Meaghan jolted awake. Panic set in immediately. The air smelled damp, salty and musky, not sharp and antiseptic. The sounds weren’t the familiar, soothing ones of her hospital room. Music was playing, a male singer she didn’t know singing something about a cowboy in the jungle. The tune was bright and lively, but the singer’s voice was edged with sadness. The bed she lay on smelled, she thought, like wet animals might. There were no railings or restraints, nothing to hold her safe if she seized.
And she was in a moving vehicle.
Several of Shaw’s more creative expressions exploded from her mouth.
“Easy there,” a man said. “You’re all right. You’re safe. It’s weird waking up in a strange place anyway, and it’s got to be scarier if you can’t see. We’re heading up to my friend’s house. He and his family should be able to help you. Might as well get comfortable. We’ve still got hours to go.”
The voice wasn’t one of the familiar ones she’d known forever—Garrett, Becky, the doctors—and yet it put her at ease. It reminded her of the singer’s in the way it was lively and good-humored and a little melancholy at the same time.
Kyle. His name was Kyle.
It all came back to her. Kyle and his family had pulled her from the arms of the ocean, had saved her life when she was trying to die. But that was all right. Kyle reminded her of the ocean, dangerous and welcoming at the same time. Kyle understood when she babbled about the Agency, said he could help her, said he knew somewhere she could be safe. They’d stopped briefly at his family’s house and then they’d gotten on the road. And she’d been asleep within minutes, as if Kyle’s presence were a lullaby.
Kyle was different from anyone she’d ever known, not that she’d known all that many people. His voice tasted different. He felt different under her skin, his words singing in her blood, his touch, even when he checked her for injuries, nothing like a doctor’s or nurse’s, and nothing like Shaw’s had become either.
He felt stormy and saltsharp, cool and hot at the same time, fierce and caressing. He felt like the ocean, and she could hear waves in the rhythm of his words. And when he touched her, she felt fur.
She liked how he felt. She thought he might not be human, and she found that idea bitterly delightful, that the first ally and friend she’d made was one of those the Agency persecuted.
Kyle’s Pacific voice interrupted her reverie. “Brace yourself. I’m pulling off the road. You hungry?”
Meaghan wasn’t used to thinking about hunger. Food appeared at set times and she was expected to eat it whether her body prompted or not. But Kyle’s question made her aware of the hollowness in her belly. “Starving,” she said. “And I need to…”
Kyle laughed. The sound swam over her skin like he was touching her with it. “Why do you think I was pulling off?”
Kyle came around to the back to the van. She heard a large door open, felt a rush of cool, damp air scented with a hint of something that ought to be familiar.
Cigarettes and fried food?
Yes.
She hadn’t smelled cigarettes since she was a little girl, before the hospital. It wasn’t a pretty smell, but it now proved to her that she was Outside the Hospital, “with capital letters,” which was something Garrett would say sometimes, though Meaghan had needed him to explain what he meant.
It smelled like freedom.
As for the fried food, that simply smelled delicious. She didn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She’d just picked at breakfast at the hospital. It hadn’t seemed worth the effort to eat much. But since it seemed she was going to live—at least until her brain blew up—she might as well enjoy a good lunch. Or dinner. Or whatever.
She hesitated at the door of the van. She suspected the door she was using was designed more for cargo than for people because it was wide, with nothing easy to grasp. “It seems like I’m far from the ground.”
“A couple of feet, a hop, not a step. I’m sorry. I know you can’t see, but I’m still figuring out what info you need.” Kyle chuckled, obviously at himself and not at her. The sound washed over her, warm and pleasant. Laughter wasn’t a completely unfamiliar sound, but nine times out of ten she’d heard it in a movie or an audiobook, not real life. Garrett and Becky and the other nurses had done their best, but life in the hospital wasn’t lighthearted.
And Shaw never laughed. Even in the middle of sex, he’d been stern, controlled.
Remembering that, she felt sick, not physically, but in her heart, knowing how fucked up it was to have let someone like Shaw into her body. She swayed slightly.
Kyle must have seen something was wrong—but not, thank goodness, what. “Let me help you down. That way you won’t have to leap into the unknown.”
“I’ve been doing enough of that lately.”
Strong arms grasped her around the waist. Kyle still smelled like the Pacific, even though she’d heard him showering before they left his house, after she had. He’d stayed in the bathroom while she’d showered, to make sure she was all right after her near drowning and seizure. He’d been apologetic, but it made her feel safe. They’d let her shower alone at the hospital, but there was always a nurse nearby in case of a seizure. It had been different with Kyle there, though. More intimate. She kept feeling fur and ocean pass over her skin as she bathed and knew he was watching her, and not just to make sure she was safe.
He enjoyed looking at her. She liked knowing that. Her freakishness must not show on the outside.
“Hop down,” he said.
She did, and for a second, she pretended she was flying in his arms.
No. Riding a wave, only on purpose this time. Not caught up in helpless terror, but knowing she could swim to safety and thus able to enjoy the sense of weightlessness.
Too soon, her feet touched pavement. She expected Kyle to let go then, but he didn’t, just changed the way he was touching her. “Is it okay if I take your arm?” he asked, as if he didn’t realize he was already holding it. “I’ll try to keep you from walking into walls.”
“Good idea. I’m not used to open space.”
Which sounded sad once she said it out loud. She knew her life had been odd, but hearing Kyle’s little intake of breath, she suspected that in the world outside the Agency, blind people had more opportunities to get around than she ever had.
She took a few steps, following Kyle’s lead, and realized they were leaning on each other. Maybe it felt as natural to him as it did to her.
That was a pleasant thought. She was a fugitive, and she was in seventy-two different kinds of trouble and she had a terminal illness, but she could pretend she was a normal girl out with an attractive young man. At least he sounded young and felt fit and strong, so she could imagine him as attractive.
Kyle couldn’t possibly be interested in her. If he’d enjoyed looking at her naked body while she showered, it was because he didn’t know she was broken. Defective, as Shaw told her toward the end, worth fucking only because of the magic. And Kyle wouldn’t be able to exploit the magic. He didn’t have that sulfur smell, didn’t give her a harsh, scraping sensation on the inside of her mind, like Shaw and his sorcerer colleagues had. So she’d be of no use to him.
Although he knew she was a Different, a freak, and didn’t seem to care.
Then again, he might be a Different himself.
Kyle stopped walking “You okay? You smell upset.”
She smelled upset? Garrett said she smelled and heard better than most people because her body was compensating for the blindness. Even so, she wouldn’t have been able to smell if someone was upset. “I’m just nervous,” she lied, “I’ve never been in a restaurant before.” She realized as she said it that it was true, though far from the whole truth. The pleasure of Kyle’s touch had overshadowed her jitters.
“You’ve never…” Kyle hugged her, quick and hard. “This is just a diner, simple, cheap food and lots of it. But as soon as I can, I’m taking you out for the meal of your life.”
She’d need new clothes first. Kyle had commandeered everything she was wearing, including her flip-flops, from his various relatives. Her still-damp bra was hanging somewhere in the back of the van to dry and she wasn’t wearing underpants under the oversized sweats. But the thought made her smile as Kyle very carefully escorted her through the door.
Noise and smells bowled her over. Disoriented, she clung to Kyle’s arm, trying to make sense of all the chattering, clanking and bustling. She clung to the reassuring scents of coffee and bacon in much the same way she held on to Kyle.
“Two?” an unfamiliar, raspy female voice said. Waitress.“This way.”
Kyle led her, obviously following the waitress, and guided her into a bench seat—a booth. She heard something flat smacking the table in front of her. Menu. She hoped Kyle would be okay with reading it to her, but Kyle had a different idea.
“What’s on special today?” he asked. “The board’s a little hard to read.”
“Sorry, Joe’s handwriting stinks but all the regulars know the Wednesday specials anyway.” The raspy-voiced waitress rattled off a list almost too fast for Meaghan to catch, but she settled on the meat loaf and Kyle ordered a fried fish sandwich. Both asked for coffee.
“I’m glad you got the meat loaf. I’m more of a fish guy, but I love a good meat loaf and that way I can steal a taste,” Kyle said.
“I’ve never had meat loaf, but it sounded good. Meat in a loaf, which is like bread. How could meat-bread be bad?”
“You’ve never had…” Kyle’s voice did a weird dive from a shout to a gentle whisper over the course of those three words. “Well, you just disproved a theory. I thought every mom in America had a special meat loaf recipe, none of which are as good as my mom’s.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember my mom much. I’ve been at an Agency hospital since I was little.” To her horror, Meaghan felt her eyes fill up with tears. It had been years since she let herself cry over the loss of her family. She recalled so little of the time before the hospital that she could pretend there never was a time before. But in this comfortably alien environment with this comfortable stranger, she realized how odd and lonely her life had been.
A hand brushed her cheek. “I’d say ‘don’t cry’,” Kyle whispered, “but maybe you need to. You’ve gone through some bad shit, and it must be stressful being outside, even though it’s good. But I’ll keep you safe. I promise. Maybe my friends can help you find your parents. No promises on that, but if anyone can, it’s them.”
For a second, hope flared, along with memories of a woman’s gentle hands, a man singing to her, and vague memories of being able to see. Then she remembered other things: her parents fighting about what to do about a child who wasn’t normal. Fighting about her. Being left in a strange place with a stuffed rabbit and a tall, quiet man she found later was Shaw. She’d been terrified, and at the same time oddly relieved because the big man didn’t make the same low buzzing in her head that everyone else did. She had to touch him or hear his voice or his footsteps to know where he was. One of the first things she’d been taught at the Agency hospital was how to shield out the buzzing made by the hum of other people’s thoughts.
“No.” Her voice was firm enough it surprised her, considering how close to tears she was. “My parents gave me up, so I gave them up.”
Then something dawned on her. “Or maybe the Agency stole me. They probably told my parents they could help me with the seizures and they hid me away so they could use my visions to hurt other people. Maybe they even told my family I’d died. I wouldn’t put it past them. I know they’ve done worse things.”
Suddenly she was weeping. She hadn’t let herself cry more than a tear or two since she was little. It didn’t do any good, and it drew Shaw’s scorn. But she had a lot of tears stored up. In between sobs, she added, “I was trying to kill myself. It was the only way I could think of to escape. I’d rather die than go back, but I’m glad you rescued me.”
Caught up in her own drama, she didn’t hear the waitress approaching until that raspy voice said, “None of that, honey. You kill the bastard, if you have to, but not yourself.” It took a second for Meaghan to figure out the waitress had overheard just the last sentence or so and assumed she was running away from an abusive partner.
Kyle must have picked up on that too. “Ma’am, I’m doing my best to make sure it doesn’t come to that. Which would be why if anyone asks, you haven’t seen a blind, blonde woman.”
“Ain’t seen no one like that here, and no good-looking, white-knight types either. Let me know if you need anything.” Her tone implied a great deal more than a refill on coffee.
When the waitress left, Meaghan whispered, “You’re a quick thinker.”
“I simply told the truth.” He dropped his voice even lower. “Just a simplified version.” The low, sultry tone made Meaghan shiver in the most delightful way, but not as much as the sense that Kyle had made a commitment to her with what he’d said to the waitress. “But we’d better wait to do any more plotting until we’re back in the van. Too many people might hear.” His voice was even lower and more shiver inducing. Cool and embracing, welcoming and menacing as the ocean, soft as fur.
She let herself savor the unfamiliar sensation as she ate her meat loaf and mashed potatoes. The meal was heavy and greasy and definitely the most delicious thing she could remember eating.
Maybe because it was the first meal she had eaten in freedom.