Burning Yves (Benedicts #2.5) (2 page)

‘Our mom would skin you if she heard that,’ warned Will. ‘Besides, Yves can hardly be counted a runt. He’s sixth and already the most successful of us.’

‘Rub it in, why don’t you?’ Rohan punched Yves’ arm in a friendly fashion. ‘He’s totally amazing—we all know that.’

‘Anyway,’ continued Will, with a wink at Yves, ‘I thought the runt was usually the youngest. Number seven is Zed. Runt material, you think?’

‘Er, no.’ Rohan shook his head. ‘Absolutely not.’

Yves laughed. His friends were still a little scared of his bad-boy, motorbike-riding younger brother, even though Zed had mellowed since meeting Sky.

As if on cue, Zed appeared out of nowhere and football-tackled Yves, carrying him away over his shoulder with a hoot. ‘And he makes a break for the line! The crowd roars!’

Xav then, of course, had to tackle Zed and the three fell in a heap on the football field near the goal posts.

‘Touch down!’ crowed Zed.

‘Geez, what did I do to deserve such brothers?’ said Yves. He flopped on his back in a happy sprawl of limbs like he was making a snow angel, without the snow. Despite his lack of ball skills as a child, his brothers had insisted on involving him in sports—as their football. He was used to being bundled from one end of the field to the other.

Zed slapped his chest. ‘I haven’t done that in years. Boy, Yves, you’re getting too big for this.’

Will and Uriel arrived and scooped up Yves.

‘Hey! No!’ he groaned, knowing what was coming but powerless to stop it.

‘Watch out, we’re stealing your ball,’ said Will.

‘Wow, needs two of us now. Should put you on a diet, Yves,’ joked Uriel.

They pelted for the other end of the field. Trace and Victor, abandoning their pretence of being all grown up, joined in on Zed’s side. Yves could hear Sky squawking on the sidelines ‘Don’t hurt him!’ and his dad’s rumbling laughter. No longer a little six-year-old, Yves twisted free of his brothers, dodged and ducked outstretched hands and bolted for safety, pursued by both factions of his brothers with his gown rippling behind him. His hat was long gone. He guessed if he got to either Sky or their mom the others would concede that he had gotten home. He almost managed to reach Sky when Trace bundled on top of him, the signal for all the others to add themselves to the heap with lots of laughter and banter. Seven smart graduation suits were soon covered in grass stains.

‘Get off him, guys. He can’t possibly breathe under there!’ protested Sky, hauling the nearest Benedict off the top of the pile.

‘Join the family bundle!’ coaxed Zed, holding out his hands to her.

She backed off. ‘No way, Zed Benedict. I’m wearing a white dress. You’ll ruin it!’

‘Guys, Sky won’t join the family bundle,’ said Zed with mock sorrow.

‘Aw, that won’t do.’ Trace shook his head. ‘Once a Benedict, always a Benedict, right Yves?’

‘Yes!’ groaned Yves, thinking Sky might’ve been right about that not-breathing thing.

‘I’m not a Benedict—I’m a Bright!’ Sky argued with flawless logic.

‘You’re a Benedict to us, cupcake!’ said Xav, also with utter reasonableness in Yves’ opinion.

The weight lifted off him as the brothers scooped up Sky and lifted her high above their shoulders. ‘See, we’re not spoiling your dress, are we?’ said Zed.

‘Don’t you dare toss me!’ said Sky.

‘Aw, honey, why did you have to put the idea in our heads?’ asked Zed.

Yves winced at her shriek as they gave her a gentle toss and caught her. She was their darling and no one would ever hurt her, or even seriously scare her. Once lowered to the ground, Sky held out her hand to Yves. ‘OK, this kind of family bundle I can do. Standing on two feet. Hug.’

Yves stood in the middle with her, surrounded by his brothers. He had never felt more loved or more united with each of them. Even Zed, who had had such a hard time until finding Sky, was happy today. Yves couldn’t imagine what could get better than this moment.

He had to go to London to find out.

Yves did not dare fall asleep on the night flight from Denver to Heathrow. Sitting in the window seat as Victor and Xav dozed next to him, he gazed out at the darkness. A faint stain on the horizon told him they were racing towards dawn. Soon the whole sky would be on fire with a rapid sunrise, each morning a reminder of how the universe burst from a nugget of impossible nothing. Right now it looked like a Turner painting of the Big Bang.

A twenty-something flight attendant with neat blonde hair walked down the aisle with a jug of iced water. Yves was amused to see that she kept returning to the row of three young men to see if there was anything they needed. His brothers had that effect on people.

‘Can I fill your cup for you, sir?’ Her make-up looked like she had just refreshed it, lips pink and glossy.

‘Thanks.’ Yves put the plastic beaker on the tray and she poured the water.

‘And what about your friends?’ Her eyes lingered on Victor, who managed to look lethal even while sleeping.

‘My brothers? No, they’re fine, thanks.’

‘Brothers? Wow, that’s some gene pool.’ She cleared her throat, deciding that was probably an unprofessional remark. ‘I’ll be back when they wake up then.’ With a smile for him, she walked off to the service area behind the blue curtain.

Yves sipped the water, relishing the coolness against his tongue. He wished he could give in to sleep but he worried that in the unfamiliar surroundings of a plane he might have a nightmare and lose control of his gift. A fire at ground level was bad enough but in the skies was unthinkable.

That was not a productive line of thought, Yves acknowledged. To calm himself he ran through the fingering for the clarinet part in his favourite Mozart concerto, tapping it out on his chest. With a savant gift to manipulate energy, he had found that the patterns of musical notation and discipline of following a score had helped train his mind to take less dangerous routes when he was nervous or angry. Things could start to smoulder if he forgot to rein in his power. He recognized that his gift was both awesome and something of a curse. By some oddity in his body chemistry, he was able to absorb energy and release it, usually by setting fire to things. He had only just begun to grasp the physics behind it, and knew himself well enough now to understand that his fascination with his own power had probably led to his science major and future study plans: he had his own mystery to solve. If he concentrated very hard he could now shape his output, form balls of energy, but that had taken a long time to learn and some of his mistakes along the way had been disastrous.

Don’t think about Woodrow now
, Yves told himself, but he couldn’t help it once the memories crawled out of the woodshed of his brain. His worst moment growing up had come seven years ago with their family dog, Woodrow. The Irish wolfhound had, with his usual sensitivity to when one of his pack was distressed, tracked Yves into the woods that surrounded their house on the mountainside. Yves wished he had never gone but temper had gotten the better of him. He had stormed out there to find a space away from nine-year-old Zed. Mom and Dad had just that day allowed Yves to take part in the family meeting to investigate a savant crime, leaving Zed outside the door. This hadn’t gone down well with the youngest boy so he had made Yves pay by being more annoying than ever. The casualty in their shared bedroom had been Yves’ science project which he had painstakingly worked on, producing a poster and model. The atomic model was in pieces, victim of a wonky baseball pitch, and the poster had a footprint in the middle. Uriel had said he would help fix it while Mom had put Zed on kitchen duty for the rest of the week, but Yves hated Zed right at that moment. Knowing he was in danger of setting his brother’s pants on fire for real, he had slammed the door, stomped off up the mountain and found a clearing to vent his emotions.

A twig had begun to smoulder. Yves hadn’t stamped it out as he usually would; instead he had let the feelings pour from him. The dry wood of the fallen branch bloomed into flame. It felt good to send everything out of him and into the bark. Soon the blaze had spread and Yves realized he’d gone too far to call back the energy; it was no longer just his being released but all the stored energy packed in the timber. He did his best, clearing a firebreak around his bonfire, but it had been a hot dry summer so far and the sparks were drifting. He vividly remembered swearing and panicking, knowing he would have to confess and ask his dad to call the fire department. As he ran back to the house, he thought he heard a distant barking but he was too intent on reaching home and raising the alarm.

It was only twenty-four hours later, after teams had managed to contain the fire and let it burn out naturally away from the chalets on the mountainside, that Woodrow limped back to the house. From the burns on his paws and distressed state, it was clear the hound had got cut off and been injured trying to escape the flames. Xav did his best to heal Woodrow but the dog had never been the same after that, dying later that summer with a rather confused look in his tired old eyes. Yves’ guilt had been acute. Distraught to see his canine playmate suffer, Zed had spent months blaming Yves, accusing him of hurting the dog on purpose to pay him back for damaging the model. He had picked fights with Yves and anyone at school who got in his way, the beginning of his bad-boy reputation. It had been a long time before the relationship between the two youngest Benedicts had healed—Yves asked for forgiveness and it had been granted. Zed confessed he had never really thought his brother did it deliberately, but still, Yves had learned a painful lesson about the harm he could do to innocents and to those he loved if he failed to control himself.

After that he had reined in any sign of temper or even spontaneity, becoming the quietest and most understated of the brothers. He was used to being the last one people noticed and he liked it that way. If he could slip through life without making more hurtful mistakes, then he would count it a success. Aware that the volatile fire-raiser still lived inside him, he just hoped his soulfinder would be a calming balance to his hidden stormy side, someone to pour water on a situation, not chuck oil on his flames.

Victor stirred. ‘Can I have a sip?’

Yves passed him the iced water.

‘Can’t sleep?’

‘Don’t want to risk it.’

Victor nodded, accepting that. ‘I could put some barricades up in your mind if you like.’

Yves shook his head. ‘No thanks. It’s only three more hours to go. I’ll be fine. I’ll catch up on my sleep when we get to our hotel.’

Victor got out his slim laptop. ‘Not a hotel. My contact at Scotland Yard has sorted out an apartment for us in a place called the Barbican. She thought we’d prefer to be able to come and go without too many people watching what we are doing.’

‘The Barbican? I think I’ve heard of it—a modern arts complex, isn’t it, built on more or less the site of the old Roman wall?’

‘You tell me. I just saw some pictures and thought it looked good—great views across the city. How are you getting on with the data trawl I asked you to run?’

Yves drew out his iPad. ‘I’ve got the Savant Net database set up with some new searchable functions beyond the conception-date one that most of us seem interested in.’ The list of all known savants had been started so people could find likely matches for their soulfinder, but had run into serious problems. As with many early computer initiatives, it suffered from obsolete software, patchy upgrades and was comprehensively bug ridden. Yves had been giving the whole thing a complete makeover, trying to future proof it for the next generation of digital advances.

‘You’ve got protections on that thing, I trust? Our enemies would just love to get their hands on all of our names and addresses.’

‘You are talking to a security expert, you know.’

Victor smiled wryly. ‘I know, but I can’t forget you’re my kid brother, too. I taught you to ride your first bike.’

‘Yeah, by persuading me that I still had the stabilizer wheels on when you’d taken them off. I have the scar on my knee to show for your teaching methods.’

‘You were way too cautious. It worked, didn’t it?’

Yves laughed. ‘Yeah, I guess. And yes, big brother, I do have multiple layers of protection on it, not least because this iPad is running a new system. Apple has asked me to road test it for them and my reputation would be toast if I lost it. Now, are you going to tell me what you’re hoping to get from my work?’

Victor’s grey eyes shuttered. He was one of the most private men Yves knew, which was a feat considering how being part of the Benedict clan was like living in a house with no doors and many windows. Zed and their mom could read minds and glimpse the future; Uriel could tell you the history of your things; Trace could track where you had been by touching you; Will and their dad knew when you were up to something risky. The only one who didn’t intrude was Xav, but even he was gifted with natural powers of empathy that he hid under a wise-cracking demeanour. He could usually make a shrewd guess as to what was really going on inside without a savant power to lever open your secrets. ‘You’re just supposed to have fun at that conference of yours, Yves. I’ll only ask you to help if I really can’t get anyone else.’