3

EXIT

“EXCUSE ME? MA’AM?”

Someone near me cleared his throat.

My eyes clicked back into focus.

I found myself looking at a man in a dark blue suit. A bright red silk tie contrasted the blue of his jacket, setting off the auburn highlights in his long hair. His light brown eyes studied mine, crinkling at the edges in a smile.

When he cleared his throat politely, my gaze drifted down to his hand, where he held out several twenty dollar bills.

“Can I use paper currency here?” the man said.

He spoke like someone who’d already asked the same question several times. I blinked, then looked down at his hand. Christ. He was a customer. I’d probably waited on him; that’s why he looked familiar.

Where had my head been?

I glanced down the bar counter at Jon and Cass, a little bewildered that I wasn’t standing next to them anymore. I stood by the cash register instead. Jon and Cass didn’t seem to have noticed that I had apparently teleported to the opposite end of the bar.

Cass laughed while I watched, leaning closer to Jon’s ear to answer something he’d said.

Feeling the man in front of me waiting, I jerked my eyes back to his.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Yeah, sure. Of course. Sorry.”

His smile widened. “No apology necessary, my dear. I am the one who is sorry...to have interrupted your thoughts just then.”

I smiled back noncommittally, hitting through keys on the old fashioned register.

“You looked very deep in thought right then, Alyson.”

I hesitated, glancing up at him.

I wasn’t wearing a name tag. Maybe I’d told him my name when I waited on him earlier. Shrugging it off, I gestured towards his arm. When he bared it to the elbow, I summoned the bill by scanning his barcode.

“Were you?” he said politely. “...Deep in thought?”

I smiled. “Yeah. Well. Even waitresses think about things, I guess.”

The man returned my smile, his gaze flickering over the rest of me.

Ignoring his appraisal, I met his gaze. “Do you want the change in hard currency, too?” I said. “Or just on your account?”

“Hard is fine.” His smile widened, even as his amber-colored eyes grew more serious. “What are you doing after work? Can I buy you a drink, Alyson?”

Counting out the coins, I handed him his change. I kept my smile polite. “I can’t date customers, sorry.”

“No? You won’t make an exception?”

I smiled again. “Sorry.”

The man met my gaze. When he did, I paused, in spite of myself.

For the first time, I really looked at him.

His eyes were riveting, difficult to look away from. That amber color nearly glowed, such a light color they seemed to have an internal fire. I found myself lost there, wondering why I’d been so quick to turn him away.

I could have one drink with the guy, sure. Why not? He was age appropriate, more or less, and while I didn’t usually date suits, he was cute. Nick the bartender, the guy I'd been seeing casually for the past few weeks, probably wouldn’t like it, but we weren’t exactly a couple.

My attention got pulled off him when the door to the diner opened with a bang.

I looked up, blinking in confusion.

Once I did, I found myself staring at the black-haired man. He stood there, looking angry, his athletic frame looming over the guy in the blue.

For the first time, he looked directly at me.

His colorless eyes grew utterly motionless, like a held breath.

Immediately, my head started to clear. I was still standing there, my hands poised over the cash register, when the man with the amber eyes turned, staring up at the black-haired man along with me. Neither of them spoke.

Even so, the man with the amber eyes smiled.

Looking away from the taller man, he brought his gaze back to rest on mine. He made a strange, soft clicking noise with his tongue, giving me a regretful smile.

“Ah. I see that you’re already taken,” he said. “Perhaps another time, my dear.”

“Sure,” I said, only half-hearing him. “Whatever.”

I was still looking at the man with the black hair.

The guy in the blue suit turned from the counter, heading for the door.

The black-haired man didn’t take his eyes off him as he passed. His eyes followed the man past him and through the front door and even outside, onto the street. I saw the amber-eyed man watching him as well...saw him wink at the black-haired man through the window before he disappeared down the sidewalk, past the edge of the building.

Before I could wrap my head around what had just happened, the black-haired man walked directly up to where I stood. His colorless eyes met mine.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now, Allie.”

When I didn’t move, only stared, the black-haired man grabbed my arm.

“Allie.” His voice was a growl. “Now.”

Before I could bring my eyes back into focus, Jon appeared at my side. He had his hand on the other man’s forearm even as he inserted his entire body between us. Jon’s voice came out quiet but firm, not an ounce of compromise in his words.

“Let go of her, man. Now. Step back.”

I saw the black-haired man look at Jon.

“Jon,” he said. “I won’t hurt her. But I need to get her out.”

I saw Jon’s eyes widen in surprise, right before they blurred, growing less clear. The black-haired man focused back on me.

We don’t have much time.

I stared up at him, feeling a cold wash of fear when I realized I’d heard his words from inside my mind, not with my ears. His mouth hadn’t moved.

Allie! I know you can hear me! You have to come with me. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a cage? Wearing a collar? That man who just left here. He knows what you are.

More fear coursed up my spine.

What I am? What the hell was he talking about?

Allie! They can’t hear me! Only you can...what does that tell you?

Cass ran up at the same moment. “Allie! What is going on?”

The black-haired man looked at her. As he did, his concentration on me and Jon seemed to break. Jon’s eyes cleared in the same instant. He stepped forward once they had, as if remembering where he was.

His mouth hardened into a line as he grabbed ahold of my wrist.

“Al...get away from this guy! Right now.”

Confusion twisted my stomach in knots. I tried to think through the fear I saw in Jon’s eyes, the worry I saw on Cass’s face...but the black-haired man’s words resonated somewhere in my mind, and I knew suddenly, that I believed him. Without understand at all what he was talking about, I believed him that I was in danger.

I couldn’t stay here.

Memories swam forward, worsening that ache in my gut.

They’d tested my blood a few hundred times when I was a kid. It always came up human. Always. They’d only done it so many times because of how I’d been found, my parents assured me, and the fact that they couldn’t trace my biological parents, despite the record-keeping processes now in place. An unregistered baby found under an overpass in the middle of a major city like San Francisco had been big news...they had to be sure, my mom explained. It had been suspicious that they couldn’t trace my parents through my DNA. All people were registered at birth now––human and seer. Pretty much everyone had a DNA record on file.

So they had to check, my mom said. They had to be sure.

But my blood was human. They verified it, re-verified it. There was no question what I was.

I was 100% human being.

The doubt lingered. I remembered feeling my father’s fear...

I couldn’t go there again. I couldn’t.

When Jon yanked on my arm, I didn’t think.

A part of me reached out, seemingly on its own. It happened so fast there was no thought behind it, nothing that made sense. It felt more like a reflex than anything I did consciously. A folding sensation started somewhere deep inside my mind...as if a part of me collapsed like a telescope, pulling me along with it.

I exhaled it out, flexing a muscle I didn’t know I had...

...and then Jon was all the way across the room.

I couldn’t remember raising a hand, any part of me––and the black-haired man hadn’t moved from where he stood by my side.

Anyway, if it had been something like that, something physical, Jon himself wouldn’t have been caught so completely by surprise. Jon was a trained fighter––a fourth degree black belt in Choy Li Fut. Fighting was his job; he’d been a senior instructor at a kung fu school in the Richmond District for years, training people in self-defense and for the ring.

I saw a soft flash of light. I saw Jon’s eyes widen.

Then, he was just gone.

When that force hit him, he released my arm.

He tried to grasp at me the instant he had, but despite his super-fast martial arts reflexes, he missed his grip. His fingers splayed, groping first for a bar stool, then the counter. He careened backwards as if he’d been thrown bodily by a much larger man.

He slammed into a series of shelves covered in clean water glasses. Over ten feet from where I stood...from where he’d started...he fell to the rubber mat, taking half the shelves’ contents with him.

The sound was deafening. Everyone in the diner looked up.

Tom, the manager, emerged from the back room. He looked between me and Jon, stunned, then back at the mess covering the back area behind the counter.

Jon scrambled to get up, impressively fast, but water glasses continued to fall. Over the sound of breaking glass and people rising to their feet, I realized everyone in the diner was staring at me now, too.

I didn't take my eyes off Jon.

He was bleeding. One arm and his face were nicked with cuts.

I tried to understand how he’d gotten there. I tried to make sense of it.

Had I done that? Had I just hurt my brother?

I stopped then, staring at myself in the mirror over the bar.

My eyes...

What the hell is wrong with my eyes?

They glowed at me in the mirror’s reflection, like pale green fireflies.

Out of nowhere, I found myself remembering my Uncle Stefan. The memory crystallized starkly in my mind, if only for a single beat of my heart. We’d been visiting his farm, touring the pig barn. I’d been maybe seven years old. No one in the family ever talked about what happened that day...not once, at any point afterwards. Even now, my memories struck me as strangely surreal, like they might have happened to someone else.

I remembered standing there with Uncle Stefan, his rough hands on my shoulders. I’d been crying. My father had been trying to reassure me.

Uncle Stefan wasn’t a bad man. He was a rough man, a practical man and a life-long farmer...but he wasn’t a bad man. He’d just finished telling me what they did to the runt baby pigs. I’d been all excited to see those babies, having recently read Charlotte’s Web.

Then Uncle Stefan told me what they did to them.

I couldn’t believe it was real. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a story...they really did that, killed something for being small.

The next thing I knew, Uncle Stefan was screaming, pinned against the wall of the barn. He’d been a big man, around six-two, over two hundred pounds, most of it muscle.

I forced the image from my mind, feeling sick.

When I glanced up, my anxiety turned into full-blown terror.

The black-haired man was staring at me, shock written all over his face.

I saw that shining reflection of seething green light in his glass-like irises, and realized that came from me, too. That otherworldly light wasn’t his––it shimmered back at me from my own eyes. Like in my dreams, my eyes were glowing.

They were really fucking glowing.

Glow eye...

At the same instant, I knew.

Maybe I'd always known. Maybe my parents had known, too.

Clearly, this black-haired guy knew what I was. At any rate, he'd known I could hear his thoughts inside my head. Not a whole lot of humans who could do that. I looked up at his pale, colorless eyes, maybe even for help. But the shock on his face was as prominent as anyone else’s in the bar. More so, maybe.

For a long moment, no one in the diner made a sound.

Then the last glass fell and shattered on the tile floor at the edge of the rubber mat.

The black-haired man spoke, his words thickly accented.

“Dul-ententre d’gaos!” he burst out. “You’re a fucking manipulator!”

I barely understood his words.

For my brain, enough was enough.

Everything around me grayed...then went totally dark.