“There’s a place in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Warinanco Park. One a.m.”
“Okay.” I committed that crazy name to memory.
“I want to go with you,” Bethany said.
“We have a trade already,” Sasha replied.
“Not as a hostage or whatever. I want to go with you and meet the others. I just want to talk to them, you know? Please?”
Handing Bethany off to them was a double-edged sword. We were down one Looney Tunes teenager who seemed to entertain herself by hitting on anyone who struck her fancy. We were also turning her loose on the world, putting her right into the hands of some other wild-card kids I still didn’t fully trust. Plus Landon would shit himself if his “sister” ran away with the bad guys.
“It’s okay with me,” Rick said. He eyeballed Bethany, who cocked a hip for his benefit.
I rolled my eyes.
“Fine,” Sasha said. “You pick a fight or get out of line, and I’ll dump your skinny ass on the side of the road somewhere in Ohio before you’ve figured out what’s going on.”
Wow. Just how fast did the human tornado spin?
“Cool,” Bethany said.
I glanced at Thatcher, who finally met my gaze. He didn’t look any happier about this situation than I was, but we both knew the same thing—the decision wasn’t in our hands this time.
The three of them left first, marching out of the decrepit old rest stop in single file, Bethany a prize between them. Once the door swung shut with a bang, Thatcher made a strangled, somewhat infuriated sound.
“I can’t believe we let her go with them,” he said.
“What were we supposed to do?” I retorted. “Tell her no, she can’t hang out with her friends, she’s grounded?”
“What if they use her against us?”
“They can try, but they won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Instinct.”
“Great.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Look, I know you’re worried about how Landon’s going to react, but he’s a big boy. He’s not going to bust his stitches or throw a clot over Bethany going off on her own.”
The way his jaw twitched told me I’d hit right on the mark.
“Derek, the important thing is that Maddie is going to get the treatment she needs.” I didn’t even know the girl, and I wanted her to get help. She might have been raised on lies about how she became an orphan in Uncle’s care, but she was still a Meta. She was still a kid. She deserved a chance.
“You’re right.” The heavy sigh tacked onto the end made me think admitting that was a huge burden for him. The jerk.
I stepped up to him, better able to see the barely contained frustration and anger in the way he clenched his fists and breathed hard through his nose. The heightened emotions made him impossibly better-looking. “One step at a time. First HQ, then the swap.”
He stared down at me, mouth pressed into a thin line. He raised a hand and touched my cheek, and I didn’t flinch away. “I am so mad at you for trading yourself for Maddie,” he said softly. Roughly.
“I couldn’t tell,” I teased, forcing a smile I didn’t feel. My insides twisted up at the idea of being a hostage again.
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, as he worked out whatever he was trying to (or trying not to) say. I waited, anxious and curious and scared as hell.
“The hell with it,” he said.
A warm mouth pressed gently to mine, a flutter of lips and heat. The vaguest taste of coffee and man hit me in the gut, and a noise deep in my throat broke loose. Something needy and wonderful and embarrassing all at once. I cupped the back of his neck and pulled him closer, opening for the kiss that didn’t deepen right away. His lips played at mine, tasting and teasing, until the tip of his tongue swiped across my teeth, and then it was over.
My heart slammed against my ribs, and I clung to his shoulders, breathing hard despite the gentleness of the kiss. I wanted more, but couldn’t make myself ask for or take it. I’d lost that courage somewhere these last few months, lost confidence in myself as a sexual person. In some ways, I felt like a teenager getting her first kiss from a forbidden older boy. And it was awesome.
He brushed his lips across my forehead. “I’ve wanted to do that for a while.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I said, “Disappointed?”
“Hardly.” He pulled back a few inches. “Are you going to slap me for taking liberties?”
“Taking liberties?” I laughed, genuinely amused at his words and his concern. “No, I’m not going to slap you. I’m impressed you made the effort.”
“You can’t see your own beauty beyond your old injuries, can you?”
I pulled away, and he let me go. A few feet of safe distance between us shattered the spell of that lovely kiss, and it brought back up a nice, defensive wall. “We should get back. We’re on a timetable.”
“Right.”
He called HQ while I drove. Teresa was, as expected, pissed about us losing Bethany. She was less angry about the trade for Maddie, because she understood the decision I’d made—“I’d have done the same thing,” she said, and that made me feel better about the whole deal. She told us Dr. Kinsey would be ready when we got back to the parking lot.
Derek and I made the rest of the drive in silence.
Eighteen
Warinanco Park was easy to find. As soon as he heard the destination, Marco shifted into his raven form, then flew off to find the place so he knew exactly where to go later. He would be driving the Sport containing me, Teresa, and Dr. Kinsey. Teresa had insisted on being part of the exchange, not just for security but in case Kinsey needed assistance with Maddie on the drive back to HQ.
My entire body hummed with kinetic energy, with the need to stretch and flex and use the power that my damaged skin no longer allowed. Mostly it was from nerves. I was scared to go out there without my friends. Scared to be a prisoner, even if it was with a bunch of teenagers. Their powers rivaled ours and they knew it. So much could go wrong so easily.
Teresa twisted around in the front seat and looked back at me, her eyebrows arched. I stopped tapping my fingers on the door, starting tapping on my thigh, then just sat on my hands. Her sympathetic look made me want to burst into tears. No one knew how long the swap would last. Dr. Kinsey needed to assess Maddie’s wounds before he could guess at her recovery time.
The entrance to the park loomed like a table at a high-stakes poker game—one wrong move, one tell, and it was all over. I shivered.
“Learn everything you can,” Teresa said for the third or fourth time since the trip began. She was nervous, too, if she was repeating herself. “Try to get on their side.”
“I was the way wrong person for this job if it requires being friends,” I said. My attempt at levity fell flat, because it was so often true. I wasn’t the diplomat of our group, and I never would be.
Why had I volunteered to do this again?
Marco met my gaze in the rearview mirror, his glowing green eyes warm and sincere when he said, “You will succeed, Renee.”
His vote of confidence meant more to me than anyone else’s. Marco didn’t offer encouragement very often. Hell, he didn’t talk much anymore, period, but he had a quiet strength he couldn’t hide, even if he tried, and I liked
