Revival (The Variant Series, Book 1) (2 page)

Alex turned on her heel and followed Cassie out of the store. As they emerged into the bright sunshine of the boardwalk, Alex let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Ugh!” Cassie led the way down the promenade at a steady clip, her blonde hair whipping around in the breeze. “The
nerve
of that guy!”

Alex sucked in a deep breath of the warm salty air, grateful to be walking out onto the pier and away from any more electronic equipment. The last thing she needed right now was to accidentally barbecue another computer.

She sighed. So much for a peaceful start to their vacation.

— 2 —

I
t hadn’t always been like this.

Alex hadn’t
always
possessed the freakish ability to fry a television set from twenty paces. She had been normal once. Just like Cassie. Just like Connor.

Four months ago she had been relatively popular, making straight A’s, and had her sights set on an Ivy League college. Alex had also been the envy of every girl in their junior class—she’d been dating senior-class hottie, Connor Talbot.

Her life had been picture perfect.

And then one day, out of nowhere, Connor went and broke her heart… and everything had changed.

Alex had since realized that most major, life-altering changes came in one of two varieties.

The
first
was the kind of change that you saw coming.

Take Alex’s beat-up Jeep Wrangler, for example.

It had taken two summer jobs and months of saving, but three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Alex had finally pulled together enough cash to afford a new car.

Well… New-
ish
, anyway.

“Dear God,” Connor had said. “You’re not
serious
about buying this thing, are you, babe? This is a joke, right? You’re joking.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Alex,” Cassie had said. “That is one Grade-A, top-of-the-line,
heap
you’ve picked out for yourself.”

“It’s a bucket of rust, Lee-Lee,” her Aunt Cil had argued with a sigh. “Surely we can find you something more suitable than
that
.”

It had taken Alex less than thirty seconds to fall in love with that Jeep. And in less than a heartbeat, her boyfriend, her aunt,
and
her best friend had all ruled it out.

Undeterred, Alex began listing what she saw as the Jeep’s selling points, ticking them off on her fingers as she went.

It was jet black (if you overlooked the reddish-brown accents of the slowly oxidizing framework), it had air conditioning (a
must
if you didn’t want to die of heat stroke during the dog-days of a Florida summer), there was a soft-top that could easily be rolled up on sunny days (it was basically the convertible that she and Cassie had always wanted—only, you know… not), and it got excellent gas mileage for a Jeep its age (which is to say, she’d be able to afford the gas—provided she never had to drive it anywhere that was farther than ten miles away).

It was perfect.

And besides that, it was the only car on the lot that was even remotely in her price-range.

“Are you offering to help pay for a better car, Aunt Cil?” Alex had asked.

She and her aunt had been over this. Aunt Cil wanted Alex to
earn
her first car and pay for it with her own money—and Alex would never have dreamed of asking her aunt for the cash, anyway.

“…No.”

“Then the rust bucket it is!” Smiling, Alex had turned toward the nearest salesman—a smallish man who smelled vaguely of onions and was wearing a rather unfortunate toupee—and started the negotiations.

The instant Leo down at Vinny’s Auto World dropped that jangling set of keys into her outstretched palm, Alex had known her life would never be the same again.

But that had been the point.

That
change was one that she’d worked very hard, over the course of many months, to achieve.

The second variety of life-altering changes, she’d learned, were the ones that struck you like a bolt from the blue, usually turning your life upside-down in the process.

Only twice in sixteen years had Alex experienced that sort of upheaval.

The first had happened when she was four.

The second had taken place exactly four months, three weeks and one day ago.

*   *   *

It happened on a Tuesday.

Alex and Cassie had been stuck in the computer lab since school let out, working on a PowerPoint presentation for their economics class. The computer science teacher, Mr. Hanson, had gone home an hour earlier, leaving them alone in the lab to finish their report.

At least they
were
alone… until the door opened and a couple of students came stumbling though.

Alex had been standing by the printer, copies of their PowerPoint slides still warm in her hands, when she noticed them—a rather familiar looking couple, six feet away and frenching the life out of each other. His arms were wrapped tightly around her waist and her mouth seemed to have been permanently adhered to his.

A full five seconds passed before her brain managed to process what it was she was seeing.

Jessica and Conner had slipped into the computer lab, assuming it was empty, and were well on their way into a serious make-out session.

“Oh. My. God,” Cassie managed.

Suddenly realizing they weren’t alone, Connor broke off the embrace and pushed Jessica to arms length. His face flushed bright red as a look of panic flickered in his expression.

Jessica, on the other hand, appeared smug.

“I can explain!” said Connor.

Alex couldn’t find her voice to speak, but she didn’t have to. Her best friend did it for her.

“You lousy, cheating,
jerk
!” Cassie spat, leaping to her feet and shoving the rolly chair under the desk with a little too much force. “How
could
you? And with
Jessica Huffman
? Could you have picked anyone skankier?”

“Who are you calling a
skank
?” Jessica shot back.

Cassie and Jessica’s argument faded into the background as Connor finally turned to face her. As their eyes met, something inside of Alex snapped.

At first, she assumed that the unfamiliar sensation coursing through her was simply the
shock
that came from seeing her philandering boyfriend in the arms of another girl—but that assumption didn’t last long.

As the feeling intensified, the air around them grew thick with the smell of ozone and the tingle of static electricity.

Before Alex could make sense of what was happening, a bolt of electricity arced from an electrical socket on the far side of the room and slammed into the nearest computer. One by one the computers shorted out, the surge of electricity working its way toward them in a wave of blinding light and shattering glass.

Cassie jumped out of the way and pressed herself against a window as the surge passed by.

Alex could see the wave getting closer, could hear the strange whirring noise coming from the printer in front of her, but her feet were frozen in place. Her mind screamed at her muscles to move, but all she could manage was a surprised gasp as the wave of destruction reached the computers across the aisle.

“Lexie, lookout!”

Connor slammed into her as the printer Alex had been standing in front of exploded into flames. The next thing she felt was the jagged corner of a waist-high filing cabinet tearing through her right side.

She cried out in shock and in pain and only barely registered the impact when she and Connor landed in a heap on the linoleum floor.

Outside in the parking lot, half a dozen car alarms wailed to life. All Alex could hear, though, was the ringing in her ears.

When she opened her eyes she found Connor kneeling next to her, staring blankly at her stomach.

“Are you okay?” asked Alex.

Connor looked up. “Am
I
okay?” He seemed surprised by her question. Alex struggled to sit up, but Connor held her still. “Lexie, stop! Don’t try and move.”

“But I need to check on Cass,” she protested.

Cassie was hurrying toward her, grabbing a discarded sweatshirt along the way. “Don’t move, Alex,” she said.

Confused, Alex looked down to see what it was about her stomach that had so captured everyone’s attention.

Shaking fingers traveled to her waistline. A steady flow of blood was pouring from a gash across her abdomen, turning her white cotton shirt a muddy shade of crimson.

Cassie knelt beside her and pressed the sweatshirt hard against Alex’s side.

Her memory went a little hazy after that.

According to Cassie, it took Connor less than a minute to put out the flames of the printer and the smoldering computers thanks to a nearby fire extinguisher. The paramedics Cassie called arrived minutes later and whisked Alex off to the hospital for a blood transfusion and eighteen stitches.

Since she wasn’t family, Cassie hadn’t been allowed to ride in the ambulance. Instead she’d been stuck at the school with Connor and Jessica, explaining to Principal Snyder what had happened. Despite Jessica’s attempts to implicate Alex, the accident was eventually ruled to be the result of a freak power surge.

Officially, that was the story.

Unofficially, Jessica wasted no time in telling half the school about Alex’s “bizarre psychotic episode” wherein she had tried her best to
murder
Jessica and Connor, in true Carrie-at-the-prom fashion. Jessica creatively edited the details so as to make the tale more believable, but in the end, Alex had still been branded a freak.

With Connor’s testimony supporting the claims, Alex’s social standing went up in flames faster than the Hindenburg. She’d gone from social elite to social pariah before she could even be discharged from the hospital.

It didn’t help that she’d been trapped at home for the next two weeks while she recovered from her injury. Without Alex there to defend herself, the rumor mill ran wild.

Alex’s Aunt Cil had spent the entire two weeks glued to her side, insisting that Alex stay off her feet so that she could heal. She’d always been something of a worrywart when it came to Alex’s well-being. It was a maternal and over-protective side of her personality that stood in contrast to her normally carefree nature.

Cecilia Cross—or Aunt Cil, as Alex called her—was about as free-spirited as they came. As a professional artist, Cil had earned quite a name for herself in their small, seaside community; her tiled sculptures and handmade porcelain pottery often fetched a pretty penny in the busier galleries down on the boardwalk.

And, like most artists, Cil had that quality about her that occasionally left you wondering if she was really there
with
you, or if she’d slipped into some other world entirely. There were times when they’d be in the midst of a conversation and Alex would start to suspect that, in her mind, her aunt had already disappeared into the small workshop that stood behind their blue, two-story Victorian home, in order to plan out her next creative project.

Before becoming Alex’s guardian, Cil had embraced a much more bohemian lifestyle. At 27, she’d long since decided to put off starting a family of her own and, instead, had thrown herself into her artwork. The “white picket fence, 3.2 kids and a dog” mentality that her older sister had so readily embraced had been a foreign concept to her.

Then, shortly after Alex turned four, wet roads and a drunk driver had taken the life of Cil’s sister and brother-in-law, leaving young Alex with a single living relative—her Aunt Cecilia. 

That had been 12 years ago.

*   *   *

“
Ground control to Major Tom…? Alex!”

Cassie’s voice snapped Alex from her reverie.

They’d made it to the end of the pier and now stood leaning against the wooden railing, staring out over the water.

“Sorry,” said Alex, not wanting to admit where her thoughts had just been.

But then, that was the great thing about having Cassie for a best friend. She didn’t have to.

After the rumors started flying, Cassie was the only one of Alex’s so-called friends who stuck around, proving herself to be—quite literally—loyal to a fault. She refused to betray their friendship, even though standing by her friend meant that Cassie would share in Alex’s new persona-non-grata social status.

“It’s alright,” said Cassie. “How about crab legs at The Mainsail? You can pretend it’s Connor’s legs you’re breaking. And then there’s that nutcracker they give you for the claws… It’ll be therapeutic.”

Alex smiled in spite of herself.

As they made their way back to the shoreline, Cassie started outlining their plans for the afternoon: lunch at The Mainsail, tanning on the shore, a little more shopping...

Alex was only half-listening. Up ahead, leaning against the railing, stood the military jacket clad mystery guy from the shop, staring intently in their direction. The luminous hazel eyes Alex had been so taken in by seemed darker now, a strange intensity burning behind them.

An uneasy feeling stirred in the pit of her stomach.

“So what do you think?” asked Cassie.

“Huh?” Alex snapped back to attention. “What do I think about what?”

“About renting a bunch of movies and having pizza for dinner,” she said. “You have
got
to keep your head out of the clouds, girl. The whole point of today was to get your mind off of things! And, okay, I realize the Connor incident was a setback, but that little toad is
not
going to ruin our day.”

“I’m sorry… It’s just that guy—” Alex came up short. Mr. Military Jacket was no longer leaning against the railing up ahead. In fact, he’d disappeared from the pier entirely.

“What guy?” Cassie looked around, her voice hopeful. “Yay, guy!”

Alex stopped in her tracks and turned to see if maybe he’d slipped past them while her attention had been fixed on Cassie. The other end of the pier was completely deserted.