“Sorry,” Quinn said. “I guess I’m just weak.”
“Worse is coming,” Sam said darkly. “But all of a sudden a nice easy blink doesn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen, does it?”
“Drake’s been gone for two days,” Diana said. “We need to look at what we have here.”
“I’m busy,” Caine snapped.
They were standing on the front lawn of Coates. Caine was supervising an effort to repair the hole caused by the earlier power struggle. He teleported bricks, a few at a time, up to where Mallet and Chaz were attempting to cement them in place.
It had all collapsed twice already. It was one thing to pour concrete into a mold in the ground. It was a lot harder to mortar bricks into place.
“We need to make some kind of deal with…with the townies,” Diana said.
“Townies. Carefully avoiding having to say ‘Sam.’ Or ‘your brother.’”
“Okay. You caught me,” Diana said. “We have to make some kind of deal with your brother, Sam. They still have food. We are running out.”
Caine made a show of being distracted as he levitated another stack of bricks out through the front door of the school and up to the second floor, where Mallet and Chaz dodged the arriving load.
“I’m getting better at this,” Caine said. “I’m gaining control. Precision.”
“Goody for you.”
Caine’s shoulders sagged. “You know, you could occasionally show some support. You know how I feel about you. But all you ever do is bust me.”
“What do you want to do, get married?”
Caine reddened, and Diana erupted in an unusually loud laugh. “You get that we’re fourteen, right? I mean, I know you think you’re the Napoleon of the FAYZ, but we’re still kids.”
“Age is relative. I’m one of the two oldest people in the FAYZ. And the most powerful.”
Diana bit her tongue. She had a smart-ass answer ready, but she had tweaked Caine enough for one day. She had bigger issues to deal with than Caine’s puppy love. And that’s all it was. Caine wasn’t capable of real love, the deep kind, the kind that would grow over time.
“Of course, neither am I,” Diana muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She watched Caine as he worked. Not what he was doing, but the boy himself. He was the most charismatic person she’d ever known. He could have been a rock star. And clearly he thought he was in love with her. It was the reason he tolerated her impertinence.
She supposed she liked him. They had been attracted to each other almost from the start. They had been friends…no, that wasn’t quite the word. Accomplices. Yes, that would do: accomplices. They had been accomplices since Caine first discovered his powers.
She had been the first person he showed. He had knocked a book off the table from across the room.
She’d been the one who encouraged him to work at it, develop it, practice it in secret. Each time he reached some new level, he would show it off for her. And when she showed even the slightest kindness toward him, a word of praise, an admiring nod, even, he would puff up and seem to shine with some reflected light.
It took so little to manipulate him. It didn’t require real affection, just the hint of it.
Diana would task Caine to use his power to trip some snob she didn’t like, or humiliate some teacher who had come down on her. And when she reported to Caine that the science teacher had cornered her in an empty lab and tried to feel her up, Caine sent him sprawling down a set of steps and into the hospital.
Diana enjoyed that time. She had a protector who would do her bidding and ask nothing in return. Caine, despite his oversized ego, his looks, his charm, was terribly awkward with girls. He had never even tried to kiss her.
But then he had attracted the attention of Drake Merwin, who had already acquired a reputation as the most dangerous bully in a school with plenty of bullies to go around. And from that point on, Caine had played them off against each other, doing a little for Diana when she asked, and a little with Drake.
As Caine’s powers grew, both relationships changed.
And then the school nurse, Sam’s mother—Caine’s mother too, though none of them knew that then—started to figure out that something was very, very strange about her long-lost little boy.
The bricks collapsed suddenly, a series of thuds as they hit the lawn, and a series of groans and curses from Chaz and Mallet.
Caine seemed almost not to notice. “What do you think it was, Diana?” he said, almost as if he’d read her thoughts.
“I think they didn’t set them straight enough,” she replied, knowing that wasn’t what he meant.
“Not that. Her. Nurse Temple.” He repeated the name, drawing it out to get the feel of it. “Nurse. Connie. Temple.”
Diana sighed. This was not a conversation she wanted to have. “I didn’t really know the woman.”
“She has two sons. One she keeps. The other she gives up for adoption. I was a baby.”
“I’m not a shrink,” Diana said.
“I always had the feeling, you know? That my family wasn’t my real family. They never said I was adopted, but my mother—well, the woman I thought was my mother, I don’t know what to call her now. Anyway, her, she never talked about having me. You know, you hear moms talking about going into labor and all. She never talked about that.”
“Too bad Dr. Phil’s not around. You could tell him all about it.”