“Healer . . .” He was reluctant to take it.
“Cookie. Take.” She placed it in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Good. Now, listen, I need you to do something else while I’m gone.”
“What?”
She forced a smile. “I’m so hungry, I could eat Patrick. Look around this dump and see if you can find something to eat. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
She turned toward the door and plunged out into the night before he could argue any further.
Lana slipped her hand into her bag, wrapped her fingers around the cold plastic grip of the pistol. She pulled it out and let it hang by her side.
She was going to get the key from the dead miner. If Pack Leader showed up to stop her, she would shoot him.
And if . . . and if she could not bring herself to come back out of that cave, if she found herself instead walking deeper into it, deeper, toward the Darkness, unable to resist, well . . .
Taylor was not Brianna. Breeze had an image of herself as a superhero. Taylor knew she was just a girl. Like any other girl except that she had the strange ability to think of a place and appear there instantaneously.
And now Brianna was very late getting back. The Breeze was never late. Brianna didn’t know how to be late. Something had happened to her.
So it was Taylor’s turn. She felt it, knew it. But Sam didn’t ask her. He stood there staring down the road, like he was willing Brianna to appear.
Dekka was more upset than Taylor had ever seen her. Dekka was normally a rock, but the rock had some cracks in it now.
Edilio kept a poker face. Eyes straight ahead, waiting for orders. Patient.
No one wanted to pressure Sam. But everyone knew that with each passing minute, it was becoming harder to act.
It was up to Taylor. Sam didn’t want to send her. So it was up to her.
She would do anything for Sam. Anything. She supposed she was kind of in love with him, even though he was older than her and was totally into Astrid.
Sam had saved Taylor’s life. He had saved her sanity.
Caine had decreed that uncooperative freaks at Coates be kept under control. He had figured out that most powers seemed to focus through a kid’s hands, and with Drake’s help he had moved quickly and decisively.
It was called plastering. It involved encasing a kid’s hands in a block of cement. The blocks weighed forty pounds. The sheer weight rendered kids helpless. At first Caine’s flunkies had fed them in dishes on the ground, like dogs. Taylor and the others, including Brianna and Dekka, had lapped up bowls of cereal and milk like animals.
Then trouble had broken out between the kids left in charge at Coates while Caine went down to grab control in Perdido Beach.
The feedings had grown less frequent. And then they had stopped altogether. Taylor had eaten weeds poking up through gravel.
Sam was the reason she wasn’t dead.
She owed him. Everything.
Even, she realized with a sinking in the pit of her stomach, the life he had given back to her.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Before Sam or anyone else could speak, she was gone. Just down to the end of the road so she could see the gate, not far, not as far as she was capable of teleporting.
One second she was with Sam and Edilio and Dekka. A millisecond later she was alone in the dark, her friends just out of sight behind her.
It was like changing a TV channel. Only she was inside the TV.
Taylor took a shaky breath. The gate was just fifty yards away. The power plant beyond was bright and intimidating.
They would expect her to either bounce into the guardhouse or directly into the plant. She wouldn’t do either.
A split second later she was on the hillside above the guardhouse, tripping because she had materialized on a steep slope.
She caught herself, glanced around quickly, saw no one, and bounced to a dark shadowed place behind a parked delivery truck just off to one side of the gate.
“Ah!”
A shout of surprise and Taylor knew she had made a bad choice.
Two kids, two of Drake’s thugs, both armed with rifles were right there, right next to her, hiding behind the truck. Waiting in ambush.
Surprise slowed their reactions. She could see it in their eyes.
“Too slow,” Taylor said.
They shouted, swiveled their guns, and she was gone.
She appeared three feet from Sam, who was still staring down the road.
“Taylor. What are you doing?” he asked.
He hadn’t realized she was gone. She laughed in relief. “Two guys with guns behind a big truck, just past the gate, to the left. I don’t think anyone’s actually in the guardhouse. It’s an ambush. If you guys went toward the guardhouse, these guys would be able to shoot you in the back. They saw me.”
Now it was Sam’s turn to be a little stunned.
“You . . .”
“Yeah.”
“You shouldn’t . . .”
“Had to. And look, I didn’t see Brianna anywhere.”
“Load up,” Sam ordered. He leaped into the Jeep. “Dekka?”
“On it,” Dekka said, breaking into a run for her own vehicle.
Edilio shouted to his guys to load up as well.
“Thanks,” Sam said over his shoulder.
Taylor felt amazingly happy over that one word acknowledgment. “I could . . . ,” she began, not really wanting Sam to say yes.
“No,” he said firmly. “And keep your head down.” To Edilio he said, “Straight to the gate, but pull over before you reach it. We have to move fast before they can figure out what to do. But, remember, there’ll be one more guy out there. The one that Taylor didn’t see.”