Chasing Power (3 page)

“Were you having bad dreams?” Moonbeam asked.

“I wasn’t having any dreams,” Kayla said. “I was awake.”

“One of the girls at work analyzes dreams. Yesterday she was telling everyone if you dream of a flounder, it means you’re feeling indecisive. Who dreams about a flounder?”

“Indecisive people, apparently.”

Moonbeam lit three candles in the center of the table. Warm light spread through the cottage. Shadows danced larger. The candles smelled like sandalwood, rosemary, and sage. “Who even knows what a flounder looks like?”

“Indecisive people who love seafood?”

“I wonder what indecisive vegetarians dream about.”

“Vegetarians are naturally decisive,” Kayla declared. “After all, they decided no steak, despite the temptation of steak tacos with fresh guacamole.”

Moonbeam nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Ooh, let’s make guacamole tomorrow. I’ll pick up some avocados after work.”

“Okay.” Kayla perched on one of the kitchen stools and
rested her chin on her knee as Moonbeam filled a teakettle and set it on the stove. The gas clicked as it ignited. A soft blue flame added more layers and colors to the shadows. “Do you ever feel the urge to travel? See the world? Eat guacamole in Mexico? Or crème brûlée in France with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Or, ooh,
on
the Eiffel Tower with a view of all of Paris?”

Moonbeam fetched two mismatched mugs from a shelf. They’d made these mugs themselves during Moonbeam’s pottery phase. Kayla had painted hers with hearts and stars—she was ten at the time. Moonbeam had painted symbols, amalgams of Celtic runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Are you having itchy feet?”

“Not really. Maybe someday.”
Yes
, she thought. “You and me, we could do it cheap. Stay in hostels. Camp. Backpack around. I heard you can get a train pass around Europe for not too much. Or maybe we could go to Asia. Or South America. See the rain forests and commune with the medicine men, or whatever you want.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in some teenage rebellion stage and not want to be seen in public with your highly embarrassing mother?” Moonbeam brought out a canister of tea leaves.

“That’s so eighties. But if you want, we can schedule in some time for me to cringe in between climbing the Eiffel Tower and shopping on the Champs-Élysées.”

Moonbeam scooped tea leaves into a strainer. She didn’t meet Kayla’s eyes. “Are you so unhappy here? We have a nice life. It’s a nice place. You have nice friends. You’d miss Selena.”

“I don’t want to move! Just … see more.” Kayla shrugged, as if the suggestion was merely a thought and didn’t make her want to leap off the stool and pack right now. “It would be educational.”

“It would be unpredictable.”

As the water heated, the teakettle shimmied on the stove. “Not if we planned it. Lots of guidebooks. Lots of maps. We could have a route mapped out for every day, if it makes you feel better. I promise not to improvise.”

Moonbeam’s mouth quirked. “Don’t promise what you can’t do.” And then she sighed. “Oh, Kayla, can’t you be happy with here and now? We’re part of this place, and it’s a part of us. We fit. It’s familiar.”

The teakettle whistled. Moonbeam poured the boiling water into the mugs. Kayla watched the brown tea seep from the leaves and swirl like paint in the water. In a soft voice, as if she were speaking to the tea, Kayla ventured, “It would be nice to not always be scared.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I don’t want you to be scared. But I want you to be smart. Familiarity is safety. We hide in plain sight—”

“Maybe I don’t want to hide my entire life.”

Moonbeam drew in a breath that shook, and Kayla wished she could suck the words back in. She’d never meant to say that out loud. It wasn’t her mother’s fault that they had to hide. She’d given up everything to keep Kayla safe. Everything she did was oriented around that one goal. And Kayla had just slapped her with it. “I’m sorry,” Kayla said quickly. “Forget I said it. I’m tired. I didn’t mean it. Maybe I did have some bad dreams. Not about fish.”

Moonbeam sank heavily onto one of the other stools. “This isn’t about travel. It’s about …” She tapped her forehead. Kayla’s power. She never named it out loud, as if she were afraid of even the wind overhearing. “You think I’m not letting you be yourself.”

“What? No!” Kayla rubbed her forehead. Maybe yes.

“I know it must be so very tempting, and, Kayla, you should know I am so very, very proud of you for resisting. But you can’t use it. Ever. He’d find us.”

Drop it
, her mind whispered.
You’ll never convince her
. She didn’t know what made her want to continue the conversation. Maybe it was the moonlight, making everything seem softer and easier to say. Maybe she was tired—tired of hiding and tired of lying. She thought of the boy with black hair who had watched her so closely. Sometimes Kayla thought it would be nice to be seen—to have at least someone recognize and acknowledge what she was. “But you use magic.” Kayla gestured at the charms and amulets all around them.

“To protect us. Not to play. And I hide it under nonsense.” Moonbeam gestured too, throwing her arms wide to encompass the entire house. “No one will see the real under all the fake. Or if they do, they’ll think it’s merely luck, that I don’t know the difference. I’m hiding in plain sight! And you need to too. You have to be a normal girl, inside and out, home and away. Be what you want him to see. It’s the only way to stay safe.”

“I’d be careful.”

“Of course you would. You’d try. But you can never be careful enough. Someday, someone might see, and someone might talk, and then word would spread of a girl who can move things with her mind. And your father will hear, and he will know, and he will come. And he will do to you what he did to her.”

There it was, the mention of “her.” Neither of them said the name of Kayla’s older sister, Amanda, but it still hung in the air, caught in the summer night breeze that twisted around the cottage. Kayla wanted to say it wasn’t healthy to always live in the
past, to let fear consume their lives, to always hide and lie. But the word “her” clogged her throat. “It might not be like that. He might not even be looking for us.”

“He is. He will. If there’s one word to describe your father, it’s ‘determined.’ But then, so am I.” Her lips thinned, and for an instant, Kayla saw an expression in her mother’s eyes that she’d never seen before. It flashed by so quickly that Kayla wasn’t sure what to name it.

“What if I only use it here? Supervised. At safe times. Like now.” Before her mother could reply, Kayla concentrated on the sugar bowl. The spoon was silver, too heavy, but she lifted a stream of granules. Sparkling like diamond dust, they arced out of the bowl and dove into Moonbeam’s mug. Moonbeam’s hands tightened so hard around the mug that her knuckles looked like popcorn, bumpy and white. It was tricky, controlling so many specks of sugar at the same time, but Kayla guided the last one into the mug without faltering. Exhaling, she sagged back onto the stool.

Silence. Outside, insects buzzed and clicked.

“Tell me you haven’t been practicing that.” Moonbeam’s voice was quiet.

Kayla studied her mother’s face, and her heart fell. She’d hoped for … She didn’t know. Pride maybe? Surprise? Maybe she could even be a little impressed? Instead her mother sounded … tired. So very tired. “I haven’t.” It wasn’t a lie. She’d done a similar trick with sand but never sugar. “It’s just …”

“He killed her, Kayla. He killed my Amanda. Your sister. He took her from us, and I can’t let him take you too. Do you understand? I can’t lose you!”

And like that, the shadows felt darker, and the breeze felt
sharper. The candle flames twisted. Kayla wished she’d never started this conversation. The wild edge in her mother’s voice … She didn’t want to hear that. She was an idiot to think she could change her mother’s mind. It was stuffed too full of fear.

“Promise me you won’t use your power ever again,” Moonbeam said.

“I’ve already promised you a billion times.”

“You used it just now!”

“Once. As an example. Safely. No one saw but you.”

Moonbeam hopped off the stool and hurriedly pulled at the open curtains. They bumped into crystals and snagged on dreamcatchers. “You don’t know that. It’s dark outside, light in here. The windows are open.” She shook the curtains, hard, yanking them away from all the charms. A few of the lighter ones, ribbons with pompoms and sequins, tumbled into the sink as she closed the curtains.

“The window faces the garden. You can’t see it from the street. If there are lurkers in the garden, we have worse problems—” Kayla cut herself off. She drew in a breath and tried to steady herself.

Leaving the charms, Moonbeam sat down again. She had unshed tears in her eyes. She wrapped her hands around the mug. “Promise me. You won’t use it again, ever, anytime, for any reason.” She looked so fragile in the moonlight, as if she were a puff of smoke that could dissipate. The tea in her hands shook slightly, the surface rippling, and Kayla could tell how much she needed to hear the words.

Kayla met her mother’s eyes. “Of course. I promise.”

She’d steal from every goddamn store on State Street before the end of the summer, Kayla swore. Or before the end of July. Restaurants too, especially the ones where the hostess glared at you if you used the bathroom and weren’t eating there. She strode down State Street, her hood up, her hands jammed into her hoodie pockets, twisting the diamond ring around the tip of her pinkie. She’d steal from every man, woman, and child on the street who had a designer purse or sunglasses that cost nearly as much as a boat.

Last night … she
knew
how that conversation would unfold. She should never have started it. And she certainly shouldn’t have demonstrated one of her tricks to Moonbeam. What had she thought that would prove? Moonbeam had spent the rest of the night “quietly” crying into her pillow, as if it were possible to do anything quietly in a one-room house. You could practically hear how many squares of toilet paper someone used.

Kayla had felt as if she were the pillow, battered and damp. She’d slept badly, racked with guilt, and she’d woken to an empty house. Moonbeam had already left for work. Kayla had
found a note on the kitchen table, next to a bran muffin:
Please pick up a half gallon of milk, water the plants, and remember your promise
.

After that, Kayla had started to feel angry. And the anger ate the guilt for goddamn breakfast, which was a buttery croissant bought with stolen money,
not
a bran muffin.

Moonbeam was wrong. Kayla was careful enough. She was careful, clever, and damn good at what she did. Halfway down the street, she parked herself on a bench that was free of breastfeeding women, middle-class teens pretending to be homeless, and overworked business types shoveling burritos into their mouths on their lunch breaks. She could do her tricks, help her family, and no one would ever know. Even Moonbeam.

Kayla focused on the store in front of her, a trying-too-hard surf store that sold novelty surfboards with fake shark bites cut out of them and bikinis so tiny they would have embarrassed a nudist. The cash register was by the front, next to a display of designer sunglasses. That was her target, simple and straightforward. She needed only to distract the clerk for half a minute.

Scanning the store, she selected her unwitting accomplice: a man in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt checking out the suntan-lotion options. He was holding a shopping bag from one of the other novelty shops. She popped a receipt out of his bag and set it skittering toward the front door. She left it next to the doorframe to use later.

The man reached for a bottle of suntan lotion.
Go time
, Kayla thought. She focused on the cash register, causing the buttons to depress one by one. As the drawer popped out with a ding, she covered the noise by causing the receipt to block the sensor—the bell for the door rang at the same time as the ding. The kid at the counter automatically glanced at the door, and Kayla
mentally reached for the bills in the cash register. She caused three to slide out and down the side of the counter. She then stacked them together and rolled them into a thin, straw-size tube. As the customer approached the cash register with his bottle of suntan lotion, Kayla jumped the bills into the cuff of his pants. The customer paid and then walked out of the store.

Outside, Kayla forced the bills to jump out and then roll across the sidewalk to hit her own sneaker. She bent as if to retie her sneaker, palmed the bills, and then stuffed them into the pocket of her hoodie as she sat up.

A boy was sitting next to her.

Kayla jumped a half inch off the bench. He hadn’t been there when she’d bent over, had he? Maybe he had. Maybe she’d been concentrating so hard she’d failed to notice him. His elbows were resting on the back of the brick bench as if he’d been relaxing there for a while. He was looking at the surf store, not at her. She recognized him: smoky brown eyes, black hair, the kind of face that Selena would have declared poster-worthy. He was the guy who had been checking her out yesterday after the diamond heist.

She debated saying hi, casually. Any other day, she would have. But today she was in too foul a mood to allow even for gloriously gorgeous guys. He spoke anyway.

“Nice day,” he said.

“It’s Santa Barbara. We specialize in nice days.”

“Live here long enough and you get used to it?”

She shrugged. “Something like that.”

He tilted his head back as if soaking in the sun. Over them, the palm trees fluttered. It hadn’t rained in a while, and the stiff, dry leaves sounded like muffled wind chimes as they brushed against each other. “Here’s the part where you ask me where I’m
from, since I’m so obviously not from a place with nice days all the time.”

“Only if I’m actually interested in hearing the answer.”

“That’s not necessary,” he said. “People have conversations all the time where they don’t care the slightest what the other person says.”

“I didn’t know we were officially having a conversation. Really, I’m having a bad day, so if you’re looking to make new friends in a new place, try me tomorrow.”