Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3 (12 page)

“It didn’t work,” she said, clearly disappointed.

“What a surprise,” Jameson said, every word tinged with sarcasm.

“Look, I never said I could heal people. You were the ones who came up with that conclusion.”

“Maybe you just need time,” Mallory said. “Maybe with practice…”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Jameson, again with the sarcasm.

“Or maybe it works a different way,” she said. “Like you have to be standing a certain way or have a certain mindset. We can try again later. Let’s just wait and see.”

As if we had a choice. She sighed and turned the key, revving the engine. As we drove off down the road, I said, “Are we picking up Nadia?”

“Nadia never goes out,” Jameson said, no expression in his voice.

I said, “That’s not entirely true. I saw her out just the other night.”

Mallory said, “Her mother never lets her out of her sight. Nadia sneaks out for our night walks. We all do.”

“Well I knew that.” It was coming back to me now. “Didn’t you say that Nadia was attacked on a bus a few years ago? And that’s why her mother is so overprotective and never lets her go anywhere?”

“Well, if you knew that why did you ask?” Jameson somehow managed to sound patronizing and bored at the same time. For a pencil-necked geek, he sure had a lot of confidence.

“Boys, boys,” Mallory said. “Can’t we all get along?” She turned down a side road that led to the outskirts of town. Something about it felt wrong.

“Where are we going?” I had a sudden sick feeling that I knew
exactly
where we were going, and I didn’t like the idea at all.

“I thought that first we’d go past the field and see if there’s any sign of the activity you saw the other night.”

Jameson said, “Mallory told me about the claimed events. I’d like to take a look and see for myself.”

It took me a second to process his insinuation that I was lying. “They weren’t just claims,” I said. “Everything I told Mallory was true. I saw a crew of men with detectors combing the field. Two armed guards were there and a guy who looked like he was supervising. When they saw me they chased me and shot at me. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the bullet.”

“That won’t be necessary. I believe you have
a
bullet.”

Complete silence. What he was implying, of course, was that I made up the whole story and was using some random bullet as proof. Mallory didn’t come to my defense, and she had seemed to believe me Friday afternoon. “Going to the field is not a good idea,” I said. “What if they’re there and they recognize me?”

“The field is really far from the road,” Mallory said. “They won’t even be able to see our faces from that distance. We’ll just swing by.”

The last time I swung by the field someone had tried to kill me. I definitely had a bad feeling about this.

When we got to the field, it couldn’t have looked more deserted and less menacing. Of course, I told myself, everything looks safer in the light of day.

“The guys with the guns must have gone home,” Jameson said to no one in particular, but I got it—he was needling me.

“I guess that trying to kill me tired them out,” I said.

Mallory slowed the car to a stop. “I want to get a closer look.” Before I could stop her, she was out of the car and walking up the incline toward the train station building. Jameson got out as well, leaving me in the back seat by myself. Fear kept me there for a moment, but peer pressure is a powerful thing and a second later I was right on his heels.

“I thought you were afraid,” Jameson said, not turning around. “Or was it terrified?”

I wanted to make a smart-mouthed comment, but I’d decided a while earlier that I was better than that. Let Jameson be petty and superior and possessive of Mallory. All of those things made him look small and insecure. I would rise above his condescension. “I’m not afraid for me,” I said. “I know I can outrun and outsmart them. You, on the other hand, might need some protection.”

He muttered something under his breath and kept going. Ahead of us, Mallory had reached the site and stopped. She stared at the ground intently, and when we approached, she said, “Amazing.”

“What is it?”

“There’s nothing,” she said. “No signs that there were light fragments. No signs that anyone has been walking here. Didn’t you say this area was staked out?” She looked up at me.

I nodded. “Like a crime scene. There were stakes in each corner connected by yellow tape. The men were walking inside of it.”

She had a puzzled look on her face. “It doesn’t look like anything’s been disturbed.”

“The grass has been trampled,” I pointed out.

“It’s spring. Everything looks like that after the snow melts,” Jameson said.

I hated to admit it, but he was right.

“The last time the lights fell from the sky somebody actually scraped the top layer of the field and took it away.” Mallory crouched down and touched the dirt. “I wonder why they did it differently this time.”

“Probably because you made those phone calls asking about it,” I said. “They decided not to draw so much attention to the field this time around.”

“That’s probably it,” Jameson said, and he gave me a look that reminded me a little bit of admiration. “And if so, that means that the guys who shot at Russ are either from the government or someone who’s got them in their pocket.”

“Or they’re aliens,” I said, joking.

Mallory stood up and wiped her hands together to brush off the dirt. “No, we pretty much ruled out aliens, remember?”

“Maybe you did, but I’m still mulling it over,” I said. “You know what they say—the truth is out there.”

We wandered around a bit, pacing our way around the field, but nothing indicated that a big event had happened there just two days earlier. The unused train tracks were built on wood ties that were now crumbling, weeds growing in between the rails. The building, off in the distance, was the same. Just an old boarded-up structure with peeling paint and a cracked slab of concrete on either side of it. It was hard to believe I’d been afraid to come back here.

“Hey, Russ, want to see something cool?” Jameson asked after we’d inspected nearly every inch of the ground. Without waiting for a reply, he took his phone out of his pocket and held it loosely in his palm. As I watched, it levitated and zoomed around my head and zipped back to Jameson, who let it hover for a moment before he reached out to snatch it in midair.

“That is cool.” I wasn’t quite as flabbergasted as I’d been with the jelly packet, but I had to admit that Jameson could do something incredible. I was still doubtful that I would ever be able to heal people. (And even if I
had
healed myself before, could I do it again? Maybe Mallory was right and the circumstances had to be just right.)

“Show-off.” Mallory poked Jameson’s arm.

“That’s nothing,” he said. “I’ve been practicing with weights every day. I can move things farther and heavier than I ever could before, and my powers seem to get stronger with practice.”

“A renewable energy,” Mallory said thoughtfully. “I’ve noticed that with me, too. I haven’t really been practicing though. It seems immoral somehow to make people do things without their consent.”

“I could get past that,” Jameson said.

I had a sudden thought. “So if you can move things with your mind, what makes you think you can’t do other things too? Maybe you can also do mind control like Mallory and read people like Nadia. Have you even tried to do other things? Hey, maybe you can fly or turn invisible.”

Jameson scowled. “It’s been a year. If we had other abilities, they would have manifested themselves by now.” He was back to the old Jameson, the one who knew better than me. Apparently our truce had been short-lived.

Heading back to the car, I held my hand out for Mallory as we approached the incline. It wasn’t much of a drop, but she still took my hand for support, and I felt a surge of victory over poor Jameson, who, walking ahead of us, didn’t even notice. “At my house yesterday we were interrupted right when you were going to tell me why we can’t talk to the authorities,” I said.

She squeezed my hand as we made our way over the last small bump and then let go when the ground leveled off. “Other kids before us have had this happen, and when they tried to tell, they disappeared or were killed.”

I stopped. “You know this for a fact?”

Her face turned grave. “Fairly certain. Over the past thirty-five years a disproportionate number of teenagers from this area have suddenly died or disappeared, many of them after reporting seeing strange things in the sky. Some of their families also disappeared—just moved out of the area without a forwarding address. Like they were…relocated or something.”

“How do you know this?”

“I spent hundreds of hours at the library looking at old copies of the local newspaper and the high school newspaper.” She gave me a smile. “They actually used to print up little newspapers and sell them at the school. Isn’t that cute?”

I was still stuck on the idea of missing teenagers. “Like how many are we talking about who died or disappeared?”

“Over the last thirty-five years there were maybe a dozen? I can show you a list if you want.”

“Yeah, I think I’d like to see that,” I said. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, because I did, but sometimes seeing something on a page helps my mind to make sense of things. And I needed to make sense of this.

“And here’s another strange thing,” Mallory said. “No one else seems to have observed the lights except for teenagers. Instead, on the dates the kids see the events, there are next-day reports of adults having had trouble staying awake that night—falling asleep at the wheel, dozing on the job, that kind of thing—which leads me to believe the light particles energize and draw some people, notably some teenagers, while having the opposite effect on adults. Some of the teenagers mentioned feeling compelled to go outside at night long before the lights appeared.”

“Just like us.”

Mallory nodded. “Exactly.”

“Why would that be?”

She shrugged. “It would be hard to say without more information. I can only make conclusions based on the information at hand.”

Because we’d paused to talk, Jameson had reached the car ahead of us, and now I saw that he appeared to be leaning over someone who was actually
inside
the car. Jameson’s back was to us, and he was blocking our view, but I could see that the back door was open and he was hovering over a man who was slumped in the back seat in what had been my spot.

Jameson turned around and gestured frantically. “You guys, come quick! Hurry!” Mallory broke into a run, and I was right behind her. Judging from Jameson’s wide eyes and the way he bellowed, I knew it was something major. Still, when Mallory pushed Jameson aside, it took me a moment to register that it was Gordy, the old guy from the diner, who was lying across the back seat of the car.

“What happened?” I asked.

Mallory said, “Where’d he come from?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” For once Jameson didn’t look smug and sure. “I got to the car and there he was, just laying there. I think he’s dead.”

“Not dead yet.” Gordy’s voice came out soft and raspy. His whole body shuddered.

Mallory leaned in, giving me a view of her backside. “What happened, Gordy? Did someone do something to you?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer, she whispered reassurances to him, telling him everything would be okay from now on. When she straightened up she went into take-charge mode—first handing Jameson the keys and telling him to get a blanket out of the trunk. I was next. “Help me move him,” she ordered, and just like that I was pressed into service, following her instructions to pull Gordy further into the car so that his dangling legs were inside and we could close the car door. When Jameson came back with a green plaid blanket she folded it up and handed it to me. “Lift him up and cushion his head with it.” She took the keys from Jameson and got into the front seat, barking orders as she went.

“Let’s move.”

“Hang in there, Gordy. We’re going for help.”

“Jameson, call the hospital and tell them we’re on our way to the ER.”

“Shouldn’t we call 911?” Jameson asked.

“No!” Mallory yelled. “Just do what I tell you to do.”

I was on the side of the car opposite the curb, trying to lift Gordy’s head onto the folded-up blanket. The length of his body took up the entire back seat, begging the question: “Where am I going to sit?”

Mallory turned around and frowned. “Put his head on your lap, of course. Come on, Russ, get serious. We have an emergency here.”

As if I weren’t being serious. I sat on the edge of the seat and cautiously lifted his head as I slid in. When I shut the back door, his eyes fluttered. For the split second they were open, they locked on mine and he smiled briefly. “Hold tight, sir, we’re going to the hospital,” I said. He nodded slightly.

Jameson called Mercy Hospital to let them know we would be arriving to the ER soon. Listening to his end of the conversation, it was clear that not having all the answers rattled him. He couldn’t tell the hospital Gordy’s last name, his age, or even what was wrong with him. At one point they must have questioned the validity of the call because he said, “No, I’m not joking.”

Mercy Hospital was in the city, a half hour away, but Mallory managed to get there in twenty minutes. She paused at red lights, looked both ways, and went through; she passed people in no-passing zones; she went eighty-five on the highway. Jameson said, “Jeez!” when she passed a semi on the two-lane highway and we found ourselves heading straight toward another car. Luckily, she was able to maneuver back into our lane with split-second timing. “If there’s a cop around we’re in trouble,” Jameson added.

“I hope there is a cop around,” she said. “We’ve got a dying man in the back seat who needs medical attention.”

“Well, if we had called 911…” Jameson said.

Mallory gave him a sharp look and frowned. “And bring attention to us being at the field? Are you out of your mind?”