Stolen (3 page)

“You know I already ate, right?” I ask. I don’t mention the obvious – that there’s no way I’m going to be able to eat after what just happened.

“Wait until you taste it,” he says. “You might get your appetite back.”

When the pizza arrives, he puts a slice on my plate. And he’ right – it
is
delicious. And somehow, I’m able to eat two slices.

***

During dinner, Brody and I avoid the topic of Cam and his sister, which is fine with me. Instead, we talk about people at school, our classes, and the football team. When the waitress sets dessert down in front of us – a chocolate cannoli and piece of tiramisu, because Brody couldn’t decide which one he wanted – he says, “You have to have some.”

And even though I’m stuffed, I fork up a piece of the tiramisu. I might as well drown my sorrows in chocolate and spongy cake. “So listen,” I say. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Okay.” He takes a sip of his Sprite and then takes another bite of cannoli. “Go for it.”

“I’ve been thinking,” I say carefully, “that I need to get Raine’s necklace.”

Brody takes another sip of his drink, this time slowly, like he’s using the time to think about how exactly he wants to respond. He puts his glass down and slides it back and forth between his hands. “Why?”

“Because if she doesn’t have her necklace, I can beat her.”

“Beat her at what?” he asks. He looks up at me, his eyes slightly accusing and I can tell what he’s really asking. He wants to know if this has anything to do with Cam.

Up until this point, Cam has been the major source of contention between me and Raine.

There’s the bigger picture, of course, the taking over the world stuff, but before I knew that any of that was even going on, there was Cam.

At the thought of losing Cam to Raine, my stomach turns. I think about them together, what she could do to him. But then I push the thought out of my mind. Cam made his decision. No matter what he says, he doesn’t love me. Not anymore, maybe not ever. If he did, he wouldn’t have been with Kaci.

“Just beat her,” I say to Brody. “Not at anything specific. I don’t want to have to hurt her, I just want to be stronger than her in case something happens.”

“Something like what?”

“Something like… I don’t know, whatever new battles come up.” He’s frustrating me, because I haven’t thought that far ahead. It is true that I don’t want to have to hurt Raine – but I’ll do it if that’s what it takes to stop her. And let’s face it --she doesn’t seem like the type that will stop trying to destroy me just because I ask her nicely.

Besides, if we’re not talking about Cam, we’re talking about things that are a lot scarier, and I’ll definitely have to be ready for a fight if it comes to that.

Brody sighs and leans back in the booth. He rubs his face and then looks out the window, not saying anything. A light rain has started to fall, and the view of the parking lot is slightly blurry. “Look,” he says, “I understand why you would want the necklace, I do. But Natalia, I’m already too involved. I can get in a lot of trouble for helping you.

As it is, if anyone finds out I gave you that ipad...” He trails off, shaking his head. The light from the candle illuminates his face, and I can see how worried he is.

And then I realize something. If Brody’s supposed to be keeping the peace, maybes Kaci is, too. My heart speeds up thinking that maybe Kaci was with Cam because she somehow found out that he told me he loved me. Maybe she realized that wasn’t good, that he was getting too close to me, and so she put him under some kind of spell, the same way Raine did.

But Cam didn’t say any of that. If that’s what had happened, he would have told me. And besides, from what I can tell, Brody and Kaci don’t have any real powers. At least, not the way I do. So it wouldn’t make sense that Kaci would be able to put Cam under a spell

Brody reaches over and takes my hand. “I’m sorry you’re having to deal with all of this,” he says. “Cam, Raine, everything. It’s not fair.”

I shrug, not trusting myself to be able to speak without crying. But then I swallow my tears and look at him. “I’m sick of being powerless. And I’m going to get that necklace, with or without your help.” I take a deep breath, trying to calm the shaking in my voice. “If I get Raine’s necklace, I’ll be stronger than her. Maybe not a lot, but enough. Enough that I can probably force her to tell me what she knows.” I look Brody in the eye and play my ace in the hole. “And she might know something about where that iPad is.”

I see the spark of interest in his eyes, and so I rush on before I lose him. “I could get it back,” I say. “You could help me get her necklace, and if you did, then I could get the iPad back. I could give it to you, and no one would even know that I had it.”

He waits a beat. “How are you going to get the necklace?”

“I have no idea.” I twist my napkin in my hands. “I was hoping you would help me come up with a plan.”

He shakes his head and then rubs his eyes. He looks tired suddenly, like this conversation is taking a lot out of him. Which I guess it is. “It’s going to be difficult to get that necklace,” he says.
“Really
difficult. Raine knows you don’t have yours, and there’s no way she’s going to just leave it lying around. She’s too smart for that. She’s stronger than you right now, and she’s not going to want to give up that advantage.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” I say. “I have nothing to lose anymore, not after…” I trail off, not wanting to say Cam’s name. I turn and look out the window, watching a raindrop slide down the pane of glass. “I’ll take it right off her neck if I have to,” I say quietly.

“Once I get it on, she won’t be able to do anything to me.”

“But how are you going to get it off her neck in the first place?”

“If we could just distract her somehow --”

“I don’t know, Natalia,” Brody says, and shakes his head again. “That sounds really dangerous. What if she fights back before you can get it? You could get hurt. It might be better to just wait for her to leave it somewhere.”

“But you just said yourself she’s never going to do that! And if she does, how would I even know? It’s not like I hang out with her all the time. It’s going to be hard enough to be around her long enough to get it off her neck.”

His brows furrows, and I can tell he’s thinking. When his eyes meet mine again, I can tell he knows I’m right. It’s risky, but it’s the only way.

“You could distract her,” I say.

He nods slowly.

“But where?’ I ask. “We can’t do it at school. A football game maybe?”

“No,” he shakes his head. “Too dangerous.”

“Then where?”

Brody closes his eyes, leans his head back and looks up at the ceiling like he can’t believe he’s going to do this. And then he says, “We’ll do it at Lancaster’s party.”

Chapter Four

Campbell

My eyes are burning. I open them and the burning only gets worse.

“What the fuck?”

I’m lying on the ground. The sun is shining down on me, but it’s not providing any warmth. I sit up and leaves fall out of my hair.

I’m in the woods. Why the hell am I in the woods? There’s a fuzzy memory lingering at the edges of my mind. I think it has to do with last night. I reach for it, trying to remember, but it’s not coming back to me. I shake my head, blinking, and stand up.

It feels like I’ve been run over by a truck or something. My knees crack. My back aches terribly. I look down and see long red scratches from my wrist to my elbow.

They’ve scabbed over, but the cuts are deep.

That’s when I remember. The sound of tittering laughter echoes in my head and the whole thing comes flooding back to me, like I’ve been fully submerged in the ocean of my memory.

My mom’s car breaking down on the drive home. Walking down the road, alone in the dark, no clue where I was going. The Triad appearing out of nowhere, Raine and me arguing, me trying to get away and then…

She had sex with me. Or we had sex. At least, I think we did.

It’s all a vague blur, even though certain individual frames of it are vivid. It’s as if I have a store of digital pics on my internal hard drive and some images can be examined in detail, while others are inaccessible, corrupted.

I do remember where the scratches came from, though. Raine was sucking the life out of me and I couldn’t breathe. The more I was dying, the more she seemed to be enjoying herself. At one point she scratched her fingernails down my arms and when I screamed, she smiled and whispered in my ear.
“Just a little souvenir of our romantic
night together.”

After that, the whole thing just fades to black. There’s nothing left, no more images or sounds to recollect. Maybe I passed out? I’m not sure. But when Raine was finished, she and the Triad obviously just left me here in the woods. The same way a group of kids might leave their empty beer cans after a night of boozing. The bottle of

“Camerade” was all gone, so why not leave it out here?

I start walking back up the road to my mom’s car, praying it’s still there. It is, sitting exactly where I left it last night, dead center in the middle of the street. The battery’s probably for shit, but it’s worth a shot. I get inside and the keys are in the ignition, cold in the palm of my hand as I give them a turn.

The engine revs once, twice, and then finally kicks in. I sit there with the driver’s side door open, one leg hanging out, half-expecting the car to stall out at any second. But it doesn’t. It’s fine. In fact, the motor’s purring like a kitten. I pull my leg in and close the door with a slam.

Whatever caused my mom’s car to die on the road last night, I’m sure the issue wasn’t mechanical. Raine made sure I couldn’t get home. She made sure that when my car crapped out it was on this isolated road where she could do what she wanted with me.

I grit my teeth and breathe heavily out of my mouth. Anger rushes through me as I think about the trouble Raine has caused. I’ve seen her hurt people with joyous glee, I’ve seen her kill a person and laugh it off like it meant nothing. And now she’s trying to destroy me one piece at a time, so I can be her personal Duracell battery. I need to find a way to stop her,
really
stop her.

But first things first – right now I’ve got to get home and see if my mom is awake or even alive. I need to shower and change and try to shake off this exhaustion, this fog that Raine’s attack has put me into.

I arrive home fifteen minutes later, not sure what I’ll find when I get inside. Will my mom be in her room, sleeping off yet another bender? Is she even home at all?

Maybe she’s back at the same bar Kaci and I dragged her out of yesterday.

But when I get inside, I hear clattering and clanging in the kitchen.

“Hello?” she calls as I shut the door behind me.

“Hey.” My voice sounds weak.

My mom comes around the corner, and I’m shocked to see that she’s dressed for work. You’d never know she’d spent the last week drunk enough to fail ten breathalyzer tests. “You were up bright and early this morning!” she says. “Were you out for a run?”

I glance down at my ripped jeans and muddy shoes. It doesn’t exactly look like the kind of outfit you’d wear on a morning jog. “No,” I say, “just took a drive to the store.”

“Oh.” She smiles and then turns around. If she notices I’m not holding any grocery bags, she doesn’t say anything. “I’ve got a pot of coffee brewing. Want some?”

“Sounds good.” I follow her into the kitchen. Even though she’s still acting a little crazy, seeing her up and about is somehow comforting. It’s at least some small semblance of normalcy.

I sit down at the table while she bustles around the kitchen in a flurry of activity.

My mom frequently steps up her game after a big drinking binge, almost as if she’s trying to make up for not being around for the last few days. Maybe it’s guilt or maybe she’s just energized now that she’s sober again.

She pours us both mugs of coffee, then brings me the cup and gives me a peck on the cheek. I sniff for the scent of alcohol -- a reflex action at this point in my life -- but all I get is a whiff of the apple blossom perfume she’s been wearing for the last couple of months.

“How’s that friend of yours?” my mom asks, walking back to the counter where she begins slicing an orange.

“Aiden?”

She laughs. “No, your lady friend. The one who had us over for dinner.”

My stomach sinks. “Oh. Natalia.”

My mom nods, slides the orange slices into a Zip Lock bag, then puts it in her lunch sack. “That’s the one. How is she?”

I hesitate, not sure how to respond. “We’re sort of in a weird place right now.”

“Uh-oh.” She stops and looks at me with motherly concern. “A lover’s quarrel?”

“I guess you could say that.”

We’re fighting because I cheated on her with Brody’s sister.

“You like her a lot, don’t you?”

I sigh and sip my coffee. It tastes hot and good going down my throat. “Yeah, Mom. I do like her. But she hates me.”

“Honey, you have to fight for someone if you don’t want to lose them.”

I look up from my coffee, taken aback that she’s actually making sense, wanting to ask her how I should do that, how exactly I can get Natalia back. But my mom’s already back to fixing her lunch, moving around the kitchen, humming a song with a smile on her face.

I finish my coffee and then drive my mom to work so that I can keep her car. She seems content to believe that mine is still in the shop. I’m not sure how she’s going to react when I break the news that the car is never coming back from the imaginary mechanic.

“Have a good day at school,” she says as she’s about to get out of the car and head into work. She still looks tired if I stare closely at her eyes, which have dark bags under them. There’s something worn out about her. Maybe she’s just getting older, or maybe it’s all the hard drinking finally catching up with her.

But instead of feeling annoyed and resentful, which is how I usually feel, I kind of wish I could hug her and tell her everything’s going to be okay.