“We’ll find her,” Clint said. “She’s not lost forever.”
“Not like you thought my mother was,” Teddy said.
“If Marysue is alive,” Clint said, “we’ll find her. I promise.”
There was a knock at the door. “Not interrupting a Hallmark moment, am I?” Nick slipped into the room, looking more handsome than ever in a charcoal gray suit.
“It’s fine,” Teddy said. “I was just leaving.” She’d been avoiding him since he’d shown up with the rest of the Misfits on the cliff’s edge. With any luck, she wouldn’t see him again until next year. She offered Clint a quick smile and squeezed his arm.
Clint winced. “That would have been a Hallmark moment, Teddy, if you’d gone for my uninjured arm.”
“Sorry,” Teddy said. She grabbed her leather jacket and moved to the door.
“I’ll walk you out,” Nick said. “Just in case.”
“I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine.”
She left the room and made her way down the hospital corridor only to have Nick follow. “Teddy, wait.”
She spun around. “What do you want? Another apology? You’ve made it clear you don’t want to hear it. So—”
“No. I don’t want another apology.”
She shook her head. “Look, let’s just forget about everything, okay? Pretend like it never happened. Next year it’ll be like a fresh start. Deal?” She stuck out her hand to shake.
“I’d like that.”
When she looked at him, she wanted to believe him. With every fiber of her being she resisted the urge to read his mind.
He took her hand in his. Rough fingertips grazed her skin. His eyes locked on hers. “Nick Stavros, FBI. Some people know me as just plain ol’ Nick.” He smiled, revealing that dimple.
She wanted things to be different. She wanted to be different. But she wasn’t. She was just herself. She cleared her throat. “Theodora Cannon. Stanford dropout, former gambling addict, current student at the Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development. Once owed over a quarter million dollars to a Russian loan shark. Astral telepath and telekinetic. Misfit. I used to live in my parents’ garage in Las Vegas. My birth parents were psychics, and the government experimented on them and killed my father. My mother is still alive but may be working for a vigilante political psychic assassination squad. Some people call me Teddy for short. But those who know me really well call me TeAnne.”
* * *
Later that night on Angel Island, Teddy sat with her friends at the Cantina, waiting for the last ferry to take them to San Francisco. From there, they’d all enjoy a little time off until returning to school the following year. Soon, with some help, Teddy would try to unlock the puzzle of the Patriot Corps. She would try to figure out how to find Molly and her mother. But for now, all she wanted to do was knock back a cold beer on a warm summer night with three friends who had taught her that even misfits have a place.
“Excuse me.” A guy with a red baseball came up to their table. “Are you Teddy?”
“What’s it to you?” Pyro asked, laughing, taking a swig of his beer.
“Some guy asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Teddy a folded piece of white paper.
“What guy?” Dara said.
The stranger shrugged and returned to the bar.
Teddy opened the crisp white paper, folded neatly in half. Inside, the writing was blocky, bold, large. Scrawled across the page in thick black ink:
I always keep my word.
See you soon, Theodora.
Until then.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.C. ARCHER is a pseudonym. School for Psychics is the first book in a new stay-up-all-night series.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-5011-5933-6
ISBN 978-1-5011-5935-0 (ebook)
