Out of This World

Chapter 24

In that split second that the bullet shot out the window and glass sprayed, time seemed to stop.

Kellan stood there, feet wide, holding the gun, looking fierce and determined and outrageously tough. But even with his new strength, he’d remained true to himself. The old Kel wouldn’t have done anything differently than this Kel.

And now, because of me, we stood here in a no-win situation. Chances were, someone was going to get hurt.

Or killed.

Unless…unless I could face my fears once and for all, and commit, with my whole heart and soul. Commit to getting us out of here, commit to loving Kel for the rest of my life. I’d do both, I decided, and pushing past Kel, I ran out into the spot in front of the porch where everyone could see me.

“Jesus, Rach!” Kel started to run after me, but I whirled back and held up my hand.

“No, wait!” Craning my neck, I looked at the front door, knowing Curly and Moe were hanging on my every action. “This has to stop,” I called out. “We’re all armed. Someone’s going to die.”

Curly’s face appeared in the shattered window, his gun trained right on me. “Hey, hot stuff. We just want the abilities.”

“Then let’s swap,” I said. “Right now. We have the Blackberry. We can do the swap with that.” Or so I hoped.

Moe’s face appeared, and then Serena’s, with Moe’s gun in her face. “No funny stuff!”

“No funny stuff,” I promised, hoping I would be able to keep that promise, because I knew I couldn’t control the variables-meaning Kel, Axel and Marilee. I could only hope. I turned back to them, Moe’s and Curly’s guns making my shoulder blades itch. Axel held a gun in one hand and Marilee’s hand in the other. They were both looking at me as if I were crazy.

And I probably was.

But it was Kellan I wanted to reach.

At the moment, he was further from the San Diego dolphin trainer I’d ever seen, without an ounce of the easygoing, laid-back, slightly self-conscious guy I knew so well visible. He stood there, his dark shirt ripped, the cut on his face bleeding again, his eye swollen, his jaw bruised, every part of him streaked with sweat and dirt from the attic and from the climb down the side of the house. He held that huge, scary-looking gun as if he might use it at any second, his eyes dark and focused, his body tensed and ready for battle.

And I loved him.

The knowledge and epiphany were no longer so shocking. I loved him. I knew it with every fiber of my being.

It wasn’t this place or the “abilities,” as he thought, but the situation that had led us here, the experiences we’d shared. It was watching him be the man he was in shocking and extreme circumstances, all of which had taught me more about myself than I’d learned in my entire lifetime.

He was everything to me, and though he didn’t believe it yet, I knew now how to prove it to him. “Put down your guns. Everyone!”

“No,” Kellan said.

“No,” Curly and Moe said together.

“Fuck no,” Axel said.

“If you don’t,” I said as calmly as I could with panic shrinking my voice, “we’re going to stand here all night at an impasse.”

“What does ‘impasse’ mean?” I heard Moe ask Curly.

“How the fuck should I know?” Curly answered.

“I mean,” I called out, “that we’ll get nowhere. We’ll stand around looking stupidly at each other, and no swap will get made.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Marilee said.

Ah hell. More stuff I didn’t know. I debated with myself, because how much worse could this get? Answer: a lot worse. I glanced at Marilee, and lifted a brow.

“Never mind.” She lifted her hands, waved me on. “It probably won’t matter. You just go ahead.”

Ah hell. “Tell me.”

“Well, when the abilities are taken without permission, it’s dangerous for the person they’re taken from. They can get really sick, even die.”

I stared at her. “Did that happen to you?”

“No.” She looked…guilty? “It didn’t happen to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because at the time,” she said very quietly, “I, um…” She sighed. “I wanted my ability stolen.”

“What?”

“I sold out, okay? I was in debt and having some trouble. When the pirates came, I made a deal. I took cold hard cash. I’d give anything to be able to take it back, but I can’t. It’s done. But the truth is, my ability wasn’t stolen; I sold it.”

I stared at Axel, who was not looking shocked by this revelation. “And you?”

“I gave it willingly to stay here with Marilee.”

Marilee gasped. “You did? Oh, Axel, that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“And dangerous,” I said.

“So dangerous!” Marilee couldn’t take her eyes off Axel. “My cousin’s brother’s best friend’s fiancé went into a coma on her wedding day when their abilities were stolen! I can’t believe you did that for me.”

A coma. God. “Your cousin. Did she ever wake up?”

“Four years later, to find out that her best friend had married her fiancé. So you want to be real careful here, because believe me-” She squeezed Axel’s hand. “A good fiancé is damn hard to find.”

“I’m not paying anyone cold hard cash, even if your ability comes wrapped in pure gold,” Curly yelled, lifting his gun again. “So don’t even think about it. I don’t care who ends up in a coma, as long as I walk away with the strength ability.”

“Yeah, you’re going to need that brawn,” Kellan muttered, “to combat the lack of brains.”

“Hey!” Curly leveled his gun at Kellan. “That wasn’t nice!”

I leaped forward in my haste to get between the two. “No shooting, remember?”

“Too late,” Curly sneered.

“What do you mean?” My heart kicked, but everyone was here and accounted for…

“Nothing,” Kel said grimly.

“Let’s do this,” Curly said.

“You’re going to take the ability and go, right?” I pressed him. “You’ll leave all of us alone?”

“The moment the swap is made,” he said, and showed those disgusting teeth. “Scout’s honor.”

Uh-huh. And his honor meant so much. “No shooting, right?”

“Tell him,” Curly said, and gestured at Kellan.

I looked at Kellan, who shook his head. “Bad idea, Rach.”

“It’s the only idea we’ve got.” I looked at Serena and Axel. “You willing?”

They nodded. I had no idea what would happen to them without their abilities, but being alive seemed far more important at the moment.

The faintest purple light tinged the edges of the night sky now.

Dawn.

I turned to Axel. “What exactly happens at dawn?”

He glanced at the pirates, then whispered, “Well, you might have noticed their increased desperation and violence.”

“What happens at dawn, Axel?”

“They have to leave or risk getting stuck here.”

“Then why aren’t we stalling instead of bargaining?”

“Because they have guns,” he reminded me. “Big ones.”

Oh yeah.

“Lead the way!” Curly yelled. “To the clearing right now!”

Axel looked at Marilee, who as the new expedition leader lifted her chin regally and took the front.

We all followed, tromping through the woods in eerie silence. Even the birds were quiet today, and when I looked up, I had to execute a double take.

The crystal-clear night had shifted. The massive black, swirling cloud was back, building steam that made me gulp.

The wind had picked up, too, just like the last time, and as we finally stepped into the clearing, the first few drops of rain began to fall.

My heart kicked into gear.

With every fiber of my being, I felt…terrified. No other word described the feeling gripping me. There were so many variables and what-ifs that my brain couldn’t even take it all in. It didn’t help that the first lightning bolt was still far too fresh in my mind. It hadn’t been a piece of cake. It had hurt like hell, and all that confusion afterward, the mind-numbing fear…I didn’t want to go through it again.

Knowing how dangerous it all was didn’t help, nor did the knowledge that doing this again could send me spiraling into a coma-

I looked over at Kel, who looked bleak, his expression closed, and my heart lurched even more.

Then he staggered in a rare misstep, and I reached for him.

“I’m fine,” he said, shaking me off, not looking fine at all, but deathly pale.

Curly gestured for us to go ahead of him into the clearing, and when we both hesitated, he lifted his gun at me. “I’ll shoot her this time.”

“This time?” I looked at Kel, and I just knew. I searched him with my eyes-His dark shirt. God. I ran my hands over him and found the stickiness at his shoulder, down his side. “Oh my God! You were shot!”

“Just in the shoulder,” he said, jaw clenched so tightly he had to fit the words through his teeth.

I thought I’d been terrified before, but now it raced like ice up my spine. “Kel-”

“Later.” He moved into the clearing, but just as he did, a harsh gust of wind blew through, knocking us all into each other and down to our knees.

The clouds seemed to swell, then they lowered, surrounding us in an inky blackness that blocked out the growing dawn.

Someone gasped, and the rain began to fall in earnest, soaking into my clothing in a blink. It was going to happen any second now, I knew it.

Kellan was ahead of me. He’d pulled out the Blackberry and was crawling into the clearing, his face tight with the pain of the gunshot wound and, undoubtedly, fury with me.

Now, Rach. Now or never. Trying to be careful with his shoulder, I jumped on him, and with the element of surprise on my side, took him down to the ground and grabbed the Blackberry from him.

While he groaned and ate dirt, I sprinted up and into the clearing myself.

“Rach, no!” he yelled after me, and snagged my ankle so that I got only one foot inside before the huge CRACK sounded, and with it, screams.

Marilee?

Serena?

Actually, maybe it was me, because it hurt like hell, but only for a second, because as before, everything faded to black.

At least I alone got into the clearing, I thought with relief.

Kel was safe…