Not real.I pushed my foot, trying to walk through the hallucination, but I was stuck, welded flat, frozen.
“You have impressed me. Your resourcefulness. Your strength. No one knows, do they? That you see me? That you hear me?”
A flicker of panic fluttered under my skin. I wanted to call out for help. Wanted to tell him to get away from me. Wanted to scream.
“Shh,” he said, raising his hand to my mouth and pressing one black-gloved finger to my lips. “This is just for us, our special time.”
I could feel the warmth of the leather against my lips, the soft pressure of his finger gently silencing me. Could smell the burn of stones and some other scent that reminded me of lightning.
I wanted to squirm out of my skin.
His eyes widened slightly, and as if sensing my revulsion, he pulled his finger away. Then he dropped his gaze to the ground, his shoulders pulling back. Almost as if he were putting space between us.
I sucked in a hard breath. Had I been breathing? Had I been holding my breath all this time? Panic was doing weird things to my brain, and time skidded like a rock skipping over flat water.
The dragon pig in my arms wasn’t moving. The leaves in the trees weren’t moving, even though this was the coast and there was always a breeze.
“You only need one more thing,” he said, bringing my attention back to him.
He’d stepped back a pace and pulled his hands behind his back, in parade rest. His intensity had been dialed down several hundred ticks.
Even his eyes looked different, brownish swimming there in the yellow, softening that hard glare, humanizing it.
Still not nice, I thought,andstill not real.
But even that small space between us helped. The feathery fingers of panic receded, the need to scream was gone.
I felt like myself, well, as much of myself as I could be while hallucinating. I felt like I had ground to stand on.
“When you have that one last thing, then this,” he used two fingers to wave between us, “will no longer be necessary.”
I could ask. Just open my mouth and make him tell me what the hellthiswas. What he wanted from me, and what he was.
There was more I could ask. That thought tickled the back of my brain. This was familiar. We’d been here before, he and I. I didn’t know how many times, but I knew I’d seen him before and forgotten.
Just like that, my heart was beating too fast again, my breathing going reedy.
How long had this been going on? Had it been years? All my life?
No, someone would have known. There were too many people in this town with too many gifts and powers. Someone would have known that I was…whatever this was. It couldn’t have been going on for long.
Maybe only since…something flickered there. A clue. Something had happened recently, and that’s when this had started.
It hadn’t been long ago either. It had been night, I remembered that, I’d been awake because Ryder was gone, because Ryder was always gone…
“Now, now,” he said again. His voice buzzed through my memories, and scrambled the pieces I’d almost put together.
“There’s no need to think so hard,” he said. “All we need is for you to find one more thing. And you know what that is, don’t you, Delaney?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Ah, well, you will. Once you see it, you’ll understand. And I’ll be there to guide you. Then…” He clapped his hands in a softwhumpand rubbed his palms together. “Everything is going to change. Big, big, change.”
“Boss?” Shoe’s voice was sudden, loud, and too close. I jerked as if I’d been shot, and twisted toward him. He was walking my way from the far side of the parking lot, and all I could do was stand there breathing too hard, blinking too fast, and shaking.
“Shoe?”
He gripped a coffee carrier with two big cups in one hand and his phone in the other. He was not a tall man, built like a pallet of bricks with a few extra bricks stacked in the middle. Shoe had a wicked sense of humor, didn’t say much unless he had something to say, and was ten for ten finding the good chocolate Myra thought she could hide from us all in the station.
