The Gift

And I have a good guess who.

Chapter 45

Wisty

INSTANTLY, IT’S AS IF someone’s quadrupled the gravitational force in this place, and the energy’s leaking out of me. I can’t even sit up straight anymore. He has these electrifying Technicolor eyes- you’ve never seen anything like them. They’d be, like, model gorgeous if he wasn’t so evil. As it stands, they’re like an instant barf inducer. I’m queasy. But Whit’s still locked into his weirdly placid state.

The One Who Is The One steps around the table, sliding our former interrogator’s pot into a corner of the room with one foot.

“He’ll need some watering,” he says to nobody in particular, and then smiles silkily. “Or not.”

The One waves at the far end of the room and transforms what had been a featureless white wall into floor- to-ceiling windows. He can turn a man into a plant. He can fly. He can vaporize children. I guess turning a wall into windows with a panoramic fiftieth-floor view must be a walk in the park.

“Now,” he says, eyes briefly pulsing red but then turning a charismatic blue-a shade you might see on some touched-up face in a magazine ad (that is, if they made magazine ads for Pure Evil).

“Come,” he invites as if we’re old friends. He gestures at the picture windows. “Have a look.”

“Um,” says Whit, “we’re kind of hooked up -”

But all the polygraph wires are now gone, like they’d been particularly unlikely figments of our imaginations.

The One beckons gently. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” he says. I’m shaking now. The One seems to “enjoy” nothing except torture and death. What’s up his sleeve? And what’s up with my brother, for that matter?

Whit gets out of his chair and walks over to The One like an obedient child.

“S’all right, Wisty, come on.” Does he have some intel I don’t? Last I heard him say more than a few words, he was bouncing off the van walls with rage.

But I don’t want to be sitting over here alone. “For lack of anything better to do,” I say begrudgingly, “okay. Let’s have a look.”

“Why the impudence?” The One asks. “You do know I don’t intend to kill you.” He puts his creepy, long arms around our shoulders and leads us to the windows. Strangely, his touch feels totally warm, even a little reassuring.

“Will you look at that?” he asks almost wistfully. “Do you see how the sky and the mountains there seem to be joined? Almost seem to be one?”

We gaze out across the city, the foggy street and building lights twinkling through the gloom. The clouds on the horizon are a sinister purple that does kind of merge with the snowless mountains beyond the valley.

“Do you have any idea how much work it took to make this perfect evening?”

I start shaking again. It’s as if he’s a cat playing with mice. He just said he wasn’t going to kill us, but is he about to anyway? In any case he’s definitely going to put some serious hurt on us.

“I bet you’re wondering what I mean by that,” he goes on. “A terrific high-pressure zone had been screaming down across the northern plains and would have brought torrential downpours tonight. Possibly even hailstorms.”

We look at him blankly.

“So I stopped it.”

Now I get it, and what he’s done is pretty mind-blowing actually.

He raises his arms to point at a cloud on the horizon, and with the most casual of gestures, he steers it in over the city. Now he’s making a spinning gesture with his other hand, and the cloud rotates. And now he’s guiding in another massive cloud, and another, and another… Soon there’s an enormous swirling, lightning-streaked vortex circling over the entire city.

As it churns and intensifies, the winds start rattling the windows. My ears pop as the pressure in the room drains. Does he plan to have us sucked up into the black core of the vortex? Is that tonight’s plan? The rain is crashing down in iron-colored curtains. The building is groaning on its foundation. Is he going to vacuum the entire city off the face of the Earth?

But then he snaps his fingers, and the storm moves in reverse. The spiral turns backward and de-intensifies, and then the clouds retreat to their original stations in the sky.

“Now, you try, Wisteria,” he says.

Chapter 46

Wisty

“WHAT?” I’M CAUGHT off guard-completely flabbergasted. Then it gets even weirder. Suddenly it’s as if I’m at my piano lessons again, and he’s Mr. John Masterson, my sweet-as-pie teacher, encouraging me to believe in myself. Say what?

“You have more than enough power to do it. Just tell the energy what it should do, and let it out. You saw what I did. Give your power that same image, and let it go. I have every confidence in you and your wonderful Gift.”

He’s out of his mind. Turning people into animals is, I admit, pretty cool, but it’s, like, finite. Graspable. I can’t wrap my mind around the sky, the wind, clouds, hurricanes- that’s big-time.

“I can’t do that,” I whisper.

“Now, Wisteria,” he says, a tone of threat creeping into his recently soothing voice.

I close my eyes and try to remember exactly how the clouds raced in over the city, how they joined together and began to swirl like an upside-down, ink-filled toilet flushing in the sky, the lights of the city twinkling below and almost disappearing as the rain whipped down. I let the tune of Mrs. Highsmith’s song work as a soundtrack as I imagine it all playing before me… Can I actually do this? More important, do I want to? How can I live, and be the same person, with so much power?

And then I feel my heart flip inside me. My whole being flips.

“Idiot!” he screams.

I open my eyes. The clouds are exactly where they were. The only thing that’s changed is that the city has gone entirely dark; even the lights in the room are out. We’re bathed in evening shadow.

“You put out the lights, Wisty. All the lights,” whispers Whit.

Chapter 47