Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) (15 page)

12

DANI

APRIL
27, 1AE

Great
Basin Desert, Nevada

I sneezed, then
blew into a red and white paisley hankie, expelling mostly rust-colored dust,
and grimaced. “Dusty brains…” And my brain already felt dusty enough without
all of the added, well,
dust
. Slipping into animal minds at night wasn’t
quite as rejuvenating as sleeping, but sleeping wasn’t nearly as comforting,
and I craved the deepened telepathic connection I shared with whichever animal
I was merged with even more after losing some of the horses.

“What was that?”
Jake asked, glancing my way. He was on “Dani duty”—akin to guarding me while
most of my attention was funneled into splitting my own consciousness among my
avian scouts—and had been riding nearby on Highway 50 all morning. The task was
usually Jason’s, but he’d been convening en route with Sanchez, Chris, Grayson,
and Harper all morning and had asked Jake to take his place before we’d packed
up camp.

We were still
moving through the Great Basin Desert, the endless expanse of parched earth and
sagebrush stretching out on either side of us, but we’d managed not to repeat
our near-catastrophe via dehydration of a week earlier.

Jake guided his
horse, a robust sorrel gelding whose reddish-brown coat looked overly vibrant
in the sun-bleached high desert, closer to Wings’s side.

“What? Dusty
brains?” I laughed as I stowed the hankie in my jacket pocket. “It was just
something Grams—my grandma—used to say to me whenever I sneezed.” Adopting her
age-roughened tone and Irish accent, I said, “Bless you, child, you and your
dusty brains…” With a quick look around, I added, “Though it seems particularly
appropriate here.”

Jake’s lips
twitched, and a faint smile cracked the usually austere set of his face. “Dusty
brains…I knew someone who used to say that.” Jake stared ahead at some point
beyond where Ky and Ben were riding, his eyes distant as he spoke. “But that
was a long time ago.”

I watched him,
watched the way nostalgia altered his features, softening them. “Another life,”
I said softly.

Jake’s eyes met
mine, his gaze intense in a way that made me self-conscious. “It seems like it
sometimes, doesn’t it?”

Feeling my cheeks
warm, I shifted my attention to the road ahead. The highway was empty of all
but a few vehicles—some abandoned, some
not
—making the passage of the
cart, wagon, and herd fairly easy.

“Your grandma,”
Jake said, his voice tentative. “She’s the one who raised you?”

Surprised by the
personal question—I didn’t know much about Jake, but a prier he was not—I
looked at him, head tilted to the side and eyes wide. “She is…Grams.” I forced
myself to smile, automatically raising my right hand to touch my fingertips to
Grams’s Claddagh medallion through my shirt.

Seconds passed
with nothing but the sounds of horse hooves on pavement and cart and wagon
wheels rolling along behind us.

Surprising me
again, Jake said, “Zoe used to talk about her. Said she was like a mother to
her.”

Running my
fingers through the streak of white hair at the base of Wings’s mane, I nodded,
recalling the countless days Zoe had passed at my house under Grams’s
attentive, motherly watch. During middle school, when the tension at home
between her dad and Jason had escalated to an unbearable level, Zoe had spent
more nights at Grams’s house with me than at her own.

Lifting my right
hand, I brushed my fingertips over the part of my cast that covered the tattoo
on the inside of my left wrist; it was the Celtic knot that symbolized the
unbreakable bond between sisters. Zoe had the same tattoo on her hip, though
she neither knew what it meant nor remembered the day we’d suffered through
their creation together.

Staring ahead at
nothing, I cleared my throat. “I miss her.”

“She raised you,”
Jake said evenly, and I had the impression that it was his way of saying that
he understood…that he could relate. Of course, he didn’t know I hadn’t meant
Grams; I’d meant Zoe.

I blinked a
little too rapidly. “Yeah, uh…my mom died when I was born, and I guess my dad
didn’t want to stick around”—he hadn’t even written his name on my birth
certificate, and he’d been gone by the time Grams arrived—“so Grams moved to
the States to raise me.” I laughed softly, a ward against the decades-old sense
of rejection. “I used to daydream about what my life would’ve been like if
she’d taken me back to Ireland and raised me there.”

“You were lucky.”

Brow furrowed, I sent
Jake a sideways glance.

He smiled, just a
little, and shook his head. “Not about your mom and dad; you were lucky to have
your grandma.”

My eyebrows
lowered, and I frowned, sensing that I’d just stumbled upon a kindred spirit in
the least likely of places. “What about you?” I asked, not really expecting
much of a response. Jake wasn’t known for his verbose insights into his past…or
for being verbose
at all
.

Grip tightening
on his reins, Jake stared ahead. “My dad left when I was six, but not before he
nearly beat my mom to the point of miscarrying.”

I glanced over my
shoulder, seeking out Becca. I found her on the cart, sharing the bench seat
with Camille. “Becca?”

In my peripheral
vision, I saw Jake nod.

I returned to
facing forward. “Did he ever come back?”

Jake looked at me
askance. “Nah.” He shot a quick glance behind us at Becca. “He didn’t want us
in the first place, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to come back to take care
of us once she was gone.”

I didn’t think he
meant that his mom had left him and his sister, too. “How’d she die?”

“Overdose,” he
said, the single word a blade. After a quiet, tense moment, he added. “Becca
found her.”

“Jesus…how old
was she?”

“Four.”

I brought my hand
up to my mouth, covering my horrified expression.

“Sometimes I
wonder if it wouldn’t be for the best if she never remembers her life before,”
he said quietly.

“That’s not your
decision.” My voice was sharper than I’d intended, making the words sound like
a reprimand. When Jake turned widened eyes on me, I rushed to say, “Sorry—didn’t
mean to snap at you.”

He said nothing,
just stared at me, his expression wary. There was something wild about him,
like a mustang who’d been broken but still remembered the days when he could
run free through endless rolling hills and prairies. Cracking his shell was
going to be a challenge. I smiled on the inside; I’d always liked challenges.

Finally, after
neither of us spoke for some time, Jake broke the silence. “What if Zoe doesn’t
want to remember?” There was a challenge in his eyes.

I stared at him,
refusing to look away. “
If
we find a way to fix—I mean, to return her
memories, it’s her choice,” I lied.

Jake raised his
eyebrows the barest amount.

Snapping my mouth
shut, I sighed. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. There’s no way in hell I’d let her
choose
not
to remember. One way or another, I’m getting my Zo back.” I gave
him a sidelong glance. “How’d you know?”

Again, he
chuckled. I never would’ve pegged him as a chuckler, but if the shoe fit…
“You’re the only person who loves her as much as I do.”

For a long time,
I simply watched him, assessing. I hadn’t known things were quite so serious
between them before the Clara-induced mind-wipe.

His horse, a few
steps ahead of Wings, veered a little bit closer to us. Wings swung her head to
the right, extending her neck.

“Don’t,”
I warned before she could nip at his
shoulder.

With a snort, she
shook her head.
“Spoilsport”
was the general gist of her response.

I caught Jake
splitting his attention between me and my horse, a quizzical expression on his
face. “Wings considers herself my second-in-command of the herd, and she gets a
kick out of keeping her”—I raised my right hand and made air quotes—“‘charges’
in line.”

Jake looked like
he was trying not to laugh. “So she was trying to show Brutus who’s boss?”

I nodded. “Pretty
much, yep.” Squinting, I looked over the sorrel from nose to flank. Only a tiny
white star on his forehead and white socks on his hind legs broke the
unrelenting red-brown of his coat. “So…Brutus, huh? Are you, um, expecting him
to stab you in the back?”

Jake smiled and
shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “Don’t laugh.” He was
quiet for a moment, and I was about to badger him for more of an explanation
when he said, “Our neighbor, Joe, he took us in for a bit after our mom…” Jake
raised one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “I used to watch college football
with him. Ohio State was his favorite team, which didn’t ever make sense to me
because he was from Indiana…but the mascot’s name was Brutus.” He met my eyes
briefly, a self-deprecating half-smile on his face. “It was the first thing
that came to mind.”

“It’s sweet,” I reassured
him. “What was he, anyway—Brutus the mascot?”

“A Buckeye—it’s a
nut.”

I snorted. “You
are such a geek,” I said without thinking. Worrying I’d gone too far, I peeked
over at Jake. He was smiling.

~~~~~

Carlos pulled his
hands away from
almost
touching Mase’s head and shook them out. It
always amused me when he did that, because every time his fingers touched, they
emitted a faint crackling sound, and when he did it in the dark, little blue
sparks accompanied the crackle. I smiled.

Mase stood from
his perch atop a knee-high rock and stretched his thickly corded arms over his
head. It was late in the evening, and Mase, Camille, and I were sitting by the
stream near our camp—a freshwater supply like that wasn’t one we could pass
up—“washing dishes.” Which was code for helping Carlos hone his electrotherapy
skills in semiprivacy. He was still reticent, bashful even, to show this new
facet of his Ability to the others, but I didn’t think we could make much more
progress without a
certain
member of our group’s help.

Camille took
Mase’s place and closed her eyes, a small smile curving her lips. Both she and
Mase seemed to
enjoy
the sensations caused by Carlos’s version of
electrotherapy, which was utter lunacy to me. Not that I said so out loud.
Often, anyway.

Mase moved
several yards upstream to crouch beside me and grab a plate from the stack of
dirty dishes I’d been working through for the past fifteen minutes. “He’s
getting really strong,” Mase said quietly, his eyes flicking toward Camille and
Carlos. “And his control—” He shook his head. “The way he can focus it so
precisely…contain it…”

I met Mase’s
murky gaze. “You think he’s ready?”

Mase nodded. “I
know he is, but I think the only way for
him
to know that, too, is to
bring Gabe in on what we’re doing.”

Narrowing my
eyes, I nodded slowly. “You can be incredibly insightful sometimes, you know
that?”

With a shrug,
Mase once again glanced at Carlos and Camille. “He has more in common with her
than I do…now.” His voice was that of someone letting go.

I touched Mase’s
thick forearm. “They may be around the same age and be able to relate to each
other’s troubling pasts, but she loves
you
, Mase.”

Mase was quiet
for a moment. When his eyes met mine, they were glassy. “She’s different now.”

I shook my head
and laughed softly. “But she
still
loves you.”

“How do you
know?”

I rolled my eyes
and bumped his arm with my shoulder. “Because I see the way she looks at you,
doofus.”

He frowned,
apparently not buying
my
skills of observation and insight.

Sighing, I said,
“Fine, don’t believe me. But you should talk to her about this. If you don’t,
you’ll never know…”

Mase opened his
mouth, but he was interrupted by Ray, who’d been circling overhead as my
lookout. “Kak-kak-kak.” She swooped just over our heads. “Kak-kak-kak.”

I watched her
land on a rock directly across the creek from us, ruffling and settling her
black- and gray-speckled white feathers effortlessly. “Someone’s coming.” I
translated
stalk-of-wheat two-legs
and, laughing, said, “It’s Gabe.”

“I need a
few…more seconds,” Carlos said between clenched teeth. His hands were covering
around Camille’s head like a flesh and bone skullcap.

I pivoted on the
dusty rocks so I was facing Jack. My dog’s ears perked up, but he remained on
his belly.
“Please go after Gabe and distract him.”

Jack sprang to
his feet and trotted away.

Mase watched the
German shepherd go. “I can’t imagine being able to communicate with other
creatures like that.”

A smile spread
across my face, and I shook my head. “I can’t imagine facing the prospect of going
through life
without
being able to talk to them—or fly or run with
them—but it’s more than that. It’s like I’m a
part
of them.”