Resistance (The Variant Series #2) (11 page)

None that immediately sprang to mind, but still…

Alex straightened slightly and peered once more over the edge.

“We could easily beat both of them to the jeep, if you would just—”

“No means no, Declan.”

Wait…

Wait, wait,
wait.

She could
fix this!
  All she had to do, was warn her past self about what was going to happen. That way, she could tell Declan
yes
and absorb his ability.  Then she wouldn’t be so defenseless when Masterson found her in the woods.

Or—even better—she could warn
herself not to go into the woods in the first place.

She could stop it from happening altogether.

Warming to this idea, Alex got to her feet.

She wasn’t sure how she’d landed herself in the past, and for the moment she didn’t care. All that mattered now, was that she’d been given the chance to change things.

Earlier, Alex had wanted nothing more than to go back in time, to this exact moment, and tell Declan yes.

Now she was going to have her chance.

With a triumphant smile, Alex jumped—and immediately knew that something had gone wrong.

Alex could feel the building pressure of the ensuing jump and, as it normally did when she teleported, the world around her shuddered to a stop.

Only, this time, the arcs of electricity that coiled themselves around her body and pricked at her skin were the color of crimson.

The familiar violet light of the jump had been a constant since this all began. This new color felt
wrong
.

The pressure of the jump knocked the air from her lungs and forced her eyes closed. Prepared for the tingling numbness that normally filled her muscles in the moments after she reappeared, Alex was caught off guard by what was, instead, an excruciating
stretching
sensation. It felt as though she’d been laid out on a medieval torture device meant to wrench her into submission.

Swallowing a scream, Alex materialized.

Once the pain abated, Alex looked herself over. In spite of what she’d expected to find, she was still in one piece.

“Hey she’s back!” said a voice. Kenzie, Declan and Cassie were all gathered beside the jeep, looking roughly the same as they had when she’d last seen them.

Somehow, Alex had reappeared in the junior class parking lot, several hundred feet and at least forty-five minutes
past
her intended destination.

“When am I?” asked Alex.

“You’re in the Bay View High parking lot,” Declan said slowly.

“Not
where
.” Alex could feel a tremble slowly working its way through her. “
When
?”

“What?” asked Cassie.

Declan walked closer. “Where did you go when you jumped, Alex?”

Alex swallowed hard, unsure of how to answer. “How long have I been gone?”

“About five minutes.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Give or take. We were just about to go looking for you. Where did you go? And what happened to you in the woods earlier?”

Alex was silent for a long moment as she tried to calm her racing thoughts and pull herself back together.  Walking back to the jeep, she opened the driver’s side door. It creaked loudly on its rusty hinges as Alex slipped into the driver’s seat. 

In a calmer voice than she thought she’d be capable of, she answered him. “Masterson was in the woods.”

“What?”
Cassie and Kenzie asked in unison.

Alex looked down at her arms, one caked in dried mud and the other free of debris, having already been washed clean in the puddle of rainwater on the school’s roof.

She stared unseeing through the jeep’s windshield.

Dark clouds were forming in the skies above as an unseasonably chilly breeze rippled its way across the parking lot.

A storm was approaching—and fast.

It would start raining soon.

“Masterson found me in the woods,” Alex repeated. “And I think I just traveled through time.”

* * *

“Are you alright?” asked Cassie, eyeing her date with growing concern.

Across from her in the tiny booth Aiden O’Connell was choking on a french fry. He reached for his water glass and downed half of it in one go.

“I’m sorry,” he managed once his coughing had ceased. “Did you just say Alex traveled through
time?
”

“No,” said Cassie, eyebrow raised in amusement. “I said she
thought
she traveled through time. Obviously she dreamed it though, right? I mean, your cousins seemed pretty confident that
actual
time travel was impossible.”

“Right.” Aiden cleared his throat. “Definitely. Totally impossible.”

Outside the cafe, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. A storm had sprung up just offshore and appeared to be making its way swiftly inland.

They’d almost rescheduled their date, but decided at the last minute to go ahead. At least with their dinner reservations, anyhow.

The rain was now coming down sideways on account of the steady winds. Their trip to the outdoor art exhibit set up by one of the boardwalk galleries was going to have to wait until next time.

Cassie smiled. With the way things were going, there would almost
definitely
be a next time.

When Aiden had picked her up an hour earlier, he’d been so glad she’d agreed to go that he’d promised Cassie not a single drop of rain would fall upon her blonde head as she traveled to and from his truck through the downpour.

No ruined hair, no running mascara. Aiden would make sure of it.

He was a gentleman like that.

At Alex’s suggestion, Aiden took Cassie to one of her favorite restaurants, Cafe Luna. It was a seaside bistro that offered a gorgeous view of the water and the sort of food Cassie rarely had the chance to enjoy, having lived in a house with a bunch of growing boys her entire life.

Between her parents’ hectic schedules and her brothers’ voracious appetites,
cheap and easy
was usually the name of the game.

If Cassie wanted a nice meal, she had to find it elsewhere.

But it wasn’t just the delicious plate of chicken piccata in front of her that had Cassie enjoying her evening out, it was also the company. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d
laughed
this much on a date.

It didn’t hurt that Aiden had been so adorably
awkward
when he’d first picked her up, submitting himself to a fifteen-minute long interrogation conducted by her younger brothers (her older brother, Tom, had been at work.)

For the first time in ages, Cassie found herself nervous about her upcoming date. So much so, that it took her twice as long as normal to decide on an outfit, an extra half an hour to transform her stick-straight hair into loose golden curls, and another ten minutes to decide on the right eye makeup.

Aiden wasn’t just any guy.

She was
determined
to knock his socks off the second she walked down those stairs.

If she looked the part, maybe she’d be able to calm her suddenly rioting nerves.

Any lingering butterflies in Cassie’s stomach started flying in formation again, however, the second her baby brothers went to work on the water-wielding O’Connell when he came to pick her up.

The twins grilled him mercilessly while Cassie took her time applying the finishing touches to her makeup—upstairs in her bedroom, with her door open to the hall so that she could hear the conversation taking place downstairs in the living room.

“Do you have a car?”

“I have a truck.”

“Do you have any outstanding warrants?”

“No?”

“You don’t sound very sure about that.”

“No. I’m not wanted by the cops.”

“Do you have a dog?”

“I used to, back when I was growing up in Kansas.”

“That’s good. But a man should own a dog, ya know? So you should probably get a dog at some point.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“How’d you get to be so damn tall?”

“He’s not
that
tall, Danny.”

“Shut up, Runt. Is too. Well? How’d you do it?”

“I… ate my vegetables?”

“Ew. Even spinach and brussels sprouts? Cause that shit’s disgusting.”

“Is your sister going to be much longer?”

After answering the all-important questions put to him by the twins—and after being studiously ignored by Matthew who sat texting silently at the other end of the sofa—Aiden had the dubious honor of being stared-down by her overprotective father, just home from a double shift at the hospital.

The poor guy was so rattled, in fact, that he made it halfway around the truck before his manners kicked in and he remembered to open her door. He jogged back to the passenger side, cursing, as four of the five men in Cassie’s family watched on in amusement.

When Aiden nearly smacked her in the forehead with the door, Cassie’s brothers gave up staring and laughed.

Cassie found the entire exchange
exceedingly
funny. Aiden, not so much.

When he moved down from Portland, Aiden brought
Norma Jean
with him—his beloved, battle-scarred Chevy pickup.

The three bullet holes rumored to be in her side had apparently been patched up the week before. Which was
fantastic
, because Cassie wasn’t sure how she would have explained those to her father, who watched them leave from his position at the dining room windows.

Now that they were safely at the restaurant, Aiden stared past Cassie and out at the shoreline, watching the rain fall in steady torrents along the beach, completely lost in his thoughts.

“Everything alright?” asked Cassie.

He looked away from the water and met her eyes, flashing a smile. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“What about?”

He folded his napkin and set it on the table, then leaned back in his seat. “Is the weather always like this?”

Cassie looked out the window at the darkened skies and the heavy rains dimpling the ocean waves.

“Always? No,” she said. “Although it
is
an El Niño year. Sometimes that makes our storms more severe.”

“An
El Niño
year?” Aiden’s expression turned wry. “Harboring a secret desire to become a meteorologist, Cassie?”

She smiled. “While I’m sure I’d make for a
fantastic
weather girl on the five o’clock news, no. I have other ambitions. My brother Matthew, however, can’t get enough of
Storm Chasers
, so the TV in the living room is usually blasting the Weather Channel any time he has control of the remote.”

“Really?” said Aiden. “Matthew was the silent one with the phone surgically attached to his hand, right?”

“Correct.”

“And the twins are Runt and Danny,” he continued. “Danny’s the
shorter
of the two, and Runt is the taller one that hates brussels sprouts and thinks any man worth his salt owns a dog.”

“You’re a quick study,” she said.

“It’s a reflex,” he said. “I tend to be hyperaware of my surroundings and the people in them any time I fear for my life.”

Cassie snorted in amusement. “Come on, my family’s not
that
bad.”

“Have you actually met your brothers?” Aiden laughed. “Runt told me that if I ever hurt you, he—and I quote—‘
knew a guy’
who could ‘
get the job done’
and
‘the body disposed of’
before anyone even noticed I’d gone missing.”

Cassie rolled her eyes, smiling. “That sounds like Runt.”

“You know, I’m surprised,” said Aiden. “Usually it’s the
older
brothers that meet me at the door issuing death threats. I’m used to the
little
brothers greeting me with the incriminating photos and embarrassing stories from my date’s childhood.”

“Oh? Been on a lot of dates, have we?”

Aiden hid his smile by taking a sip of water from his glass.

“The twins know better than to try anything,” she added.

“Oh really?”

“Yeah,” she said. “
I know a guy
.”

Leaving the cafe that night, Aiden held true to his earlier promise as he walked her to the door of his truck, keeping Cassie dry by redirecting the driving rains to either side of them as they crossed the restaurant’s puddle-filled parking lot.

“You know,” she said. “Most
people would just use an umbrella.”

Aiden grinned. “Where’s the charm in that? Wouldn’t be much of a superpower if I couldn’t use it to rescue a pretty girl once in a while. Or a pretty girl’s
hair
, at the very least.”

“You’re a regular knight in scruffy armor.”

“I try.”

As he helped her into the truck, Aiden’s eyes met hers and he smiled.

Before he could step back and close the door, Cassie leaned out of the truck’s cab and placed a kiss on Aiden’s lips.

She’d meant for it to be brief peck, but apparently her lips never got the memo.

And neither did her
hands
, obviously, because in the next moment they’d reached up to take hold of Aiden’s shirt in an attempt to draw him closer.

It wasn’t until after she pulled away some moments later, that Cassie realized they were both completely drenched. The kiss took Aiden so much by surprise, he forgot to redirect the rain.

Cassie sat perched on the edge of the truck’s bench seat, grinning up at Aiden’s bemused expression.

“I
really
owe Kenzie that new phone now, don’t I?”

“Yes,” said Cassie, leaning in for another kiss. “You
really
do.”

— 10 —

T
he storm that moved ashore that night was unlike anything the town of Bay View had seen since Hurricane Charlotte skirted inland just north of them, three years earlier.