Out of Body

He felt himself grow detached from the room and blinked to focus.

“Who were they?” Willow asked. “Your parents?”

“No!”

“I don’t mean Gus. He would never hurt you. But the ones who came before them. Were they people who took you in, but didn’t like you?”

He felt an urge to escape. This was another of the “gifted” Millets, all right.

Suddenly, Willow held Gray’s arm. “You were abandoned. Left outside a church when you were a small boy.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Gray said. “It happened a very long time ago and in the end I got Gus. I got the best part.”

“They did things to you—”

“Please stop.”

Willow didn’t seem to hear him. “They wounded you. Always in places that didn’t show on the outside.”

Gray’s mind shifted quickly. He felt his built-in protection waver and got an impression of lying on a kitchen table. He put the back of his arm over his eyes.

“Could it be that he had powers and they were suppressed?” Marley asked. “Did it happen back then?”

“I think so,” Willow said. “Gray, the young man and the woman held you down while the other man cut you.”

Gray felt numb. He could see the yellowing ceiling in that kitchen. He should be able to, he’d stared up at it a number of times while he tried not to scream. But in the end he had always screamed.

“It hurts so much,” Willow moaned. She covered her face and rocked in place.

“Not anymore,” Gray said.

“They sat on your legs and tied your arms together behind your back. The woman said…she wanted you castrated.”

Gray’s eyes rose to meet Marley’s. She looked as if she might faint.

“The men said, no, and they cut you inside your mouth. Long slivers of flesh cut out and thrown away. And you bled so much. They left you there and you rolled off the table and just bled such a long time.”

Willow traced lines on his face. “I can feel where they did it. Why?”

“Cruelty and true evil don’t need reasons,” Gus said. He had rolled his wheelchair into the room unnoticed and approached Gray. “They went too far that night and someone heard. They called it in and my partner and I went. Both of those men are dead. They died in prison—after they found out all about pain. I don’t know about the woman.”

“But why?” Marley said. “There has to be a reason.”

“You want to tell ’em,” Gus said.

Gray shook his head.

“They had a whole bunch of foster children. That’s how they lived. When they were arrested they said Gray was strange, that he wasn’t like other children. They said he was dangerous—an eight-year-old boy, mind you. They said he did things. Made things move around. Made the other children cry. They said—” Gus paused. “They said he wasn’t a human, but some sort of mutant.”

“Are we done?” Gray said.

Marley got close to him, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “It explains a lot. I wonder if you got born to people who didn’t understand. Perhaps something happened to your birth mother. It’s unusual for one of us to be abandoned. I don’t think I ever heard of that happening.”

“We’ll never know,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

“But you don’t mind that your powers are coming back?”

“Not as long as I have you. I want them back.”

Willow hadn’t moved away. She stood close, studying them.

“And you needn’t bother to keep pretending the specialness of the Millet family is nothing to do with you,” Marley said to her. “So you detect the hurts of others? And you see the terrible events they’ve suffered. What else, I wonder?”

“I don’t know what came over me.”

“You came over you,” Marley said. “And what you just showed could be used for good. You can pick out perpetrators, can’t you?”

Willow crossed one lime-green-and-white sneaker over the other. “I don’t know about that. I’ve got a business to run. I just wanted to help you and Gray because…well, because you’ve Bonded.”

Gray narrowed his eyes at her. “How do you know that?”

“Everyone in the family will know because we have a connection at times that affects all of us. A Bonding affects us all since it’s the enlarging of our circle to include fresh blood. It hasn’t happened for a long time so it’s a very good thing.”

“They cut him in a lot of places,” Gus said. “On the bottoms of his feet so he couldn’t try to go for help —”

“Leave it there, please.” Gray’s nerves jumped. Gus was fixated on this now, but there were many things better left unsaid.

“I’ll always hate what they did to you, Gray, but I’m glad I was the one who went out on the call. At the hospital they cleaned up inside his mouth and they had to do some grafts, but he’s okay.”

“Of course he is,” Marley said, and caught Willow’s eye. Willow had not only been able to see the scars when Marley couldn’t, in full daylight, she had known she was seeing some sort of reflection from old wounds that weren’t visible on the outside, on his face.

Marley didn’t intend to let her sister hide away all her lights again.

This time it was her phone that rang and she backed away from the others a little to talk.

“Marley, is that you?” a woman said for the second time. “Answer me.”

“Who are you?” Marley asked cautiously.

“It’s Sidney, of course. I need to see you right now.”

Chapter 40

The moment Marley had hung up from talking to Sidney Fournier, the Ushers started rustling and arguing across her mind. “Don’t let Gray hear you. He’s more aware all the time. You talked to him when I wasn’t there—I can’t believe that,” she had told them.

But they couldn’t keep quiet. Their whispers followed her from the cottage, into Gray’s car and kept coming in little bursts while they drove toward J. Clive Millet and the Court of Angels.

“You okay?” Gray asked. He braked the Volvo for an accordionist who played and sang his way across the street despite the rain and occasional rumbles of thunder.

“He needs to get in out of this storm,” Marley said. Lightning ripped the hot sky, but the musician played on.

“Marley, are you okay?” Gray said again.

“Great,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about a thing. The shop is my turf and it’s the best place for me to meet Sidney alone.” The whispering rose again and she frowned fiercely. “Stop it now. All of you. We’ll talk when I’m alone.”

“Are you angry about something?” Gray said.

She looked at him. “No. Why?”

“I thought you were talking to yourself. Why can’t I be there with you when Sidney comes?”

“She won’t open up if you are. She felt some sort of understanding coming from me and she’s decided to trust me. I think she’ll tell me about last night.”

Gray had told her exactly what Nat said on the phone and she was ready to listen closely to Sidney when she came—which wouldn’t be for three hours—something Marley hadn’t told Gray when she agreed to have him drop her at the shop. Sidney had said she wanted to meet Marley right away, then changed her mind and asked to come