning. “That wasn’t us, I give you my word. It revealed you to us, but we didn’t do it.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought I believed him.

A sudden wind whipped up, tugging at their suit jackets, raking through their hair. It pushed at my back, and I was forced to take a couple of staggered steps forward before grinding my heels into the ground to anchor myself. The men, too, fought against it, leaning into the sudden wind to avoid being pushed back.

“Is this you?” Philip Middleton demanded, shouting above the sound of the wind. “If it is, stop it right now, or your father is going to be missing a piece of his skull. I know what you people are capable of.”

“It’s not me,” I cried in panic. “There’s a storm coming, look behind you.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the growing black clouds, but shook his head. “It’s too far away, and the wind is coming from the wrong direction.” He turned to one of his men. “There’s someone else here.”

I knew Hunter was trying to help, perhaps hoping to use the wind to distract them or even force them off the side of the cliff, but it was too perilous. My father was right there with them. Whatever Hunter tried to conjure up, there was no way my dad would go unscathed.

“No, stop!” I cried, hoping Hunter would hear me. The wind tore my words from my lips, carrying them away, so I wasn’t even sure he’d heard me.

He must have heard me. The wind died away as quickly as it had arrived. Movement came from behind me, and I glanced back to see another black-suited man shoving Hunter forward. I could only assume from their position, and that Hunter hadn’t fought back at all, that the man had a gun pressed into the small of Hunter’s back. I didn’t think they’d shoot us, however. We were Middleton’s little pet projects. He’d try to take us alive before he killed us.

Hunter caught my eye and gave me a little shrug, as though to say, ‘I tried.’

I turned back to Philip Middleton. “Okay, I’ll tell you where Kit is. Just let them both go.”

“Ari, no!” Hunter yelled.

I ignored him. “I can’t tell you where it is. It’s impossible to describe. You’ll never find it unless I take you there myself.”

“It’s in San Francisco, though?” the older man said.

“Yes, it’s not far from here. But I can’t show you while we’re all on this island. Let Hunter take my father home, and I’ll take you to where your son is hiding.”

He barked laughter. “Do you really think I’m going to let these two go? As soon as they’re safe, you’ll refuse to show me.”

“Why would I? Kit’s been lying to us all this time. He never told us the Myriad Group were responsible for the drugs that did this to us and killed our mothers. He’s acted like our leader, when he’s been lying to us the whole time.”

A massive crash of thunder made everyone duck. The clouds were close now, almost upon us. If we didn’t get off the island before the storm hit, we’d be trapped here.

“Let my dad and Hunter go, and I’ll take you to him.”

“You can’t go with him, Ari,” my father called to me. “The man is insane.”

“It’s okay, Dad. I know what I’m doing.”

But Middleton only laughed. “You have no idea what you’re doing. You think you know things? What you know isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.”

My anger grew. Beneath my feet, the ground began to tremble. Above us, another roll of thunder cracked across the sky. Waves crashed against the cliff face below.

“Ari,” Hunter called out to me. “Ari, you’ve got to stop it.”

I spun around to him. “I’m not doing anything!”

“Yes, you are.”

It was happening again. My inability to control my powers. Only now it was happening on a massive scale. The sky flickered like a strobe light then lit up in a blinding white flash. Lightning jagged down toward us, as though it was trying to hit the man who’d started this whole thing. Was I doing that? Was I directing it?

I remembered what both Kit and Hunter had taught me—that I needed to center the energy inside me and focus it, but I couldn’t. Just thinking of Kit filled me with fury at his lies. My rage was all of me, seeping from every pore and nerve ending.

The tremors in the ground grew worse, shaking us from side to side. The men murmured, growing anxious, stepping their feet farther apart to keep their balance.

“Move away from the edge,” Middleton yelled to his men, as though only just becoming aware of their treacherous position.

I let out a yell of rage, every muscle in my body gripped with unreleased anger and grief at everything that had happened to me—the loss of my mother and sister, the blackmail and lies. The tremors increased, and one of the men in black let out a scream as the ground beneath his feet gave way. His hands scrabbled wildly in midair for a fraction of a second, the gun falling from his grip, before he vanished from sight.

The area of ground that had fallen down the cliff side was too close to my father. I remembered my warning to Hunter about not wanting my father hurt, and yet I was in danger of doing that myself. I needed to regain control, but I couldn’t. It was too much. It was stronger than I was, and I couldn’t rein it in.

Another streak of lightning sparked across the sky, blinding us in its white light. A massive boom sounded seconds later, concrete and stone fracturing, and the roof of the building where Hunter and I had been sheltering exploded in a huge ball of sparks and fire.

“Ari, move!” Hunter’s cry.

I turned to see more than a dozen cracks running down through the brick and concrete. I was too close. Like I was watching in slow motion, the whole of the side of the building began to give way, concrete dust running in rivulets down the wall.

My dad, taking the moment of distraction, let out a roar and swiped a fist at the man holding the gun to his head. A gunshot sounded, and I cried out, terrified he was hurt or worse. The two men tumbled together, and Philip Middleton yelled a command I couldn’t quite make out.

Another huge crack echoed in my ears, and I turned to see the side of the building start to fall. I couldn’t outrun it. The building was several stories high. Instinctively, I crouched, my arm raised to protect myself, though I knew it would be of no use. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to be crushed by a block of concrete.

The crush never happened.

With my heart pounding, fear thick in my mouth, I dared open my eyes.

Suspended above me were numerous chunks of concrete and brick, a strange patchwork of the side of the building floating midair. Was I doing this, too? I glanced over at Hunter. He stood, utterly focused on the pieces of the building. This wasn’t me holding the slabs of concrete in midair. No, I was only about destruction. This was all Hunter’s doing.

“Ari,” he said, calmly, “move out from under there. Slowly.”

The slab directly above me was the size of a car. If Hunter let it fall, it would kill me.

With my heart in my throat and my whole body trembling, I crawled. The pieces of the building shivered in midair, as though fighting against Hunter’s control of their motion.

Beyond Hunter, I saw movement.

Philip Middleton and his men were slipping away.

“Hunter, they’re getting away. Stop them!”

He shook his head, his focus never leaving the pieces of the building he was holding. “I can’t, Ari. If I do anything, it’s all going to fall.”

I remembered something. “You said I might not be able to get hurt. Just let it fall. Stop him.”

Hunter continued to stare at the floating objects. “I’m not going to take that risk.”

I wanted to run, but I was frightened any rash movement would make Hunter lose control, and so I remained on my hands and knees, cowering down, as I crept out from under them. I made it out from under the final piece, and fell onto my back, panting hard.

The chunks of brick and concrete hit the ground with a massive crash, sending dust and dirt flying up from beneath them. In what remained of the building, a fire raged in the timbers of the roof. Sparks flew into the night sky, the sound of the fire building to a roar.

My father’s voice. “Ari!”

I remembered the others—Philip Hamilton and the men in black.

When I turned to look, they’d already gone.

Chapter Twenty-two

Above our heads, the storm clouds broke apart as quickly as they’d gathered, the thunder and lightning no more. The ground beneath our feet was once more stable, and I knew it was because the fury that had held me in its grip had subsided.

Philip Hamilton and his remaining men took advantage of the distraction I had created and, obviously realizing their guns were no defense against earthquakes and lightning, sneaked away.

Dammit. It had been my fault. If I’d been able to control myself, we could have turned the tables and held Hamilton accountable for his actions, but instead he was free.

But so were we. And my dad was safe.

I got to my feet and staggered up to my father. I fell into his arms, squeezing him tight.

“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, Dad.”

His eyes were wide, his face pale. Beneath my arms, I could feel him shaking.

My father released me and stared down at me, his expression a mixture of anger, confusion and fear. “What the hell is going on, Arianna? You’re supposed to be away with work.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you, but I had no choice.”

“What happened there? It was like those pieces of the building were floating. Why didn’t they hit you?”

“Hunter did that, Dad. He saved me.”

I almost added from myself, but managed to close my lips around my words.

My father shook his head, bewilderment filling his features. “But how? How is such a thing even possible?”

“I don’t have time to explain it all now, but I will. I promise.”

I turned to Hunter and hugged him, too.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said into my hair.

“Me, too. They got away, though. It was my fault.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re safe, and your dad is safe. That’s what counts.”

Tears caused by every overwhelming emotion—relief, fear, anger at myself—filled my eyes. “I couldn’t control it, Hunter. I could have gotten everyone killed.”

He kissed my head and smoothed my hair with his palm. “But you didn’t, and we’ll figure it out, Ari. It will be okay.”

My dad stepped forward and put out his hand to Hunter. “I don’t know what you and my daughter are into, and frankly I’m not sure I believe my own eyes right now, but thank you for keeping her safe.”

Hunter shook his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Sheppard.”

“Call me Bryce, please. After what I just saw, I think we can be on a first name basis.”

Hunter nodded.

From somewhere far below us came the growl of an engine. We all turned toward the sound.

“Look, there,” I said, pointing past the cliffs, to the ocean beyond.

A small speedboat bobbed across the waves. Three figures sat inside—Middleton and his two remaining men. They were getting away.

Familiar anger boiled up inside me. “I’m going to flip the damn boat.”

Hunter touched my arm. “No, let him go.”

I turned to him, my eyes wide. “Why?”

“That’s Kit’s father. You want to be the one responsible for killing Kit’s father?”

He had a point.

“Besides, he has knowledge we want. He’ll know where we came from. What was in those drugs given to our mothers to make us this way? He might be the only one with answers, and if we kill him now, we might never find out.”

“He’ll try again. He still doesn’t know where his son is. He’s not just going to let things rest.”

“Good. Because neither will we.”

The boat vanished into the darkness.

And we let them go.

Chapter Twenty-three

We made our way down through the island together, to where we’d left the small rowboat. Before we reached the jetty, I remembered something and turned to Hunter.

“We still need to untie that poor park ranger. We can’t leave him like that.”

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Okay, and then we’re getting the hell off this island. We need to go and have a serious conversation with Kit.”

We went back to the spot where we’d found the ranger, my dad following. The man was in exactly the same position, lying tied up on the ground. He started yelling the moment he saw us, though it came out as a muffled grunt against the tape over his mouth.

Hunter crouched beside him and undid the ropes around his feet and hands. He helped the man to sitting, and then yanked the tape back off his mouth.

“I’m calling the cops,” the ranger declared, rubbing at his wrists and ankles. “You can’t do this to people and expect to get away with it.”

“Listen, asshole,” said Hunter. “We weren’t the ones to do this to you. We just set you free. Call the police all you like, tell them who hit you and tied you up, but if you mention anything about us being here, we’ll come back and kill you, got it?”

The ranger looked away and mumbled something that sounded like got it.

I hoped that was what he’d said. I didn’t much like the idea of trying to explain all of this to the police.

We left him where he was—we weren’t going to offer to help any more than we already had; we had enough to deal with—and hurried back down to the jetty.

Hunter pulled me to one side. “What are we going to do with your father?” he said, his voice low. “We need to go and find out what Kit knows.”

“We have to take him with us,” I said, looking up to Hunter, my eyes wide. “I can’t abandon him now.”

“It’s breaking the rules, Ari. Remember, we don’t tell anyone about the Cavern.”

“I don’t get a damn about the rules. How would you feel if this was someone you loved? Would you just leave them?”

“The only person I care about already knows everything.”

I jolted at his words. Did he mean me? This wasn’t the right time to start analyzing our relationship.

“If he can’t come,” I said resolutely, “I’m not coming either.”

He reached down and caught my hand in his. “We need you, Ari. We can’t leave you out here, unprotected.”

His words caused my hackles to rise and I pulled out of his grip. “I’m not unprotected. I have my abilities. You said it yourself that I’m stronger than anyone else. I can protect myself.”

“No, you can’t. Not yet anyway. You almost just got yourself killed.”

My father called over to us. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Dad,” I said, shooting Hunter a look. “Everything is fine. We’re taking you somewhere safe.”

Hunter gave a sigh of exasperation, but didn’t argue with me any further. Miraculously, the little rowboat was still tied up and in one piece. We jumped down to it, the boat wobbling beneath us, before seating ourselves.

Hunter rowed as before, using his ability, but I could tell he was exhausted, the power he was putting into the movements nothing like before. The waves were still up from the storm I had caused, and it felt like forever before we finally hit the shingle cove beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

“What are we doing here, Ari?” my dad asked.

“Please, Dad. It’s important you don’t ask too many questions now, okay? I’m breaking the rules just by bringing you here.”

Now the immediate threat appeared to have passed, he went back into dad mode. “I heard everything that was said back there, Ari. About your mother being given drugs, and them killing her. Don’t tell me this isn’t my business, because as well as you losing your mother, I lost my wife. As for all the other stuff … Well, I saw what I saw. Maybe this was supposed to be a secret, but it’s gone beyond that now. I already know, even though you haven’t told me anything.”

Hunter shrugged. “He has a point.”

I looked between Hunter and my father. Now Hunter was apparently onboard, I couldn’t see any reason not to take my father with us. I certainly didn’t intend to send him back to the house. “Okay, follow us.”

And we led him through the tunnel through the rock and into the Cavern beyond.

Chapter Twenty-four

We emerged into the Cavern, with Hunter leading the way, me stepping through after him, and my dad bringing up the rear. It was the early hours of the morning, so most people were sleeping, but there were a few still awake, perhaps keeping guard in case someone uninvited tried to enter. They turned to us with wide eyes and open mouths, as though we were ghosts appearing in front of their eyes.

Dixie was the first to react. She let out a cry of relief and ran up to me, throwing her arms around my neck. “Oh, my God. You’re safe. I’ve been so worried.”

I hugged her back. “Yes, we’re safe.”

“What happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

I looked over her shoulder to see Natasha and Sledge in the background. They were both looking toward my father.

“He’s not supposed to be here,” said Sledge.

Hunter stepped in to support me. “We had no choice. He already knows.”

“You’re Ari’s dad,” said Dixie, but it was more of a statement than a question.

My dad nodded. “Please, call me Bryce.” He looked around the Cavern in wonder. “What the heck is this place?”

I touched his arm. “I’ll explain everything, Dad. We just have some things to deal with first, okay?”

Hunter looked around, his eyebrows knitted, his face rigid with anger. “Where’s Kit?”

“I’m right here,” Kit called as he emerged from the corridor which led to the living area. “Where have you been? We’ve been worried about you two. We went to the house, but you were already gone.” He turned to my father with a frown. “Who the hell is this?”

Hunter ignored his question and stormed toward him. He hit him in the chest with two hands, sending Kit stumbling backward in surprise. “We found out who’s been after us. Not only that, but they’re most likely responsible for what we are, for our mother’s deaths.”

Kit, seeing the fury in his eyes, held up both hands in defense. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit,” he snarled. “The Myriad Group sound familiar to you? It should—your father is the founder.”

Confusion filled Kit’s features. “I know what the Myriad Group is, asshole. I grew up with it, remember?”

“Yeah, and your father is behind all of this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your father is the one responsible for us being who we are. He is the one behind developing the drug that killed all of our mothers.”

Kit shook his head. “No, that’s not true. It’s a government experiment.”

I joined in. “You’re wrong. Your father told us himself, face to face.”

Hunter gave a cold laugh. “You realize he experimented upon his own wife? His firstborn child? What sort of sick son-of-a-bitch is he?”

Kit’s ice blue eyes narrowed. “That’s exactly what he is. I wouldn’t put anything past him. Why do you think I’ve estranged myself from him? I haven’t had contact with my father for the past four years. Ever since my brother died, and all he did was blame me for his favorite son’s death.”

“You must have known. How else would you have created all of this?” Hunter gestured at the Cavern, at all the equipment. “Don’t tell me no one at the Myriad Group knows you’re down here.”

“I told you already, they think it’s all gone, destroyed in a tunnel collapse. The entrance from beneath the bridge is my creation. Yes, I’ve worked with what was already here, but the Myriad Group has hundreds of different research centers, all over the country. My father has no idea where I am, or even if I’m still alive. When I left, I took the money out of my trust fund—every last cent. I invested everything I had into the Cavern, so don’t try to make me out to be the bad guy. I didn’t leave my father because I thought he’d been experimenting on me and caused my mother’s death, I left because they guy was an asshole who I no longer wanted to be anywhere near.”

Hunter and I exchanged a glance. Was he telling the truth? He certainly sounded genuine enough, but it could all be a front.

“How do we know you’re not working for him?” I said. “This could all be one big conspiracy to get us all in one place so your father can bring us in. You’re the one who said the government was after us, when this whole time it was your own father.”

“I thought it was the government. Why wouldn’t I have assumed that—men in suits who seemed to either want us dead or to take us in. What else was I supposed to think?”

“You didn’t need to think anything,” Hunter growled. “You already knew! You’ve been working for him this whole time.”

“No, I didn’t. If I was working for my father, don’t you think I would have given you all up by now? I swear to you, I had no idea.” His big fists bunched. “If I’d known, I would have gone back and killed him myself.” His voice was thick with anger.

I touched Hunter’s arm. “I think he’s telling the truth. I believe him.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then we’ll find out soon enough. He’ll give up this place, and all of us, but I think he’d have done it already if he wanted to. Philip Middleton had to kidnap my father to find out where his son was. That doesn’t sound like they’ve been in touch recently.”

Hunter appeared to consider my words then nodded.

“The others need to know the truth,” he said. “They deserve to know who is behind all of this. And they deserve to know who their leader really is.”

“I’m not different than the man I’ve always been,” said Kit. “I’m as angry as anyone—more so. How would you feel if you’d just found out your own father was behind your mother’s death? I want to put an end to this, too.”

“You know where we can find your father, then?” I asked him.

“Not right at this moment, but I’m sure if I speak to the right people, I’ll be able to find out. He won’t go down easily,” Kit warned. “He keeps himself surrounded by armed security.”

Hunter nodded. “Yeah, the men in black who’ve been chasing us all this time.”

“We have to plan for this,” Kit continued. “We need answers. It’s not as though it’s just a case of figuring out how to kill him, as much as I want to see the son-of-a-bitch dead. He’s going to have one hell of a lot of backup, especially now he’s revealed he’s the one responsible. We need to train hard and be ready.”

I took a step forward. “How long are we going to train for before we actually do something? You say we’re down in the Cavern to hone our abilities, but isn’t the truth that we’re really hiding?”

“We’re not hiding, Ari,” he said, his lips thinning into a line. “We can’t just launch into a fight without knowing what we’re doing.”

“And how long is that going to take? We can’t just let your father carry on like he is. We need to get out there and stop him!” My anger built inside me, and I knew I had to keep control, or the Myriad Group wouldn’t be the only ones hurting people. “How many more people are we going to lose before we act?”

Kit shook his head. “I don’t want us to lose anyone else, either.”

“I know that, but we will, if we don’t do something.”

“I swear to you that we’ll take action,” said Kit, “and we’ll do it soon. I won’t let my father get away with what he’s done to us all.”

Chapter Twenty-five

I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. I was exhausted but unable to sleep, a million thoughts racing through my mind. The future felt terrifyingly uncertain. I wanted all of us to be safe, but that would never happen with Philip Middleton still out there. Who knew how deep into the Myriad Group this went? There must have been others involved. As far as I was aware, Kit’s father wasn’t a scientist, which meant there were people who worked for his company who knew exactly what had been done to us. It might have been more than twenty years ago, but that didn’t mean they were no longer working for the group. There could be an entire division dedicated to rounding up what they’d created all those years ago…

Us.

Dixie had stayed with Sledge, and Kit had found my dad a bed with the other men. I was alone in the room, with only my thoughts for company. I worried Philip Middleton might have been watching out for where we’d gone after we left the island, and would launch an attack on the Cavern. Every little noise jolted me from the lure of sleep, and set my heart racing.

Movement came at the door.

I sat up, clutching the bed sheet around me.

Hunter stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame. His head tilted to one side as he regarded me.

“Jesus, Hunter. You scared me.”

“Sorry.” He moved farther into the room. “I saw Dixie with Sledge in the common room, and I realized that meant you were alone.”

“Yes, but I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

My heart caught in my chest. “It wasn’t?”

“I thought I might lose you tonight, Ari. I don’t think I’ve ever been so fucking frightened in my life.” I watched as he hooked his fingers beneath the bottom of the gray t-shirt he wore and pulled it up over his head.

“Hunter …” I said, not sure how I was going to finish.

His hands went to the buckle of his belt. All words fell from my lips as he undid the belt and shucked his jeans from his hips. He toed off his boots and jeans with them. In only his underwear, which left little to the imagination, he slipped into bed beside me and pulled me into his arms.

It didn’t even occur to me to ask him what he was doing. We both knew. This had been building between us since the first moment we’d met.

He kissed me, our lips crushing together, our tongues meeting. The scent of him filled my nostrils—a musky scent that was purely Hunter—and then he flipped me onto my back with him above, so his body shadowed mine. His hips slotted between my thighs, and I wrapped my heels around his hips, pulling him closer.

“I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you,” he told me between kisses.

“Me, too.” I nodded in earnest. “Me, too.”

Our hands learned each other’s bodies, ridding ourselves of our remaining clothing. I wanted him to know me in that way, for us to have the intimate connection I’d been so sure of from the start. His mouth was on my skin, mine on his. His fingers found my most secret place, and I reached down to stroke him, too, so wondrously hard and silky soft, all at the same time.

Pleasure built inside me and I urged him on, wanting more. Above our heads, the lights flickered on and off.

“Ari?” He growled his warning against my mouth.

“Sorry,” I replied, suppressing the grin threatening to break across my face.

He settled himself back between my thighs and pushed inside me. I was relieved he’d brought protection, though I know I’d rib him later about taking me for a sure thing. We moved together, both building toward our peaks. I lost myself in him, forgetting everything else for the moment, only aware of how the feel of his body against mine felt like coming home. My pleasure found its tipping point and I spiraled down in its grip, crying out against Hunter’s shoulder. He gritted his teeth, his breath hot against my neck, as he found his own release inside me. Somewhere in the room, something exploded with a pop, but I was too far gone to notice what it was.

We came down together, sweat-slicked skin, heaving chests, and glowing cheeks. He kissed me again, and we held each other beneath the sheets.

I sighed in contentment, incredibly happy in his arms. “There was a while there where I didn’t think this was ever going to happen.”

He propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me with those dark eyes I’d come to care about so much. “Yeah, me, too. I’m sorry. I cared too much about the power Kit had over us. With this new information, I just thought screw it. His father is the man who did this to us. He has no moral right to hold anything over us anymore.”

“It’s not Kit’s fault that his father is an asshole,” I pointed out.

“No, but it’s Kit’s fault when Kit acts like an asshole.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You’ve had some moments yourself.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll do better going forward, I promise.”

I gave a small shrug. “Hey, I’ve made mistakes myself. I could have gotten everyone killed on that island. I can’t trust myself, and that worries me more than anything. More than you or Kit, more than Philip Middleton and the Myriad Group, even.”

“We’ll keep working, Ari. We’ll figure it out. What you did tonight with the storm was incredible. You have all this power inside you, and if we can figure out a way to control and channel it, you will be the most powerful Kin ever known.”

From out of nowhere, I shivered. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“It’s scary, I know, but it’s also incredible. You’re incredible. And I will be right here, by your side, every step of the way, if you’ll have me.”

I nodded, and he kissed me again.

“I’ll have you,” I whispered against his mouth.

Chapter Twenty-six

This time, when I blinked open my eyes and realized Hunter was no longer beside me, it didn’t worry me. Instead, I hugged myself with happiness at the memories of the night before. The musky scent of him permeated my sheets, the memory of the taste of his skin still on my tongue. I knew he’d be somewhere in the Cavern and I’d see him soon. Our lives were inextricably entwined now.

Dixie was back in her bed, still sleeping, buried deep beneath the covers. I wondered if she and Hunter had crossed paths while she’s been sneaking in after spending time with Sledge, and he was slipping out after being with me. A smile tweaked my cheeks at the thought, and I pressed my lips together. Each of them must have looked as guilty as the other.

Remembering my dad was somewhere in the Cavern, probably feeling lost, worried, and alone, I jumped out of bed. The picture frames still sat on my bedside table, their emptiness somehow mocking me. I’d hoped deep down I might have tugged at someone’s conscience with my plea for the photographs to be returned, but whoever was responsible for taking them hadn’t cared.

Pushing the thought of my missing belongings from my mind, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a clean t-shirt, quickly used the bathroom, and went out to try to track down my father.

I passed several people in the corridor—Russell, the guy who’d been chewing gum during a meal when I’d first arrived, and Caro, the New York girl with red hair who had an affinity for electricity. They both smiled and called “morning” to me as I passed by, their friendliness leaving me puzzled. I checked the kitchen for any signs of my father, but he wasn’t there. A few other Kin were preparing themselves breakfast—an Asian woman with the shiniest hair I’d ever seen, who I thought was called Tori, and a blonde guy whose name might have been Matt, or possibly Mark. They both glanced over at me as I entered.

“Hi, Ari,” the female half of the pair called.

“Morning, Ari,” said Matt—or Mark.

“Good morning,” I replied, feeling off kilter. Why was everyone being so nice to me? It made me suspicious. Had I done something in my sleep again? “Umm, have you seen my dad, Bryce, anywhere? I brought him to the Cavern last night.”

“Yeah,” said Tori. “I think he’s in the rec room.”

“Okay, thanks.”

I turned and walked away with chirps of “see you later,” following me. What was going on? Why was everyone being so friendly? I couldn’t help wonder if Hunter was behind it. Had he spoken to everyone about my missing photographs and told them to be nicer to me?

I entered the common room to find my dad sitting on the couch, surrounded by people perched on the armrests, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. He glanced up at me as I entered, the smile that had already been on his face widening at the sight of me. He clutched a mug of coffee, the scent of which made my mouth water.

“Ari, you’re up!”

“Yeah, Dad.” My gaze scanned all the people around him. So much for him being alone and worried. “I see you’re making friends already.”

“Sure, everyone’s been great.”

“Hey, Ari,” said the girl with the big dark glasses who’d been sitting opposite me at lunch. I searched my mind for her name. Ashley. Ashley from Arkansas. That was it. “Your dad’s been telling us all how you rescued him.”

A young-looking guy with light brown hair, whose name I was completely clueless about, nodded in agreement. “Calling in that storm was totally badass.”

Ashley’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “And causing a landslip that made Bryce’s captor fall down the side of the cliff into the ocean? That’s insane.”

All the attention made my cheeks heat. “Oh, well, it wasn’t exactly intentional.”

It dawned on me the reason everyone was being so friendly. They’d heard what had happened the previous night, and it had elevated my position in the group. Well, I’d been at rock bottom, so the only way had been up. Maybe my dad being here helped, too. Even though it was against the rules to tell anyone about the Cavern, these had been extreme circumstances, and anyway, everyone liked my dad. With each member of the Kin having lost a parental figure, I thought perhaps they liked having an older person around for once.

I looked around for Hunter, hoping he’d miraculously appear from somewhere and rescue me. He didn’t. I spotted the twins, Lisa and Lyle, sitting off to one side, just the two of them together, as always. They both gave me a smile as I caught their eye then went back to their own private little world.

Natasha was here, though, and she joined in the breakdown of what had occurred the previous night. “And what about Kit’s father being the person who’s been after us?” she said. “I mean, thinking about it, it’s hardly surprising, is it? Rich, powerful man, with research centers at his disposal. I can’t believe Kit didn’t know, though.”

I noticed Kit hadn’t appeared yet. Something turned uncomfortably inside me. This was his territory, and I felt as though I was stepping on it. Everyone had looked up to Kit before I’d arrived and uncovered his background. I didn’t think he’d been covering up for his father, but I knew my discovery left the rest of the Kin questioning his motives.

“I think he did know,” said someone else. “How could he not know what his father was up to?”

Natasha looked to me. “Do you think Kit’s father killed your sister?”

I saw my dad flinch at her words.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. He said it wasn’t him, and he had no reason to lie.”

“Then who was it?” called over Lyle, the male half of the twins, surprising me by joining in the conversation.

I shook my head and shrugged. “Maybe Kit was right about that part all along, and it was the government. But honestly, I’m just guessing.”

Ashley continued to stare up at me. “You were so brave.”

Natasha nodded in agreement. “We know who’s behind the men in black because of you.”

Movement came from behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Hunter walk in. He walked right up to me, slipped his arm around my waist, and kissed my cheek. “Morning, Ari.”

I tried not to squirm with embarrassment under his attention. “Morning.”

“Sleep well?” he enquired.

I pressed a smile between my lips. “Not bad. You?”

He kissed me again, but this time on my earlobe, and spoke low into my ear. “Best sleep I’ve had for years.”

I held back a giggle as he let me go.

“Ari,” a female voice said from behind me, and I turned to see Caro, the red-head girl, together with several others, Dixie and Kit included, following in behind her. She held a small cardboard box in her hands.

“We have something for you. I’m sorry it’s not your missing pictures, but Dixie said some other things were messed with, too. It’s not much, but … anyway … here …”

Awkwardly, she shoved the box into my hands.

I frowned down at it. “What’s this?”

She gave a little shrug. “Just open it.”

I pulled the flaps apart to expose what lay inside. A fluffy pair of purple socks, brand new and still in the packaging, and a boxed tub of what looked like expensive moisturizer.

“Oh, wow. Thank you.”

She shrugged, her face going even redder than mine due to her complexion. “It’s not much. Just to replace what you had. And to say thank you for finding out what you did. From all of us.”

I sensed everyone trying not to look at Kit.

“And to say welcome,” Dixie threw in.

I smiled, my heart swelling in my chest. I reached in and fingered the socks, soft and thick. “Thank you. That’s really lovely of you.”

No one had admitted to taking the photographs and messing with my things. Maybe I would never find out who was responsible and I needed to let it go. We had more important issues ahead of us. I knew Kit’s father would continue to try to hunt us down, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to be the prey any longer. We needed to work hard and train so that he was the one frightened of us, instead of the other way around. We couldn’t be divided in ourselves, and I certainly didn’t want to be the one who’d cause the division.

Hunter put his arm around my waist and squeezed me. “Everyone wanted to make sure you knew you’re welcome here.”

I looked up at him, and then around at everyone else, all their smiling faces. “Thank you, everyone. This means a lot.”

For the first time, I felt a part of it. We had a long, frightening road ahead of us, but I wasn’t alone. I was a part of the Kin.

Family.

THE END

Liked what you read? Look out for book two in the series, ‘After Flux’ which will be available for pre-order soon! So you never miss out, make sure you sign up to Marissa Farrar’s new release list to stay updated about new releases, exclusives, and special offers!  http://forms.aweber.com/form/61/19822861.htm

About the Author

Marissa Farrar is a British author of more than twenty five novels, and has been a full time author for the last six years. She predominantly writes paranormal romance and urban fantasy, but has branched into contemporary fiction as well. When she’s not writing, which isn’t often, she’s taking care of her three young daughters or binge watching shows on Netflix.

If you want to know more about Marissa, then please visit her website at www.marissa-farrar.blogspot.com. You can also find her at her facebook page, www.facebook.com/marissa.farrar.author or follow her on twitter @marissafarrar.

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Also by the Author

The Blood Courtesans Vampire Romance:

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THE COMPLETE SERIES BOXED SET

The Dhampyre Chronicles:

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The Spirit Shifters Series:

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The Monster Trilogy

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The Mercenary Series:

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FLUX

The Flux Series

Book One

Copyright © 2017 Marissa Farrar

Warwick House Press

Edited by Lori Whitwam

Cover art by Killer Covers

License Notes

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Publisher’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.